THE STINK BUGS ON THE BALTIMORE COUNTY COUNCIL

June 7, 2011 - Three months ago today, five members of the Baltimore County Council told the immigrant residents of Baltimore County that they had no representation on the Council:


http://stm-in-md-11.blogspot.com/

TODD HUFF FOSTERS RACIAL DIVISIONS IN BALTIMORE COUNTY, MD

Todd Huff, a Baltimore County Councilman, does not think the residents of Baltimore County are racially divided - enough.


This is why he is enthusiastically pushing for a statewide referendum on a bill - the DREAM Act - passed by the Maryland General Assembly in 2011. The DREAM Act would permit kids who complete high school in Maryland and are academically qualified, to attend a Maryland Community College, paying in-state tuition. This is fair, since these kids are already Maryland residents.


Mr. Todd Huff does not think so. He wants to forbid these - mostly Latino - high school students from attending college in Maryland, as Maryland residents - which they are. 


Mr. Todd Huff wants to send a message to these kids, many of them resident here for most of their lives, many of them with no memories of life in any other country. But never you mind all of that.


Mr. Huff, Councilman for District 3, wants to send them a racially explosive message: 


GO BACK WHERE YOU CAME FROM. YOU ARE NOT WELCOME HERE.


The children Mr Huff and his GOP colleagues have targeted are the children of parents, who are not legally in the US.


We are talking about kids, here, like ones I know, who stayed in school, studied hard. Some of them have even applied for and were accepted at a state university and began to attend classes - only to be told that they could not continue because they are "ilegal."


If these kids should be blocked from going to college, where do we draw the next line? 


Should these kids not get medical care if they are sick? 


Should their little sisters and brothers not be allowed to go to K-12? 


Why is it good policy to tell bright Maryland residents they are not wanted here - except in low paying, menial, dead-end employment?


Why is it OK to racially divide the community like this? 


Mr Huff needs to meet these kids. 


Mr. Huff needs to tell them to their eager but now-disappointed faces, that he does not want them around - except maybe to trim his lawn. 


Shame on Mr Huff and on all other politicians and office holders, who believe in maintaining and enlarging the racial divide.   


SOURCE: 
Council Majority Supports Repeal of In-state Tuition for Illegal Immigrants - Towson, MD Patch

THE GOP's AYN RAND BUDGET

PAUL RYAN BUDGET LINKED TO AYN RAND: 

According to thinkprogress (see Source, below) Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) architect of the GOP's 2012 budget plan, is a devotee of Ayn Rand and especially of her Atlas Shrugged.


Although Conservative columnist Ross Douthat  has dismissed the connection the Ryan-Rand connection, thinkprogress points out:


- Ryan was a speaker at the Ayn Rand Centenary Conference in 2005, where he described Social Security as a "collectivist system" and cited Rand as his public service inspiration.


- He has at least two videos on his Facebook page in which he heaps praise on the author. "Ayn Rand, more than anyone else, did a fantastic job of explaining the morality of capitalism, the morality of individualism" 


- Ryan's budget plan comports with Ayn Rand's world view. 


Examples: 


- He guts Medicare, Medicaid, and a whole host of housing,food, and educational support programs. 


- Then he uses approximately half of the money freed by those cuts to reduce taxes on the most wealthy Americans. 


Ayn Rand, Ryan has written, explained the morality of Capitalism" to him (see above)


Ayn Rand thought of altruism as "evil" and wrote that highly successful individuals are morally superior to others.


No surprise that the Ryan-Rand budget plan seems a logical plan to Paul Ryan and the GOP.


SOURCE:  http://pr.thinkprogress.org/

But what about the reactors in Virginia?

Maryland press and media reports today (Mar 15, 2011) declare that Maryland's nuclear reactor at Calvert Heights (on the eastern shore, next to Delaware) is perfectly safe.

That's good to know . . . but what about Virginia?

Prevailing winds over MD indicate we receive the air that has passed over Virginia, West Virginia, etc. This means, we need to KNOW what's up with the nuclear power plants in Louisa and Surry County and the power plants under military supervision at Ft Belvoir and the active duty ships and subs which receive nuclear reactor installation at Newport News, VA.

Newport News is also the site where deactivated nuclear ships and subs are housed. These last are "deactivated" not fully "decommissioned" since the navy must wait at least fifty years before it is considered safe to disassemble these reactors.

No worries. Right?

