CNN commentator Roland S. Martin has a piece up today (July 22) entitled, Obama birth issue is nutty that proceeds to make good fun of the wingnuts. But since one of George W. Bush’s first serious actions as President after 9-11 was to arrange the biggest government overhaul since the New Deal – by inventing the so-called “Department of Homeland Security” – there are Americans out in the hinterland who are suddenly quite confused about their legal status. I’m one of them, and so is recent Republican Presidential candidate John McCain. Who, like me, actually wasn’t born in the United States of America.

McCain, like me, was a Navy brat. He was born in the Panama Canal Zone, I was born in the Philippines. There used to be a clear law on the books that held the children of American citizens born in a foreign country are indeed ‘natural born’ American citizens, even if they automatically get dual citizenship for the country in which they were born. I had that until I was 18, though after that I would have had to formalize, and I was never very fond of Ferdinand and Imelda “Shoe-Lady” Marcos. So I let it slide. Still, if nobody questioned McCain’s citizenship qualification for POTUS, the fervor with which wingnuttia rants about Obama seems even crazier. I mean, even if Hawaii hadn’t been a state when he was born, did not all Hawaiians receive automatic citizenship when it WAS made a state? It was a territory, after all. Like Puerto Rico. Which apparently some wingnuts in Congress think is a foreign country too, thus Judge Sonia Sotomayor couldn’t be a citizen. Weird.

The last day job I held was in the period after 9-11 when DHS became the designated troublemaker for Americans of all kinds. My problems started when Human Resources was informed that my birth certificate didn’t qualify as “proof of citizenship” for me to have gotten the job. So I responded that my state driver’s license and Social Security card should suffice if HR couldn’t manage to read the line that designated US citizenship for both my parents and myself on that Philippine-issued birth certificate. They told me I had to get a birth certificate from a state here in the US. So I asked them which state they’d suggest I pretend to be born in, thinking there must be a racket in California or somewhere that provides fake birth certificates for people like me who weren’t actually born there. They were not amused.

Then they found a “discrepency” on my Social Security card. Seems I had used the name I’ve always gone by in addition to the first name on my birth certificate, when I had the last name changed after I got married back in 1969. I was informed they could no longer make my pay checks out to my legal name (which WAS on the card), and which is the name on my bank account. The bank then proceeded to tell me it couldn’t cash my checks! I was informed I’d have to take unpaid time off work – for which I’d get in trouble because no one would approve it – to stand in line at the SS office to have the name changed again. So I could work. I began to get the very strong feeling they didn’t want me there.

So I wrote a nice missive to HR telling them that I’d been paying taxes for more than 35 years under the NUMBER on my SS card, and that the IRS – a duly authorized agency of the federal government – had never once complained or refused my money. I further wrote that when I got married, I had my named changed to his on that card, and nobody ever asked to see a court order or required me to get one that “legally” changed my last name. In fact, I had dropped my given middle name entirely and used the first initial of my original last name on all legal matters from that time on. Also a CUSTOM, not something for which I ever had to go to court. I further said that if I were to be required per DHS’s audit to legally change my name, they were going to have to go after every single married woman in the country who had ever taken her husband’s name or used their maiden name’s initial for their middle. That’s about 55% of the entire population, not something this nation had the money to accomplish while spending $10 billion a month in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I did end up quitting that job just because I know when I’m not wanted. Now write full time freelance, and my boss has never asked me to prove I’m a citizen or argued with me about what name I care to attach. Oh… and he uses direct deposit to pay me, in the account with my terrorist name attached.

I call it my “terrorist” name because DHS was supposed to be chasing terrorists, not messing up the lives and livelihoods of lifelong American citizens and taxpayers in good standing. Thus they must have believed I’m some sort of terrorist. I prefer the title “Terrierist,” since I’m quite fond of small dogs. You’d think these folks would have better things to do in the wake of 9-11, perhaps going after real terrorists or something. Guess that’s what I get for thinking.

I presume these crazy wingnuts would be doing this same weird Dervish Dance if John McCain were President right now. I mean, he absolutely wasn’t born in the United States, while Barack Obama absolutely was. And while they’re at it, they should make a new law that says the wives of military officers stationed overseas are forbidden to visit them or live with them, on the off-chance a baby might be born somewhere outside of Kansas. Sheesh!

Most of these idiots are so dumb and so ill-educated that they can’t even find California on a map, much less Panama or Philippines or Iraq. Why are they being given time and attention in the media? Shouldn’t we be ashamed of the morons among us, the fact that they represent a good 20% of our population? Is that inbreeding, environmental toxins, or just insane?

