Rights and Liberties

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For the Record, I'm No Holocaust "Skeptic"
Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet on December 24, 2009 at 10:24 AM.

Earlier this week, I wrote about this silly "study" purporting to find wide-spread anti-Semitism* among progressive bloggers.

Among the really pathetic bits of innuendo that passed for evidence of this dark truth was this: a blog-post written by the very liberal Glenn Greenwald was linked to, approvingly, by David Duke. This supposedly means that, in their heart of hearts, Greenwald and Duke share a similar world-view. Duke's a well-known anti-Semite, ergo ...

Anyway, I won't provide a link, but a Holocaust denier has now approvingly linked to my post on his blog, calling me "an honest Jewish writer."

According to the logic of that study, it's now perfectly legitimate to assume that I, too, am a Holocaust "skeptic" because of the link. Or at least it's an open question. So I figured I'd just go on the record to reaffirm my long-held belief that the Holocaust really did happen!

Thanks for your attention to this matter.

*No, I don't care that Arabs are technically a Semitic people as well, and I'm not sure why commenters always think this semantic point is so significant -- I'm just employing the common usage.

Commander Changes Tune, Says He Won't Court-Martial, Jail Pregnant Soldiers
Posted by Amanda Terkel, Think Progress on December 23, 2009 at 12:47 PM.

This week, news outlets reported on a controversial new policy that threatens women soldiers on active duty who become pregnant — and the men who impregnate them — with jailtime. Maj. Gen. Anthony Cucolo issued the new rule, which took effect on Nov. 4, “because he said he was losing too many women with critical skills” and needed the threat of jail and a court martial as an “extra deterrent.”

Since the news of the directive came out, Cucolo has faced strong criticism from women’s rights advocates. The National Organization for Women (NOW) called it “ridiculous.” Four women Democratic U.S. senators — Barbara Boxer (CA), Barbara Mikulski (MD), Jeanne Shaheen (NH), and Kirsten Gillibrand (NY) — wrote a letter to Cucolo urging him to rescind the policy, saying they could “think of no greater deterrent to women contemplating a military career than the image of a pregnant woman being severely punished simply for conceiving a child.”

Yesterday, Cucolo clarified the directive, saying he has no plans to court-martial pregnant women:

While violation of any of the rules in “General Order Number 1″ could lead to court-martial, Cucolo said he never intended such a drastic punishment for pregnancy.

“I believe that I can handle violations of this aspect with lesser degrees of punishment,” Cucolo told reporters. “I have not ever considered court-martial for this. I do not ever see myself putting a soldier in jail for this.”

The general said he alone would decide on each case based on the individual circumstances.

So far, there have been “eight cases of women getting pregnant while deployed under his command. Four were given letters of reprimand that were put in their local files, which means they would not end up in their permanent files and they would not be a factor in being considered for promotions. The four other women found out they were pregnant soon after they deployed; because they were not impregnated while deployed, no disciplinary action was taken.”

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Cop Pulls Gun During Snowball Fight ... Could it Have Been 'Roid Rage'?
Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet on December 21, 2009 at 5:15 PM.

OK, here's an item. There's a snowball fight. Broad daylight. Young people. One of them chucks a snowball at a Hummer, which happened to be driven by an off-duty cop. The cop gets out, and decides that pulling his gun is an appropriate response. To a snowball.

The DC police department denied the allegation at first, until Reason put up footage of the incident on Youtube (video to your right).

BBC:

At one point on the video - shown on YouTube - the man identifies himself as a "detective", but refuses to give his full name.

Then he proceeds to admit to pulling his gun.

"Yes I did because I got hit by snowballs," he tells angry residents who demand to know his badge number.

He challenges them to "throw another snowball".

A senior police official in Washington DC has said an off-duty officer who drew a gun at a snowball fight behaved in a "totally inappropriate" way.

Metropolitan Police Chief Cathy Lanier said video footage left "no doubt" the office drew his gun after his vehicle, a hummer, was pelted with snowballs.

The footage showed an angry crowd gathering, chanting: "You don't bring a gun to a snowball fight".

Ms Lanier said the officer had been placed on desk duty.

