New Delhi Decriminalizes Gay Sex, Rest of India
Will Have to Wait

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Alyssa Morin

In a landmark decision that promises new rights to the gay, lesbian, and transgender populations of India, the Delhi High Court ruled today to abolish a 150-year-old law criminalizing homosexual sex.

The law in question was Indian Penal Code Section 377, a leftover from British colonial rule that deemed sexual acts between members of the same sex "against the order of nature." The high court today determined that criminalizing sex that occurs between consenting adults in private violates the Constitution in the areas of equality, privacy, and protection against discrimination.

While Section 377 has rarely been used to prosecute homosexuals in modern times, it was often used as a tool for blackmailing and intimidating those considered "sexual deviants." The law also provided legitimacy to the social stigma against homosexuality and impeded efforts to prevent the spread of HIV in India, where over 2.5 million are thought to be infected by the virus. It was this latter concern, in particular, that led the Naz Foundation, an NGO focusing on HIV/AIDS awareness, to take up the suit to amend Section 377 in 2001.

That year four Naz workers were arrested in Lucknow, a northern city in India, for distributing educational materials about the prevention of AIDS. The government deemed the literature "obscene" and charged the men with "conspiracy to commit sodomy" under Section 377. The Naz foundation responded by filing a petition to decriminalize consensual gay sex amongst adults and the high court has been deliberating since.

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Is torture special enough to prosecute

Our nation bears responsibility to learn from the mistakes of this dark episode. Even if criminal[...]

Read The Full Article:
http://www.everydaycitizen.com/2009/07/is_torture_special_enough_to_p.html

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AIPAC Spy Figure: "Zionist" Wanted Me Dead

It looks like a jail sentence might not have been all that Larry Franklin, the former Pentagon official convicted of spying for Israel, had to fear in recent years.

Court documents filed last week suggest a Soprano's-like effort to get rid of Franklin, who had agreed to testify against two former AIPAC activists, CQ's Jeff Stein reports.

Franklin's lawyer, Plato Cacheris, told Stein:

Somebody approached Larry and suggested it would be good if Larry could disappear and fake a suicide, and this person would assist him in doing that.

And Franklin himself made clear to Stein that he took it as a threat:

I grew up on the streets of New York, and when you fake a suicide -- Well, if you're dead to everyone else, it's a lot easier to get rid of you....Did I let him know I took it that way? No. Did I take it that way? Internally, yes.

Franklin's description of the incident seems to suggests that it was an effort by pro-Israel extremists to prevent or discourage him from testifying against the former AIPAC activists, Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman. Writes Stein:

"It was in West Virginia. I was parking cars at the time. He came to see me at the Charles Town Race Track. He said, 'Let's go to lunch and talk about raising money for my defense.'

"And we talked about all these rich people," Franklin continued. "But first I had to agree to a scheme...

"I was going to go somewhere, and it was going to be arranged that I could occasionally meet my wife. It was supposed to be on a bridge."

In Israel?

"No," he said. "Florida."

Franklin added that the man who approached him was definitely a Zionist," meaning that "he's beyond good and evil. They're not subject to the laws the rest of us are."

Franklin was charged with giving classified information to suspected agents of Israel -- Rosen and Weissman -- and in 2006 was sentenced to almost 13 years in prison. That was later reduced to probation and 10 months house arrest, thanks to his cooperation with the feds. The charges against Rosen and Weissman were dropped earlier this year.

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Sanders and the "Coalition of the Unwilling"

Now this is an Independent. Sanders talks to Ezra.

The Coalition of the Willing sounds a bit strange to me. You have a Democratic president and a Democratic majority in the House and 60 votes in the Senate, and the coalition that is determining health-care policy are seven people, including four Republicans?...

Max calls his group the Coalition of the Willing. We'll try and form a Coalition of the Unwilling. People prepared to stay strong for a strong public option. You know my view, which is that single payer is the way to go. But if we can't do that, at the very very very least you need to have a strong, simple, Medicare-like option that every American can use....

Look, the Democrats said give us 60 votes so we can come up with something. They gave it to us! I'm not a Democrat, I'm an Independent, but I caucus with the Democrats. They gave us 60 votes. So how many do we need? Seventy? Eighty? I understand that there are some Democrats, without ascribing motives, who are not comfortable voting for a strong public plan period. But I think it is not asking too much that they vote against the Republican filibuster....

...I like Chuck Grassley. But people in the country are not sitting around saying, "We need a good bipartisan bill! That's what we need!'" They're saying we need good, universal coverage for every American, man, woman, and child. And it needs to be affordable. If Chuck Grassley and Olympia Snowe and these other nice people I know decide to vote against it, that's fine. People in America aren't sitting up nights worrying how they'll vote. The goal should not be bipartisanship. It's passing something that is strong and good.

