A rather dim prosecutor is making threats against Craigslist (TG Daily 5/6/09).

South Carolina attorney general Henry McMaster asks Craigslist to remove certain “portions” of its classifieds categories that allow for “the solicitation of prostitution and the dissemination and posting of graphic pornographic material,” which is considered a crime in the state. Craigslist has ten days to comply with the request, otherwise the site will be targeted by a criminal investigation and prosecution, McMaster said.

South Carolina is the latest state to go after Craigslist and its “Casual Encounters” section, which is believed by authorities to have become a major channel to promote prostitution. The site has been in hot water over the issue for some time, especially with the attorneys general from Missouri, Connecticut and Illinois, with whom representatives of Craigslist met yesterday to discuss the issue.

In a letter addressed to Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster, McMaster demands the removal of the section within ten days, until “5:00 pm EST, the close of business Friday May 15, 2009.” He claims that following a November 2008 promise the site “to install safeguards to combat unlawful activity and improve public safety” has not happened yet and that there are “indications” that Craigslist “has not installed sufficient safeguards since November to prohibit the Internet site from being used as a vehicle to advertise or solicit prostitution.” He added that “the unrestricted manner in which graphic pornographic pictures are posted and displayed by users on the craigslist site and their accessibility to minors” is also a concern.

You would think that a prosecutors would have better things to do with their time. But, with the high profile "Craigslist Killer" case, grabbing headlines is a high priority.

There's an obvious problem with these efforts to gain political traction by going after Craigslist. It's blantantly unconstitutional to prosecute them or sue them.

Efforts to get rid of prostitution also have never been effective. Those laws end up throwing sex workers in prison or extorting fines from them, but don't stop prostitutes because of the huge demand for these services. It's similar to the futility of drug laws.

Keep in mind that much of the ranting on Craigslist is typical technophobic scapegoating. Murderers have been targeting women who are sex workers or who are perceived as sex workers for centuries. (Remember Jack the Ripper?) It isn't the new technology that is the problem.

As long as our society demonizes prostitution and prostitutes, it will justify abuse of people in this profession in the minds of people with hateful and violent tendencies. An important first step towards ending this demonization and its horrific consequences is to legalize prostitution. The last thing that is needed is for irresponsible people in law enforcement and the media to throw tantrums over this profession just to appeal to the worst in human instincts.

 

Ex-Christian.Net had an article by someone who is liberated from Christianity who was tired of the failure of Christians to provide evidence supporting their claims. The poster also showed an understandable lack of patience with the "you have to have faith" argument for justifying religious belief. It inspired me to write a theoretical dialogue which gives one reason why the argument doesn't work.

Believer: Better stop eating that s'more!!!!!

Camper: WTF?

Believer: You are offending the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.

Camper: The who?

Believer: The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, the creator of the universe. You will roast in Hell on a stick for all eternity if you eat that s'more.

Camper: You've got to be kidding! There's no reason to believe that.

Believer: The Holy Puftpiece says it's true. That's enough reason for me.

Camper: (Giggling) Do you have any evidence of this?

Believer: You have to take it on faith.

The reality is that there isn't any more credible evidence to support Christianity than there would be for this poor theoretical believer. Yet, by the common Christian "you have to have faith" argument, you would have to accept the notion that eating s'mores would have horrible eternal consequences.

In other words, the argument fails because you can't apply it consistently.



 

This blog is now four years old as of yesterday. It's amazing that it has been this long. In the process, I've found out about so many other fascinating blogs. Be sure to check the Links list and the More Links section. I've uncovered some real hidden gold nuggets out there.

Thanks to all the spooks monitoring this blog for reading it.

Thanks a whole lot more to the rest of you.

The New York Times just gets more and more rightist and dishonest with each passing day. Check out this lead paragraph on an internal Justice Department investigation on the people responsible for the torture memos.

