Saturday, February 20, 2016
Friday, February 19, 2016
Scalia's Black Beemer by Greg Palast
Scalia's Black Beemer By Greg Palast | for OpEdNews
It was one of our team’s weirder investigative discoveries: The recently departed Justice Antonin Scalia – aleha hashalom – in 2011, was ticketed for recklessly driving his black BMW. To his family, I offer condolences. To my readers, I offer the facts. A man's soul must be laid to rest, but history must not be buried as well, especially now that the Justice's passing has become grounds for stories that border on historical obscenity, cf. the New York Times "Liberal Love for Antonin Scalia". Love?? Well, if you want a Valentine, this ain't it.
There's been a lot of gleeful chuckling, for example, about Scalia's courtroom bench "humor." But behind his jokey comments lay a cruelty aimed at the poor, the injured, the Beemer-less class that turns to the Court as the last hope for protection against corporate and state violence.
Here’s a telling example of Scalia’s humor from a crucial voting rights case. In 2005, Indiana's Republican legislature passed a law barring the vote to anyone without current state photo ID. The excuse: an official ID would prevent voter fraud – despite the fact that the state had not found, in over 100 years, even one case of a voter illegally impersonating another.
The media did get a laugh out of the ten nuns who were turned away from an Indiana polling station because the sisters' driver’s licenses had expired. The nuns were in their eighties and nineties. Their licenses had expired, though they had not. Tough luck ladies, you lose your vote.
Bobby Kennedy and I covered the cute story of the nuns; but we also wrote about the unnoticed 78,000 African-Americans in Indiana who lost their right to vote because they did not have the right ID to vote. A disproportionate number of African-Americans lack cars, and therefore driver’s licenses; and only a few, apparently have passports for weekends in Paris.
Get a free copy of the investigative report – in comic book form, Steal Back Your Vote
Civil rights groups sued, stating the obvious: that the Indiana law is racist in its operation, a violation of the Voting Rights Act. Black folk, the elderly, students, and poor whites – were all blocked from registering and voting. Federal Justice Terence Evans threw out the biased ID law, writing, “The Indiana voter photo ID law is a not-too-thinly veiled attempt to discourage election-day turnout by certain folks believed to skew Democratic.”
But Indiana argued before the Supreme Court that anyone could get an ID – they just had to get a non-driver ID from a county office. Experts pointed out that the average poor person in Indiana – a poor person likely to be Black – lived an average 17 miles from a county seat. That’s when Justice Scalia rode, recklessly, to Indiana’s rescue. Scalia chortled that “Seventeen miles is seventeen miles for the rich and the poor,”
Black or white. How cute. How droll, Mr. Justice. And it's true, at 65 miles per hour, 17 miles is just a 15 minute cruise, whether your BMW is black or white. But the experts I spoke with told me they calculated that travel required two bus rides, cost a day of work, and included fees that amount to a poll tax. In the non-BMW world, 17 miles is just another long, obstacle-choked road to the ballot for voters of color.
All week I’ve heard Scalia praised as an "originalist," that is, sticking with the intent of the writers of the Constitution. Really? The right to vote without regard to race, the 15th Amendment, grew from the ground watered by the blood of Abraham Lincoln’s warriors. "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state.”
Was it the original intent of these words to enable the creation of new Jim Crow obstacles to citizen rights? Since when does an "originalist" so insouciantly ignore the clearly marked signposts of the law?
My suggestion: The President should not nominate a replacement for Scalia. Let's make this election a referendum: make Americans choose our Court. Let Americans decide if our Court will defeat or cuddle up to Jim Crow, whether our government may dictate whom you love and marry, whether the Bill of Rights is just a porous veil covering an unfettered and brutal spy state. Let's put the soul of America to a vote.
We are completing our film on the latest, hidden tactics of racially poisonous vote suppression which has grown like a mold from the 2013 decision by Scalia and his Court comrades to gut the Voting Rights Act. As John Pilger kindly said of my work, "The information is a hand grenade."
