Category Archives: Activism & Advocacy

POLITICS: “GOPs Immigration Reform ‘Problem is Their Base is Old White People'” / Paul Krugman

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“The Republican Party has a problem,” [. . .] “The leadership understands that . . . they’re doomed if they are only the party of old white people, to put it bluntly. The problem is their base is old white people.”

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POLITICS: Amitai Etzioni / “The Conservative ‘Party’ Dominates”

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There is a very widely shared myth about “Washington.” Accordingly, there are two camps, the right-wing GOP and the left-leaning Democrats, who are more or less matched. Each control one house of Congress, and command about half of the electorate. Hence, the gridlock.

Actually, much of American politics over the last four years or longer should be understood as a contest between the conservative “party” (most of the GOP and good part of the Democrats) and a liberal minority party. . . . 

Gridlock exists when one party pulls east and the other party pulls west and, hence, nothing budges. This is not the case in Washington. Here, most times, one party wants to move east and the other wants to stay put. Thus, what appears as gridlock is actually one conservative blocking victory after another. The fact that the last Congress passed only half as many bills as most previous ones does not trouble the conservatives one bit.

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OP-ED: Thom Hartmann and Sam Sacks / “The Founding Fathers Versus The Gun Nuts”

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Sorry, gun nuts, you’re on the wrong side of our Founding Fathers.

For example, in a tirade against CNN’s Piers Morgan, Alex Jones argued, “The Second Amendment isn’t there for duck hunting. It’s there to protect us from tyrannical government.”

It’s an argument that’s often echoed by gun nuts – as though their fully-loaded AR-15 with 100-bullet drum will keep them safe from Predator drones and cruise missiles. If indeed this is the true intent of the 2nd Amendment, protection from the government, then here’s the newsflash: you guys are woefully outgunned. And the 2nd Amendment would have allowed you to own a cannon and a warship, so America today would look more like Somalia today with well-armed warlords running their own little fiefdoms in defiance of the federal government.

But luckily, this was never the intent of the 2nd Amendment. Our Founding Fathers never imagined a well-armed citizenry to keep the American government itself in check. It was all about protecting the American government from both foreign and domestic threats.

Poring over the first-hand documents from 1789 that detailed the Fist Congress’ debate on arms and militia, you’ll see a constant theme: the 2nd Amendment was created to protect the American government.

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NDAA: Chris Hedges / “The Final Battle [Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)]”

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Over the past year I and other plaintiffs including Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg have pressed a lawsuit in the federal courts to nullify Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). This egregious section, which permits the government to use the military to detain U.S. citizens, strip them of due process and hold them indefinitely in military detention centers, could have been easily fixed by Congress. The Senate and House had the opportunity this month to include in the 2013 version of the NDAA an unequivocal statement that all U.S. citizens would be exempt from 1021(b)(2), leaving the section to apply only to foreigners. But restoring due process for citizens was something the Republicans and the Democrats, along with the White House, refused to do. The fate of some of our most basic and important rights—ones enshrined in the Bill of Rights as well as the Fourth and Fifth amendments of the Constitution—will be decided in the next few months in the courts. If the courts fail us, a gulag state will be cemented into place.

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[T]he NDAA is not about protecting us. It is about protecting the state from us.

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