By Ian Millhiser (ThinkProgress) During a recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, conservative Justice Antonin Scalia said that U.S. Constitution is vastly inferior to that of one of our long defunct enemies:
The bill of rights of the former evil empire, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was much better than ours. I mean it literally. It was much better. We guarantee freedom of speech and of the press, big deal! The guaranteed freedom of speech, of the press of street demonstrations and anyone who is caught trying to suppress criticism of the government will be called to account.
via Scalia: The Soviet Union’s Constitution Was ‘Much Better Than Ours’ | ThinkProgress.
By Paul Krassner (Huffington Post) Jim Jones, founder of the 8,000-member People’s Temple in San Francisco, once asked Margo St. James, founder of the prostitutes’ rights group, COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics), how he could obtain political power.
She answered, sardonically, “Arrange for some of your women to have sex with the bigwigs.”
It was well known around City Hall that Moscone had a predilection for black women. Police almost arrested him once with a black prostitute in a car at a supermarket parking lot.
Soon after the Dan White trial, Lee Cole, an ex-Scientologist I had met in Chicago while researching the Charles Manson case, took me to see Lowell Streiker, author of The Cults Are Coming! and a deprogrammer who had counseled one-third of the Jonestown survivors. In the course of our conversation, I mentioned my theory that Jim Jones had served as a pimp at City Hall and maintained power by implied blackmail.
Dr. Streiker told me of his friend — a member of Jones’ planning commission — who had told him about the technique that People’s Temple had used on Mayor Moscone. They sent a young black female member to service him, as a gift, then called the next week about a serious problem — she had lied, said she was eighteen, when in fact she was underage, but don’t worry, we have it under control — just the way J. Edgar Hoover used to manipulate top politicians with his juicy FBI files.
So Jim Jones had taken Margo St. James’ sardonic advice after all, on how to achieve political power: “Arrange for some of your women to have sex with the bigwigs.” And he had taken it all the way to a mass suicide-murder — which occurred simultaneously with a mass demonstration by the women’s movement in San Francisco, called “Take Back the Night!”
Paul Krassner’s dialogue with Andrew Breitbart appears in the December issue of Playboy.
via Paul Krassner: Sex, Corruption and the Kool-Aid Massacre.
(TheFW) This Thanksgiving, millions of Americans will sit down at the table and gawk over all the goodies they are planning to cram in their gullet. The holiday might seem as familiar as singing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” during the “Seventh Inning Stretch” or packing a finger in ice that was blown off by a firework on the Fourth of July. However, like all traditions based on history and passed down through the ages, its genesis and story has been morphed and changed to fit the times.
In fact, just about every major, hallowed tradition and belief behind “Turkey Day” has either changed completely or developed new traditions and facets in the wake of modern life. Don’t worry, none of them are gross or disgusting enough to put you off roasted turkey. We’re looking forward to stuffing our face with tasty starches and protein too. To get you ready for the big day (and provide some conversation fodder to break up the awkward silences between courses) here are a few things you might not know about Thanksgiving.
by Jed Lewison (Daily Kos) Two years ago, Rick Perry was talking about Texas Independence. Now he wants a bailout.
Mr. Secession himself wants more Federal aid, and he’s got no sense of shame in demanding it:
Texas Governor Rick Perry criticized the Obama administration on Thursday for not responding to a request for a disaster aid for the parched state, where wildfires have scorched nearly 2 million acres.
“You have to ask, ‘Why are you taking care of Alabama and other states?’ I know our letter didn’t get lost in the mail,” Perry, a Republican and frequent critic of the federal government, said after addressing a Texas emergency management conference.
So hundreds die in storms throughout the South and Rick Perry’s response is to question why those states are getting federal aid instead of Texas? Funny how he doesn’t mention that Texas has already gotten at least $39 million in firefighting aid from FEMA over the past two fire seasons and has already received 22 grants in this fire season alone.
