TEA BAGGERS

Posted: 27 Apr 2010 10:04 AM PDT

The University of Washington has just published a multi-state study that offers convincing evidence that members of the Tea Party are far more likely to be racist than average Americans. Their results agree with a recent NY Times / CBS News survey that found similar racist attitudes. But Tea Partiers know they should not use overtly racist language, “so they use coded language”. Like about “taking our country back” … but from whom?

If you doubt this, here’s a simple exercise you can do. Imagine the Tea Party doing and saying the same things it does now, but its members are black (or Arabic, or Latino), and the president is white.

Imagine that white members of Congress, while walking to work, were surrounded by thousands of angry black people, one of whom proceeded to spit on one of those congressmen for not voting the way the black demonstrators desired.

Because Tea Partiers did that.

Imagine that hundreds of black protesters were to descend upon Washington DC and Northern Virginia, just a few miles from the Capitol and White House, armed with AK-47s, assorted handguns, and ammunition. And imagine that some of these protesters — the black protesters — spoke of the need for political revolution, and possibly even armed conflict in the event that laws they didn’t like were enforced by the government.

White gun enthusiasts and Tea Partiers did that.

Imagine that a black radio host were to suggest that the only way to get promoted in the administration of a white president is by “hating black people,” or that a prominent white person had only endorsed a white presidential candidate as an act of racial bonding, or blamed a white president for a fight on a school bus in which a black kid was jumped by two white kids, or said that he wouldn’t want to kill all conservatives, but rather, would like to leave just enough—“living fossils” as he called them—“so we will never forget what these people stood for.”

Yup, Rush Limbaugh said all that.

Imagine a black radio talk show host gleefully predicting a revolution by people of color if the government continues to be dominated by the rich white men who have been “destroying” the country, or if said radio personality were to call Christians or Jews non-humans, or say that when it came to conservatives, the best solution would be to “hang ‘em high.” And what would happen to any congressional representative who praised that commentator for “speaking common sense” and likened his hate talk to “American values?”

Michael Savage said those things, and Texas Congressman John Culberson praised him for it.

Imagine that a rap artist were to say, in reference to a white president: “He’s a piece of shit and I told him to suck on my machine gun.”

Rocker Ted Nugent said that about President Obama.

Tim Wise sums it up nicely:

This, my friends, is what white privilege is all about. The ability to threaten others, to engage in violent and incendiary rhetoric without consequence, to be viewed as patriotic and normal no matter what you do, and never to be feared and despised as people of color would be, if they tried to get away with half the shit we do, on a daily basis.

NOW THEY ARE MAD??? GIVE ME A BREAK!!

We are told by the Tea-Party that they are “mad and can’t take it anymore”

and that the rest of us should be too!



Folks, we had eight years of Bush and Cheney, but NOW they are getting

mad??? REALLY?!!!! NO, REALLY? !!!!



They didn't get mad when the Supreme Court stopped a legal recount and appointed a President.



They didn't get mad when Cheney allowed Energy company officials to dictate energy policy.



They didn’t get mad about gas prices when Bush and Cheney friends at the oil companies raised a gallon of gas price to more than $5 and posted highest profits

in the history of U.S for 8 years straight (Bush presidency).



They didn't get mad when a covert CIA operative identity was revealed.



They didn't get mad when the Patriot Act, which allows torture and disregards personal rights for Americans, got passed.



They didn't get mad when Bush and Cheney illegally invaded a country that posed no threat to us, Iraq .



They didn't get mad when Bush and Cheney spent over 600 billion (and counting) on said illegal war, Iraq .



They didn't get mad when over 10 billion dollars just disappeared in Iraq .



They didn't get mad when they found out about torturing people.



They didn't get mad when the government was illegally wiretapping Americans.



They didn't get mad that Bin Laden was not caught when Bush had a chance to do so.



They didn't get mad when they saw the horrible veterans conditions at Walter Reed.



They didn't get mad when Bush let a major US city drown like a 3rd world country.



They didn't get mad when Bush gave a 900 billion tax break to the rich.