This film is the peaceable weapon for the new civil rights movement. Right now, support the completion of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: a Tale of Billionaires and Ballot Bandits, with a $100 donation and I'll list you in the film credits as a supporter and I'll send you the signed DVD once the film wraps.
Donate $50 if you just want the signed DVD ... For $1,000 or $500, get a film credit (Producer or co-Producer respectively) and tickets to the film's opening. Or support the film for any amount you can, no matter how small or large.
Please make this donation to our foundation right now. All donations are tax-deductible.
We're so close to the finish line, I can’t thank you enough for keeping us going. For 15 years, Greg Palast has been uncovering voter suppression tactics in investigative reports for BBC Television, The Guardian, Harper’s and Rolling Stone.
In 2016 Greg Palast will be releasing his new feature film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy—A Tale of Billionaires and Ballot Bandits, which includes his award-winning investigation Jim Crow Returns. Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed Vultures' Picnic.
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Monday, February 15, 2016
Boycotting the Jews
I'm not sure where this piece originated. It was sent to me by an enlightened and honest friend, a man of integrity. I'm reprinting it here because I feel it deserves the widest audience possible.
A short time ago, Iran's Supreme Leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei urged the Muslim World to boycott anything and everything that originates with the Jewish people. In response, Meyer M. Treinkman, a pharmacist, out of the kindness of his heart, offered to assist them in their boycott as follows:
"Any Muslim who has Syphilis must not be cured by Salvarsan discovered by a Jew, Dr. Ehrlich. He should not even try to find out whether he has Syphilis, because the Wasserman Test is the discovery of a Jew. If a Muslim suspects that he has Gonorrhea, he must not seek diagnosis, because he will be using the method of a Jew named Neissner.
"A Muslim who has heart disease must not use Digitalis, a discovery by a Jew, Ludwig Traube. Should he suffer with a toothache, he must not use Novocaine, a discovery of the Jews, Widal and Weil. If a Muslim has Diabetes, he must not use Insulin, the result of research by Minkowsky, a Jew. If one has a headache, he must shun Pyramidon and Antypyrin, due to the Jews, Spiro and Ellege. Muslims with convulsions must put up with them because it was a Jew, Oscar Leibreich, who proposed the use of Chloral Hydrate. Arabs must do likewise with their psychic ailments because Freud, father of psychoanalysis, was a Jew. Should a Muslim child get Diphtheria, he must refrain from the Schick reaction which was invented by the Jew, Bella Schick.
"Muslims should be ready to die in great numbers and must not permit treatment of ear and brain damage, work of Jewish Nobel Prize winner, Robert Baram. They should continue to die or remain crippled by Infantile Paralysis because the discoverer of the anti-polio vaccine is a Jew, Jonas Salk.
"Muslims must refuse to use Streptomycin and continue to die of Tuberculosis because a Jew, Zalman Waxman, invented the wonder drug against this killing disease. Muslim doctors must discard all discoveries and improvements by dermatologist Judas Sehn Benedict, or the lung specialist, Frawnkel, and of many other world renowned Jewish scientists and medical experts.
"In short, good and loyal Muslims properly and fittingly should remain afflicted with Syphilis, Gonorrhea, Heart Disease, Headaches, Typhus, Diabetes, Mental Disorders, Polio Convulsions and Tuberculosis and be proud to obey the Islamic boycott."
Oh, and by the way, don't call for a doctor on your cell phone because the cell phone was invented in Israel by a Jewish engineer.
Meanwhile I ask, what medical contributions to the world have the Muslims made?" The Global Islamic population is approximately 1,200,000,000; that is ONE BILLION TWO HUNDRED MILLION or 20% of the world's population.
