How Many People Must Die for Indian Arrogance? India was partitioned in 1947 into two countries, one dominantly Moslem (Pakistan), one dominantly Hindu (India). Some 14.5 million people moved to the area they preferred, often from fear of reprisal and oppression if they stayed where they were. Wikipedia says, cryptically:

Partition was accompanied by one of the largest and most rapid population transfers in history, with 17.9 million people leaving their homes. Of these, only 14.5 million arrived, suggesting that 3.4 million went "missing".

The Wikipedia article says that the number of people who died in intercommunal violence during the process is not known with certitude (estimates varying from 200,000 to 1 million, with a compromise guess of 500,000). Plainly, if 3.4 million people left their homes but didn't arrive in the other country yet at most 1 million people died, that leaves a lot of people unaccounted for. What probably happened is that they left parts of one country they felt dangerous but settled in another area of the same country that they felt safer in, without proceeding all the way to the other new country.
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In any case, one Moslem-majority area in the far north of British India, Jammu and Kashmir, was not transferred to Pakistan, and India violated a demand by the United Nations, in 1948, to hold a plebiscite to determine the disposition of the territory. Pakistan and India are fiercely hostile to each other because of India's refusal to hold a plebiscite, and now both have nuclear weapons, and individuals have enormous firepower within reach with which to launch massively destructive terrorist attacks.
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No one can talk any sense into India, which refuses to hold the plebiscite the UN demanded 60 friggin' years ago. Why? What could possibly be so valuable about this one relatively small tract of land, about the size of Minnesota overall but comprising almost nothing but uninhabitable mountains and one habitable valley, the Vale of Kashmir, and holding only 10 million of India's 1.1 billion people, 2/3 of them Moslems? (It used to be even more Moslem, but India moved Hindus in to bolster its claim.) As is so often the case, utter irration controls, and the world won't simply step in and tell India to live up to its obligation to hold an internationally-run or at least internationally-monitored plebiscite, then abide by the will of the people. Insanely, India is fiting a rearguard action in an endless war against a partition that is a done deal, and has been for 60 years!

The concept of partition is anathema to Indians. Kashmir's symbolism to India is as critical a consideration as any security significance associated with this fragment of ice and rock threaded by a beautiful valley. India is unwilling to lose even one additional hectare of this land.

The pretense is that letting Kashmir go would incite other separatist movements, but no other movement has the legitimacy of a UN resolution demanding a plebiscite. India is in violation of a United Nations resolution. Remember how indignant the U.S. supposedly got over Saddam Hussein's defying UN resolutions? What will it take to get India to accept that partition happened and has to be completed for there to be closure?
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Does the entire world have to impose sanctions, a watertite regime of complete economic embargo thrown up around India? Do we have to shut down all the telephone lines and satellite communications to Indian call centers that service U.S. companies? Ban all imports from India? Forbid tourism to India? Send the U.S. Navy and all the world's other navies to strangle Indian ports? Forbid aircraft from India to land in any airport in any other country around the world? What will it take? Because whatever it is, is better than a nuclear war between India and Pakistan. It would as well be better than more mass terrorist attacks to push India out of Kashmir, especially since innocent foreigners who share none of India's guilt stand to be killed in such violence too.
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It's time for the U.S. to tell India that it's time to let go and move on. Partition happened. It's over. If India is ever to be reunited, it will have to be by voluntary, democratic merger of now independent countries, Pakistan and Bangladesh, into Federal India. You cannot have a voluntary merger, nor even normal relations, as long as you behave like a spoiled brat or lunatic insanely adamant about keeping something that belongs to somebody else. Kashmir in itself is NOTHING, indeed just a bunch of rock and ice. Let it go.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,207 — for Israel.)

