Just do it!

Perhaps Fred Phelps Jr. is getting slow, or perhaps he has to type with one hand because he's so exited at God's wrath being inflicted on Moore, Oklahoma.  The very thought of little children being crushed or torn to pieces as they scream in terror must excite him past the point of self control. It took him hours to inform us that this disaster was the result of Oklahoma City Thunder basketball star Kevin Durant’s public support for gay basketball player Jason Collins.  God works in mysterious ways, but there's nothing mysterious about Fred unless you're interested in the chemistry of foul smells.

But there's light at the end of the drain and maybe a suggestion for people like Fred with more demons than synapses in their skulls. Dominique Venner is billed in the press as a right-wing historian, although some may prefer to call him a hate-filled pervert obsessed with other people's sexual preferences,  or an ultra nationalist militiaman because of his past involvement with a paramilitary Secret Army Organisation which fought against France giving up colonial rights in Algeria. A gay hating enemy of human rights and freedom, in short. Mr. Venner walked into Notre Dame de Paris Monday, placed a letter on the altar and then blew his brains out with an illegally owned pistol.

The famous Cathedral has been the site of many demonstrations and protests over the issue of gay marriage which became legal last week. Catholic conservative Venner certainly made his point to the horror of the tour groups present and one has to wonder about the dedication of lesser nobles like Phelps for not martyring himself for his ridiculous cause.  I presume God has to wonder too.

So what about it Fred?  I mean you don't need to go to Paris or even to bloody up someone elses Church, you've got one of your own. Take your dad along, make it a father and son thing, or take the whole flock along, but Just do it!

Untitled

Benghazi: Time to Investigate the Investigators

A CBS News report surfaced yesterday suggesting House Republicans may have altered Benghazi emails to advance a political agenda. Leaked versions of Benghazi emails released last week by House Republicans do not match the same documents made public by the White House. Two noteworthy examples:

White House version: "We need to resolve this in a way that respects all of the relevant equities, particularly the investigation." 

GOP version: "We must make sure that the talking points reflect all agency equities, including those of the State Department, and we don't want to undermine the FBI investigation." 

----------------------------------------------------- 

White House version: "The penultimate point could be abused by members to beat the State Department for not paying attention to Agency warnings." 

GOP version: “The penultimate point is a paragraph talking about all the previous warnings provided by the Agency (CIA) about al-Qaeda's presence and activities of al-Qaeda."

Apparently, the White House documents were too generic and ambiguous to satisfy GOP instigators investigators, who wanted to make sure doctored leaked versions of the same emails contained specific references to 'talking points,' the 'State Department,' the 'FBI,' 'CIA,' and 'al-Qaeda' (mentioned twice for good measure). It appears House Republicans were determined to leave no turn unstoned.

Who authorized these changes? What did Representative Darryll Issa (R-Ca), Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, know and when did he know it? Can we trust the findings of the House Oversight Committee? How does a partisan hatchet job serve the public interest?

IRS- The Latest Republican Phony Scandal

I know this issue has already been the subject of a post here, but I wanted to get my two cents in too.  I hope that's okay.

Oh, the outrage!  How dare the IRS question the honesty of tea party groups who asserted in legal documents that they were primarily social welfare organizations, not political groups!  Who would ever think such a thing!  And how dare the IRS single them out and not make a move against liberal groups!

Here we go again, with the usual Republican mountain of outrage, designed to smear the Obama administration and at the same time ignite more hatred against the government and particularly against having to pay taxes.  And of course, the tools in the mainstream press are likely going to do the bidding of their rich masters and run with this phony scandal all summer long, despite the fact that anyone with an hour or so to spend can completely deconstruct the whole lying pack of nonsense.

Well, here is what I have found out in my hour of time.  First of all, the IRS' scrutiny was not directed solely at right wing organizations:

"Liberal groups received same IRS letter that ignited Tea Party outrage...The maelstrom over the revelation that the IRS targeted anti-tax Tea Party groups applying for tax exempt status for scrutiny is showing no signs of slowing down, with Republicans seeing their chance to milk a scandal for political purposes. But while the politics is heating up, some important context is emerging, like the fact that liberal groups were targeted as well, and in fact the only group to have its application denied was a liberal group."

