America’s Shrinking Middle Class Cannot Afford to Bear the  Full Burden of Taxation Any Longer and Our Children Cannot Afford to  Bear the Cost of Dealing With the Nation’s Debt Any Longer, Either. If  Congress and the President Won’t Force the Super-Rich to Pay Up, Then  the Courts Must

ENOUGH IS ENOUGH! — Middle-class and working-class Americans have unfairly borne the bulk of the nation’s individual income tax burden for far too long as a result of the Bush-era tax cuts. With the Bush and now the Obama administrations having spent billions on two wars without regard to how they would be paid for; with the Bush Administration having created a massive Medicare prescription-drug benefit without regard to how it’s to be paid for; and with the massive $700 billion bailout of Wall Street to prevent a total market collapse — again, without regard as to how it would be paid for — the nation now stands on the precipice of a total fiscal meltdown. Yet instead of doing the right thing by requiring the nation’s super-rich multimillionaires and billionaires to bear more of the burden to close this huge fiscal hole — a burden the super-rich can surely afford to bear — Congress and the White House instead chose to extend the fiscally irresponsible Bush tax cuts for the super-rich, adding yet another $900 billion to the deficit. The time has come for the courts to step in and do what Congress and the White House have refused to do. (Image courtesy ImageShack.us)

(Posted 2:00 p.m. EST Saturday, December 18, 2010)

By SKEETER SANDERS

This is not my usual Tuesday blog commentary (My annual Christmas column will be published this Tuesday, December 21). But I have to ask, in light of President Obama’s signing into law the extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest two percent of Americans, the following question:

I’m not a lawyer and I’m not going to pretend to be one. And I’ll be the first to concede that what I am calling for may not be legally possible. But for once, I find myself in agreement with the Tea Party movement’s chief complaint that the federal government — both Congress and the White House — is being dangerously derelict in its fiduciary responsibilities and I’ve had enough of it.

The federal budget deficit has grown too large to be closed by spending cuts alone, yet the Republicans refuse to take off their blinders and face up to this reality.

Whether they like it or not (and the Republicans have made it abundantly clear that they don’t), taxes will inevitably have to go up. And they will inevitably have to go up on those who can most afford to bear the burden: The nation’s muiltimillionaires and billionaires who make up only two percent of the nation’s population, but hold more than 70 percent of the nation’s total wealth.  

For the GOP to expect the increased taxes to be borne on the nation’s middle class and working class — whose incomes have been drastically squeezed by the vicious combination of increased unemployment and freezes in wages and salaries while at the same time confronting ever-increasing energy and health-care costs — is not just unconscionable. It is flat-out unrealistic, to say nothing of being grossly unfair.

It is precisely that kind of unfair taxation that led to the American Revolution against the British crown in the late 1770s. It is also what led to the far bloodier French Revolution a decade later (and why, to this day, the French still look down on overtly ostentatious displays of extreme wealth).

Because Congress and the White House have failed to meet their fiduciary  responsibilities by extending the fiscally irresponsible Bush tax cuts onthe nation’s super-rich, the time has come to seriously consider taking legal action to do away with those cuts.

As I mentioned earlier, I am not a lawyer and I’m not going to pretend to be one. But I cannot imagine how there could not be a class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of middle-class and working-class taxpayers, who will continue to disproportionately bear the burden of taxation at a time when many simply cannot afford to do so because of unemployment or freezes in their wages.

I also cannot imagine a class-action lawsuit not being filed on behalf of the nation’s young people who will inevitably be forced to deal with the nation’s multi-trillion-dollar federal debt, which has now ballooned by yet another $900 billion as a result of this travesty.

Middle-class and working-class Americans have reached the economic breaking point. Indeed, the middle class is in danger of disappearing altogether — which would create a dangerous situation akin to that which existed in France at the time of the French Revolution — and, I dare say, in Russia at the time of the revolution that overthrew the czars in 1917.  

I say there has to be a shift in the individual income-tax burden to those who can most afford to bear it: The millionaires and billionaires of this country. If Congress and the President won’t do it, then the courts (and ultimately the Supreme Court) must.

If not, this country will face the kind of economic chaos that Greece and Ireland are now going through and that Spain and Portugal are likely to go through next — severe economic austerity imposed upon them by outside economic forces. Remember that many foreigners hold trillions of dollars of our country’s debt. Our largest creditor is China. At any time, our foreign creditors can demand immediate payment on what we owe them; if that happens, then Greece and Ireland will be a walk in the park compared to what we Americans will experience.

What do you think? Should there be legal action to strike down the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy? Let me know by visiting my home site. I’ll publish as many of your comments as I can.

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Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.  

While Radical ‘Hactivists’ Launch Cyberattacks Against Companies That Have Cut Ties to the Whistleblowing Web Site Over its Publication of Secret U.S. Diplomatic Documents, Others Call Into Question the Legitimacy of Sex-Assault Charges Against Assange and of the  Constitutionality of a U.S. Crackdown

JUST HOW MUCH FREEDOM DO ONLINE MEDIA HAVE? — WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is driven into Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London after being arrested last Tuesday morning on a European Union arrest warrant issued at the request of Sweden, where the 39-year-old Australian is wanted on charges of sexual assault. Supporters of WikiLeaks charge that the sex-assault accusations are politically motivated and that Assange is being targeted by the United States for publishing hundreds of thousands of secret U.S. diplomatic cables. While some conservatives have called for WikiLeaks’ shutdown, others say that the freedom of online media is at stake. (Photo: Stefan Rousseau/British Press Association)

(Posted 5:30 a.m. EST Tuesday, 14 December 2010)

NOTE TO READERS: When this column made its debut as a stand-alone site five years ago this week, questions about media freedom were very much in the news. At the time, the debate was centered around radio “shock jock” Howard Stern, who had announced that he was leaving terrestrial radio after 35 years to move to uncensored satellite radio, having signed a five-year contract with Sirius (Stern on Friday announced that he has inked a new five-year deal with the network — and that he plans to retire in 2015). Now, five years later, a debate over media freedom has flared anew — this over the freedom of online media, as a result of the WikiLeaks furor. While this column has made clear that it considers WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange a rogue for threatening — then backing off from — the release of the site’s entire uncensored cache of secret U.S. government documents upon his arrest last week in London, the controversy nonetheless raises serious issues of how much freedom the online media have. — Skeeter Sanders, Editor & Publisher, The ‘Skeeter Bites Report  

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SPECIAL REPORT

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By WILLIAM FISHER

Inter-Press Service

NEW YORK — As pro- and anti-WikiLeaks forces draw their battle lines, and WikiLeaks’ impresario Julian Assange marks time in storied, overcrowded and very Victorian Wandsworth Prison in southwest London, a group of his supporters are taking a different tack.

No, they’re not hacking MasterCard or Sarah Palin. Instead they’re speaking out in no uncertain terms. Their message: On balance, the staggered release by WikiLeaks of some 250,000 diplomatic cables from U.S. embassies around the world is providing a valuable public service for which some believe Assange is being persecuted with trumped up sex charges.

These champions of transparency and enemies of government secrecy are the small but vocal community known as the human rights and press freedom constituencies.

‘WIKILEAKS SPEAKS TRUTH TO POWER,’ DEFENDER SAYS

Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, told IPS  that WikiLeaks “has played a critical role in giving the American people the truth about the lies the U.S. government has told about its wars, especially those in the Middle East and Central Asia.”

Regarding Assange’s arrest, he added, “Yes, the charges for which he is being investigated need to be investigated. Yet the irregularities in the proceeding are glaring. Why was the case dropped originally? Why was he allowed to leave Sweden?”

“Why was bail denied when he surrendered and his lawyers had let the police know he would do so when the warrant was served? Finally, is the hand of the U.S. the answer to these questions?” Ratner asked.

ACLU: PROSECUTING WIKILEAKS WOULD VIOLATE FIRST AMENDMENT

On Tuesday, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley announced that the U.S. was considering criminally charging Assange for his role in releasing the diplomatic cables that have embarrassed Washington and many of its allies.

Two days later, Assange’s lawyer Jennifer Robinson told ABC News she believed an indictment was “imminent.”

However, Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU National Security Project, says she is deeply skeptical that prosecuting WikiLeaks “would be constitutional, or a good idea.”

“If newspapers could be held criminally liable for publishing leaked information about government practices, we might never have found out about the CIA’s secret prisons or the government spying on innocent Americans,” Shamsi told IPS. “Prosecuting publishers of classified information threatens investigative journalism that is necessary to an informed public debate about government conduct, and that is an unthinkable outcome.”

RIGHTS GROUP SAYS CABLES CONFIRM YEMEN LIED ABOUT U.S. MISSILE STRIKE

Amnesty International staked out a similar position, noting that international human rights law permits states to invoke censorship only on narrow grounds such as national security or public order.

And even in cases where these criteria apply, “states do not have a blank check to keep information secret or to punish individuals for publishing it, simply by declaring the information to be ‘classified’ or declaring it necessary to restrict it as a matter of ‘national security’,” said the London-based group.

More substantively, it noted that one of the cables corroborates images Amnesty released earlier this year showing that the U.S. military carried out a missile strike in south Yemen in December 2009 that killed dozens of local civilians, including women and children.

“What we know, and what the WikiLeaks cable confirms, is that Yemen clearly lied to its people and to the world, and the United States thereby avoided a response,” Tom Parker, Amnesty’s policy director for terrorism, counter-terrorism and human rights, told IPS.

ARREST OF ASSANGE ‘UNDEMOCRATIC,’ SAYS RUSSIA’S PUTIN

Even some world leaders have weighed in on Assange’s case, with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin calling his arrest “undemocratic” and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva commenting that, “There is nothing, nothing for freedom of expression and against the imprisonment of this guy who was doing better work than many of the ambassadors.”

On Friday, Assange was moved to a segregation unit in Wandsworth Prison. He is due in court today (Tuesday).

Dinah PoKempner of Human Rights Watch says she “has no information regarding Mr. Assange’s personal actions in Sweden and thus no position on his arrest on charges of sexual assault other than that like any suspect in a criminal case, he should be accorded full rights of defense due under international and domestic law.”

However, she said that her organization is concerned about recent allegations from various political figures that the actions of WikiLeaks somehow amount to either “terrorism” or “espionage” in the absence of evidence of any intent to attack civilians or endanger national security.

“Threats made against Mr. Assange’s life are particularly reprehensible,” she told IPS, adding that, “Although the quantity of the WikiLeaks cable release is unprecedented, the nature of the material is not. Traditional media frequently reveal non-public government information of an embarrassing nature, and this can be in the public interest and in furtherance of the right to receive information in a democratic society.”

WORRIES PERSIST OVER SAFETY OF HUMAN-RIGHTS ACTIVISTS ABROAD

“We have expressed concern to WikiLeaks that care be taken not to reveal information that endangers lives, and we continue to monitor the disclosures to that end,” PoKempner added.