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:43 PM

 
Phony Democrats. The "Democratic" Party is actively turning its back on the people who elected them. Every day brings news of more betrayal. I have said it before and will say it again: the Democrats are a PHONY party of the opposition, and wouldn't know what to do if they actually gained power, because they are a SHILL for the Republican Party. Now we see this in action. Having gained the Presidency and convincing majorities in both houses of Congress, the Democrats are actively betraying every principle they claimed to believe in to get our votes. They have forgiven Jew Lieberman, an active enemy of both the Democratic Party and the United States, an Israeli agent who wants Americans to die to protect Israel, and is perfectly willing to have dozens more equivalents of 9/11, even the total destruction of the United States if that is what it takes to protect his country, Israel. He wants to fite the world's billion Moslems to the last American.
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But Lieberman is to suffer no consequences whatsoever for his aggressive campaigning for the Republicans and opposing the Democratic nominee for President. No consequences whatsoever. Why? Because the Democrats ARE the Republicans, and have been since, at latest, the early days of the Clinton Administration. Clinton bragged of being a different kind of Democrat. Yes, he was: a Republican.
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The Democrats have become the liberal wing of the Republican Party that was banished by the takeover of the Republican Party as such by Radical Rightwingers. The people didn't know that, however, and believed that Democrats really were the party in opposition. What opposition? They passed the Bush tax cuts and all the Bush Administration's record-breaking deficit budgets. They authorized Bush to invade Iraq, a country that never attacked us, and passed all Bush funding requests for continued operations in Iraq. They passed Bush's bankruptcy "reform" legislation that ended bankruptcy as we knew it and trapped people in debt, forcing them to pay off every cent they owed, at most altering some terms and lowering some interest rates. Joe Biden, the bastard from Delaware, voted for the abolition of Chapter 7 (liquidation) bankruptcy for individuals and substitution of Chapter 11, "workouts", in which you can't simply void debts but must pay them off. This is the same bastard from Delaware who has smiled upon his state's ruining the Nation by blazing the trail to unlimited interest rates by abolishing the state's usury law. It is because of Biden and his rotten, evil state that other states followed suit and gave us interest rates on ordinary credit cards of over 20%, even 30% a year, compounded, and "payday" loans that bear interest rates of over 300%! That is not a Democrat. That is a Republican.
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Now Obama, the President-Elect, is filling his Cabinet with Zionists and Rightwingers, and making nice with the Republicans, promising bipartisanship. It's not bipartisanship. It is Republicanism. The Democrats are selling out, and at present it looks as tho the Democrats will leave the Bush tax cuts for the rich in place thru 2010! Obama ran on raising taxes on the rich by ending the Bush tax cuts, but now he's letting it be known that he probably won't do that. He promised to end "business as usual" in Washington and end the stranglehold of "Washington insiders" on the people's business, and stop thinking about what is best for Wall Street and start thinking about what is best for Main Street. But all his appointments to date have been Washington and Wall Street insiders!
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Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
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Barack Obama sold us out even before he was elected. He promised to take only public financing, then 'changed his mind'. He promised to oppose the Bush domestic spying and wiretapping programs, then voted for them. Now he is filling his inner circle with Washington and Wall Street insiders. Even before he takes office, he has betrayed the people who voted for him, in favor of the people who opposed him.
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When he betrayed his pledge on public financing, I was immediately alienated. But there were apologists who said that he did not flat-out say he would take only public financing but that he would negotiate on that issue. I was not persuaded, but let it pass. He was black (well, half-black), so maybe he needed a lot more money than McCain to overcome racism.
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But when he voted for the "FISA improvements" that not just permitted but actually endorsed warrantless wiretapping, I knew that Barack Obama could not be trusted. I did not vote for him but for Ralph Nader, who has never betrayed us but always stuck to his principles, most of which accord with mine.
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Will the people rise in fury at further betrayals from Obama? What if he wants to cut Social Security payments or Medicare for the poor and middle class? Will people finally wake up and see him for what he is, another puppet of the plutocratic rich? Will they finally see that the Democrat-Republican dichotomy is only apparent, not real, and that today's Democrats are really Republicans by another name? Will they finally admit that the supposed two-party system is no such thing, but two heads of the same beast, and finally turn against this conspiracy of the rich to keep all power to themselves by suppressing third parties?
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Bipartisanship is Republicanism, period. The Democrats are frauds. Republicans and Democrats are both servants of the rich, and will continue to be so until and unless the people revolt and show their rage with massive demonstrations in the streets, massive strikes, massive protests at our unprotected borders and the ports that bring in cheap Chinese goods and symbolically take away American jobs. If that doesn't work, the people must move to the next step: invade the Capitol, invade the White House, invade the Supreme Court, and take the government away from the rich and put it back in the hands of the people, as the Founding Fathers intended. Make lots of vacancies, to be filled by new people in special elections (House) and/or gubernatorial appointments (Senate). And if Obama will not change his ways, force him not just to flee on a helicopter and try to find an "undisclosed location" that no one will betray ("betray"; sound familiar, Mr. Obama?), but to resign and let the law of succession (as it stands after Congress has lots of new faces) give us a new President from among the few real Democrats who remain in Congress. How about President Barney Frank or President Ted Kennedy? President Kennedy. Has a nice ring to it, doesn't it?
