"SNL" will have the first of three prime-time specials Thursday at 9:30, devoted specifically to the presidential race. Should be funner than the role models. -Ed
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/09/opinion/09collins.html?th&emc=th Clearing the Ayers By GAIL COLLINS NY Times Op-Ed: October 8, 2008 John McCain traces the rancorous tone of the presidential campaign back to last summer when he invited Barack Obama to have lots and lots of town-hall meetings with him all around the country. When Obama turned him down, obviously McCain had no choice but to start depicting his opponent as a terrorist-loving advocate of talking dirty to kindergarteners. Finally this week, the two men did meet in a town-hall showdown, which turned out to be like all other debates, except with much less excitement and much more pacing around. It seems unlikely that many people switched off their TV sets and said: "Gee, I could sit through a dozen of these." McCain may feel compelled to go back to his guilt-by-association theme. And this has me feeling very guilty about my associates. ( And he did, within minutes of this publication. -Ed) The McCain folks have been obsessed with William Ayers, a neighbor of Obama's, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Back in the 1960s, Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, were leaders of the Weather Underground, an antiwar group whose penchant for violence was exceeded only by its haplessness. Ayers has since become an education expert and was named Chicago's Citizen of the Year in 1997. He gave Obama a house party when Obama was running for the State Senate. In my experience, most State Senate hopefuls are so thrilled at any sign of interest that they would happily attend a reception given by a homeless couple in their cardboard box. But even though Obama was 8 years old at the time the Weathermen were in the news, that house party puts all their misdeeds on his platter. Sarah Palin has been telling her increasingly scary rallies that he is somebody "who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists." Fox News, in a one-hour special on Obama's associates hosted by Sean Hannity, came up with an "Internet journalist" named Andy Martin who has spent his life running bizarre political campaigns with occasional detours into the clink and filing lawsuits laced with paranoia and anti-Semitism. Based on this expertise, Martin deduced that Ayers was the puppet master of Obama's rise in politics and that Obama's community-organizer gig was actually training for "a radical overthrow of the government." Before we go any further, I have a confession to make. When I was a college student, I believe I attended a party with Bernardine Dohrn. This was pre-Weather, when Dohrn was a leader of the Students for a Democratic Society, better known as S.D.S. Some of my friends wanted to meet her because they were interested in establishing an S.D.S. chapter at our campus. I was opposed, under the presumption that S.D.S. meant Students for Decent Styles, a group that had been active in fighting spaghetti-strap dresses at my high school. Still, under the new rules, I believe I may now be held partly responsible for all of Dohrn's misdeeds, including aggravated battery, bail jumping, the Days of Rage and unreadable political tracts. McCain's favorite supporter, Senator Joseph Lieberman, recently called the Obama-Ayers connection "fair game." This reminded me that Lieberman once came to a party at my house. It was years ago, when he was still a Connecticut state senator, and we have already established that state senators will go to anything. Still, I can't help but feel that I am not only a potential victim of the new guilt-by-association standard, I am also somewhat complicit in establishing it. Obama's retaliation for the Ayers assault has been to remind voters that many years ago McCain was censured in the Senate for his relationship with Charles Keating, the rogue banker whose failed Lincoln Savings and Loan cost the taxpayers $2.6 billion at a time when $2.6 billion was really worth something. When I was a teenager, Keating came to my Catholic girls high school in Cincinnati in his capacity as the founder of Citizens for Decent Literature, an anti-pornography group. His theme was the evil of wearing shorts in the summertime. Keating said he knew a young mother who took her child for a walk while wearing Bermuda shorts. A motorist, overwhelmed with lust at the sight of the back of her uncovered calves, lost control of his car and slammed into them. Everybody was killed, and it was all her fault. We were then asked to sign pledge cards promising to conform to standards of modesty that would have satisfied the Taliban. True, none of this really proves that I was responsible for the banking scandals of the 1980s. But if Barack Obama is responsible for the Weather Underground, and if the mother in Bermuda shorts was responsible for the car crash, I am pretty sure that I am on the hook as well. *** http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20975.htm Thousands of Troops Are Deployed on U.S. Streets Ready to Carry Out "Crowd Control" Members of Congress were told they could face martial law if they didn't pass the bailout bill. This will not be the last time. By Naomi Wolf 08/10/08 "AlterNet" -- Background: the First Brigade of the Third Infantry Division, three to four thousand soldiers, has been deployed in the United States as of October 1. Their stated