Whatever it is, I’m glad I’m not one of them. And I think there should be an IQ test administered to all employees of the Department of Homeland Security to ensure we don’t have to actually deal with any of these defectives in our day-to-day lives.

One of the reasons we voted Monday instead of Tuesday (when the library’s One-Stop will be open until 9 instead of 5) is because of what happened to Obama supporters in Fayetteville on Sunday. Not only were McCain/Palin supporters stationed to shout epithets and harass the long voting lines after Obama’s speech, but about 30 of the attendees of that rally got their tires slashed. Very ugly.

When I had finished marking my ballot, I fed it into the second of two machines there to take ballots. I don’t know why there were two, perhaps they switch them off day to day. It’s the first time I early voted at the library instead of journeying to the County Seat to vote at the courthouse. There are just two precincts at this end of the county, both actual polling places are in churches. I don’t like to vote in the First Baptist Church.

I noted the number on the machine (like a glorified copier) when I fed my ballot in, so I’d see it counted. It was. Number 445, in fact. This particular machine had received 444 votes since early voting opened last Thursday, and it’s not open on Sunday. That number reflects what must be extremely close to all the duly registered voters in both precincts of our town! Even if we’re up to maybe 900-1,000 people by now, there probably aren’t more than 500 of ‘em old enough to vote.

My husband made small talk with the poll ladies (who were all very nice and helpful) while we waited for grandson to finish registering and vote.  They said turnout had been surprising, and that new young voters had been registering in droves even though there’s only one high school and community college in our county, both in the seat. They’d apparently heard nothing about the Fayetteville rally on Sunday or the ugly antics of McCain supporters. We were the only voters there so close to closing, so it’s not like the conversation would have upset any other voters.

Now, I remember when Jesse Helms ran this state with an iron-fisted “machine.” Back when our poll was in the train station I’d see ambulances lined up to wheel elderly people in from nursing homes to vote, many of whom didn’t look able to punch those cards and couldn’t see well enough to know which to punch. They got a lot of help, of course, but to me it was quite the spectacle. Back in those days (early ’90s) you had to ‘prove’ you were out of state (or would be) on election day to vote absentee, otherwise you had to physically show up no matter how disabled you were.

After the 2000 election fiasco (when about a third of voters got ‘lost’ and a lot of dead people were on the rolls), they went to no-excuse absentee. Then after the 2004 fiasco when Diebold’s glorified Etch-a-Sketches threw state races into turmoil, they came up with early One-Stop voting and paper ballots. This year I expect there may be no more than a dozen voters who put it off until November 4th.

So… I am now wondering what it will be like when “election day” comes and nobody shows up… because they’ve already voted.

The parties may have to play catch-up with the voters this time. It’s entirely possible that this state will have been firmly decided well before November 4th. Wouldn’t that be a gas?

Rich takes a refreshingly detached look at the current situation in the Presidential candidate fields on both sides of the party divide, that stupid game I like to call “Dueling Religious Bigots.” In particular, Rich dares to take on John McCain’s coveted endorsement by the right-wing religious ‘base’ wannabe spokesperson, the Reverend John Hagee. Who stars in the amazing (and highly disgusting) video below, that everyone who reads this should watch – if for no other reason than to remind you WHY Democrats very much need to win big this November…

Now, we’ve all heard over and over again ad nauseum all about the strange racial ideas of Barack Obama’s favorite black clergyman, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Obama has reluctantly had to distance himself and even denounce his old friend after Wright went on the warpath to destroy his parishoner’s chances at the White House to the best of his abilities. Who knows why a black preacher would want to prevent the chance that we might elect our first black president? I expect hubris is right up there with the money for that odd situation.

But who besides Rich has bothered to take a real look at Hagee’s crazy views? Why is the mainstream media harping on Wright and giving Hagee a pass? Pertinent observation from Rich…

None of this is to say that two wacky white preachers make a Wright right. It is entirely fair for any voter to weigh Mr. Obama’s long relationship with his pastor in assessing his fitness for office. It is also fair to weigh Mr. Obama’s judgment in handling this personal and political crisis as it has repeatedly boiled over. But whatever that verdict, it is disingenuous to pretend that there isn’t a double standard operating here. If we’re to judge black candidates on their most controversial associates — and how quickly, sternly and completely they disown them — we must judge white politicians by the same yardstick.

To which I say, Amen.

“We will never forget, we will never hide, and we will never stop asking ourselves every morning what we must do to prevent what happened to ever repeat itself.”

So said Israeli President Shimon Peres at the main ceremony marking Holocaust Memorial Day at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert warned his audience that anti-semitism is on the rise across the world today, and that insidious forms of Holocaust denial were asserting themselves even in nations that have every reason to remember with circumspection what occurred in Europe 63 years ago.

