April 2010 archive

  Late last June the Obama Administration decided to ship 40 tonnes of weapons to Somalia so that the Transitional Government there could build up an army. Yesterday we got to see the results of this effort.

 Hundreds of Somali soldiers trained with U.S. tax dollars have deserted because they are not being paid their $100 monthly wage, and some have even joined the al-Qaida-linked militants they are supposed to be fighting, The Associated Press has learned.

  The desertions raise fears that a new U.S.-backed effort beginning next month to build up Somalia’s army may only increase the ranks of the insurgency...

  Earlier this year, trainee soldiers had their guns confiscated and replaced with sticks after a riot broke out between those who had been paid and those who had not. The African Union, which has peacekeepers at Camp Jazira, temporarily suspended payments over fears that men who had been paid would be killed by those who had not, an official involved with the training said.

The Associated Press should have read the Globe and Mail six months ago when they interviewed former prime minister Ali Mohamed Gedi. He said, “All those weapons will end up in the hands of the terrorists.”

  The weapons are being sold to the insurgents by members of the Somalia government.

     Yesterday, Glenn Beck expressed POUTRAGE that anyone would compare something to Nazi Germany, that is, anyone not named Glenn Beck.

    When Democrat Jared Polis (CO-2) compared Arizona’s new “Breathing while Latino” law ( as Fox’s Shep Smith calls it ) to the Nazi tactic of demanding papers be presented at all times or face arrest, Glenn Beck started to cry.

Glenn Beck:     “Are you comparing the systematic cold blooded extermination of millions of Jews to America making sure that people are here legally?

    No, Glenn Beck, you moron. Jared Polis is comparing the law that required that anyone suspected of being a Jew in Nazi Germany must show documentation or face imprisonment to the new Arizona law that requires anyone suspected of being an illegal immigrant to show their documentation or face imprisonment.

mediamatters.org

More below the fold

These videos need to go viral.

State Senator Russell Pearce of Arizona wrote and sponsored the anti Latino/Hispanic racial profiling law that demands law enforcement in his state act as proxies for Federal agents for deporting non residents, which was signed into law last week by Arizona’s Republican governor Jan Drinkwine Brewer.  https://www.docudharma.com/diar…

I am placing the 2nd of the videos first, which shows Russell Pearce and JT Ready obviously working together at an event, then the video below, it will be easier to see the same JT Ready at the Neo Nazi rally last year at the state capitol.

The videos are well captioned.  

This one is from August 2008.



Russell Pearce, part 2

Begins with photo of (State Senator)  Russell Pearce and JT Ready.

caption begins: JT Ready was exposed as a neo Nazi by the ADL and the press at an open legislative hearing in March 2007.  In June of 2007, Pearce and Ready worked a crowd at an anti immigration rally together.

Neo Nazi JT Ready at the podium, speaking-

“We’re not going to ask anymore, we’re going to start yanking people out by their collars…. we’ve been treasoned by people that we trusted, I won’t mention any names, Kyle –  McCain –  Flake ”    Russell Pearce (in strange looking shirt half dark blue, half red and white stripes)  applauds him, and JT Ready calls him a “great statesmen” and says he has a message for “we’re going to yank you out by your collars, too, and say, you’re done, we’re going to put patriots back in office.

Later a man walks up to Senator Pearce and asks if “JT Ready is your friend?” he denies it and says that he just showed up at a rally with me and JD Hayworth and New Times, the great fiction it is, tried to find a picture they could use.  It’s an old story, it’s fiction, they made it up.  Caption after that is about Pearce’s statement in Dec 2007 at a Sheriff Joe Arpaio Roast in Sun City, AZ

“I don’t think JT’s a bad guy, I think his association with these groups is wrong.”

Pearce has Buffalo Rick Galeener’s endorsement on his website. United for a Sovereign America.

Another man (looks like Galeener ?)  is saying to the camera, “You ought to be ashamed of yourself. God is going to put you over his knee and spank your butt. isn’t it unfortunate that when you walk thru the Pearly Gates, God’s going to say, you get to go thru the other gates here to hell. ”

Anna Gaines also listed as an endorsement

(Recall Mayor Gordon.) Pearce refers to her as his “only Hispanic friend.”