[...]

Is a statement, Ms Lanier said she had reviewed all the video footage of the incident taken by the public and it was "very obvious" the officer had drawn his police-issue gun "in response to the snowballs hitting his vehicle".

"I have no doubt about this, nor has the officer denied the accusations," she said.

The confrontation ended only when other policemen were despatched to the scene, and managed to calm everyone down.

She said he had not denied the allegations.

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Ridiculous "Study" Supposedly Finds Widespread Anti-Semitism on Progressive Websites
Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet on December 21, 2009 at 3:00 PM.

Given how ubiquitous unsubstantiated charges of anti-Semitism have become in the debate over the Middle East conflict, I’m tempted to ignore the Institute for Global Jewish Affairs’ recent “report” supposedly exposing the liberal blogosphere as a teaming hotbed of raw Jew-hatred.

It's easy to dismiss. It may dress itself as some sort of empirical research project, but the "study" is transparently devoid of any informational value, intellectually bankrupt and clearly the product of working backwards from a conclusion arrived at on ideological grounds.

But I won't ignore it, because the strategic decision to pin one's political opponents with charges of anti-Semitism only dilutes the power of that word. Then, like the boy who cried wolf, when real anti-Semitism rears its decidedly ugly head the word loses its all-important power to shame. I'm Jewish, and I don't fear sharp-elbowed criticism of Israeli policy on websites, so it's not in my interest to allow it to be conflated with true anti-Semitism, which is absolutely no joke.

The gist:

Progressive blogs and news sites in the United States are a new field where Jew-hatred, in both its classic and anti-Israeli forms, manifests itself. This incitement is hardly monitored, as many of the most popular blogs are only a few years old and it seems counterintuitive that such anti-Semitic expressions would be found in this political milieu. Monitoring the media for anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli bigotry has so far almost exclusively consisted of reading the major American newspapers, magazines, and journals and attending to the three major news networks, as well as radio broadcasts. However, the huge amount of content in the political blogosphere makes such monitoring - which is increasingly necessary - much more difficult to achieve with any degree of thoroughness.

And they're not going to begin applying any thoroughness here. Ultimately, what the researchers actually found will come as a surprise to few readers: people tend to be mean on the internet.

That is undeniably true. They're mean, cantankerous, undignified, unrestrained and hyperbolic (obviously I don't mean you kids, who are always perfectly dignified). And that's true whatever the subject. For example, in addition to politics, I fancy baseball, and when Red Sox and Yankees fans go at it on the fan websites, it's as fierce as a member of Hamas debating an Israeli settler.

Progressive bloggers (and blog readers, which I'll get to in a moment) can offer some uncomfortable criticism. If one wants to marginalize them as fringe anti-Semites, it's easy enough to find a few saying mean things about their opponents on this issue, as one could with any other. Like baseball. Then if one works, say, at the Institute for Global Jewish Affairs, one merely extrapolates some larger, darker message about modern liberalism from that typically unconstrained rhetoric. It becomes more proof -- dubious, but eagerly accepted in some quarters -- of the rise of "new anti-Semitism" on the left.

Having established a point of agreement -- people are mean on the internet -- consider the flimsiness of the evidence the authors marshal in support of their larger thesis, at least when their ominous editorial flourishes are stripped away.

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Revealed: Bush White House Raised Terror Alert Based On Con Man's Wild Al Jazeera "Decoding" Claims
Posted by Liliana Segura, AlterNet on December 21, 2009 at 12:00 PM.

From the Dept. of You-Can't-Make-This-Shit-Up, TPM Muckracker reports:

A self-styled Nevada codebreaker convinced the CIA he could decode secret terrorist targeting information sent through Al Jazeera broadcasts, prompting the Bush White House to raise the terror alert level to Orange (high) in December 2003, with Tom Ridge warning of "near-term attacks that could either rival or exceed what we experience on September 11," according to a new report in Playboy.

We all knew the DHS color-coded terror alerts were bogus and politically-motivated -- Ridge himself recently admitted as much -- but this? This is just ... loony tunes.

