Glenn Beck is Planning a $2 Billion Libertarian Commune in Texas

Earlier this week, Glenn Beck announced that he was reinventing The Blaze, his online media property, as a global libertarian news network, complete with three foreign bureaus, a nightly news magazine, and, no doubt, lots of Beck himself.

Last night, he announced the next stage of his full-bodied embrace of libertarianism, which seems to be a massive commune inspired by "Galt's Gulch," Ayn Rand's utopian community in Atlas Shrugged.

You can watch Beck's 20-minute rant about the community, which he's dubbed Independence, USA, or you can turn to Right Wing Watch, which reports:

On his program last night, Beck revealed that his intention to "go Galt" is quite literal, unveiling grandiose plans to create an entirely self-sustaining community called Independence Park that will provide its own food and energy, produce television and film content, host research and development, serve as a marketplace for products and ideas, while also housing a theme park and serving as a residential community.

At the center -- in the middle of the lake that is itself larger than all of Disney Land - Beck (with the help of David Barton) will create a massive "national archive"/learning center where people can send their children to be "deprogrammed" and elected officials can come to learn "the truth."

The Blaze painted a more sympathetic portrait:

Galt railed against the collectivist system and believed that only through freedom could people tap into their divine potential to become creators of their own: leaders, businessmen, artists, and so on. The community that was created in this spirit was called "Galt's Gulch," and it is that very ideal Beck strives to emulate in his own enterprises. In fact, that's why he moved to Texas.

Drawing on this free market, limited-government model, Beck said he aspires to build an actual community based on just that. While the price tag of building an actual city-slash-theme park is steep at an estimated $2 billion, Beck said he feels compelled to move forward with his ultimate plan "once piece at a time." Having toured "three possible sites in three different states" and having spoken to two governors already, Beck is serious in his goals.

Beck doesn't specify where in Texas this community will be, whether it will be based near his Westlake home, or his Las Colinas studio, or on some of that farmland he bought. He also doesn't say if or how the community would deal with state and federal law. We're sure Beck will come up with those answers. Anyways, it's best not to think too hard about it.

http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfairpark/2013/01/glenn_beck_is_planning_a_2_bil.php

Conservative Think Tank Ranks Countries with Government-Run Health Care as The Freest In World

Former Senator Jim DeMint, the new president of the conservative Heritage Foundation, has decried Obamacare as “a cancer” that is “is fundamentally inconsistent with liberty.” During the Senate Obamacare fight, DeMint famously declared “If we’re able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him.”

But a new report from DeMint’s own organization suggests that, far from being incompatible with freedom, countries with health care systems with as much or significantly more government control over healthcare are the freest countries in the world.

The report in question is Heritage’s Economic Freedom Index, released annually since 1997. The report defines the concept of “economic freedom” in misleading right-wing terms, but even by those standards, it appears that universal health care systems far more expansive than Obamacare aren’t “fundamentally inconsistent with liberty.” In fact, the ten “freest” economies in 2013 by Heritage’s lights range from mandating individuals save a certain amount of money for health care to almost the entire health care system, including hospitals, being owned and operated by the government:

1. Hong Kong: The semi-autonomous city inside China has a universal, publicly run health care system: about 80 percent of Hong Kong hospitals are government owned and operated. While private supplemental insurance is available, it’s more expensive than public services.

2. Singapore: Singapore is often cited as a free-market health care system that works. But one of the centerpieces of the Singaporean model, as conservative David Frum notes, is a government mandate requiring citizens to place a certain percentage of their income in “medical savings accounts” to ensure they can pay for routine health care costs out of pocket (when their income is inadequate to pay, the government pays direct subsidies a la Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion). Hardly seems consistent with DeMint’s point that health care mandates are “slippery slopes” towards the death of freedom.

3. Australia: Australia has a single-payer system in which, like Canada, doctors are privately employed but all Australians are eligible for insurance coverage through a government-run provider called Medicare.

4. New Zealand: The Kiwi government has made most services free or nearly free to all residents; the government covers roughly 80 percent of national health care expenditures and directly owns and operates about half of all health care services in the country.

5. Switzerland: This Swiss system is closer to the American health plan post-Obamacare than most other national systems; Switzerland has both privately owned health care and privately-provided insurance together with an individual mandate to purchase health insurance. Interestingly, Swiss insurers are legally prohibited from profiting on the basic, mandatory insurance package.

6. Canada: Our northern neighbor is, of course, the most famous example of a single payer system in the United States.

7. Chile: Like Singapore, Chile mandates that individuals pay into health savings accounts to cover health care costs and supplements the accounts of poor Chileans. It also has both publicly and privately run health care services.

8. Mauritius: A tiny island nation in the Indian ocean, Mauritius has government-run health services that cover roughly 70 percent of the country’s health expenditures, with private supplemental practices making up the remainder. All government health services are provided free of charge to Mauritian citizens, which has helped the country improve quality of life for its citizens markedly in the past two decades.

9. Denmark: As in Mauritius or the United Kingdom, the Danish government owns and operates the vast majority of the health care system.

Number 10 on the list is, of course, the United States, which will finally join the rest of the top ten “most economically free nations” in providing universal or near-universal health care when Obamacare is fully implemented.

http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/01/11/1429241/conservative-think-tank-ranks-government-run-health-care-as-compatible-with-freedom/

Scientists Hate the GOP for a Reason

One of the great political shifts in the past decade has been the move of scientists toward the Democratic Party, a casualty of the Republican Party’s war on reality. It’s not about politics for scientists, it’s about the fact that only one party accepts scientific findings on everything from global warming to evolutionary theory to what does and doesn’t prevent pregnancy. Only 6 percent of scientists identify as Republican, whereas 55 percent identify as Democratic. In October of 2012, 68 Nobel-winning scientists co-signed a strong endorsement of Obama, saying the President “has delivered on his promise to renew our faith in science-based decision making.” Which is why it was so strange to read Daniel Sarewitz, co-director of the Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes at Arizona State University, argue in Nature that it’s wrong for scientists to throw their weight behind electing Democrats.

Sarewitz’s opening sentence lays out his argument neatly:

To prevent science from continuing its worrying slide towards politicization, here’s a New Year’s resolution for scientists, especially in the United States: gain the confidence of people and politicians across the political spectrum by demonstrating that science is bipartisan.

He argues that the perceived liberal bent of the social scientists has caused Republicans to be wary of that field and to defund it, and warns that if scientists in other fields—he names public health and environmental science—don’t stop supporting Democrats so openly, Republicans will come after them, too. But the cause-and-effect relationship is reversed. Republicans started it when, as early as the environmentalist movements of the ’70s, they began to morph into the party that defended corporate profits over public health and environmental good. Why would scientists support a party that ignores and refuses to fund important scientific initiatives like efforts to fight climate change, stem cell research, and advances in improving sexual health, like development of the cervical cancer vaccine?  Sarewitz blames scientists for the politicization of science, when any fool can see that Republicans attacked first and scientists are just defending themselves.

Both journalist Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science, and historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, who together wrote Merchants of Doubt, have done extensive research that shows the faults in Sarewitz’s argument. In Merchants of Doubt, Oreskes and Conway laid out how the fields of environmental science and public health, not the social sciences, turned Republicans into anti-science warriors. They explain that it was during the debates over tobacco’s carcinogenic properties that conservatives began their assault on science, claiming a controversy where there was none in hopes of delaying government interventions that would depress the tobacco industry’s profits. After that, the strategy was set. If scientists made proclamations that could undermine industry, conservative politicians claimed the research was more controversial than it was, offered up well-paid but unethical experts who claimed to have doubts, and introduced shoddy research with divergent findings. The strategy has been employed to resist and delay government regulation to combat acid rain, global warming, and the hole in the ozone.

At some point, the conservative movement began to realize that since these fights were going to come up over and over, it wasn’t enough to simply cast doubts on individual scientific claims. They had to sow suspicion of the field of science itself. Oreskes and Conway highlight how this was used recently in attacks on the long-dead Rachel Carson, the environmental author of The Silent Spring, a book that led to the ban of DDT in 1972. Even though there’s no real movement to bring back the use of DDT, conservative pundits and publications routinely drag Carson’s corpse out to punch it some more to spread the myth that scientists are dangerous anti-business ideologues who make up phony research for no other reason than their secret socialist agenda to bring down capitalism. Typical of the anti-Carson genre is Hoover Institute scholar and Forbes contributor Henry I. Miller calling her work “sentimental claptrap” and accusing her of lying. Writing for Reason, libertarian Ronald Bailey accused Carson of having an anti-human agenda, claiming that environmentalism isn’t about protecting our habitat so much as pushing the belief that “humanity is arrogant, heedless, and often the source of moral evil.” The reality is that Carson was a nature-lover and a researcher who believed, correctly, that throwing off the natural balance can have long-ranging negative effects, and thus should be guarded against.