Well, that's the least of the problems with this latest non-scandal. Now on to the real outrage.  Here are a few excerpts from an official IRS document* entitled "IRC 501(c)(4)Organizations   ByJohn Francis Reilly, Carter C.Hull, and Barbara A. Braig Allen:"

 "IRC 501(c)(4) provides for exemption of:

Civic leagues or organizations not organized for profit but operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare.

Local associations of employees,the membership of which is limited to the employees of a designated person or persons in a particular municipality and the net earnings of which are devoted exclusively to charitable, educational, or recreational purposes.

Organizations that promote social welfare should primarily promote the common good and general welfare of the people of the community as a whole.  An organization that primarily benefits a private group of citizens cannot qualify for IRC 501(c)(4) exempt status.

an organization that loses its IRC 501(c)(3) status because of excessive lobbying or political campaign intervention may not be treated as an organization described in IRC 501(c)(4)."

A few remarks on the above.  First of all, let me point out that despite the clear wording of the above, at some point in the past, the IRS decided to replace the word "exclusively" with the word "primarily."  If you are interested in why this happened, you are welcome to read more of this IRS document, which contains numerous short explanations of cases the IRS has ruled on, which show that many groups which were clearly social welfare organizations under the meaning of this act had minor activities which could have resulted in their being denied their appropriate status (i.e. bingo games run by charities, which could be seen as a for-profit activity.)  Unfortunately, this change in interpretation left the act open to the most egregious abuse.  The notion, for example, that Karl Rove's political smear factory is a "social welfare" organization is ludicrous; yet it continues to claim tax exempt status, due to the IRS's utter failure to enforce this law with appropriate action.

Now, a few comments from an article in the Columbia Journalism Review, which I found via the Daily Kos post linked to above:
 

"• Congress requires the IRS to review every application for tax-exempt status to weed out organizations that are partisan, political, or that generate private gain. Congress has imposed this requirement on the IRS, and its predecessor agencies, since 1913.

• When it comes to 501(c)(4) organizations, what the IRS is supposed to do is draw a distinction between groups that are “primarily engaged” in politics and groups that really are primarily engaged in “social welfare”—somehow “promoting the common good and social welfare of the community.”

• The first scandal here, meanwhile, is that the social welfare tax exemption is being used by existing 501(c)(4) organizations, including some very large ones, to promote partisan political interests—the very activity Congress has explicitly prohibited for a century"

What must be noted here is not that the IRS exceeded its mandate by examining these organizations, but that it was legally obligated to examine all of them; and the real scandal here is that every single one of these purely political groups was not denied its tax exempt status.  And further, it is even more of a scandal that Rove's group and the many like it that were formed in the wake of the miserable Citizens' United decision were not laughed out of Washington when they applied for tax exempt status for the hundreds of millions of dollars that their few thousand rich donors spent to buy elections. 

But still, we are treated to the mindless regurgitation of the Republican point of view from our mainstream press, such as this example from the Voice of the Serious People, the Washington Post:

 "The fact that Tea Party groups — especially smaller organizations — appear to have been specially singled out for scrutiny is what most troubles many experts here. Not least because larger, politically oriented groups like Crossroads GPS and Priorities USA were able to form 501(c)(4) organizations with little trouble.

“The targeting aspect of this is god-awful,” agreed Douglas N. Varley, a Washington-based lawyer with Caplin & Drysdale who deals with tax-exempt organizations. He adds that the agency’s special focus on conservative groups is a much bigger deal than the sheer number of questions that were posed to groups seeking 501(c)(4) exemption, which isn’t by itself unusual."