For more info, here is a website:

Nuclear Power in Virginia

DREAM for students is a NIGHTMARE for Extremists

Public opinion was solicited in Annapolis on Feb 16, 2011, regarding a bill to permit any Maryland resident to attend college and pay in-state tuition, regardless of immigration status.


Maryland IAF brought dozens of representatives to the state capitol to support the bill.


And there was opposition. Extremist opposition.


Those giving testimony against Maryland's DREAM Act include groups, who speak the language of division and exclusion. 


One such group, HELP SAVE MARYLAND, has been declared a "nativist extremist group" by the Southern Poverty Law Center.


For coverage of the Feb 16 2011 Senate Committee hearings see the post at MarylandReporter:

In-state tuition for illegal immigrants: A dream for some, a nightmare for others – MarylandReporter.com

For the Southern Poverty Law Center listing of Rockville based HELP SAVE MARYLAND as a nativist/extremist group, here is the link:

http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2009/spring/sinister-intentions/nativist-extremis

For a listing of Maryland politicians who have associated themselves with the extremist HELP SAVE MARYLAND, here is the link:

http://maryland-politics.blogspot.com/2009/03/help-save-maryland-named.html


For a link to Washington Post coverage - which suggests a compromise on the bill is likely:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/16/AR2011021606279.html?sid=ST2011021606358

Connie, You are not in Kansas Anymore

From ThinkProgress . . . link below

KS GOP Rep. Connie O’Brien Says She Can Tell Who Is ‘Illegal’ Because They Have ‘The Olive Complexion’

One week ago, the Kansas House Federal and State Committee held a hearing about in-state tuition being granted to the children of undocumented immigrants, which has been the policy in the state since 2004.

Speaking in favor of repealing the law, Rep. Connie O’Brien (R-KS) began telling an anecdote at the hearing about how her son had difficulty in getting financial assistance to attend college. She explained that she took her son to a financial aid office, and as she was waiting in line, she believed there was a girl waiting in line with them who was “not originally from this country.” Fellow committee member Rep. Sean Gatewood (D-KS) asked O’Brien how she knew this student was “illegal.” O’Brien replied that she knew because the student “wasn’t black, she wasn’t Asian, and she had the olive complexion”:

[. . .] 

Kansas Democratic Party lawmakers have asked her to apologize. For her part, O’Brien counters that she’s been told she’s “got olive complexion” and that she’s not going to apologize until she’s “had time to think.”

Here is a link to the ThinkProgress item, where you can here Representative O'Brien's comment.

ThinkProgress » KS GOP Rep. Connie O’Brien Says She Can Tell Who Is ‘Illegal’ Because They Have ‘The Olive Complexion’

FOX NEWS INSIDER: Stuff Is Just Made Up

“They’re a propaganda outfit but they call themselves news.” This, from a Fox News Insider.

. . . as reported by MediaMatters. Here are parts of the MM piece (with a link below, to the entire MM blog article) 

FOX NEWS INSIDER: “Stuff Is Just Made Up”

February 10, 2011 7:20 am ET by Eric Boehlert

[. . .] 

“I don’t think people would believe it’s as concocted as it is; that stuff is just made up.”

[. . .]

a former Fox News employee who recently agreed to talk with Media Matters confirmed what critics have been saying for years about Murdoch’s cable channel. Namely, that Fox News is run as a purely partisan operation, virtually every news story is actively spun by the staff, its primary goal is to prop up Republicans and knock down Democrats, and that staffers at Fox News routinely operate without theslightest regard for fairness or fact checking.   

“It is their M.O. to undermine the administration and to undermine Democrats,” says the source. “They’re a propaganda outfit but they call themselves news.”

[. . .]

“They say one thing and do another. They insist on maintaining this charade, this façade, that they’re balanced or that they’re not right-wing extreme propagandist,” says the source. But it’s all a well-orchestrated lie, according this former insider. It’s a lie that permeates the entire Fox News culture and one that staffers and producers have to learn quickly in order to survive professionally.

“You have to work there for a while to understand the nods and the winks,” says the source. “And God help you if you don’t because sooner or later you’re going to get burned.”

The source explains:

“Like any news channel there’s lot of room for non-news content. The content that wasn’t ‘news,’ they didn’t care what we did with as long as it was amusing or quirky or entertaining;  as along as it brought in eyeballs.  But anything—anything--that was a news story you had to understand what the spin should be on it. If it was a big enough story it was explained to you in the morning [editorial] meeting. If it wasn’t explained, it was up to you to know the conservative take on it. There’s a conservative take on every story no matter what it is. So you either get told what it is or you better intuitively know what it is.”