What Sarewitz fails to understand is that scientists, as a community, admirably held off becoming overtly political until this shift occurred. Before recent election cycles, only researchers whose actual work was under attack who defended themselves. But now Republicans are a threat to science itself. In other words, scientists are simply acting like any other constituency, and throwing their support behind the party that fights for their interests and against the party that openly fights against them. This isn’t a threat to democracy, but a clear-cut example of how democracy works.

Sarewitz has the entire political process backwards. He seems to consider Republicans and Democrats to be more like sports teams than entities that organize around genuine political differences in America. Subsequently, he thinks that all you need to do to get them to support your interests is to refuse to take sides:

In the current period of dire fiscal stress, one way to undermine this stable funding and bipartisan support would be to convince Republicans, who control the House of Representatives, that science is a Democratic special interest.

Let’s be clear. Republicans don’t attack scientists because they want to punish them for supporting Democrats. If all scientists agreed tomorrow to stop donating to parties, expressing political opinions in public, or even voting, Republicans would not gratefully start agreeing with scientific consensus around global warming or embrace public health recommendations to reduce unplanned pregnancy and STDs. They wouldn’t even come around on the now 154-year-old theory of evolution. They oppose these ideas because they come in conflict with Republican ideological concerns. In a larger sense, conservatives aren’t going to abandon their discomfort with empiricism, because it’s so destabilizing to their political authority.

Since scientists have no ability to stop Republicans from attacking science, their only real option is to take power away from Republicans by supporting Democrats. Scientists, like most people trying to do good work in this world, would far prefer to have the support of all policy-makers. Since that’s not an option, it does no good to scold them for looking out for their own interests.

http://www.salon.com/2013/01/11/scientists_hate_the_gop_for_a_reason/

Jeff Parker Copyright, 2013 Cagle Cartoons

Are We on the Verge of an American Hemp Renaissance?

Advocates for hemp legalization and politicians are building pressure, with the biggest push in Kentucky.

Kentucky was America’s leading hemp producer in the early 19th century.  Now, two hundreds year later, after a  historic election for drug policy has led to a shift for marijuana policy reform in America, Kentucky lawmakers are taking steps to revive the crop.  While advocates for hemp legalization say the plant could bring a wealth of green jobs to Kentucky, deep-rooted drug stigma and conflict with federal law have made the legislation’s passing unlikely. Nonetheless, two state bills are in the works, while a federal proposal aims to clear the way for state legalization.  Lawmakers suggest the bills could at least open up the conversation about hemp, and clear misconceptions about its use.

Because hemp is increasingly imported from Canada, growing and making  it in the US could save the US money and create green jobs at home. Aside from soy, no other plant has shown the potential to create so many different products -- from hemp soap to paper and oil. Moreover, hemp rarely requires pesticides, can be grown in the same fields over several consecutive years, and produces biodegradable plastics and biofuels. Lightweight and dense, hemp-limeis a building material that known to be an efficient insulator leaving behind a minimal carbon footprint.  

Kicking off the call for hemp production in Kentucky is KY Representative Terry Mills (D), who has pre-filed an industrial hemp bill that would allow hemp to be made from marijuana crops  containing .3% THC, which, at at least one and a half times less than typical marijuana THC levels, would not get you high. T he marijuana that is psychoactive, moreover, comes from the flowering buds, leaves, and resin of the plant, while the stalks and seeds are what make  hemp.  of the cannabis plant include the flowering tops (buds), the leaves, and the resin of the cannabis plant. The remainder of the plant — stalks and sterilized seeds — is what some people refer to as “hemp.”

A federal hemp bill is indeed in the works, but  the chances of it passing in the near future are slim to none.  Called the Hemp Farming Act of 2012 U.S, Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR), Rand Paul (R-KY), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) introduced the bil this summer. Iit would amend the Controlled Substances Act so that low-THC hemp is allowed, and exempt industrial hemp from marijuana legislation.  "I'm not opposed to it," said state Rep.  Jim DeCesare (R),  "It is a good alternative crop for the ag community." Stil, DeCesare acknowledges the prevalent misunderstanding that the pot people smoke is just the same as hemp.

"They are not the same," he said.  "It is going to take an education effort" for the bill to pass the state House. If they can make it happen, which is unlikely, the benefits would be immense. As Rand Paul recently wrote, "[Hemp] jobs will be ripe for the taking, and I want farmers in Kentucky to be the first in line.”

http://www.alternet.org/drugs/american-hemp-renaissance-about-begin

NASA - At Least One in Six Stars Has an Earth-sized Planet

The quest to determine if planets like Earth are rare or common is taking another stride forward on the journey. Using NASA's Kepler spacecraft, managed by NASA Ames Research Center, astronomers are beginning to find Earth-sized planets orbiting distant stars. A new analysis of Kepler data shows that about 17 percent of stars have an Earth-sized planet in an orbit closer than Mercury. Since the Milky Way has about 100 billion stars, there are at least 17 billion Earth-sized worlds out there.

Francois Fressin, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), presented the analysis today in a press conference at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Long Beach, Calif. A paper detailing the research has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.

The research team found that 50 percent of all stars have a planet of Earth-size or larger in a close orbit. By adding larger planets detected in wider orbits up to the orbital distance of the Earth, this number increases to 70 percent.

Extrapolating from Kepler's currently ongoing observations and results from other detection techniques, scientists have determined that nearly all sun-like stars have planets.

Planets closer to their stars are easier to find because they transit more frequently. As more data are gathered, planets in larger orbits will be detected. In particular, Kepler's extended mission will enable the detection of Earth-sized planets at greater distances, including Earth-like orbits in the "habitable zone," the region in a planetary system where liquid water might exist on the surface of an orbiting planet.

Kepler is the first NASA mission capable of finding Earth-size planets orbiting in or near the habitable zone of the host star. NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., is the home organization of the science principal investigator, and is responsible for the ground system development, mission operations, and science data analysis.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., managed Kepler mission development. Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colo., developed the Kepler flight system and supports mission operations with JPL at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore archives, hosts and distributes the Kepler science data. Kepler is NASA's 10th Discovery Mission and is funded by NASA's Science Mission Directorate at the agency's headquarters.

To read more about the discovery, see the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics press release.

Read more about the Kepler Mission.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/news/17-percent-of-stars-have-earth-size-planets.html

Adam Zyglis, Copyright 2013 Cagle Cartoons

9 Stories that Will Change Your World in 2013

While the Earth didn’t end on December 21, 2012, the year’s end was marked by a new awareness of the urgency of the climate crisis. Americans are becoming increasingly aware of the preciousness and fragility of life on Earth. That and other cultural shifts are setting the stage for significant change in the year ahead.

Nine key trends tell the story:

1. Climate Crisis: Alarm Translates Into Action

The climate crisis is the top story of 2012, with record-breaking heat, severe drought that led to the declaration of more than half of U.S. counties as disaster zones, wildfires that burned more than 9 million acres, and superstorm Sandy, with costs reaching into the billions. Four out of five Americans now believe that the climate problem is serious, according to an AP-Gfk poll.

The Obama administration has done little to address this problem—in part because of congressional resistance—but did set higher fuel emissions standards for automobiles, an important step in curtailing greenhouse gases.

The real action, though, is at the grassroots. Bill McKibben and 350.org launched a national movement in the fall of 2012 to press colleges and universities to divest their holdings in big energy companies. Texas and Nebraska landowners, Canadian tribes, and environmentalists everywhere are taking action to block the construction of a tar sands pipeline to ocean ports. Thousands turned out at hearings in Washington state to oppose the transport of millions of tons of Powder Basin coal through the region for export to China. And resistance to natural gas fracking is spreading throughout the Northeast.

Meanwhile, coal plants across the U.S. are closing, and a West Virginia coal company is giving up mountaintop removal as a result of pressure from environmental groups and falling demand in the wake of low prices for natural gas.

With widespread alarm at the extreme weather events, conditions are now ripe for a strong popular movement to take on the fossil fuel industry and its threat to human civilization.

2. U.S. Politics Get More Colorful

2012 saw the number of babies born to families of color exceed the number for white families. But the clout of non-whites is growing for other reasons. African Americans, Asians, and Latinos, along with women of all races, overcame discriminatory voter suppression tactics to hand President Obama the majority he needed to win a second term. The growing clout of communities of color has consequences, putting immigration reform firmly on the national agenda.