They have received the following Nobel Prizes:
Literature: 1988 - Najib Mahfooz
Peace: 1978 - Mohamed Anwar El-Sadat 1990 - Elias James Corey 1994 - Yaser Arafat 1999 - Ahmed Zewai
Economics: (zero)
Physics: (zero)
Medicine: 1960 - Peter Brian Medawar 1998 - Ferid Mourad
TOTAL: 7
The Global Jewish population is approximately 14,000,000; that is FOURTEEN MILLION or about 0.02% of the world's population.
They have received the following Nobel Prizes:
Literature: 1910 - Paul Heyse 1927 - Henri Bergson 1958 - Boris Pasternak 1966 - Shmuel Yosef Agnon 1966 - Nelly Sachs 1976 - Saul Bellow 1978 - Isaac Bashevis Singer 1981 - Elias Canetti 1987 - Joseph Brodsky 1991 - Nadine Gordimer
World Peace: 1911 - Alfred Fried 1911 - Tobias Michael Carel Asser 1968 - Rene Cassin 1973 - Henry Kissinger 1978 - Menachem Begin 1986 - Elie Wiesel 1994 - Shimon Peres 1994 - Yitzhak Rabin
Physics: 1905 - Adolph Von Baeyer 1906 - Henri Moissan 1907 - Albert Abraham Michelson 1908 - Gabriel Lippmann 1910 - Otto Wallach 1915 - Richard Willstaetter 1918 - Fritz Haber 1921 - Albert Einstein 1922 - Niels Bohr 1925 - James Franck 1925 - Gustav Hertz 1943 - Gustav Stern 1943 - George Charles de Hevesy 1944 - Isidor Issac Rabi 1952 - Felix Bloch 1954 - Max Born 1958 - Igor Tamm 1959 - Emilio Segre 1960 - Donald A. Glaser 1961 - Robert Hofstadter 1961 - Melvin Calvin 1962 - Lev Davidovich Landau 1962 - Max Ferdinand Perutz 1965 - Richard Phillips Feynman 1965 - Julian Schwinger 1969 - Murray Gell-Mann 1971 - Dennis Gabor 1972 - William Howard Stein 1973 - Brian David Josephson 1975 - Benjamin Mottleson 1976 - Burton Richter 1977 - Ilya Prigogine 1978 - Arno Allan Penzias 1978 - Peter L Kapitza 1979 - Stephen Weinberg 1979 - Sheldon Glashow 1979 - Herbert Charles Brown 1980 - Paul Berg 1980 - Walter Gilbert 1981 - Roald Hoffmann 1982 - Aaron Klug 1985 - Albert A. Hauptman 1985 - Jerome Karle 1986 - Dudley R. Herschbach 1988 - Robert Huber 1988 - Leon Lederman 1988 - Melvin Schwartz 1988 - Jack Steinberger 1989 - Sidney Altman 1990 - Jerome Friedman 1992 - Rudolph Marcus 1995 - Martin Perl 2000 - Alan J. Heeger
Economics: 1970 - Paul Anthony Samuelson 1971 - Simon Kuznets 1972 - Kenneth Joseph Arrow 1975 - Leonid Kantorovich 1976 - Milton Friedman 1978 - Herbert A. Simon 1980 - Lawrence Robert Klein 1985 - Franco Modigliani 1987 - Robert M. Solow 1990 - Harry Markowitz 1990 - Merton Miller 1992 - Gary Becker 1993 - Robert Fogel
Medicine: 1908 - Elie Metchnikoff 1908 - Paul Erlich 1914 - Robert Barany 1922 - Otto Meyerhof 1930 - Karl Landsteiner 1931 - Otto Warburg 1936 - Otto Loewi 1944 - Joseph Erlanger 1944 - Herbert Spencer Gasser 1945 - Ernst Boris Chain 1946 - Hermann Joseph Muller 1950 - Tadeus Reichstein 1952 - Selman Abraham Waksman 1953 - Hans Krebs 1953 - Fritz Albert Lipmann 1958 - Joshua Lederberg 1959 - Arthur Kornberg 1964 - Konrad Bloch 1965 - Francois Jacob 1965 - Andre Lwoff 1967 - George Wald 1968 - Marshall W. Nirenberg 1969 - Salvador Luria 1970 - Julius Axelrod 1970 - Sir Bernard Katz 1972 - Gerald Maurice Edelman 1975 - Howard Martin Temin 1976 - Baruch S. Blumberg 1977 - Roselyn Sussman Yalow 1978 - Daniel Nathans 1980 - Baruj Benacerraf 1984 - Cesar Milstein 1985 - Michael Stuart Brown 1985 - Joseph L. Goldstein 1986 - Stanley Cohen [& Rita Levi-Montalcini] 1988 - Gertrude Elion 1989 - Harold Varmus 1991 - Erwin Neher 1991 - Bert Sakmann 1993 - Richard J. Roberts 1993 - Phillip Sharp 1994 - Alfred Gilman 1995 - Edward B. Lewis 1996- Lu RoseIacovino
TOTAL: 129!