Human Rights First supports the debate over U.S. diplomacy that has been sparked by the latest round of WikiLeaks documents, but it shares the concerns of Human Rights Watch about the question of human rights activists who may be at danger if certain information is not redacted.

WikiLeaks says it has been especially careful in removing those names.

John Kampfner, the chief executive of Index on Censorship, associated with the International Freedom of Expression Exchange (IFEX), says, “Good journalists and editors should be capable of separating the awkward from the damaging. Information that could endanger life, either in the short term or as part of a longer-term operation, should remain secret.”

CRITIC: WIKILEAKS DOING WHAT MAINSTREAM MEDIA AREN’T

In an editorial last week, he predicted: “Once this latest flurry is over, prepare for the backlash. Mr. Assange’s industrial-scale leaking may lead to legislation in a number of countries that makes whistle-blowing harder than it already is. Perhaps the most curious aspect of the WikiLeaks revelations is not that they have happened, but it took someone as mercurial as Mr. Assange to be the conduit.”

“Rather than throwing stones, newspapers should be asking themselves why they did not have the wherewithal to hold truth to power,” he said.

Of course, many publications certainly did, if only after the fact. As noted by Reporters Without Borders, which strongly supports the right to publish, “Any restriction on the freedom to disseminate this body of documents will affect the entire press, which has given detailed coverage to the information made available by WikiLeaks, with five leading international newspapers actively cooperating in preparing it for publication.”

EFFORTS TO SILENCE WIKILEAKS ‘WILL FAIL’

As Assange’s supporters rally to his side, one thing is clear: The genie is out of the bottle and can’t be put back, regardless of the pressures exerted on the whistleblower organization by corporations and government authorities.

Chip Pitts, past president and current member of the executive committee of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, told IPS, “Assange’s arrest now further complicates and escalates the situation.”

“The ferocity with which the establishment has targeted Assange reveals its profound concern over the historic new trend toward global transparency WikiLeaks exemplifies: If the big thieves can’t keep their thievery secret, what will they do?”

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Special Report Copyright 2010, Inter-Press Service. Republished Under Creative Commons license 3.0.

The ‘Skeeter Bites Report Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

It took an independent senator to finally stand up for the middle class and the poor. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), vowed Monday night to filibuster to block passage of the compromise tax-cut package reached between President Obama and GOP congressional leaders.

And Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Illinois) might very well join him.

“I think for a Democratic president, a Democratic House, and a Democratic Senate to be following the Bush economic philosophy of tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires is absolutely wrong public policy and absolutely wrong politically,” Sanders said in an interview on MSNBC. “I’ve got to tell you, I will do whatever I can to see that 60 votes are not acquired to pass this piece of legislation.”

“How can we rationalize tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans when were facing this kind of a deficit?” Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) said in an interview with NPR Monday night. “There is a group [of Democrats] that may walk. Let’s say at some point, ‘You’ve gone too far.’ ”

Read the full story at Politics Daily.

A Week After WikiLeaks Alerts the World to North Koreans’ Sale of Missiles to Iran, the Whistleblowing Web Site’s Founder — Now an International Fugitive — Vows to Make Public Entire Cache of Top-Secret Files Completely Uncensored if He’s Arrested; Human-Rights Groups Fear Exposure By WikiLeaks Endangers Safety of Their Activists in Countries With Repressive Regimes

ACTING LIKE A CORNERED ANIMAL? — One week after WikiLeaks revealed to the world that North Korea sold 19 intermediate-range ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads to Iran and that China has become “fed up” with its increasingly belligerent longtime ally, the Web site’s founder, Julian Assange, has “gone rogue” and is threatening to unleash its entire cache of of top-secret U.S. government documents if he is arrested over their publication. WikiLeaks is also coming under fire from an unlikely source: Human-rights organizations, who fear that the safety of their activists in countries with oppressive regimes has been compromised by the Web site’s disclosures. (Image courtesy Online USA News)

(Posted 5:30 a.m. EST Tuesday, December 7, 2010)

Updated 8:00 a.m. EDT Tuesday, December 7, 2010)

By SKEETER SANDERS

One week after the controversial whistleblowing Web site WikiLeaks made pubic secret U.S. diplomatic cables revealing that North Korea sold to Iran 19 intermediate-range ballistic missile capable of carrying nuclear warheads — and that the Chinese have become “fed up” with their longtime ally’s increasing belligerence — the site’s founder has gone completely rogue.

Founder Julian Assange — now an international fugitive wanted in Sweden on unrelated sexual-assault charges — threatened to unleash what he called the Internet equivalent of a thermonuclear bomb: The release of WikiLeaks’ entire cache of top-secret U.S. government files, totally uncensored if he’s arrested by authorities, The Globe and Mail of Toronto reported Monday.

The cache, contained in an encrypted 1.3-gigabyte file that WikiLeaks distributed last summer through file-sharing services, include the full, uncensored versions of every top-secret U.S. document — both diplomatic and military — the site has obtained, the newspaper reported. The documents include the names of U.S. military personnel, intelligence operatives and their confidential contacts — precisely the kind of sensitive information that Washington warns would endanger their lives if disclosed.

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HUMAN-RIGHTS GROUPS WARN ASSANGE DISCLOSURES ENDANGER THEIR OVERSEAS ACTIVISTS

If Assange is arrested and he makes good on his threat to unlock the documents cache, U.S. government operatives won’t be the only ones in danger. Several prominent human-rights organizations have voiced alarm that the safety of their activists in countries with repressive governments were also in danger as a result of WikiLeaks’ disclosures.

Two of those organizations, the New York-based Human Rights Watch and the Washington, D.C.-based Human Rights First, warned that WikiLeaks would be making “a grave mistake” if it published the names of human-rights advocates and organizations operating overseas whose work is supported by the U.S. government.

Elisa Massimo, president and CEO of HRF, in a letter to Assange issued several days before WikiLeaks made public more than 250,000 secret U.S. diplomatic cables, warned that “publishing the names of individuals or organizations from repressive or authoritarian countries — such as Iran, China, Russia, Cuba etc. — is extremely reckless as it will increase their risk of persecution, imprisonment and violence.

“We support freedom of expression and greater transparency in government,” Massimo wrote in her letter, dated November 29 and posted on the HRF Web site. “Yet, in releasing the information in the circumstances we describe above, the very real dangers to the health and well-being of human-rights activists would outweigh the benefits.”

STATE DEPARTMENT REPORTEDLY OFFERING PROTECTION TO ‘OUTED’ RIGHTS WORKERS

Meanwhile, the State Department reportedly has offered to provide protection to human-rights workers whose identities already were exposed by WikiLeaks — including evacuation from the countries they were working in.

“We have great concern,” State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley was quoted as saying by Inter-Press Service on Thursday.

IPS, citing an earlier report by CNN, quoted Crowley as saying that “There are clearly sources identified in these documents, particularly in authoritarian states, that have talked to us and we believe the release of these cables definitely puts real lives at risk. We have taken steps, in anticipation of this release.”

ASSANGE THREAT AMOUNTS TO ‘INTERNET BLACKMAIL’ AND MAKES MOCKERY OF ONLINE JOURNALISM

The file — which already has been downloaded by thousands, and possibly millions, of Web users around the world — is protected by a hacker-proof 256-bit encryption key. Mark Stephens, an attorney representing Assanage, told The Globe and Mail that if his client were to be arrested on the sexual-assault charges he faces in Sweden or on espionage charges he might face in the U.S., he would release the encryption key, giving Web users around the world full access to the documents contained in the file.

Assange calls the file — which he called the Internet equivalent of a thermonuclear bomb — his “insurance policy” against arrest.

Others would call it “blackmail” — which is, in the opinion of this column, exactly what it is. One week after this column praised WikiLeaks for performing “a vitally needed public service” for alerting the world to North Korea’s sale of nuclear-capable missiles to Iran, its founder has, for all intents and purposes, destroyed whatever credibility WikiLeaks had by resorting to blackmail to avoid arrest.

WikiLeaks proclaims on its “About Us” page that it is “a not-for-profit media organization” and that its goal “is to bring important news and information to the public.” But what news organization would threaten to publish an entire cache of highly sensitive government documents with complete disregard to the potential danger posed to people either directly working for or having close ties with the government?

No responsible news organization, journalist or blogger would be that reckless. Make no mistake: Julian Assange is not a journalist. His rogue actions make a mockery of journalism and undermines the very media WikiLeaks claims to be — especially the new and rising cyber news media, from giants such as The Huffington Post to blogging sites such as this one.

Many journalists have gone to jail rather than reveal their confidential sources of their investigations of government wrongdoing. No responsible journalist is going to risk his or her reputation — not to mention his or her job — by stooping to blackmail to get the story out.

Imagine if Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post reporters who, more than 35 years ago, uncovered the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon, had resorted to blackmail to get to the bottom of the story, the Post would have fired them both.

WIKILEAKS POSTS LISTS OF SITES U.S. CONSIDERS VITAL TO ITS SECURITY

As if to demonstrate that Assange means business with his threat to open up the entire document cache, WikiLeaks on Monday published yet another secret U.S. diplomatic cable — one that includes a list of places both inside and outside the U.S. that Washington considers vital to national security.

The list includes industrial complexes, research facilities, oil and gas pipelines, ports, undersea telecommunications cables and other sites — including dams — that Crowley said “gives a group like al-Qaida a targeting list” of places to attack.

Reaction in Britain was just as condemnatory. “It’s a gift to any terrorist [group] trying to work out what are the ways in which it can damage the United States,” Malcolm Rifkind, chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee in the British Parliament, told CNN.  

LATEST DISCLOSURE FOLLOWS INCREASING FINANCIAL, TECHNICAL PRESSURE ON WIKILEAKS

Wikileaks’ latest publication of secret U.S. government documents comes as the site is coming under mounting financial — and technical — pressure. In Switzerland, the bank PostFinance closed Assange’s account — costing him and WikiLeaks about 100,000 euros, or $144,000 — citing a lack of proof that Assange maintains a residence in Switzerland.

Assange, according to the bank, listed his residence as being in Geneva, the country’s commercial capital, but found his statement to be false. “Mr. Assange cannot provide proof of residence in Switzerland and thus does not meet the criteria for a customer relationship with PostFinance,” the bank said in a statement.

PostFinance — the bank of the Swiss post office — becomes the second major source of WikiLeaks’ finances to pull out. Last week, PayPal.com, citing violations of its terms of service, cut off WikiLeaks, just days after its main Web host, EveryDNS, pulled the plug, citing repeated cyberattacks against WikiLeaks that threatened to paralyze the server.

Meanwhile, WikiLeaks announced Monday that its supporters had set up more than 300 mirror sites to carry its content, to thwart any attempts to shut it down, with a goal to have 500 mirror sites in all.