Meanwhile, the Republican Party’s radical platform has alienated large majorities of women and people of color, and more than half of Americans call Republican policies “extreme.”

The failure of policies unfriendly to women, people of color, and many others in the 99 percent has the Republican Party in disarray. There is now space for a progressive and inclusive agenda to emerge aimed at raising everyone up (including white men, but not privileging them).

3. Tolerance for Gun Violence Runs Thin

The school shooting in Newtown, Conn., may be the event that finally turns public opinion firmly against tolerance of gun violence. The Sandy Hook tragedy came on top of mass shootings in an Aurora, Col., movie theater, in a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisc., in a shopping mall in Clackamas, Ore., and elsewhere, for a total of 151 killed and injured, according to Mother Jones. This continues a trend of more than 2,000 children and teens killed by guns each year, according to a 2012 study by the Children’s Defense Fund.

The good news is that a majority of Americans now supports bans on assault weapons, and, in spite of spikes in gun sales, the number of American households that own guns is actually down from the last few decades. Research shows that having a gun in the house increases the risk of homicide and suicide in that household.

4. U.S. Global Military Posture in Question

Pursuing the most globally aggressive military posture on the planet is causing a level of blowback little discussed in mainstream media. U.S. drone attacks are killing and terrorizing civilians in Pakistan and Afghanistan. It remains unclear how the United States will extract itself from Afghanistan and wrap up the longest war in U.S. history. And American men and women in the armed services are now killing themselves at a higher rate than they are dying from any other cause, including combat. The year ended with the apparent suicide of Job W. Price, a Navy Seal.

Like what you’re reading? YES! is nonprofit and relies on reader support.
Click here to chip in $5 or more to help us keep the inspiration coming.

The long-term costs to service members and their families coupled with the financial costs of carrying out wars, responding to the inevitable blowback, preparing for hypothetical wars, maintaining hundreds of foreign military bases, and paying top dollar to military contractors may be doing to the U.S. what Al Qaeda couldn’t do. Other empires fell after exhausting their people’s morale and treasure through protracted warfare. The United States is in danger of falling into a similar trap, while neglecting to invest in sources of real security, like the well-being and productive employment of citizens, and the abundance and resilience of the natural systems that supply food, water, livelihoods, and a stable climate.

In 2013, look for a reassessment of our policies of international violence. We will see efforts to rebuild our national self-worth, not based on our capacity to project death and mayhem, but on our contributions to health and well-being, climate stability, and life-enhancing technology.

5. The 99 Percent Got Inventive (and Got Some Respect)

By early 2012, as the Occupy camps were disbanded, many thought the Occupy Movement had died out. But this fall, Strike Debt arose and the Rolling Jubilee raised thousands of dollars to dissolve millions of dollars of medical debt of individuals. Both actions raised questions about why we allow the banking system to transfer so much wealth from the 99 percent to the 1 percent.

Then, when Superstorm Sandy hit, a movement that had become expert at leaderless mobilization rose up to help those harmed by the storm. Occupy volunteers hiked up stairwells to supply elderly tenants of high-rise housing projects with food and water. Distribution centers were set up throughout neighborhoods that had been flooded and lost power. Police, who had once arrested occupiers, were themselves aided by Occupy Sandy volunteers when their neighborhoods were flooded. Even the big disaster relief agencies began referring volunteers and those in need to Occupy Sandy.

The Occupy movement is inventing new forms of action and grassroots power, reinventing social movements, and building the solidarity and ethics of a new society. Watch for more powerful and creative interventions ahead in 2013.

6. Low-wage Workers Stood Up

This was a year of new labor militancy, with Walmart workers picketing for basic rights, Hot and Crusty bakery workers winning a union contract, and the original Republic Windows and Doors workers founding a worker-owned enterprise in Chicago. Still, there remains powerful pushback against labor rights. A so-called right to work bill passed in Michigan—one of many similar bills promoted by the corporate lobby group, ALEC. And the new “free trade” deal, the TransPacific Partnership, looks likely to prevail and to further benefit large transnational corporations at the expense of workers.

Look for labor organizing to continue taking creative and original forms in 2013, mobilizing unorganized workers, confronting low-wage poverty, drawing in formerly middle-class workers who are now confronting the reality of surviving in a low-wage economy, and challenging the power of the 1 percent.

7. Election 2012 Spending Spurs Backlash

What does it mean to hold an election costing nearly $6 billion? Thanks to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, 2012 was the year we learned just how many annoying advertisements billions of dollars can buy. The fundraising arms race boosted the power of those in the 1%, since their contributions became more essential than ever to both parties’ victory strategies.

Eleven states have now passed resolutions recommending a constitutional amendment to overturn the Citizens United ruling. More than 300 town councils have done likewise, and  President Obama has endorsed the movement. The election of Elizabeth Warren to the U.S. Senate showed you can take on Wall Street and win. Look for more efforts to confront the power of corporations in 2013.

8. Love Won

In an otherwise bitter political sphere, love showed up. The image of Michelle and Barack Obama embracing became the most tweeted and Facebook “liked” image of all time. Our hearts broke when we learned of the loss of the children and the brave teachers and staff who gave their own lives to protect their students in Newtown, Conn. The president encouraged a response to the Sandy Hook shootings built on the love of our children rather than on vengeance, on the complexity of the issue rather than on simplistic solutions. He led the national mourning with his tears.

An archetypically feminine approach (to respond to a crisis with “tend and befriend” responses that look out for the best interests of all) could come to balance out the “fight or flight” responses that frequently dominate political discourse. Having record numbers of women elected to Congress in 2012 can’t hurt.

9. More Love: An Outbreak of Marriage

Here’s another place love stepped in. In an election that saw the defeat of candidates promoting an anti-gay/anti-women platform, gay marriage initiatives passed in Maine, Maryland, and Washington. The Seattle City Hall opened at midnight on the first day such marriages were legal to accommodate the flood of weddings; judges and city staff volunteered their time, and well-wishers, both straight and gay, lined the entrance to throw petals and rice, and to cheer on the newlyweds. The festivities were an eruption of unexpected joy on a cold December day.

2012 was the year when the word “love” made a comeback. This valuing of each and every life could undercut partisan bickering, a culture of violence, and political attacks, and set the tone for a new radically inclusive agenda for change.

2013’s Big Story?

The year 2013 may offer our last chance to take on the climate crisis. If we fail to take action that is up to the challenge, we may be like the passengers of the Titanic, arguing over entertainment choices while the real threat looms. With climate disasters mounting, 2013 must be the year we commit ourselves to action at the scale needed to—literally—save our world.

http://www.yesmagazine.org/blogs/sarah-van-gelder/9-stories-that-will-change-your-world-in-2013

The Hitler Gun Control Lie

This week, people were shocked when the Drudge Report posted a giant picture of Hitler over a headline speculating that the White House will proceed with executive orders to limit access to firearms. The proposed orders are exceedingly tame, but Drudge’s reaction is actually a common conservative response to any invocation of gun control.

The NRA, Fox News, Fox News (again), Alex Jones, email chains, Joe “the Plumber” Wurzelbacher, Gun Owners of America, etc., all agree that gun control was critical to Hitler’s rise to power. Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership (“America’s most aggressive defender of firearms ownership”) is built almost exclusively around this notion, popularizing posters of Hitler giving the Nazi salute next to the text: “All in favor of ‘gun control’ raise your right hand.”

In his 1994 book, NRA head Wayne LaPierre dwelled on the Hitler meme at length, writing: “In Germany, Jewish extermination began with the Nazi Weapon Law of 1938, signed by Adolf Hitler.”

And it makes a certain amount of intuitive sense: If you’re going to impose a brutal authoritarian regime on your populace, better to disarm them first so they can’t fight back.

Unfortunately for LaPierre et al., the notion that Hitler confiscated everyone’s guns is mostly bogus. And the ancillary claim that Jews could have stopped the Holocaust with more guns doesn’t make any sense at all if you think about it for more than a minute.

University of Chicago law professor Bernard Harcourt explored this myth in depth in a 2004 article published in the Fordham Law Review. As it turns out, the Weimar Republic, the German government that immediately preceded Hitler’s, actually had tougher gun laws than the Nazi regime. After its defeat in World War I, and agreeing to the harsh surrender terms laid out in the Treaty of Versailles, the German legislature in 1919 passed a law that effectively banned all private firearm possession, leading the government to confiscate guns already in circulation. In 1928, the Reichstag relaxed the regulation a bit, but put in place a strict registration regime that required citizens to acquire separate permits to own guns, sell them or carry them.

