Schwarzenneger remains on board of racist organization while others resign in protest

U.S. English  ostensibly wants English to be the official language of the U.S. However they appear to have other agendas. Co-founder John Tanton has started 13 anti-immigrant groups, including three which are labeled hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Raul Yzaguirre, president of the National Council of La Raza, minces no words: “U.S. English is to Hispanics as the Ku Klux Klan is to blacks.” However harsh that analysis may seem, it is the consensus among Latino leaders, from rightist Cubans to liberal Chicanos to radical Puerto Ricans. English Only has united them like nothing else in recent memory.

Arnold Schwarzenegger has remained on the board of U.S. English since 1987 while others quit in disgust at their racist agenda.
 
In 1988 Tanton circulated this stomach-turning memo

“In this society, will the present majority peaceably hand over its political power to a group that is simply more fertile,” Tanton wrote in his 1988 memo. “Can homo contraceptives compete with horno progenitivo if our borders aren’t controlled. . . .Perhaps this is the first instance in which those with their pants up are going to get caught by those with their pants down. As whites see their power and control over their lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night? Or will there be an explosion.”

Comments Atrios

That was enough to get Walter Cronkite and Linda Chavez to resign. Not Arnold.

About three months ago U.S. English hired James Lubinskas, an assistant editor of American Renaissance, white supremacist magazine. This apparently caused David Horowitz to leave the board, (despite that fact that Lubinskas seems to have been frequently published in Front Page Magazine).

But, not Arnold.

Let’s repeat that, the hard right extremely conservative (ex-60’s radical) David Horowitz, publisher of Front Page Magazine, resigned in protest.

But Arnold didn’t. He’s still on the board.

More information:

In depth SPLC report on John Tanton

“The Puppeteer. The organized anti-immigration ‘movement,’ increasingly in bed with racist hate groups, is dominated by one man” - John Tanton.

Nathan Newman weblog.
Took the Atrios post and dug up lots more info. He concludes with -

Arnold Schwarzenegger sits on the board of directors of a group at the nexus of racist white supremacists, part of a funded network of groups with clear racist hate of latinos. Arnie defends Prop 187. I would normally discount his Nazi father, since no one can choose their parents, but Arnold could choose his associates and he chose John Tanton and his racist white supremacist network.

Washington Post article.

Democracy Now interview with researchers.

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Janis Ian gets married!

From singer Janis Ian’s website comes this delightful wedding announcement.

Janis Ian and Patricia Snyder were married at 2 pm on August 27, 2003, in the wedding chamber of Toronto City Hall.

The couple plan to honeymoon at Torcon III, the annual Worldcon science fiction convention, and celebrate their marriage with a round of free dinners courtesy of various publishers and friends.

Both brides wore clothes.

Said Ms. Snyder: “After 14 years, it’s about time. I think the idea of spending my wedding week with a group of geeks masquerading as giant lobsters and Star Trek characters is perfectly in character with my life with Janis.”

Said Ms. Ian: “Whatever you say, dear.”

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The Weather Underground movie

The long-awaited documentary about the Weather Underground opened Friday night in L.A.

Who were they? From the website of the film  -

In October 1969 hundreds of young people, clad in football helmets and wielding lead pipes, marched through an upscale Chicago shopping district, pummeling parked cars and smashing shop windows in their path.

This was the first demonstration of the Weather Underground’s “Days of Rage.” Outraged by the Vietnam War and racism in America, the organization waged a low-level war against the U.S. government through much of the 1970s, bombing the Capitol building, breaking Timothy Leary out of prison, and evading one of the largest FBI manhunts in history.

Many of them spent years underground, and bombed a not inconsiderable number of carefully chosen government targets. No one was ever injured or killed in their bombings. (Except for three of them who blew themselves up in a Greenwich Village townhouse while constructing a bomb).

The film features interviews with former members Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, Mark Rudd, David Gilbert Brian Flanagan, and others. Most of them were never prosecuted. Why? Because the FBI broke so many laws trying to find them that their evidence was inadmissible in court, that’s why…

The movie lets them talk, and wisely chooses not to impose a judgment. They get the context of the times quite right, and put the politics in the foreground, which is where it should be in discussing the Weather Underground. They come across as real people driven half-mad by the Vietnam War who had to invent what they were doing as they were doing it, with no clues or cues from anyplace else. A white revolutionary group in America is what they were.

