During the first year of his administration, Barack Obama followed Bush regime policies in most major areas, while making a number of small concessions to try to mollify Democratic voters. Here are some examples of major policy continuity:

1) Increasing total occupying forces in Iraq (troops plus mercenaries)

2) Continuing the policy of kidnapping people and sending them to other countries to be tortured ("extraordinary rendition")

3) Keeping the torture center in Guantanamo open

4) Expanding the Bush regime's hate based initiatives to take federal grant money from inclusive nonprofits and give it to nonprofits that discriminate on the basis of religion.

5) Continuing the policy of creating AFRICOM.

6) Refusing to withdraw from the World Trade Organization

7) Refusing to negotiate the end of corporate controlled trade agreements such as NAFTA

8) Attending "National Prayer Breakfasts"

9) Expaning the wars in Pakistan and Afghanistan

10) Supporting a huge corporate giveaway in the name of "healthcare reform" (remember the Bush regime's Medicare changes?)

11) Refusing to support legislation cracking down on bankster and brokester bonuses.

12) Continuing illegal spying on Americans without warrants.

I could go on, and on, and on, but you get the point. This year's administration budget proposal includes some important continuity with the Bush regime. Obama wants domestic spending (including veterans benefits) frozen while continuing enormous increases of military spending. The proposal does nothing to cut off funding for the illegal war on Iraq that goes against American values.

Yet, there is an aspect of the budget that actually does represent a major break with the policies of the Bush regime. President Obama is calling for Bush's tax cuts for the rich to expire. Even when the tax breaks expire, the parasitical rich in this country won't be paying anywhere near their fair share in taxes. But, any progress in this area is critically important. It represents a break with 30 years of corrupt policies that have robbed the poor and middle class to benefit wealthy campaign donors.

We need to pressure President Obama to break with more Bush regime policies. This is a good start, but Obama has a long way to go before he can call himself a Real Democrat.

 

One of the few decent things that President Obama has done since getting in the White House has been to support funding to close the illegal gulag in Guantanamo. (It's illegal because the only thing our treaty with Cuba allows us to do there is refuel ships and because of human rights violations there that violate international law.) So, what do the vast majority of so-called Democrats in Congress do?

They join with Republicans to block this funding.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has not been alone in his disturbing desire to keep Gitmo open. However, he has pursued this with a missionary zeal, a Mormon missionary zeal, to be more specific. Reid's actions are in concert with the fanatical racism of Mormonism.

Mormons certainly have no monopoly on racism, but Mormonism is the only major church in this country to explicitly endorse white supremacy in its teachings. Mormons believe that non white people are being punished for their ancestors refusing to fight with Jesus against Lucifer before humans lived on this planet. Yes, this is crazy, but so much of religion is crazy that it shouldn't surprise you.

Ex-Mormons and other critics of that hateful cult accurately point out that Mormonism is based on plagiarized science fiction. What often gets left out is when Joseph Smith plagiarized the Book of Mormon, the late 1820s and early 1830s.

If you think that racism is bad now, the white supremacy of that era would make your hair stand on end. People of African origins were considered completely subhuman and all non white people were openly claimed to be inferior, without hesitation or apology. A major motive for this disgusting ideology was to justify slavery and trade arrangements that impoverished non-white people.

Under these circumstances, it should be no surprise that Mormon ideology is like a KKK sci fi fantasy. Equally unsurprising is that discussion of this is taboo, given the pro religion bias in our society and the corporate media. However, if you want to understand Mormonism, you have to acknowledge that it is as racist, sexist, and heterosexist as the Ku Klux Klan.

When you know that Harry Reid subscribes to this hateful ideological system, it should surprise no one that he is obsessed with continuing a gulag whose prisoners primarily suffer there based on racial profiling. One would also expect that Reid would work behind the scenes to sabotage lgbt civil rights legislation, which he has. It would be typical for a Mormon to oppose the inalienable right of women to have abortions, based on misogynistic gender role expectations. Reid does just that too.