The 1938 law signed by Hitler that LaPierre mentions in his book basically does the opposite of what he says it did. “The 1938 revisions completely deregulated the acquisition and transfer of rifles and shotguns, as well as ammunition,” Harcourt wrote. Meanwhile, many more categories of people, including Nazi party members, were exempted from gun ownership regulations altogether, while the legal age of purchase was lowered from 20 to 18, and permit lengths were extended from one year to three years.

The law did prohibit Jews and other persecuted classes from owning guns, but this should not be an indictment of gun control in general. Does the fact that Nazis forced Jews into horrendous ghettos indict urban planning? Should we eliminate all police officers because the Nazis used police officers to oppress and kill the Jews? What about public works — Hitler loved public works projects? Of course not. These are merely implements that can be used for good or ill, much as gun advocates like to argue about guns themselves. If guns don’t kill people, then neither does gun control cause genocide (genocidal regimes cause genocide).

Besides, Omer Bartov, a historian at Brown University who studies the Third Reich, notes that the Jews probably wouldn’t have had much success fighting back. “Just imagine the Jews of Germany exercising the right to bear arms and fighting the SA, SS and the Wehrmacht. The [Russian] Red Army lost 7 million men fighting the Wehrmacht, despite its tanks and planes and artillery. The Jews with pistols and shotguns would have done better?” he told Salon.

Proponents of the theory sometimes point to the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising as evidence that, as Fox News’ Judge Andrew Napolitano put it, “those able to hold onto their arms and their basic right to self-defense were much more successful in resisting the Nazi genocide.” But as the Tablet’s Michael Moynihan points out, Napolitano’s history (curiously based on a citation of work by French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson) is a bit off. In reality, only about 20 Germans were killed, while some 13,000 Jews were massacred. The remaining 50,000 who survived were promptly sent off to concentration camps.

Robert Spitzer, a political scientist who studies gun politics and chairs the political science department at SUNY Cortland, told Mother Jones’ Gavin Aronsen that the prohibition on Jewish gun ownership was merely a symptom, not the problem itself. “[It] wasn’t the defining moment that marked the beginning of the end for Jewish people in Germany. It was because they were persecuted, were deprived of all of their rights, and they were a minority group,” he explained.

Meanwhile, much of the Hitler myth is based on an infamous quote falsely attributed to the Fuhrer, which extols the virtue of gun control:

This year will go down in history! For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration! Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future!

The quote has been widely reproduced in blog posts and opinion columns about gun control, but it’s “probably a fraud and was likely never uttered,” according to Harcourt. “This quotation, often seen without any date or citation at all, suffers from several credibility problems, the most significant of which is that the date often given [1935] has no correlation with any legislative effort by the Nazis for gun registration, nor would there have been any need for the Nazis to pass such a law, since gun registration laws passed by the Weimar government were already in effect,” researchers at the useful website GunCite note.

“As for Stalin,” Bartov continued, “the very idea of either gun control or the freedom to bear arms would have been absurd to him. His regime used violence on a vast scale, provided arms to thugs of all descriptions, and stripped not guns but any human image from those it declared to be its enemies. And then, when it needed them, as in WWII, it took millions of men out of the Gulags, trained and armed them and sent them to fight Hitler, only to send back the few survivors into the camps if they uttered any criticism of the regime.”

Bartov added that this misreading of history is not only intellectually dishonest, but also dangerous.  “I happen to have been a combat soldier and officer in the Israeli Defense Forces and I know what these assault rifles can do,” he said in an email.

He continued: “Their assertion that they need these guns to protect themselves from the government — as supposedly the Jews would have done against the Hitler regime — means not only that they are innocent of any knowledge and understanding of the past, but also that they are consciously or not imbued with the type of fascist or Bolshevik thinking that they can turn against a democratically elected government, indeed turn their guns on it, just because they don’t like its policies, its ideology, or the color, race and origin of its leaders.”

http://www.salon.com/2013/01/11/stop_talking_about_hitler/

Alex Jones Goes Crazy on Piers Morgan Show

Dana Summers, Copyright 2013 Tribune Media Services

2,200+ Limbaugh Sponsors - Gone!

 

Sponsor contact is working!

The StopRush Project has announced that over 2,200 sponsors have pulled ads from Limbaugh's show, via documented messages/statements. Many other sponsors have left his show quietly, bringing the actual amount of sponsors who have left, to a higher, unknown total.

Daily Kos diaries, this Petition, FlushRush, The StopRush Project and numerous other activist groups, are causing an immense impact on the demise of Limbaugh's hate-filled show. One of our new Daily Kos diarists, ProgLegs, just posted this diary yesterday, and it's already going viral: http://www.dailykos.com/...

We can all join the Fight to Flush Rush. This Petition goes out to 40 sponsors at a time and lists the StopRush and FlushRush groups: http://www.change.org/...

Many wonder how Limbaugh has managed to stay afloat, given the mass sponsor exodus. This past weekend, it was reported that FreedomWorks, linked to The Tea Party and Super PAC, has been picking up much of the slack for Rush, after his loss of  so many advertisers. Adding insult to injury, StopRush groups also report that some sponsors were offered free ad spots on the Limbaugh show to fill the empty space. (and sometimes even the free offers were turned down)

Rush, you just don't get to call Sandra Fluke, or any woman, a 'slut' and 'prostitute' on our public airways - and get away with it.

This is happening. It's time for Limbaugh to Exit (Stage Right). The people are speaking and sponsors are listening. This is the true beauty of free speech.

Let's keep this momentum going.

To Become A Part Of The StopRush Project, You can:
Join:      FlushRush: https://www.facebook.com/....
Visit:     StopRush: http://stoprush.net
Sign:     http://www.change.org/...
Tweet:   Hashtag#StopRush

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/01/06/1176920/-2-200-Limbaugh-Sponsors-Gone

First Antibiotic-Resistant Gonorrhea Cases Detected in North America

The fears of major health organizations have come true: Gonorrhea that is immune to the last remaining effective oral antibiotic has been detected in at least nine North American patients, meaning the era of "incurable" gonorrhea could be close.

In a study released Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, a group of scientists led by Vanessa Allen of Public Health Ontario, found that 6.7 percent of patients with gonorrhea at a Toronto clinic still had the disease after a round of cephalosporins, the last effective oral antibiotic used to treat the disease. Of 133 patients who returned for a "test of cure" visit, nine remained gonorrhea-positive. This is the first time cephalosporin-resistant gonorrhea has been found in humans in North America.

Last year, both the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control warned that untreatable gonorrhea—the world's second most common sexually transmitted infection—could soon be a reality as the bacteria showed increasing resistance to cephalosporins in lab tests.

"These are the clinical cases we've been waiting for," Allen says. "This is the translation of the lab information into what the clinical consequence is."

Previously, there had been a couple individual case reports of untreatable gonorrhea cases in the United Kingdom, Austria, France, Norway, and Japan. In an accompanying editorial, Robert Kirkcaldy of the CDC writes that gonorrhea is quickly becoming a more threatening disease.

"Cephalosporin treatment failures have now been documented in North America," he writes. "Although this milestone was expected, its arrival is deeply troubling."

Gonorrhea is estimated to infect close to 700,000 Americans each year. Symptoms include painful urination, abdominal pain, genital discharge, itching, and infertility in women. Women who have both HIV and gonorrhea are more likely to pass HIV to their offspring than women with just HIV.

Less than a year ago, Gail Bolan, director of the CDC's sexually transmitted disease prevention program, wrote that the "threat of untreatable gonorrhea is emerging rapidly." At the time, just 1.7 percent of gonorrhea isolated in the lab were considered resistant to cephalosporins. Allen says her study shows just how fast antibiotic resistance is evolving in the organisms.

"Our results aren't generalizable to the overall concentration because they all came from one clinic," she says. "But basically, the problem appears worse than we originally thought."

Although each of the nine patients in Canada were cured with the injectable antibiotic known as ceftriaxone, Allen warns that there's been "a parallel increase" in resistance to that antibiotic.

"I think without a doubt this will become a bigger problem," Allen says. "The next threat is when, not if, the same thing happens with ceftriaxone. And then what?"

According to Kirkcaldy, "clinicians now face the emergence of cephalosporin-resistant [gonorrhea] without well-studied, effective backup treatment options."

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/01/08/first-antibiotic-resistant-gonorrhea-cases-detected-in-north-america

Facts of Obama Record Belie GOP Partisanship Accusations

We Don’t have a Spending Problem, we have a Military Spending Problem

Have you read Brad Plumer’s terrific, chart-heavy primer on America’s insane defense budget? If not, I’ll wait while you do.