Today, Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers are married. He is a respected educator and author, and recently wrote Fugitive Days about their life underground. Dohrn is a professor of law. They raised Kathy Boudin’s just born son Chesa as their own when Boudin, another Weather Underground member, went to prison. He is now 22, a Rhodes scholar and a prison activist. She was just granted parole after 22 years, so Chesa will soon finally get to see his mom outside of prison.

None of them are particularly penitent about what they did. Did they make tactical and ethical blunders along the way? Sure. Would they do it again? It appears most would.

The Weather Underground believed that to do nothing while our government slaughtered and bombed in Vietnam would have been utter immorality. Which makes this a tale worth telling in these times of insane wars and invasions.

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Expect massive retaliation

Iraq holy city blast kills scores

Iraq’s top Shia Muslim politician is among about 80 people killed by a car bomb at a shrine in Najaf

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Your Health Tip for the Day

Via the always excellent I Make Content

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Supersize that fatwa please!

From Muslim Wake Up

What do the Saudi monarchy and their Wahhabi cohorts have in common with McDonald’s (besides the sad fact that women and men have to order from separate sections at Saudi Mickey D’s–the women’s line is always shorter)? See Adam Misbah’ul Haqq’s “Fast-Food-Islam: How Wahhabism Feeds Our Intellectual Retardation”

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Grand Theft America

How Katherine Harris stole Florida election, and the Presidency for Bush. All in a powerful two minute Flash animation. Check it out, and circulate widely.

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Guess who’s pushing for touchscreen voting machines?

“Northrop-Grumman, Lockheed-Martin, EDS and Accenture”, that’s who. You may know Accenture by their previous name, Andersen Consulting. Yes, that Andersen. This is not making me feel warm and fuzzy.

They just had a meeting, one member said

We were too subtle by half. Our #4 goal, “develop liaisons with key constituencies” is a nice word for lobbying. We just didn’t want a document floating around saying the election industry is in trouble, so they decided to put together a lobbying campaign“

Oh heck, let’s not actually FIX any of the problems, just grease a few palms in D.C. instead.

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Cruz goes populist!

Bustamante blasts oil companies

He is now supporting a “state constitutional amendment to regulate the price of gasoline”

Which, since regular gas is now $2.12 a gallon in L.A., ain’t a bad idea at all, as the right for the public to have fairly priced commodities supercedes the right for corporations to make money.

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Workers comp in California

Total premiums paid statewide have risen from around $9 billion in 1995 to about $29 billion this year, even though the system is treating fewer workers then it was eight years ago.

Rates spiked 8 percent in July and could rise another 20 percent by the end of the year

A friend last night was foaming-at-the-mouth angry about workers comp prices here in California. It got so expensive he shut his contracting business down, “and now 90 people don’t have a job”. This is a not uncommon story.

Workers comp is paid by employers. It costs more in California than anywhere else. For clerical workers, employers pay 1.5% of their gross pay, for teachers, about 8% - which is already getting hefty. For a job where serious injury might reasonably occur, like roofers, the rates are much higher.

Who’s to blame? Take a card, any card. Greedy insurance companies and lawyers? Chiseling malingering workers? A comatose state regulatory agency with way too many rules and not enough brains? Employers trying to blame their problems on something else?

But it’s more than just a few broken parts, the problems are structural, the whole system is dysfunctional and no one know how to fix it.

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Dean Takes Lead in Iowa Poll

Coming fresh on the “stunning” lead revealed in the latest Zogby poll of New Hampshire voters, Des Moines television station KCCI today released a new poll showing Howard Dean leading in Iowa. The numbers, with June’s results in parenthesis:

Dean 25 (11)
Gephardt 21 (27)
Kerry 16 (14)
Lieberman 12 (10)
Edwards 6 (4)

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The Right is getting scared of Dean

Larry Kudlow, from the National Review Online, has posted an all out attack on Howard Dean, advising the Bush Administration to “take out the long knives” and kill his candidacy.

Indeed, they have good reason to be scared of Dean…

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A nice Orwellian twist

Why has the “evidence” Bush used as justification to invade Iraq proven to be false? Was it because our leaders were lying through their teeth and knew it? Was it because they falsified data and launched a propaganda campaign to convince us war was the only option?