An internal Justice Department inquiry into the conduct of Bush administration lawyers who wrote secret memorandums authorizing brutal interrogations has concluded that the authors committed serious lapses of judgment but should not be criminally prosecuted, according to government officials briefed on a draft of the findings.

This is doubly dishonest.

First, the use of the spin term "brutal interrogations" is a deliberate distortion intended to avoid using the factually and legally accurate term "torture." Second, there is a consensus among credible law enforcement and intelligence professionals (Internet trolls aside) that torture is not an even remotely effective interrogation technique. Pretending that torture is a useful method of interrogation is as deliberately dishonest as pretending it is not torture.

It gets even worse.

The opinions permitted the C.I.A. to use a number of interrogation methods that human rights groups have condemned as torture, including waterboarding, wall-slamming, head-slapping and other techniques. The opinions allowed many of these practices to be used repeatedly and in combination.

Excuse me, the fact that these criminal actions are torture is not merely a view of human rights groups or any kind of faction. Facts don't stop being facts merely because they are politically inconvenient or worse for former Bush regime officials and far right ideologues at the New York Times.

Diminishing facts that cannot honestly be disputed merely as views of certain groups is downright dishonest. What's next? Is the Times going to say that 2 + 2 = 4 is something that math teachers have insisted is correct?

Newspapers are supposed to be accurate with the facts. Yet, the Timesis going out of its way to distort and spin facts for a partisan, far right political agenda. Tell me again why liberal and moderates should waste money on this garbage during a deep recession?

 

These comments are very uncomfortable, but there is a lot of truth to them. (From an interview by Kevin Sessums in The Daily Beast)

“I don’t think we are going to win anything federal—which is really the only important place where it counts—until a few of these Supreme Court justices expire (including that homophobe Anthony Scalia) and Obama replaces them with people sympathetic to our side,” he says. “This, of course, is by no means a sure thing. I have high hopes for Obama, but I do not feel all warm and fuzzy that he is going to be enough of a friend when push comes to shove. I hope I am wrong. I have never believed in patience, but I do not see that we have either the leaders or the troops enough—a la ACT UP—to go out there and fight. We continue to be a passive population. It drives me nuts. It has always driven me nuts. I do not think the gay population has been all that rabid for gay marriage. Note that I do not use the words ‘gay community.’ Expunge that expression from your vocabulary. We are not a community. There are too many of us to qualify for that word, which connotes something much smaller and more intimate than the huge multipeopled grab bag of our rainbow coalition.”

He goes on: “The work, as it was done for AIDS, has been done by relatively few warriors. And we are losing sight of the HIV/AIDS battle. What is not being done about HIV/AIDS in the United States is shocking. It is more than shocking. It is tragic. Three percent of the entire population of Washington, D.C., is infected. One in ten of its residents between the ages of 40 and 49 is infected. Seven percent of its male African-American population is infected. Gay politics? What gay politics? I don’t see any gay politics. I see a few lazy, torpid, unimaginative—certainly passionless—‘organizations’ that maintain they fight for us when what they do is relatively useless. It has never been otherwise. I am afraid we have never ever had a decent gay organization, outside of ACT UP, that accomplished what we need to accomplish—which is to free ourselves from the tyranny of THEM!”

I wonder what it would take to revitalize a queer movement that is so out of touch with the everyday lives of most queers.

 

I found Ramona's Voices because Preserve, Protect, and Defend passed along the Honest Scrap Award to her. Ramona has a nice photo button to support the Employee Free Choice Act. It inspired me to make some of my own. I encourage you to use one or make one own of your own.