The Jews are NOT promoting brainwashing children in military training camps, teaching them how to blow themselves up and cause maximum deaths of Jews and other non-Muslims. The Jews don't hijack planes, nor kill athletes at the Olympics, or blow themselves up in German restaurants.
There is NOT one single Jew who has destroyed a church. There is NOT a single Jew who protests by killing people. The Jews don't traffic slaves, nor have leaders calling for Jihad and death to all the Infidels.
Perhaps the world's Muslims should consider investing more in standard education and less in blaming the Jews for all their problems. Muslims must ask 'what can they do for humankind' before they demand that humankind respects them.
Regardless of your feelings about the crisis between Israel and the Palestinians and Arab neighbors, even if you believe there is more culpability on Israel 's part, the following two sentences really say it all: 'If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence. If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel."
Benjamin Netanyahu: General Eisenhower warned us. It is a matter of history that when the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, General Dwight Eisenhower, found the victims of the death camps he ordered all possible photographs to be taken, and for the German people from surrounding villages to be ushered through the camps and even made to bury the dead. He did this because he said in words to this effect: 'Get it all on record now - get the films - get the witnesses - because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened'
It is not removed as yet. However, this is a frightening portent of the fear that is gripping the world and how easily each country is giving into it. It is now more than 65 years after the Second World War in Europe ended. Now, more than ever, with Iran, among others, claiming the Holocaust to be 'a myth,' it is imperative to make sure the world never forgets.
h/t to Bob Poris
Boycotting the Jews
A short time ago, Iran's Supreme Leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei urged the Muslim World to boycott anything and everything that originates with the Jewish people. In response, Meyer M. Treinkman, a pharmacist, out of the kindness of his heart, offered to assist them in their boycott as follows:
"Any Muslim who has Syphilis must not be cured by Salvarsan discovered by a Jew, Dr. Ehrlich. He should not even try to find out whether he has Syphilis, because the Wasserman Test is the discovery of a Jew. If a Muslim suspects that he has Gonorrhea, he must not seek diagnosis, because he will be using the method of a Jew named Neissner.
"A Muslim who has heart disease must not use Digitalis, a discovery by a Jew, Ludwig Traube. Should he suffer with a toothache, he must not use Novocaine, a discovery of the Jews, Widal and Weil. If a Muslim has Diabetes, he must not use Insulin, the result of research by Minkowsky, a Jew. If one has a headache, he must shun Pyramidon and Antypyrin, due to the Jews, Spiro and Ellege. Muslims with convulsions must put up with them because it was a Jew, Oscar Leibreich, who proposed the use of Chloral Hydrate. Arabs must do likewise with their psychic ailments because Freud, father of psychoanalysis, was a Jew. Should a Muslim child get Diphtheria, he must refrain from the Schick reaction which was invented by the Jew, Bella Schick.
