A LOOK AT THE BOOK

Here it is - the anthology containing my article on Michael Jackson is now in print. You can order a copy direct from the editor, details here, or get it from Amazon.com in a few weeks.

FREEDOM OF SPEECH…OR HARASSMENT AND SLANDER?

The story excerpted below can be read in its entirety HERE. h/t to ELIZABETH for posting this in her comments on my Kids Are Heroes post.

For Will Phillips, standing up to say the pledge of allegiance and repeating the words, “with liberty and justice for all” is something he refuses to do because he believes that these words are not true. And it has gotten him into hot water and garnered some unwanted attention.

See Will Phillips is only 10 years old, but a rather precocious 10 year old. He has skipped a grade this year and as his mother puts it, “Yes, my son is 10, but he's probably more aware of the meaning of the pledge than a lot of adults. He's not just doing it rote recitation. We raised him to be aware of what's right, what's wrong, and what's fair.”
“I've always tried to analyze things because I want to be lawyer,” Will said. “I really don't feel that there's currently liberty and justice for all.”

Will’s family have a number of gay friends and they have been actively involved in supporting gay rights by attending rallies and other functions. It is this failure to provide equal rights and protections to gays that Will finds objectionable.
Will and his parents have had to contend with the school system, of course, although they have backed down when Will’s mother pushed the issue of whether it is mandatory to say the pledge; it is not.
Will himself has had support from some students but has also had to deal with the derision and taunts from his detractors.

[Given that his protest is over the rights of gays and lesbians, the taunts have taken a predictable bent. “In the lunchroom and in the hallway, they've been making comments and doing pranks, and calling me gay,” he said. “It's always the same people, walking up and calling me a gaywad.”]
“They [the kids who don't support him] are much more crazy, and out of control and vocal about it than supporters are.”

When asked what being an American means, Will didn’t hesitate; “The freedom of speech. The freedom to disagree. That's what I think pretty much being an American represents.”

But the right to freedom of speech which Americans have long claimed also carries a great responsibility of how we use that freedom. When making this statement on other blogs I have been called Orwellian or the speech police.

And yet, I have never intimated that I would support suppressing speech but rather contend that people are responsible for the things they say. It is one thing to express your disagreement with say, a neighbor. That would be your right to free speech. But now imagine you speak about this neighbor to other neighbors, perhaps their children are listening as you claim the neighbor is selling drugs and sexually molesting his granddaughters and then state someone should blow his head off. If one of those children grows into a teen who believes this neighbor is a child molester and one day goes over there and blows the guy’s head off – are you in any way culpable? Can you simply hide behind the “freedom of speech” rag and declare you aren’t responsible for the actions of the kid; after all, you didn’t TELL him to do it.

I recently took this a step further on another blog, suggesting that the increasing violence in this country might be related to the increasing level of violent, angry rhetoric and use of shockingly violent images along with the spreading of rumors, lies and innuendo. And, predictably, the first amendment was dutifully trotted out.

There is a continuing apathy and a strong desire to deny the growing gang activity and the ensuing indoctrination of thousands of poor kids into these violent gangs that further feeds the culture of violence festering in this country. The screamers of death threats and bearers of violent images of death feel no shame for their wanton conduct nor any responsibility for further fanning the flames of violence.

It is one thing to disagree and voice your opinion. It is quite another to spread lies and call for violent action. So, when do we cross the line from first amendment protected free speech to harassment, libel, slander and inciting violence? Or does the first amendment mean that anything goes?

God is great - Bill O'Reilly? Not so much.

Blurry words and fuzzy logic are the tools of the deceiver. Take the word "terrorist." We're still trying to fit it into the Procrustean bed, or should we call it the Republican Bunk? In fact we can no longer distinguish between terror, the emotion or terrorism; the acts designed to produce terror. We're always arguing about who is a criminal and who is a terrorist but, always willing to help us find our balance, Fox news and Sean O'Reilly are on the job.

