The Unapologetic Liberal Lion

Proudly so and without apology Sen.Ted Kennedy was a controversial yet highly respected politician.

A true passing of a political giant and his impact will be measured much greater than either of his slain brothers. Sometimes in US Politics serving as a US Senator you can be much more effective than a US President. Ted Kennedy wielded out sized influence and political power, in the Congress and as head of the Kennedy Dynasty.


Kennedy was at the center of the most important issues facing the nation for decades, and he did much to help shape them. A defender of the poor and politically disadvantaged, he set the standard for his party on health care, education, civil rights, campaign-finance reform and labor law

Joe Holley writes in The Washington Post on Ted Kennedy's political importance

He was a Rabelaisian figure in the Senate and in life, instantly recognizable by his shock of white hair, his florid, oversize face, his booming Boston brogue, his powerful but pained stride. He was a celebrity, sometimes a self-parody, a hearty friend, an implacable foe, a man of large faith and large flaws, a melancholy character who persevered, drank deeply and sang loudly. He was a Kennedy.

New York Times journalist John M Broder describes the Kennedy effect.

Seared in my memory: When I interned at the Heritage Foundation, I would pop into Mass at Saint Joseph's on the Hill. And I would almost always find myself sitting near Ted Kennedy. He's responsible for things that are deeply offensive to my conscience and diametrically opposed to the teachings of the Catholic faith, and he probably led some people astray by his example. But our faith also teaches that we are all sinners and that there is redemption. He had some incredibly good forces in his life, not least among them his sister, Eunice, who just died. I pray for the repose of his soul. R.I.P. Senator Kennedy.

Kathryn Lean Lopez blogs her tribute at the National Review.

Elected first in 1962, the 77-year-old Massachusetts liberal was rooted in the civil rights and Great Society battles of that decade, but his enduring strength was an ability to renew himself through his mastery of issues and the changing personalities of the Senate. Nowhere was this clearer than in Kennedy's early support of Barack Obama in 2008, when the young Illinois Democrat needed to establish himself against more veteran rivals for the White House. Kennedy not only campaigned for Obama but, at risk to his own health, opened the Democratic National Convention a year ago in Denver and returned to Washington repeatedly last winter to cast needed votes to move the new president's economic recovery agenda.

David Rogers in Politico highlights the veteran senator's lasting political importance.

In many ways, he was the last man standing, straddling a mythic family mantle of fame and a vaunted career of political service, all the while wearing the crown of Camelot decades after its heyday...the senator's death brought to a close a storied political era - of assassinations, Jackie O, Palm Beach, Chappaquiddick - and a lifetime of both tragedy and public service.

Andrea Billup writes in the The Washington Times that 'Camelot' fades with Kennedy passing

In losing Kennedy, Obama loses a key Senate dealmaker at a crucial moment in legislative negotiations over the health care bill. Though an icon of Democratic liberalism, Kennedy was known to colleagues as a jovial pragmatist, whose many friendships with colleagues across the political and ideological spectrum made him one of the Senate's most influential players.
Kathy Kiely in USA Today examines the impact of Ted Kennedy's death on healthcare reform.

"When Does the Greed Stop?"" Not just a rhetorical question but prescient coming from Kennedy in 2007 after the GOP controlled Senate had just passed 240 billion dollars in corporate welfare while throttling a vote to increase the minimum wage for the first time in ten years.

How does the Secret Service Protect and..

Distinguish who the crazy potential threats to a President might be when they are Congressmen or until last year one of the LOONS was in the White House!

Read both and Weep for a nation gone mad...

Georgia Republican Worries Dems Will Declare Martial Law

Posted on Aug 13, 2009

house.gov

Rep. Paul Broun, who once compared Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler, now thinks the president is part of a radical “socialistic elite” that may try to declare martial law. Broun’s comments came during what an area newspaper described as a “relatively peaceful” town hall.

That’s right, while members of Congress around the country have to deal with screaming crazies at their town hall meetings, in one frightening district of Georgia the member of Congress is one of the screaming crazies.

The Raw Story has a comprehensive look at Broun’s comments, including a classic non-apology. —PS

Athens Banner-Herald:

At another point, Broun, who last year made national news by comparing Obama to Hitler, called Cuba’s former dictator Fidel Castro and leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez Obama’s “good buddy.”

He also spoke of a “socialistic elite” - Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid - who might use a pandemic disease or natural disaster as an excuse to declare martial law.

“They’re trying to develop an environment where they can take over,” he said. “We’ve seen that historically.”

Calling Gog and Magog...

The first part of William Plaffs article is disgusting enough then it makes a surreal turn into the truly Terrifying! Seems the French President was at a loss at how to deal with the FREAKING LOON in the White House who was telling him France Had to go to war with America against Iraq.

