Secret Service Prostitution Scandal About More Than National Security:

Secret Service Prostitution Scandal About More Than National Security

By Janice Raymond, Guardian UK

23 April 12

Given what we know about the sex trade in Colombia, the US has a responsibility to investigate possible trafficking of women.

ired of yet one more political prostitution scandal caused by men who can't keep it in their pants? Andnow, the elite guard of the US president's secret service detail.

Most interesting is what has and has not been said by authorities when asked about the US secret service and military personnel's use of women in prostitution. Embarrassed by allegations that ten military men were involved in the Colombian scandal of buying women for the sex of prostitution, the US chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Martin Dempsey, seemed most concerned that "We let the boss down." He also added, "We're embarrassed by what occurred in Colombia, though we're not sure exactly what it is."

We're not sure exactly whether the general knows that the Department of Defense (DoD) has a zero tolerance policy opposing the purchasing of persons in prostitution, recognizing that it contributes to sex-trafficking. Readers learn that prostitution is legal in certain areas of Colombia called "tolerance zones". We don't learn that patronizing prostitution by US servicemen is illegal anywhere. Since 2006, patronizing prostitution is a crime when committed by service members under article 134 of the US military's criminal law (the uniform code of military justice).

Senator Susan Collins of Maine, the ranking member of the homeland security and governmental affairs committee, is worried that the prostituted women might be members of groups hostile to the United States - agents of terrorists, perhaps - who might have planted listening devices and jeopardized presidential security. This followed revelations that 20-21 of the women are foreign nationals, who were brought to the hotel after US officials spent the night boozing and buying women through the "Pley Club" in Cartagena. Senator Collins wants the women tracked down to find out who they are and with whom they might be affiliated.

Those working against the commercial sexual exploitation of women and children know that "tolerance zones" in countries that have legalized prostitution - which is actually legalization of brothels and pimping - are magnets for traffickers. The "Pley Club" is a strip club and brothel. Worldwide, such clubs provide cover for the recruitment and use of women and girls for commercial sexual exploitation.

The secret service detail didn't simply take a stroll to an isolated brothel. There are rows of sex clubs and brothels in the Cartagena prostitution zone, where many women from different countries also walk the streets in search of "customers" seeking sexual services. The US officials were among the hundreds of US sex tourists who, every year, visit these sex clubs and brothels. Pimps control many of the women in the legal tolerance zones. The woman who set the secret service scandal in motion sought more money from the secret service agent than the puny $30 he'd paid her because she had to pay her (legal) pimp.

Teresa Ulloa Ziaurriz, regional director of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, says that many women in the brothels of Cartagena are victims of sex-trafficking. Women displaced as a result of the internal armed conflict in Colombia were trafficked into prostitution in places like Cartagena. Sex-trafficking became prevalent not only in Cartagena, but in other parts of Colombia when members of the drug cartels used their criminal networks to take over the prostitution trade.

As for the men who are prostitution-users, many come to Cartagena on official business. Teresa Ulloa states that Cartagena has also become a paradise for tourists who seek sex with children.

President Obama said that he "would be angry" if allegations were true that these US officials had bought women for prostitution in Cartagena. Obama, who seldom gets angry, though he tends to do so more in pre-election periods, should translate these words into action. He should apply his own words spoken in Colombia - where he took a strong stand against legalization of the drug trade - to the prostitution trade:

"The capacity of a large-scale drug trade to dominate certain countries if they were allowed to operate legally without any constraint could be just as corrupting, if not more corrupting, than the status quo."

The US government has a responsibility to probe whether these women might be victims of trafficking and commercial sexual exploitation. Of course, the women won't immediately tell their truths to another branch of the same authorities that used them sexually, nor to inquiring journalists. However, the US Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking should be brought into the investigation, and local authorities and NGOs should be enlisted who are experienced in assisting women who are victims of trafficking and commercial sexual exploitation.

