The Christian Right Still dominates the GOP — Is There Any End in Sight?

 

By Amanda Marcotte
Progressive America Rising via AlterNet

March 18, 2015 – In a recent interview on Fox, Christian right writer [3] James Robison went off on a rant about how Christian conservatives need to take over the government: “There are only 500 of you,” Robison said of Congress. “We can get rid of the whole bunch in one smooth swoop and we can really reroute the whole ship!”

He added that this takeover would cause "demons to shudder" and the "gates of hell to tremble," but what was really delusional about it was the idea that Congress is somehow devoid of Christians. In reality, 92% of Congress people identify [4] as Christian. More to the point, nearly every Republican, regardless of their sincerity in saying so, aligns with conservative Christianity, whether Catholic or Protestant, an affiliation reflected in their policy preferences. (One solitary Republican is Jewish.) The Christian right might not own all 535 members of Congress, but with Republicans in the majority, the Christian right is also in the majority.

And yet, as New York Times writer Jason Horowitz explained in a recent profile piece about evangelical organizer David Lane, Lane feels quite similarly: “For Mr. Lane, a onetime Bible salesman and self-described former “wild man,” connecting the pastors with two likely presidential candidates was more than a good day’s work. It was part of what he sees as his mission, which is to make evangelical Christians a decisive power in the Republican Party.”

Say what, said any reader who has cracked a newspaper, the New York Times or otherwise, in the past four decades. Making the Republican Party beholden to the Christian right is like making the sky blue or making cats stubborn. Can you really make something be what it already is?

That the evangelical right already controls the GOP shouldn’t really be in dispute. Not only do the Republicans do exactly as the Christian right tells them on every social issue, such as reproductive rights or gay rights, but Republicans also pay fealty to the Christian right by targeting Muslim countries with their hawkish posturing or using [5] Christian language to rationalize slashing the social safety net. If you were trying to come up with a quick-and-dirty description of the Republican Party, “coalition of corporate and patriarchal religious interests” would be it. (Continued)

Continue reading The Christian Right Still dominates the GOP — Is There Any End in Sight?

We’re Spending Billions to Support the Most Corrupt, Abusive Arm of Law Enforcement

By Susan Grigsby
Daily Kos via Alternet
March 15, 2015

These guys are scary.

In March 2014, three women from Honduras—a mother, her 14-year-old daughter and another teenage girl—crossed the Rio Grande near Abram, Texas. According to Garrett Graff’s [3] article in Politico Magazine, they surrendered to U.S. Custom and Border Protection (CBP) agent Esteban Manzanares of the Border Patrol. Instead of taking them to the holding area in McAllen, Texas, Manzanares put them in the back of his patrol vehicle and drove around for a couple of hours.

    Then he stopped his truck in a wooded area. He raped both the mother and the daughter. He slit the mother’s wrists and tried to break the daughter’s neck, leaving them for dead in the brush.

    He drove off with the third woman bound in his green-and-white heavy-duty Border Patrol truck with a red-and-blue light bar on top, a Department of Homeland Security logo on the door and a U.S. flag on the hood. Somewhere out in the borderlands, the agent left his third prisoner hidden, bound with duct tape.

At the end of his shift, he went back for the girl, took her to his apartment where he raped her. Meanwhile, one of his earlier victims, still alive, had stumbled across the field of a surveillance camera and Border Patrol agents were sent to pick her up. Questioning the two victims led the agents to suspect that a CBP officer was involved and they called the local FBI office. Finding duct tape and blood in Esteban Manzanares’ service vehicle, the FBI agents headed to his apartment. There, Manzanares shot himself after the FBI knocked on his door and identified themselves as federal officers. The girl was found in his apartment, alive, naked and bound to a chair.

Border Patrol Agents conduct an operations check on a Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicle on the South Texas border.
Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicle. To protect against a secret flood of IEDs on the border?

After an internal bureaucratic struggle that forced him to turn to the secretary of the DHS, the new U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) [4] director, Gil Kerlikowske, issued a statement [5] that said, in part:

    I want you to know that I consider these actions, if true, to be reprehensible and I know they are not representative of the agents of the U.S. Border Patrol. … I am deeply sorry that this incident occurred and am committed to doing everything in my power to prevent incidents like this from occurring again.

There are two things of note about this story. One is that Esteban Manzanares was already under suspicion [6] for allowing two border violators to go free, but the backlog of misconduct allegations at the inspector general’s office was so great that he was allowed to remain on duty until an investigation could be done.  (Continued)

Continue reading We’re Spending Billions to Support the Most Corrupt, Abusive Arm of Law Enforcement

Obama Absurdly Declares Venezuela a Security Threat

Channeling Reagan, Obama continues US pressure on Latin American leftist governments

by Mark Weisbrot
al-Jazeera

March 10, 2015 – Yesterday the White House took a new step toward the theater of the absurd by “declaring a national emergency with respect to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by the situation in Venezuela,” as President Barack Obama put it in a letter to House Speaker John Boehner.

It remains to be seen whether anyone in the White House press corps will have the courage to ask what in the world the nation’s chief executive could mean by that. Is Venezuela financing a coming terrorist attack on U.S. territory? Planning an invasion? Building a nuclear weapon?

Who do they think they are kidding? Some may say that the language is just there because it is necessary under U.S. law in order to impose the latest round of sanctions on Venezuela. That is not much of a defense, telling the whole world the rule of law in the United States is something the president can use lies to get around whenever he finds it inconvenient.

That was the approach of President Ronald Reagan in 1985 when he made a similar declaration in order to impose sanctions — including an economic embargo — on Nicaragua. Like the White House today, he was trying to topple an elected government that Washington didn’t like. He was able to use paramilitary and terrorist violence as well as an embargo in a successful effort to destroy the Nicaraguan economy and ultimately overturn its government. (The Sandinistas eventually returned to power in 2007 and are the governing party today.)

The world has moved forward, even though Washington has not. Venezuela today has very strong backing from its neighbors against what almost every government in the region sees as an attempt to destabilize the country.

“The Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) reiterates its strong repudiation of the application of unilateral coercive measures that are contrary to international law,” read a statement from every country in the hemisphere except for the U.S. and Canada on Feb. 11. They were responding to the U.S. sanctions against Venezuela that Obama signed into law in December.

Didn’t read any of this in the English-language media? Well, you probably also didn’t see the immediate reaction to yesterday’s White House blunder from the head of the Union of South American Nations, which read, “UNASUR rejects any external or internal attempt at interference that seeks to disrupt the democratic process in Venezuela.” (Continued)

Continue reading Obama Absurdly Declares Venezuela a Security Threat