In order to keep the terror, angst and anger flowing and the ratings high, it's important to keep the supply of terrorists visible and to keep them ethnic -- and here comes Sean Hannity to tell us that what makes a terrorist a terrorist is that he praises God before he terrorizes. It's not all that simple though, he has to do that in Arabic otherwise every foxhole would be full of terrorists of many faiths.

It's simple enough however to say that because Major Nidal Malik Hasan allegedly said Allahu Akhbar before shooting up Fort Hood. On the other hand, attacks from the bombing of Guernica to the Rape of Nanjing to the shocking and awing of Baghdad are not. Simple haters like simple rules for hating. They like simple things that can be used to create convenient groups: tropes like "political correctness" of which O'Reilly accused The Washington Post's Sally Quinn Wednesday night. It's much easier to condemn a group fabricated for the purpose than to address her reluctance to call the man a "Muslim Terrorist."

"You have a hard time saying the words 'Muslim terrorist. I don't know why."

I do know why. If the only difference between Charles Manson, Timothy McVeigh, David, Son of Sam, Berkowitz and Major Hasan is religion, it becomes awfully hard to launch the Fox Crusade against Muslims alone. So one hates along with Bill, or one is politically correct which means unwilling to hate along with Bill. One jumps to convenient conclusions with him or one refuses in that politically correct way, thus defining PC as smart and honest and responsible for people more logically adept than the Fox Fools.

One must be a hater of Muslims or a terrorist supporter and without that assertion O'Reilly melts on the floor like the Wicked Witch. A nice binary, Good V. Evil choice to replace the kind of reasoning stupid people hate and fear and are incapable of: the kind of choice Lyin' Bill peddles like crack in the high school parking lot.

Shameless in the morning

Fox may just be the most busted name on Television, but it never seems to affect them or the faithfulness of their coven. We've heard plenty from them about how President Obama is a racist and the lack of evidence doesn't keep them from clinging to the slur or using it to disparage anyone who dares disagree. It also doesn't keep them from airing obnoxious and personal racist attacks without any disguise at all. What else would you call Bo Dietl, pulling on his eyes and mocking CBS anchor Katie Couric for looking Chinese and "oriental?" Probably the same thing he would call me if I put burned cork on my face and said "Holy Mackerel, Andy:" a racist idiot.

"Ten years ago, she looked American," Dietl remarked. "Today she is an Oriental"

as though nobody of Asian ancestry could possibly be an American. As though nobody with dark skin could possibly be one either. As though Dietl weren't a nasty little racist prick.



Dietl, who is a frequent Fox contributor, former Bush appointee and midwife to the "birther" hoax, chose Imus in the Morning simulcast on Fox for this infantile insult. In any other venue, he would immediately be fired and Imus, if he had a brain in that zombie-like head of his should have thrown him off instantly, but of course Imus is Imus and all he could do was to call Curic a rodent in that whiskey and heroin voice of his, but of course it was on Fox and the racism and ugly slander is fair and balanced, you dirty Liberals.

Sure, they'll have an excuse, it wasn't racist, he was misunderstood, Liberals have no sense of humor and yada yada. We've heard it all before. They'll get away with it because Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch and their employees are pigs who deserve nothing better for Christmas than to be visited by the ghost of Bruce Lee who can demonstrate to them just how hilariously funny it is to be Chinese.

COLLATERAL DAMAGE AFTER THE FORT HOOD MASSACRE

Inspiration for this post comes from a close friend, Lindsay at Majikthise, who questioned the journalistic integrity of one of our major news gatherers in: AP trafficks in innuendo over Ft. Hood shootings.

My interest in the Fort Hood story is more than causal. My daughter is a career military officer who was once stationed there, and it was from Fort Hood where she deployed on the first of four missions to the Middle East.

Years ago, I received one of those telephone calls that parents dread: “Dad, I am shipping out, and if you want to see me before I go, the time is now.” Immediately, I booked a flight to Dallas with a transfer to Killeen to spend what few precious days I could with my daughter. As the years passed, I would repeat this drama again and again.