There's more than national security involved in the secret service prostitution scandal. If the US military code of justice means what it says, buying women in prostitution anyplace is a crime for US servicemen. It should also be a crime for other federal agents. If our US Trafficking Victims Protection Actmeans what it says, the presumption should be that the women used for commercial sexual exploitation in Cartagena may have been trafficked for prostitution.

Janice Raymond is professor emerita of women's studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and the author of a forthcoming book on prostitution, trafficking and the global sex industry. Janice is a former director of the International Coalition Against Trafficking in Women.

'via Blog this'

New Laws on Voter Registration Could Hurt Obama:

New Laws on Voter Registration Could Hurt Obama

By Deborah Charles, Reuters

22 April 12

New state laws designed to fight voter fraud could reduce the number of Americans signing up to vote in this year's presidential election by hundreds of thousands, a potential problem for President Barack Obama's re-election bid.

oting laws passed by Republican-led legislatures in a dozen states during the past year have sharply restricted voter-registration drives that typically target young, low-income, African-American and Hispanic voters - groups that have backed the Democratic president by wide margins.

A further 16 states are considering bills that would end voter registration on election days, impose a range of limits on groups that register voters and make it more difficult for people to sign up, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School.

The new laws - many of which include measures requiring voters to show a photo ID at the polls - could carve into Obama's potential support in Florida, Ohio and a few other politically divided states likely to be crucial in the November 6 election, analysts say.

The analysts note that massive registration drives in 2008 helped put millions of people aged 18 to 29 on voting rolls, and that age group - which makes up roughly one-quarter of the U.S. electorate - helped propel Obama to victory, voting 2-to-1 for him.

Rock the Vote, a nationwide organization that mobilizes young voters, said the new laws would make it more difficult for the group to educate people on how to sign up to vote.

"The types of laws have varied, but state by state they've added up to the fact that it's going to be harder for young people to get registered and vote in this election cycle," said Heather Smith, president of Rock the Vote.

"We have a very busy year ahead of us, and a very important one," she added. "What a shame if we can't continue to engage this generation in the political process because these laws have made it harder."

Problems With Registrations

Rock the Vote, which registered a record 2.25 million young voters in 2008, has set a considerably lower target this year: 1.5 million. The group says the drop is because of the new laws as well as the fact that unlike 2008, this election year has had a competitive primary contest only among Republicans.

The League of Women Voters also could sign up fewer voters this year, partly because it has joined Rock the Vote in suspending voter registration drives in Florida as the groups challenge that state's new restrictions in court.

Another factor expected to drive down voter registration totals this year: the absence of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, which registered more than 1 million mostly low-income voters in 2008.

Thousands of those registrations were for people who did not exist, submitted by ACORN-hired workers who were paid based on how many names they registered to vote.

The scandal helped lead to the demise of ACORN and inspire some of the anti-fraud laws affecting registration drives this year.

The episode involving ACORN, which folded in 2010 after it lost federal funding, showed a need for the new anti-fraud laws, said Brian Darling, a senior fellow for government studies at the conservative Heritage Foundation.

Like other conservatives, Darling rejected the notion that Republican-led legislatures had passed the laws to try to prevent certain groups from voting.

"There have been problems of voters being registered who weren't real voters," Darling said. "Just look at the ACORN scandal."

The new laws have led to a flurry of lawsuits across the country.

Florida's Law Draws Fire

The new anti-fraud election laws vary from state to state, but Florida's has received much attention largely because the state will be crucial in determining the winner of the November 6 presidential election.

Last May, Florida Governor Rick Scott, a Republican, signed a law that imposes tough new restrictions on third-party groups if they do not turn in voter registration forms quickly.

State legislators in Florida - the state at the center of the disputed 2000 presidential election won by Republican George W. Bush - said the law was aimed at preventing fraud and adding credibility to elections.

But the groups that try to register voters say the law - which requires the groups to register with the state and turn in voter forms within 48 hours of obtaining them or face at least $5,000 in fines - are onerous and discriminatory.

