HB-The backlash is growing against Liz Cheney after she demonized Department of Justice attorneys as terrorist sympathizers for their past legal work defending Gitmo detainees — and now it’s coming from within deeply conservative legal circles.

On Friday, the conservative blog Power Line put up a post titled, “An Attack That Goes Too Far.” Author Paul Mirengoff, called Cheney’s effort to brand DoJ officials the “Al Qaeda 7,” “vicious” and “unfounded” even if it was right to criticize defense lawyers for voluntarily doing work on behalf of Gitmo detainees.

Reached on the phone, Mirengoff offered an even sharper rebuke, contrasting what Cheney is doing to the anti-communist crusades launched by Sen. Joseph McCarthy and, in some respects, finding it worse.

“It could be worse than some of the assertions made by McCarthy, depending on some of the validity of those assertions,” Mirengoff said, explaining that at least McCarthy was correct in pinpointing individuals as communist sympathizers. “It is just baseless to suggest that [these DoJ officials] share al Qaeda values… they didn’t actually say it but I think it was a fair implication of what they were saying.”

Mirengoff isn’t alone among conservative legal theorists who think the ad campaign by Cheney’s group, Keep America Safe, is distasteful. In a statement to the American Prospect, John Bellinger III, a former legal adviser to Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, called the effort “unfortunate.”

“It reflects the politicization and the polarization of terrorism issues,” Bellinger said. “Neither Republicans nor Democrats should be attacking officials in each other’s administrations based solely on the clients they have represented in the past.”

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By Research Analyst Anthony Gregory

Former Democratic VP candidate Joe Lieberman and former GOP presidential candidate John McCain have introduced a new detention policy bill in response to the Christmas Day underwear bomber. From The Atlantic: “A close reading of the bill suggests it would allow the U.S. military to detain U.S. citizens without trial indefinitely in the U.S. based on suspected activity.”

This is another reminder of why, as horrible as Obama is on practically every issue, his competition was likely no better. Not that I expect Obama to veto this monstrosity. On detention policy, he has proven himself to be approximately as bad as his predecessor, if not worse.

Can we build a bipartisan police state, complete with the destruction of the last vestiges of due process, while we distract the public with political sideshows and debates over whether the government should control 60% or 61% of the economy? Yes we can.

BY Senior Vice President Mary L.G. Theroux

The current $350 million ad campaign for the 2010 Census, including the much-maligned $2.5 million Super Bowl spots, urges individuals to “Tell your story.” The Census Bureau is particularly eager for minorities and illegal immigrants to do so, as they are traditionally believed to be the most undercounted.

Yet widespread non-compliance, especially among those most likely to be discriminated against by a majority, may not be rooted strictly in the “ignorance” the ads are designed to overcome. History—including very recent history—shows that the information provided to the Census can be used against you.

The most recent examples occurred in 2002 and 2003, when the Census Bureau turned over information it had collected about Arab-Americans to Homeland Security.

Data from the 1940 Census was used to intern Japanese, Italian, and German Americans following the U.S.’s entry into the war, and to monitor and persecute others who escaped internment. In addition to providing geographic information to the War Department, the Census Bureau released the name, address, age, sex, citizenship status and occupation of Japanese Americans in the Washington, D.C., area to the Treasury Department in response to an unspecified threat against President Franklin Roosevelt in 1943.

There may well be other instances of such data sharing of which we remain unaware, as the full scope of the personal information released during World War II has only recently been brought to light.

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I am 50 years old. I was diagnosed with carcinoma in-situ 16 years ago and following my divorce 12 years ago I became self-employed. After my Cobra ran out I was able to find costly, but affordable health insurance. As a responsible individual, I have struggled to maintain my individual coverage and have increased my deductible and out of pocket-limits in an attempt to control my cost and keep my health insurance.

Last year (2009) my insurance premium was increased over 25% even though I increased my deductible and out of pocket to the highest limits available. I paid out over $6075.24 in premiums, $2415.26 for medical care, $225 in co-pays and $1500 for prescriptions. I never reached my deductible of $2500 so the insurance company only paid out a total $935.32 to my providers.

I must repeat, in 2009 my insurance company received $6075.24 in premiums and paid out only $935.32!

I have just been notified that my premium for next year 2010 has been increased over 40% to $8496.24 ($708.02 per month) !!!! This is the same insurance company I have been with for over 11 cancer free years!!!

I need your Health reform bill to help me!!! I simply can no longer afford to pay for my health care costs!!

Thanks to this incredible premium increase demanded by my insurance company, January will be my last month of insurance.

I live in the house my mother & father built in 1958 and I am so afraid of the possibility I might loose this heirloom as a result of my being forced to drop my health care insurance. The health insurance industry has not denied me insurance directly, but indirectly they have by increasing my costs. They perceive me as becoming a higher risk factor to them despite being a loyal customer. I will never be able to obtain new health insurance due to the lack of real competition.

We are talking about Anthem who apparently has no respect for your attempts to reform the health insurance industry.

Please stay focused in your reform attempts as I and many others are in desperate need of your help.