Military life can be almost as hard on families as on soldiers. Holidays are less than festive when there is an empty place at the table. There is always the missing person at family milestone events … the succession of births and funerals that mark our days … and the skipped heartbeat before answering unexpected knocks on the door.

There were times when the telephone rang in the middle of the night, and it was the voice of my daughter who said: “Dad, in case you haven’t heard the news yet, there was a rocket attack but we are okay.”

Lucky for me, my daughter always returned home, shaken by flashbacks never discussed, but otherwise unharmed. Thousands of other families have been less fortunate. To date, there have been 4,362 deaths in Iraq and 918 in Afghanistan … the sons and daughters, husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles of someone, but not everyone.

I repeat “not everyone,” because less than a third of one percent of our citizenry has a family member in the military. Most Americans bear witness to war from afar … from the comforts of home in front of televisions that report frontline news from thousands of miles away. Flip the channel. On any given day, the voice of Wolf Blitzer hawking headlines segues into the voice of Billy Mays plugging OxyClean, which merge into one continuous deafening screech. Accounts of war interspersed with crass commercialism create an aura of banality that deadens the senses … until some strange act of violence takes place on native soil and shakes Americans from their stupor.

Mass murder has become so commonplace, we are almost too numb to be shocked. Scarcely a day after the Fort Hood massacre, a disgruntled ex-employee entered an office building in downtown Orlando and opened fire, killing one and wounding five. How quickly we forget the carnage at Virginia Tech that left 33 dead or this massacre at Fort Hood 18 years ago that left 23 dead.

What makes this bloodbath different from others? It occurred on a military base deep in the heart of Texas, and the shooter is an Army Major with a foreign name: Malik Nadal Hasan.

MSNBC: “At least three gunmen involved.”

CNN: “One gunman “neutralized” and one cornered.”

FOX: “Three gunmen dressed in fatigues.”

CNN: “One shooter dead, two in custody.”

FOX: “M-16s used.”

ABC: “Gunman was a convert to Islam.”

TWITTER: “Hasan handed out Korans before the shooting.”

In retrospect, the headlines of the day were riddled with hearsay, and none of these accounts proved accurate or true. Have we grown so accustomed to junk journalism that we fail to notice anymore?

All too often, there are opinion makers willing to jump to conclusions and spin certitudes and platitudes before all facts are known. And all too often, there are bigots, demagogues, and political opportunists willing to spin false reports and half truths into inflammatory cants, such as the infamous Jerome Corsi, who writes:

“Nidal Malik Hasan, the alleged shooter in yesterday's massacre at Fort Hood, played a homeland security advisory role in President Barack Obama's transition into the White House, according to a key university policy institute document.”

This statement was so outrageously false, Frank Cilluffo, Director of the Homeland Security Policy Institute at George Washington University, issued an immediate disclaimer:

"[Nidal Hasan] has no role on the task force, other than the fact that he attended these meetings as an audience member, as did hundreds of others."

The American Family Association, a conservative Christian group, posted a website article (caution: this link crashed my browser four times) calling for Muslims to be barred from military service. According to their spokesperson, Bryan Fischer:

“It is time, I suggest, to stop the practice of allowing Muslims to serve in the U.S. military (…) Yesterday’s massacre is living proof [sic].”

The infamous Islamaphobe, Dave Gaubatz said in this interview:

“ Politicians, Muslims, and law enforcement are concerned about a 'backlash' against Muslims. Now is the time for a professional and legal backlash against the Muslim community and their leaders. ”

Even more ominous and disturbing, four Republican members of Congress … Sue Myrick [R-NC], John Shadegg [R-AZ], Paul Broun [R-GA] and Trent Franks [R-AZ] … want to bypass a formal FBI inquiry and conduct their own investigation, an initiative supported by the undead Senator from Connecticut whose image no longer reflects in Democratic mirrors.

There are compelling reasons for conducting a non-politicized inquiry through proper channels. Is Malik Nadal Hasan really an Islamic terrorist (a forgone conclusion in the minds of Islamaphobes), or does he fit the profile of other criminally disturbed personalities who have committed past mass murders?