The law also cuts the number of days for early voting and no longer allows voting on the Sunday before Election Day. Some activists said that unfairly targeted blacks and Hispanics, who went to the polls in large numbers the Sunday before Election Day in 2008 through programs called "Pews to the Polls" and "Souls to the Polls.

In Ohio, another crucial state in the election, the Obama campaign has asked supporters to rally against a proposal to curtail early voting, arguing weekend polling hours allow many workers more of a chance to vote.

Complications in Wisconsin

Other states' voting laws complicate things for groups seeking to register voters.

In Wisconsin, new laws require licensing for anyone who registers someone else to vote, and the rules for licensing vary in the state's 1,800 municipalities.

That could mean a volunteer for a voting drive in a school district would have to take a course and get licensed in a dozen different municipalities in that one school district, said Jeannette Senecal, director of elections for the League of Women Voters.

Senecal called Florida's law the most "extreme" of the new regulations. She said the impact was already being felt across the state, with about 81,000 fewer voters registered this year than at the same time in 2008.

"Since they're making it more difficult for organizations like ourselves to participate in the process," Senecal said, "it does cut back on the amount of opportunity that we have to register these unregistered voters."

Senior Obama campaign officials would not comment. But in some states, the campaign began its own voter registration efforts earlier than it did in 2008, to try to make up for the impact of the new laws.

The Heritage Foundation's Darling said Democrats and voter registration groups were overplaying the impact of the new laws.

"Voter registration drives are great and all that, but it's not the end-all and be-all of voting," he said. "If (people are)going to vote, they should take the initiative to go register themselves."

'via Blog this'

Rachel Maddow: Lessons of housing crash lost on Romney

Rachel Maddow: Lessons of housing crash lost on Romney:
Eliminating HUD.
'via Blog this'

Rachel Maddow: Congress ignores public opinion (again)

Rachel Maddow: Congress ignores public opinion (again):

'via Blog this'

Severe Conservative Syndrome - NYTimes.com

Severe Conservative Syndrome - NYTimes.com:

OP-ED COLUMNIST

Severe Conservative Syndrome

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: February 12, 2012

• RECOMMEND
• TWITTER
• LINKEDIN
• COMMENTS (826)
• SIGN IN TO E-MAIL
• PRINT
• REPRINTS
• SHARE

Mitt Romney has a gift for words — self-destructive words. On Friday he did it again, telling the Conservative Political Action Conference that he was a “severely conservative governor.”

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Paul Krugman

Go to Columnist Page »

Blog: The Conscience of a Liberal

Related

• Romney’s Record as Governor Resumes Central Role in Nomination Fight (February 11, 2012)

Readers’ Comments

Readers shared their thoughts on this article.

• Read All Comments (826) »

As Molly Ball of The Atlantic pointed out, Mr. Romney “described conservatism as if it were a disease.” Indeed. Mark Liberman, a linguistics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, provided a list of words that most commonly follow the adverb “severely”; the top five, in frequency of use, are disabled, depressed, ill, limited and injured.

That’s clearly not what Mr. Romney meant to convey. Yet if you look at the race for the G.O.P. presidential nomination, you have to wonder whether it was a Freudian slip. For something has clearly gone very wrong with modern American conservatism.

Start with Rick Santorum, who, according to Public Policy Polling, is the clear current favorite among usual Republican primary voters, running 15 points ahead of Mr. Romney. Anyone with an Internet connection is aware that Mr. Santorum is best known for 2003 remarks about homosexuality, incest and bestiality. But his strangeness runs deeper than that.

For example, last year Mr. Santorum made a point of defending the medieval Crusades against the “American left who hates Christendom.” Historical issues aside (hey, what are a few massacres of infidels and Jews among friends?), what was this doing in a 21st-century campaign?