The targeting aspect of this was not God-awful.  It was one hundred percent appropriate, as required by law (which this ignorant reporter would know if he had bothered to do any research beyond regurgitating Republican talking points.)  Is there a person in this country that does not know that the tea party groups and all of the other Republican groups like Rove's existed for no other purpose than to elect Republican candidates?  When they applied for tax exempt status, they openly perjured themselves by claiming that they had any other purpose.  It was the legal responsibility of the IRS to question the legitimacy of their criminal filings, and what is more it was the legal obligation of the IRS to deny every single one of these applications.  What is "God-awful" is that the Republican party, along with its stooges in the press, are intimidating IRS officials into not applying the law, so that they may enjoy the privilege of openly breaking the law every day that these organizations exist.


 *If you want to read the whole thing (be my guest- I did and it didn't quite kill me,) here it is.

Nothing Political Here

Move right along

When asked why he robbed banks, Willie "the actor" Sutton is famously but falsely said to have replied: "that's where the money is."  Perhaps the IRS has been thinking along the same lines by targeting groups using words like "patriot" and agitating against "how the government is run" and about the debt. Far Right think tanks and agitators tend to have rich supporters.

According to some, Jewish groups as well have been selected for special handling, whether pro-Israel or purely religious.  Perhaps not.  Perhaps  it's all political, a claim which was and is the standard Republican answer for any charges against Nixon.

The comparison with Richard Nixon and his enemies list is inescapable although we certainly don't have audio tapes of President Obama telling Jimmy Graham that we need to go after the Jews who are "ruining the country."  Even for long term and relentless Nixon defenders, the opportunity to suggest impeachment, to demand impeachment now is so irresistible that it seems at long last to be acceptable for perennial supporters to remind us of Tricky Dick's tricks even though the dismissal of such charges as political is maintained.

We know Nixon was behind a "weaponized" IRS, but do we have a smoking tape of Obama?  I doubt it but that difference will be forgotten. It happened under his watch and that's enough.   Claims that the IRS is independent won't matter. Questions about whether the IRS was politically motivated to take down Al Capone won't arise nor did anyone accuse President Hoover of such things.

Of course there have been so many ridiculous claims against Barack Obama of  impeachable 'high crimes' already that the demands of the self-righteous Right don't quite have the desired effect on the unconverted and those who catalog Republican transgressions.  Still, people like Smugster George sWill aren't going to let it go and the attack on possible 2016 candidates will be joined by increasingly nasal and polyphonic choruses of  Sic Semper Tyrannis. 

sWill, wearing his outrage costume on ABC's This Week, tells us " all hell" would have broken loose had Bush used the IRS against progressives and his poker face never twitches as he forgets about the political assassination of Valerie Plame and other scandals to voluminous to list.  And of course that Bush might in fact be guilty of the same thing isn't quite obscured by the standard props of  Gerogewillian pomposity.

But the level of 'truthiness' in charges against several presidents, including Bill Clinton for using IRS harassment in retaliation against personal lawsuits is significant and of course it's scary.  Anyone who has been through an audit knows that,  and Obama has no choice to make an open investigation rather than to invoke Executive Privilege as his predecessor was wont to do.  But regardless of  who the Special Prosecutor might be and regardless of evidence or lack thereof, I can already smell the stink of  American politics once again.

Terrorist without a cause

No, this one does not star James Dean chewing on the scenery as he wails "You're tearing me apart" but it's tearing us all apart. I'm starting to think there's a national competition going on and I'm getting tired of saying "not again!"

19 people shot at a parade in New Orleans, with 3 suspected perpetrators as yet to be apprehended. Why?  Is it some bizarre political statement only they can understand?  I can only guess, but the notion that we have a lunatic fringe competing for their share of obsessive media coverage is tempting. If there are indeed three men involved, we have to rule out mental illness as we usually think of it although we can't avoid the question of what kind of sanity could prompt such acts of random violence.

New Orleans is a violent, crime ridden city with a police force that has been accused of incompetence, corruption and its own acts of violence, but one has to ask why New York is a vastly safer city; Miami, El Paso  -- all of which prove that ethnic diversity has nothing to do with it and suggests strongly that strong gun laws have little to do with it.