Done? Good. The numbers there should shock you. In particular, this one: “Since 2001, the base defense budget has soared from $287 billion to $530 billion — and that’s before accounting for the primary costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.” Or, if you prefer to see it in graph form:

That’s big money. More than we spent on Medicare, in fact. But it’s big money that doesn’t often get recognized in our budget conversation.

The forward of Rep. Paul Ryan’s 2011 budget — which was later adopted by both House and Senate Republicans — offers a concise version of the Republican take on our deficits. “The U.S. government is not running sustained deficits because Americans are taxed too little,” the authors write. “The government is running deficits because it spends too much.”

Among the most serious attempts to prove this point came from Charles Blahous writing at the conservative think tank E21. Blahous set out to show the exact factors that took us from surpluses in 2001 to deficits in 2011. In particular, he wanted to show that tax cuts were not at fault.

The Bush tax cuts, he finds, were responsible for about a quarter of the deterioration in the budget outlook, making them the single most expensive set of policies enacted. But all spending, together, was responsible for about half of the turn towards deficits. Finally, the flagging economy accounts for another quarter. “Had the tax relief never been enacted but everything else happened as it has, we still would face enormous deficits today,” Blahous concludes.

So where did all the new spending come from? Well, largely from the post-9/11 defense build-up. “One major factor that worsened the fiscal outlook was a large increase in federal discretionary spending. Much of this, of course, happened after the United States was attacked on September 11, 2001. The U.S. thereafter conducted major military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and also increased expenditures on homeland security.”

This isn’t the easiest graph to read, but it tells the basic tale. The blue line is what the Congressional Budget Office thought would happen. The green line is what happened when you take into account the economic turbulence. The purple line shows the budget after discretionary spending, which was driven by increased war and security costs. Then the light blue adds in mandatory spending (including Medicare Part D), the orange adds in TARP, and the periwinkle — yeah, I know my colors — adds in the stimulus. Compared to the discretionary spending, they barely move the needle:

As a broad point, I don’t think this proves that we have a spending problem rather than a taxing problem. It shows we have deficits driven by a range of factors, including tax cuts, war spending, the recessions, Medicare Part D, the stimulus, and more. It implies the solution should include measures to boost taxes, cut spending, and increase growth,. But if you want to argue that our current deficits are the result of overspending, then the military budget and the wars need to be the center of your analysis. Yet the Republican budget doesn’t envision big defense cuts and the 2012 Republican nominee for president sought large increases in defense spending.

That accounts for the 2001 to 2011 period. Going forward, of course, we have a health care problem more than we have a taxing or spending problem. But even that may be abating.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/01/07/we-dont-have-a-spending-problem-we-have-a-military-spending-problem/

The Rise Of DIY Abortions

Jennie Linn McCormack took pills to end her pregnancy and hid the fetus under her bed. Her case could change the course of abortion law in America.

JENNIE LINN MCCORMACK was 14 when she had her first baby. It was 1993, and she was in junior high in southeast Idaho, where she’s always lived and where she still lives now. Blond, petite, and fine-featured, she did tap, ballet, drill team, and cheerleading. She started spending time with an 18-year-old boy in her group of friends. Because he was older and she was a virgin, she trusted him when he said nothing bad would happen if they had sex. The first time they did, she got pregnant.

McCormack hid the pregnancy for as long as she could. She’d been brought up Mormon, although her parents were divorced and didn’t make her go to church anymore. But after she started showing, she had to tell her mom. Her mother took her to an adoption agency, but McCormack ran out of the room—she was scared, but felt like she was meant to have the baby. She named her son Tanner, and she didn’t ask the father for anything.

After that, McCormack went to a school for teen parents and got her GED. She went on to work various jobs: at a car wash, a McDonald’s, a laundromat, a Dillard’s. When she was 18, she married a man who worked in the heating-and-air business, and they settled down in the sleepy college town of Pocatello. Everything nice she now owns is left over from that marriage, like the plush, comfy furniture in her living room. When she was 19, they had a daughter. But the marriage foundered, and they got divorced in 2004.

Her third child, a boy, was born in 2009. The father was “not a long-term relationship,” she says. When the baby was three months old, she started dating an old friend, Buddy Lee, who had recently gotten out of prison after serving time on a robbery charge.

Their relationship was tempestuous and occasionally violent; there was at least one restraining order involved. Soon after they’d started dating, she found herself pregnant. Lee took her to the nearest clinic, some 140 miles away in Salt Lake City, and paid for the abortion. Then, in 2010, she realized she was pregnant by him again. “I wasn’t being careless or sleeping around all the time,” McCormack says. “I just didn’t know quite about the options other than condoms.”

By then, Lee was back in jail—his parole had been revoked for drinking. McCormack had no income other than the $200 to $250 per month of child support she received from her baby’s father. She shared custody of her daughter, who was then 12, with her ex-husband. Tanner, 17, was hoping to go to college. “I didn’t want to raise it in that situation,” McCormack says, “nor put more on my children and me that I couldn’t handle. I had no money. No car. I didn’t have anything.”

McCormack knew that an abortion would cost $400 to $2,000, depending on how far along she was. Utah has a mandatory waiting period of 72 hours, which meant she would either need to stay in a hotel for that time, or make the six-hour round trip twice over the course of several days. She couldn’t come up with that kind of money. So she called her older sister, who owned a computer, and asked her to order abortion pills for her on the Internet. The pills cost $200, and McCormack says the logistics of arranging it all took about two months.

By the time the medication arrived in an unmarked envelope on December 23, she was in her second trimester—at, she thought, week 14. Following the instructions, she took the first pill right away and the others some hours later. That night, she started having cramps. The next morning, Christmas Eve, she delivered a dead fetus alone in her bathroom, along with the placenta and a great deal of blood.

The fetus was much bigger than she had expected. It was about a foot long, clearly female, with identifiable features and hair. McCormack wrapped the remains in a bag with the placenta. Then she put it in a box and hid it under her bed. That evening, she attended Christmas Eve dinner at her father’s place and dropped her daughter off with her ex-husband for an overnight visit. She wrapped the children’s presents, including new clothes she’d bought on layaway for her fashion-conscious daughter, and put them under the tree. She told no one about the abortion apart from her sister.

After about a week, the box began to emit an odor. McCormack wrapped it up in more bags and put it out on the back porch, on the shelf of a covered barbecue. It didn’t feel right to her to throw it away. A week or so later, unable to figure out what to do, she finally confided in a friend. He called his sister, and his sister called the police.

On the afternoon of January 9, 2011, two officers arrived at McCormack’s house. She led them to the back porch and told them, according to reports, “My baby is in the box.” When an officer opened the parcel, he discovered the fetal remains, partially decomposed and frozen. One officer took McCormack to the police station, where she described the abortion. An autopsy would later determine that she had actually been between 19 and 23 weeks—around five months—pregnant.

Several months later, in May 2011, McCormack was charged by the Bannock County Prosecutors’ office under 1973’s Idaho Code 18-606, which makes it a felony for a woman to have an abortion in a manner not sanctioned by the state and carries a possible prison sentence of up to five years. McCormack isn’t the only woman in recent years to be prosecuted for ending her own pregnancy. But her case could change the trajectory of abortion law in the United States.

TECHNIQUES FOR TERMINATING a pregnancy can be found in the Bible, on Egyptian papyrus, and in Chinese records dating to around 500 B.C. There are too many to list, but women have attempted home abortions with mercury, quinine, pennyroyal, iron sulfates, and a mixture of camel saliva and deer hair; Hippocrates once advised a prostitute to jump up and down.

Before Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in 1973, American women inserted knitting needles and other sharp objects into their cervixes to end unwanted pregnancies. They put dangerous drugs like the tissue-destroying potassium permanganate into their vaginas, which typically failed to terminate pregnancy but sometimes caused hemorrhage. Elihu Sussman, a retired New York City pediatrician who was working as a medical student at Boston City Hospital in the 1960s, says, “There were thirty beds, and some of them were always filled with women who came in because of septic abortions—four, five, six at any given time.” His wife, Geraldine Sussman, was a student nurse at Bellevue in New York during the same period. “They’d use coat hangers, laundry detergent products,” she says. “A lot of them would rupture their uteruses and end up with hysterectomies. People now don’t realize what it was like. It was awful.”