They didn't get mad when, using reconciliation; a trillion dollars of our tax dollars was redirected to insurance companies for Medicare Advantage, which cost over 20 percent more for basically the same services that Medicare provides.



They didn't get mad when the deficit hit the trillion dollar mark (when during Clinton presidency we had almost a Trillion dollars surplus), and our debt hit the thirteen trillion dollar mark.


They finally got mad when a government decided that people in America deserved the right to get treatment if they are sick and can not afford to do so.


Yes, an illegal war, lies, corruption, torture, stealing your tax dollars to make the rich richer, are all okay with the Tea party. They are partying not with tea, but with sucking the blood of the ordinary Americans.



Sure! NOW, THEY ARE MAD!!! Helping the ordinary Americans...

”Oh Hell No! They have got mad!!!”



Get Real!!!



Please forward to as many people as you know.

MAKE ME A WITNESS-

Make Me a Witness
By Marc Ash, Reader Supported News
12 April 2010




All morning October 2002 phone rings, I answer, woman's voice begins in earnest: "Hello is this Truthout?" "Yes," I reply, "this is Truthout." Woman's voice: "Paul Wellstone has been killed in a plane crash... are you there... did you hear what I said?" "Yes," I replied finally, "I heard you." Woman's voice: "His small plane crashed this morning. His wife and daughter were killed with him. His plane crashed the same way Mel Carnahan's did... it was the same thing... do you understand? You must say it was the same thing." "Yes," I replied, "I understand." I don't remember her saying anything else, I don't remember her hanging up.

It was the same thing.

People talk from time to time about the Bush years and what they meant. They meant the death of American integrity.

It was a pivotal turning point for all things that mattered. From law to militarism, to civil and human rights; from things foreign and domestic, to education and the environment. Ruthlessness triumphed over the good of mankind from start to finish.

The process could not have had a more ominous start. The Supreme Court of the United States of America interceded in the outcome of the 2000 presidential election. Voting without legal or historical precedent, along partisan political lines, to insert corporate America's too-good-to-be-true candidate come true, George W. Bush as commander in chief.

For a graphic understanding of what it all meant, watch the WikiLeaks video of an American Apache helicopter crew gunning down people in the streets of Baghdad. Listen to their voices, they'll tell you what time it is.

And it's on to Afghanistan, and let's win there.

100 Mai Lais, the destruction of Babylon, a trillion dollars of US taxpayer money to the Iraq war, so far, and a trillion more handed to the Wall Street bankers as they foreclose on American home after home.

We do torture. We have always tortured. The difference is that now we rationalize it, discuss it in mainstream print, radio and television broadcasts. We live with it, we turn a blind eye to it, and because we cannot face it down we are endlessly tortured by it.

The issue is justice, in all things. The willingness to do the right thing, and the wisdom to understand that it is not harder or more costly, but easier, more natural and more fulfilling to be fair than it is to deny fairness. These are things we knew, really things we know now, but choose to forget.

Which is the better national security strategy, peace through strength or strength through peace? Choose one, you can't have both. Ever heard the adage, "The cold war was a race between the US and the Soviet Union to see who would go bankrupt first"? But that was when the Soviet Army was bogged down in Afghanistan. Now the American military is.

Get a job. Can't get a job working for a corporation anymore? Get a job fighting a war for corporations at one-third the pay. Main street look like a ghost town? Might be a perfect time to go independent.

Make me a witness. Make you a witness too.

RADICAL PRESIDENTS- JOHN AVALON

New York (CNN) -- Newt Gingrich called President Obama "the most radical president in American history" at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference last week.

The leader of the 1994 Republican Revolution is a smart man and a historian, so he must know better. But he's also exploring a run for president, an action that frequently suspends good judgment in pursuit of sound bites. Perspective is the first thing abandoned in hyper-partisan attacks.

So here is a look at five presidents who, it could be argued, exceed Obama in the "radical" sweepstakes.

• Franklin D. Roosevelt: How about this for radical: a president who overturned the two-term precedent set by George Washington and ultimately won four terms in an era when dictators were in vogue worldwide. He also proposed expanding the Supreme Court to pack it with his own appointees, attempting to fundamentally alter the separation of powers. And his New Deal created the basis for the modern welfare state in the U.S., whose apex under self-styled inheritor Lyndon Johnson provoked a backlash that ushered in a generation of conservative resurgence.

