politics

The Constitution provides that every ten years, the Federal government shall conduct an "Enumeration" of the people, for the purpose of apportioning Congressional representation.

It does not provide for interrogating the people about race, ethnicity, family relationships, home ownership status, or any other information. (I got the "long form" back in 2000, which had over 50 questions; they seem to have done away with that one this time, though.)

Before you provide such information, feeling assured that it's private and protected by law, you might want to consider that the Census Bureau provided the U.S. Secret Service with names and addresses of Japanese-Americans during World War II so that they could be herded up and put in concentration camps.

It's not that I'm expecting any such round-up to be repeated any time soon, mind you; it's a matter of principle. The only thing the Federal government needs to know for the census is how many people live here, and that's all it's going to get from me. If it wants more information, it can get it with anonymized surveys.

It's well-known that the CIA's MK-ULTRA program dosed unwitting people with LSD in the 1950s and 60s as part of their mind control experiments. (Really. I Am Not Making This Up, and it is not loony conspiracy theory history -- read the linked Wikipedia article if you've never heard of MK-ULTRA before.)

However, these experiments were thought to have limited to administration of drugs to one person at a time, or at least only to small groups. But new research into the history of MK-ULTRA provides evidence that a bizarre 1951 outbreak of mass insanity and hallucinations in a southern French village was caused by the CIA spiking the food supply with LSD, rather than by ergot-containing fungus poisoning the bread.

Hundreds of people were affected, dozens were committed to asylums, and at least five died.

According to the Telegraph,

Mr Albarelli said the real "smoking gun" was a White House document sent to members of the Rockefeller Commission formed in 1975 to investigate CIA abuses. It contained the names of a number of French nationals who had been secretly employed by the CIA and made direct reference to the "Pont St. Esprit incident." In its quest to research LSD as an offensive weapon, Mr Albarelli claims, the US army also drugged over 5,700 unwitting American servicemen between 1953 and 1965.

None of his sources would indicate whether the French secret services were aware of the alleged operation. According to US news reports, French intelligence chiefs have demanded the CIA explain itself following the book's revelations. French intelligence officially denies this.

Jamal Juma’, coordinator of the Palestinian grass-roots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign, writes about trying to bring about non-violent change while living under Israeli oppression:

Yet, every Friday, Palestinian villagers losing precious agricultural land to Israel’s wall turn out to protest peacefully. Unarmed farmers and entire families march to defend their lands. They do so though 16 have been killed, many just kids. They continue to show up though thousands have been injured.

In October, I expressed concern over the arrest of my colleague Mohammed Othman. Shortly before his arrest, Israeli soldiers at a West Bank checkpoint took him aside and warned, “We’re going to arrest you, but it’s difficult with you because all you do is talk.” I wrote then, “If talking is a crime, if urging the international community to hold Israel accountable for theft of our land is a crime, then we all are vulnerable.”

Less than two months later I, too, was sitting in an Israeli prison cell – for talking too much.

As they dragged me from my house, Israeli occupation forces threatened my family’s well-being, saying they would only see me again after a prisoner exchange.

Because we Palestinians are under military occupation, where military decrees sharply limit political activity, the struggle for our most basic human rights is, by default, criminalized. Once arrested, protesters do not face civil courts, but military courts which blatantly violate international standards of fair trial.

Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to enable Israel's oppression and theft of land to the tune of $5.5 billion annually, fueling more anti-American feeling in the Middle East.

I've been thinking for a while that there are (at least) two unlikely pre-conditions that must be met before there will be peace in this region:

1. The existence of Israel must be recognized a fait accompli. It has no special "right to exist" any more than than did the U.S.S.R., Austria–Hungary, or any of the other nations that have come and gone; but the people living there now are there and, so long as they respect the rights of others, have the right to be free from violence. This does not mean that the Palestinian people give up the right of self-defense.
2. The existence of Israel must be recognized and admitted to be based on a huge crime, dating back to the 1917 Balfour Declaration when the U.K. decided it could exploit the Zionist movement for its own geopolitical benefit by supporting a "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people," and never mind all the people already living there. This does not mean that the people of Israel all have to pack up and leave, any more than the fact that the United States was founded on the genocide of the Native peoples means that I need to move to the homeland of my ancestors.

But so long as so many Americans believe that Palestine was essentially empty until Israel was formed, and so many Palestinians still think it's possible to expel the invaders, and so many Israelis actually believe that they have some divine right to that land, and so long as we ignore the fact that most of the trouble can be traced to the goddamn British Empire and fail to demand aid and compensation for the region from the U.K., the blood and the tears will continue.