Nor is this only about sex and religion: he has also declared that climate change is a hoax, part of a “beautifully concocted scheme” on the part of “the left” to provide “an excuse for more government control of your life.” You may say that such conspiracy-theorizing is hardly unique to Mr. Santorum, but that’s the point: tinfoil hats have become a common, if not mandatory, G.O.P. fashion accessory.

Then there’s Ron Paul, who came in a strong second in Maine’s caucuses despite widespread publicity over such matters as the racist (and conspiracy-minded) newsletters published under his name in the 1990s and his declarations that both the Civil War and the Civil Rights Act were mistakes. Clearly, a large segment of his party’s base is comfortable with views one might have thought were on the extreme fringe.

Finally, there’s Mr. Romney, who will probably get the nomination despite his evident failure to make an emotional connection with, well, anyone. The truth, of course, is that he was not a “severely conservative” governor. His signature achievement was a health reform identical in all important respects to the national reform signed into law by President Obama four years later. And in a rational political world, his campaign would be centered on that achievement.

But Mr. Romney is seeking the Republican presidential nomination, and whatever his personal beliefs may really be — if, indeed, he believes anything other than that he should be president — he needs to win over primary voters who really are severely conservative in both his intended and unintended senses.

So he can’t run on his record in office. Nor was he trying very hard to run on his business career even before people began asking hard (and appropriate) questions about the nature of that career.

Instead, his stump speeches rely almost entirely on fantasies and fabrications designed to appeal to the delusions of the conservative base. No, President Obama isn’t someone who “began his presidency by apologizing for America,” as Mr. Romney declared, yet again, a week ago. But this “Four-Pinocchio Falsehood,” as the Washington Post Fact Checker puts it, is at the heart of the Romney campaign.

How did American conservatism end up so detached from, indeed at odds with, facts and rationality? For it was not always thus. After all, that health reform Mr. Romney wants us to forget followed a blueprint originally laid out at the Heritage Foundation!

My short answer is that the long-running con game of economic conservatives and the wealthy supporters they serve finally went bad. For decades the G.O.P. has won elections by appealing to social and racial divisions, only to turn after each victory to deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy — a process that reached its epitome when George W. Bush won re-election by posing as America’s defender against gay married terrorists, then announced that he had a mandate to privatize Social Security.

Over time, however, this strategy created a base that really believed in all the hokum — and now the party elite has lost control.

The point is that today’s dismal G.O.P. field — is there anyone who doesn’t consider it dismal? — is no accident. Economic conservatives played a cynical game, and now they’re facing the blowback, a party that suffers from “severe” conservatism in the worst way. And the malady may take many years to cure.

'via Blog this'

Ronald Reagan: Welfare Queen of Montana:

Ronald Reagan: Welfare Queen of Montana

By Rick Perlstein, Rolling Stone

11 February 12

ere is one thing we know about Mitt Romney: He loves Ronald Reagan (or at least he does now). Here is another: He also loves the Cayman Islands. It's something he kind of shares with the Gipper: creativity in sheltering his fortune from the prying eyes of tax collectors. But here's something he does not share with Ronald Reagan at all: skill at waving his hands and making the story go away. Not many people remember this now, but when Reagan was governor of California in the early 1970s, it came out that he'd paid no state income taxes - none - one year, despite being a wealthy man. And yet, he went on to run - twice - for the highest office in the land, without the revelation making any sort of dent at all. Learn from the master, Mitt.

It happened like this. One Friday in late April of 1971, a student-operated radio station at Sacramento State College reported that Reagan's 1970 California tax return claimed the governor owed precisely zero dollars and zero cents.

Brazen stuff. For one thing, Gov. Reagan pulled his tax dodge during an election year, when he was running for a second term. For another, his big crusade after reelection was fighting the Democratic legislature's attempts to institute tax withholding on salaries to make up for a budget shortfall. He wanted people should know exactly what they were paying; "taxes should hurt," was his slogan.