“WikiLeaks is currently under heavy attack,” the site said in a statement. “In order to make it impossible to ever fully remove WikiLeaks from the Internet, we need your help.”

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Volume V, Number 48

Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

Diplomatic Cables Based on U.S. Intelligence Reports — Published by Whistleblower Web Site WikiLeaks — Reveal North Koreans Sold 19 Nuclear-Capable IRBM Missiles to Iran Capable of Striking Targets Throughout Europe and in Russia; Documents Show Arab States Called for Attack on Iran’s Nuke Facilities — China Admits It’s Fed Up With North Korea’s Belligerence, Wants Peninsula Reunified Under Seoul’s Control

FOR ONCE, WIKILEAKS PERFORMS A VITAL WORLD PUBLIC SERVICE — Contrary to demands by Representative Peter King (R- New York) that the whistleblower Web site WikliLeaks be “designated a foreign terrorist organization” for making public thousands of previously secret U.S. diplomatic cables, the Web site should be honored for performing a vital public service to the world by revealing that North Korea sold 19 nuclear-capable R-27 missiles — such as these on display in a recent military parade in Pyongyang — to Iran, giving Tehran the potential to fire them at targets throughout Europe and even toward the Russian capital, Moscow. The documents, if accurate, show that Iran and North Korea pose a far greater threat to world peace and stability than previously thought. (Photo: Yonhap News Agency via European Pressphoto Agency)

(Posted 5:30 a.m. EST Tuesday, November 30, 2010)

(Updated 11:15 a.m. EST Tuesday, November 30, 2010)

By SKEETER SANDERS

Memo to Representative Peter King (R-New York):

Shut the hell up!

The ranking Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee — who will take over as chairman in January — called on Attorney General Eric Holder to prosecute Julian Assange, founder of the whistleblower Web site WikiLeaks, under the Espionage Act and for Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to designate the site “a foreign terrorist organization,’ in reaction to its posting on Sunday of more than 250,000 secret U.S. diplomatic cables.

“This is extremely damaging to U.S. troops, U.S. interests and U.S. intelligence,” King told Fox News on Monday. “They [WikiLeaks] are engaged in terrorist activity. What they’re doing is clearly aiding and abetting terrorist groups. Either we’re serious about this or we’re not,” adding that putting the Web site on the State Department’s list of known foreign terrorist organizations would enable the U.S. to shut down WikiLeaks by seizing its assets and to stop other entities — including news media outlets — from cooperating with it.

Excuse us, Congressman King, but since when is it “aiding and abetting terrorist groups” to expose the fact that Iran and North Korea pose a dangerous threat to world peace — a threat much more dangerous than previously thought — to the point that even China is reportedly “fed up” with North Korea’s belligerence?

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CHINA CONFIRMS IT WANTS KOREAN PENINSULA REUNIFIED UNDER SEOUL’S CONTROL, ADMITS ‘FRUSTRATION’ WITH PYONGYANG

The officials admitted to a sense of frustration in Beijing over North Korea’s recent actions, including its nuclear and missile tests – which China opposed – and last week’s lethal artillery bombardment of a South Korean island.

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Instead of prosecuting Assange and attempting to shut down WikiLeaks — which, by the way, would clearly violate the U.S. Constitution’s guarantees under the First Amendment of a free and unfettered news and information media — WikiLeaks should be honored for performing, for once, a vital public service by alerting the world to the mounting threat to world peace and stability posed by Tehran and Pyongyang — a danger that has been building since 2003 and is now approaching a dangerous flashpoint on the Korean Peninsula.

The whistleblower site made public what the State Department should have told the world months ago: That North Korea sold to Iran 19 intermediate-range R-27 ballistic missiles — missiles that could be armed with nuclear warheads and, when fired from Iran, could strike cities throughout Europe.

Even the Russian capital Moscow could potentially be threatened by nuclear-armed Iranian IRBMs, the U.S. diplomatic cables show, based on intelligence reports. That revelation comes just four months after relations between Russia and Iran began to deteriorate over Iran’s nuclear program.

MISSILE THREAT TO EUROPE, RUSSIA DETAILED IN U.S. MEETINGS WITH RUSSIAN OFFICIALS

According to the cables obtained by WikiLeaks — accounts of which were published Sunday by The New York Times — top Russian officials were alerted to the Iranian missile threat in February during a meeting in Moscow with a U.S. delegation led by Vann Van Diepen, a top official of the State Department’s nuclear nonproliferation division.

Van Diepen, while working in his previous capacity as a national intelligence officer, “played a crucial role in the 2007 assessment of Iran’s nuclear capacity,” according to the Times account of the cables.

Iran’s acquisition of the North Korean-built R-27 missiles — which, ironically, were originally designed by the Russians during the Soviet era — gives Tehran the capability of striking cities throughout Europe and that even Moscow lies within the missiles’ striking range, the cables show.

The U.S. delegation warned their Russian counterparts that the missiles, which have an advanced propulsion system that the North Koreans developed, would bring Iran closer to developing its own arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) at a time when the two former Cold War adversaries reached a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) — yet to be ratified by the U.S. Senate — aimed at further reducing the U.S. and Russia’s ICBM stockpiles.

CABLES REVEAL GROWING WORLDWIDE ALARM OVER IRANIAN NUKE PROGRAMS

The nuclear development program of Iran been the source of increasing alarm by the United States for the past half-decade. Now, it appears, the alarm has spread worldwide — nowhere more so than in the Arab world.

Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah is so worried about Iran’s nuclear program that he repeatedly called on the U.S. to launch a pre-emptive strike and destroy the Islamic Republic’s nuclear facilities — as the Israelis did to Iraq’s nuclear plant in a 1981 air strike, according to an account of the cables published Sunday by Britain’s The Guardian newspaper.

And Saudi Arabia isn’t alone, according to the cables. They reveal that Arab governments are just as suspicious as the U.S., Israel and the European Union are that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. One cable recorded King Abdullah as having “frequently exhorted the U.S. to attack Iran to put an end to its nuclear weapons program.”

According to Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudi ambassador to the U.S., the king, in an April 2008 meeting in Riyadh with General David Petraeus, then the commander of the U.S.-led multinational force in Iraq, told him to “cut off the head of the snake,” referring to Iran’s nuclear program, the Guardian reported in its account of the cables.

ARAB COUNTRIES DEMAND ACTION AGAINST IRAN’S NUKE FACILITIES, CABLES SAY

Other Arab countries, notably Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, referred to Iran as “evil”, an “existential threat” and a power that “is going to take us to war,” according to the cables. Jordan and Bahrain have even gone so far as to openly demand that Iran’s nuclear program “be stopped by any means necessary” — including military action.

The Arab countries’ demand for action against Iran marks a dramatic departure from widely-held perceptions that to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities would have triggered a much wider war in the Middle East, with Tehran likely to retaliate with a massive missile strike against Israel.

For its part, Israel let it be known to American officials in June 2009 that it was prepared, if necessary, to “go it alone” and attack Iran’s nuclear facilities unilaterally, according to the Guardian account of the cables. They quoted Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak as saying that there was a window of “between six and 18 months from now in which stopping Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons might still be viable,” beyond which any military action “would result in unacceptable collateral damage.”

According to Barak’s timetable, that window will close at the end of this year.

Iran lashed out at the WikiLeaks disclosures Monday, with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad dismissing the leaks as a “worthless” psychological warfare campaign by the U.S. against his country. “We don’t think this information was leaked,” Ahmadinejad said during a televised news conference in Tehran. “We think it was organized to be released on a regular basis and they are pursuing political goals.”

Ahmadinejad insisted to reporters that Arab nations’ demand for action against Iran’s nuclear program would have no impact on his country’s relations with them. “We are friends with the regional countries and mischievous acts will not affect relations,” he said.

CABLES REVEAL CHINA ‘FED UP’ WITH ‘SPOILED CHILD’ NORTH KOREA’S BELLIGERENCE

Disclosure of North Korea’s sale of the R-27 missiles to Iran could not have come at a more sensitive time, as tensions on the Korean Peninsula have reached a crisis stage after North Korea launched an artillery barrage on a South Korean island, killing four South Korean civilians and bringing the peninsula to the brink of war.

Among a second cache of U.S. diplomatic cables made public by WikiLeaks on Monday include a bombshell revelation that China, North Korea’s longtime ally, is “fed up” with the increasingly belligerent regime in Pyongyang, with senior Chinese officials quoted as derisively branding North Korea “a spoiled child.”

While Beijing publicly has refused to condemn Pyongyang for its November 23 attack on the South Korean island of Yeongyeong and has called for a resumption of the six-party nuclear talks, the cables reveal China’s mounting private frustration with North Korea in the four years since Pyongyang’s provocative underground nuclear tests and test firings of its long-range Taepodong-2 ballistic missiles.

In a February 17 cable, South Korea’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Chun Yung-woo, told Kathleen Stephens, the U.S. Ambassador to South Korea, that senior Chinese officials told him that Beijing “is fed up with the North Korean regime’s behavior and would not oppose” the unification of the Korean peninsula under South Korean control.

S. KOREAN OFFICIAL; N. KOREA ‘ALREADY COLLAPSING’

Chun, who heads the South Korean delegation to the six-nation talks aimed at dismantling North Korea’s nuclear program, said China “would not be able to stop North Korea’s collapse” following the death of its ailing, 68-year-old dictator, Kim Jong-il, according to the cable. The North, Chun said, “had already collapsed economically and would collapse politically [within] two to three years” after Kim’s death — despite Pyongyang’s apparent grooming of the dictator’s 27-yer-old son, Kim Jong-un, to take over.

Chun dismissed South Korean media reports that Chinese companies had agreed to pump $10 billion into the North’s economy, the cable said. “Beijing had ‘no will’ to use its modest economic leverage to force a change in Pyongyang’s policies,” Chun said.

In a sign of the deteriorating relations between Beijing and Pyongyang, the cable quotes Chun as saying that North Korea has a low regard for Wu Dawei, China’s deputy foreign minister and chief representative at the six-party nuclear talks, with the North Koreans characterizing him as “the most incompetent official in China.”

For his part, Wu is quoted in an April 2009 cable as telling U.S. officials that Pyongyang was behaving like “a spoiled child” to get Washington’s attention by carrying out its missile tests — which severely jangled nerves in Japan, where the government in Tokyo regarded the tests as a direct threat to Japan’s national security.

Another sign of tension between the two countries has been a series of violent incidents along the Chinese-North Korean border — the most highly publicized of which was the deadly shooting in July by North Korean border guards of three Chinese citizens and the wounding of a fourth.

The four Chinese were shot on the North Korean side of the border, after North Korean guards suspected them of “crossing the border for trade activities,” according to Qin Gang, a spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry. Beijing filed a formal diplomatic protest to Pyongyang over the incident.