• John Adams: The nation's second president has been getting a well-deserved reappraisal, thanks to David McCullough's magisterial biography. But Adams' signing of the Alien and Sedition acts during the threat of war -- effectively outlawing anti-government dissent and curtailing freedom of speech and freedom of the press -- was a radically anti-democratic action and a black mark on this Founding Father's otherwise honorable service to our nation.

• Andrew Jackson: The man on the $20 bill was the original populist president, a general who fought Washington elites, British soldiers and native American tribes alike. Old Hickory's wars with the Second National Bank, Congress and the Supreme Court were legendary. His native American removal policies rescinded previously agreed-upon treaties and brought about the infamous "Trail of Tears" that led to the deaths of thousands.

• Abraham Lincoln: Abolitionists accused Lincoln of being insufficiently radical because he pledged only to preserve the union at all costs. But his political opponents accused him of being radical because he wanted to stop the spread of slavery, and they spurred secession from the union soon after hearing of his election. It's a reminder that exaggerated fear of change can lead to the rise of violent factions. During the Civil War, Lincoln suspended habeas corpus. He has become controversial again to some activists; one panel at the Conservative Political Action Conference asked, "Lincoln on Liberty: Friend or Foe?"

• George W. Bush: The Bush Doctrine reversed decades of American foreign policy by allowing pre-emptive invasions of foreign nations. In Iraq's case, this was complicated by the fact that the dictator in question did not, in fact, have the weapons of mass destruction as advertised. Add to that Bush's reluctance to actually pay for his wars directly, which resulted in his turning a hard-won surplus into a deficit, and you've got what can be considered a radical affront to small-government conservative principles from a Republican president.

Each of these presidents has his passionate defenders, and many are routinely listed among America's greatest chief executives.

Of course, plenty of other presidents could be added to this list: from Woodrow Wilson, who institutionalized segregation in the federal government, to Richard Nixon, whose "Saturday Night Massacre" firing of his attorney general, Justice Department first deputy and independent special prosecutor created a constitutional crisis in the wake of Watergate.

But you get the idea. None of the presidents are really radical in any global sense. Any all-good or all-bad analysis of American history always misses the big picture. And politics is history in the present tense.

Yes, the past 16 months have seen unprecedented levels of government spending, intended to alleviate the economic crisis that was occurring when Obama took office. And although skyrocketing debts and deficits are dangerous if not addressed decisively in the near-term, Obama's general approach to the office has been decidedly more center-left than radical left.

Think Afghanistan, for example, where he has committed more troops to the war. Or his economic team, led by Clinton administration alumni and Wall Street veterans. Though many conservatives have called him a socialist, some liberals (and libertarian Republican Ron Paul) consider him a "corporatist." You can't be both a socialist and a corporatist at the same time.

The larger issue is politics, plain and simple. Gingrich is trying to run for president. And red meat lines like "the most radical president in American history" help keep him relevant in GOP circles.

The real issue is less what Obama has done as president than who he is.

Gingrich and most baby boomer conservatives have spent their professional lives running against the liberal excesses of the 1960s. It is engrained in their political DNA. And Obama looks like a child of the Great Society, an embodiment of the social changes of the 1960s.

The more centrist his rhetoric, the more some conservatives are convinced that it's all part of activist Saul Alinsky's playbook: to sound reasonable but act radical. The problem is that this suspicion of Obama's motives dooms any concept of common ground and poisons the well for bipartisan progress. You can't negotiate reasonably with a president when you've convinced supporters that he is a threat to our constitutional republic.

More broadly, we've grown almost accustomed to these overheated attacks on the presidency. Obama Derangement Syndrome on the right -- of which Gingrich's claim was a mild example -- was preceded by Bush Derangement Syndrome on the left, with protestors comparing W. to a Nazi and a terrorist.