Starting in the early ’70s, activist Carol Downer promoted the creation of self-help groups at which women would teach each other how to do their own speculum exams and “menstrual extractions”—the suction removal of menstrual blood that can serve as an early at-home abortion method. “When we were working to get abortion legalized,” Downer said by phone, “there were groups around the country—at any given time about one hundred—that were fully capable of performing these procedures. Once Roe v. Wade came along, clearly the energy shifted.” Later, in the 1990s, some feminist activists also advocated do-it-yourself (DIY) abortions. The band Bikini Kill sometimes handed out a DIY abortion flyer, “Body Mine,” at its shows, with information on abortifacient herbs, menstrual extraction, fertility cycles, and safe sex.

These activists believed that such information was necessary because, even though clinical abortion is legal in the United States, accessing one has become increasingly difficult, especially for poor women. In 1976, the Hyde Amendment banned most types of federal funding for abortion. Eighty-seven percent of U.S. counties now have no abortion provider. Several states—including Wyoming, Arkansas, North Dakota, and South Dakota—have only one. Mississippi’s lone clinic is under constant threat of closure.

The past few years have also seen the rise of the “fetal personhood” movement, which promotes legislation around the concept that a rights-endowed person is created the second that sperm meets egg. A record-setting 92 abortion-restricting measures passed in 2011. Seven states—including Idaho—have recently banned abortion past 20 weeks through so-called “pain-capable unborn child protection act” legislation. These laws are an attempt to redefine the legal parameters for abortion. Roe v. Wade essentially holds that an abortion may be performed until the fetus is “viable”—that is, until it can survive outside the womb, which most states determine is 24 or 25 weeks. The new measures instead seek to prevent an abortion after the point at which a fetus is able to feel pain—according to the bills’ authors, at about 20 weeks. (In 2010, an extensive study by U.K.’s Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists concluded that a fetus can’t feel pain in the first 24 weeks.)

But while obtaining an abortion at a clinic is becoming harder, home abortion has never been easier or safer. In 2012, women have two resources that previous generations did not: abortion pills and the Internet. The combination of two drugs—Cytotec (Misoprostol) and Mifeprex (Mifepristone, known as RU-486 in trials) is 95 to 99 percent effective at ending a pregnancy in the first nine weeks, according to Ibis Reproductive Health’s Daniel Grossman, an expert on medical abortion. (Cytotec is 85 to 90 percent effective on its own.) “Essentially they induce an abortion similar to a spontaneous miscarriage,” says Grossman of the drug combination.

When conducted correctly, a medicated abortion is far less harrowing than the ordeal experienced by McCormack. If the pills are taken in the first nine weeks of a pregnancy, there is no fetus to deliver or dispose. At nine weeks, an embryo is the size of a grape and weighs a fraction of an ounce; the effect of the abortion is comparable to a heavy period. Both Cytotec and Mifeprex have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration, and the mortality rate for Mifeprex is one in 100,000. (By contrast, Viagra’s is five in 100,000.) “The bottom line is these medications are incredibly safe,” says Grossman.

When Mifeprex was approved for sale in the United States in 2000, it was expected to increase abortion access for marginalized women. The theory was that the pills would be more widely available than a surgical procedure, especially in parts of the country where clinics are few and far between. Instead, because of tight regulation of the drugs, the pills have simply become a clinical alternative to a surgical abortion. Medication is only used in about one-quarter of early terminations, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

Online, however, these drugs are readily available, often via suspicious-sounding sites that make claims like: “The Affordable Abortion Pill Will Safely, Quickly Terminate Your Undeveloped Fetus In The Privacy Of Your Home, Save You Time And Hundreds Of Dollars. It Is 100% Clinically Safe, Very Effective And The Most Affordable Abortion Pill You Will Get Your Hands On For Now!!!”

Determining how many American women have had home abortions is exceedingly difficult: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does not track illegal abortions. There is no blood test for drugs like Cytotec, and so such an abortion is indistinguishable from a natural miscarriage, even to a doctor. However, the proliferation of online dispensers suggests a rising demand. There are thousands of websites selling Cytotec for as little as $45 to $75 (compared with $300 to $800 for a legal medicated abortion in a clinic). Some claim to offer the harder-to-come-by Mifeprex, but may in fact be peddling Cytotec, or aspirin, or nothing at all. (Possible sources for the drugs include Mexico, where Cytotec is available over the counter, or even the United States, since it’s also prescribed here as an ulcer medication.)

The question of how drugs like Mifeprex and Cytotec are sold and administered is emerging as the next major front in the abortion debate. A number of pro-choice groups argue that access to the drugs should be vastly expanded, perhaps available by prescription from general practitioners. Susan Yanow of the Reproductive Health Access Project told me, “Ideally, I would like for a woman who is under nine weeks to be able to call a clinic or a physician and to get excellent counseling about medical abortion and then at the end of the call hear, ‘So, would you like me to phone a prescription in to your nearby pharmacy, or would you like to come in and do this with the support of a medical practitioner?’”

The law, however, is moving in the opposite direction. Several states have recently passed or are considering legislation to limit access to abortion drugs online and off. In 2011, Wisconsin passed a measure that would potentially subject doctors to criminal charges for performing medication abortions without adhering to certain specific protocols, such as seeing the patient three times; Planned Parenthood clinics in the state stopped providing medication abortions in April, and the organization has filed suit against the law.

Meanwhile, women continue to purchase abortion drugs on the Web without medical guidance, an undertaking that is more dangerous and fraught. Misuse or fraudulent pills could cause complications. A woman could, like McCormack, misjudge the length of her gestation or just decide to take the pills after nine weeks. Or she could unknowingly have a risk factor, such as an ectopic pregnancy.

Then, there is the risk of prosecution. Pro-life activists have long said that, if abortion were to become illegal, the doctor, not the woman, would be arrested, with the woman considered a second victim or material witness. According to new research by the nonprofit group National Advocates for Pregnant Women (napw), since Roe v. Wade more than a dozen women have been charged with illegal abortion or manslaughter for attempting to end a pregnancy. In 2004, a Mexican migrant worker named Gabriela Flores was arrested in South Carolina for taking Cytotec to end her pregnancy and sentenced to 90 days in jail. In 2007, a Massachusetts teenager named Amber Abreu was arrested for the same act and given probation and therapy. In 2011, 20-year-old New Yorker Yaribely Almonte was arrested for inducing an abortion at home with herbs. The charges were ultimately dropped. Some of these women have been charged with murder in the wake of a miscarriage or stillbirth; others, like McCormack, have been charged with violating the abortion laws in their state.

 

AFTER SHE WAS charged, McCormack contacted the largest law firm in Pocatello for help with her criminal defense. The lawyer who took her case was Rick Hearn, a Georgetown Law graduate who specializes in civil rights and personal injury litigation. A father of four and a practicing Catholic, he had once argued for the state in favor of a parental-consent law.

In October, I visited Hearn in his Pocatello office. Originally from Alabama, he has a faint Southern accent and exudes the warmth and gentle humor of a favorite uncle. Unlike McCormack, he very much belongs to the establishment of Pocatello: He is friendly with people in the prosecuting attorney’s office; his daughter plays on the same volleyball team as an assistant prosecutor’s daughter.

Hearn was able to get the charges against McCormack dismissed for lack of evidence. But the prosecutor made it very clear that he would consider refiling charges if more evidence emerged. McCormack would always have the threat of jail time hanging over her head.

Hearn is an avid fan of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo books. He saw the character of dogged reporter Mikael Blomkvist as a good role model for a lawyer—“he follows the trail wherever it leads, even if where it leads is dangerous or unpopular,” he told me. When it came to McCormack’s case, Hearn realized there was only one way she could put the incident behind her.

In September 2011, within minutes of the case’s formal dismissal, Hearn helped McCormack file a civil suit against county prosecutor Mark Hiedeman. Hearn’s argument was that certain Idaho restrictions on abortions—including its recent pain-capable legislation—were unconstitutional. He aimed to prevent Hiedeman from prosecuting McCormack, or any other woman, for obtaining an illegal abortion.

McCormack and Hearn won a preliminary injunction from the District Court. The state appealed, and the case made its way to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The state tried to have the case dismissed, arguing that McCormack lacked standing because she was not currently seeking an abortion. (Norma McCorvey, “Roe,” was able to go forward only because she was pregnant at the time of her suit.) Hearn realized that he needed a doctor to intervene as a co-plaintiff, since a doctor could argue that the law prevented him from carrying out his medical obligations. But he couldn’t find one willing to join the suit.

As it happened, however, Hearn is also a doctor licensed to practice medicine in the state of Idaho. In February 2012, he became a co-plaintiff himself. “I intervened in this thing as a doctor against my wishes,” says Hearn. “I think it is so unfair that to a woman, the court says: ‘Go away. A doctor has to bring the case for you.’ It really reminds me of during the Civil War days, when they told slaves: ‘You can’t appear in court because you’re not a real person. Your master can come in and talk about those things.’”