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If a new, Real Democrat as President and a Congress dominated by Real Democrats still won't behave like Democrats, then the people must turn to the third parties, present and future, to smash the two-party system that has given us nothing but the same old crap year after year, and come up with real solutions from fresh sources and bolder minds. Universal, single-payer healthcare, none of this half-assed sh*t that this country does all the time. No 35 different prescription plans that old people have to try to figure out. One plan. Full coverage, no deductibles, all paid for by progressive taxation that makes the rich pay dearly for the rich life they live at our expense. So the rich might be able to afford only 6 houses each rather than 7? They'll survive, which is more than can be said for hundreds of thousands of Americans who have literally died for lack of healthcare because Democrats and Republicans are hard-hearted slime who don't care about the uninsured because they've got the best health insurance plan in the country.
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The two-party system has given us wars abroad, social and economic inequality at home, vast criminality, crumbling infrastructure, mass death from illness, accident, and crime that universal healthcare could prevent, scores of millions of people buried in inescapable, life-crushing debt, and on and on. Third parties could not possibly do worse.
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My own third party, the Expansionist Party of the United States, would enlarge our national territory by extending statehood to Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgins Islands (together, in one state), Canada, Mexico, the Philippines, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and multitudinous other compatible societies, and give us thereby much greater resources, both natural and human, with which to solve not just our own problems but the world's problems, including overpopulation. But you never hear Democrats or Republicans talking about that. No, we're just supposed to make do with our inadequate territory and resources, and let the world's problems overwhelm us. Every 4 years, the world's population grows by much more than the total population of the United States. There's no way we can keep on top of that. Each year we become a smaller and smaller percentage of the world's population, and that immense population is scrambling to survive. More people chase after little more in the way of resources, driving up prices on things like oil and all its products, which threatens to put those not just eternally beyond the reach of most of the poor around the world, but even beyond our own reach. Our own standard of living is falling, as the whole world is in a race to the bottom.
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The rich are delited, because the more miserable other people are, the happier the rich are. They can't feel good about all they have unless others have nothing. They're on a toboggan riding on top of the avalanche. For them, it's an exhilarating ride. They never think about what happens when we hit bottom and the people reach up, drag the rich from their tobaggan, and kill them by torture, gleefully laffing and singing as they slash them with white-hot razor blades (so they suffer agony with each slice but don't bleed to death) or roast them upside down over a pit of fire. Their bodyguards will turn on them, and no amount of money will save them from their just rewards. All the old goodies of torture and execution will pop up again, from the rack and iron maiden to flaying (slicing the skin off in strips), to the Chinese torture of a thousand cuts. And new tortures with new forces, like electricity, radiation, and ebola, will come to the fore. The paintings of hell by Michelangelo and Hieronymus Bosch will come to life. Sadly, the glee of the poor during those few weeks of vengeance won't really make up for all the decades of privation and suffering, all the loved ones they had to watch die because the rich killed them by withholding medical procedures that could have saved them, but it sure will feel good finally to have fought back and won.
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The rich do not believe for an instant that the poor can fite back and win. They believe that no amount of privation, no level of mass unemployment, will produce violent revolution that actually kills them by torture. No privileged class has ever thought revolution could really happen to them. The French nobility and aristocracy didn't believe it until they were being rolled up in horsecarts to the guillotine. The Russian royal family didn't believe it until they were forced down into the basement and shot. What is now will always be. Sure it will.
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What will it take to turn Americans into a roaring, uncontrollable mob taking vengeance on the rich who are not just ruining their lives but actually killing thousands and thousands a year by withholding medical treatment they desperately need? Do smaller mobs have to shut down entertainment television and radio first? intimidate pro sports teams to stay off the field? shut down entertainment websites and flood the Internet only with news showing how bad things really are? Or will each family wake up only when it is forced out onto the streets because the bank has foreclosed, or they have to wait for hours, in the snow, on a soup line?
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Has the present stock-market panic shaken the rich out of their own complacency, so they finally realize that they can't keep doing what they've been doing to us because it hurts them too? Will Obama realize that he can't keep selling us out without turning everyone against him? Will millions of indignant emails to Congress shake Congress awake? Or will it all just collapse into chaos, in which the people crushed by the rich finally realize that it is the rich who have all the money, and the rich who caused all this trouble, and the rich who must pay? It's not looking good. For anyone.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,205 — for Israel.)