I simply don't know, but this, once again, isn't crime for profit, it isn't about gangs or gangsters or their territorial disputes.  I can only ask myself why people compete, why people are willing to court death, even seek it just so CNN can have another huge boost in ratings.

UPDATE:

And speaking of ratings, why is it that we've been carpet bombed with coverage of this incident as though it were an indicator of increasing violence, yet New Orleans' 193 homicides in 2012 are seven fewer than in 2011 and the slowdown has continued at least through March of this year.  We saw and heard little about  the January drive-by shooting of five people after a Martin Luther King Jr Day parade, or the four wounded in a shooting after an argument in the French Quarter just before Mardi Gras. Suspects are in custody for those crimes, which seem gang related.  Perhaps the Mother's day shooting is too. Are the media suggesting that gang related crimes could be caused by gangs and reduced by somehow getting rid of them?  I don't think so.

Police have named 19 year old Akein Scott as the first suspect and have released video of him, according to The Guardian. It's hard for a rational mind to understand why some gang might perpetrate such a crime, but this may be another lesson in how gangsters and the culture of gangsterism eats away at civilization and perhaps how our culture of  prohibition, our failure to deal with poverty and lack of education nourishes the criminal culture in America.

Mother's Day Without My Mother

1926-2013

This will be my first Mothers' Day without my mother who passed away last month at age 86. When you lose your mother, you lose a keeper of your family memories, an eyewitness account, a living legacy.  Gone are the stories partially told, or never told, that will never be told again. There is never enough time. Nevertheless, I remind myself: Your mother also lives within you, in your children and in future generations. But Mothers’ Day will never be the same again without your mother.

The Grand and Great-Grand generations

A cute kid until he turned himself ...

... into THIS!

What, will these hands ne'er be clean?

There's a lesson to be learned from the trial of Guatemala's former dictator Efrian Rios Montt, ‘a man of great personal integrity . . . totally dedicated to democracy’ said Ronald Reagan, surprised upon visiting him in Honduras that Central America was composed of several countries. But few Americans will care or will even be aware that at long last he's been found guilty of genocide and war crimes.

The things that went on in Guatemala  were gruesome, horrifying and heart-breaking but I don't have the stomach to relate even part of it.  You can read about it here and if you do, if you can tear yourself away from Boston Bomber stories, School shooting stories' da scores' and Cleveland sex slaves long enough, perhaps you'll take a further moment to meditate and perhaps agonize over the part our country, always howling about freedom as if we invented it, played in yet another sordid and brutal horror.

Yes, Rios Montt is a monster like so many Latin American monsters in Chile, Argentina and elsewhere, all of whom were supported by the Land of the Free and even placed in power by violent  US assistance.  Rios Montt whose  squads were supported and advised by and trained by the Reagan administration, wasn't a Communist you see and that's what counts and so it didn't matter that he raped, tortured, brutalized attempted to murder an entire ethnicity because they were better off dead than Red. better off dead than getting in the way of  the very few and very rich. Red of course means looking for some hero to improve life from the hopeless, unchanging, grinding, disease ridden, starvation and poverty Central American Kleptocracy needs in order to provide a most excellent life for people like Rios Montt and his generals.

The 86 year old and frail monster has now been sentenced to 80 years in jail, although he claims he never got his hands dirty or bloody, as though that were grounds for clemency or forgiveness.

Who amongst us, the champions of freedom, has clean hands?  Kindly old avuncular Ron is dead, but he's still the hero who made the sun come up in America. His own Himmler, Ollie North continues to be admired and listened to and frankly my dear, America doesn't give a damn about any of the things we did in the name of protecting American Corporate imperialism from land reform or about how much innocent blood was soaked into foreign soil to do it.

Go on worrying about how dangerous it is to live in America, how expensive to fuel your three SUVs and how high your taxes are. There's a one in more than a million chance of some psycho shooting you after all and that Asian, Middle Eastern, central and South American blood isn't on your hands. You're not some bleeding-heart Liberal anyway.