According to TPM, "the man who prompted the December 2003 Orange alert was Dennis Montgomery, who has since been embroiled in various lawsuits, including one for allegedly bouncing $1 million in checks during a Caesars Palace spree. His former lawyer calls him a 'habitual liar engaged in fraud.'"

He must have been a pretty good liar to have pulled this off (at least one would hope):

Working out of a Reno, Nevada, software firm called eTreppid Technologies, Montgomery took in officials in the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology and convinced them that technology he invented -- but could not explain -- was pulling terrorist-produced "bar codes" from Al Jazeera television broadcasts. Using his proprietary technology, those bar codes could be translated into longitudes and latitudes and flight numbers. Terrorist leaders were using that data to direct their compatriots about the next target.

The original article quotes a "former CIA official" who was incredulous when he discovered the arrangement between the agency and Montgomery:

The federal government was acting on the Al Jazeera claims without even understanding how Montgomery found his coordinates. "I said, 'Give us the algorithms that allowed you to come up with this stuff.' They wouldn't even do that," says the first officer. "And I was screaming, 'You gave these people fucking money?'" ...

In a detail that should really piss off right-wingers, credit for calling out this bullshit artist goes to ... France.

A branch of the French intelligence services helped convince the Americans that the bar codes were fake. The CIA and the French commissioned a technology company to locate or re-create codes in the Al Jazeera transmission. They found definitively that what Montgomery claimed was there was not. Quietly, as far as the CIA was concerned, the case was closed. The agency turned the matter over to the counterintelligence side to see where it had gone wrong.

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Jailtime For Pregnant Soldiers? The Army Has Made Getting Pregnant a Punishable Offense
Posted by Amanda Terkel, Think Progress on December 21, 2009 at 11:00 AM.

Major General Anthony Cucolo, who is responsible for operations in northern Iraq, has issued a controversial new policy -- which went into effect on Nov. 4 -- that allows throwing women servicemembers on active duty in jail if they become pregnant:

Under the new policy, troops expecting a baby face court martial and a possible prison term -- and so do the men who made them pregnant.

And the rule applies to married couples at war together, who are expected to make sure their love lives do not interfere with duty.

Usual U.S. Army policy is to send pregnant soldiers home from combat zones within 14 days.

But Major General Anthony Cucolo, who runs U.S. operations in northern Iraq, issued the new orders because he said he was losing too many women with critical skills. He needed the threat of court martial and jail time as an extra deterrent, he said.

All troops under his command are covered by the extension to the military’s legal code -- the first time the U.S. Army has made pregnancy a punishable offence.

Military staff judge advocates for the Army have reviewed and approved the policy. The policy is legal under military law, but it raises "a mare's nest of legal, ethical and policy issues." For example, while the policy does say that a man who impregnates a woman will receive equal punishment, it may be difficult to identify him unless the woman reveals who he is.

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What Houston's Election of a Gay Mayor Tells Us About "Red State" Texas
Posted by Amanda Marcotte, Comment Is Free on December 21, 2009 at 10:00 AM.

Some local news stories go nationwide and cause a national alarm, and some simply go nationwide and then sink underwater unnoticed. But on the very rare occasion, a news story goes nationwide and is received with a double take and a "come again?".

That's what happened when Houston became the biggest city in the U.S. last week to elect an openly gay mayor, Annise Parker. Yes, that would be Houston, Texas – the largest city in a state that's assumed worldwide to be nothing but a hot bed of gun-toting, Bible-thumping rightwing reactionaries. Obviously, it's time for the rest of the world to start taking a more complex view, and start thinking of Texas as more than the home of George W Bush.

Parker's election inadvertently revealed the dirty little secret that native (and liberal) Texans like myself have known and been trying to publicize for a long time, which is that Texas is far from a conservative monolith. On the contrary; not only do all the major cities in Texas vote consistently for Democrats, but some rural areas on the Texas-Mexican border have been marginal to consistently "blue" for some time now.

This lines up with the larger national trends in America. Republicans only win elections by controlling white-dominated rural and suburban areas, and almost all other parts of the country lean towards the Democrats. And thus Republican power is being chipped away at slowly through pure demographics, as the nation as a whole grows more racially diverse and more urban. In many ways, Texas is ahead of the trend, since the state has not had a white majority since 2005.

