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Local News & Opinion
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01.13 Hawaii, the Unique State Books, Films, Arts & Education
01.24 Can Apple “Rescue” US Education? (Graphics) 01.23 What You (Really) Need to Know 01.22 How to Forecast Weather Infographic w/Simple Explanations Letters
Ref. : Letters to the editor Health Care & Environment
02.10 LET’S REMAKE THE WAY WE MAKE THINGS 02.09 Cancer rates triple among New York police officers who responded to 9/11 02.08 The seed emergency: The threat to food and democracy 02.07 Bill Gates backs climate scientists lobbying for large-scale geoengineering 02.04 Your Day at the Beach Could Soon Lead to a Night at the Hospital 02.03 Obama Won't Touch Climate With a 10-Foot Pole 02.03 Komen reverses decision to cut Planned Parenthood funding 02.03 Reforming EU Deep-Sea Fisheries Management 02.02 By defunding Planned Parenthood, the Susan G Komen Foundation betrays women 02.02 Ohio Tries to Escape Fate as a Dumping Ground for Fracking Fluid 01.31 Eleanor Smeal dissects Obama vs. Catholic Church controversy over birth control coverage - video 01.30 Scientists Call on Obama Administration to Use Science as Guide for Arctic 01.28 Universal health care proposal stalls in California Senate 01.27 Apple, Electronics and Environmental Ills 01.25 Solar Cheaper Than Diesel Making India’s Mittal Believer: Energy 01.24 Sounding an Alarm on Birds and Mercury 01.24 Why Don’t We Have Abundant Solar Power? Blame Financing, and Industry, not Science 01.22 The Money Traps in U.S. Health Care 01.22 Looking Inside the Twinkie Ref. Dollars for Doctors - How Industry Money Reaches Physicians Ref. 2010 Comparative Price Report Medical and Hospital Fees by Country - Graphics Ref. Health at a Glance 2011 - OECD Indicators Ref. : Why is Healthcare Absurdly Expensive in USA (Part 2) [Graphics] (Part 1 is here) Video Health Care Systems in Less Corrupt Countries “News” Media
02.07 Did Obama make the economy worse? Not according to most statistics 02.02 ABC's Iran Propaganda 02.02 The Ongoing “Foxification” of the Wall Street Journal 01.30 While temperatures rise, denialists reach lower 01.29 Fox News psychiatrist: Newt Gingrich's affairs 'mean he might make a strong president' 01.22 ‘Shocking victory’: With SOPA shelved, Markos Moulitsas on a way forward for Internet policy - video Daily The Daily Howler Justice Matters
02.05 Why the AGs Must Not Settle: Robo-signing Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg 02.04 THE CAGING OF AMERICA 02.03 Senate Votes To Ban Its Members From Insider Trading... Kind Of 01.31 Senate clears way for vote on insider-trading ban 01.25 Why all the robo-signing? Shedding light on the shadow banking system 01.25 In Iraq, Haditha case is reminder of justice denied 01.22 Still Not Clear on SOPA & PIPA? Infographic w/Simple Explanations US Politics, Policy & Culture
02.10 The Cancer in Occupy 02.10 How Opus Dei Influenced Rick Santorum 02.10 People Are Not Leaving the Labor Force 02.09 Obama, Explained 02.09 OPED: The White Underclass 02.09 EDITORIAL: A Terrible Transportation Bill 02.09 THE OBAMA MEMOS 02.06 Are Conservatives More Fearful Than Liberals? 02.04 Soaking the Poor, State by State 02.04 Reddit Co-Founder Alexis Ohanian's Rosy Outlook On The Future of Politics 02.03 SUPERBOWL XLVI: Are You Ready for Some Football??? 02.03 Buffett rules: Sheldon Whitehouse introduces the Paying a Fair Share Act - video 02.02 Secrecy Shrouds ‘Super PAC’ Funds in Latest Filings 02.01 Rich Patrons Are Major Source of Romney’s Cash 01.31 How Newt Gingrich Crippled Congress 01.30 Corporate Rule Is Not Inevitable 01.30 Clashes in Oakland: 400 Arrests, Tear Gas, Flash-Bang Grenades 01.30 A European look at the US primaries - video 01.29 Obama’s Faux Populism Sounds Like Bill Clinton 01.25 Inside Romney’s Tax Returns: A Reading Guide 01.24 ILLUSIONS: Being Led Down the Primrose Path...??? 01.24 Science Bulletins: Whales Give Dolphins a Lift - video 01.24 THE OBAMA MEMOS 01.22 Three Takeaways From South Carolina High Crimes?