Iran’s quixotic dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claims the Holocaust is a “myth,” and hosted a revisionist Holocaust conference in 2006. Given that Israel and Iran are currently at a heightened state of tensions – complete with bravado from Hillary Clinton about “nuclear umbrellas” and US defense of Israel (which has plenty of its own nuclear weapons) – it’s worthwhile for those who weren’t born when this horror occurred to take a long, hard look at reality.

Yet in Britain, Muslims have joined in commemoration events, which is a step forward, at least for those Muslims who have chosen to participate in the modern world by immigrating to countries like Britain.

A documentary film entitled Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed was released just two weeks ago purporting to examine the censorship and discrimination in American academia against biologists and other scientists who criticize the Neodarwinian model of biological evolution. The never-ending Evolution vs. Creationism debates aside, a disturbing focus of the film are images linking Darwinism to Eugenics, and Eugenics to the Holocaust. This has resulted in the explosion of a very strange form of Holocaust denial coming from the ranks of science and academia that is a bit shocking.

Despite the ebbs and flows of partisan politics and election campaigns and candidates who will say or do anything to get themselves elected to power, today is a very good day to stop for a moment and asses our overall sociopolitical situation. We are at war on two fronts (again), and the costs are now coming due in increasing poverty and rising prices for every necessity of life. Will we again stoop to blaming the poor? Will we once again single out the religious for persecution and ‘elimination’? Will we allow the so-called “intellectual elite” to deny the lessons of real history in order to justify a renewed eugenics aimed (as always) at those they see as ‘lesser’ humans?

That seems a serious question to me. The quadrennial international convention of the United Methodist Church meeting on this day in Fort Worth, Texas, issued a historic and detailed resolution deploring the legacy of eugenics in the 20th century, apologizing for Methodist support of eugenic policies in America in the first half of the 20th century, and warning about a resurgence of eugenics in the 21st century. They are the first Christian denomination to issue such a resolution and apology, in recognition of the Holocaust such policies were used to justify.

Perhaps someday we’ll see a similar resolution from some organization of influence in biological/evolutionary science apologizing for the corruption of Darwin’s theory that was used to justify forced sterilization and miscegenation laws in this country and in Europe, and which did in fact get further corrupted by Hitler in his quest for “racial purity.” That too would be a step forward after more than 6 decades. Denial is more than just a river in Egypt.

Links:

Marking annual Holocaust Memorial Day
Holocaust Memorial Day
Israel marks Holocaust Memorial Day
Eugenics Apologies

On the last day of November, 2007, a tense standoff in Rochester, New Hampshire occurred when a man walked into Hillary Clinton’s local campaign headquarters, claimed he had a bomb strapped to himself with duct tape, and took two campaign volunteers hostage. It lasted for hours before he finally allowed the hostages to leave and walked out to unstrap the “bomb” to turn himself in.

There has been quite a lot of talk in the political blogosphere about how hate speech in the ‘normal’ course of politics as usual can incite unstable people to commit terrible crimes. And as people living near the economic edge begin to fall off, we aren’t seeing any slowdown of bizarre acts and mass murders. But in politics, the hate is just getting warmed up.

On the right (RedState and FreeRepublic) the denizens were hoarding popcorn and speculating that Clinton had arranged for this attention-grab herself, liberally (ha!) salted with the usual right-wingnut hate speech we’re so used to from that corner. Fox’s Bill O’Reilly has of course embraced “The Politics of Hate” as his theme for the election season.

On the left there is also no shortage of hate, and it’s not all directed at G.W. Bush. Hillary Clinton, whom many progressives believe to be just another puppet of the status quo of cowards and shrinking violets that comprise the Democratic leadership gets more than her share.

Things haven’t gotten any better since the start of the primaries and caucuses, though many of the wannabes have dropped out. Republican front-runner John McCain comes in for regular trashing from the talking heads of his own party’s hate machine (Rush Limbaugh, et al.). Though no one should take the threats of suicide should he win the nomination seriously. More interesting are the threats to vote for Hillary instead!

Meanwhile, Hillary is still distrusted by many. First for her macho posturing – an attempt to be more of a hawk than the chickenhawks to prove a woman can be Commander In Chief – and secondly for the confusion her hubby keeps slinging into the race. As if Hillary’s quest for the White House is just a way to get him a third term.

Obama hasn’t really encountered the worst of the Hate Machine yet, but things are picking up from the usual racist front as well as the religious bigot front. So long as things remain essentially tied, we can expect the hate speech to get louder and louder.

Perhaps as things go forward to the conventions America will have overdosed on the Politics of Hate enough to change the station. We can always hope!