The hype and hysteria in the aftermath of the Fort Hood massacre concern me. There are thousands of Muslims serving in our military. Some are bullied, subjected to ridicule and scorn, called “towel heads” and “sand n***ers” by fellow soldiers. Muslim-Americans serve as soldiers, translators, and military liaisons with our allies in the Middle East, which include the Arab Emirate States, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, and Turkey, as examples. Muslim-American families make the same sacrifices and suffer the same anxieties as my family when their soldiers deploy overseas.

How does our country appear in the eyes of the world and our allies when bigots and hate-mongers insinuate themselves into the public debate? My question is more than rhetorical. These malevolent voices dishonor the service of our soldiers and sabotage their efforts.

A blogger who calls herself an American Black Chick in Europe puts this issue into proper perspective:

“Why do some elements of American society attribute the actions of an individual to an entire group of people? I'm tired ... tired of generalisations thrown out at folks who have a different name, different religion, different skin color, different look, different ideas than what's considered "mainstream America.”

I raised similar concerns at the blog of our esteemed colleague, Robert Stein of Connecting.The.Dots, when a fly-by troll steeped in Fuzzy Logic said this to me:

“ Well, thank goodness you spoke up and aligned yourself with the mass murderer at Fort Hood instead of with my comment.”

How smug and offensive! These days, hyper-partisanship respects no boundaries. Sometimes I feel as if we are at war on two fronts: The terrorists who attack us from abroad and the lunatic fringe that assails us at home. We have turned into a nation at war with ourselves when our most cherished beliefs and values, including civil liberties and the rule of law, are no longer considered sacred and sacrosanct, but must be defended on all fronts.

Who would Jesus blackmail?

A high proportion of the atheists and agnostics I know are, or have been Roman Catholic and I have to say a good number of my favorite comedians as well. The sense of alienation and the sarcasm of such people no mystery to me when I read stories like the Washington Post's piece on the Archdiocese of Washington DC and its threat to discontinue being all charitable and Christlike about feeding and sheltering the homeless and hungry if a proposed bill allowing same sex marriage passes.

Although the Church would not of course be required to perform or to lend their floor space to such unions, they would be required to obey the same laws forbidding discrimination against gay men and lesbians as the rest of us.

"The city is saying in order to provide social services, you need to be secular. For us, that's really a problem" said Archdiocese spokeswoman Susan Gibbs.

No, the city is saying that to be a partner with a publicly funded service, you don't hold the city hostage until they deny civil rights to law abiding citizens. Consider the homeless of the streets, shall we let them starve if only two gay men are allowed to marry? Shall we let them die if we allow people to divorce? What other taboos must we as citizens observe before the Archdiocese of Washington will deign to obey Biblical commandments to help others?

I do understand that they have a problem recognizing certain lay employee's right to share employment benefits, I just can't see Jesus making an issue of it or attempting to use the homeless as a hostage if the Romans refused to implement Jewish law.

Of course the peanut gallery will respond with nonsense about religious persecution and freedom and there will be no reasoning with them, but if a religious test to receive public services is repugnant, the demand that the public go along with their dogma or the poor will not be served is more so. It's another example lending credibility to all the warnings about "faith based" initiatives. It's another example illustrating just why Congress shall make no laws concerning an establishment of religion.

Lou Dobbs Translated

In case you haven't heard, Lou Dobbs is leaving CNN. Translation provided below.


TRANSLATION: I made this network, and now it's dead last in the ratings so I'm jumping ship. I've made my pile, don't have to put up with suits telling me I can't go the full George Wallace on camera. Goddamnit, I've been speaking racial code and channeling fringe anti-immigration hysteria since that little shit was in diapers! But now CNN has changed, and maybe America has changed, and I'm just sick of holding back. Maybe I'll be a politician so I can rake in the big bucks and serve my ginormous ego.