It’s a sign of the times that tea party’s favorite governor, the guy who said Texas ought to consider seceding from the United States, is now begging the Federal government for dollars.
It used to be that conservatives said Texas was the miracle that proved the conservative vision of government worked best, where low taxes actually increased revenue and led to balanced budgets, that the only problem they had with government was that there was too much of it. But then reality set in, and now Texas doesn’t have enough money to pay its bills. And its governor has gone from talking up secession to pleading for a bailout.
Well, perhaps if Republicans hadn’t been so successful in stigmatizing the notion of Federal aid to states, Rick Perry would be getting the money he says he needs.
via Daily Kos: Rick Perry to President Obama: Screw Alabama, what about Texas?.
By (ThinkProgress) In the middle of his presidency, then-president Ronald Reagan learned that a number of big corporations, including his former employer, General Electric, were completely escaping paying federal corporate income taxes. “I didn’t realize things had gotten that far out of line,” Reagan told his Treasury secretary, Donald T. Regan, according to his 1988 memoir.
So Reagan undertook a comprehensive tax reform effort that actually raised the corporate taxes and closed numerous loopholes that allowed big firms to dodge their tax responsibilities. As part of these reforms, Reagan passed the 1986 Tax Reform Act. This law “raised corporate taxes by $120 billion over five years and closed corporate tax loopholes worth about $300 billion over that same period.”
During the signing ceremony for the speech, Reagan explained that his goal in pursuing these reforms was to make sure “that everybody and every corporation pay their fair share”:
REAGAN: We’re going to make it economical to raise children again. Flatter rates will mean more reward for that extra effort, and vanishing loopholes and a minimum tax will mean that everybody and every corporation pay their fair share.
By (ThinkProgress) New data released by the IRS reveals that, over a period of 12 years, tax rates for the richest 400 Americans were effectively cut in half. In 1995, the richest 400 Americans paid, on average, 29.93% of their income in federal taxes. In 2007, the last year for which the IRS has released data, the richest 400 Americans paid just 16.63%.
As their tax rates plummeted, the total income of the richest 400 Americans skyrocketed. In 1995, the combined income of the richest 400 was just over $6 billion. By 2007, the combined income of the richest 400 was almost $23 billion.
By Kim Severson and Matthew Healy (NY Times) The United States Postal Service has issued a new stamp featuring the Statue of Liberty. Only the statue it features is not the one in the harbor, but the replica at the New York-New York casino in Las Vegas.
via This Lady Liberty Is a Las Vegas Teenager | The New York Times
By Michael Isikoff (MSNBC) Dr. Chiyome Fukino, the former director of Hawaii’s Department of Health, in a rare telephone interview with NBC said the original so-called “long form” birth certificate — described by Hawaiian officials as a “record of live birth” — absolutely exists, located in a bound volume in a file cabinet on the first floor of the state Department of Health.
Fukimo said she has personally inspected it — twice. The first time was in late October 2008, during the closing days of the presidential campaign, when the communications director for the state’s then Republican governor, Linda Lingle (who appointed Fukino) asked if she could make a public statement in response to claims then circulating on the Internet that Obama was actually born in Kenya.
Before she would do so, Fukino said, she wanted to inspect the files — and did so, taking with her the state official in charge of vital records. She found the original birth record, properly numbered, half typed and half handwritten, and signed by the doctor who delivered Obama, located in the files. She then put out a public statement asserting to the document’s validity. She later put out another public statement in July 2009 — after reviewing the original birth record a second time.
Joshua Wisch, a spokesman for the Hawaii attorney general’s office, noted that a public index of vital records, available for inspection in a bound volume at the Health Department’s Office of Health Status Monitoring, lists a male child named “Obama II, Barack Hussein” as having been born in the state.
But Wisch, the spokesman for the attorney general’s office, said state law does not in fact permit the release of “vital records,” including an original “record of live birth” — even to the individual whose birth it records.
via Ex-Hawaii official denounces ‘ludicrous’ birther claims – Politics – More politics – msnbc.com.
