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n2doc's JournalJuan Cole- Abortion Clinics, White Christian Terrorism and GOP Candidates
Americans are more at risk from violence by armed white Christian fanatics than they ever were from Muslims.
Abortion clinics have been targeted for violence by fundamentalist Christians of a violent bent for decades. In 2009, Dr. George Tiller was relentlessly shot to death by Scott Roeder, who insisted that the good doctor was satanic because he performed abortions. Dr. John Britton was murdered in 1994 on similar grounds. A strain of Christianity in the United States has never accepted Roe v. Wade, which made it a woman’s right to have an abortion. Not accepting it for oneself is a matter of conscience, and there is nothing wrong with that. But not accepting it for other people is a form of coercion aimed at depriving them of a legal right.
Deploying violence against people to halt abortions is the textbook definition of terrorism, which in the 1990s the Federal Code sensibly defined as non-state actors using violence against civilians to achieve a political aim. Much violence and coercion at Planned Parenthood (only 3% of its activity has to do with abortion) is inspired by Christian fundamentalism.
On this point, Christian ultra-conservativism agrees with the point of view of the Malik school of law among Muslims. In essence, Christian terrorists are attempting to move the United States on the below map away from a modern European norm, where abortion is elective up to a certain point in pregnancy, to an Afro-Asian and Maliki Muslim norm where it is often forbidden except to save the mother’s life (or not even then).
more
http://www.juancole.com/2015/11/christian-terrorism-candidates.html
Bernie Sanders Takes On Walmart
By Greg Boone - Nov 28, 2015
Showing once again his support for the common man, Senator Bernie Sanders, I-VT, has taken on the Walmart corporation for its exploitation of its workers and this time Sanders hit the $130 billion plus Walmart family square in the face with an honest pie.
Sanders took to Twitter, the social media communications network to lambaste the Walmart family. At present, Walmart pays minimum wage, cuts employee hours, doesn’t offer benefits and is the epitome of the user/exploit model of administration found far too often in business, government, and religious bodies. It’s gotten to the point that the American taxpayers are paying an additional $6 billion in economic support for Walmart’s employees who are in need of welfare and food stamps and other subsidies just to survive.
Walmart’s owners and stockholders are the culprits here because they care not about the workers and know they have the American public wrapped around their fingers. The public is too stupid, indifferent, uncaring, and uninformed to care about their fellow Americans in such desparate need. The reason being is that Walamart provides such cheap discounts that the American people have become figuratively addicted to the chain.
What’s worse is the lack of support from official sources. Walmart stock is good and is part of every investment portfolio. That unfortunately includes all police, military, all three branches of government employees, teachers, doctors, nurses, all unions in including construction. These stockholders don’t want to see their dividends drop so they won’t stand up to the suppression the Walmart family is putting on the workers. It’s much like what happened to Disney ten years ago. Employees and even high end execs had been complaining about the company and then leader Michael Eisner. Even with mountains of evidence regarding corruption and incompetence, the American people sat on their butts until the dividends dropped and they booted Eisner out in no time and now Disney is the biggest entertainment juggernaut on the planet.
more
http://www.politicallore.com/bernie-sanders-takes-on-walmart/1618
According to Bernie Sanders, income inequality means many Americans aren’t “truly free”
“True freedom does not occur without economic security.”
Bernie Sanders, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate, delivered his latest campaign speech at Georgetown University on Nov. 19. Sanders is a politician, not a professor, but his speeches recently have taken on a distinctly educational cast. Mostly, they aim to teach Americans about democratic socialism, to dispel boogey-monster fears about the “s-word” and explain how it can be used to address America’s current social and economic woes.
The lessons he delivers to audience after audience are pretty much the same: economic inequality in America is severe and growing; the middle class has all but disappeared; the majority of new income generated today is going to the top 1% of Americans; the US is controlled by “a handful of billionaires.” His proposed solutions are familiar now, too: free universal healthcare, free college education, paid parental leave, higher taxes on the wealthy, banking regulations, a living wage.
But last Thursday, Sanders added a new dimension to his argument: the yawning gap between rich and poor has created a growing class of Americans, he suggested, who aren’t really free.
“People are not truly free when they are unable to feed their family,” he said. “People are not truly free when they are unable to retire with dignity. People are not truly free when they are unemployed or underpaid or when they are exhausted by working long hours. People are not truly free when they have no health care.”
more
http://qz.com/560106/according-to-bernie-sanders-income-inequality-means-many-americans-arent-truly-free/
The Truth
The DEA has failed to eradicate marijuana. Now Congress wants it to stop trying.
By Christopher Ingraham
The Drug Enforcement Administration is not having a great year.
The chief of the agency stepped down in April under a cloud of scandal. The acting administrator since then has courted ridicule for saying pot is "probably not" as dangerous as heroin, and more recently he provoked 100,000 petition-signers and seven members of Congress to call for his head after he called medical marijuana "a joke."
This fall, the administration earned a scathing rebuke from a federal judge over its creative interpretation of a law intended to keep it from harassing medical marijuana providers. Then, the Brookings Institution issued a strongly-worded report outlining the administration's role in "stifling medical research" into medical uses of pot.
Unfortunately for the DEA, the year isn't over yet. Last week a group of 12 House members led by Ted Lieu of California wrote to House leadership to push for a provision in the upcoming spending bill that would strip half of the funds away from the DEA's Cannabis Eradication Program, and put that money toward programs that "play a far more useful role in promoting the safety and economic prosperity of the American people:" domestic violence prevention and overall spending reduction efforts.