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:05 PM

 
Yet Another Female Secretary of State?? A report today on NBC News says that President Obama may nominate Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. If that is true, he is indeed insane.
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One reason the United States has been absolutely incapable of projecting power and persuading people around the planet to work with us is the insistence of recent Presidents on sending women to tell men what to do. The whole world HATES it, but Radical Feminists in this castrated country insist on presenting a female face to the world. How is that female face seen? How do you think?: weak, soft, cowardly, useless, feckless, not to be taken seriously but to be pushed aside as inconsequential. And that is how U.S. foreign-policy initiatives are received, as female idiocy to be dismissed instantly, without consideration of any kind whatsoever.
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You see, most of the world is controlled by men. Real men, not the castrated pussyboys of the U.S. Government. Real men in places like Communist China and Russia don't pay any attention to women. It doesn't matter whether that woman be Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice, or Hillary Clinton. If a woman brings a proposal from the President of the United States, she will be regarded as a messenger, no more consequential than the FedEx guy. We don't take orders from the FedEx guy — or gal. Send us a man as Secretary of State, someone we can feel has some real power to get our points across. Respect us, or we will not respect you. You want our cooperation? Stop insulting us.
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And that is what the bulk of this planet will do if Obama appoints Hillary Clinton Secretary of State: looked upon the United States as a Nation of castrated losers who cannot be taken seriously. The Butchers of Beijing do not quake in their boots at the threats of a stupid woman. Vladimir Putin does not take orders from a loser bitch. The Moslem world does not take orders from women. The Sudanese government slautering people in Darfur will not take seriously anything any woman says.
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When will this country wake up to reality and stop subverting our influence in the world by appointing woman after woman to what should be the most powerful position in the Cabinet, rivaled only by Secretary of Defense? If the United States wants to guarantee being treated with contempt all around this planet, why not install an all-female Cabinet and have done with it?
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Perhaps Obama should have a 'little operation' to make himself not only our first black President but our first 'female' President too. It would seem his balls don't work anyway, so he might as well just chop them off, slice a slit in his crotch, and make history again!
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:58 PM

 
Voting Shares, Not Preferred. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson is making exactly the wrong investments in the corporations being "bailed out" with public moneys, in buying preferred stock. Preferred shares do not have voting rights, so the Government, and thus taxpayers, will have no say in the determination of policies by the executives they are underwriting. If, for instance, that approach were used with automakers, they could continue to build gas guzzlers when the Nation wants them to stop making gas guzzlers and produce nothing but fuel-efficient cars, including hybrids, electrics, and cars that can use multiple types of energy, from gasoline to ethanol to natural gas to hydrogen to electricity.
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The Government should have at least one director on the board of directors of every company it bails out, to keep watch on the internal workings of those corporations and make sure they make wise decisions within the law. In the case of AIG, the Nation's taxpayers should be represented by a large majority of all directors. And for every company the taxpayers buy into, a proportionate share of the directors on each board should be appointed by the President on advice of the Secretary of the Treasury, if not even consent of the Senate.
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We have seen with banks that used bailout money to buy other banks or pad their reserves rather than re-lend it as Congress intended, that the Government must have some power within the corporate structure to control behavior of executives, and fire them if they abuse the taxpayers' trust.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,196 — for Israel.)