If you wonder why Reid has been so rabid in his opposition to doing what any decent, moral human being would do on the Gitmo gulag, just look at his religious beliefs. Comprehension requires breaking the taboo of looking at religion to explain political behavior.

When anyone speaks out against a hateful and bigoted church, the conditioned reaction among so many of our society is to claim that it is bigoted or intolerant to do so. This is based on a rhetorical ploy invented by the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s and picked up by Christian Right hate groups in the 80s. (The Mormons adopted it during the controversy over Prop. 8.) The claim is:

It is "intolerant" to speak out against intolerance.

Given the similar values between the Mormon Church and the Klan, it isn't exactly shocking that they use the same rhetorical ploys to defend themselves.

The privileged status of religion is so great in our society that it is considered hateful to hold churches to the same standards that any other organizations or institutions. This religious privilege harms real debate. Any privileged status for religion is inherently discriminatory against atheists as well.

Prop. 8 is hardly the only reason why people should boycott Utah and boycott Mormon businesses. There are lots of reasons for this and why the Sundance Festival should be moved out of Utah. The Mormon cult is one of the worst outgrowths of the prejudices of 19th Century America. Mormonism is a cancer on our society.

 

Image: beachblogger42

During the distorted and dishonest campaign by Dick Cheney to continue torture and indefinite detentions going, one element of it really sticks out. The corporate media are actually taking what Cheney says seriously.

Never mind that Dick Cheney got himself put in charge of the Bush regime's terrorism task force and made sure it didn't meet until October 2001. Never mind that Cheney sent our Air Force on highly distracting exercises at the same time when the Bush regime had numerous credible warnings from a variety of countries that Al Qaeda was going to stage terrorist attacks using commercial airplanes.

These facts alone should completely discredit Cheney on the subject of terrorism. There are more.

1) Cheney led a campaign of fraud and fear in order to get us into an illegal war of aggression and genocide against the Iraqi people.

2) Cheney was deeply involved in other criminal activities including, torture, illegal domestic surveillance, and detentions of innocent people without charge, much less trial.

3) Cheney had lied about the alleged effectiveness of torture on numerous occasions in the past, despite the fact that every credible source in law enforcement and anti terrorism work has made it clear that torture does not produce accurate information.

4) Cheney held secret meetings with energy company contributors on energy policy. While we don't know all the details of the meetings, we do know that an important aspect involved details on how Big Oil would carve up Iraq's oil after the War had been launched.

5) Cheney was an active member of the Project for a New American Century, which had expressed hopes that a major attack, comparable to Pearl Harbor, would be launched on the US so they could push their agenda.

A defender of the corporate media might say that Cheney is a former Vice President, so his views have to be taken seriously. Even that is factually incorrect. Dick Cheney never was legally or constitutionally this country's Vice President. He was illegally occupying the office due to two stolen elections.

There really is no excuse for the corporate media's pandering to Dick Cheney. It is a truly brazen example of the propagandistic and unreliable nature of what we are bombarded with on a regular basis.

 

While the pundits and public debate the merits of keeping the detention centers at Guantanamo Bay open, no such debate is taking place in the Bush regime. Why?

You don't have to dig far to find out why. Last year, Halliburton received another construction contract for work on yet another prison facility there. This $30 million contract was not the first for a company that was Dick Cheney's former employer and where Cheney continues to have incredibly valuable stock options in the company. It is extremely unlikely that this will be the last Halliburton contract at Gitmo.

Throughout the War on Terror, protecting the country has been of little or no concern to the Bush regime, which is far more interested in justifying bilking the taxpayers than fighting terrorism. If Bush cronies could make money by handing bombs to bin Laden, the Bush regime would do everything possible to facilitate the transaction.

The Washington Post’s usual habit is to propagandize in favor of corporate interests and the GOP in its “news pages” while running moderate to liberal editorials. This lets them promote their right-wing agenda while giving their knuckle-walking rightist subscribers the proper impression that they are part of the “liberal media.” Every once in a while, they slip up big time as was the case in their recent editorial trying to put a positive spin on Bush’s gulags.