mission is the form of crowd control they practiced in Iraq, subduing "unruly individuals," and the management of a national emergency. I am in Seattle and heard from the brother of one of the soldiers that they are engaged in exercises now. Amy Goodman reported that an Army spokesperson confirmed that they will have access to lethal and non lethal crowd control technologies and tanks. George Bush struck down Posse Comitatus, thus making it legal for military to patrol the U.S. He has also legally established that in the "War on Terror," the U.S. is at war around the globe and thus the whole world is a battlefield. Thus the U.S. is also a battlefield. He also led change to the 1807 Insurrection Act to give him far broader powers in the event of a loosely defined "insurrection" or many other "conditions" he has the power to identify. The Constitution allows the suspension of habeas corpus -- habeas corpus prevents us from being seized by the state and held without trial -- in the event of an "insurrection." With his own army force now, his power to call a group of protesters or angry voters "insurgents" staging an "insurrection" is strengthened. U.S. Rep. Brad Sherman of California said to Congress, captured on C-Span and viewable on YouTube, that individual members of the House were threatened with martial law within a week if they did not pass the bailout bill: "The only way they can pass this bill is by creating and sustaining a panic atmosphere. . Many of us were told in private conversations that if we voted against this bill on Monday that the sky would fall, the market would drop two or three thousand points the first day and a couple of thousand on the second day, and a few members were even told that there would be martial law in America if we voted no." If this is true and Rep. Sherman is not delusional, I ask you to consider that if they are willing to threaten martial law now, it is foolish to assume they will never use that threat again. It is also foolish to trust in an orderly election process to resolve this threat. And why deploy the First Brigade? One thing the deployment accomplishes is to put teeth into such a threat. I interviewed Vietnam veteran, retired U.S. Air Force Colonel and patriot David Antoon for clarification: "If the President directed the First Brigade to arrest Congress, what could stop him?" "Nothing. Their only recourse is to cut off funding. The Congress would be at the mercy of military leaders to go to them and ask them not to obey illegal orders." "But these orders are now legal?'" "Correct." "If the President directs the First Brigade to arrest a bunch of voters, what would stop him?" "Nothing. It would end up in courts but the action would have been taken." "If the President directs the First Brigade to kill civilians, what would stop him?" "Nothing." "What would prevent him from sending the First Brigade to arrest the editor of the Washington Post?" "Nothing. He could do what he did in Iraq -- send a tank down a street in Washington and fire a shell into the Washington Post as they did into Al Jazeera, and claim they were firing at something else." "What happens to members of the First Brigade who refuse to take up arms against U.S. citizens?" "They'd probably be treated as deserters as in Iraq: arrested, detained and facing five years in prison. In Iraq a study by Ann Wright shows that deserters -- reservists who refused to go back to Iraq -- got longer sentences than war criminals." "Does Congress have any military of their own?" "No. Congress has no direct control of any military units. The Governors have the National Guard but they report to the President in an emergency that he declares." "Who can arrest the President?" "The Attorney General can arrest the President after he leaves or after impeachment." [Note: Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi has asserted it is possible for District Attorneys around the country to charge President Bush with murder if they represent districts where one or more military members who have been killed in Iraq formerly resided.] "Given the danger do you advocate impeachment?" "Yes. President Bush struck down Posse Comitatus -- which has prevented, with a penalty of two years in prison, U.S. leaders since after the Civil War from sending military forces into our streets -- with a 'signing statement.' He should be impeached immediately in a bipartisan process to prevent the use of military forces and mercenary forces against U.S. citizens" "Should Americans call on senior leaders in the Military to break publicly with this action and call on their own men and women to disobey these orders?" "Every senior military officer's loyalty should ultimately be to the Constitution. Every officer should publicly break with any illegal order, even from the President." "But if these are now legal. If they say, 'Don't obey the Commander in Chief,' what happens to the military?" "Perhaps they would be arrested and prosecuted as those who refuse to participate in the current illegal war. That's what would be considered a coup." "But it's a coup already." "Yes." Naomi Wolf is the author of Give Me Liberty (Simon and Schuster, 2008), the sequel to the New York Times best-seller The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot (Chelsea Green, 2007). ------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/laamn/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/laamn/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