WHY WIKILEAKS: LACK OF FEDERAL ‘SHIELD LAW’ TO PROTECT JOURNALISTS’ SOURCES

Congressman King and other politicians, in their condemnation of WikiLeaks, have forgotten the reason why WikiLeaks came into being in the first place: The refusal of the U.S. Supreme Court in 2005 to review federal court rulings ordering two investigative reporters to reveal their confidential sources.

It has been a longstanding practice of investigative journalists uncovering corruption in and wrongdoing by the government and private entities to keep the identities of confidential sources secret to protect them from retaliation for their disclosures. The Valerie Plame affair undermined that practice, prompting many sources to remain silent, out of fear of discovery and retribution.

Courts ordered then-New York Times reporter Judith Miller and then-Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper to reveal their sources for information about the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame in apparent retaliation for the public challenge by her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, to the credibility of the Bush administration’s claim of an alleged Iraqi stockpile of weapons of mass destruction as the rationale for invading Iraq in 2003.

WIKILEAKS ‘CREATED TO PROTECT WHISTLEBLOWERS’

As Peter Scheer, a journalist and practicing attorney who is also executive director of the First Amendment Coalition, writes in a November 16 blog posting on the coalition’s Web site, “WikiLeaks emerged as a technological solution to this hole in the fabric of legal rules implementing the First Amendment’s free press and free speech guarantees.”

WikiLeaks is designed “to foil subpoenas or other assertions of judicial power,” Scheer wrote. “Because the Web site is not tied to any single real-world venue and apparently was built with layers of redundancy, court injunctions issued against WikiLeaks, whether directed to its Internet service providers (ISPs), its lawyers or other entities, are unlikely to disable it.”

More important, Scheer wrote, “WikiLeaks claims to use technology that erases the fingerprints of sources, rendering leaked documents untraceable. By contrast, the same documents leaked to a newspaper, such as The Washington Post, whether by means of e-mail, ‘cloud’-based Internet services or other electronic communications, would be vulnerable to interception and tracing.

“Even if the documents, instead, were hand-delivered to the Post, its reporter could be subpoenaed and forced to testify,” Scheer added.

It is a both a tragedy and a disgrace that it took a Web site such as WikiLeaks to alert the world to the dangers to world peace and security that Iran and North Korea pose — a job that the mainstream media should have done but has been intimidated by the court rulings in the Plame case into not doing.

WikiLeaks should not be prosecuted for that. It should instead be given a great deal of thanks for performing a vitally needed public service.

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Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.  

Republican Leadership Faces a Crisis as It Prepares to Take Control of House in January: Congress Must Vote on Raising the Nation’s ‘Credit-Card Limit’ by Spring, But Newly-Elected Tea Party Hard-Liners Vow They Won’t Support Raising Debt Limit — Raising the Threat of a Government Default That Could Set Off Another Financial-Market Meltdown, Plunging the U.S. Economy Into a Free Fall

AFTER ROUTING DEMOCRATS, REPUBLICAN RIFT BLOWS WIDE OPEN — Less than three weeks after routing the Democrats in the midterm elections, Republicans already are in the throes of a major rift that threatens to destroy party unity. Newly-elected Tea Party-backed Republicans are causing a huge headache for the GOP leadership by vowing not to vote to raise the national debt ceiling — which Congress must vote on by next spring. Essentially the nation’s de facto credit-card limit, the debt ceiling is due to max out by that time. If Congress fails to act, the government would legally default on paying its debts — forcing the government to shut down and setting off chaos in the financial markets that could plunge the U.S. economy into a free fall. (Photo: Steve Bloom/Barcroft Media)

(Posted 5:30 a.m. EST Tuesday, November 23, 2010)

By SKEETER SANDERS

WASHINGTON — As the nation prepares to celebrate Thanksgiving, the euphoria and boldness expressed by Republicans in the three weeks since they routed the Democrats to take control of the House of Representatives in January already has given way to bitter internal feuding as the GOP leadership confronts having to make a decision by next spring on raising the nation’s de facto credit-card limit.

House Republican Leader John Boehner, who will take over as speaker from Democrat Nancy Pelosi, said Thursday that the GOP-controlled House will have to act on the national debt ceiling, now set at $14.3 trillion. The actual national debt now stands at $13.87 trillion and is expected to hit the ceiling by next spring.

But the speaker-to-be already is facing an open revolt by newly-elected Tea Party-backed hard-liners, many of whom have vowed to vote against raising the national debt ceiling, insisting that voters gave them a clear mandate to reduce government spending and that raising the debt limit would only encourage more spending.

TEA PARTY-BACKED REPUBLICANS WANT SPENDING CUTS FIRST

Representative-elect Tim Scott (R-South Carolina) told The Wall Street Journal on Monday that “The [debt ceiling] vote will garner a lot of attention and provoke a lot of pain and anxiety, but there are consequences to all votes. The question is, when are we going to stop the way we are going? I think we have to stop it now.”

And Senator Jim DeMint (R-South Carolina) said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” November 7 that he would vote against raising the debt ceiling, “unless it’s combined with some path to balancing our budget, returning to 2008 spending levels,” and repealing the health-care reform law passed by Congress last spring without a single Republican vote.

“We have got to demonstrate that we have the resolve to cut spending,” DeMint said. “We cannot allow that to go through the Congress without showing the American people that we are going to balance the budget, and we’re not going to continue to raise the debt in America.”

FAILURE TO RAISE DEBT CEILING WOULD TRIGGER ECONOMIC CHAOS  

But Boehner, in a series of closed-door meetings with Republican freshmen, bluntly warned the Tea Party-backed firebrands that Congress has little choice but to raise the debt limit. “I’ve made it pretty clear to them . . . that Congress is going to have to deal with this,” Boehner said in a Thursday news conference. “We’re going to have to deal with it as adults. Whether we like it or not, the federal government has obligations and we have obligations on our part.”  

Failure to raise the debt ceiling would force the government to default on paying its bills and shut down. A default would, in turn, trigger severe economic shock waves, damaging, if not destroying, the nation’s credit rating.

Interest rates would soar dramatically, making it all but impossible for individuals or businesses to obtain or maintain credit. Foreign investors — who, according to the Treasury Department, now hold more than $4 trillion in U.S. Treasury securities — would be prompted not to buy any more, causing the dollar to plummet in value against other currencies and triggering chaos in world financial markets.

That, in turn, would cripple the already-struggling U.S. economy, throwing millions more Americans out of work.

COBURN AIDE: ‘ECONOMY IS GOING TO COLLAPSE’

Those dire predictions don’t appear to faze Senator Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma). According to Coburn spokesman John Hart, “We know the American economy is going to collapse, so why don’t we start the hard work of cutting spending now? We’re already in a crisis, and the time to reduce spending is immediately.”

Hart told The Washington Times last Sunday that Coburn was prepared to tie up the debt-ceiling measure unless it’s accompanied by major spending cuts. “He’s willing to block it, to put a hold on it, to use all procedural tools available, to ensure Congress reduces spending,” Hart said.

Other newly-elected Republican firebrands weren’t swayed by Boehner’s warning, either. Representatives-elect Kristi Noem of South Dakota, >Tim Scott of South Carolina, Reid Ribble of Wisconsin, Steven Stivers of Ohio and Lou Barletta of Pennsylvania all insisted to Boehner that they will vote against raising the debt limit.

Ribble called raising the debt limit “unconscionable” and “insane.” Stivers denounced it as “a reckless desire to spend money we don’t have, and borrow money we can’t afford to pay back.” Barletta compared the national debt to slavery, denouncing both congress and President Obama of “spending our country into servitude.”

FOR TEA PARTY FRESHMEN, A DIFFICULT TRANSITION FROM CAMPAIGNING TO GOVERNING

Boehner faced a difficult task in convening the freshmen on the need to raise the debt ceiling from the start, as many of the freshmen made the national debt and government spending the top-priority issues in their campaigns to unseat Democratic incumbents — and they’re in no mood to do anything to increase the debt further.

At the same time, however, the debt-ceiling vote poses a stark challenge for many of the newly-elected lawmakers to make the transition from campaigning to actually governing.

“A lot of these Tea Party Republicans made a lot of sweeping pronouncements on the campaign trail about cutting government spending and reducing the debt,” said a Democratic strategist who spoke on condition of anonymity. “But once they’re sworn into office, they’re going to get a hard dose of fiscal reality and they’ll be forced to do things they swore on the campaign trail they would never do.”

WILL OBAMA, DEMOCRATS HANG TOUGH ON BUSH TAX CUTS?

With the Tea Party Republican freshmen likely to insist on deep spending cuts as the price for their support to raise the national debt ceiling, will the Democrats be equally insistent that the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest one percent of Americans expire as scheduled at the end of the year as the price for their support for spending cuts?

While Republicans have sounded the mantra of tax cuts for more than 30 years, an 18-member bipartisan commission appointed by President Obama to find ways to reduce the more than $1 trillion federal budget deficit made it clear that spending cuts alone cannot close the deficit — it has grown far too large for that.

In their 50-page preliminary report, released November 10, commission co-chairs Erskine Bowles and Allan Simpson conclude that a combination of spending cuts, tax increases and revisions to existing government programs and departments — as well as a revision of the tax code — are necessary to create more sustainable budgets.

Whether Democrats like it or not, spending must be decreased to reduce the deficit. But whether Republicans like it or not, taxes must be increased  to close the deficit as well — and since neither the poor nor the middle class can afford to bear the burden of higher taxes, they must be increased on those who can most afford to bear the burden: The wealthiest one percent of Americans.

# # #

Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.  

Iowa Voters Tossed Out Three Justices of the State Supreme Court Solely Because They Declared Unconstitutional a State Law That Barred Gay and Lesbian Couples From Marrying; Vote Sends a Clear Message That  Anti-Gay Bias Trumps Gays’ Constitutional Rights — and Sets a Dangerous Precedent for Protecting the the Rights of Other Minorities

A VICTORY FOR HOMOPHOBIA — Three justices of the Iowa Supreme Court who struck down as unconstitutional a state law that barred gay and lesbian couples form marrying were tossed out of office on November 2 solely because of that decision. Never mind the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court declared in its 1996 Romer v. Evans decision that no state can deliberately exclude gays and lesbians from the constitutional rights and freedoms enjoyed by everyone else. The vote sets a dangerous precedent that state judges can be tossed out of office by the whims of a fickle electorate for protecting the constitutional rights of all minorities, not just gays and lesbians. (Image courtesy KCBS-TV, Los Angeles)

(Posted 5:30 a.m. EST Tuesday, November 16, 2010)

By SKEETER SANDERS

Here we go again.

In yet another state, the voters sent a clear and unmistakable message on November 2: That gay and lesbian couples have no constitutional right to marry — regardless of what the courts say to the contrary.

