The Price of Our Freedom

George Lakoff- Author, 'The Political Mind,' 'Moral Politics' and 'Don't Think of an Elephant!'

"Are we prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?" -- Barack Obama, Newtown Address, December 16, 2012

That sentence, uttered by President Obama in his Newtown Address, may turn out to be a turning point in American history. The president, in one sentence, turned the beautiful faces of the 20 first-grade children murdered brutally by assault weapons into the moral measure of our nation. Conservatives have argued that guns = freedom, and that there should be no limit on such freedom. The president trumped their argument: The price of not protecting the nations' children is too high. Permitting the mass murder of our children is not freedom.

It comes as a shock at a certain point where you realize no matter how much you love these kids, you can't do it by yourself. That this job of keeping our children safe and teaching them well is something we can only do together, with the help of friends and neighbors, the help of a community, and the help of a nation.
And in that way we come to realize that we bear responsibility for every child, because we're counting on everybody else to help look after ours; that we're all parents; that they are all our children.

This is our first task, caring for our children. It's our first job. If we don't get that right, we don't get anything right. That's how, as a society, we will be judged.

Democracy, as the president has said, begins with the people taking care of one another responsibly, importantly through government as an instrument of freedom. That how we get our public schools, our roads, our sewers, our patent office, our scientific research, our energy, communication and transportation systems, our food safety, our protectors, and all the rest that we need to be free in our private lives. It is a truth: the private depends on the public. We, all together, constitute the public. Unless we take care of one another and one another's children, we can't get democracy -- and freedom -- right.

The gun lobby rests on conservative ideology: Democracy supposedly gives each of us individually the "liberty" to seek our own self-interests with no responsibility for the interests or well-being of anyone else. After and Obama's Newtown Address, the whole idea of such "liberty" makes no sense.

The time is ripe to end the conservative grip over nearly half of America. That starts with an all-out effort to put in place responsible gun safety laws. Total registration, just like with cars. An end to automatic and semi-automatic weapons. And an end to blaming massacres on crazies. Gun massacres require guns that can massacre. Eliminate them.

The president set just the right tone. We're in this together. We bear joint responsibility for one another and all our children. If you accept this, really accept it, you can't keep conservative ideology, not just on guns, but on anything.

George Lakoff is Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley. He is co-author, with Elisabeth Wehling, of The Little Blue Book.

Article source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-lakoff/the-price-of-our-freedom_b_2314658.html?utm_hp_ref=daily-brief?utm_source=DailyBrief&utm_campaign=121712&utm_medium=email&utm_content=BlogEntry&utm_term=Daily%20Brief

Does the NRA Represent Gun Manufacturers or Gun Owners?

Lee Fang on December 14, 2012 - 7:40 PM ET

Over the last four years, Congress and the Obama administration have only enacted laws that have deregulated gun use in America. It’s no secret why. As pundits love to note, the gun lobby is incredibly influential. But as we consider the potential for reform in the wake of the tragedy today, one of the first questions we should ask this time is: who does the gun lobby really represent?

The National Rifle Association portrays itself as an organization that represents “4 million members” who simply love the Second Amendment. The truth is much more murky.

In reality, the NRA is composed of half a dozen legal entities; some designed to run undisclosed attack ads in political campaigns, others to lobby and collect tens of millions in undisclosed, tax-deductible sums. This power has only been enhanced in the era of Citizens United, with large GOP donors in the last election reportedly funneling money to the NRA simply to use the group as a brand to pummel Democrats with nasty ads. (As The Huffington Post’s Peter Stone reported, even the Koch network now provides an undisclosed amount to the NRA.)

Despite the grassroots façade, there is much evidence to suggest that corporations that profit from unregulated gun use are propping up the NRA’s activities, much like how the tobacco lobby secretly funded “Smokers Rights’” fronts and libertarian anti-tax groups, or how polluters currently finance much of the climate change skepticism movement.

In a “special thanks” to their donors, the National Rifle Association Foundation lists Bushmaster Firearms Inc., the company that makes the assault rifle reportedly found with the shooter responsible for the mass murder today in Newtown, Connecticut. How much Bushmaster Firearms Inc. (a firm now known as Windham) contributes is left unsaid.

The Violence Policy Center has estimated that since 2005, gun manufacturers have contributed up to $38.9 million to the NRA. Those numbers, however, are based on publicly listed “sponsorship” levels on NRA fundraising pamphlets. The real figures could be much bigger. Like Crossroads GPS or Americans for Prosperity, or the Sierra Club for that matter, the NRA does not disclose any donor information even though it spends millions on federal elections.