As a country, we have become accustomed to using fear and hate in the service of hyper-partisanship. We need to wake up to the fact that demonizing people we disagree with, and indulging in attempts to delegitimize a duly elected president from Day One, hurts us all as a nation. We can do better -- and we deserve better, especially from people who want to lead the nation themselves.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of John P. Avlon.

DOES REASON KNOW WHAT IT IS MISSING? STANLEY FISH

The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas has long been recognized as the most persistent and influential defender of an Enlightenment rationality that has been attacked both by postmodernism, which derides formal reason’s claims of internal coherence and neutrality, and by various fundamentalisms, which subordinate reason to religious imperatives that sweep everything before them, often not stopping at violence.

In his earlier work, Habermas believed, as many did, that the ambition of religion to provide a foundation of social cohesion and normative guidance could now, in the Modern Age, be fulfilled by the full development of human rational capacities harnessed to a “discourse ethics” that admitted into the conversation only propositions vying for the status of “better reasons,” with “better” being determined by a free and open process rather than by presupposed ideological or religious commitments: “…the authority of the holy,” he once declared, “is gradually replaced by the authority of an achieved consensus.”

In recent years, however, Habermas’s stance toward religion has changed. First, he now believes that religion is not going away and that it will continue to play a large and indispensable part in many societies and social movements. And second, he believes that in a post-secular age — an age that recognizes the inability of the secular to go it alone — some form of interaction with religion is necessary: “Among the modern societies, only those that are able to introduce into the secular domain the essential contents of their religious traditions which point beyond the merely human realm will also be able to rescue the substance of the human.”

The question of course is what does Habermas mean by “introduce”? How exactly is the cooperation between secular reason and faith to be managed? Habermas attempted to answer that question in the course of a dialogue with four Jesuit academics who met with him in Munich in 2007. The proceedings have now been published in Ciaran Cronin’s English translation (they appeared in German in 2008) under the title “An Awareness of What is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-secular Age.”

Habermas begins his initial contribution to the conversation by recalling the funeral of a friend who in life “rejected any profession of faith,” and yet indicated before his death that he wanted his memorial service to take place at St. Peter’s Church in Zurich. Habermas decides that his friend “had sensed the awkwardness of non-religious burial practices and, by his choice of place, publicly declared that the enlightened modern age has failed to find a suitable replacement for a religious way of coping with the final rite de passage.” The point can be sharpened: in the context of full-bodied secularism, there would seem to be nothing to pass on to, and therefore no reason for anything like a funeral.

To be sure, one could regard funerals for faith-less persons as a vestige of values no longer vital or as a concession to the feelings and desires of family members, but Habermas chooses to take it seriously “as a paradoxical event which tells us something about secular reason.” What it tells us, he goes on to say, is that secular reason is missing something and without it threatens to “spin out of control.”

What secular reason is missing is self-awareness. It is “unenlightened about itself” in the sense that it has within itself no mechanism for questioning the products and conclusions of its formal, procedural entailments and experiments. “Postmetaphysical thinking,” Habermas contends, “cannot cope on its own with the defeatism concerning reason which we encounter today both in the postmodern radicalization of the ‘dialectic of the Enlightenment’ and in the naturalism founded on a naïve faith in science.”

Postmodernism announces (loudly and often) that a supposedly neutral, objective rationality is always a construct informed by interests it neither acknowledges nor knows nor can know. Meanwhile science goes its merry way endlessly inventing and proliferating technological marvels without having the slightest idea of why. The “naive faith” Habermas criticizes is not a faith in what science can do — it can do anything — but a faith in science’s ability to provide reasons, aside from the reason of its own keeping on going, for doing it and for declining to do it in a particular direction because to do so would be wrong.

The counterpart of science in the political world is the modern Liberal state, which, Habermas reminds us, maintains “a neutrality . . . towards world views,” that is, toward comprehensive visions (like religious visions) of what life means, where it is going and what we should be doing to help it get there. The problem is that a political structure that welcomes all worldviews into the marketplace of ideas, but holds itself aloof from any and all of them, will have no basis for judging the outcomes its procedures yield. Worldviews bring with them substantive long-term goals that serve as a check against local desires. Worldviews furnish those who live within them with reasons that are more than merely prudential or strategic for acting in one way rather than another.