Cause the RAPTURE was coming! Fucking Elmer Gantry!

Bush’s Pioneering Sadists: A Tale From the ‘War on Terror’ Dark Side Posted on Aug 13, 2009

By William Pfaff

PARIS—Little mainstream comment seems to have appeared on the latest revelations of incompetence and sadistic fantasy that have been published this week about the ways in which the American nation lost its honor and international reputation because of the Bush administration’s infatuation with torture.

Or with, as Vice President Dick Cheney has put it, “the dark side”: its eight-year excursion into what commonly is understood to be criminal international behavior, which the former vice president continues to defend with relish and conviction.

The revelations concern the two men who reportedly created the torture techniques that the CIA and U.S. military have been using on prisoners since early in the “war on terror.”

According to The New York Times (in a story by Scott Shane), the two had for years been involved with an Air Force survival course that was supposedly based on Chinese Communist “brainwashing” techniques used in the Korean War.

The program, housed at an Air Force base outside Spokane, Wash, involved midlevel abuse (and sometimes more; one of the two, Bruce Jessen, allegedly had to be stopped in a mock interrogation that colleagues thought had become “pretty scary”). This was to prepare the airmen for what they might meet if captured by an enemy.

Most anyone who has been in military service since the Korean War has been given a taste of this, but it was an Air Force specialty.

Jessen was a farm boy who earned a psychology doctorate at Utah State in what was known as “family sculpting,” in which clients made physical models of their family to deal with emotional relationships.

The other of the two successive head psychologists at the course was Jim Mitchell, a poor boy from Florida who joined the Air Force in 1974 for adventure, became an explosives expert and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in psychology. Later, he received a doctorate at the University of South Florida; his dissertation compared diet and exercise plans in controlling hypertension.

When 2001 came, the two friends saw their opportunity, convincing the government that they were experts on torture. Neither knew much, if anything, about al-Qaida, the intelligence world, Islam, foreign languages or foreign countries.

They simply reversed what they had been teaching, and taught the torture rather than the resistance. According to the Times, they then “made millions selling interrogation and training services to the CIA.”

Now there is an aspect to this which so far as I know has never been mentioned in connection with the U.S. torture program.

“Brainwashing” is a myth. The Defense Department official conclusion after the Korean War was that “no confirmed cases of brainwashing came out of the Korean war.” The DoD said that Chinese Communist treatment of prisoners was not unusual. The academic community eventually concluded that the concept of brainwashing was “not considered useful in Social Science.”

The whole thing came from one sensational book, and the press and public hysteria built up from the fact that some American prisoners in Korea gave “confessions” of war crimes that were used in enemy propaganda, presumably to escape routine brutality or to get privileged treatment.

The Air Force courses of the past 60 years on how to survive brainwashing were cooked up in the United States out of people’s imaginings of what it might be like to be brainwashed. The tortures sold to the CIA by Mitchell and Jessen were made up in the USA.

One more thing must be added to illuminate the atmosphere in which this could have happened in the United States.

The University of Lausanne in Switzerland has allowed it to be made known that one of their theology faculty, professor Thomas Römer, in early 2003 received a call from the Élysée Palace in Paris, the seat of the French presidency.

The president, Jacques Chirac, supposedly wanted a clarification of the significance of the figures of Gog and Magog in biblical prophecy. He was calling Lausanne because he didn’t want his query to be leaked to the press in France.

The theologian explained to him that the two are obscure figures who appear in the Book of Genesis, and again in Ezekiel, in connection with a prophesy of a great war, desired by God, to cleanse the world of his enemies before the arrival of the world’s Last Days, after which a new age would follow.

Chirac reportedly said he was calling because he was distressed that President George Bush had twice telephoned him to inform France’s president that this war was beginning, and urging France to join the United States in fulfilling the divine prophesy. As is well known, France did not do so.

This appears in a new book of interviews by a respected French journalist and friend of Chirac, Jean-Claude Maurice, provocatively called “If You Quote Me, I’ll Deny It.” The report by Maurice has not been confirmed by the former French president. But it has not been denied.

Visit William Pfaff’s Web site at www.williampfaff.com.

Obama still isn’t president in the south

Denying the Obamas American birth is just another form of racism
Andrew Sullivan

A naive person might believe that Barack Hussein Obama was born, as he has long said he was, in Hawaii to a young American mother and a distant father from Kenya. There are notices in two local papers and the certification of birth is filed in the state of Hawaii’s records.