That message came loud and clear when voters in Iowa ousted three justices of the state Supreme Court who participated in Varnum v. Brien, the court’s unanimous 2009 ruling that struck down as unconstitutional a state law that barred gay and lesbian couples from marrying.

Chief Justice Marsha Ternus and Associate Justices David Baker and Michael Streit were all denied reconfirmation with roughly 54 percent voters saying “no” and 46 percent saying “yes.”

Under Iowa law, the governor appoints justices to the state Supreme Court, with the assistance of a judicial selection committee. Each justice, however, is subject to a retention election five years after his or her appointment.

Under normal circumstances, a Supreme Court justice does not remain on the bench if he or she is accepting bribes or has become incompetent or is simply not doing his or her job. But the circumstances in which Justices Ternus, Baker and Steit were ousted were anything but normal.

JUSTICES WERE DUTY-BOUND TO UPHOLD RIGHTS GUARANTEED BY IOWA CONSTITUTION

The justices, acting on an appeal of a lower court decision, ruled unanimously on April 3, 2009 that the state law defining marriage exclusively as a union between a man and a woman violated the equal-protection clause of the Iowa Constitution.

Article I, Section 6 of the Iowa Constitution states quite explicitly that “All laws of a general nature shall have a uniform operation; the [Iowa] General Assembly shall not grant to any citizen, or class of citizens, privileges or immunities, which, upon the same terms shall not equally belong to all citizens.”

The court also rejected civil unions, declaring that “A new distinction based on sexual orientation would be equally suspect and difficult to square with the fundamental principles of equal protection embodied in our Constitution.”

The justices made it clear they were duty-bound by their oath of office to uphold the Iowa Constitution — and the rights of individuals that it guarantees. “Our responsibility . . . is to protect constitutional rights of individuals from legislative enactments that have denied those rights, even when the rights have not yet been broadly accepted, were at one time unimagined, or challenge a deeply ingrained practice or law viewed to be impervious to the passage of time.”

APPEAL TO U.S. COURTS DEEMED ‘TOO RISKY’ IN FACE OF FEDERAL LAWSUITS AGAINST PROP. 8, DOMA  

Yet despite the clear and unmistakable language of the Iowa Constitution’s equal-protection clause, opponents of same-gender marriage adamantly refused to accept the court’s decision — and vowed an all-out campaign to reimpose the ban.

An appeal to the federal courts was not in the cards, since the justices based their ruling on the Iowa Constitution and — in the absence of a direct conflict with the U.S. Constitution — the federal courts lacked the jurisdiction to intervene.

An appeal also carried with it a high risk of losing, as California’s voter-approved Proposition 8 — which amended the California Constitution to ban same-gender marriage — is presently under challenge in federal court on the grounds that it violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

There are also at least four lawsuits now pending in the federal courts — two of them filed just last week — challenging the constitutionality of the federal Defense of Marriage Act of 1996, which denies federal recognition of same-gender marriages that are legal in six states and the District of Columbia and bars federal spousal benefits to legally married gay and lesbian couples.  

RIGHT-WING ANTI-GAY GROUPS FROM OUTSIDE IOWA TARGET JUSTICES  

Instead of filing an appeal, opponents of same-gender marriage launched a drive to oust the justices solely because of their ruling in the Varnum case, rallying voters to lash out against an interpretation of the state Constitution that was deeply unpopular with conservatives.

In the process, Iowa Constitution itself — that the justices were duty-bound to uphold — came under attack.

The right-wing National Organization for Marriage and other anti-gay groups from outside the state launched a multi-million-dollar campaign to oust Chief Justice Ternus and Associate Justices Baker and Streit, whose five-year terms were up for retention votes.

The campaign quickly became a cause celebre for the Religious Right, whose utter contempt toward the idea of two men or two women who love each other getting married is so strong that they’ve taken a Constitution-be-damned attitude in an all-out jihad to make marriage the exclusive province of opposite-gender couples.

Not only did they target the justices for ouster, they also campaigned hard to get conservative, anti-gay Republicans elected to the Iowa Legislature, with the ultimate goal of amending the Iowa Constitution to restrict marriage to opposite-gender couples. In the end, the Republicans took control of the Iowa House, but the Democrats kept control of the Iowa Senate, making passage of a marriage amendment to the state constitution — a very cumbersome and difficult process to begin with — highly unlikely.

OUSTER VOTE SETS DANGEROUS PRECEDENT FOR PROTECTING RIGHTS OF ALL  MINORITIES

While the removal of the three Iowa Supreme Court justices over their ruling in the Varnum case cannot, on its own, overturn the decision, it nonetheless sets a dangerous precedent for the protection of the constitutional rights of not only gays, but of all minorities at the state level. Imagine if there had been retention votes to oust the judges a generation ago had they declared that a ban on interracial marriages was unconstitutional — as the California Supreme Court did in Perez v. Sharp nearly 20 years before the U.S. Supreme Court did so in 1967.  

Unlike federal judges, who are appointed for life and can be removed only by impeachment by Congress for clear malfeasance and/or crimes, state judges are subject to retention votes by the electorate and county and municipal judges are directly elected to the bench. This raises the specter of undue political influence that can run directly counter to judges’ sworn duty to uphold the U.S. Constitution and the constitution of their home state.

The Iowa retention vote also raises the specter of state judges across the country being targeted for ouster for daring to uphold the constitutional rights of anyone — let alone gays and lesbians. It sends an unmistakable message to any judges who might be inclined to rule in a manner that is consistent with the Constitution, but inconsistent with the vagaries of popular opinion.

This is unacceptable and dangerous. The U.S. Supreme Court declared in its 1996 Romer v. Evans decision thatno state can deliberately deny to its gay and lesbian residents the constitutional and civil rights enjoyed by everyone else, solely because they are gay.

In that case, the high court struck down an amendment to the Colorado constitution that would have prevented the Legislature or any city, town or county in the state from passing legislation to protect gays and lesbians from discrimination. “The amendment imposes a special disability upon [gay and lesbian] persons alone,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the court. “Homosexuals are forbidden [under the amendment] the safeguards that others enjoy or may seek without constraint. . .This the state cannot do.”

DO GAYS HAVE A CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT TO MARRY? RECENT COURT PRECEDENTS STRONGLY SUGGEST YES

While the question of whether gay and lesbian couples have a constitutional right to marry under the Fourteenth Amendment is one that has yet to be addressed by the U.S. Supreme Court, past rulings by the nation’s highest tribunal strongly suggest — and this column strongly asserts — that they do.

The freedom of two single, mature adults who deeply love one another to marry is a freedom that the U.S. Supreme Court declared more than four decades ago is guaranteed by the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, when the justices, in Loving v. Virginia, unanimously struck down laws in 16 states — all of them in the South — that barred interracial couples from marrying.

Writing for the court, then-Chief Justice Earl Warren declared, “The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry — or not marry — a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the state.”

Gay and lesbian couples, in the opinion of this column, effectively earned to right to marry when the Supreme Court, in Lawrence v. Texas, fully decriminalized same-gender sexual relations in 2003 by striking down the last remaining anti-sodomy laws on the books in 13 states.

Although the court’s six-justice majority made it clear that its decision in the Lawrence did not directly address the issue of same-gender marriage, Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, in a bitter dissenting opinion, wrote that the ruling cast into doubt the constitutionality of laws that outlaw same-gender marriage.

“If moral disapprobation of homosexual conduct is ‘no legitimate state interest’ for purposes of proscribing that conduct,” Scalia wrote, “what justification could there possibly be for denying the benefits of marriage to homosexual couples exercising ‘the liberty protected by the Constitution?’ Surely not the encouragement of procreation, since the sterile and the elderly are allowed to marry.”

Between past precedents in Loving, Romer and Lawrence and the pending challenges in federal court to California’s anti-gay Proposition 8 and DOMA, it’s only a matter of time when the U.S. Supreme Court will have the final word on whether gay and lesbian couples have the same Fourteenth Amendment constitutional right to marry that interracial and interfaith couples have.

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Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

Congratulations, Voters: You Swept Out the Last Remaining Republican Moderates in the GOP Primaries and Democratic Moderates in Last Week’s Elections — Leaving Both Parties in Congress Totally Dominated by Hard-Line Ideologues of Both the Right (GOP) and the Left (Dems). Bipartisan Cooperation? Forget About It!

WELCOME TO GRIDLOCK CITY, AMERICA — You were warned in last week’s column not to vote to return control of Congress to the Republicans, but you wouldn’t listen. Now that you’ve turned over control of the House to the GOP, you’ve guaranteed that the next two years will see nothing but total ideological warfare on Capitol Hill, for the Democrats you swept out of office were mostly moderate-to-conservative Democrats — replaced by conservative Republicans — including several hard-line Tea Party ideologues — and leaving behind a Democratic caucus dominated by liberals determined not to be intimidated by the so-called “Red Wave.” Congratulations, America — You’ve now got a Congress that you said for months you didn’t want: A Congress completely dominated by unrepentant ideologues of both the left and the right, to whom the word “compromise” is as alien as a Martian. (Image courtesy Wikipedia.org)

(Posted 5:30 a.m. EST Tuesday, November 9, 2010)

Dear Readers:

Congratulations, America. You did the exact opposite of what Guest Columnist Russell King strongly urged you not to do last Tuesday.

Now, for the next two years, you’re going to have to suffer the consequences.

For months, you’ve told pollsters that you were sick and tired of the partisan wrangling in Washington. Yet when you went to the polls — in both the primaries and in last week’s general election — you elected what is destined to be the most ideologically polarized Congress in American history since the Civil War — the 150th anniversary of which, ironically, is next year.

In the Republican primaries, you defeated one moderate Republican after another, going instead with conservatives, many of them backed by the Tea Party movement. In last Tuesday’s election, you swept out one moderate-to-conservative Democrat after another, going instead with even more conservative Republicans.

ONE AFTER ANOTHER, MODERATES OF BOTH PARTIES GET SWEPT OUT BY FIREBRANDS

Indeed,, instead of ending the partisan gridlock, you, the electorate, did the exact opposite, voting in a Congress with a near-total absence of moderates of either party — especially in the House — guaranteeing that the hyper-partisanship you so thoroughly despise will only intensify, as both parties become even more ideologically rigid than before, to whom the word “compromise” is as alien as a Martian.

Of the 49 Democrats you tossed out of the House, 24 of them were moderate-to-conservative “Blue Dogs,” including Mike Arcuri of New York, Baron Hill of Indiana, Jim Marshall of Georgia, Glenn Nye of Virginia, John Salazar of Colorado and Earl Pomeroy of North Dakota.

In the Senate, the most prominent “Blue Dog” who lost was Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas — who barely survived a fierce primary challenge from party liberals angered by her opposition to a government-run “public option” as part of the health-care reform law passed last May.