And like other industry fronts, the NRA is quick to conceal its pro–gun industry policy positions as ideological commitments.

Take, for example, “The NRA Civil Rights Defense Fund.” It’s a pro–gun rights legal fund “involved in court cases establishing legal precedents in favor of gun owners.”

And who helps pick which impact-litigation cases the NRA will become involved with? Folks like James W. Porter II, a board member of the NRA Civil Rights Defense Fund, who doubles as an attorney whose private firm specializes in “areas of products liability defense of firearms manufacturers.” His last client, according to a search of the federal court docket, was Smith & Wesson Corporation.

Is the NRA working for casual gun-owners, many of whom, according to polling, support tougher restrictions on gun ownership— or is the NRA serving the gunmaker lobby— which is purely interested in policies that will promote greater gun sales and more profits? Any gun control policy debate should begin with this question.

The NRA never walks alone. Read John Nichols on ALEC's efforts to thwart honest gun policy debate.

Article source: http://www.thenation.com/blog/171776/does-nra-represent-gun-manufacturers-or-gun-owners?utm_medium=email&utm_source=HeadlineNation&utm_term=&utm_campaign=#

Women: The Silent Majority?

"Election results told a clear story, however. A Gallup poll released on Monday showed that women in crucial swing states favored Obama over Romney by sixteen points and that nearly 40 percent named abortion as the most important issue for women in the election. Women’s issues that are seen as “fringe” were actually central. And it may be that women who don’t like talking about how personally these issues affect their lives were not afraid to be loud in the voting booth."

To read more, click here.

Turkish book on Darwin sparks outrage

By Daniel Dombey in Istanbul and Funja Guler in Ankara

A series of books for primary schoolchildren, describing Charles Darwin as a Jew with a big nose who kept the company of monkeys and other historical figures in anti-Semitic terms, has caused outrage in Turkey amid fears of rising religious intolerance.

To read more click here.

From Greta Christina's Freethought blog

"My father figured out that there was no God, pretty much on his own: without atheist billboards, without the atheist blogosphere, without a local atheist support group, without a dozen atheist books on the best-seller list, without anything but Bertrand Russell and his own fearless, “fuck authority,” razor-sharp mind. And he did it when he was a teenager. " To read more, click here.

Women Who Love Republicans Who Hate Them

Katha Pollitt | August 29, 2012

I know there is no monolithic voting bloc called “women”—femaleness, like maleness, is cross-cut with race, education, class, income, ethnicity, religion, marital status, even geography. I also know we all make allowances for our own side, which usually boils down to forgiving men for sexual shenanigans and insulting “gaffes” (aka blurting out their true feelings) that no woman politician would get away with. But with that fully acknowledged, I still want to say: Women! WTF?! After all the weird, heartless, misogynistic, ignorant things Republican men have said about women and pregnancy and rape over the past month, I’m ashamed for my sex that any woman is still planning to vote for Romney and Ryan.

And a lot of them are: 51 percent of white women, to be exact. What’s the matter with them? Do they have Stockholm syndrome? And how about you, women of Virginia—21 percent of whom in a just-issued Public Policy Polling survey say they “strongly” agree that abortion should be banned even in cases of rape and incest? (For women 18 to 29, it’s 32 percent.)

Ladies, I doubt you read The Nation, but I’m going to say it anyway: The Republican Party is not your friend! It does not respect you or even like you. Rush Limbaugh thinks women who use birth control are sluts and prostitutes. Ann Coulter regrets that women can even vote. Most recently, you may have heard, Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin said it’s “really rare” for women to get pregnant from rape because “if it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” He has said he “misspoke” about “legitimate” rape—he meant “forcible,” another problematic word—and denies believing that women have magic sperm-killing plumbing. But both ideas—that only some rape really counts as rape, and that such rape doesn’t cause pregnancies—have long, inglorious Republican pedigrees. Some highlights:
§ In 1988, Pennsylvania Republican State Representative Stephen Freind said that women emit “a certain secretion” that stops pregnancy when they are raped.

§ In 1995, North Carolina Republican State Representative Henry Aldridge said that when a woman is raped, “the juices don’t flow” so she can’t get pregnant.

§ In 1998, Arkansas Republican Senate candidate Dr. Fay Boozman claimed that hormones prevented rape from resulting in pregnancy. Boozman lost the election, but Governor Mike Huckabee appointed him to run the state Department of Health.

§ In 2004, President Bush appointed to the federal bench James Leon Holmes, who had stated in 1980, “Concern for rape victims is a red herring because conceptions from rape occur with approximately the same frequency as snowfall in Miami.”