Sincerely

Natoma Canfield

From Sen. kyl

….Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona, the Republican whip, argued that unemployment benefits dissuade people from job-hunting “because people are being paid even though they’re not working.”

Unemployment insurance “doesn’t create new jobs. In fact, if anything, continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work,” Kyl said during debate over whether unemployment insurance and other benefits that expired amid GOP objections Sunday should be extended.

“I’m sure most of them would like work and probably have tried to seek it, but you can’t argue that it’s a job enhancer. If anything, as I said, it’s a disincentive. And the same thing with the COBRA extension and the other extensions here,” said Kyl……

From Sen Bacus

….Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), about as far from a populist as can be found in the Democratic Party, appeared surprised at Kyl’s claim.

“The Senator from Arizona argues that unemployment insurance is a disincentive to jobs. Nothing could be further from the truth. I don’t know anybody who’s out of work and is receiving some unemployment insurance believes that that payment is sufficient not to find a job. The payments are so much lower than any salary or wage would be, it’s just ridiculous. I might add, there are five unemployed Americans today for every job opening in the economy,” said Baucus, chairman of the Finance Committee. “People are looking for work. They’re not unemployed because of choice.”

He added that Kyl’s economic argument was flawed, as well. Unemployment benefits do create jobs because the recipients cycle the money through the economy. He cited a Congressional Budget Office analysis that said the Gross Domestic Product grew $1.90 for every dollar the federal government paid out…..

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By Jack E. Lohman

When you already have 60 votes in the senate, demanding bipartisanship is a lame excuse for doing what your corporate funders wanted in the first place. It’s just more of the game the Dems have been playing.

Neither party wants real fixes, because then the corporate money will cease to flow. Quit the wars and defense money dries up. Fix health care and insurance money dries up. Our congress will remain owned by corporations until Obama keeps his promise to fix campaign funding.

The voters learned that even after installing their favored party and giving them an unbreakable majority, they still lose out to the moneyed interests. Proof positive that we have a one-party system. Proof positive that neither party are for the people. Proof positive that we have a political and criminal conspiracy that should be prosecuted.

The voters didn’t seek bipartisanship, they voted the Republicans out and the Democrats in. Giving the Dems 60 votes was more than they asked for, more than they wanted, and certainly more than they deserved.

I can hear it now: “Damn, now that we have 100% control, how do we give some of it back?”

Scott Brown’s win made Obama’s day, because he now has his excuse when bending to his corporate funders. He can now blame the R’s when before he had to dance to the Jig, shifting blame from one supposedly disgruntled Dem to another.

All an orchestrated strategy to make it look to the voters like they really had this “ideological” difference when in fact it had to do with cash flow. Much like filibusters increase the flow of political cash.

The Dems can fix this by simply taking the R’s out of the equation for the balance of 2010 (by totally eliminating the filibuster, which they can do), and then doing the right thing for the public to get the party re-elected. But it’s not the public that they are concerned about; it’s their corporate funders.

Obama is intent on keeping the R’s in the loop so he can deny the public what it wants. In one case a single-payer health care system; in another, reform of the financial system; and still another, reform of our corporate shareholder rights. These industries helped fund his election and it’s now payback time. He is no better than the rest.

And while we voted out some politicians, the industries that fund the elections didn’t have to campaign. They are simply writing the same checks with a different name on them, and tickled pink that the public is willing to pay their salaries.

And I object to that, too. If the politicians are going to govern for the industry, let the industry pay their salary and benefits!

So if changing parties won’t fix it…

… a third party would be a good start. I voted for McCain but now wish I’d have voted for Ron Paul.

We must, every two years beginning in 2010, throw out the R’s and D’s, at least until they pass public funding of campaigns. ONLY having the elections funded by the taxpayers will return their allegiance to the nation’s well being.

But we have more problems than just political…

Everybody wants to be richer, and I don’t blame them. But Labor demanded and won higher wages, and CEOs responded by sending their jobs offshore. Now the CEOs demand and are winning control over government, which will remove the ability of citizens to afford their product.

Our economy and country is in a downward spiral, and the outcome will not be pretty. We got there because our politicians care more about campaign funding that they do a stable economy, and the only solution is to re-install our democracy.

Are the voters willing to make change happen? If so, 2010 is the year.

Tidbits–

Conservatives and Liberals have one common enemy: politicians that take money from corporations and spend half of our “discretionary taxes” paying them back.

– One of these days they’ll come together and throw the bastards out. All of them!

– Throwing them out is the ONLY thing what will get their attention. Everything else has been tried.

– The new grass roots Coffee Party, the Left’s answer to the Tea Party, are seeking to set up a branch in Wisconsin and other states.

– Obama says he’d rather be a good one-termer than a bad two-termer, but what if he’s a bad one-termer? Looks like the direction he’s headed.

HP-A seventh grader who touched a prescription drug pill while at school has been suspended for a week because of her school’s interpretation of their zero-tolerance drug policy.

According to officials at River Valley Middle School in Jeffersonville, Indiana, student Rachel Greer violated their drug policy simply by holding Adderall, an ADHD drug, that a fellow student offered to her and placed in her hand. Despite declining the pill and returning it to her classmate, Greer was in “posession” of a drug and broke the rules, according to a school official.