The Benghazi Desperation Ploy

Benghazi, Benghazi!  Is this the new Rebel Yell, or the cry of some demented parrot?  Or maybe it's the desperate attempt to find some new tail to pin on the Donkey, now that the Birther Bullshit and so many of the previous attempts have failed or backfired for all but the most ardent of the crooks and liars called Republicans.

Benghazi, Benghazi! it may continue to hound Hillary Clinton if she makes the attempt to be the 2016 Democratic presidential Candidate says Democratic pollster and author Doug Schoen. " “Look, the hearing today [Wed, May 8] raises more questions about what happened, why a force was not sent in to try to rescue the ambassador and his colleagues.”

Could it be that Republicans can be considered complicit since they voted against beefing up security, voted to cut security?  Hey, can we blame the Republicans for anything, what with their long term sterling record of success in all things?   Hell no because the appeal to ignorance, forgetfulness and neurotic hatred of all things not GOP always works. Failure is success. Truth is in the definition.

“We still have unanswered questions about what the president knew, when he knew it, what he was doing,” says Schoen. “So, we are really still in the middle of a drama that’s playing itself out.”

Is farce a kind of drama? Are these "unanswered questions"  scripted by the same creative minds that gave us unanswered questions about Obama's birth certificate, about whether he murdered his grandmother, about his terrorist affiliations?  Nothing was said by the GOP or their Friends at Fox about what the president knew and all that when we went to war with Iraq or what he knew before Sept 11, 2001.

The Benghazi gambit hasn't really affected the real world that I can see, Obama was handily re-elected despite Fox News' round the clock Banghazithon before the last election, despite Fox &  Friends host Eric Bolling's claim that  Obama “went gambling in Las Vegas when he could have been saving our people in Benghazi.”  Even Geraldo Rivera, that paragon of journalistic integrity, seems to have choked on that steaming turd and called Bolling a liar before his audio was cut off in the interest of fairness and balance.

Benghazi, Benghazi, we haven't heard the last of it and we won't any time soon as the national memory fades and the fake history is implanted. The hypocrisy won't be noticed by those who have forgotten about Reagan, the Marines and Lebanon or by those who still desperately need to hide the real Obama behind a claim of weakness, made of straw.

UPDATE

Seems that Dick Cheney thinks Congress should subpoena Hillary Clinton all over again to get "more answers."   You know, sometimes words fail me. Hey, let's bring up Whitewater again.  You never know -- we might get more answers in time for 2016. Will we ever get answers about Cheney's  crimes - you know the kind of thing he used "executive privilege" to hide behind? 

"Fine and dandy. Let us first subpoena Mr. Cheney to testify about 9/11, Iraq, torture and the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame."

Says Paul Abrams, but of course we won't, the public having long lost interest in such ancient history or is so entrenched in Denialism and caught up in fake controversies about a non-existent crime wave and other media obsessions. Besides it's not criminal when they do it.  Never has been, never will be.

 

Kokesh and the Marching Morons

When you look into the career of Adam Kokesh, you realize that he's pretty much just a media whore, who bases his entire schtick on anarchy and "government bad!" In his opinion, governments shouldn't be able to stop people from doing whatever they want to do. That's pretty much the extent of his philosophical depth, as far as I can tell: "you're not the boss of me! I can do what I want!"

I'm pretty sure he isn't married: he couldn't share the spotlight. Life with him would be one constant tantrum-fest.

He likes to stage random events where he can demonstrate that the government is power-hungry and out of control. But most of his problems seem to stem from his own inability to accept authority. He's been reduced to social media and YouTube, since, ironically, even Russia Today (a Russian-funded propaganda channel) got tired of his bullshit.

In the larger sense, I guess I have to appreciate that Kokesh is happy to piss off both sides equally - I can't find a mention of him on any right-wing website that doesn't call him "paid Russian agent Adam Kokesh." But in the end, that isn't enough: he's too busy marketing the one product he has - himself - to be anything more than a self-absorbed yutz.

His latest gag, though, is exactly what a disaster looks like in the fetal state: it's a bad idea waiting to blossom into a nightmare.