Among Republicans, one moderate after another found themselves swept away by a right-wing tsunami driven by the Tea Party movement in the GOP primaries. Among the moderates who got thrown under the Tea Party bus: Mike Castle of Delaware, Charlie Crist of Florida, Trey Grayson of Kentucky, Bob Bennett of Utah, Rick Lazio of New York and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.

(Murkowski, however, may well have gained sweet revenge for her primary defeat by beating her Tea Party-backed opponent, Joe Miller, in last week’s general election as an independent write-in candidate. Murkowski’s win, if confirmed, would be a bitter blow to former Governor Sarah Palin, who ousted Murkowski’s father, Frank, as governor in 2006 and strongly supported Miller.)

But by far the biggest loser of all was Republican-turned-Democrat Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania. He abandoned the GOP when it became clear that he would lose in the primary to conservative former Representative Pat Toomey — only to lose the Democratic primary to liberal-backed Representative Joe Sestak. In the end, though, Toomey narrowly defeated Sestak, 51 percent to 49 percent.  

RESULT: GOP MORE RIGHT-WING THAN EVER; DEMS MORE LEFT-WING THAN EVER

Left standing on Capitol Hill after the “Red Tsunami” is a Republican caucus that is the most right-wing in its history and a Democratic caucus that is equally the most left-wing in its history.

Within days after the election, Republican leaders — and their Tea Party allies — made it abundantly clear that they’re in no mood for compromise. Senator-elect Rand Paul told ABC News on Sunday that compromise with the Democrats — or even with his own party’s leadership — was out of the question.

“We’re coming,” Paul said. “We’re — we’re proud. We’re strong. We’re loud. And we’re going to co-opt. And, in fact, I think we’re already shaping the debate.”

House Democratic leaders, however, aren’t about to roll over and play dead. Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California), who will lose the speakership to GOP House leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), declared Friday that she was in the running for House minority leader. In a letter to fellow House Democrats, Pelosi vowed to fight to preserve her party’s legislative achievements — especially the health-care reform law that Republicans have vowed to repeal.

“Our  work is far from finished,” Pelosi wrote. “As a result of Tuesday’s election, the role of Democrats in the 112th Congress will change, but our commitment to  serving the American people will not. We have no intention of allowing our great achievements to be rolled back.”

Pelosi has reason to strike a defiant tone: Her congressional district is one of the bluest in the country. While the outgoing speaker has only a 30 percent job-approval rating in national polls, she won a record 13th term in her overwhelmingly liberal San Francisco district with 80 percent of the vote, breaking the record set by her predecessor, the late Phillip Burton.

She also has the numbers on her side: Although several moderate-to-conservative House Democrats are likely to oppose Pelosi, they’re now badly outnumbered by the  liberals, thanks to the loss of nearly half of the House Democrats’ conservative caucus in the election.  

For his part, Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell sharply defended his comments that his party’s top priority in the next two years will be to ensure that President Obama becomes a one-term president. “Some have said it was indelicate of me to suggest that our top political priority over the next two years should be to deny President Obama a second term in office,” McConnell said Thursday in a speech to the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank.

“But the fact is, if our primary legislative goals are to repeal and replace the health spending bill, to end the bailouts, cut spending and shrink the size and scope of government, the only way to do all these things is to put someone in the White House who won’t veto any of these things,” McConnell asserted.

IT ISN’T ALL BAD: WORST OF TEA PARTY EXTREMISTS — AND A LIBERAL FIREBRAND — GOT THE BOOT

However, to your credit, voters, you did say “no” to several hard-line right-wing Tea Party-backed extremists who proved to be an embarrassment to the GOP and incurred the wrath of Latino voters angry at their anti-immigrant, anti-Latino campaigns, including Sharron Angle of Nevada and  Tom Tancredo of Colorado.

And, also to your credit, you resoundingly rejected the totally off-the-wall campaigns of Christine O’Donnell of Delaware and Carl Paladino of New York — both of whom clearly demonstrated that they were unfit to serve in the U.S. Senate and the New York governor’s office, respectively.

In Florida, you threw out a left-wing firebrand, Democrat Alan Grayson, voting in a Republican with, ironically, one of the most famous names in American history: Daniel Webster.

And in Kentucky, you said “no” to Democrat Jack Conway after Conway made the foolish mistake of mocking his GOP opponent Rand Paul’s religious faith — or lack thereof — in his now-infamous “Aqua Buddha” TV campaign ad, which angered conservative Christians in a deeply conservative state.

Frankly, this column is surprised that Conway’s ad didn’t also anger practitioners of Buddhism — the world’s fourth largest religion, with 360 million adherents worldwide — who could rightly accuse Conway of mocking their faith.

SENATE FACES TOTAL PARALYSIS AS BOTH PARTIES CAN NOW FILIBUSTER BILLS

But with the Democrats now more firmly under liberal control with the ouster of so  many “Blue Dogs” — and under tremendous pressure from liberal activists and public-sector labor unions not to give in on health-care reform — a knock-down, drag-out ideological war is almost certain.

Republicans have vowed to repeal the health-care reform law passed by Congress without a single GOP vote. But the repeal effort is almost certain to fail, with Obama wielding his veto stamp and Republicans fully aware they lack the two-thirds majority required to override.

A repeal bill is unlikely reach the president’s desk anyway; with the Senate still under Democratic control, Senate Republicans lack the 60 votes required to choke off an expected Democratic filibuster. Indeed, with neither party able to choke off each other’s filibusters, the Senate could fall into total paralysis.

GRIDLOCK COULD PROVE DANGEROUS AS DEBT-CEILING VOTE NEARS

This could prove extremely dangerous next year, when Congress will be required by law to vote on raising the national debt ceiling. Essentially the nation’s credit-card limit, the debt ceiling, now set $14.3 trillion, could max out as early as next spring.

The national debt is now estimated at $13.7 trillion. If Congress fails to raise the limit, the government would legally default on its debts, destroying the nation’s credit rating and causing a panic on Wall Street that would make the Meltdown of 2008 seem tame by comparison.

Already, there is a bitter debate among Republicans over what to do about the debt ceiling, with some newly-elected Tea Party hard-liners vowing to vote no. GOP national chairman Michael Steele declared that his party won’t approve any debt-limit increase. “We are not going to compromise on raising more debt. We are not going to compromise on raising the debt ceiling,” Steele said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on the Sunday before the election.

But soon-to-be Speaker Boehner warned that failure to raise the debt limit is not a viable option. “Increasing the debt limit allows our government to meet its obligations,” Boehner told ABC News, “and I think that there are multiple options for how you deal with it. But for our [GOP] team, I think we’re going to have to demonstrate that we’ve got to have reductions in spending. The government’s spending more than what we bring in. We can’t afford it.”

PARTY POLARIZATION SEEPING DOWN TO STATE LEVEL

Under these circumstances, do you really expect the hard-line ideologues of the right and the left who now control both major parties to find common ground and compromise — especially since they’re already sounding white-hot belligerent rhetoric? If you do, we have a bridge in Brooklyn that we want to sell you.

The really bad news is that the ideological polarization in Congress is seeping down to the state level, as state after state is seeing one party or the other take total control of both the legislatures and the governor’s offices — essentially bifurcating the nation into red states and blue states and leaving moderate voters out in the cold.

While much of the country was swept in a tsunami of Republican red, The Northeast and the West Coast, particularly California, have become fortresses of Democratic blue. Democrats swept all but one of the nine statewide offices in California for the first time in the state’s history and tightened their control of both houses of the legislature — as well as both U.S. Senate seats and the majority of the state’s congressional delegation.

In Vermont, Democrat Peter Shumlin, a champion of a state-run “single-payer” health-care system, was elected governor and Democrats retained their overwhelming majorities in both houses of the Vermont legislature. Connecticut will have a Democrat as governor for the first time in 20 years as Dan Malloy narrowly defeated Republican Tom Foley.

For all the bemoaning and bewailing by voters about the partisan polarization of the two major parties, the results of the 2010 elections clearly show that, to the contrary, America is a more deeply polarized nation now than at any time since the Civil War — and perhaps in all of American history.

Former President Jimmy Carter, in an interview broadcast on “NBC Nightly News” in September, said that the country has become “astonishingly” polarized to a degree that he’s never seen before. “President Obama suffers from the most polarized situation in Washington that we have ever seen,” Carter said, “even maybe than the time of Abraham Lincoln and the initiation of the War between the States,” as most Southerners, including Carter, refer to the Civil War.

For those who complain bitterly about the poisoned partisan atmosphere in the nation’s capital, it may already be too late to do anything to bring a halt to it.

Which is why the next two years could prove to be America’s worst political nightmare.

Sincerely,

Skeeter Sanders

Editor & Publisher

The ‘Skeeter Bites Report

Copyright 2010, Skeeter sanders. all rights reserved.

An Open Letter to Conservative Americans: This Is the Same Bunch of Republicans Who Caused Our Economic Meltdown in the First Place and Have Embarked on a Disgusting Campaign of Stoking Irrational Fears of People of Color, Muslims, Gays and Anyone Else Who Isn’t a So-Called ‘Red-Blooded Patriotic American” — If You Vote to Put These Paranoiacs Back in Charge of Congress, You Will Send Our Country Plunging Down the Toilet

ARE YOU REALLY GOING TO VOTE FOR A BUNCH OF REPUBLICAN FEARMONGERERS AND HYPOCRITES? — Today is Election Day and the time has come once and for all to end the denial: If you plan to vote to put the Republicans back in charge of Congress, then you’re going to condemn America to at least two years of total political chaos, for the Republican Party of 2010 is farther to the right — and loaded with more out-and-out fearmongering demagogues and paranoiacs — than at any other time in its 146-year history, according to an “open letter to conservative Americans” by guest commentator Russell King. (Cartoon by David Horsey/Seattle Post-Intelligencer)

(Posted 5:30 a.m. EDT Tuesday, November 2, 2010)

NOTE TO READERS: Today is Election Day in the United States. As millions of voters across America cast their ballots in this midterm congressional and state election, polls show many races for Congress too close to call, with party control of both the House and Senate hanging in the balance. In a commentary first posted on his own blog, Russ’ Filtered News, in March, Russell King, a Wisconsin-based blogger and lobbyist for progressive causes, wrote a lengthy “Open Letter to Conservative Americans” that lays bare the case against voting for the Republicans in today’s election. The ‘Skeeter Bites Report is republishing King’s article — with his permission, even though it is not copyrighted — in a last-ditch effort to persuade voters to not make a grave mistake with their ballot. — Skeeter Sanders, Editor & Publisher

By RUSSELL KING

Dear Conservative Americans,

The years have  not been kind to you. I grew up in a profoundly Republican home, so I can remember when you wore a very different face than the one we see now. You’ve lost me and you’ve lost most of America. Because I believe having responsible choices is important to democracy, I’d like to give you some advice and an invitation.