The Associated Press reported Tuesday that a NYC Subway Attack Possible Hate Crime. Seems a group of overage juvenile delinquents decided to attack two men and two women in a subway car, apparently for being Jewish.

The criminal types doing the attacking have been described as your basic cowardly hoodlums. One was awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty last year to “attempted robbery as a hate crime” for yelling racial epithets while assaulting two black teens in Brooklyn. This time they yelled anti-Semitic remarks at their targets, who had the tumerity to respond “Happy Chanukah” to their assailant’s greeting of “Merry Christmas.”

The victims were helped by ‘A Hero’ named Hassan Askari, a Muslim student at Berkeley College in Manhattan. Askari was also punched and beaten.

The attackers numbered eight men and two women (that’s 10 people against 4 plus one good Samaritan). They have all pled not guilty to assault, menacing and other charges, while prosecutors say the charges could be upgraded to hate crimes.

I’m sure Bill O’Reilly will be tickled with this evidence that his “War on Christmas” has finally gone publicly violent. And I don’t suppose Bill-O has the cognitive capacity to learn anything about the real Pagan roots of the Christmas holiday and all its many trappings – Yule logs, holly wreaths, adorned evergreen trees, etc. The Pagan holiday is Solstice, taking place during the week of December 19-25, a.k.a. ‘Yule’ or ‘Saturnalia’. The traditional African holiday is Kwanzaa, a.k.a. ‘Second Christmas’ in some parts of southern slave states. The Jewish holiday is Chanukah, the ‘Festival of Lights’. In Islam there is the Hajj and Eid-ul-Adha (Festival of the Sacrifice). Buddhism celebrates Bodhi Day in December (‘Enlightenment’ Day). Seems like just about every culture has a solstice celebration or festival of light couched in their own traditional religious terms but with clear roots to prehistoric reliance on the cycle of seasons.

Isn’t it about time Christians figured out that they don’t own the Solstice or control anybody else’s celebrations of it?

Links:

Winter Solstice Celebrations

Subway Attack; Skirmish from the War On/For Christmas?

Helper ‘A Hero’ in NYC Subway Attack

NYC Subway Attack Possible Hate Crime

Nobel laureate, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA and chancellor of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory James Watson got himself into a bit of a pickle after opining in an interview with the UK’s Sunday Times (published Oct. 13) that he isn’t hopeful about our attempts to help Africa because Africans just aren’t as smart as other humans.

Within a week Watson had been soundly denounced by his scientific colleagues, the debate over cultural bias in intelligence testing was reignited, and the subject of modern day “New Eugenics” became prominent in dozens of internet forums and political websites.

By the end of the week Watson found himself out of a job as Cold Spring Harbor desperately tried to divert unwanted attention from its sordid history as the scientific base of American eugenics in the early decades of the last century. He also had his book tour cancelled and was sent home to “think things through.”

Now, it’s not unusual for James Watson to ruffle some PC feathers. He’s been at it ever since he stole Rosalind Franklin’s life’s work while simultaneously denouncing her for her ‘natural’ female inferiority. He has always been a notorious bigot, is probably lucky got to be 79 years old before his usually amused peers finally put him out to pasture.

Then this week the BBC weighed in with some rather humorous reporting on things genetic. Check the capture of their online website below, and see if you can figure out what’s wrong with this picture…

Now, the average person might look at that headline juxtaposed to that particular picture, and think that some input-flunky at BBC just decided to get cute. But last week that same BBC reported that according to “evolutionary theorist” Oliver Curry of the London School of Economics, humans are on a course to split into “a genetic upper class and a dim-witted underclass” representing two distinct sub-species within the next 100,000 years or so.

Curry described the two subspecies as an upper class of tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent and creative beings as opposed to the underclass of dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures. Hmmm…

One might wonder what’s going on in the biological fields of evolutionary theory and genetic research to suddenly break through the recently erected barriers of political correctness. When added to the robust emergence of this “New Eugenics” movement, people might begin to wonder if science ever really got over its fondness for eugenic ’solutions’ to human social issues. Perhaps they were just forced to lay low after the notorious debacle of Hitler’s Holocaust and various attempted genocides since then. Maybe racist eugenics just went underground for awhile, but never really swore off the political corruptions of science they once embraced so enthusiastically in the name of Charles Darwin.

At any rate, it’s something to think about. Since it’s so suddenly out there loud and clear asserting the same sort of garbage eugenicists asserted back when they testified in favor of laws to force sterilization on the poor, the imprisoned, the handicapped, and the orphan. In THIS country, not in Nazi Germany (which used American eugenics laws to promote its own version).

Links:

Liberal Eugenics

Science Magazine: Is a New Eugenics Afoot?

ZMagazine: The New Eugenics