No no no. Silly you. It was because Saddam made it all up and had sneaky bogus defectors tell it to us, poor unknowing dupes that we are, and thus we were forced, forced I tell you, into invading them. Yes, those fiendish Iraqis tricked up into going to war against them!

I am not making this up. This “explanation” is front page in the LA Times this morning. Yet a careful reading shows NO facts to back up this conjecture. None, zero, zip. Lots of innuendo, lots of “we suspect”, but, as usual, no actual facts. This is a common Bush tactic. Make outrageous statements, pretend they are facts, then fight tooth and nail when called on them.

In other words, their lying and propaganda machine continues. But it does seem they’re getting a bit desperate, eh? The lies are getting threadbare and transparent, with people more and more understanding the Emperor has no clothes.

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Is North Korea next?

From MSNBC

President Bush argued Tuesday for sustained involvement in Iraq in the face of mounting casualty tolls and calls to pull out, promising veterans that he would remain “on the offensive against terrorism” even if it meant expanding operations to other countries.

Hello North Korea! A cynic might opine Bush will invade just before the 2004 election for maximum effect on voters.

However the US already has so many troops occupying countries across the globe that there are none to spare to invade yet another country. This could be a blessing!

An ANSWER volunteer was in North Korea in July with Ramsey Clark, and she took pictures and wrote about it on the ANSWER L.A. website. Yes there’s terrible poverty there, some no doubt due to the embargo and U.S. pressure. Yet by viewing her photos, it’s clear they aren’t all exactly living in mud huts, are they?

The first photo is a celebration in Kim Il Sung Square, the second is Pyongyang out her hotel window. 

South Korean friends tell me that North Koreans are more unified that our media might have you believe. I suspect we will all be learning more about North Korea rather quickly as the Bushies appear to have it in their gun sights. Yet one more reason Bush must not be re-selected in 2004.

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Bremer: Billions needed for Iraq

Iraq will need “several tens of billions” of dollars from abroad in the next year to rebuild its rickety infrastructure and revive its moribund economy, and American taxpayers and foreign governments will be asked to contribute substantial sums, U.S. occupation coordinator L. Paul Bremer said yesterday.

“Occupation coordinator”? Golly, what a perky NewSpeak title for someone who is, for all practical purposes, a hand picked dictator running the civilian end of things for the occupying army. And let’s not forget the reason Iraq needs rebuilding is precisely because of the damage that occupying army did in two invasions plus the havoc caused by years of sanctions.

So now they want everyone else, US taxpayers and other govenments included, to help clean up their mess. Note the unctuous doublespeak language, asking for “contributions”, like they’re raising money for a worthwhile charity or something like that…

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World Beyond Borders

World Beyond Borders just launched their website. They hope for a world without artificial borders, and invite all to join in.

With your help, we hope to grow as an organization and spread a vision for the future that isn’t restricted by the arbitrary political boundaries of nations and the brutal conflicts created by sustaining them. Now more than ever, we are coming to realize that a world beyond borders is the only solution for building a sustainable human civilization in which a global constitution and bill of rights provide liberty and justice for all.

There’s some seriously good writing on the site - thoughts about global government, ideas on different models of governments, and more. Yes it’s Utopian, but there’s practical stuff too! “Head in the clouds and feet on the ground”, a good mix indeed. Plus it’s a fun site.

And check out their contest to design a Earth Flag and Anthem for when the first spacecraft from Earth lands on Mars in 2019! (Click Interactive Activities on the Home Page)

This was co-founded by Eli-Williamson-Jones and Jane Shevtsov. I know Jane a bit, she’s a creative, brilliant thinker, and I predict much good stuff from World Beyond Borders!

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How gas prices got so high

There are lots of reasons for rising prices, says MSN

Crude oil prices have stayed higher than expected, in part because it’s taken longer to get Iraq back on line. In addition, about 300,000 to 400,000 barrels daily of Nigerian oil production are curtailed because of local political turmoil. At the same time, Venezuelan oil production has not returned to pre-strike levels. And on top of everything else, OPEC has cut back on quotas  <and yadda blah blah blah>

Yet oil prices always seem to spike higher and faster than other commodities - and take considerably longer to fall back. Other commodities have supply problems, yet their prices don’t soar like oil. Could it be an opportunistic oligolopy is taking advantage of minor supply problems to make windfall profits knowing their “campaign contributions” and lobbyists have everything covered in DC should the populace get restless?