The Post actually had the audacity to write about Amnesty International’s use of the term “gulags” in the following manner:

But lately the organization has tended to save its most vitriolic condemnations not for the world's dictators but for the United States.

This is laughable when you remember that George W. Bush is illegally occupying the White House due to not one, but two stolen elections. Thus far, the Post has refused to report that either election has been stolen. This claim also is deceptive because condemning the actions of the Bush regime is not condemning the United States. The Bush regime in no way represents the United States.

The Post also falsely claimed that “Guantanamo Bay is an ad hoc creation, designed to contain captured enemy combatants during wartime.” In fact, the gulag at Guantanamo Bay is part of the Bush regime’s broader desire to torture and imprison Muslims. So far, none of the American citizens illegally imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay has been charged or tried in a legitimate court of law.

The Post goes on to say:

Abuses there -- including new evidence of desecrating the Koran -- have been investigated and discussed by the FBI, the press and, to a still limited extent, the military.

These “investigations” have been mere coverups. There has yet to be any Special Prosecutor appointed to determine the Bush regime’s roll in the mass torture, rape, and murder of prisoners in their gulags. If legitimate criminal investigations had been taken place, senior Bush administration officials already would have been indicted for war crimes. If the press in the US were truly independent of corporate corruption and the Bush regime’s political influence, every major daily paper in this country already would have called for Bush’s and Cheney’s impeachments. There would be equally strong calls in the nation’s daily newspapers for Bush Administration officials to be tried for crimes against humanity.

The Post also engages in homophobic rhetoric in its editorial.

Turning a report on prisoner detention into another excuse for Bush-bashing or America-bashing undermines Amnesty's legitimate criticisms of U.S. policies and weakens the force of its investigations of prison systems in closed societies.

The Washington Post’s use of the terms “Bush-basing” and “America-bashing” is outrageous. Equating completely fair, accurate, and legitimate criticism of brutal policies with violent assaults and murders of people on the basis of their sexual orientations and gender identities is viciously heterosexist. The Post owes all of its lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender readers an immediate apology for this bigoted rhetoric.

The use of the second term adds additional insult given the fact that every patriotic American is outraged at the Bush regime and its gulags.

The Post has abandoned the pretense of any kind of journalistic professionalism or editorial judgement. The Post is nothing more than a propaganda device for corporate interests, the GOP, and the Religious Right. There is no point in even buying the paper. It is a complete joke.

Human Rights First: In Their Own Words: Detainees Tell of Degradation of Religious Beliefs at Guantanamo

NEW YORK – Detainees held at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay told their U.S. lawyers about the use of tactics intended to degrade their religious beliefs in a series of interviews that were recently declassified by the U.S. Department of Defense and were published at Human Rights First today. The charges are consistent with other allegations by detainees at U.S.- run facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan, and with Defense Department reports that have already been made public.

In addition to the press release, Human Rights First has released a detailed report.

It is becoming even more obvious that trashing the Koran is part of the Bush regime's policy of torturing prisoners, not just in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also at Gitmo. This is typical of the Christian Right's book-burning mentality.

Harper’s Magazine has released an interview with an Afghan prisoner who was an eyewitness to throwing the Koran “into the latrine.”

Even before this latest disclosure, it was obvious that Newsweek had backed down from an accurate story in response to political pressure from the Bush regime. The retraction is so typical of the right-wing bias and lack of journalistic standards so common in today’s corporate media.

Of course, the very notion of “desecration” is intellectually dubious, to put it charitably. But, flushing books down the toilet too closely reflects the anti-intellectualism of Bush and the rest of the Religious Right.

Congratulations to The Liquid List for sniffing this one out.

UPDATE: The International Red Cross informed the Pentagon about similar incidents in 2002 and 2003.