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02.10 This is no bailout for Main Street America 02.10 Why the Foreclosure Deal May Not Be So Hot After All 02.10 Matt Taibbi assesses the $26 billion settlement designed to aid victims of foreclosure fraud - video 02.10 Foreclosure Deal to Spur U.S. Home Seizures 02.08 Banks Paying Homeowners to Avoid Foreclosures 02.07 App Stores Create 500,000 U.S. Jobs 02.07 The Payroll Tax Fight 02.07 Obama super PAC decision: President blesses fundraising for Priorities USA Action 02.06 How Privatizing Government Shovels Cash to Parasitic Corporations and Undermines Democracy 02.05 We’re More Unequal Than You Think – Graphic: Unequal rise in income 02.03 PRIVATE INEQUITY 02.02 The New American Divide 02.02 American Airlines proposes to end all four pension plans 02.01 Economics 101 01.30 New Strategy, Old Pentagon Budget 01.30 Where Did All the Workers Go? 60 Years of Economic Change in 1 Graph 01.29 The Apple Boycott: People Are Spouting Nonsense about Chinese Manufacturing 01.29 Made in the World 01.28 Sugar daddy Adelson could save $500 million in taxes if his boy Gingrich wins - video 01.28 How Swedes and Norwegians broke the power of the ‘1 percent’ 01.27 Unemployment in Spain Rises to 22.9% 01.27 Chinese Company Continues Plan To Replace Workforce With 500,000 Robots 01.27 Details Emerge of New Financial Fraud Unit 01.27 Not all jobs are equal 01.27 The Shift from Manufacturing to Service Economy - Graphic 01.25 Billionaires Occupy Davos as 0.01% Bemoan Inequality 01.24 Germany has the economic strengths America once boasted 01.23 State Capitalism: The visible hand 01.22 How Big Money Bought Our Democracy, Corrupted Both Parties, and Set Us Up for Another Financial Crisis - video 01.22 How U.S. lost out on Apple's iPhone work International
02.03 What the Occupy movement must learn from Sundance 02.02 US plans to halt Afghan combat role early surprise Kabul 01.31 TABLE TALK 01.30 With its deadly drones, the US is fighting a coward's war 01.30 UN panel aims for 'a future worth choosing' 01.26 Iran is ready to return to nuclear talks 01.24 Reagan’s Hand in Guatemala’s Genocide We are a non-profit Internet-only newspaper publication founded in 1973. Your donation is essential to our survival.
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COMMENTARY:Right Wing Gun Group Puts “ObamaCare” in Its CrosshairsFirst published in his blog Unsilent Generation earlier today, 7 December 2009
The health care legislation, Gun Owners of America say, threatens their right to bear arms. Right-wingers have depicted health care reform as a front for various dastardly schemes, which include everything from killing off grannies and unborn babies to ushering in a socialist state. Now, one radical gun rights group sees yet another hidden agenda behind the reform effort: The health care legislation, they say, threatens their right to bear arms. ![]() D.C. Tea Party protest, September 12, 2009 The accusation comes from Gun Owners of America, a 300,000-member group that proudly advertises itself with a quotation from Ron Paul: “The only no-compromise gun lobby in Washington.” The GOA has been described as “eight lanes to the right” of the NRA, which it tends to dismiss as a pack of wussy sell-outs; and the group’s longtime leader, Larry Pratt, was booted from Pat Buchanan’s inner circle for having ties to the militia movement and hobnobbing with white nationalists. Yet, like the Tea Partiers who draw Republican Congressional leaders to their racially tinged protests against “National Socialist Health Care,” the Gun Owners of America could well influence the reform debate in ways that belie their extremist status. GOA has thrown itself wholeheartedly into the battle for the soul of the GOP, pledging to help oust “RINOs” and other insufficiently trigger-happy Republicans in the 2010 primaries. And last week the Washington Post reported that the GOA’s campaign against health care reform could also “cause political indigestion for Democrats from conservative states,” and have some influence on their final votes. In fact, no version of the reform legislation even mentions firearms. But that hasn’t stopped the Virginia-based group from raising the alarm about what it calls the “anti-gun ObamaCare bill.” In its most recent alerts, the GOA has fixed on the proposal for a nationwide system of electronic health care records, which, it says, “will most likely dump your gun-related health data into a government database....This includes any firearms-related information your doctor has gleaned or any determination of post traumatic stress disorder or something similar, that can preclude you from owning firearms.” In other words, better record-keeping and information-sharing might lead some people to be denied gun permits on the basis of serious mental illness. Presumably, this could include people like Cho Seung-Hui, the student who