The following week, the story was the talk of the State Capitol. At Reagan's weekly press conference, after he announced the state was running so short of cash that by fall it would be forced, for the first time since the Great Depression, to rely on outside borrowing to pay the bills - because, of course, Democrats were "playing fast and loose with the fiscal integrity of this state for purely partisan advantage" - a newsman asked him if it was true that he himself had contributed nothing to state coffers the previous year. Obviously taken aback, he responded slowly: "You know something? I don't actually know whether I did or not. I'd have to check up .... I have a fellow making it our for me — a lawyer makes it out." He added, "I know in the federal the last couple of years I got a rebate back."

Five minutes after the press conference his office released a one-sentence statement: "Because of business reverses of Gov. Reagan's investments, he owed no state income tax for 1970."

Well. The UPI wire service did the accounting. It turned out that, in addition to his $41,100 salary as governor, for which a Californian would ordinarily owe $2,700 without deductions, Reagan had sold 236 acres of his Yearling Row Ranch in the Malibu Mountains in 1968 to 20th Century Fox studios for a reported $1.93 million. (To figure these sums in current dollars, multiply by a factor of about 5.5). He refused to say how this all added up to an absence of taxable income. He also refused to make his tax records public, or say what the "business reversals" were - refused with a vengeance. Arriving at the Capitol the next day, asked whether he would clarify his federal tax status, he answered, "Why should I have to clarify the status? Frankly, I think the Capitol press corps demeaned itself a little by engaging in invasion of privacy." (Turn the question around, playing the victim card against the wicked jackals of the press: Newt Gingrich would absorb the lesson well.)

As the kerfuffle grew, Reagan stuck to his guns. It was, he insisted, the patriotic thing to do: "We fought a war about that!" he snapped. "I say all men have a right to be safe in their books and records. That's what the revolution was all about." And he claimed the return had to have been leaked by a temporary worker hired to open tax returns - which would mean the Capitol press corps was abetting a crime.

The story made the New York Times four days after it broke: "Suddenly this spring," the paper noted, "Governor Ronald Reagan has become embroiled in one of the bitterest controversies of his four-and-a-half year career." Well, not really. Actually, the issue never much took off. Only one politician proved palpitatingly ambitious enough to take advantage of the story and release his own taxes. His name was Jimmy Carter. Of the networks, only ABC paid attention, giving the story all of twenty seconds. And the Democrats were too high-minded in their attacks to be effectual: Certain the governor had done nothing illegal, they spoke earnestly of changing the laws. (Buffett Rule-a-go-go: "It's interesting - or perhaps saddening - that an unskilled laborer with an income of $5,000 a year paid more state taxes than our governor," a California state senator commented to the Times.) As today - see Colbert, Stephen - it took jesters to really speak truth to power. The California Welfare Rights Organization attempted to present Reagan with a "Highest Paid Welfare Recipient" award; Fresno State students organized a canned-food-and-clothing drive to help the governor through hard times. (A libertarian group on the same campus, conversely, sent him a sincere note of congratulations: "You are a true tax rebel.")

Meanwhile, conservative titan William F. Buckley charged to his hero's defense, in terms that would become familiar Romneyian parlance: "Somebody, giving pause to the demagogic imperative to tirade against wealthy men, should point out that if a rich man pays no taxes 'because of business reverses,' that means that he is - net - less well off than he would have been if he had paid taxes." Liberal columnists Frank Mankiewicz and Tom Braden weren't buying it: "What he really was talking about were the paper reverses that abound in the tax field, artificially created expenses and deductions which cancel out income and profits."

They were right, and Buckley was wrong. One month later, the Sacramento Bee broke the story of how things really went down with Reagan's taxes, and it was a doozy. The governor had contracted to have cattle he owned "managed" by a company called Oppenheimer Industries, which in its brochures advertised to clients with a net worth of at least $500,000. "Federal tax laws favor cattle if you pick the right kind and stick to the rules. Herds of beef cows top the list. When you buy them, you become a farmer and can keep your books on a cash basis. You put in dollars that depreciate or are deductible. You take out capital gains." Voila: newly minted cattlemen - their ranks, the Bee reported, also included Jacky Benny and Alfred Hitchcock - "lose" enough money on cows raised hundreds or thousands of miles away "to avoid or postpone payment of any income tax, state or federal."

