Just Short of Treason in Georgia and Kansas

By Michael Collins

It’s official. The crazies have arrived for the 2012 presidential race, florid in their deviant and repulsive rhetoric. Andrew B. Adler, editor of The Atlanta Jewish Times, called on Israel’s President Benjamin Netanyahu to “Order a hit on a president in order to preserve Israel’s existence.” This reference to President Barack Obama appeared in the print edition of the paper on January 13 and was first published online by Gawker on the 20th (alternate links here and here).

Right wing Republican Mike O’Neal, speaker of the Kansas House of Representatives, forwarded an email referring to the president that quoted (approximately) Psalm 109.8: “Let his days be few and brief; and let others step forward to replace him.” The Lawrence Journal World noted that the very next verse, 109.9, indicates how the president should be replaced: “Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.” (Image SND)

The First Amendment is ignored when reactionary mayors want to stop the free speech and assemblies of Occupy Wall Street. However, free speech is expanded beyond the limits of the law when religious extremists in Atlanta and Kansas step well outside of the boundaries of U.S. Code.

Blagojevich gets 14 years, but what about these guys?

By Michael Collins

(Washington, DC) Former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich just got 14 years in prison. He wheeled and dealed to leverage contributions and other favors based on his position as governor. He was indicted by former special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald (who tanked the Valerie Plame case).

Maybe it was the former governor’s colorful (and to some vulgar) language captured on audio tapes or his brash style. Regardless of the motives, the time, money and attention wasted on his indictment and trial stands in stark contrast to the crimes never prosecuted, crimes that resulted in death, unnecessary illness and suffering, and the loss of trillions of dollars caused by the perpetrators of the current economic crisis. (Image: michaelpickard)

While prosecutors pick easy targets like Blagojevich, serious crimes go unprosecuted.

President George W. Bush and Vice President Richard Cheney lied about the basis for invading Iraq. As a result, they are responsible for the deaths of soldiers resulting from that invasion and occupation.

Quds Force II – The Storyline Repeats Itself

By Michael Collins

(Washington, DC)  A faction of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard called the Quds Force (QF) is center stage in the War on Terror for the second time in five years. In 2007, President George W. Bush hauled out the group of middle and upper level Iranian government officials as a rationale for military action against Iran. The decisive shutdown of the Bush effort marks a critical turning point in recent history and will be discussed later in the article.

QF II began last Tuesday when FBI Director Robert Mueller and Attorney General Eric Holder unified the terror storyline between the rabid neoconservatives of the Bush era and the low key loyalists to the national security state in the Obama administration.

Constitutionalist federal judge target of Loughner shooting

Alex Jones interviews Sheriff Richard Mack

Death Panels, Palin’s Targets, and Political Assassination

Michael Collins

The attempted assassination of Representative Gabrielle Giffords raises the bar for political lies and hate to a new level. Previously, incendiary political lies stopped just short violent imagery. Sarah Palin’s Take Back 20 campaign presented a violent threat in the form of rifle site crosshairs placed over the congressional districts of 20 Democratic supporters of health care reform.

Ironically, Giffords sent Palin a clear message to end the violent allusion in the ads. In this brief video, she warns:

“… we’re on Sarah Palin’s targeted list but the thing is that the way she’s had it depicted has the cross hairs of a gun site over our district. When people do that, they’ve got to realize that there [are] consequences to that action.” Rep. Giffords

The appeal had no effect. It took the events of Saturday, January 8 at a shopping mall in Tucson, Arizona to finally get Palin to pull down her crosshairs studded map marking 20 Democrats for defeat as punishment for support of health care reform.

Lawless Nation – the Executive Branch

By Michael Collins
Part I of III

WASHINGTON – Selected to run by the powerful and wealthy, promising the public one thing and delivering another after elected, the President of the United States is the focus of a new political doctrine – the unitary executive. The office of the president has rapidly become a law unto itself over the past ten years. (Image)

The Secrecy State

By Robert C. Koehler

Under the I-hate-government, let’s-drown-it-in-the-bathtub administration of George Bush and Dick Cheney, the Secrecy State swelled to such enormous proportions it required more than a dozen investigative journalists from the Washington Post two years to fathom its size and shape.

In our otherwise financially bankrupt society, where we can afford virtually nothing that actually helps people, money is no object in the Secrecy State. Thus in the name of national security, as Dana Priest and William M. Arkin tell us in “Top Secret America,” their harrowing tale of government gone wild, 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies are currently in the homeland security, counterterrorism and intelligence game.

One Year After Coup, Honduras Still in Crisis; Is the US Enabling?

Pro-democracy demonstrators clash with police on September 23, 2009, in the capital of Tegucigalpa.

Jeremy Kryt July 7, 2010 HuffingtonPost

A year after a military coup toppled the democratically-elected government, a “horrifying” human rights crisis continues amidst economic and environmental decay. Is the U.S. enabling this repression with taxpayer dollars?

One year ago last week, on June 28, 2009, the Honduran special forces – led by U.S.-trained officers, wearing U.S.-issue uniforms and armed with U.S.-made M16s – attacked the home of president Manuel Zelaya, kidnapped him in his pajamas, and after a quick stop at the local U.S. airbase, flew him off to Costa Rica in exile. Honduras hasn’t been the same since.

“[It’s] a totally different country since the coup,” says Dr. Adrienne Pine, a Central American expert at American University in Washington, D.C. In an exclusive interview, Dr. Pine, who was in the capital of Tegucigalpa as an international observer last week, described conditions in the new Honduras as being “horrifying.”

“We’ve now reached a point where it’s like we’ve returned to the 1980’s, when death squads killed several hundred people and effectively ended the Leftist movement in Honduras at the time,” says Pine, who spent Monday marching with about 200,000 pro-democracy demonstrators in the capital. She believes a heavy presence of foreign observers and reporters was the only reason the police and soldiers, who shadowed the marchers at all times, did not attack as they have in the past. “What we’re seeing now is that they’re using the same repressive strategies [as in the ’80’s],” she says. “Even the same people are in charge.”