Smaller, less intrusive religion

Just who owns your life and when you die, who owns your remains? Do you get to decide or does someone else's religion get to decide?

Let's say the great love of your life dies. Let's say you live in Rhode Island and you want to retrieve the body from the morgue, take it to a funeral home and plan a funeral. That's fine as long as you're legally next of kin, otherwise you're eroding traditional heterosexual marriages says the Governor. I'm not even going to try to figure out the tortuous path down which the Republican Governor of Rhode Island, DonCarcieri trod to get to that conclusion. I'm just going to assume that there is no logical process at all and that it's just the same nasty religious authoritarianism that sparked the existence of the Rhode Island colony in the first place.

I'm going to venture to assert instead that blocking such a simple act of decency toward people who are in a committed relationship; allowing any of us the freedom to decide who is our family or not, who we want to give a responsibility to or not, prevents a danger to heterosexual relationships is ludicrous and offensively stupid and that he is only acting in the traditional theocratic role of forcing his religious doctrine up the collective arses of the Rhode Island citizens.

Don Carcieri vetoed a bill yesterday allowing same sex couples to plan the funerals of deceased partners, although Democrats may have the votes to override it. Carcieri believes that elected representatives do not have the power to write such legislation and there should be a direct ballot referendum instead. I wonder if this will erode the institution of our republican form of government as much as treating domestic partnerships outside of a Church approved relationship with equal protection under the law will erode my own marriage. So far my wife and I have survived such "disturbing trends" and are getting along just fine minding our own business.

A right wing bigot owns our media

Well there you have it. With Fox News, it starts right at the top. He's not sure if it's valid to compare President Obama with Stalin, he says, but he certainly is a racist and Glenn Beck was right in saying it, says Rupert Murdoch.

"But he did make a very racist comment. Ahhh…about, you know, blacks and whites and so on, and which he said in his campaign he would be completely above. And um, that was something which perhaps shouldn’t have been said about the President, but if you actually assess what he was talking about, he was right,"

he said on Australian TV. Well ahhh and um, anybody who can look at Barak Obama in the context of early 21st century America; stand him against Murdoch's race-baiting bogus journalism and call him a racist is either deranged, dishonest or stupid. I don't rule out that Rupert has hit theTrifecta here.

Of course Murdoch denied being aware that Beck had compared our President with Joseph Stalin even though, of course, he did just that and of course Fox in general is engaged in an often self-contradictory orgy of slanderous invention deceptive video editing and stealing rumors from disreputable blogs without investigation. If Murdoch isn't aware or doesn't understand, it argues strongly for the deranged and dishonest. If we're looking for the reason behind Fox's loyalty to someone who is loosing advertisers and making our country and much of its media a laughing stock, here you have it: Rupert Murdoch thinks Glenn Beck is right and I don't mean far Right.

Obama may not hate white people, admitted Beck, but he has a problem with "white culture" and I suppose that might be true if you define white culture as Glenn Beck's kind of loathing for anything smelling of decency. Indeed lumping together the "white" people of the world into one culture is in itself an act of idiotic, deceptive and ugly racism, but do we need to need to explain Glenn Beck or do we need to boycott every and any Rupert Murdoch enterprise until he feels it in his swollen bank accounts?

The great dollar plot -- There's a conspiracy in my coin!

It's not only the idiot Sarah Palin who sees a conspiracy in the current dollar coin issue. I've had shopkeepers refuse to take it (in violation of the law) because they too see a conspiracy. I confess to using them as often as I can, just for the petty pleasure of irritating the subhuman ascendancy.

Yes, I know, the idiot Palin sees conspiracies and witches ( and uninhabited Russian islands) all the time and likes to talk about such things to cover up the total absence of any constructive ideas, much less a child's knowledge of American history and current affairs.