Despite the cold, hard facts, however, Texas is still seen as the old conservative stereotype. In fact, the mainstream media went to some lengths to downplay the significance of Annise Parker's election. The initial AP story covering the victory dedicated a lot of ink to the low voter turnout, without noting that this is typical in an off-season run-off election. It failed to mention that both candidates in the run-off -- Annise Parker and Gene Locke -- are Democrats, or that Locke also brings liberal bona fides to the table as a former civil rights activist. Anyone reading Andrew Malcolm's account of the election in the LA Times, in which he calls Parker "conservative" and refuses to mention that the actual conservative candidate, the Republican, got knocked out of the running in the first election, would not get a true picture of Houston politics. So wed are many mainstream media writers to the "Texas is a conservative monolith" narrative that Democrats are being turned into Republicans in order to make the story work.

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It's Time For Americans to Get Comfortable With Black Santa
Posted by Melissa Harris-Lacewell, TheNation.com on December 21, 2009 at 9:00 AM.

On Sunday night I indulged two of my favorite obsessions, the Christmas holidays and sentimental Americana, by watching Oprah Winfrey's special "Christmas at the White House."

This televised tour of the decorated White House immediately evoked my holiday musings from last year. In the month after Obama's election I felt like a kid at Christmas, with visions of a black president dancing in my head.

I have always been an over-the-top lover of all things Christmas: cookies, stockings, carols, lights, twinkly trees, sappy TV movies, egg nog, and wrapping paper. I was raised in a secular, humanist household. I came to Christianity as an adolescent. This means Jesus is a second string character in my holiday memories. It is Santa Claus who occupied the central iconic position of Christmas during my childhood.

And for me Santa Claus always was, is now, and always will be a black man.

Part of my investment in Santa's blackness derives from my personal biography. My father is a brown-skinned man who smokes a pipe and has had a full beard of gray hair since my infancy. Black Santa looks like my dad, so I am drawn to him. But my father is nothing like a jolly elf. Professor Harris is a stern disciplinarian and a politically engaged intellectual. I can't imagine anyone less likely to hang out with toy-building magical creatures while wearing a fur-trimmed red suit.

My attachment to black Santa is rooted in a fierce racial consciousness I have nurtured since childhood. In my adulthood I have revised much of my unthinking, black nationalist assumptions. My feminist commitments, interracial political work, and emerging cosmopolitan sensibilities make me somewhat less likely to exercise an automatic preferential option for blackness. This journey of political consciousness is also reflected in my holiday choices.

In college I added Kwanzaa celebrations to my holiday calendar. It was a way of countering Christmas commercialism and asserting my connections to black culture. Later I learned the brutal, misogynist history of Kwanzaa's founder, Malauna Karenga, and I became less enthusiastic about the holiday. I have experienced similar shifts in racial consciousness as a researcher, writer, political advocate, and Christmas enthusiast.

But through it all my insistence on and attachment to black Santa has never wavered.

As a kid, black Santa represented a benevolent spirit of goodness and kindness directed toward African American children. Black Santa cared about little girls who look like me. I did not need blue eyes or blond ringlet curls for black Santa to find me adorable. Black Santa did not put a blond baby doll under my tree. He knew that I needed to rock, hold and nurture a baby doll with brown skin and kinky hair. Black Santa expected Nat King Cole to be playing on the stereo when he arrived on Christmas Eve.

The election of Barack Obama has changed my thinking about black Santa a bit. I am now convinced that black Santa is equally important for white Americans. Barack Obama is now the President of the United States. He is a deeply imperfect president. Racism still exists during his presidency and will persist when it is over. Obama cannot cure racial inequality. But he, Michelle, and the girls have altered the face of the first family.

Symbols matter. They help shape our understanding of national culture and identity. A president is not a country, but he embodies the national identity. Santa is the secular, commercial symbol of a religious holiday, but he nonetheless embodies the popular imagination of the holiday.

It is time for Americans to get comfortable with black Santa.