The Liberal state, resting on a base of procedural rationality, delivers no such goals or reasons and thus suffers, Habermas says, from a “motivational weakness”; it cannot inspire its citizens to virtuous (as opposed to self-interested) acts because it has lost “its grip on the images, preserved by religion, of the moral whole” and is unable to formulate “collectively binding ideals.”

The liberal citizen is taught that he is the possessor of rights and that the state exists to protect those rights, chief among which is his right to choose. The content of what he chooses — the direction in which he points his life — is a matter of indifference to the state which guarantees his right to go there just as it guarantees the corresponding rights of his neighbors (“different strokes for different folks”). Enlightenment rational morality, Habermas concludes, “is aimed at the insight of individuals, and does not foster any impulse toward solidarity, that is, toward morally guided collective action.”

The consequences of this “motivational weakness” can be seen all around us in the massive injustices nations and tribes inflict on one another. In the face of these injustices, a reason “decoupled from worldviews” does not, Habermas laments, have “sufficient strength to awaken, and to keep awake, in the minds of secular subjects, an awareness of the violations of solidarity throughout the world, an awareness of what is missing, of what cries out to heaven.”

So what will supply the strength that is missing? The answer is more than implied by the reference to heaven. Religion will supply it. But Habermas does not want to embrace religion wholesale for he does not want to give up the “cognitive achievements of modernity” — which include tolerance, equality, individual freedom, freedom of thought, cosmopolitanism and scientific advancement — and risk surrendering to the fundamentalisms that, he says, willfully “cut themselves off” from everything that is good about the Enlightenment project. And so he proposes something less than a merger and more like an agreement between trading partners: “…the religious side must accept the authority of ‘natural’ reason as the fallible results of the institutionalized sciences and the basic principles of universalistic egalitarianism in law and morality. Conversely, secular reason may not set itself up as the judge concerning truths of faith, even though in the end it can accept as reasonable only what it can translate into its own, in principle universally accessible, discourses.”

As Norbert Brieskorn, one of Habermas’s interlocutors, points out, in Habermas’s bargain “reason addresses demands to the religious communities” but “there is no mention of demands from the opposite direction.” Religion must give up the spheres of law, government, morality and knowledge; reason is asked only to be nice and not dismiss religion as irrational, retrograde and irrelevant. The “truths of faith” can be heard but only those portions of them that have secular counterparts can be admitted into the realm of public discourse. (It seems like a case of “separate but not equal.”) Religion gets to be respected; reason gets to borrow the motivational resources it lacks on its own, resources it can then use to put a brake on its out-of-control spinning.

The result, as Michael Reder, another of Habermas’s interlocutors, observes, is a religion that has been “instrumentalized,” made into something useful for a secular reason that still has no use for its teleological and eschatological underpinnings. Religions, explains Reder, are brought in only “to help to prevent or overcome social disruptions.” Once they have performed this service they go back in their box and don’t trouble us with uncomfortable cosmic demands. At best (and at most), according to Habermas, “the encounter with theology,” like an encounter at a cocktail party, “can remind a self-forgetful secular reason of its origins” in the same “revolutions in worldviews” that gave us monotheism. (One God and one reason stem from the same historical source.)

But Habermas gives us no reason (if you will pardon the word) to believe that such a reminder would be heeded and lead to reason’s being furnished with the motivation-for-solidarity it lacks. Why would secular reason, asked only to acknowledge a genealogical kinship with a form of thought it still compartmentalizes and condescends to, pay serious attention to what that form of thought has to offer? By Habermas’s own account the two great worldviews still remain far apart. Religions resist becoming happy participants in a companionable pluralism and insist on the rightness, for everyone, of their doctrines. Liberal rationality is committed to pluralism and cannot affirm the absolute rightness of anything except its own (empty) proceduralism.

The borrowings and one-way concessions Habermas urges seem insufficient to effect a true and fruitful rapprochment. Nothing he proposes would remove the deficiency he acknowledges when he says that the “humanist self-confidence of a philosophical reason which thinks that it is capable of determining what is true and false” has been “shaken” by “the catastrophes of the twentieth century.” The edifice is not going to be propped up and made strong by something so weak as a reminder, and it is not clear at the end of a volume chock-full of rigorous and impassioned deliberations that secular reason can be saved. There is still something missing.