The New York Times was the only outlet to follow up. The paper tracked down a Montana rancher who domiciled beasts for Oppenheimer. "This is strictly a tax dodge on their part," he attested. The Times also found nifty brands signifying ownership by the "Reagan Cattle Company" on steer in three different states - a "Trident Bar R" mark in Wyoming, "Gunsight Rocking R" in Nevada, and "Gunsight R" in Montana. (Reagan had, to be fair, starred with Barbara Stanwyck in the 1954 Cattle Queen of Montana.) The Times also found a copy of Reagan's contract, "signed for him by his personal attorney and close friend, William French Smith." Long-memoried political junkies of a certain age will recall that President Reagan later named Smith attorney general of the United States.

The governor's defense was rice-paper thin: "I have been interested in cattle, horses, and ranching all my life. It is an ordinary part of my business and I intend to continue with it even if it is a relatively small investment." The question-begging was magnificent: If this was only a small investment, how were the reverses big enough to erase his tax bill? But the media response to this extraordinary scoop was - hardly anything at all. Few newspapers picked it up; no newscasts did. And, what was extraordinary, as Reagan became a more and more prominent figure and eventually the Leader of the Free World, the blot on his character created by the bald-faced lie simply disappeared.

Yes, the fact that he admitted to having paid no state taxes in 1970 recurred as boilerplate in years to come, in dozens of articles - but with the "business reverses" explanation always appended, unquestioned. (In a typical one - I love it - his gubernatorial successor Jerry Brown, known as "Governor Moonbeam," explained that he didn't bother to claim all his allowable deductions because "it doesn't turn me on." Brown is currently on his second tour of duty as California governor.) Occasionally, the fact that Reagan had availed himself of a "tax shelter" would be noted, but never that he had lied about it. Most of the time, "business reverses" played. When asked about it, he would respond in wounded, whining tones, insisting that he would have loved to have paid more; after all, who wanted to have had a bad fiscal year? And that would be that.

In 1976, Reagan ran for Republican nomination against President Gerald Ford. In January of that year he released an anemic little statement totting up the amount of taxes he had paid over the previous five years.On February 15, Ford's own tax release story broke - the modest Michigander had only $1,230 in the bank and paid nearly half of his salary in taxes - and Reagan took the occasion to adamantly refuse any further disclosure of his own. As it happened, February 15 was also the day Americans were introduced to another story about Ronald Reagan and taxes when New York Times ran an item featuring a centerpiece of Reagan's presidential campaign rhetoric: a "welfare queen" who, he claimed, fictitiously, "has eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards and is collecting veterans benefits on four non-existent deceased .... She's got Medicaid, getting food stands, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income is over $150,000." He almost won the Republican nomination - and in a year in which a post-Watergate climate of financial disclosure was supposedly the public's obsession. His tax lies made no appreciable difference. Certainly fewer people know about them than "know," say, that "Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet."

Nancy Reagan, after the dust-up in 1971, said she hoped her husband would never run for another office again, because though she'd "always believed that people are basically good, and I'm trying very hard to hold on to that," politics was "dirty." (She claimed, too, "We've never avoided taxes. We've never taken advantage of anything.") Apparently, she got over it. Her husband admitted he told his accountants, after the flap, to make sure he paid taxes. And by his next time 'round the track, running against Jimmy Carter in 1980, he'd gotten over his aversion to financial disclosure, his accountants by then having padded things nicely so as to avoid unwelcome insinuations.

