A Couple of Fun Factoids - Palin Meets Her Doppelganger and Keep America Safe Fails to Rally

A couple of fun factoids from today.

• Sarah Palin will be in Denver on Thursday on what she likes to call her "road trip" but what others commonly refer to as a book tour. The woman who proudly proclaims herself a "real" American and pro-life, has been rated a Tier 4 by American Right to Life (ARTL), a very powerful anti-abortion grou and they plan to rally in opposition to her.Tier 4 is earned when an individual claims that they are pro-life, but "deny the personhood and God-given right to life of the unborn." Considered one of the more radical of the anti-abortion groups, ARTL sees the issue in black and white with absolutely no shades of gray: you see abortion as murder, or you don't. The fact that Sarah Palin appointed a pro-choice judge to the Supreme Court of Alaska was enough to lose her Tier 1 position. There are other factors that ARTL cites, but that was the biggie for them. I just find the whole thing ironic, and something you might expect to see in a sci-fi movie. You know, the character suddenly meets their doppelganger or other self? Except, in fiction, there is always some sort of explosive event when that happens as two selves cannot exist in the same time and place together. Here is Sarah Palin coming face to face with some of her lies and political manipulations, but this time, it is all coming from the right, and her religious right at that.

• Bill Kristol, Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich, and Liz Cheney tried to get a rally going to protest the decision by Eric Holder to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in federal court in New York. They each tweeted their followers (Rove has 92,000, Gingrich 1.2 million) to meet at 9:30 Wed. Nov. 18 at the Dirksen Senate Office Building to oppose Attorney General Holder's testimony as to why he had made this decision. Liz Cheney's new group, "Keep America Safe" is all about promoting the neo-con policies espoused by her father and she tweeted a reminder a couple of hours before the hearing. The fun fact part? Nobody showed up. Oh the hearing happened, and there were plenty of people there on both sides of the debate (see the post below on Senator Sessions), but there were also empty seats, and nobody identified as being a member of Keep America Safe either inside or outside the Dirksen Building. This leaves me with a nice, warm fuzzy feeling. 

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Did Hate Speech Kill Stephen Tyrone Johns?

In April of this year, the Department of Homeland Security produced a report, leaked to the media, that detailed home-grown, terrorist threat assessments of right-wing extremists. A report on threats coming from left-wing extremists had been released in January. It should be noted that these reports had been commissioned and data collected during the Bush Administration.

The report says that conditions similar to that leading to the militia movements of the 1990's - and the Oklahoma City bombing - are occurring now. Joan Walsh in Salon quotes Susan Page from an interview on MSNBC today, saying that, "... based on history: They include a prolonged economic downturn, the demonization of immigrants, the election of the first black president, fears about losing the right to own guns, a banking crisis inciting age-old paranoia about "Jewish cabals" and the return of many veterans to the States suffering from PTSD and other conditions while getting insufficient care."

When this report on potential threats by right-wing extremists was leaked, conservative talking heads immediately took offense, somehow believing that they were being personally attacked. I'm not sure how they felt linked to extremism, but hey, if the shoe fits ....

Rush Limbaugh insisted that right-wing groups had never done anything violent (!), while Michelle Malkin, who led the charge, called the report a "piece of crap" and said it was released at this time to smear those participating in the upcoming "tea parties." Columnist Bill Kristol called it "juvenile" and Rep. Michelle Bachman said, "To me, it looks like the extremists are those running the DHS." Continuing in this vein, Newt Gingrich demanded that the person who wrote this "outrageous" memo "smearing veterans" should be fired, and Rep. John Boehner said Napolitano herself had a lot of explaining to do. Rep. Peter Burgess said that Napolitano should step down.

I wonder how many of them regret those remarks today? I wonder, after the murder of Dr. George Tiller, and the murder of the guard at the Holocaust Museum today by a white-supremacist how many of them regret those remarks today?

Words have power. In our society, there is a price to be paid for free speech. We have a violent history and we know, based on our history, that there are people in our society who walk on the edge. People who are willing to pick up a gun, willing to make a bomb, and willing to die for a cause. When our talking heads are allowed to refer to legally practicing doctors as "baby killers," and say that our President should fail, that he is worse than al Qaeda. When torture is considered okay some of the time, and the law only applies to some of the people, then it's easy to see how someone can pick up a gun and shoot up a factory, or a church, or a museum.

Did this hate speech on our televisions cause von Brunn to murder Stephen Tyrone Johns today at the Holocaust Museum? I don't know. But it certainly didn't do anything to prevent it.

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Intersection of Racism and Politics

Newt Gingrich is in Poland filming "9 Days that Changed the World" about Pope John Paul II's trip to Poland in 1979. I refuse to go into any more detail or discussion about anything Newt is promoting or to appear as if I am promoting him. If interested, Google him. What I find exceptionally disturbing is that Newt is in Poland to do a documentary about one of the leading religious figures of the 20th century. He is touring Auschwitz today (perhaps as he discusses the Pope's boyhood in Nazi Poland, he should include a chapter on the Catholic Church's complicity in the rise of the Nazi Party? just sayin).

Anyway. At Auschwitz, the ultimate expression of racism, Newt is twittering away and sends out this tweet:

"We just went through a gas chamber & crematorium at auschwitz. Everyone should see it and think of the evil which stalks the world today ..."

and a bit later:

"Imagine a judicial nominee said "my experience as a white man makes me better than a latina woman" new racism is no better than old racism..."

and then:

"White man racist nominee would be forced to withdraw. Latina woman racist should also withdraw..."

This man calls himself an educator. He writes books. He needs to educate himself about racism, although, I think it's not a matter of education, I think it's a matter of politics. Discrimination is when one group oppresses another group because they can, and they can because of their position of power. Systemic, institutionalized racism occurs when the group in power oppresses and marginalizes those without power. Although there may be minor shifts in power over time, the overarching power is held by the dominant group - in this case, white men. Therefore, accusations of racism and/or discrimination by white men towards those who are historically oppressed, i.e., African-Americans, Native Americans, Hispanics, women, etc., are disingenuous.

Certainly African-Americans or Hispanics may say they don't like whites, but rather than being a form of racism, it is instead, a response to hundreds of years of systemic oppression and is not because of race per se, but because of the oppression and treatment received because of the oppressed individuals' membership in the oppressed group. See the distinction? There is one.

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GOP's Torture Tricks Backfire

I love Matthew Yglesias. He was talking to Nora O'Donnell on MSNBC about his article on the Daily Beast. Nora tried to keep the subject on Pelosi rather than what it should be by asking about Newt Gingrich's demand that Speaker Pelosi resign, to which he replied:

"YGLESIAS:You know, Newt Gingrich knows a lot about saying stupid things and being forced out of the job as Speaker."

You can catch his article GOP's Torture Tricks Backfire here

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