Palin's Wisconsin speech last Friday night wasn't recorded because forbidding all recording and communications devices has become a standard tactic in her war on sanity, but still it isn't necessary to have audio or video to stun the rational public with -- well, with her idiocy. At the "Right to Life" rally, writes Jonathan Martin at Politico, she dishonestly extrapolated the legality of abortion rights to the government's desire to cut off all health care to the elderly and children with birth defects just to see them die and re-iterated that euthanasia would be a likely result of extending Medicare-like coverage to the general population. Yes, she's still raving about death panels as though her constant yammering and stammering could create an alternate reality in which she made some kind of sense and where she wasn't lying through her cheap lipstick.

“It is so bogus that society is sending a message right now and has been for probably the last 40 years that a woman isn’t strong enough or smart enough to be able to pursue an education, a career and her rights and still let her baby live”

said the idiot Palin. Those of us who still remember some English will wonder why more people don't laugh, since bogus means counterfeit and what she is really saying is that society is not sending that message, but of course people who line up to hear the idiot Palin aren't able to see the idiocy. It's proof that with stupidity, it takes one not to notice one. It takes one not to have noticed that the "message" that a woman can pretty much do what she damn well pleases with respect to having a career and children, is a Liberal one that's been fought hard against and took centuries to achieve in the face of conservative intransigence, dishonest appeals to "family Values," fictitious fears and the kind of pseudo-Biblical claptrap the idiot Palin is famous for.

That would have been enough, as the old Passover song goes, but the idiot Palin, finding the audience less than mindlessly ebullient about her incoherent rants, launched into a riff on the sinister conspiracy behind putting "In God We Trust" around the rim of the dollar coin instead of the obverse. Stopping short of blaming it on the Elders of Zion, she asked her audience to fill in the blanks from their own piggy banks of bigotry, ignorance and idiocy. As Martin writes:

"Noting that there had been a lot of “change” of late, Palin recalled a recent conversation with a friend about how the phrase “In God We Trust” had been moved to the edge of the new coins."

Of course the coin in question was issued by the Bush administration and perhaps the Treasury Secretary thought it would be fine to follow not only what much of the world has done with their coinage, but what the US $20 St. Gaudens gold coin displayed from 1907 to 1933 and mint an inscription around the edge. Traditionally such things have been done for 200 years to make it impossible to shave off precious metal without detection, but many countries still follow the practice with the brass tokens we use today. So far, YHWH hasn't dispatched them like Gommorah. None the less, the inscription was put back on the face of the coin to please the unclean and unintelligent rabble that sees conspiracy in everything -- years ago. Hasn't anyone noticed? Certainly not the idiot Palin. None of our more common coinage has an edge inscription - hasn't the ambassador from the Pleistocene noticed? Apparently her demand for outrages to put around the edges of Liberals has exceeded the supply and so she's minting these counterfeit slugs herself -- and the Republican rubes are filling their pockets with them.

“Who calls a shot like that?” she demanded. “Who makes a decision like that?”

I've asked myself the question of who thought up the practice of putting theistic proclamations on coinage in the first place. It certainly wasn't the 'Founding Fathers.' According to the Treasury Department itself, it began during the Civil War, which coincided with a large influx of the huddled masses yearning to retain theocracy and the Union's need to find a "God is on our side" justification for all the carnage. The practice has certainly not extended to all coins in all years, and that fact hasn't been made much of in the past, but never before have these United States been in such a fugue state of holy rolling, snake handling, tongues talking, foaming at the mouth, apocalyptic insanity.

The answer to her question of course was Republican Senator John Sununu with heavy Republican support in the Senate and House and with the blessings of George W. Bush and his Secretary of the Treasury and the idiotPalin is going to have to outdo herself in order to convince me that Bush or any of his cloven-hooved accomplices was plotting a war on Christianity by removing a religious oath from where God told us not to put it in the first place.

“It’s a disturbing trend.”

She said, illustrating either her disregard for any actual meaning or applicability to reality her words might have. Something that happens for a year and then returns to the way it's been for 150 years is not a trend, but hey, that's why she's called the idiot Palin and that's why the angry, fearful, confused, uneducated, unintelligent, underclass finds her mysterious pathological fears so appealing. That's a a disturbing trend indeed.