[. . .] 

“When I first got there back in the day, and I don’t know how they indoctrinate people now, but back in the day when they were “training” you, as it were, they would say, ‘Here’s how we’re different.’ They’d say if there is an execution of a condemned man at midnight and there are all the live truck outside the prison and all the lives shots.  CNN would go, ‘Yes, tonight John Jackson, 25 of Mississippi, is going to die by lethal injection for the murder of two girls.’ MSNBC  would say the same thing. 

“We would come out and say, ‘Tonight, John Jackson who kidnapped an innocent two year old, raped her, sawed her head off and threw it in the school yard, is going to get the punishment that a jury of his peers thought he should get.’ And they say that’s the way we do it here. And you’re going , alright, it’s a bit of an extreme example but it’s something to think about. It’s not unreasonable.

"When you first get in they tell you we’re a bit of a counterpart to the screaming left wing lib media. So automatically you have to buy into the idea that the other media is howling left-wing. Don’t even start arguing that or you won’t even last your first day. 

“For the first few years it was let’s take the conservative take on things. And then after a few years it evolved into, well it’s not just the conservative take on things, we’re going to take the Republican take on things which is not necessarily in lock step with the conservative point of view.

“And then two, three, five years into that it was, we’re taking the Bush line on things, which was different than the GOP. We were a Stalin-esque mouthpiece.  It was just what Bush says goes on our channel. And by that point it was just totally dangerous.  Hopefully most people understand how dangerous it is for a media outfit to be a straight, unfiltered mouthpiece for an unchecked president.”

[. . .]

“It was a kick ass mentality too,” says the former Fox News insider. “It was relentless and it never went away. If one controversy faded, goddamn it they would find another one. They were in search of these points of friction real or imagined. And most of them were imagined or fabricated. You always have to seem to be under siege. You always have to seem like your values are under attack. The brain trust just knew instinctively which stories to do, like the War on Christmas.”

[. . .]

“People assume you need a license to call yourself a news channel. You don’t. So because they call themselves Fox News, people probably give them a pass on a lot of things,” says the source.

[. . .]

“I don’t think people understand that it’s an organization that’s built and functions by intimidation and bullying, and its goal is to prop up and support Republicans and the GOP and to knock down Democrats. People tend think that stuff that’s on TV is real, especially under the guise of news. You’d think that people would wise up, but they don’t.”

[. . .] 

If you take on Fox, they’ll kick you in the ass,” says the source. “I’m sure most [journalists]  know that. It’s not worth being  Swift Boated for your effort,” a reference to  how Fox News traditionally attacks journalists who write, or are perceived to have written, anything negative things about the channel.

The former insider admits to being perplexed in late 2009 when the Obama White House called out Murdoch’s operation as not being a legitimate new source, only to have major Beltway media players rush to the aid of Fox News and admonish the White House for daring to criticize the cable channel.

“That blew me away,” says the source, who stresses the White House’s critique of Fox News “happens to be true.” 

FOX NEWS INSIDER: “Stuff Is Just Made Up”

BORN IN THE USA? So What? Birthright Citizenship Under Threat

The Tea Partiers praise the US Constitution - but not all of it.


The Constitution extends citizenship to all born in the US.


But a right-wing movement is in place to deprive citizenship from infants born in the US - if their parents - or it just their mothers? - are not citizens.


Would it be rude to suggest that a push for the constitutional amendment is a Whites-only-please gambit? Let's be fair and wait to see which politicians and pressure groups support this effort.


For recent details - and with more to follow - here is a helpful NY Times link:


Birthright Citizenship Looms as Next Immigration Battle - NYTimes.com

" . . . the deteriorated moral state of the senior commanders . . ."

 - Breaking the Silence  - http://www.shovrimshtika.org/index_e.asp


Quoted in 

Israeli Ex-Soldier Defends Her Facebook Snapshots

This interview appeared in The Lede,  NYT Blog Aug 17 2010
______________________________


Rank: First Sergeant
Place of incident: Nablus
Description:


End of 2003

Let’s start with the things you want to tell, the things lying heavy on your heart. I ask you to tell everything, what happened, how you felt, what do you think now…