First, the invitation: Come back to us.

Now the advice. You’re going to have to come up with a platform that isn’t built on a foundation of cowardice and fear of people with colors, religions, cultures and sex lives that differ from your own; fear of reform in banking, health care, energy; fantasy  fears of America being transformed into an Islamic nation, into  social/communo-fascism, into a disarmed populace put in internment camps; and more. But you have work to do even before you take on that task.

Your party — the Republican Party — and the conservative end of the American political spectrum has become irresponsible and irrational. Worse, it’s tolerating, promoting and celebrating prejudice and hatred.

Let me provide some examples — by no means an exhaustive list — of where the Right as gotten itself stuck in a swamp of hypocrisy, hyperbole, historical inaccuracy and hatred.

If you’re going to regain your stature as a party of rational, responsible people, you’ll have to start by draining this swamp:

A LONG RECORD OF GOP HYPOCRISIES

You cannot flip out – and threaten impeachment — when Democrats use a preliminary procedure (deem and pass) that your party used repeatedly (more than 35 times in just one session and more than 100 times in all!), that’s centuries old and which the courts have supported. Especially when your leaders admit it all.

You cannot vote and scream against the stimulus package and then take credit for the good it’s done in your own district (happily handing out enormous checks representing money that you voted against is especially ugly) — 114 of you (at last count) did just that — and it’s even worse when you secretly beg for more!

You cannot fight against your own ideas just because a Democratic president endorses your proposal.

You cannot call for a pay-as-you-go policy, and then vote against your own idea.

Are they “unlawful enemy combatants” or are they “prisoners of war” at Guantanamo? You cannot have it both ways.

REPUBLICANS KINGS OF CORPORATE WELFARE EVEN AS THEY BLAST RUNAWAY SPENDING

You cannot carry on about the evils of government spending, when your family has accepted more than a quarter-million dollars in government handouts!

You cannot refuse to go to a scheduled meeting, to which you were invited, and then blame the Democrats because they didn’t meet with you.

You cannot rail against the president using TelePrompTers while using TelePrompTers yourselves. Repeatedly.

You cannot rail against the bank bailouts when you supported them as they were happening.

You cannot be for immigration reform, then be against it. You cannot enjoy socialized medicine, while condemning it.

A DOUBLE STANDARD IN BLACK AND WHITE

You cannot flip out when America’s first black president puts his feet on the presidential desk when you were silent about white presidents doing the same. George W. Bush did it. Gerald Ford did it.

You cannot complain that the president hasn’t closed Guantanamo, yet campaign to keep it open.

You cannot flip out when America’s first black president bows to foreign dignitaries, as appropriate for their culture, when you were silent when white  presidents did the same. Bush did it. Richard Nixon did it. Even Dwight Eisenhower did it. You didn’t utter a peep when Bushheld hands — and even kissed on the mouth — leaders of countries that are not on “kissing terms” with the U.S.

You cannot complain that the Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the so-called “Underwear Bomber,” was read his Miranda rights under Obama when Richard Reid, the so-called “Shoe Bomber,” was read his Miranda rights under Bush — and you remained silent (And, no, Newt Gingrich, Reid is not a U.S. citizen either, so there’s no difference.).

You cannot attack a Democratic president for not publicly condemning a terrorist event for 72 hours when you said nothing about his Republican predecessor, who waited six days to comment on an eerily similar incident (and even then, he didn’t issue a condemnation). The Obama administration did so the day of the event.

You cannot throw a hissy fit, sound alarms and cry that Obama freed Guantanamo prisoners who later helped plan the failed Christmas Day underwear bombing, when, in fact, only one former Guantanamo detainee — released by Bush — helped to plan the failed attack.

You cannot condemn those blaming the Republican former president for an attempted terror attack on his watch — then blame the Democratic incumbent president for an attempted terror attack on his.

You cannot mount a boycott against singers who say they’re ashamed of President Bush for starting a war, but remain silent when another singer says he’s ashamed of President Obama and falsely calls him a Maoist who makes him want to throw up and says he ought to be in jail.

HEALTH-CARE HYPOCRISY

You cannot cry that the health care bill is too long, and then cry that it’s too short.

You cannot support theindividual mandate for health insurance, and then call it unconstitutional when Democrats adopt it and then campaign against your own idea.

You cannot demand television coverage, and then whine about it when you get it. Repeatedly.

You cannot praise criminal trials in U.S. courts for terror suspects under a Republican president, and then call them “treasonous” under a Democratic  president.

You cannot propose ideas to create jobs, and then work against them when the Democrats put your own ideas in a bill.

You cannot be both pro-choice and anti-choice on abortion.

You cannot condemn someone for failing to pay $900 in taxes, when you’ve paid nearly $20,000 in IRS fines.

You cannot condemn criticism of the president when U.S. troops are in harm’s way, then attack the president yourselves when U.S. troops are in harm’s way — the only difference being the president’s party affiliation (and, by  the way, armed conflict does NOT remove our right and our duty as  Americans to speak up).

You cannot be both for cap-and-trade policy and against it.

You cannot block debate in the Senate on a bill, then bemoan the lack of “open debate.”

A REPUBLICAN DOUBLE STANDARD EVEN IN EXPRESSIONS OF HOMOPHOBIA

If you push anti-gay legislation and make anti-gay speeches, you should probably  take a pass on having gay sex, regardless of whether it’s 2004 or 2010.

This is true, too, if you’re taking GOP money and giving anti-gay rants on CNN (Are you reading this, Carl Paladino?).

Taking right-wing money and GOP favors to write anti-gay stories for news sites while working as a gay prostitute, doubles down on both the hypocrisy and the prostitution (Are you reading this, Jeff Gannon?)

This is especially true if you claim your anti-gay stand is God’s stand, too (Are you reading this, Ted Haggard?).

When you chair the House Committee on Missing and Exploited Children, you cannot send sexually explicit e-mails to 16-year-old boys — which is illegal anyway, but you made it hypocritical as well (Are you reading this, Mark Foley?).

HAVE YOU REALLY FORGOTTEN GOP’S SORRY RECORD WHILE IN POWER?

You cannot criticize Democrats for not doing something you didn’t do while you held power over the past 16 years, especially when the Democrats Democrats have done more in one year than you did in 16.

You cannot decry “name-calling” when you’ve been the most consistent and outrageous at it. And the most vile at that (Remember Joe Wilson?).

You cannot spend more than 40 years hating, cutting and trying to kill Medicare, and then pretend to be the defenders of Medicare.

You cannot praise the Congressional Budget Office when its analysis produces numbers that fit your political agenda, then claim it’s unreliable when it comes up with numbers that don’t.

You cannot vote for extending unemployment benefits under a Republican president, then vote against extending them under a Democratic president. Either you support unemployment benefits or you don’t. And it makes it worse when you change your position merely for the sake obstructionism.

You cannot call the reconciliation process in the Senate “out of bounds” when you used it repeatedly.

You cannot spend taxpayer money on ads against spending taxpayer money.

You cannot condemn individual health insurance mandates in a Democratic bill, when the mandates were a Republican idea.

You cannot demand everyone listen to the generals when they say what fits your agenda, then ignore them when they don’t.

You cannot whine that it’s unfair when people accuse you of exploiting racism for political gain, when your party’s first black national chairman admits you’ve been doing it for decades.

You cannot portray yourself as fighting terroristswhen you openly and passionately support terrorists.

You cannot complain about a lack of bipartisanship when you’ve routinely obstructed for the sake of political gain — threatening to filibuster at least 100 pieces of legislation in one session, far more than any other since the procedural tactic was invented — and admitted it. Some admissions are unintentional; others are made proudly.

This is especially true when the bill is the result of decades of compromise between the two parties and is filled with your own ideas.

You cannot question the loyalty of Justice Department lawyers when you didn’t object when your own Republican president appointed them.

SOCIAL CONSERVATIVES — AND MORAL HYPOCRITES

You cannot preach and try to legislate “Family Values” when you:

# take nude hot-tub dips with teenagers (and pay them hush money);

# cheat on your wife with a secret lover and lie about it to the world;

# cheat with a staffer’s wife and pay them off with a new job;

# pay hookers for sex while wearing a diaper and cheating on your wife or just enjoying an old-fashioned non-kinky cheating on your wife;

# try to have gay sex in a public toilet;

# authorize the rape of children in Iraqi prisons to coerce their parents into providing information;

# seek, look at or have sex with children;

# replace a guy who cheats on his wife with a guy who cheats on his pregnant wife with his wife’s mother.

FOR YOUR OWN SAKE, YOU’VE GOT TO KICK THESE OFF-THE-WALL LOSERS TO THE CURB

You really need to disassociate with those among you who:

# assert that people making a quarter-million dollars a year can barely make ends meet or that $1 million “isn’t a lot of money;”

# say that “Comrade” Obama is a “Bolshevik” taking cues from Lenin. Lenin died nearly 40 years before the president was born;

# ignore the many times your buddies use a term that offends you and complain only when a Democrat says it;

# liken political opponents to murderers, rapists and “this Muslim guy” that “offed his wife’s head” or call then “un-American;”

# say Obama “wants his plan to fail…so that he can make the case for bank nationalization and vindicate his dream of a socialist economy;”

# equate putting the good of the people ahead of your personal fortunes with “terrorism;”

# smear an entire major religion with the actions of a few fanatics;

# say that the president wants to “annihilate us;”

# compare health care reform with the bombing of Pearl Harbor, a Bolshevik plot, the9/11 terrorist attacks, or reviving the ghosts of communist dictators (And, by the way, it’s also not Armageddon, either);

# equate our disease-fighting stem-cell research program with “what the Nazis did;”

# call a bill passed by the majority of both houses of Congress, by members of Congress each elected by a majority in their districts, an “an unconscionable abuse of power,” a “violation of the presidential oath” or “the end of representative government”. . .

I could go on and on, but you get the point.

So, dear  conservatives, get to work. Drain the swamp of the conspiracy nuts, the  bold-faced liars undeterred by demonstrable facts, the overt hypocrisy and the hatred. Then offer us a calm, responsible, grown-up agenda based on your values and your vision for America.

We may or may not agree with your values and vision, but we’ll certainly welcome you back to the American mainstream with open arms.

We need you.

Sincerely,

Russell King

# # #

(This article, although not copyrighted, is republished with the permission of the author and was edited for length. The full-length version of this article can be found on King’s Web site Russ’ Filtered News.)