Photo: Backwards Bill


Photo: Maritime Union of New Zealand


Photo: Nancy CZ

Of course, you will want to link to some place where people can take action. Here are a few options. Pick the one you like best.

http://www.unionvoice.org/campaign/passefca_II (AFLCIO)

http://changetowinaction.org/campaign/one_million_strong (Change to Win petition)

http://www.teamsterstakeaction.org/campaign/employee_free_choice_clone (Teamsters)

http://www.nea.org/home/16375.htm (National Education Association)

 

This show of Bill Maher's had the most bizarre booking. He put on Naomi Klein, one of the most important and influential economic thinkers of our time, with (giggle) Andrew Sullivan to discuss the economic crises. The booking made about as much sense as it would have made for a previous generation of talk show to book Jean Paul Sartre to discuss Philosophy with Tim Conway or Twiggy. The clip is worth watching just to listen to Ms. Klein. (Hat tip to Driftglass)



I stopped reading Sullivan years ago. His writing was aesthetically pleasing, but it was intellectually vapid. Even worse, Sullivan loved to pontificate on subjects he knew little about.

Aside from the fact that talk show banter can't be polished to sound nice, his appearance on the show fit the rest of the pattern. I couldn't believe how many silly far right talking points he parroted even though they had just been conclusively proven wrong.

There were claims that Sullivan made that were especially silly. Most amazingly, he blamed the financial crises on ordinary people who kept spending more money by borrowing while wages had stagnated.

One obvious problem is that he is completely ignorant of what triggered the subprime mortgage collapse. The underlying cause was the practice of the banksters to use predatory subprime mortgages to try to defraud people into giving them big down payments and then suddenly jacking up interest rates and taking away their homes.

Anyone who has a mortgage knows that the documents are written to be understood only by lawyers. I'm well educated and have an IQ of 140, yet I had trouble understanding my relatively simple fixed rate mortgage documents. I've read enough of Sullivan's columns in the past to know that he would have no hope of understanding my mortgage, much less the language used in the predatory mortgage paperwork.

Even worse, the banksters quietly changed industry practices on adjustable rate mortgages. Before, the interest rates paid on ARMs followed general interest rates, with some lag time because they weren't adjusted daily. With the predatory ARMs, the banksters slipped in huge interest rate increases, unrelated to market conditions, without warning people ahead of time.

The scam collapsed because the banksters, shock of shocks, got too greedy. One bank imitated another until lower middle class and poor people were inundated with deceptive marketing for these ripoffs. So many people had been conned (with no warning from the corporate media I might add) that the flood of foreclosures caused the housing market to collapse.

Some of the banksters realized that the whole thing was shaky and overextended before the whole thing went caput. They created novel and deceptive mortgage paper with complex structures that most of the banksters themselves didn't really understand and peddled them to speculators without providing adequate explanations.

We know what happened next.

Another problem with Sullivan's spin is that stagnating (or even declining) incomes didn't occur in a vacuum. They were the result of the same "free market" ideology and policies that Sullivan almost drooled over later in the clip. It's amazing that even when the show was taped, Sullivan was completely unaware of this.

Oops!

Naomi Klein made some excellent points. The one I hadn't heard before is one I would like to mention. She asked Sullivan where in the world has the kind of "free market capitalism" that he espoused ever existed. Of course, he had no answer.

Ordinarily the silly Sullivan wouldn't bother me that much. He would just be another dim rightist hack. I know not to read his goofy columns, and wouldn't have even watched this if Naomi Klein wasn't in it.

What really galls me is that the corporate media have unilaterally chosen him as the main spokesperson for the queer community even though he is much, much more right leaning than most of us are and has internalzed homophobia issues. It's part of how the media corporations work so hard to limit the range of political thought most Americans are exposed to.

On a lighter note: I remember when I used to live in Washington, DC. When I was at the predominantly gay gym there, no hot guys cruised me one day. On that same day, Andrew Sullivan and Rich Tafel both cruised me. Ordinarily, being cruised by physically unattractive people is flattering as long as they seem like reasonably nice people. Sullivan and Tafel are far from nice people. It was one of a deluge of things that convinced me to move from DC to NYC.

 

Jack Kemp has just died and the corporate press are already abandoning any pretense of balance, fairness, or accuracy. This was one of the most venal hucksters in the history of American politics, yet he is being lionized.