Chris Simcox, Minutemen Founder and Pearce Campaign Committee member. Simcox known for embezzling thousands of dollars from supporters to build a “border fence,”  the Minutemen PACs still solicit money for this activity but send the money to a company in Texas that does voter caging. (that’s not on the video, that’s my prior research.  The Minutemen campaigned with Tom McClintock in CA 04 in 2008, and did a rally with him in Sacramento on the state capitol steps. He called for mass deportations and all federal funding to be cut off to the city of San Francisco. )  The videographer for McClintock that year, which did the swiftboating videos against the Democrat Charlie Brown, orchestrated by the Republican PR firm of Russo Marsh & Rogers and Move America Forward, was an ex Minuteman member.  Now Russo Marsh/MAF do Tea Party rallies for McClintock, besides bus tours for Sarah Palin.   How do you like that coincidence ?

This is an extensively researched diary I did at Calitics in October of 2008 on McClintock and the Minutemen, re the KKK Konnection.

http://www.calitics.com/diary/…    Photobucket removed my screen capture of a racist picture a McClintock supporter was posting in the local paper’s blogs, but the rest of the diary is intact.  It is based on what I observed, heard, and photographed, as well as what I found by researching.  I had proof that there was a Minutemen and racist component to the campaign, which was ignored by the MSM.  McClintock literally rolled down the street in Lincoln on July 4th, in a Minuteman and Mormon Battalion Mexican War themed float with a Christian flag flying over it.

I was just gobsmacked that this Republican candidate is parading down the street in a float that has General Winfield Scott on it, who forced the Cherokee from Georgia to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears, and the Latino people who were watching it were just gobsmacked that it’s got the Minutemen and the Mexican American War symbols on it, and they’re speaking Spanish in front of me because I have a camera, and I look, frankly, like I’m too blonde that day.  

(September, Sacramento)

Just like in the July parade, Tom McClintock wanted to be provocative when he stood there on the State Capitol steps early last month (Sept 2) during the “Minutemen” rally and called for the Federal government to cut off funding for San Francisco. And for the Federal government to deport millions of people.  There was a giant sign parked down on the road which says “Build the Wall, Deport them All,” the loudspeakers are playing some sort of dreadful screed about how people of Native American Indigenous ancestry have to perform a blood sacrifice when they reach adulthood, and are secretly plotting to turn California and the American southwest back into the Aztec state, “Aztlan” (this is the same stuff I’ve seen on the Council of Concerned Citizens site )  and then the group of teenaged kids in white dress shirts and dress pants and some sort of red satin sashes show up with the big “Save Traditonal Marriage” Sign on the sidewalk.  They hopped in a van and drove off when they realized they were being recorded for posterity.  

It was pretty surrealistic.

Just another day at the California State Capitol, campaign 2008, McClintock version.

Numbers USA, Barbara Coe, Council of Concerned Citizens, John Tanton, Richard Mellon Scaife (Oil $) Astroturf

The Southern Poverty Law Center said in 2002, that most of the anti immigration “movement” is the result of work by John H Tanton, who founded, served on the boards, and funded many of them.  http://www.splcenter.org/intel…

If you are going to read just one link in my post, read this one from the Southern Poverty Law Center, from summer 2002  Note the remarks from Brian Bilbray, who was to run again in 2006 in the San Diego area and narrowly win election to the current Congress.   The article says that this network of anti immigration groups is not so much grassroots as astroturfing being done by John Tanton and Numbers USA.   Richard Mellon Scaife family foundations has been funding these groups, along with the McConnell Foundation, the Shea Foundation, the Weeden, Salisbury, Smith Richardson, Blair, and Sikes foundations.

4 page story

The Puppeteer

The organized anti-immigration ‘movement,’ increasingly in bed with racist hate groups, is dominated by one man, John Tanton.

http://www.splcenter.org/get-i…

This is how I concluded it:

I see there is some skepticism about the link between McClintock and these extremist groups concerning a “guilt by association” of an old endorsement by the KKK.  Some people do not think this is relevant, others think it a distraction.   So I’m posting my observations on this relationship, reluctantly, because I don’t want to give Karl Rove the satisfaction of driving the dialogue here . But this subtext of forced removals of the “others,” based on their supposed cultural inferiority,  as being justified by a Higher Power, and therefore the Republican candidate is the “Right One”  has been running all thru McClintock’s campaign for CA- 04.  