# # #

The ‘Skeeter Bites Report Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

With Latest Polls Showing a Tightening of Scores of Midterm Contests, Republicans Have Failed to Take Into Account the Growing Numbers of Non-White, Heavily Democratic-Leaning Voters While the GOP Is Becoming What the Democrats Were as Recently as the 1950s: An Almost Lily-White, Southern-Dominated Party

REPUBLICANS TURNING INTO THE NEW DIXIECRATS — Regardless of how Republicans fare in next week’s midterm elections, the party faces a crisis of long-term survival as the nation’s population becomes more and more racially and ethnically diverse. By continuing with the infamous “Southern Strategy” hatched by Richard Nixon’s campaign more than 40 years ago that alienated blacks and is now driving away Latinos, the GOP is turning into an almost all-white, Southern-dominated party, even as the white proportion of the U.S. population is shrinking, according to the Census Bureau. Unless the GOP expands its appeal to non-white voters, it will inevitably fall into permanent minority status by mid-century, if not sooner. (Image courtesy Photobucket.com)

(Posted 5:30 a.m. EDT Tuesday, October 26, 2010)

By SKEETER SANDERS

For months now, the Republicans and just about every media pundit across the country have been virtually crowing about how the GOP will take over both houses of Congress in next week’s midterm elections.

Historically, with the notable exception of the post-9/11 election of 2002 — when the dominant issue was national security and the “war on terror” — the party in control of the White House has suffered losses in every midterm congressional election since 1934.  

But according to the latest round of pre-election polls, many key races have tightened — some rather dramatically — and are now rated too close to call.

It now appears that the Democrats are within striking distance of at least blunting the GOP advance — if not keeping control of Congress — which could make for a very long election night next Tuesday.  

Powering the Democrats’ late surge is a massive get-out-the-vote effort by the party aimed at African-Americans, Latinos, Asians and other non-white voters who are comprising an ever-growing segment of the electorate, as well as by exploiting a growing disgust among moderate voters with an unprecedented multi-million-dollar blitz of highly negative — and in many cases, outright inflammatory — TV and radio ads by “independent” groups on behalf of GOP candidates.  

President Obama himself has embarked on a cross-country blitz of his own, becoming the “campaigner-in-chief” exhorting the millions of young people who voted for him in 2008 to vote to preserve the Democrats’ congressional majority in 2010.

The contests for the House and Senate aren’t the only races where there is a last-minute Democratic surge. Several contests for governor are showing the Democratic candidate coming from behind to either surge into the lead or turn the race into a neck-and-neck contest — and in one state in particular (New York), the Democrat is on track to bury his GOP opponent in an overwhelming landslide.

ADS URGING LATINOS IN NEVADA NOT TO VOTE TRACED TO GOP OPERATIVE

Adding to the late Democratic surge is a backlash by Latinos against what they regard as an anti-Latino assault by Republicans and their conservative allies.

In Nevada, a series of Spanish-language TV and radio ads urging Latinos not to vote in protest of Congress’ failure to pass comprehensive immigration reform has been met with open derision by Latino community leaders. The ads were paid for by an organization that calls itself “Latinos for Reform” — which was quickly exposed as being led by Robert de Posada, a conservative pundit and a former Republican Party official.

“Don’t vote this November,” an announcer on the ad says in Spanish. “This is the only way to send them a clear message. You can no longer take us for granted.”

De Posada fiercely defended the ads, insisting that “We’re saying to people, you need to look at the record of the candidates and understand that in a civic engagement situation, you have the options of not necessarily voting. You should not be told you have no option but to support the lesser of two evils.”

SPANISH-LANGUAGE TV NETWORKS REJECT THE SPOTS

Both of the nation’s two major Spanish-language TV networks, Univision and Telemundo, have refused to broadcast the ads, with Univision saying they run directly counter to the network’s own non-partisan public-service campaign encouraging Latinos to participate in the electoral process. The network also yanked the radio spot from its Las Vegas station within hours after it went on the air.  

“Univision will not be running any spots from Latinos for Reform related to voting,” a network spokesman said in a statement. “It is also important to clarify that while Mr. Robert de Posada has on occasion provided political commentary on Univision, representing one of various points of views, he is not in any way affiliated with Univision. Univision prides itself on promoting civic engagement and our extensive national campaigns encourage Hispanics to vote.”

Within hours of Univision’s decision, its rival, NBC-owned Telemundo, told the Associated Press that it, too, would not broadcast the spots. De Posada’s group had planned to run the ads in Nevada, Florida, California, Texas and Colorado from now through election eve, but was forced to scuttle the plan after Univision and Telemundo gave the ads the thumbs-down.

De Posada told ABC News that although he has halted purchasing airtime for the ads, he intended  to push forward with the spots on the Internet, including YouTube. He also plans to file a complaint against Univision and Telemundo with the Federal Election Commission.

Under current law, TV and radio stations cannot edit or refuse political ads paid for by candidates’ campaigns, but they are free to accept or reject ads by outside groups.

‘DON’T VOTE’ ADS ‘OVERT ATTEMPT AT SUPPRESSING LATINO VOTE,’ SAYS LULAC

The ads were roundly condemned by Latino community leaders and even by some Republican candidates. In a statement issued last Tuesday, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the nation’s oldest and largest Latino civil rights organization, branded the ads “cynical” and an overt attempt at suppressing Latino voter turnout.

“This is overt voter suppression, and it’s ugly,” said LULAC President Margaret Moran. “It is precisely because of this latest voter suppression tactic that Latino voters should vote.”

President Obama also slammed the ads during a roundtable with reporters from Spanish-language media. “I think it is terrible,” he said. “It is a cynical political ploy to try to drive Latino votes to benefit a Republican candidate in Nevada who would never vote for immigration reform.”

The campaign of Tea Party-backed Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle condemned de Posada’s ads — but only after her Democratic opponent, incumbent Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, blasted her for not denouncing the ads sooner.

“No ad should ever discourage voters from voting or expressing their opinions at the ballot box,” Angle’s spokesman Jarrod Agen said in a statement to ABC News.

The Angle campaign issued its statement a day after Reid, speaking on the campus of the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, ripped into Angle’s initial silence on the matter. “Can you think of anything less patriotic and more un-American?” Reid asked a group of students after casting an early ballot. “It’s the American thing to do – to vote. How can she [Angle] possibly not speak out against what they’ve done?”

ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF GOP STILL FOLLOWING NIXON’S ‘SOUTHERN STRATEGY’

The episode is but the latest in what this column asserted back in April is the GOP’s wholesale writing off of the Latino vote — a continuation of the party’s infamous “Southern Strategy” that alienated African-Americans more than 40 years ago — driving both voter blocs firmly into the Democratic column.

But the GOP is writing off non-white voters at its own peril, for the strategy is also transforming the Republican Party into what the Democratic Party used to be before the 1960s: An overwhelmingly white and deeply conservative party whose voting base is most heavily concentrated in the Deep South and Rocky Mountain West.

There are some who argue that today’s GOP is turning into “the New Dixiecrats,” a reference to the conservative Southern whites who bolted from the Democratic Party in 1948 in protest of the party adopting a civil rights plank at its national convention and later formed the segregationist States’ Rights Party, better known as the “Dixiecrats,” who ran with Senator Strom Thurmond as its presidential candidate.          

FLYING UNDER THE RADAR: THE BROWNING OF AMERICA’S POPULATION

Amid all the heat of the 2010 election campaign, one fundamental factor that is likely to have a determining effect on next week’s vote — and every election thereafter — has been flying under the media radar: The changing demographic face of the American electorate.

In his inaugural address, President Obama referred to America’s changing face when he said, “Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions, who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans . . . What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them, that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply.”

Even before Obama’s election, the shift was already becoming evident: America is becoming browner, as non-white Americans become a greater and greater proportion of the U.S. population and white Americans conversely contract toward losing their majority status by mid-century, according to the Census Bureau.

Already, the white proportion of the U.S. population has fallen from 75.7 percent in 1990 to 71.6 percent in 2000, the Census Bureau reports. With the results of the 2010 Census still to be made public, the bureau estimates that the white proportion has fallen further to 65.8 percent today — barely a two-thirds majority — and projects it will shrink to barely 60 percent 15 years from now.

NON-WHITES ALREADY EXCEED 40 PERCENT OF NATION’S UNDER-18 YOUTH POPULATION  

Already, non-whites comprise more than 40 percent of the youth population of America under 18 years of age, according demographer William Frey of the Brookings Institution. And they comprise an outright majority of the youth population in eight states: Arizona, California, Florida, Hawaii, Nevada, New Mexico, New York and Texas.

In Hawaii, the president’s native state, non-whites are an outright majority of the state’s total population, with Japanese-Americans alone comprising 52 percent of the state’s residents. Frey projects that non-whites will become the majority of the youth population nationwide within the next decade.

“[Latinos] accounted for 50 percent of national population growth since 2000, compared with 14 percent for Asians, 13 percent for blacks, and 17 percent for whites,” Frey reports, adding that while the white U.S. population is projected to fall into minority status by 2042, its preschool population is likely to fall to that status by the end of this decade.

Meanwhile, the U.S. population as a whole is getting older, as the 78-million-strong Baby Boomers — born between 1946 and 1964 — are inexorably approaching senior citizenship. But the older the age group, the whiter is gets; an overwhelming 80 percent of senior citizens are white, Frey reports.

These twin developments will inevitably create a serious cultural — and political — gap between the older and younger generations that Frey predicts will be much wider than the cultural war between the Baby Boomers and their World War II “GI Generation” parents in the 1960s.

GOP IS BLANCHING WHILE AMERICA TURNS MORE COLORFUL

Nowhere is the widening gap between mostly-white older America and multiracial younger America more evident than in the political sphere. The 2008 election revealed just how stark the divide is, with young voters — especially non-white and racially-mixed young people — strongly preferring Obama, and older voters — especially white seniors — breaking solidly for Republican John McCain.

Throughout the 2008 campaign, rallies for the Democratic candidates drew substantially multiracial crowds, while turnout at rallies for GOP candidates were  almost exclusively white, including a town hall-style meeting for McCain and several rallies for then-GOP vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin, in which several attendees openly expressed racist or anti-Muslim viewpoints about Obama.

‘BLANCHING’ OF GOP ACCELERATES WITH RISE OF TEA PARTY MOVEMENT

That pattern has since accelerated with the rise of the Tea Party movement, which has proven to be a major force to be reckoned with inside the GOP. Demographic surveys found that the Tea Party movement is virtually devoid of participation in it by non-whites.

Likewise have been this year’s Republican primaries. In state after state, the results found that turnout was overwhelmingly — in some states, almost exclusively — among white voters, as African-Americans continued to shun the GOP in droves, and Latino turnout nosedived to record-low levels — the latter the clearest sign yet of a backlash by Latino voters — even conservative Cuban-Americans in South Florida — against Republicans over the volatile issue of immigration.  

As non-white Americans become a greater and greater proportion of the nation’s population and electorate, the GOP is facing a stark choice: Either expand its electoral appeal to non-white voters, or else find itself relegated permanently to minority-party status — or even electoral oblivion, replaced by a new party — within the next 20 years.

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Volume V, Number 42

Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.