If you recall, Kemp was the con artist who popularized the scam of "supply side economics" to the extreme right. This "theory" claimed that cutting taxes would raise revenues and living standards for the American people. When another dishonest, bought politician, Ronald Reagan, led the effort to apply this tripe, we had enormous deficits and the wages of most Americans declined as the rich got richer. One of the few honest things pappy Bush ever said was when he described it as "Voodoo Economics."

Kemp wasn't a drooling imbecile. He knew that what he was saying was downright laughable. He didn't care. He was completely bought and paid for by wealthy interests who wanted undeserved tax cuts regardless of the consequences for the country, the middle class, and the poor.

Politics and religion are the only two fields where brazen fraud doesn't get prosecuted. If Kemp had attempted to defraud the public in any other field on a comparable scale, he would have been imprisoned for years. He would have deserved it.

To put it simply, Jack Kemp was the Bernie Madoff of politics.

The corporate media also is lying feverishly when they say Kemp was "compassionate." Kemp didn't give a rat's ass about poor people. He just exploited them rhetorically to push "enterprise zones" in poor communities which made his wealthy donors wealthier but did little to employ or otherwise help the communities they exploited for the purposes of selective tax evasion. Even worse, revenues lost because of these scams resulted in services to poor people being cut. So much for "compassion."

Far from being compassionate to women, he was filled with such a vicious and compromising hatred that he actually opposed the basic human right of women to choose on abortion. He was so bigoted against atheists and non-Christians in general that he actually supported unconstitutional, coerced prayer in public schools.

Jack Kemp was a hateful and dishonest political hack without even the slightest human decency. When corporate media lionize this monster, they make it clear that they exist to push the financial agendas of the people who own them. Accurate news reporting is pretty much forbidden in the corporate spin zone.

Liberals are much more inclined to read newspapers, to try to be informed on the issues, and to read in general. Yet, the corporate media go out of their way to insult our intelligence with lies that would strain the credulity of a ten year old. If these media outlets don't start at least trying to be honest and accurate, they are going the way of the mastodons, extinct animals far to similar to the symbol of the GOP.

Update: Joe My God reminds us that Kemp also was an obsessive heterosexist bigot.

 

So much is going on these days, it is difficult to keep up. But, I thought this is worth mentioning even if it is a tad old.

Hillary Clinton, in her recent trip to Iraq, said exactly the opposite of what she should have said. Washington Post 4/26/09:

"I wanted to come today to repeat the commitment that President Obama and I and our government have to the people and nation of Iraq," Clinton said at a town hall-style meeting at the U.S. Embassy that was broadcast on Iraqi television.

This sounds nice, but it is just a shiny veneer on some real ugliness. Our country should be getting out of Iraq ASAP. Given what the war on Iraq is doing to hurt our economy and devastate the Iraqi economy while slaughtering the Iraqi people, we should talk about a commitment to withdraw from Iraq.

Talking about "the commitment" is disturbing, given the fact that "the commitment" has been to holding onto Iraq as an imperial colony and massacring Iraqis in the process. The overwhelming majority of Iraqis have made their desire to have our troops withdraw abundantly clear in opinion polls. This should surprise no one. Can you imagine what Americans would think if foreigners invaded our country, slaughtered over 5% of our population, and took control of our natural resources?

There also was a quote in the Post article which shows just how far corporate media outlets will go to keep us at war:

Violence in Iraq has dropped dramatically since the worst days of the war, from an average of 180 attacks daily in June 2007 to 27 a day in January, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. But the death toll has spiked lately, with insurgents demonstrating that they are still able to obtain explosives and outwit Iraqi security forces.

This is such a crock. The overwhelming majority of violence in Iraq during this war has been perpetrated by US troops against the Iraqi people. Since the Escalation began, arial bombardments have increased dramatically, causing even more violence and death.

When are the corporate media going to be honest and start including US on Iraqi violence when they talk about violence in Iraq?