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I yi yi

Hillary Clinton to discuss White House bid.

Richard Reeves says that Sen. Hillary Clinton and her advisers, “including her husband the ex-president, her money men and pollsters, will meet shortly after Labor Day — Sept. 6, I hear — to discuss whether she should” run for president in 2004.

Bill Clinton was one of the worst things to ever happen to the Democratic Party. While he was President, the Democratic Party hemmoraged seats everywhere, lost governorships, lost control of the Senate and House, all in the name of the brain-dead idea that to win, Democrats must be mini-Me Republicans so they can “take the center”.

Hillary is part and parcel of that same mind set.

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The O’Reilly monster…

Fair and Balanced, the play. “Fair and Balanced” is a new one-act play by Brian Fleming:

Fair & Balanced is a scathing satirical attack on Fox News Channel and its claim of ownership to the words “fair and balanced.” Playwright Brian Flemming, who co-wrote the Off-Broadway smash hit Bat Boy: The Musical, penned this dark one-act comedy in which “Fair” and “Balanced” are characters—they are prisoners held in an underground dungeon, and every night at 8 p.m. a foul character named “Bill O’Reilly” comes down into the dungeon to torture them. Link

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Propaganda, American-style

From Brian Eno (Yes, that Brian Eno) writing for The Guardian

The problem is not propaganda but the relentless control of the kind of things we think about

When I first visited Russia, in 1986, I made friends with a musician whose father had been Brezhnev’s personal doctor. One day we were talking about life during ‘the period of stagnation’ - the Brezhnev era. ‘It must have been strange being so completely immersed in propaganda,’ I said.

‘Ah, but there is the difference. We knew it was propaganda,’ replied Sacha. 

That is the difference. Russian propaganda was so obvious that most Russians were able to ignore it. They took it for granted that the government operated in its own interests and any message coming from it was probably slanted - and they discounted it. 

In the West the calculated manipulation of public opinion to serve political and ideological interests is much more covert and therefore much more effective. Its greatest triumph is that we generally don’t notice it.

It takes something as dramatic as the invasion of Iraq to make us look a bit more closely and ask: ‘How did we get here?’ How exactly did it come about that, in a world of Aids, global warming, 30-plus active wars, several famines, cloning, genetic engineering, and two billion people in poverty, practically the only thing we all talked about for a year was Iraq and Saddam Hussein?

In the wake of the events of 11 September 2001, it now seems clear that the shock of the attacks was exploited in America. According to Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber in their new book  Weapons of Mass Deception, it was used to engineer a state of emergency that would justify an invasion of Iraq. Rampton and Stauber expose how news was fabricated and made to seem real.

But they also demonstrate how a coalition of the willing - far-Right officials, neo-con think-tanks, insanely pugilistic media commentators and of course well-paid PR companies - worked together to pull off a sensational piece of intellectual dishonesty. Theirs is a study of modern propaganda. 

The new American approach to social control is so much more sophisticated and pervasive that it really deserves a new name. It isn’t just propaganda any more, it’s ‘prop-agenda’. It’s not so much the control of what we think, but the control of what we think about.

Read the entire article. It’s brilliant. The “debate” before the current Iraq invasion was filled with distortions, lies, evasions, and smears, all deliberately calculated to make people believe there was an imminent threat from Saddam. Yes, it really was a conspiracy. And now it’s clear that they were lying through their teeth and they knew it.

Our media framed the invasion as inevitable, regretfully neccessary, and a boost for Democracy. Little serious dissent was allowed. Fox News, if they can be called “News” any more, is of course, the most craven and sleaziest of the bunch. But CNN and MSNBC weren’t far behind. To watch any of their pre-Invasion news or talk shows, one would have to conclude that the only question was When the war would start, not If, and certainly not Why, as in questioning the motives of the war. That’s what Eno means by they wish to control what we think about.
 
Saddam was not a threat, there were no WMDs, their rationale for the invasion had no basis in reality and was simply propaganda designed to make us fear an outside threat so they could have their war, and then their hoped-for empire.

However in what could be a fatal blunder, they overestimated their own strength and underestimated Iraqi resistance and the ability of the US antiwar movement to force their lies onto the front pages.

For US style propaganda to be effective, people must not know it is propaganda, and it also must appear to be truthful. Bush’s plummeting and precipitous drop in the polls recently demonstrates that less and less people believe him or the propaganda emanating his administration.

