Think Humanely

From DemocracyNow!:

White House lawyers are debating whether the US can legally assassinate a US citizen in Yemen. Anwar al-Awlaki is a US-born cleric who has been accused of having ties to the failed Christmas Day airline bombing and the shooting at Fort Hood. ABC reports US officials fear the possibility of criminal prosecution without approval in advance from the White House for a targeted strike against Awlaki. Awlaki has not been charged with any crimes under US law.

The same government that Republicans do not trust to run a public option, that Democrats do not trust to craft meaningful health care reform, and the same intelligence and justice communities that gave us lie after lie about Iraq, weapons of mass destruction, failed to catch the person(s) responsible for the anthrax attacks and – shall I go on? – now want the power and legal authority to assasinate Americans anywhere in the world based on their say-so. Anwar al-Awlaki might very well be guilty. But we don’t know. Why? Because he hasn’t been found guilty in a court of law. Why hasn’t he been found guilty? Because he hasn’t been tried. Why hasn’t he been tried? Because he hasn’t even been charged with a crime. He is “suspected.”

Do you know who else was “suspected” of being a terrorist or having ties to terrorism? Maher Arar, a Canadian who was tortured for almost a year. There is also German citizen Khaled al-Masri, who was allegedly beaten and sodomized after he was imprisoned indefinitely “because his name was the same as that of another man suspected of terrorist links.” What of the men, women and children imprisoned it our Guantanamo Bay base? From a press release by the Department of Justice:

Since 2002, more than 550 detainees have departed Guantanamo Bay for other destinations, including Albania, Algeria, Afghanistan, Australia, Bangladesh, Bahrain, Belgium, Bermuda, Chad, Denmark, Egypt, France, Iran, Iraq, Ireland, Italy, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Maldives, Mauritania, Morocco, Pakistan, Palau, Portugal, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Sweden, Sudan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Uganda, United Kingdom and Yemen.

We were told that these were the “worst of the worst.” They want to kill your children. Et cetera. Et cetera. Why were they freed? Largely because there was no reliable or credible evidence to support their incarceration. None, which would explain why there were no charges for hundreds of prisoners. No trials. No convictions. Innocent people were imprisoned for years. Innocent people were tortured. Now the government wants to play god and be allowed, with impunity, to declare people, not only in abstentia, but without any legal proceeding whatsoever, not guilty (because, after all, they haven’t been charged with anything) but deserving of death. They want to be able to send assassins (or drones or whatever new killing toy our $700+ billion defense budget can come up with) after Americans anywhere in the world, and “neutralize” them. But we should just trust the government, right? After all, the White House, Congress, Department of Justice, and intelligence agencies have proven themselves to be perfectly credible. They definitely won’t make any mistakes. And they certainly won’t abuse this power.

UPDATED BELOW

Only in a depraved, oligarchic society such as ours, in which materialism and capital are the entire points of living and the only barometer of success, can spending money be equated to free speech. The United States Supreme Court ruled that restrictions on regulations limiting the influence and participation of corporations in our elections were unconstitutional.

Justice Kennedy, who had recently speculated that the Civil Rights Act was unfair (don’t you feel bad for all those poor racists who don’t want the niggers to vote?), wrote, “We find no basis for the proposition that, in the context of political speech, the government may impose restrictions on certain disfavored speakers.” Kennedy is begging the question. He sets up a false premise in order to justify his erroneous conclusion. Corporations spending millions of dollars in order to campaign on behalf on certain candidates isn’t what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they protected individual citizens from government reprisal for voicing dissent, disapproval, etc. And it’s not as if these multi-billion dollar corporations have been disenfranchised (like African-Americans in the South whom the ‘unfair’ Civil Rights Act was meant to protect). In fact, all this depraved ruling does is help this country move the democratic process one step further away from ordinary citizens and toward the oligarchic factions of our society, the wealthy-elite.

Justice Stevens wrote, “”The court’s ruling threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions around the nation.” This is no mere threat – it is a de facto inevitability. Those in California will well remember what happened in the despicable Prop. 8 election and subsequent scandal, when it was revealed that the Mormon church spent obscene amounts of money to alter the outcome of a sovereign state’s election and, in doing so, managed to use it’s vast wealth (and thus influence) to change public opinion. That’s not free speech. That’s just manipulation. And now corporate America has been given free reign to manipulate the voting public ad nauseam.

UPDATE:

The President had the following to say about this travesty of a decision: “It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans. This ruling gives the special interests and their lobbyists even more power in Washington—while undermining the influence of average Americans who make small contributions to support their preferred candidates.”

Corporate money has already eroded the effectiveness of representative democracy in this country. Those who doubt this need only look to the pathetic attempts at health care “reform” that have been molested time and time again by insurance companies and the health care industry. Now watering down bills, influencing legislation, and putting in corporate-constructed Manchurian candidates will be even easier. And perfectly legal.

From an AP story earlier today:

Evangelical pastor Rick Warren’s plea for donations to fill a $900,000 deficit at his Southern California megachurch brought in $2.4 million, Warren announced to cheers during a sermon at the church on Saturday.