 

Obviously, this is only a small step in the larger need for our society to ban all private gun ownership. But, it is a step. From a Brady Campaign to End Gun Violence press release 4/21/09:

Washington, DC – The day after the tenth anniversary of the Columbine High School tragedy, U.S. Senator Frank Lautenberg is poised to introduce a bill in the U.S. Senate to close the loophole that allows dangerous people to buy guns at gun shows in most U.S. states without passing a Brady background check. A new report from the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence was also released today, making a forceful case that Brady checks should be conducted for all gun sales in America, including at gun shows.

“Ten years after two dangerous high school students exploited the gun show loophole to destroy the lives of countless fellow students in a horrific massacre, it is way past time to extend the successful Brady background check system in America to every gun sale in America,” said Paul Helmke, President of the Brady Campaign. “There is no rational reason why we should continue to allow a system where criminals and other dangerous people can buy guns without a background check, no questions asked. I want to applaud Senator Frank Lautenberg for the bill he is introducing today in the United States Senate to close the gun show loophole. This legislation will make it harder for dangerous people to get guns, and will be an important step towards requiring Brady background checks for all gun sales.”

The Brady report, No Check, No Gun, was released at the press conference Senator Lautenberg (D-NJ) held this morning. It can be accessed online at http://www.bradycenter.org/xshare/pdf/reports/no-check-no-gun-report.pdf.

The report explains that though the Brady background check system has successfully blocked over 1.6 million prohibited purchasers from buying guns, the system has a major gap because it requires background checks only for gun sales by licensed dealers. About 40 percent of gun sales are made by unlicensed sellers without a background check to see if the purchaser is a criminal or otherwise prohibited from buying guns.

“In effect,” the report explains, “we have two gun markets: A regulated one, where buyers are checked to see if they can legally buy guns, and an unregulated one, where they are not.”

The report explains how the no-check loophole has become a supply source for criminals who want guns and for traffickers who supply criminals. Sales with no Brady check “have armed countless criminals, including the Columbine High School killers, the neo-Nazi spree killer of Ricky Byrdsong and others in Illinois and Indiana, the Los Angeles Jewish Community Center shooter, killers of police officers, and the notorious Mexican drug cartels. Terrorist organizations, including Hezbollah, have attempted to exploit the no check loophole to amass their arsenals,” the Brady report says.

I'm sure the pro-gay bashing, robbery, rape, and murder gun extremists at the NRA won't even support this rather mild and tame legisilation.
 

From an email I received from Progressive Democrats of America:

Immediate calls to Senator Charles Schumer (D) N.Y. requesting that he invite a single payer advocate to participate in the upcoming May 5 and May 14 Senate Finance Committee roundtable discussions on healthcare reform scheduled to take place in Washington, D.C.

Please call Senator Schumer right away at his D.C. office: 202-224-6542 and let him know that a representative from Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) or other single payer advocacy organization should be included if the Finance Committee is to make a full and honest assessment of the financing of reforming our health care system.

To reach National PNHP, Senator Schumer's office can call: 312-782-6006.

When single payer representatives were left out of the White House Summit on Health Care Reform, calls made to the White House prompted them to extend invitations to both Dr. Oliver Fein (President, National PNHP) and Congressman John Conyers.

Let's do it again!

There is broad national support among people and physicians in the U.S. for a single payer system and while the powers that be in Congress have declared single payer off the table - let's make sure they know we will not quietly and passively accept that decision.

Single payer advocates do not have enormous sums of money to influence elected representatives as do the special interests - our most valuable asset is our vote, our voice and the fact that we tell the truth about the only effective fair method of delivering medical care in our country.

So, please join thousands of people across the country and make the call to your New York State Senator: 202-224-6542

Schumer's support of Gillibrand, the Iraq War, torture, and de facto Republicans over real Democrats in the primaries gives people plenty of reason to be alienated by him. Let's hope Schumer acts like a Democrat and supports single payer healthcare.

Learn more about single payer healthcare.