TV station WAVE 3 interviewed Greer’s mother, who warned that her daughter’s punishment isn’t good policy. “We’re teaching our kids if you say no to drugs you’re going to get punished, it’s not right.”

School administrator Marty Bell told WHAS News that Rachel Greer violated school policy by simply being present. Bell faulted the teenager for putting out her hand:

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AJC-Gun control advocates think, if not pray, they can win by losing when the Supreme Court decides whether the constitutional right to possess guns serves as a check on state and local regulation of firearms.

The justices will be deciding whether the Second Amendment — like much of the rest of the Bill of Rights — applies to states as well as the federal government. It’s widely believed they will say it does.

But even if the court strikes down handgun bans in Chicago and its suburb of Oak Park, Ill., that are at issue in the argument to be heard Tuesday, it could signal that less severe rules or limits on guns are permissible

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Research Fellow Anthony Gregory comments on waging just war in Avatar:

James Cameron’s blockbuster Avatar is a thrill to see, and various commentators have judged the film for whatever ideological message they have found in it, but what struck me most is that the Na’vi people, in defending their land on Pandora from the imperialist exploitation by the humans, are engaging in one of the few just wars you’ll ever see, in fiction or real life. It reminded me of the clearly just defense of Narnia in the first Chronicles of Narnia film, so stark was the issue of right and wrong.

The movie has been lambasted by some conservatives who want to conceive of the movie into a message about environmentalism. Of course, actual pollution, strip-mining and the destruction of indigenous people’s lands by uninvited foreign corporations empowered through militaristic might should not be defended in any event—and such devastation of habitats is a very real, tangible act of aggression, unlike the far more tenuous environmental concerns like global warming that have distracted the entire conservation movement from genuine environmental degradation.

And the key point here is that the Na’vi are in fact people, sentient beings, much like the seemingly primitive alien races brutalized by the human-dominated empire in the Star Wars saga, or many other such epic stories. The Na’vi also command their own environment, taming and domesticating lower lifeforms, willing to put their own lives above those of the flora and fauna on Pandora, when need be.

It is true that they have a different set of values than modern industrialized man, but this is no reason to dispense with their property and community rights over their own territory. Whether one comes away admiring their cultural values or not—personally, unlike many who saw it, I was glad to be back inside with modern technology when the flick ended—the Na’vi rites and rituals work for their own circumstances. The Na’vi respect nature, but understand this respect as important in the context of utilizing nature for their own health and happiness. Their rituals of nature worship could be twisted into some message about the green movement, but so could the fact that the invaders in Independence Day sought to steal Earth’s natural resources. It is a real theme in history and an established one in myth that criminal gangs, bands of aggressors, states and quasi-governmental corporations will conquer indigenous peoples and rob them of their land and resources. Besides, even considering the peculiar relationship the Na’vi have to their land, one could see it as a form of technological transformation, a command of nature that the Na’vi have learned to wield. They treat nature with respect, but in a human way—taking control of animals and plants—and thus are very unlike the modern anti-human environmentalist ideal that sometimes puts sentient beings below other life forms. If James Cameron indeed intended a typical environmentalist trope, he failed.

The Na’vi have a mystical connection to their land that might bug some people, seeing all lifeforms as interwoven in a somewhat holy relationship, but this should be no more objectionable than the way the Jedi approach the Force. It is also plausible to say that the Na’vi simply have a respect for natural law, objective truth and morality that is completely lost on the materialistic, utilitarian and militarized humans who come in to steal their land. This movie is about one people defending their property rights as well as cultural values against an unambiguously rapacious and aggressive modernist invader. In any event, primitives have a right to defend whatever seemingly bizarre yet peaceful cultural practices are part of their identity.

And the way they defend it is unquestionably just. The war is winnable, unlike most that modern governments find themselves engaged in. It is declared by the proper authority, insofar as all the tribes voluntarily congregate to fight the invader. It is a last resort, since the human aggressors seem intent to exterminate all who try to stay on their land. The violence is proportional and no innocents are attacked. The only people who are harmed are belligerents. What’s more, the Na’vi take prisoners, who seem to be humanely treated, in massive numbers and let them return to where they came from in peace. Although defending their turf and having lost many of their people to the humans’ aggression, the Na’vi are much more humane in their response than the aggressors.

It excites me that people see this movie and cheer for the good guys, because rarely in a movie are the good guys so emphatically in the right and the bad guys so inescapably in the wrong. I love cheering for the white hats in an action or fantasy movie, but few protagonists offer as much with which to sympathize without reservation as do the Na’vi people. Even in Star Wars, there is more moral ambiguity, as the rebels and Jedi commit acts of fraud and violence against non-aggressors. But the real lesson here is that a truly just war is much more difficult to find in the real world, where usually both sides are at least somewhat substantially in the wrong. However, generally one side is more wrong than the other, and when we look at this movie in the context of America’s ongoing foreign policy that has persisted for decades, it could not be clearer than the Na’vi, whatever they symbolize, do not represent the U.S. government.