On the morning of July 4, 2013, Independence Day, we will muster at the National Cemetery & at noon we will step off to march across the Memorial Bridge, down Independence Avenue, around the Capitol, the Supreme Court, & the White House, then peacefully return to Virginia across the Memorial Bridge. This is an act of civil disobedience, not a permitted event. We will march with rifles loaded & slung across our backs to put the government on notice that we will not be intimidated & cower in submission to tyranny. We are marching to mark the high water mark of government & to turn the tide. This will be a non-violent event, unless the government chooses to make it violent. Should we meet physical resistance, we will peacefully turn back, having shown that free people are not welcome in Washington, & returning with the resolve that the politicians, bureaucrats, & enforcers of the federal government will not be welcome in the land of the free.

There's a remote chance that there will be violence as there has been from government before, and I think it should be clear that if anyone involved in this event is approached respectfully by agents of the state, they will submit to arrest without resisting. We are truly saying in the SUBTLEST way possible that we would rather die on our feet than live on our knees.

Really, Adam? You design an event to appeal to the paranoid lunatics with a penchant for violence, and you don't see where it can go horribly, horribly wrong? So I thought I'd make a suggestion.

The DC Metropolitan Police Department has a contact email address right their on their site, so I used it.

You guys don't get enough respect to begin with, and now you have to deal with an internet-celebrity drama queen and his planned act of "civil disobedience." On behalf of the sane people of America, let me apologize to you. You're put in the unenviable position of dealing with a man who wants to attract paranoid gun nuts to try and start a confrontation.

This is an unsolicited suggestion, so take it for what it's worth, but perhaps what you want to do is not treat it as a show of force, but simply an act of crowd control and mass processing.

They've published their planned route, which starts by marching across the Memorial Bridge. Now, that goes right into the mall around the Lincoln Memorial, which is going to make this a logistical nightmare anyway. But if you close the Memorial Bridge off to vehicular traffic and use a lot of crowd-control fences to block them off when they're distinctly in the District, you'll have already disrupted their plans. Then you set up a bunch of folding tables and chairs so that you can process 40 or 50 at a time, and a person with a loudspeaker advising them "Are you aware that you're breaking the law? This is your opportunity to turn around." Then, for any of them that continue, have a smiling officer direct them to the next open table where they can sit for the initial processing.

The Facebook page for the march says that they want it to be "a non-violent event" and "if anyone involved in this event is approached respectfully by agents of the state, they will submit to arrest without resisting." So take them at their word.

You'll probably want to have some quick reaction teams nearby, but don't have them visible to the idiots. Just professional uniformed police officers.

Borrow a lot of gun racks from the National Guard, and do the minimum processing on the scene, including, obviously, confiscating their weapons ("Oh, no, sir. You'll get a receipt, and you'll get it back when this is all over.") Two-part receipt, with half tied to the weapon and the other half given to the owner. Quick frisk to find any other weapons, basic paperwork at the table, hustle them out of sight into GP Large tents set up on either side, and when you have good-sized group, put them on buses to finish the processing elsewhere.

Mostly, you want to break them into manageable groups, get the ringleaders shipped out fast where they can't make a spectacle (that being Kokesh's big plan), and keep them moving. And anybody who wants to go back across the bridge to Virginia? Don't stop them. Once a few of them decide they don't want to get arrested today and start walking back, more will join them.

Everybody you arrest gets fined, run them for outstanding warrants, check that the firearms are legal somewhere, and let them go. They get the various weapons back after all the checks are done and you know that everything is clean, if the owner goes to a specific location (a National Guard armory, for instance - someplace you can secure that many weapons), Monday through Friday from noon to four. (You're under no obligation to make it easy for them, are you?)

Like I said, mass processing. Break up their momentum. Let their "statement" fizzle out. Anyone who wants to be arrested gets their wish. Everybody wins.

But mostly, good luck.

The cops can't let the march happen, and a show of force is just a mistake. I have no idea what they'll do, but with any luck, Kokesh will end up looking like more of a fool than he usually does.