And yet, others seem to wish McCormack would go away, too. By and large, the mainstream pro-choice movement has not embraced McCormack, likely because of what Lynn Paltrow, the founder of napw (which participated in the case as an amicus on McCormack’s behalf) euphemistically terms a “fact-pattern that does not seem particularly attractive.” (The press has represented this fact pattern as “fetus ... on the barbecue.”) Hearn says some reproductive rights advocates have expressed concern about his pursuing the case. “We’d just really rather you’d not,” is how Hearn says one activist put it.

When I asked Planned Parenthood for comment, spokesperson Eric Ferrero replied in a statement: “We are deeply concerned about the problem many women face in Idaho in accessing safe and legal abortion. As you know, compounding the access problem are many state laws restricting safe and legal abortion in the state.” His office confirmed that Planned Parenthood had no plans to become involved in McCormack’s case and declined to comment specifically on her situation. Soon after Hearn and McCormack filed their suit in Idaho, doctors represented by the aclu and the Center for Reproductive Rights brought suit against Arizona’s pain-capable law, while doctors represented by the aclu have challenged a similar measure in Georgia.

In September 2012, the Ninth Circuit issued a 37-page decision that, for the most part, vindicated McCormack. Written by Democratic appointee Judge Harry Pregerson, the ruling describes in detail the difficulty poor women experience in obtaining an abortion in Idaho. These restrictions, he argued, essentially outlawed the procedure for them, potentially violating the “undue burden” test sometimes invoked by the Supreme Court. He maintained that, since it was so hard for McCormack to obtain a legal abortion, it was unjust to charge her for having an illegal one. “It’s the first federal court decision that we know of to address the question of whether women themselves can be held criminally liable for the outcome of their pregnancies, for having an abortion, for what they do or experience during pregnancy,” says Paltrow. “The Ninth Circuit decision may have opened up abortion access to every woman with a computer,” says Hearn.

But the decision was only a partial victory. It was narrowly applied to McCormack, meaning that other women in Idaho can still be arrested for having an illegal abortion. The court also found that McCormack did not have standing to challenge the pain-capable legislation, because it had passed after she terminated her pregnancy.

Hearn responded by filing a motion that, if successful, would halt prosecutions of all women and doctors in Idaho for illegal abortion, and overturn the pain-capable law. Justice B. Lynn Winmill of the Idaho District Court is expected to rule by early next year. Hearn’s latest suit has not attracted support from most reproductive rights groups, which are perhaps nervous that McCormack’s rather messier case may rise up through the courts before the other paincapable lawsuits. If it reached the Supreme Court, it would hardly be their ideal test for reevaluating the federal position on abortion. “Many advocates for women’s rights appear to want women’s real stories and their real life troubles out of courts,” says Hearn. “They want it to be doctors in white coats.”

THIS OCTOBER, every room in McCormack’s house was carefully decorated with seasonal arrangements, from a cornucopia on the kitchen table to an autumn-leaf garland along the living room wall. Pumpkins of various sizes were artfully arrayed on the front steps. She proudly showed off the swing she built for her baby when she couldn’t afford the ones at the store.

Sitting in her living room, McCormack was alternately fragile and chatty. She told me the town has shunned her since the Idaho State Journal ran her full name, age, and home address. U.K. newspaper The Independent reported earlier this year: “In the supermarket, people stop and point. At fast-food outlets, they hiss ‘it’s her’!” “I just secluded myself with my kids,” she says. “I wish I could save my children from any more heartache. Since all this, they don’t look at me the same.” She says the nondenominational church that she once attended shamed her publicly. “There was a sermon on abortion ...” She tears up. “He said you won’t be forgiven if you do. I haven’t went since.” She would like to leave town, although she has rarely been outside the state, aside from visits to nearby Utah and childhood trips to Disneyland.

In my conversations with people in Pocatello, many expressed sympathy for McCormack. After a Sunday service at her former church (the sermon discussed the dangers of alcohol and Harry Potter), co-pastor Penny Johnson initially struggled to remember her. When she did, she brightened and said, “Oh, how is she?” She was visibly shocked to hear of the court case and insisted there was no anti-abortion sermon. “If she heard that, it was a misunderstanding,” she said. “We don’t promote abortion, but if you’ve experienced that, God loves you. I had no clue she was going through that.”

After nearly a year of unemployment, McCormack now has several low-wage, part-time positions that require traveling between various stores. Her three-year-old is in Head Start four half-days a week across town. She often walks him the hour-plus to school in his stroller, then travels home to get her bike to do her store visits. After work, she drops off the bike, picks up the stroller, and then does the round trip again to pick up her son. She no longer receives child support for any of her children. Tanner was sentenced in October to four months in jail for harboring a 14-year-old Pocatello runaway in California, where he was about to start college. “He wants to save all these girls now because of his mom,” McCormack says. “He wanted to be a drug and alcohol counselor for youth. He had a path.” She hopes that when he gets out of jail, he will resume his college education.

Before I left Pocatello, I met two detectives who participated in the McCormack investigation. They work just a wall away from the evidence locker where the remains of the fetus are still stored; because the legal proceedings are ongoing, they cannot be released. “We see dead bodies, daily, weekly, in all different stages,” Detective Brian McClure told me. “But seeing a recognizable baby in a garbage bag, frozen, outside, in a garbage pile, decomposing ...”

“I wouldn’t wish anyone to that scene or investigation,” says Detective Val Wadsworth, a father of four. “We unwrapped it and released it to the funeral home, and the next day was the autopsy. The funeral director who was there said it was the worst smell he’d smelled in his thirty-five years of the funeral home. ... I can’t imagine what it did to her, to have that baby right underneath you for so long, trying to sleep with it there. When they had it thawed out and laying on the table, it was just sad. Sad feeling. Sad little pathetic face. It was just terrible.”

McCormack, too, thinks a lot about the fetus. As we watched her son bounce a bright yellow ball against the fence in her backyard, she told me that what she wants most is a proper burial. “Just because of the circumstances doesn’t mean I’m heartless,” she says. “It’s still a piece of you, you know?”

Ada Calhoun is a book author and freelance journalist. This article appeared in the December 31, 2012 issue of the magazine under the headline “The Rise of DIY Abortions.”

Additional photo credits: Produced by Exposure New York, Elsie Connett, A.C. Conrad, John Ericson; model, Lisa Landino; styling by Katie Burnett with Jonathan Black; hair and makeup, Kyra Doorman; art direction J Heroun

http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/magazine/111368/the-rise-diy-abortions?id=sJfYuyODkD5YpCcg5G4g43FjW76CK0UpLSJHXK3AZJ7MO8GFxKxdMtwczlgFXTgD

Officials: Suspected U.S. Drone Strike Kills 17 in Pakistan's Tribal Region

A suspected U.S. drone strike killed 17 people and wounded three Sunday in Pakistan's volatile tribal region, Pakistani intelligence officials said.

The strike occurred in Babar Ziarat, which borders the Pakistani provinces of North and South Waziristan, near the Afghan border, the officials said.

Those killed and injured in the strike were believed to be militants, the officials said.

The attack follows two suspected U.S. drone strikes in the same area last week that killed 15 people, including a Taliban commander with ties to the Pakistani military.

Taliban commander Mullah Nazir, also known as Maulvi Nazir Wazir, was killed in a strike in South Waziristan, officials said.

Nazir was at odds with the Pakistani Taliban over a peace agreement he signed with the Pakistani government in 2007. As part of the deal, he refused to attack the Pakistani government or military targets, though he was believed to be behind a number of attacks that targeted the U.S. military.

Nazir narrowly escaped a suicide bomb attack in early December. After the attack, he warned the Mehsud tribe, which includes Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud, to vacate South Waziristan or face consequences.

Also killed in that strike were two of Nazir's deputies, the officials said.

In recent years, the U.S. government has sharply stepped up the use of drone attacks in Pakistan's mostly ungoverned tribal region, widely believed to be a safe haven for militant groups fueling the insurgency in Afghanistan. U.S. officials say the drone strikes are an effective

http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/06/world/asia/pakistan-drone-strike/index.html

Mike Luckovich, Copyright 2013 Creators Syndicate

Welcome to the New Civil War

Lincoln's unfinished war rages on, as the neo-Confederacy tries to turn back the clock on women, gays, God and guns

On a repeat viewing of Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” over the New Year’s holiday, a scene I had barely noticed the first time jumped out at me. Confederate vice-president Alexander Stephens (played with reptilian gentility by Jackie Earle Haley), in a secret meeting aboard a steamboat with Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of State William Seward, faces up to the reality that the era of slavery has come to an end. Ratification of the 13th Amendment, Stephens muses, will destroy the basis of the Southern economy and the South’s traditional way of life. “We won’t know ourselves anymore,” he says.