What disturbs me most, and what bothers me most is the lack of value of human life in the OT (occupied territories).Of course not that of Israelis. When my friend was killed, I caught myself suddenly saying ‘Wallah’ (exclamation of surprise) here’s a man gone, in the middle of his life. A person who’s life has stopped. All the aspects of a human being: his aspirations, what he was, what he said, the happy moments of his life, his friends. A man’s life has lots of aspects, and all of a sudden, everything stopped. And then it dawned on me that this was the death of a human being and that you start thinking ‘Wallah’ what about all these people we killed ? And my team killed….innocent people, or at least apparently innocent people. Some were killed by mistake, really by mistake. But what’s a mistake? Really—say ‘we are sorry’. We killed your husband, your daughter, your child or your grandfather or whoever else. And there were those executed on orders that, in my opinion, were illegal. As I told you, the most disturbing thing to me is that there is an absolutely Wild West in the OT. Brigade Commanders, Regiment Commanders and Company Commanders do whatever comes to their mind. No one checks them, and no one stops them. We got in- for many nights in the (Nablus) casbah - and our firing orders were: between 2 to 4(AM) anybody spotted in the casbah, is doomed to die. These were the words: ‘doomed to die’.

Who spoke these words ?

Words we heard from the CC (Company Commander) in the briefing. The CC gave us a briefing before every mission. Sometimes he said between 2 and 4 whoever wanders around the casbah is doomed to die, or sometimes between 1 and 3: doomed to die.

Our team entered (the casbah) and took over a building. From this building we advanced in a worm-like fashion, you know, blowing up a wall, going from house to house, blowing up another wall and entering another building. Like a worm, in the casbah and at Balata (refugee camp), that are highly crowded areas, avoiding crossing the alleys that were a ‘killing zone’. Whenever you crossed one of these alleys your chances of coming out alive were not good. Therefore we developed a tactic of avoiding the alleys altogether and passing through walls of buildings. As buildings are very close to each other, and have mutual walls. So you take a dynamite brick, attach it to a wall, explode it, and climb through the hole in the wall. This is a very slow advance. When you reach a strategic building, commanding its surroundings, you set up a post there to observe the surrounding alleys and roof tops.

What do you do with the family in the ‘strategic’ building?

I know all the stories, and heard from here to eternity about the non-human treatment of these families, and all sorts of plunder. I want to state here for the protocol that in my unit there wasn’t anything like it. We were always… we blew a hole in a wall, we entered homes, we gathered the entire family, not by shouting, but quietly. We tried to calm them down. Placed them in a room, we locked them up and placed a guard. Every time they had to use the toilet, they asked us, and they did with someone accompanying them. We moved furniture aside, sat on the floor, took up positions, built MG and sharpshooter positions in the highest windows or rooftops.

This means that destruction of a house entered by our forces only meant destruction of only a wall?

Yes, in the operation ‘Defensive Shield’, only destruction of a wall. After that things changed. During ‘Defensive Shield’ we cleaned up houses. The houses we left were cleaned. We made sure to clean it. That was the way with my team.

[….]

I don’t remember how long it took to conquer the entire casbah, maybe a week, maybe two. It happened during the battle of the casbah. We entered, continued advancing in the ‘worm fashion’, took over a strategic building, set up positions there, and one of the sharpshooters identified a man on the roof. The man was on a roof about two roofs away from us. I think he was between 50 to 70 m from the sharpshooter. Unarmed, I looked at the man with a night vision binocular. He was unarmed. It was 2AM: an unarmed man on a rooftop, turning around. We reported it to the PC (Platoon Commander) who ordered ‘Take him down’. He (the sharpshooter) shot and took him down. The PC, in a radioed message, actually sealed the man’s fate to die. An unarmed man!

 Did you see that he was unarmed?

I saw with my own eyes that the man was unarmed. He (the sharpshooter) also reported… the report said: ‘an unarmed man on the roof’. The PC interpreted it that the man was an observer. He interpreted that the man was an observer, meaning the man was not directly threatening us, and he ordered us to shoot the man and we did it…I myself didn’t shoot, a fellow soldier shot and killed him. And you start thinking that in the US death sentences are imposed, and on every sentence there are thousands of appeals, as they take it very seriously, judges, academically trained people, and there are demonstrations, and so on. Actually a 26-year-old man, my PC, imposed a death sentence on an unarmed man. Who was he? What’s that ‘an observer?’ So what? Is that enough of a reason to kill him? And how did he know he was an observer? He obviously didn’t know. All he knew was that there was an unarmed man on top of the roof, and he ordered to kill him, which, in my opinion was an illegitimate order, and we carried the order out, and killed a human being. The man died. In my opinion that was outright murder. And that wasn’t the only case.

http://www.shovrimshtika.org/testimonies_e.asp?cat=19