NBC Mind Control for the viewers

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NBC's 'cynical' mind-control games
The network admits it uses "behavior placement" on popular shows to encourage healthy, eco-friendly habits — and sell ads.
posted on April 9, 2010, at 6:43 PM

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Tina Fey before NBC instituted

Tina Fey before NBC instituted "behavior placement." Photo: Creative Commons

Best Opinion: Movieline, Wall Street Journal, Mediaite

First there was product placement. Now there's "behavior placement," the planting of subtle messages in popular TV shows to encourage certain viewer behavior — such as healthy eating or eco-conscious habits — and thereby convince sponsors that their brands will be associated with "feel-good, socially aware" shows. NBC has owned up to the practice, reports The Wall Street Journal, as part of its Green Initiative: If "Tina Fey is tossing a plastic bottle into the recycling bin," the theory goes, audience members will be more apt to do the same. Innocuous or "Orwellian"?

This isn't just creepy, it's dumb: The pressure to be eco-conscious has reached a new high, says says Christopher Rosen in Movieline. NBC implies that people are too dumb to make healthy decisions on their own. How "patently stupid." Do viewers really need NBC "telling them how to run their life?"
"NBC thinks you're an idiot, part 56: 'Behavior placement'"

What's the big deal? Despite the hubbub, the principles NBC promotes are "fairly innocuous," says Amy Chozick in the Wall Street Journal. "Climate change may be controversial," but these shows don't make a political statement — they simply show characters making green-conscious decisions. "Most people can agree... [this] is a good thing."
"What your TV is telling you to do"

Unfortunately, healthy habits aren't the bottom line: Clearly, for NBC, behavior placement is about dollar signs and cynicism, says Jon Bershad in Mediaite. The execs' attempts to manipulate their viewers to draw eco-conscious, health-conscious advertisers is "soul-crushing" proof that "everything is a business" these days.
"NBC — Green initiative"

Uganda's 'Kill the Gays' Bill on the Backburner?-Steve Williams

According to the AFP, members of a Ugandan parliamentary panel stated on Friday that, while backing for Uganda's Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009 still exists, support has wained and focus has turned elsewhere to matters of economic and electoral reform. Also indicated was the fact that no date has been set for when the bill should go before Uganda's lawmakers for a formal vote, and nor will it be in the near future.

From the AFP:

"I think it is useless and will not achieve what it intends to achieve," said Alex Ndeezi, a member of the Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Committee tasked with reviewing the bill before it can be presented to the house...

The panel's chairman Stephen Tashyoba said the draft law was not a priority.

"As far as I am concerned, we really have more urgent matters to discuss like electoral reforms, which are already behind schedule," he said.
The Anti-Homosexuality Bill, dubbed the "Kill the Gays Bill", would create the offense of "aggravated homosexuality" which, under certain circumstances, could mean the death penalty for repeat offenders and any sexually active gay person with HIV/AIDS.

Among other penalties, it would also demand a jail term for intent to commit homosexuality, and would call for the extradition of gay Ugandans so that they might be charged under the law. It would also make it an offense to know someone that is gay but to not inform the police about that person's sexuality, and would render HIV/AIDS relief efforts and education programs practically untenable. To read the full text of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009, please click here.

The bill has received widespread condemnation from the international community since it was introduced by MP David Bahati last year, with countries such as Switzerland and the U.S. warning that passage of the bill might have serious implications for the financial aid that Uganda receives.

Last week, 120 British MPs signed an Early Day Motion condemning the bill and requesting that the British Government and the European Union press Ugandan lawmakers to abandon the proposed law and to decriminalize homosexuality altogether. While an Early Day Motion is rarely debated in the House of Commons, such motions are often used to declare an MP's personal views on a topic, or to draw attention to a specific cause or issue.

It is widely thought that the creation of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill was influenced by certain American evangelicals that, in March of last year, attended a conference in Uganda entitled "A Seminar on Exposing the Homosexual Agenda." You can find more information on the possible American ties to this bill by going here.