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:14 PM

 
Betraying the Voters. There is much talk today that a President Obama will pursue an extreme bipartisan policy in which he would actually give cabinet positions to the enemy. Is he insane? Democratic voters did not vote for Republicans, and do not want the same crap they've heard from those bastards for a generation to be intruded into the cabinet. No. Absolutely not. NO REPUBLICANS IN THE CABINET. None. The Republican Party is a criminal organization that should be disrupted and destroyed, not legitimated.
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Why on Earth should Obama play nice with the party of slander and lies? No way in the world should he dilute a Democratic program of fundamental change by including members of the party that fought that change tooth and nail. There is no such thing as a "good Republican" any more than there is such a thing as a "good Ku Klux Klansman". No decent person continues membership in an organization that is fundamentally evil.
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If Obama wants to include non-Democrats, let him turn to third parties and underrepresented minorities, such as gay men, Hispanics, Asians, and U.S.-citizen immigrants. Ask Ralph Nader to become head of the Federal Trade Commission. Find some prominent member of a state Green Party to head the Environmental Protection Administration. But exclude Republicans. People who like to think themselves decent but who continue membership in the Republican Party are not entitled to inclusion in an Administration seated as the result of a Democratic landslide. If they want to be part of the Administration, let them LEAVE the Republican Party.
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Obama may have to work with such Republicans as remain in Congress, but on his terms, not theirs. Let them offer constructive suggestions as to how to improve legislation offered by the Democrats. But if they resist reforms fundamental to Democratizing the Nation, CRUSH THEM. Liberalism is about taking care of the little guy. Republicans don't qualify.
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Obama Surrounds Himself with Zionists. From Haaretz, a Jewish newspaper in Israel:

Obama's first pick: Israeli Rahm Emanuel as chief of staff
By Haaretz Correspondents and AP, By Anshel Pfeffer and Shlomo Shamir

A day after his historic election to become the first black American president, Barack Obama stepped into the role of president-elect yesterday, inviting Rahm Emanuel to join his administration as White House chief of staff, Democratic officials said.

Emanuel, a former Bill Clinton adviser, is the son of a Jerusalem-born pediatrician who was a member of the Irgun (Etzel or IZL), a militant Zionist group that operated in Palestine between 1931 and 1948. ***

"Obama is a pro-Israeli leader and will be a friend to Israel," he said, adding that he was pleased with Obama's election. He also said his son is the namesake of Rahamim, a Lehi combatant who was killed.

From an item from ABC News titled "Will the Arab World Take Issue With Rahm's Israeli Roots and Pro-Israel Views?":

In the Israel newspaper Ma'ariv, Emanuel's father, Dr. Benjamin Emanuel said, "Obviously he will influence the president to be pro-Israel. Why wouldn't he be? What is he, an Arab? He's not going to clean the floors of the White House."