Nor is Akin the only rape skeptic in today’s GOP. In March 2012, Idaho State Senator Chuck Winder said, “I would hope that when a woman goes in to a physician with a rape issue, that physician will indeed ask her about perhaps her marriage, was this pregnancy caused by normal relations in a marriage or was it truly caused by a rape.” Pennsylvania Senate candidate Tom Smith recently said that his daughter faced “something similar” to the situation of a pregnant rape victim because she decided to have a baby “out of wedlock.” And Iowa Representative Steve King remarked that he’d never heard of a girl getting pregnant from rape.

Should your magical uterus fail you, Mike Huckabee supports carrying your rapist’s baby: “Even from those horrible, horrible tragedies of rape, which are inexcusable and indefensible, life has come and sometimes, you know, those people are able to do extraordinary things.” Well, who says they aren’t? The issue is whether the woman should be forced by law to bear her rapist’s wonder tot.

Paul Ryan and Todd Akin wanted to restrict coverage of abortion to victims of “forcible rape” in their version of the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act, sponsored by 217 Republicans (and, sadly, ten Democrats). In the wake of Akin, Ryan has defended the term as “stock language.” John Willke, the mad physician who founded the National Right to Life Committee, has been denying that rape causes pregnancy for decades (“the tubes are spastic,” he recently explained to the New York Times). Romney welcomed Willke’s endorsement in 2008 (“I am proud to have the support of a man who has meant so much to the pro-life movement in our country”). Willke says they met last October and that Romney assured him they agree on “almost everything.”

Finally, let’s not forget that since 1984 the GOP platform has called for a complete ban on abortion, even for good girls, and that this is the position of Paul Ryan, who has described keeping abortion legal when there’s a risk to the woman’s health as ”a loophole wide enough to drive a Mack truck through.”

If a white candidate said black people don’t feel the heat because they come from Africa, would black voters brush that off as a slip of the tongue? If a Christian candidate made headlines for saying Jews secretly run the world, would Jewish voters insist the media was making a fuss over nothing? Only women refuse to take collective insults seriously. You would think even anti-choice women would pick up on the indifference, distrust, callousness and obtuseness toward women exhibited by the GOP. But no. Sometimes I feel women have been hit on the head with a great big frying pan.

Obviously, the Republicans worry that the polls will shift—as has already happened in Missouri, where Claire McCaskill is now nine points ahead of Akin. On the eve of the Republican National Convention, Romney felt the need to tell CBS that the president has little to do with abortion, a matter to be decided “in the courts.” Does he not know who nominates Supreme Court justices?

Come on, women voters. Show you have a better grasp of government than the Republican who wants to run it.

Editor's Note: This column initially misstated the year in which the Republican platform first called for banning abortion. It was in 1984, not 1998.

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Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/article/169630/women-who-love-republicans-who-hate-them

Somebody Else's Atrocities - By Noam Chomsky

In his penetrating study "Ideal Illusions: How the U.S. Government Co-Opted Human Rights," international affairs scholar James Peck observes, "In the history of human rights, the worst atrocities are always committed by somebody else, never us" – whoever "us" is.

To read more, click here.

Election Day - June 5, 2012

Click here for ballot measure and positions.

Who Polices the Police? What is Civilian Oversight and Does It Work?

A Peninsula Peace and Justice Event

Cost: Free forum,
When: Tuesday, June 05 2012 @ 07:00 PM,
Where: Community Media Center, 900 San Antonio Road, Palo Alto.

A conversation with
Judge LaDoris Cordell
Independent Police Auditor for the City of San Jose
Former Superior Court Judge

With the widespread use of mobile media such as cell phones and camcorders, police misconduct -- especially in cases involving "crowd control" at political demonstrations -- is coming under ever-increasing scrutiny. Some images of police using excessive force have become nearly iconic.

What happens when a police officer misbehaves? Who polices the police?

A movement to create citizen oversight of the police began in the 1970s, with citizen oversight in some form now established in 80 percent of the country’s 50 largest cities and in more than 100 municipalities. Efforts to create external or citizen oversight of the police have traditionally been fueled by public concerns that exclusively internal mechanisms to investigate and track police misconduct have not always resulted in unbiased, thorough, and timely investigations of citizen complaints of police misconduct. Proponents of enhanced civilian oversight believe that, even where internal processes have been adequate, police agencies benefit by the increasing scrutiny and transparency citizen oversight provides.