"After resisting such disclosures for years as an intrusion of his privacy, Ronald Reagan Thursday released his 1979 federal tax returns and said that he paid $230,886 on an adjusted gross income of $515,878" - that was the Los Angeles Times, on August 1, 1980. Also noted, way down at the end of the story, was that Reagan had lately been coming under fire for having paid just .09 percent in property taxes on his million-dollar "Rancho del Cielo" in the Santa Barbara hills. No matter. From then on, no one talked much about Ronald Reagan's taxes. The Gipper had made the issue go away. He won the election. He became known as the "Teflon President" - nothing stuck to him.

Mitt Romney is a lot more sticky. Lacking the Reagnite gumption to hold fast in a hustle for more than a few weeks, his attempts at fending off scrutiny only attracted more questions - and by the way, in the four years he had between presidential campaigns, Romney apparently never thought to restructure his financials in any sort of deceptively benign way. Reagan, on the other hand, held off the dogs for almost ten years with a masterful repertoire of moves - wounded indignation, question-begging, subject-changing, and above all, brazen repetition. And he figured out how to rejigger his financial arrangements sufficiently so that he ended up owing a regular-guy tax rate when it came time to do a reveal that proved grandiose enough to close off any interest in further inquiry.

Governor Romney, I know Ronald Reagan. You're no Ronald Reagan.

'via Blog this'

Top Ten Koch Facts « SpeakEasy

Top Ten Koch Facts « SpeakEasy:

Posted by Robert Greenwald at 11:40 am
April 10, 2012

7 COMMENTS

Top Ten Koch Facts

Co-authored by Jesse Lava

Everyone seems to be investigating Charles and David Koch lately, with exposés of their corrupt political behavior popping up in places like the New Yorker,AlterNet, ThinkProgress, and Brave New Foundation’s film Koch Brothers Exposed. Naturally, the billionaire brothers don’t like the attention, so they’re responding to it by smearing the activists and journalists. In their panic, they have now taken out Google ads attacking me and plastered an ominous image of my eyes on their website, like so:

They made me look like Emperor Palpatine. But who’s really representing the Dark Side here? The truth is that the billionaire brothers bankrolling the conservative movement are using their wealth in a way that should be terrifying to anyone who thinks democracy is about more than pulling a lever every two years and letting rich folks take care of the rest.

Accordingly, here are 10 facts that every American should know about who the Kochs are and what they’re doing to our country.

1. Koch Industries, which the brothers own, is one of the top ten polluters in the United States — which perhaps explains why the Kochs have given $60 million to climate denial groups between 1997 and 2010.

2. The Kochs are the oil and gas industry’s biggest donors to the congressional committee with oversight of the hazardous Keystone XL oil pipeline. They and their employees gave more than $300,000 to members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee in 2010 alone.

3. From 1998-2008, Koch-controlled foundations gave more than $196 million to organizations that favor polices that would financially enrich the two brothers. In addition, Koch Industries spent $50 million on lobbying and some $8 million in PAC contributions.

4. The Koch fortune has its origins in engineering contracts with Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union.

5. The Kochs are suing to take over the Cato Institute, which has accused the Kochs of attempting to destroy the group’s identity as an independent, libertarian think and align it more closely with a partisan agenda.

6. A Huffington Post source who was at a three-day retreat of conservative billionaires said the Koch brothers pledged to donate $60 million to defeat President Obama in 2012 and produce pledges of $40 million more from others at the retreat.

7. Since 2000, the Kochs have collected almost $100 million in government contracts, mostly from the Department of Defense.

8. Koch Industries has an annual production capacity of 2.2 billion pounds of the carcinogen formaldehyde. The company has worked to keep it from being classified as a carcinogen even though David Koch is a prostate cancer survivor.

9. The Koch brothers’ combined fortune of roughly $50 billion is exceeded only by that of Bill Gates in the United States.

10. The Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs accused Koch Oil of scheming to steal $31 million of crude oil from Native Americans. Although the company claimed it was accidental, a former executive in this operation said Charles Koch had known about it and had responded to the overages by saying, “I want my fair share, and that’s all of it.”