Warren said the amount raised after the appeal was posted online Wednesday included only money parishioners brought in person to Saddleback Church by New Year’s Eve. More was arriving by hand and by mail, he said.

“This is pretty amazing,” said Warren, who made the announcement by bringing out 24 volunteers each holding a sign for $100,000. “I don’t think any church has gotten a cash offering like that off a letter.”

Rick Warren is a disgusting human being, one who preaches extreme hate and intolerance while simulatenously taking advantage of thousands of people by preaching about fairy tales and the “wisdom” of backward, ignorant people from 2,000 years ago. Imagine going into a hospital for a much-needed surgery and your doctor pulling out the writings of Hippocrates for reference on how to best perform the procedure. Sure, Hippocrates was inventive and intelligent relative to how little everyone else knew and understood at the time. Today, however, even children know more about medicine. Here are some of the jewels of wisdom spouted by this fat bastard:

“Every obstacle is an opportunity. Every problem has potential. Every crisis is an opportunity for ministry.”

“”Now let me say this really clearly: We support Proposition 8. And if you believe what the Bible says about marriage, you need to support Proposition 8. I never support a candidate, but on moral issues, I come out very clear.”

This particularly vile line of preaching comes with video:

Here is an interview with the religious-friendly BeliefNet:

“WARREN: The issue to me, I’m not opposed to that [some partnership rights] as much as I’m opposed to redefinition of a 5,000 year definition of marriage. I’m opposed to having a brother and sister being together and calling that marriage. I’m opposed to an older guy marrying a child and calling that marriage. I’m opposed to one guy having multiple wives and calling that marriage.

BELIEFNET: Do you think those are equivalent to gays getting married?

Oh , I do. For 5,000 years, marriage has been defined by every single culture and every single religion – this is not a Christian issue. Buddhist, Muslims, Jews – historically, marriage is a man and a woman.”

This absurd, despicable thinking helps explain this :

“We shall not tolerate this aspect at all,” Dr Warren said.

Warren was speaking in support of Ugandan Anglicans who intend to boycott the forthcoming Lambeth Conference, and this harsh rejection of tolerance for gays and lesbians may have serious consequences in a country where homosexuals face harrassment and and the threat of imprisonment.

Warren’s comment is of a piece with his support for Martin Ssempa, the Ugandan evangelist who has been a keynote speaker at a Warren conference, and who has received US global AIDS prevention funds. As I wrote in August, Ssempa wants to ensure that homosexuality remains illegal and that gays and lesbians are identified in the public mind as sexual abusers. Ssempa calls for media censorship against opposing views and the dismissal of dissenting academics, and last summer he organised a rally with the theme “A Call for Action on Behalf of the Victims of Homosexuality”, at which he railed against “molestation and sodomy.”

He doesn’t believe in evolution; he compared those who thought that a husband should be allowed to let a comatose wife (whose brain had literally turned to mush) die and the husband’s supporters to Nazis; he thinks that the government should take away the right of a women to decide for herself what medical procedures she needs to have – having compared anything other than a complete anti-choice stance to a holocaust. There’s also this excerpted passage about Warren the tax-evader:

The California megachurch minister and opponent of gay marriage who will deliver the invocation at Barack Obama’s inauguration had his income tax returns audited in 1996. When the IRS tried to collect the taxes it claimed he owed, Warren went to court. Congress then passed a law granting Warren’s tax deduction, pre-empting the US Court of Appeals from even taking up the case against him. The votes in the House and Senate were unanimous.

The IRS permits members of the clergy to claim exemptions for their housing. At the time of Warren’s audit the amount claimed had to be “reasonable”–it shouldn’t exceed the fair market value for the rental of the home. That 1996 audit concluded that Warren was deducting more than that–the IRS said he owed it $55,300. Warren challenged the IRS in tax court, arguing that his housing exemption should be unlimited.

The facts were simple: in 1993 Warren deducted $77,663, his entire Saddleback Church salary that year, as a housing expense–and paid no taxes at all on that salary. In addition, he claimed a deduction for his mortgage expenses–even though they had been covered by the salary. He made similar claims in subsequent tax returns.

Warren spent four years defending his housing deduction in tax court

And as a preemptive counter to those who can’t get enough of this self-serving, ludicrous figure, don’t bother citing some of the “good” things he has done. I’m not arguing that he is evil incarnate, only that he is a bigoted, destructive, hateful, delusional charlatan who preys on other people’s emotional, intellectual, and psychological shortcomings and manipulates, takes advantage of, and exploits them in order to aggregate additional power, wealth, and fame – fundamentally no different than Kenneth Hagin, Rodney Howard-Browne, Ron Hubbard, David Koresh, Jim Jones, etc. He is a malignancy masquerading as a cure.

It only seems appropriate to end one one more quote by the good reverend, arguably his most intellectually dishonest and telling quote I’ve been able to find:

“We serve God by serving others. The world defines greatness in terms of power, possessions, prestige, and position. If you can demand service from others, you’ve arrived. In our self-serving culture with its me-first mentality, acting like a servant is not a popular concept.”

And Rick Warren has plenty of servants.