We mentioned recently how Sarah Palin's grandson Tripp Palin Johnston -- and reportedly all of the Palin kids -- receive free federal health care through Indian Health Services and the Alaska Native Medical Center.

According to The Daily Telegraph, her family's love for socialized medicine extends to Canada as well: when she was a kid, the family would engage in a little medical tourism, and sneak over the border to get care paid for my Canadian taxpayers:

Mrs Palin, who moved as a child to the south-eastern Alaska town of Skagway, was speaking at an event sponsored by the Fraser Institute, a conservative Canadian think tank.

"Believe it or not - this was in the sixties - we used to hustle on over the border for health care that we would receive in Whitehorse [capital of Canada's Yukon Territory]," she said.

"I remember my brother, he burned his ankle in some little kid accident thing, and my parents had to put him on a train and rush him over to Whitehorse, and I think, 'Isn't that kind of ironic now'. Zooming over the border, getting health care from Canada."

Hypocrisy: a great luxury, or the greatest luxury?

Please, keep talking, Sarah; you're the greatest weapon those of us opposed to the wingnut faction of the GOP have.

Sarah Palin's husband Todd Palin has Native American ancestry, Yup'ik and Curyung. It recently came out that their grandson, Tripp Palin Johnston, is an enrolled member of the Curyung Tribal Council -- and receives free federal health care through Indian Health Services and the Alaska Native Medical Center. (Comments on that story claim that all of the Palin kids are enrolled and get taxpayer-supported health care, but I cannot confirm that at this time.)

Sarah Palin earned Politifact's "Lie of the Year" when she claimed that government-run health care would end up with "death panels" sending the elderly and disabled to their doom. But it looks like she just wanted to scare the rest of us off, make sure that there were plenty of government benefits to go around for her family and not let us riff-raff in on the deal.

Socialized medicine for the grandkids of the rich and powerful, while the rest of us get sick and go broke thanks to private health insurance. Yep, that's the greed and hypocrisy of the GOP we know and love.

Sometime in September 2001, in the minds of most Americans the word "terrorist" became synonymous with "Arab Muslim". Somehow, the Oklahoma City bombing and the white male Christian terrorists behind it were completely forgotten.

Perhaps the bizarre case of Joe Stack, the man who crashed his plane into an IRS office today, will remind us about those other terrorists, and that racial profiling doesn't work because extremists come in all colors.

Do you remember 9/11? It seems Rudy Giuliani doesn't. In the wake of the failed "underwear bomber", Rudy has claimed that "We had no domestic attacks under Bush; we've had one under Obama."

This requires forgetting not only 9/11 -- for Giuliani, a remarkable feat -- but the anthrax attacks and the shoe bomber.

I can only see two options: 1) Giuliani is so blinded by hatred for Obama that he's come down with hysterical amnesia and believes what he's saying, or 2) Giuliani is deliberately lying but has such a low opinion of the American voter that he thinks the lie will stick in some people's minds.

A similar malady seems to be effecting Dana Perino, who actually said "We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush's term," and Mary Matalin, who claimed that 9/11 was a problem inherited from the Clinton administration. (To refresh your memory, it was not the Clinton administration that, in August 2001, received and ignored a memo titled "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US".)

I've been critical and disappointed regarding Obama's treatment of the LGBT community. But he earns back some points with the history-making appointment of transgender woman Amanda Simpson as a senior technical adviser to the Department of Commerce.

As a Facebook friend of a Facebook friend (a FFOAFF?) noted, this has the added benefit that it will likely make Glen Beck's head explode.

Another story from the "why do they put so many lunatics on police forces"? file: a plainclothes cop drew his gun on a bunch of people having a snowball fight in D.C., after he (or his car, not clear) was hit by a snowball.

From the blog of American student Lily Sussman:

I was sitting on the deck overlooking the Red Sea. Israeli security officers (most who looked around 18 years old) had completed around two hours of questioning and searching me. They had pressed every sock and scarf with a security device, ripped open soap and had me strip extra layers. They asked me tons of questions–where are you going? Who do you know? Do you have a boyfriend? Is he Arab, Egyptian, Palestinian? Why do you live in Egypt? Why not Israel? What do you know about the ‘conflict’ here? What do you think? They quized me on Judaism,which I know nothing about.

...

Moments later a man came outside and introduced himself as the manager on duty. And then, “I’m sorry but we had to blow up your laptop. “

A clear, if thankfully mild, incident of state terrorism: "We see that you have political views we find unacceptable. We will therefore, under cover of 'security procedure', seek to intimidate you with violence toward your property."