An independent body — FactCheck.org — part of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, asked to see a copy of the original during last year’s campaign. FactCheck is non-partisan and takes all sorts of politicians’ claims to task. Here’s its take on Obama’s birth certificate: “FactCheck.org staffers have now seen, touched, examined and photographed the original birth certificate. We conclude that it meets all of the requirements from the State Department for proving US citizenship. Claims that the document lacks a raised seal or a signature are false. . . Our conclusion: Obama was born in the USA just as he has always said.”

You may be persuaded. Once I’d seen the short-form certificate online, verified by independent journalists and vouched for by state authorities, I was, too. But staggering numbers of Americans remain sceptical. In fact, a majority of Republican voters — 58% — either do not believe or are unsure that Obama is a natural-born American citizen. That means most Republicans believe Obama is constitutionally illegitimate in the presidency because the constitution reserves it for those born in America. The scepticism is — surprise! — concentrated in the south. In Virginia, a southern state that backed Obama last year, only 53% are sure Obama is legitimately president and 70% of Virginia Republicans either don’t believe he is an American or aren’t sure. A poll last week also found that many Republicans believe this issue has not received enough media attention.

What do they believe? The most common theory is that Obama was born in Kenya while his mother was visiting his father. The Hawaiian birth certificate exists, the sceptics claim, because Hawaii recognises as natural-born citizens those born to American mothers temporarily outside the United States. The only problem with that theory is the certificate would mention that fact and it doesn’t.

So Obama was born where all the evidence says he was: Honolulu. Why would a woman in her last month of pregnancy travel halfway around the world to deliver a child in a developing country and then bring him back home, even though he wouldn’t have had a passport? How would she get him into the United States unless someone at the border was in cahoots? “You couldn’t sell this script in Hollywood,” Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, told reporters last week.

Why does this story stay alive? Some, like me, didn’t understand the Hawaiian intricacies at first: we thought there was a single long-form certificate that could resolve the question. But, as FactCheck notes: “The Hawaii Department of Health’s birth record request form does not give the option to request a photocopy of your long-form birth certificate, but their short form has enough information to be acceptable to the State Department.” So Obama did all he could to make this go away.

Yet the conspiracists have only become more adamant. A slew of radio show hosts have fixated on the question; Lou Dobbs, CNN’s resident crank, broadcast several segments expressing doubt about Obama’s birthplace. Sean Hannity, a Fox News pundit, ran two reports on a soldier who refused to follow orders from Obama because he doubted his eligibility to be president. When Major Stefan Cook’s orders to deploy to Afghanistan were revoked, he and his lawyer took it as an admission on the part of the military that the president is not, in fact, a legitimate citizen by birth.

On cue, as Obama turned 48 last week, a Kenyan birth certificate popped up on the web. It was immediately exposed as a forgery based on a 1959 Australian birth certificate, but the pressure hasn’t let up. Obama’s legitimacy as president has been challenged in five lawsuits, all dismissed.

WorldNetDaily, the far-right website, has run countless editorials, letter-writing campaigns and billboard advertisements on the question. WND is a fringe web publication — but its fringe has, by some estimates, about 2m visitors a month.

Rush Limbaugh, the mega-chat show host, has raised the issue and Michael Savage, the rabid rightist, has said: “We’re getting ready for the communist takeover of America with a non-citizen at the helm.” Other, calmer Republican activists have denounced the so-called “birthers”. The cannier ones have argued that this issue has been drummed up by Democrats to discredit the Good Old Party (and it has). But it’s hard to accept that explains everything.

The bolder rightwingers have condemned the whole thing: radio star Michael Medved has called the birthers “crazy, nutburger, demagogue, money-hungry, exploitative, irresponsible, filthy conservative imposters”. But leading Republican politicians, aware of how powerful the conspiracy theory is among their supporters, have tried to avoid the issue. The Alabama Senator Richard Shelby, for example, told a town hall meeting last February: “Well, his father was Kenyan and they said he was born in Hawaii but I haven’t seen any birth certificate”, even though a resolution on July 27 — issued on the 50th anniversary of Hawaii’s statehood — declared Obama a citizen unanimously (with some Republican abstentions).

This is the silly season. But this silly story seems to me an indication of something more ominous. The demographics tell the basic story: a black man is president and a large majority of white southerners cannot accept that, even in 2009. They grasp conspiracy theories to wish Obama — and the America he represents — away.

Since white southerners comprise an increasing proportion of the 22% of Americans who still describe themselves as Republican, the GOP can neither dismiss the crankery nor move past it. The fringe defines what’s left of the Republican center.

The chilling implication is that a large number of Americans believe the president has no right to be in office and has fraudulently maneuvered himself there.

I hope the secret service is on alert. If we thought racial panic had ended with Obama’s election, the resilience of this story in key parts of the country is a helpful wake-up call.