Mercifully,  I see a lot of people in this district are finally starting to reject the use of these wedge issues.   I would hope the national level Republican campaign, based on what I’m seeing at McCain’s events, could come to grips with the fear issues and stop trying to scare people into voting for them.

But I also want to emphasize that we here in the district not imagining things when we say we see a relationship between the creed of the KKK and the campaign theme being used by McClintock.   This side of the aisle is rejecting the use of fear to divide us and ostracize us from each other.  

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This is what I wrote in 2008.

The Republicans, like the Cylons on Battlestar Gallactica, had a plan. Here’s our local Congressperson at that rally.

Tom McClintock September 6, 2008, Sacramento, CA rally with the Minutemen – Law enforcement should deport aliens, federal funds should be cut off to San Francisco.  McClintock was born in New York, and did not have legal residence in the district he was running for office, while living in yet another district while representing a third one in Southern CA. McClintock still refuses to live in the district he now uses for campaign donations and his livelihood as a neocon Republican career politician who has never held a private job.

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November 7, 2009.  Neo Nazi protest against immigration in Arizona.

Russell Pearce, neo Nazis and Anarchists at the Arizona State Capitol, 11/7/2009

video is well captioned.

Neo Nazi speaker RT Ready calls Russell Pearce “a great statesmen.”  

The protesters line up with a lot of flags and actually chant “Sieg hail” and salute and then walk down the street in Phoenix.

There are counter protestors with signs with slash marks thru the swastikas chanting “Nazis go home” during the part where the police are lined up between the two groups.   Sign “Mexicans and Central Americans, we are the indigenous people of the continent, this is our land, we are not immigrants”  is held up.

Man with red swastika flag yells “WHITE POWER!”   Some man in a tan shirt/pants saying “if God wanted all of us to be the same, he would have made us the same. ”   Countersigns “Fight fascism” and “not here, not anywhere, you cowards”  near where cops are on horses.  

Neo Nazis displaying sign, National Socialist Movement  Detroit Michigan

RT Ready shows up again in a black Tyrolean hat with a little feather, standing behind Jeff Schoep the NSM National Socialist Movement Commander who is yelling “This is not your country, this is our country.”

Counter protesters in black hoods.

RT Ready in black hat with feather standing in front of Swastika flag  “we are prepared.”

To the Democratic Party:  note the dates on these stories and videos, and quit acting surprised.  They are prepared.  We assume you remember how many millions died in WWII when people wouldn’t stand up for what is right, when they turned the other way, when they didn’t see, when they deny, when they said it can’t happen here.  What the hell have you been doing ?  Do you have a quota of suffering before you might think it worth your while to act ?

Today there are more claims by Evangelical Christians that they have found Noah’s Ark.

Regardless of the many other counter factual elements in the Genesis myth (based in physics and genetics) you know, we have concrete archeological evidence of a major flood of the Black Sea area a mere 9,500 years ago.

About the same time as Niagra Falls was formed.

So you can believe your lying eyes or the infallible word of God.

The Democratic Message For 2010

Marc Ambinder, The Atlantic

Apr 28 2010, 7:06 AM ET

“We have more accomplishments to run on than any Party in a long time,” Kaine’s expected to say.

• We’ve gone from recession to recovery.
• We’ve made more progress in the war on terror in the last eight months than was made in the preceding eight years.
• We’ve strengthened our relationships with our allies around the world.
• Two million people or more have jobs today who wouldn’t have without the bold action taken by this President and Democrats in Congress.
• We have the first Latina and only the third woman ever on the Supreme Court.
• We’re using science and fact in policy making instead of ideology and politics.
• We have the most transparent Administration in modern history, with tough ethics standards, and we are wringing the influence of special interests out of the policy making process.

Oh, and Republicans == bad.

Open Thread