"Muslims should be ready to die in great numbers and must not permit treatment of ear and brain damage, work of Jewish Nobel Prize winner, Robert Baram. They should continue to die or remain crippled by Infantile Paralysis because the discoverer of the anti-polio vaccine is a Jew, Jonas Salk.
"Muslims must refuse to use Streptomycin and continue to die of Tuberculosis because a Jew, Zalman Waxman, invented the wonder drug against this killing disease. Muslim doctors must discard all discoveries and improvements by dermatologist Judas Sehn Benedict, or the lung specialist, Frawnkel, and of many other world renowned Jewish scientists and medical experts.
"In short, good and loyal Muslims properly and fittingly should remain afflicted with Syphilis, Gonorrhea, Heart Disease, Headaches, Typhus, Diabetes, Mental Disorders, Polio Convulsions and Tuberculosis and be proud to obey the Islamic boycott."
Oh, and by the way, don't call for a doctor on your cell phone because the cell phone was invented in Israel by a Jewish engineer.
Meanwhile I ask, what medical contributions to the world have the Muslims made?" The Global Islamic population is approximately 1,200,000,000; that is ONE BILLION TWO HUNDRED MILLION or 20% of the world's population.
They have received the following Nobel Prizes:
Literature: 1988 - Najib Mahfooz
Peace: 1978 - Mohamed Anwar El-Sadat 1990 - Elias James Corey 1994 - Yaser Arafat 1999 - Ahmed Zewai
Economics: (zero)
Physics: (zero)
Medicine: 1960 - Peter Brian Medawar 1998 - Ferid Mourad
TOTAL: 7
The Global Jewish population is approximately 14,000,000; that is FOURTEEN MILLION or about 0.02% of the world's population.
They have received the following Nobel Prizes:
Literature: 1910 - Paul Heyse 1927 - Henri Bergson 1958 - Boris Pasternak 1966 - Shmuel Yosef Agnon 1966 - Nelly Sachs 1976 - Saul Bellow 1978 - Isaac Bashevis Singer 1981 - Elias Canetti 1987 - Joseph Brodsky 1991 - Nadine Gordimer
World Peace: 1911 - Alfred Fried 1911 - Tobias Michael Carel Asser 1968 - Rene Cassin 1973 - Henry Kissinger 1978 - Menachem Begin 1986 - Elie Wiesel 1994 - Shimon Peres 1994 - Yitzhak Rabin
Physics: 1905 - Adolph Von Baeyer 1906 - Henri Moissan 1907 - Albert Abraham Michelson 1908 - Gabriel Lippmann 1910 - Otto Wallach 1915 - Richard Willstaetter 1918 - Fritz Haber 1921 - Albert Einstein 1922 - Niels Bohr 1925 - James Franck 1925 - Gustav Hertz 1943 - Gustav Stern 1943 - George Charles de Hevesy 1944 - Isidor Issac Rabi 1952 - Felix Bloch 1954 - Max Born 1958 - Igor Tamm 1959 - Emilio Segre 1960 - Donald A. Glaser 1961 - Robert Hofstadter 1961 - Melvin Calvin 1962 - Lev Davidovich Landau 1962 - Max Ferdinand Perutz 1965 - Richard Phillips Feynman 1965 - Julian Schwinger 1969 - Murray Gell-Mann 1971 - Dennis Gabor 1972 - William Howard Stein 1973 - Brian David Josephson 1975 - Benjamin Mottleson 1976 - Burton Richter 1977 - Ilya Prigogine 1978 - Arno Allan Penzias 1978 - Peter L Kapitza 1979 - Stephen Weinberg 1979 - Sheldon Glashow 1979 - Herbert Charles Brown 1980 - Paul Berg 1980 - Walter Gilbert 1981 - Roald Hoffmann 1982 - Aaron Klug 1985 - Albert A. Hauptman 1985 - Jerome Karle 1986 - Dudley R. Herschbach 1988 - Robert Huber 1988 - Leon Lederman 1988 - Melvin Schwartz 1988 - Jack Steinberger 1989 - Sidney Altman 1990 - Jerome Friedman 1992 - Rudolph Marcus 1995 - Martin Perl 2000 - Alan J. Heeger