If only it had been so. What an affluent slaveowner like Stephens feared most, no doubt, was the utopian vision of “radical Reconstruction” imagined by legendary abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones in the movie), in an earlier conversation with Lincoln in the White House kitchen. Stevens envisioned a future in which all the land and property of the Southern aristocracy would be dispossessed and divided among the emancipated slaves, building a new society of free soil and free labor amid the ruins of tyranny. To put it in contemporary social-studies terms, Stevens hoped that by uprooting and destroying the South’s slave economy, one could also replace its culture.

It didn’t quite work out that way. You can’t boil one of the most tumultuous periods of American history down to one paragraph, but here goes: Lincoln was assassinated by a domestic terrorist and replaced by Andrew Johnson, who was an incompetent hothead and an unapologetic racist. Within a few years the ambitious project of Reconstruction fell victim to a sustained insurgency led by the Ku Klux Klan and similar white militia groups. By the late 1870s white supremacist “Redeemers” controlled most local and state governments in the South, and by the 1890s Southern blacks had been disenfranchised and thrust into subservience positions by Jim Crow laws that were only slightly preferable to slavery.

So even though it’s a truism of American public discourse that the Civil War never ended, it’s also literally true. We’re still reaping the whirlwind from that long-ago conflict, and now we face a new Civil War, one focused on divisive political issues of the 21st century – most notably the rights and liberties of women and LGBT people – but rooted in toxic rhetoric and ideas inherited from the 19th century.

We’ve just emerged from a presidential campaign that exposed how hardened our political and cultural divide has become, and how poorly the two sides understand each other. Part of the Republican problem, in an election that party thought it would win easily, was that those who felt a visceral disgust toward both the idea and the reality of President Barack Obama simply could not believe that they didn’t represent a majority. As many Republicans are now aware, the party now faces an existential crisis. It’s all very well to go on TV and talk about attracting Latinos and downplaying cultural wedge issues. But the activist core of the Republican Party is neo-Confederate, whether it thinks of itself that way or not. It isn’t interested in common cause with Mexicans or turning down the moral thermostat. Just ask Rick Santorum: What it wants is war.

In the recent “fiscal cliff” negotiations, which ended (of course) in yet another short-term stopgap measure, most congressional Republicans, having sworn a blood oath never to raise taxes on their millionaire patrons, were content to let the nation slide into chaos and catastrophe rather than reach a compromise with the president they have consistently depicted as a socialist renegade or alien interloper. It was like a third-rate farcical reprise of the great congressional struggle depicted by Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner in “Lincoln,” when the defeated and embittered Democrats of 1864 fought a rear-guard action to defend slavery, in defiance of not just history, morality and basic human decency but also tactical judgment and common sense.

Thanks to Lincoln’s great political victory in that Congress, slavery has faded into the history books — maybe too much so. As the controversy over Quentin Tarantino’s slave-revenge western “Django Unchained” demonstrates, it still isn’t a history we know how to talk about. It may seem melodramatic to claim that the curse of slavery hangs over us still, but Lincoln himself clearly foresaw that possibility, as his slaveowning predecessor Thomas Jefferson had before him. In Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, he described slavery as an offense against God, and the bloodshed of the Civil War “as the woe due to those [on both sides] by whom the offense came.” Perhaps a cruel cosmic justice was now being extracted, he concluded, and the war would go on “until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.”

I’m not sure America ever paid that debt, in blood or money or any other currency. The lingering effects of our racist history – from the resegregation of our public schools to the enduring and astonishing “wealth gap” between whites and blacks – are national problems, not just Southern problems. Our new Civil War is infused with the undead spirit of the old one and waged by a rebellious neo-Confederacy rooted in the states of the Old South, but its influence can be felt, as with the pro-slavery forces of the 1860s, in every part of the country. (Fernando Wood, the fiery pro-slavery Democrat played by Lee Pace in “Lincoln,” was a former mayor of New York.)

The new Civil War is not entirely or even principally about race, although there’s no mistaking its pernicious racial component. Even making allowances for Bobby Jindal and Allen West, the neo-Confederate forces are perhaps 99 percent white, in a nation whose fastest-growing demographic groups are neither white nor black. While the issues of the new Civil War are contemporary, its rhetoric is ancient and all too familiar, from states’ rights and resistance to Washington to claims of a special relationship with the Almighty and vague appeals to distinctive “cultural traditions,” employed as a justification for bigotry and oppression.

While the Civil War of the 1860s really was about slavery first and foremost – it was the foundation of the Southern economy, and had concentrated immense wealth in the hands of a small landowning caste – the true subject matter of the new Civil War is much less clear. Abortion and same-sex marriage play a crucial role, to be sure (and we may soon see guns and marijuana enter the picture as well). Those are symbolic issues that reflect larger social tensions around gender roles, sexuality and the “war on women,” but they are not just symbolic issues. Many people on the neo-Confederate side see abortion and Adam-and-Steve marriage as moral outrages or offenses against God, to borrow Lincoln’s phrasing, which must be stopped at almost any cost. Of course, pro-choice activists and marriage-equality advocates see those issues as matters of basic economic justice, guaranteeing to all people the kind of basic personal autonomy that men take for granted, or the common-law legal and medical rights that heterosexual married couples have long enjoyed.

We appear to be moving into an unstable Missouri Compromise period of American history, in which regional tiers of states adopt sharply different policies on reproductive rights and marriage rights in particular, but also seem locked into fixed political identities and differing views on fundamental questions of national identity and the national future. Within the past week, we saw Illinois and Rhode Island – core “neo-Union” states, if you will – move closer to legalizing gay marriage, while the Republican governors of Michigan and Virginia (exactly the kind of “border states” where these battles are being fought on the ground) snuck new restrictions on abortion through the legal back door.

If you correlate the states where both same-sex marriage and same-sex civil unions have been banned and the states with the harshest restrictions on abortion, you begin to measure the breadth of the neo-Confederacy: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, the Dakotas, the Carolinas, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah. Most (but not all) are onetime Southern slave states and hotbeds of evangelical Christianity, and most (but not all) coincide with the familiar red-blue split between Republicans and Democrats. The battleground states of the moment, on these issues as on many others, are strikingly familiar: Florida, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin. All four are currently in the grip of neo-Confederate forces on a state level, and all four have enacted gay-marriage bans and abortion restrictions, even though Obama won them all in both of his election campaigns.

Do I even need to mention that none of the neo-Confederate states are in the Northeast or on the West Coast, regions where abortion remains widely available and same-sex marriage is rapidly becoming routine? Or that the neo-Confederate states of the South and the Plains States have sent nearly all of the intransigent, anti-taxation Tea Party members to Congress, while the neo-Union states of the East and West, with their polyglot, immigrant-rich populations, have elected few or none?

Ultimately, the Missouri Compromise collapsed (as did the short-lived Compromise of 1850 that followed it), tearing the nation apart and forcing a long overdue reckoning with the enormous evil of slavery.. We are heading toward a similar reckoning now. Secession is no longer an option (although many, on both sides, might wish it were), so the new Civil War is not likely to involve pitched battles in the meadows of Pennsylvania, or hundreds of thousands of dead. Today’s fights over abortion and gays and God and guns have a profound moral dimension, but don’t quite have the world-historical weight of the slavery question. As with slavery, however, it’s tough to imagine any viable long-term middle ground. At the moment, two women who get married in Iowa will have no legal relationship if they move to Kansas, and a teenage girl in Seattle can easily get a safe and legal abortion while her cousin in Dallas faces mandatory counseling, a 24-hour waiting period and a parental consent law. (If they have another cousin in rural Mississippi, she probably won’t find legal abortion services under any terms.)

Regardless of how you feel about those issues, that’s nuts. No nation-state can function indefinitely on that kind of patchwork-quilt basis. Then again, this is the United States of America, land of semi-permanent political paralysis, so “functional” doesn’t really apply. It’s tempting to call upon history and proclaim that the only possible outcome of this new Civil War, after many years of ugly politics and occasional outbreaks of craziness and violence, will resemble the outcome of the last one: the continued expansion of constitutional rights and freedoms and the final defeat of the Confederate strain in American political and cultural life. But other, darker outcomes are definitely possible, and I suspect that as long as we’ve got a country, the Confederacy will still be with us.

http://www.salon.com/2013/01/05/welcome_to_the_new_civil_war/