gunned down 32 others before killing himself in the 2007 Viriginia Tech massacre. Less than two years before the shooting, a state court order had directed that Cho be taken into custody for a psychiatric evaluation, declaring the young man mentally ill and “an imminent danger to himself or others.” (He was later ordered into outpatient treatment and released.) But Virginia failed to supply this information to the FBI-monitored National Instant Criminal Background Check System, so Cho was able to purchase two semi-automatic pistols in local gun stores, along with two ten-round magazines of ammo on eBay. After the massacre, even George W. Bush willingly signed a new gun control bill—the first in 13 years. But Gun Owners of America doesn’t think insanity is necessarily incompatible with gun ownership. (The group also has a novel approach to such massacres: Put more guns in schools.) A GOA alert earlier this fall was titled “ObamaCare Could be Used to Ban Guns in Home Self-Defense.” Their premise, as described by PolitiFact, is that “in a bid to control spiraling health care costs, the administration will target people who have ‘excessively dangerous’ behaviors that officials believe raise the cost of health care.” The legislation’s “special ‘wellness and prevention’ programs” the GOA warns, “would allow the government to offer lower premiums to employers who bribe their employees to live healthier lifestyles — and nothing within the bill would prohibit rabidly anti-gun HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius from decreeing that ‘no guns’ is somehow healthier.” (Sibelius earned GOA’s unending wrath when she vetoed concealed-carry gun legislation as governor of Kansas.) “It is even possible that the Obama-prescribed policy could preclude [insurance] reimbursement of any kind in a household which keeps a loaded firearm for self-defense.” Such dire prognostications are quickly spreading far beyond the GOA’s membership. The Washington Examiner quoted Dave Kopel, research director of the libertarian Independence Institute of Colorado, who said, “The more you socialize costs, the more you empower the argument that the government has the authority to control private behavior.” Kopel continued, “If [the Department of Health and Human Services] can write regulations for lower premiums for healthy habits in general...”Then I don’t see anything in the bill that stops HHS from saying people get higher premiums for unhealthy habits such as owning a gun or a handgun.” With Republicans sticking to party-line votes against health care reform, the GOA is going after what it sees as vulnerable Democrats. After the Senate cloture vote, GOA attacked Democrats from Conservative states who “were bribed into selling out the American people because Harry Reid ordered them to do so,” and declared: “Can you spell R-E-C-A-L-L? GOA is looking into which states are the best targets for recalls–and you can be sure that we will be pursuing this option aggressively, exposing the Senators who sold their vote.” It provided a model letter for its members to send, which begins: “Just so you know, I will not forget how you voted on Saturday, November 21 when you threw your support in favor of anti-gun socialized health care.” But if Democrats like Arkansas’s Blanche Lincoln or Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu are swayed by the likes of the GOA, it will mark a new low in the party’s capitulation not only to conservatives, but to extremists of a truly hateful variety. While his views on some subjects may not represent all GOA’s members, Larry Pratt, who has been the group’s executive director for 26 years, has been up to his neck in far-right extremist activity for several decades—an outrider among the pistol-packing white power crowd, and a fellow traveler and inspiration to the militias that sprung up in the 1990s. Leonard Zeskind, the expert on white nationalist movements, has described Pratt as having “one foot in the political mainstream and the other in the fringe.” Pratt comes out of Fairfax, Virginia, and served two terms in the state legislature in the 1980s, arguing an anti-abortion, anti-tax line. But he made national headlines in 1996, while he was co-chair of Pat Buchanan’s presidential campaign, after news surfaced on his attendance at a meeting of the racialist far right in Estes Park, Colorado, in 1992. As described by Zeskind, in an article for Rolling Stone:
Among the speakers were Aryan Nations leader Richard Butler and legendary Klansman Louis Beam. And as Zeskind writes, “Although many of the participants had met before, this gathering was different. This meeting marked the birth of the modern militia movement that would tie well-armed radicals to gun advocates in a right-wing national network.” Beam laid out his theory for carrying forward a white revolution against the Zionist Occupied Government by means of a “leaderless resistence” cell strategy. Instead of mass organizations with known chains of command, Beam said, right wing revolutionaries should go underground in secret cells, unknown and unrelated to one another. The cells could number a few or many members, or individuals could act on their own as so-called Phineas Priests. It’s not a stretch to say that this meeting, and the ideas and energy that came from it, may have helped inspire not only the modern Militia Movement, but also crimes ranging from the murders of abortion providers to the Oklahoma City bombing. And in the midst of it all was Larry Pratt. Lenny Zeskind describes the GOA leader’s appearance at the meeting:
Pratt, who had studied the evolution of death squads in places like Guatemala and the Philippines and glorified these vigilante groups, joined Beam in providing inspiration for a revived militia movement. He argued the importance of the old-style posse, organized in militias. In his book Blood and Politics, Zeskind quotes from Pratt’s writing: “When the government no longer fears the people, atrocities become possible....Long live the militia! Long live freedom! Long live a government that fears the people.” ![]() Larry Pratt's facebook photo. (He has 3,021 friends.) Pratt’s history, in general, exemplifies the blurred boundaries between the “mainstream” and the “fringe”—the right and the extremist (and usually racist) far right. In addition to GOA, Pratt set up the Committee to Protect the Family Foundation, which attacked gays and demanded a quarantine for anyone with AIDS. “Our judges coddle criminals instead of caring for the victims of crime. They’ve chased God out of our schools, defended abortions...and now they are trying to infect us with strange and horrible diseases.” He was a keen backer of Randall Terry and Operation Rescue, and when the government shutdown OR’s finances, Pratt’s Protect the Family Foundation raised money to help pay off the groups debts and fines. And Pratt is also a founder of the anti-immigrant groups U.S. Border Patrol and English First, and a contributing editor to a periodical of the anti-Semitic United Sovereigns of America. Pratt has said that he is not a racist or a violent revolutionary, though his record suggests otherwise. And the apparent mainstream influence of a radical group like GOA seems especially sinister at this historical moment. We live at a time when the election of the first black president has sparked an explosion in gun sales, and when attendees at anti-health care reform town halls carry assault weapons and signs saying “It is time to water the tree of liberty” (with the “blood of patriots and tyrants” as the quotation continues). All of which is just fine with the Gun Owners of America. Commenting on the idea of “Americans openly carrying firearms outside presidential appearances,”Pratt told CBS News that ”the most remarkable thing about this is that some find this behavior to be remarkable.” A few days later, Chris Matthews asked GOA spokesperson John Velleco whether people attending a presidential event should ”be allowed to walk in the door armed... Should they be allowed to come into the president’s company and sit in the first row with a loaded gun?” Velleco said that would be fine with him. In times like this, accommodating the likes of Pratt and the GOA–over health care reform or anything else–is playing with fire. Born in 1936, James Ridgeway has been reporting on politics for more than 45 years. He is currently Senior Washington Correspondent for Mother Jones, and recently wrote a blog on the 2008 presidential election for the Guardian online. He previously served as Washington Correspondent for the Village Voice; wrote for Ramparts and The New Republic; and founded and edited two independent newsletters, Hard Times and The Elements. Ridgeway is the author of 16 books, including The Five Unanswered Questions About 9/11, It’s All for Sale: The Control of Global Resources, and Blood in the Face: The Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, Nazi Skinheads, and the Rise of a New White Culture. He co-directed a companion film to Blood in the Face and a second documentary film, Feed, and has co-produced web videos for GuardianFilms. Additional information and samples of James Ridgeway’s work can be found on his web site, http://jamesridgeway.net. This article is republished in the Baltimore Chronicle with permission of the author. Copyright © 2009 The Baltimore News Network. All rights reserved.
Republication or redistribution of Baltimore Chronicle content is expressly prohibited without their prior written consent. Baltimore News Network, Inc., sponsor of this web site, is a nonprofit organization and does not make political endorsements. The opinions expressed in stories posted on this web site are the authors' own. This story was published on December 7, 2009. |
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