Each year the DEA spends about $18 million in efforts with state and local authorities to pull up marijuana plants being grown indoors and outdoors. The program has been plagued by scandal and controversy in recent years. In the mid-2000s it became clear that the overwhelming majority of "marijuana" plants netted by the program were actually "ditchweed," or the wild, non-cultivated, non-psychoactive cousin of the marijuana that people smoke.
more
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/27/the-dea-has-failed-to-eradicate-marijuana-now-congress-wants-it-to-stop-trying/?tid=sm_tw
Reporter mocked by Trump says the 2 knew each other well
WASHINGTON — Donald Trump said he couldn’t have been making fun of a reporter’s disability because he doesn’t know the man. Not so, says the reporter.
Serge Kovaleski of The New York Times says he has met Trump repeatedly, interviewing him in his office and talking to him at news conferences, when he worked for the New York Daily News in the late 1980s. “Donald and I were on a first-name basis for years,” he said in a Times story about the Republican presidential candidate’s behavior at a rally in South Carolina last week.
Onstage Tuesday, a mocking Trump flailed his arms in an apparent attempt to imitate mannerisms of the “poor guy.” He accused Kovaleski of backing off a story from a week after the 9/11 attacks that said authorities in New Jersey detained and questioned “a number of people who were allegedly seen celebrating the attacks.” Kovaleski then worked for The Washington Post.
Trump cites the story as proof of his claim that “thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey celebrated the devastation across the river. But the story did not suggest “thousands” were observed celebrating or that the reports of such a scene were true. Other accounts from that time concluded the allegations were unfounded.
Kovaleski has arthrogryposis, a congenital condition that restricts joint movement. In his speech, Trump cited the 2001 story, “written by a nice reporter,” and went on: “Now the poor guy, you oughta see this guy — uh, I don’t know what I said, uh, I don’t remember. He’s going like, I don’t remember.” He made jerking gestures and his voice took on a mocking tone.
more
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-called-out-for-appearing-to-mock-disability/2015/11/27/7f92a392-94f0-11e5-befa-99ceebcbb272_story.html
Wahhabism to ISIS: how Saudi Arabia exported the main source of global terrorism
Although IS is certainly an Islamic movement, it is neither typical nor mired in the distant past, because its roots are in Wahhabism, a form of Islam practised in Saudi Arabia that developed only in the 18th century.
BY KAREN ARMSTRONG
As the so-called Islamic State demolishes nation states set up by the Europeans almost a century ago, IS’s obscene savagery seems to epitomise the violence that many believe to be inherent in religion in general and Islam in particular. It also suggests that the neoconservative ideology that inspired the Iraq war was delusory, since it assumed that the liberal nation state was an inevitable outcome of modernity and that, once Saddam’s dictatorship had gone, Iraq could not fail to become a western-style democracy. Instead, IS, which was born in the Iraq war and is intent on restoring the premodern autocracy of the caliphate, seems to be reverting to barbarism. On 16 November, the militants released a video showing that they had beheaded a fifth western hostage, the American aid worker Peter Kassig, as well as several captured Syrian soldiers. Some will see the group’s ferocious irredentism as proof of Islam’s chronic inability to embrace modern values.
Yet although IS is certainly an Islamic movement, it is neither typical nor mired in the distant past, because its roots are in Wahhabism, a form of Islam practised in Saudi Arabia that developed only in the 18th century. In July 2013, the European Parliament identified Wahhabism as the main source of global terrorism, and yet the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, condemning IS in the strongest terms, has insisted that “the ideas of extremism, radicalism and terrorism do not belong to Islam in any way”. Other members of the Saudi ruling class, however, look more kindly on the movement, applauding its staunch opposition to Shiaism and for its Salafi piety, its adherence to the original practices of Islam. This inconsistency is a salutary reminder of the impossibility of making accurate generalisations about any religious tradition. In its short history, Wahhabism has developed at least two distinct forms, each of which has a wholly different take on violence.
During the 18th century, revivalist movements sprang up in many parts of the Islamic world as the Muslim imperial powers began to lose control of peripheral territories. In the west at this time, we were beginning to separate church from state, but this secular ideal was a radical innovation: as revolutionary as the commercial economy that Europe was concurrently devising. No other culture regarded religion as a purely private activity, separate from such worldly pursuits as politics, so for Muslims the political fragmentation of their society was also a religious problem. Because the Quran had given them a sacred mission – to build a just economy in which everybody was treated with equity and respect – the political well-being of the umma (“community”) was always a matter of sacred import. If the poor were oppressed, the vulnerable exploited or state institutions corrupt, Muslims were obliged to make every effort to put society back on track.
more
http://www.newstatesman.com/world-affairs/2014/11/wahhabism-isis-how-saudi-arabia-exported-main-source-global-terrorism
Friday TOON Roundup 2 - The Rest
Cops
T-day
Biz
Shopping
Putin
Bombs
Refugees
Climate
DNC deep in debt as RNC builds up $20 million war chest
The Republican National Committee keeps building its cash advantage over its Democratic rivals, strengthening the party’s position going into the election year – with the latest monthly reports showing the DNC with a major debt, while the RNC has accrued a $20M war chest.
The Republicans announced last week that they had raised $8.7 million in October, which they say broke a record for presidential off-year fundraising record.
“With just under a year until Election Day 2016 we’re seeing great enthusiasm for the GOP,” RNC Chairman Reince Priebus said in a press release.
Figures show the Republicans now have over $20 million cash on hand, with only $1.8 million in debts owed. The RNC has raised a total of $89.3 million to date in the current election cycle.
The figures stand in stark contrast to the DNC, that has only $4.7 million cash in hand, with $6.9 million in debts owed, putting the DNC in the red, according to FEC figures. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the Democrats have so far raised $53.2 million this election cycle, significantly less than their Republican counterparts.
more
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/11/26/dnc-deep-in-debt-as-rnc-builds-war-chest.html?intcmp=hpbt3
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