That last quote — “I want my fair share, and that’s all of it” — encapsulates the unbridled greed driving the Kochs’ political activism and business dealings. Democracy cannot thrive with so much power being in the hands of men like this. If we care about democracy, we have to work to take it back.

'via Blog this'

Rachel Maddow: Worm turns on Republican anti-women agenda

Rachel Maddow: Worm turns on Republican anti-women agenda:

'via Blog this'

FOCUS: Scalia, Fox's Man in Washington?

FOCUS: Scalia, Fox's Man in Washington?:

Scalia, Fox's Man in Washington?

By Matthew DeLuca, The Daily Beast

05 April 12

The Supreme Court justice more than once cited arguments that are suspiciously similar to ones made often on the right wing’s favorite news source, writes Matt DeLuca.

s Roger Ailes clerking for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia?

One might be forgiven for thinking so following last week’s oral arguments on the health-care law before the nation’s highest court.

As has been pointed out elsewhere, some of Scalia’s questions from the bench made use of the tone and even the diction of the attacks on the Affordable Care Act frequently heard on Fox News and conservative talk-radio shows.

After Scalia picked up on the idea that a government empowered to have its citizens buy health insurance or face a penalty may also strong arm them into buy some other good, such as broccoli, Charles Fried, who served as solicitor general under President Ronald Reagan, told The Washington Post that the court was trumpeting “the most tendentious of the Tea Party arguments.”

“I even heard about broccoli,” Fried said. “The whole broccoli argument is beneath contempt. To hear it come from the bench was depressing.”

On the second day of arguments, Scalia did indeed invoke the humble crucifer.

“Why do you define the market that broadly?” Scalia asked Solicitor General Donald Verrilli. “Could you define the market? Everybody has to buy food sooner or later, so you define the market as food. Therefore everybody is in the market, therefore you can make people buy broccoli.”

Scalia was far from the first to use the idea. That distinction may go to C. Roger Vinson, a federal judge in Florida, who brought up the broccoli-as-health-care analogy during one of the earliest cases against the ACA, in December 2010.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia speaks to students at the University of Chicago Law School on Monday, Feb. 13, 2012 in Chicago. , Brian Kersey / AP Photo

In that case, Ian Gershengorn, an attorney with the U.S Justice Department, had argued that the government can constitutionally regulate the purchasing of health-care insurance under the Constitution's Commerce Clause. In response, the states’ attorney, David B. Rivkin, contended the government cannot regulate what citizens choose not to do (such as not buy health insurance).

Vinson asked Rivkin, “They can decide how much broccoli everyone should eat each week?”

“Certainly,” Rivkin replied.

(Rivkin, an attorney at Baker & Hostetler in Washington D.C., told The Daily Beast that this wasn’t the only time he used a food product as a way to illustrate what he saw as flaws with the individual mandate. Recalling a previous debate with Fried, Rivkin said, “I got him to agree that if you can support the insurance purchase mandate you can support a mandate to purchase Froot Loops.”)

Ultimately, Vinson ruled that the health-care plan’s individual mandate was unconstitutional, and on those grounds found the entire piece of legislation to be unconstitutional, but when Fox reported on the case, Vinson’s broccoli remark led the story.

Then, in early February, Fox News picked up the thread, when one of its guests, Chapman University law professor John Eastman, said, “If the government can order you to buy health insurance it can order you to buy broccoli, it can order you to buy General Motors cars.”

Fox legal analyst Andrew Napolitano jumped in. “I don’t see where they found in the Constitution the authority for the Congress to force you to buy something,” Napolitano said last July on Fox. “Not a hat in the sun, not broccoli at dinner, but health insurance.”

By the time Scalia weighed in last week, the broccoli analogy had acquired slightly more legal nuance, but it was essentially the same.

'via Blog this'