Economics: 1970 - Paul Anthony Samuelson 1971 - Simon Kuznets 1972 - Kenneth Joseph Arrow 1975 - Leonid Kantorovich 1976 - Milton Friedman 1978 - Herbert A. Simon 1980 - Lawrence Robert Klein 1985 - Franco Modigliani 1987 - Robert M. Solow 1990 - Harry Markowitz 1990 - Merton Miller 1992 - Gary Becker 1993 - Robert Fogel
Medicine: 1908 - Elie Metchnikoff 1908 - Paul Erlich 1914 - Robert Barany 1922 - Otto Meyerhof 1930 - Karl Landsteiner 1931 - Otto Warburg 1936 - Otto Loewi 1944 - Joseph Erlanger 1944 - Herbert Spencer Gasser 1945 - Ernst Boris Chain 1946 - Hermann Joseph Muller 1950 - Tadeus Reichstein 1952 - Selman Abraham Waksman 1953 - Hans Krebs 1953 - Fritz Albert Lipmann 1958 - Joshua Lederberg 1959 - Arthur Kornberg 1964 - Konrad Bloch 1965 - Francois Jacob 1965 - Andre Lwoff 1967 - George Wald 1968 - Marshall W. Nirenberg 1969 - Salvador Luria 1970 - Julius Axelrod 1970 - Sir Bernard Katz 1972 - Gerald Maurice Edelman 1975 - Howard Martin Temin 1976 - Baruch S. Blumberg 1977 - Roselyn Sussman Yalow 1978 - Daniel Nathans 1980 - Baruj Benacerraf 1984 - Cesar Milstein 1985 - Michael Stuart Brown 1985 - Joseph L. Goldstein 1986 - Stanley Cohen [& Rita Levi-Montalcini] 1988 - Gertrude Elion 1989 - Harold Varmus 1991 - Erwin Neher 1991 - Bert Sakmann 1993 - Richard J. Roberts 1993 - Phillip Sharp 1994 - Alfred Gilman 1995 - Edward B. Lewis 1996- Lu RoseIacovino
TOTAL: 129!
The Jews are NOT promoting brainwashing children in military training camps, teaching them how to blow themselves up and cause maximum deaths of Jews and other non-Muslims. The Jews don't hijack planes, nor kill athletes at the Olympics, or blow themselves up in German restaurants.
There is NOT one single Jew who has destroyed a church. There is NOT a single Jew who protests by killing people. The Jews don't traffic slaves, nor have leaders calling for Jihad and death to all the Infidels.
Perhaps the world's Muslims should consider investing more in standard education and less in blaming the Jews for all their problems. Muslims must ask 'what can they do for humankind' before they demand that humankind respects them.
Regardless of your feelings about the crisis between Israel and the Palestinians and Arab neighbors, even if you believe there is more culpability on Israel 's part, the following two sentences really say it all: 'If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence. If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel."
Benjamin Netanyahu: General Eisenhower warned us. It is a matter of history that when the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, General Dwight Eisenhower, found the victims of the death camps he ordered all possible photographs to be taken, and for the German people from surrounding villages to be ushered through the camps and even made to bury the dead. He did this because he said in words to this effect: 'Get it all on record now - get the films - get the witnesses - because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened'
It is not removed as yet. However, this is a frightening portent of the fear that is gripping the world and how easily each country is giving into it. It is now more than 65 years after the Second World War in Europe ended. Now, more than ever, with Iran, among others, claiming the Holocaust to be 'a myth,' it is imperative to make sure the world never forgets.
h/t to Bob Poris
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