Obama's second announced pick, this time for Senior Adviser, is David Axelrod, a senior campaign adviser, who is also Jewish and a very close friend of Rahm Emanuel. So Obama, intent on putting the lie to the claim that he is a Moslem, has gone whole hog (you should pardon the expression) the other direction, to make himself a blatant, one-sided friend of Radical Zionism who cannot possibly serve as "honest broker" in the Middle East, for effectively proclaiming his Administration an enemy of Islam and enemy of justice for the Palestinians. This is a very bad sign of the judgment Obama brings to the office of President.
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Indeed, one must wonder if Obama is not just captive to Radical Zionists but also the creature of Radical Zionists, who will pull his strings as firmly as the creators of the Bush Presidency pulled Dumbya's strings. Was Axelrod Obama's adviser, or creator? If the latter, we must hope that, like Frankenstein's monster, Obama will turn against his creator and become President in his own right. But how is he to do that if Axelrod is on top of him all day long, every day of his Presidency? The first cues as to the course of the Obama Administration are very, very bad. He is to saddle us with Zionists and Republicans! Dare we hope that future days will bring announcements of appointments and nominations that signal a wiser course? I have my doubts. When Obama's very first picks are Radical Zionists, and when we have two wars in the Middle East already, produced by Radical Zionism, can an attack on Iran be far behind? Americans who thought they were voting for an antiwar candidate may be stunned to discover that they completely misread Obama's intentions.
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End the Filibuster. The rules of the United States Senate are extremely antidemocratic and must be fundamentally reviewed and revised. The filibuster is an outrageous provision that should never have come into being and should now be destroyed. So too should any rule, in the Senate ("holds" on judicial nominations) or House of Representatives, that gives a single member the power to veto anything or keep anything from coming to the the floor. That means that the incompetent tyrant Nancy Pelosi should no longer be allowed to keep anyone from bringing anything to the floor of the House just because she personally doesn't like it. And it means that a Senator who dislikes a given nominee for a judgeship should not have the right to keep the Senate from holding hearings on that candidate. All the undemocratic rules that have tainted Congress and kept it from doing the people's will should be abolished, with full knowledge that such unfair advantages as they have given the party in the minority to obstruct the majority can come around to work against the current majority. That's called "fairness", and the time for outrageous rules to be changed is when a party dedicated to change takes charge.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,191 — for Israel.)

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 9:33 PM

 
Equality for Us, Not You. Amid all the celebrating over the election of a (half-)black man as President, only a relative few people realized that on Election Day 2008, bigotry won three big triumphs. Existing same-sex marriage was undone by the yahoos of California, and banned by other yahoos in Arizona and Florida. That would be bad enuf. Worse, blacks and Hispanics — no: niggers and spics; if they can be bigoted against us, we can retaliate in kind — joined in the bigotry, voting in large majorities to take away from gay and lesbian Californians, rights that they assert for themselves, and to keep people in Arizona and Florida from ever having equal rights. This is not, for gay men, "the land of the free and the home of the brave".
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So bigoted, at essence, is this country that you couldn't even hear that story until the second half hour of extended broadcasts of the network evening news on Wednesday, not even Tuesday nite. It did not even make it into the standard half-hour nitely newscast, because antihomosexual bigotry is of no importance to the straight people who control media, as they control government.
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Obama and Biden helped take away gay men's and lesbians' rights in California, and to keep them second-class citizens in Arizona and Florida, in forthrightly standing against same-sex "marriage". So how are we supposed to rejoice in their victory? They are a tad less bigoted than the Radical Right, but still bigoted. Their election is not a big advance for human rights. Where was their bravery, to stand against bigotry in this "land of the free and the home of the brave"? What do they care about our rights? They've got theirs. Our not having ours is not their problem.
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So much for brave words like "Freedom is indivisible", something we used to say in the Sixties. Who coined that expression? Here's a longer quote. You should be able to guess the speaker before you get to the end:

Freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, all are not free. When all are free, then we can look forward to that day when this city will be joined as one and this country and this great Continent of Europe in a peaceful and hopeful globe. When that day finally comes, as it will, the people of West Berlin can take sober satisfaction in the fact that they were in the front lines for almost two decades.

All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words "Ich bin ein Berliner."

— Speech in Berlin (26 June 1963)

It would seem that Barack Obama is the poor man's JFK, not a "new, improved" version. He might nonetheless meet the same fate, as the alienated white people who voted 57% against him decide to "take back this country". They may have lost it by the ballot, but feel they can take it back by bullet. Should that happen, do not be surprised if gay men do not join in the wailing and moaning over the death of a man who wanted equality for black people but opposed it for gay people.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 9:13 PM

 

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:18 PM