While there are still strong forces pushing for the bill to be passed, perhaps chief among them Ugandan Ethics Minister James Nsaba Buturo who rather infamously told gay and lesbian Ugandans to "forget about human rights" and to get out of the country, it is known that Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, has said that, due to the fact that this has now become a matter of international relations, parliament should go slow and carefully weigh the legislation. He has even suggested that the more stringent aspects of the bill, including the death penalty, should be dropped, and has indicated that he would be inclined to veto the bill if this was not done.

It is known that there are several Ugandan legislators who also oppose the bill, many of whom feel that existing laws that criminalize homosexuality in the country are strict enough.

A formal vote on the bill was expected after Uganda's parliament returned from recess in February, but that vote never materialized, and, as signaled above, this does not seem to be a priority in the near future.

However, it would be premature to call the bill dead in the water, as the legislative process in Uganda is often tumultuous and unpredictable. Rather, this latest statement perhaps signals the slow abandonment of a bill that once looked certain to become law.

Thanks to international pressure, whether from world leaders like President Obama who labeled the bill "odious" and called for it to be scrapped, to the many religious quarters that also came out against the bill such as the leader of the Anglican church, Rowan Williams, who said that the bill was completely at odds with the Anglican ethos, and all this teamed with considerable opposition from within Uganda itself, the bill has now been marked as an unfavorable battleground for Museveni and Uganda's lawmakers and is likely to be seen as just too damaging on all sides to be allowed to pass, at least in its current form.

While this most recent news seems somewhat encouraging, it is imperative that we continue to apply pressure until the Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009 is firmly abandoned and not just watered down.

Thomas Jefferson is relevant- TOM HAHN

My rage against Texans was mild until recently when the so-called educators who determine what the textbooks for students will teach children and since Texas orders a huge amount of books, those books will be used other states and will forever change history as we know it.
This retelling of history is sociological abuse.
As the Pulitzer Prize winning author, Edward Larson, has written to me, "if you want to control the mind, first you control the telling of history." We have seen this before. Thinking about how the Catholic Church has rewritten history and how governments write documentation that affect generations has led me to realize that this is sociological abuse. These right-wing Republicans are undermining the very foundation of this countries philosophies.
As David Knowles has written-
Texas Yanks Thomas Jefferson From Teaching Standard
(March 12) — Widely regarded as one of the most important of all the founding fathers of the United States, Thomas Jefferson received a demotion of sorts Friday thanks to the Texas Board of Education.
The board voted to enact new teaching standards for history and social studies that will alter which material gets included in school textbooks. It decided to drop Jefferson from a world history section devoted to great political thinkers.
According to Texas Freedom Network, a group that opposes many of the changes put in place by the Board of Education, the original curriculum asked students to “explain the impact of Enlightenment ideas from John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Jefferson on political revolutions from 1750 to the present.”
AP
The Texas Board of Education is dropping President Thomas Jefferson from a world history section devoted to great political thinkers.
That emphasis did not sit well with board member Cynthia Dunbar, who, during Friday’s meeting, explained the rationale for changing it. “The Enlightenment was not the only philosophy on which these revolutions were based,” Dunbar said.
The new standard, passed at the meeting
in a 10-5 vote, now reads, “Explain the impact of the writings of John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and Sir William Blackstone.”
By dropping mention of revolution, and substituting figures such as Aquinas and Calvin for Jefferson, Texas Freedom Network argues, the board had chosen to embrace religious teachings over those of Jefferson, the man who coined the phrase “separation between church and state.”

According to USA Today, the board also voted to strike the word “democratic” from references to the U.S. form of government, replacing it with the term “constitutional republic.” Texas textbooks will contain references to “laws of nature and nature’s God” in passages that discuss major political ideas.
The board decided to use the words “free enterprise” when describing the U.S. economic system rather than words such as “capitalism,” “capitalist” and “free market,” which it deemed to have a negative connotation.
Serving 4.7 million students, Texas ac- counts for a large percentage of the text- book market, and the new standards may influence what is taught in the rest of the country.