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Are Hewlett Packard Computers Racist?
Posted by Staff, AlterNet on December 21, 2009 at 9:00 AM.

Via Buzzfeed:

Desi and Wanda have figured out that there's something wrong with HP's webcam face recognition software. Specifically, it doesn't see black people. A pretty funny response to a pretty huge gaffe.

Georgia Republican Saxby Chambliss Has No Idea What Roe v. Wade Actually Says
Posted by Jill Filipovic, Feministe on December 21, 2009 at 7:00 AM.

Can someone please send Saxby Chambliss a copy of Roe v. Wade? Because it does not say what he thinks it says.

The Senate healthcare bill’s language on abortion "sets up a Supreme Court challenge," one senator warned Saturday.

Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) asserted that the compromise on abortion contained within the bill, which would seek to segregate federal funds from subsidizing health plans covering abortion, is unconstitutional.

"What this provision does that Sen. Nelson negotiated sets up a Supreme Court challenge. Roe v. Wade's pretty clear on federal funding for abortion," Chambliss said at a Capitol Hill press conference early this afternoon.

The compromise was set up to win the vote of Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), who had previously threatened to vote against the bill unless he was satisfied the bill wouldn’t provide federal support for abortion. Nelson announced on Saturday morning that he’d reached an agreement to his satisfaction, and would vote for the bill.

Pro-life groups, including the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, have rejected the compromise language.

"And now, you're seeing that law that was laid down years ago in Roe v. Wade thrown up in the air. It's pretty obvious that votes have been bought," said Chambliss, who didn't signal whether or not he would lead a legal challenge to the bill.

Doesn't this man have a staff to vet facts before he gives press conferences?

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The Violent Repression of Peaceful Palestinian Protests Continues
Posted by Jonathan Pollak, AlterNet on December 19, 2009 at 11:40 AM.

On a pitch black early December night, seven armored Israeli military jeeps pulled into the driveway of a home in the West Bank town of Ramallah. Dozens of soldiers, armed and possibly very scared, came to arrest someone they were probably told was a dangerous, wanted man - Abdallah Abu Rahmah, a high school teacher at the Latin Patriarchate School and a well-known grassroots organizer in the village of Bil'in.

Every Friday, for the past five years, Abdallah Abu Rahmah has led men, women and children from Bil'in, carrying signs and Palestinian flags, along with their Israeli and international supporters, in civil disobedience and protest marches against the seizure of sixty percent of the village's land for Israel's construction of its wall and settlements. Bil'in has become a symbol of civilian resistance to Israel's occupation for Palestinians and international grassroots.

Abu Rahmah was taken from his bed, his hands bound with tight zip tie cuffs whose marks were still visible a week later, and his eyes blindfolded. A few hours later, as President Obama spoke of "the men and women around the world who have been jailed and beaten in the pursuit of justice" upon receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, Abu Rahmah's blindfold was removed as he found himself in a military detention center. He was being interrogated about the crime of organizing demonstrations. In occupied Palestinian territories, Abu Rahmah's case is not unusual - about 8,000 Palestinians currently inhabit Israeli jails on political grounds.

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Mr. Equality Goes to Washington: D.C. Legalizes Same-Sex Marriage
Posted by Amanda Terkel, Think Progress on December 18, 2009 at 11:47 AM.

This morning at the All Souls Unitarian church in Washington, DC, approximately 150 activists and same-sex couples congregated to witness marriage equality become law in the nation’s capital. “I say to the world: An era of struggle ends for thousands in Washington, D.C.,” said Mayor Adrian Fenty (D), who also invoked his biracial upbringing and noted that it was illegal for his parents to get married 40 years ago because they were an interracial couple. Several other officials spoke, including David Catania (I), the council member who sponsored the bill. When Fenty signed the bill, he held it over his head and the room erupted in cheers.

Watch some highlights from the event:

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Rightwing Fringe Welcome at Conservative Confab, Gay Republicans Not So Much
Posted by Steve Benen, Washington Monthly on December 17, 2009 at 8:23 AM.

In February, the Conservative Political Action Conference will get underway in D.C., and because CPAC has become the right-wing event of the year, the conservative movement's heavy hitters are anxious to be a part of it.