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Howard Dean: Something’s happening here

The Dean campaign is turning into a juggernaut. Big crowds everywhere, a huge grassroots buzz, major money flowing in. This is beyond unusual this early in a Presidential campaign, especially by someone who a few months ago was a virtual unknown.

No, I don’t agree with everything he says, most especially not on Israel and the Middle East. But I’m rather sure a President Dean wouldn’t be assaulting the Constitution or starting lunatic wars, and would be orders of magnitude less extreme than Bush, and right now, that’s good enough for me. Plus, it’s increasingly apparent that he can win.

From the NY Times

The staggering, seemingly spontaneous crowds turning up to meet him — about 10,000 in Seattle on Sunday and a similar number in Bryant Park in Manhattan last night — are unheard of in the days of the race when most candidates concentrate on the early-voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire and would seem formidable even in October 2004.

Yesterday morning, the campaign took another audacious step, saying that it would broadcast television advertisements in six new states beginning on Friday, and that it expected to raise $10.3 million in the three months ending Sept. 30 — more than any other Democrat in a similar period save for President Bill Clinton in 1995.

“We have to be in the president’s face to win,” Dr. Dean, 54, said.

Dean just completed his four day Sleepless Summer Tour to overflowing enthusiastic crowds and raised, via the Net, a whopping one million dollars in those four days.

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Don’t go near the water

A freak tragedy awakens Bangkok to the menace of filthy canals

On a humid monsoon night, shortly after midnight, Thailand’s favorite pop star swerved off the road and plunged his black BMW into one of Bangkok’s canals. He was pulled from the water with minor injuries, yet he is dying of a fungal brain infection.

The reason, doctors say, is that Bangkok’s canal water is so dirty that when it seeped into his head wounds, it poisoned him and left him in a coma. The doctors say his chances of survival are slim.

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Man sees again after 40 years

Mike May was blind from age 3 to 43. Three years ago, a pioneering operation gave him limited vision. You can read about his post-operation experiences in his journal - like when he saw his wife’s smile for the first time after they took the bandages off.

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The will to ignorance

From Left Business Observer (LBO), a leftie newsletter, comes a fascinating interview with Slovenian cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek.

The common leftie viewpoint is - we just need to tell people the facts. Because once people learn the truth they will come around to our views. Zizek says no - people, for the most part, actively do NOT want to know what’s going on.

There’s a active refusal to know. If you ask an average citizen  with enough of their own worries they’d say, “Don’t even tell me this. We pay taxes so the government can do all the dirty things that I don’t want to know about”
 
The key factor is not that people are being duped - there’s an active will not to know.

I’m not saying this is an eternal fact. I’m just describing how specifically today’s ideology works, through a direct appeal to the will of ignorance.

So what do we do?

The ruling system of ideology created such high democratic expectations that it can not live up to them. Gradually it will have to violate them.

My worry is not the worry of many leftist friends, like, “Why are you dreaming about revolutions - the system will just go on.” No - I am almost tempted to say unfortunately, because unstable pre-revolutionary situations are not a holiday of history. They can be very unpleasant. But they will compel us to invent new political forms. In a couple of years we will literally be forced to reinvent new ways.

LBO concludes with

A will to ignorance suggests a troubled conscience: if our government kills and improverishes people to maintain a global hierarchy, Americans don’t want to hear about it because it hurts.

It’s not just a matter of getting the facts out there. The will to ignorance is too tenacious for that, and there’s no master key in existence that will unlock it. But the first step in devising such a key is to admit one is needed. Facts alone won’t do the trick.

LBO, which deals primarily with financial matters from a leftist perspective, is published by Doug Henwood, author of several books and host of a radio show on Pacifica outlet WBAI in NYC. You can listen to the interview online. If you want to read the interview, then you gotta subscribe! $22 a year and well worth it.

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Psst, wanna get a deal on software?

Educational versions of software sell at greatly reduced prices. They are exactly the same as the commercial versions! You’re supposed to be a student to qualify for buying them, however gray market educational versions of software are freely available at many computer shows, no questions asked.

The savings can be major. For example, at a recent L.A. computer show the educational version of a popular high end program went for $250. The full commercial version goes for $900 and the upgrade is $450.

Educational software is available in full version only, with no upgrade version. This is because the price is already is so low it’s pointless to also have an upgrade version.

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