This month's Other Voices forum will take an in-depth look at civilian oversight of the police. How does it work in practice? What is the complaint process? What are the most common types of complaints against police officers? If an officer is deemed to have engaged in misconduct, what are the consequences?

Our guest, former Superior Court Judge LaDoris Cordell is the Independent Police Auditor for the City of San Jose, having been appointed to that position after a national search, in April 2010.

Judge Cordell, a 1974 graduate of Stanford Law School, was the first lawyer to open a law practice in East Palo Alto. In 1978, she was appointed Assistant Dean for Student Affairs at Stanford Law School, where she implemented a successful minority admissions program.

In 1988, Judge Cordell won election to the Superior Court of Santa Clara County, making her the first African American woman to sit on the Superior Court in northern California. In November 2003, Judge Cordell, accepting no monetary donations, ran a grassroots campaign and won a 4-year term on the Palo Alto City Council.

Judge Cordell has been an on-camera legal analyst for CBS-5 television. Over the course of her distinguished career, she has received many honors for her contributions to civil rights and to the local community, including the Santa Clara County Trial Lawyers Association’s “Judge of the Year” award and the Silicon Valley NAACP’s Freedom Fighter Award.She was the 2011 recipient of the Don Edwards Defender of Constitution Liberty Award from the Santa Clara Valley Chapter of the ACLU. And she is a 2012 recipient of the John W. Gardner Leadership award presented by the American Leadership Forum of Silicon Valley.

Free and open to all. Wheelchair accessible.

Simultaneous live TV broadcast on Mid-Peninsula cable channel 27.

Simultaneous live webcast on the Media Center website http://midpenmedia.org/watch/stream/ (select channel 27)

Event URL: http://peaceandjustice.org/article.php?story=Who_Polices_The_Police

GENOCIDE MONUMENT UNVEILED IN SOUTH AUSTRALIA

For the first time in history, on May 20, 2012 in Adelaide, South Australia, descendants of the original Christian inhabitants who survived the Turkish Ottoman Empire's genocide united for justice and recognition.
As Elena Harrison, President of the Armenian Cultural Association of South Australia Inc., the small but vibrant Armenian, Pontian-Greek and Assyrian Universal Alliance communities unveiled a monument in recognition of the 1,500,000 Armenians, 800,000 Greeks of Asia Minor, 500,000 Pontian Greeks and 800,000 Assyrians, all Christians, who were massacred or deported from their ancestral lands through a series of genocides by the Ottoman Turks, between 1915 and 1923.
Click here to read more.

PPJC Celebrates Its 30th Anniversary!

When:	Saturday, May 19 2012 @ 02:00 PM - - 04:00PM
Where:	University Lutheran Church 1611 Stanford Ave (at Bowdoin) Palo Alto, CA 94301
Description:	Peninsula Peace & Justice Center is celebrating 30 years! Join us in a gala picnic celebration! A friendly gathering to celebrate community-based activism … Food ~ Live Music ~ Speakers ~ Peace Loving People! Mark your calendars. More details coming soon! Free and open to all! Hosted by Peninsula Peace and Justice Center's Board of Directors & Staff (See event web page)

2nd Annual Bay Area Walk Against Genocide

Sunday April 29, 2012
Lake Merritt, Oakland, CA

Noon-4pm: Music & Tabling
1-2pm: Program
2-3pm: Walk

Click here for details: http://sfbadc.kintera.org/faf/home/default.asp?ievent=1009906

Debate between Richard Dawkins and the head of the catholic church in Australia

Click here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibLo-Cxg1L4 
(Length: 1 hour program)

Ray McGovern: Whistleblowing, Truth Telling, Bradley Manning & the Moral Imperative of Activism

When:     Tuesday, April 10 2012 @ 07:30 PM - - 09:30PM
Where:     First Baptist Church, 305 N. California Avenue, Palo Alto, CA 94301
Description: The State of the National Security State

A talk by
RAY McGOVERN
Former CIA Intelligence Analyst
Founding Member, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity

Ray McGovern came to Washington in the early Sixties as an Army infantry/intelligence officer and then served as a CIA analyst from the administration of John F. Kennedy to that of George H. W. Bush. Ray’s duties included chairing National Intelligence Estimates and preparing the President’s Daily Brief. In January 2003, Ray helped create Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) to expose the way intelligence was being falsified to “justify” war on Iraq. His continues to be a leading voice to challenge the lies that lead us to war, spying on citizens, torture and indefinite detention.

FREE and open to all. Contributions will be requested.
Wheelchair accessible.

Sponsored by
Peninsula Peace and Justice Center
www.PeaceandJustice.org

(see event page)