But let's note who, exactly, has become part of the conservative movement. For example, the 2010 CPAC gathering will be co-sponsored by the hyper-conservative John Birch Society. While JBS was, not too long ago, considered far too ridiculous for the American mainstream -- even Republicans considered Birchers a political pariah -- the bizarre group has slowly been welcomed into the fold as conservatives have become more extreme.

When Glenn Beck embraced the Birchers two years ago, Alex Koppelman reminded us, "The JBS is, after all, the group that believed fluoridated drinking water was a Communist mind-control plot. Oh, and its founder, Robert Welch, once accused Dwight Eisenhower -- and no, we are not kidding -- of being 'a dedicated conscious agent of the communist conspiracy.'"

And now the John Birch Society is co-sponsoring CPAC. When I talk about radicalism being mainstreamed by the right, this is what I'm talking about.

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NY Governor Extends Protections to Transgender State Employees
Posted by Cara , Feministe on December 17, 2009 at 3:15 AM.

Today, New York Governor David Paterson signed an executive order barring discrimination against state employees on the basis of gender identity and gender expression. Seeing the high numbers of transgender people who report discrimination in the workplace, this is great news for those current and future employees who will be affected.

But it’s also only a first step in the right direction. While New York is now ahead of many states, it’s also really behind many others:

While supporters of transgender legal protections said they were encouraged by Mr. Paterson’s order, they noted that New York was not a pioneer in extending such rights.

“It has been a long road, and I think New York is behind,” said Dru Levasseur, a transgender rights attorney for Lambda Legal. “So this will bring New York up to par with other states that are taking the lead on workplace fairness.”

Twelve states and the District of Columbia have broad laws prohibiting discrimination based on gender expression or identity, according to gay and transgender rights groups. In addition, more than 100 cities and counties across the country provide similar legal protections

Indeed, just within the state, New York City, Albany, Binghamton, Buffalo, Ithaca, Rochester, Westchester County and Tompkins County already have workplace discrimination laws applying to trans people in place.

Further, the executive order only applies to state employees, because a law is required to extend those same protections to all workers in New York. What is truly needed is the passage of GENDA, an anti-discrimination bill affecting trans New Yorkers that the legislature has allowed to languish for several years — or, as many would argue, a revamped version of GENDA that doesn’t risk causing as many problems as it solves. (Better yet, an inclusive ENDA would extend workplace protections on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation to all employees across the United States.)

In other words, it’s great news that Governor Paterson finally got around to doing this. But he and the rest of New York’s elected officials still have significantly harder work ahead of them.

Alleged Police Cover-Up Adds Shocking Angle to the Racist Murder of Luis Ramirez
Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet on December 16, 2009 at 4:00 PM.

It was always difficult to comprehend how a jury could find the young Pennsylvania men who brutally murdered Luis Ramirez -- a Mexican immigrant and father of two young children -- during the hot summer months of 2008 not guilty. The six young men surrounded Ramirez, shouted racial slurs at him and beat him to death.

If federal charges bear out, the result should come as little surprise; justice was apparently not served in the case. As attorney Patrick Young writes, many in the community would have had you believe "that the racial epithets hurled at Ramirez did not make this killing a hate crime."

They also expect you to see no unfairness in the fact that the initial investigation into the crime was carried out by the partner of a cop who was sleeping with the mother of the young man accused of killing Ramirez. Or that the first person arrested in the incident was a Latino who tried to come to Ramirez's rescue.

And they would have you believe that the young assailants were acquitted of all major charges by an all white jury in a fair trial even though the prosecution failed to call significant witnesses, including a former Philly cop who responded to Ramirez's cries outside her window.

It turns out that the fix was allegedly in among members of the local police department, who tampered with witnesses, destroyed evidence and otherwise made sure a conviction was not forthcoming in the case. Federal prosecutors say the corruption tainting the case went all the way to the top.

But justice may yet be served for Luis Ramirez and his family, with a slew of indictments handed down yesterday against not only the young men who took Ramirez' life, but also several of the cops involved in the investigation which followed.

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