He adds, talking to Sam Stein:

"I think the idea of going to conservative Republicans, who are essentially representing the insurance companies and the drug companies, and watering down this bill substantially, rather than demanding we get 60 votes to stop the filibuster, I think that is a very wrong political strategy," Sanders added....

"I think that politically that is something everybody can handle. You say, 'Look, I think there should be a vote. I'm gonna vote against it for A, B and C reasons. But I think the process has to move forward and it's unacceptable that Republicans keep trying to stop everything," said the Vermont Independent, who added that "The White House could play a very important part in this process."

"I think it would be great if we could have 100 senators voting for this, but what is important is the product that you get, not bipartisanship," Sanders went on. "So we should ask Republicans to support it. If they choose not to they do so at their own political risk. The focus should be on a strong bill trying to get Republican support rather than a weak bipartisan bill."

A Coalition of the Unwilling would be a welcome thing in the Senate. It exists in the House, where progressives have drawn a bright line--they will not vote for a plan without a robust public option. Turning the "Gang of 14" on its head by creating a real coalition of progressives that could be the significant bloc on legislation would be an interesting maneuver, harder to achieve, probably, than in the House, but potentially very helpful.

At the very least, Senate leadership--and the White House--are in a position to start knocking some "moderate" Democratic heads together. The very least, the very least Democrats in the Senate should be doing is stopping Republican obstructionism. Asking all the Democrats in the Senate to vote for cloture is the minimum that should be demanded of them. It's certainly not going to be any less productive than trying to get Republicans on board with anything worth doing.

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Boehner Enlists Bloodhound to Look for Stimulus
Jobs, Forgets Theyre in His Home State

The stimulus is failing! All we need to do now is to cut taxes.[...]

Read The Full Article:
http://firedoglake.com/2009/07/02/boehner-enlists-bloodhound-to-look-for-stimulus
-jobs-forgets-theyre-in-his-home-state/

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Rove: Obama ‘Has Carried Pre-Packaged,
Organized, Controlled, Scripted Events To A New Height’

Former Bush adviser Karl Rove went on Fox News this morning and attacked President Obama’s health care town hall meeting yesterday as “pre-packaged, organized, controlled, [and] scripted,” adding that the Bush administration would never have done something so audacious:

ROVE: This White House has carried pre-packaged, organized, controlled, scripted events to a new height, and they’re getting away with things that in any previous White House, the media would have eviscerated the press secretary and the White House for it.

Watch it:

video details and more

ThinkProgress contacted a White House spokesperson who said that at yesterday’s health care town hall event in Virginia, half of the tickets were given out by the school (to “students, faculty, staff, as well as members of the health community from the area”) and the other half by the White House (”grassroots activists and people involved in the issue in the area”). The spokesperson then explained how questions were chosen:

The President posted a video on YouTube several days ago, saying respond to this video with questions for me on health care, and we got hundreds, and all of those are online. So in terms of the videos that were selected, anyone can look at the range and see which ones we did and didn’t select. That’s fully transparent. They’re all up on YouTube; they were all up yesterday on our website.

Because YouTube doesn’t actually have a voting function, our new media staff took videos that were rated highly by other users and selected, from among those, questions that represented the range of things being asked. So a lot of people in the progressive community still want a single-payer system, so the first question was from a single-payer advocate. We took a question from a Republican member of Congress, Mike Burgess, about medical malpractice reform.

The spokesperson then noted that there were also questions taken from people who were following along on Twitter and Facebook. When asked whether these questioners or audience members were pre-screened for their political ideology or whether they agreed with the President, the spokesperson replied, “Absolutely not.”

Of course, pre-screening for political ideology is exactly what the Bush administration did.

In March 2005, people seeking tickets to a Social Security event were quizzed about their support of President Bush and his Social Security plan ahead of time. In April 2005, Bush?s security detail threw out three people from an event in Colorado because they had a bumper sticker reading ?No More Blood For Oil.? White House spokesman Trent Duffy said that if there?s any evidence people might ?disrupt the president,? they ?have the right to exclude those people from those events.?

Bush even screened the assembled group of soldiers he would meet in Iraq during a 2003 Thanksgiving visit: Soldiers had to fill out a questionnaire asking whether they supported Bush.

Transcript:

HEMMER: This was the scene at the White House in the press room before the town hall event took place on health care. Roll this with Helen Thomas.

(VIDEO) THOMAS: You have left open the suggestion that you are pumping the answers.

REID: Even if there’s a tough question, it’s a question coming from somebody who was invited or was screened — the question was screened.

GIBBS: Chip, Chip, let’s have this discussion at the conclusion, how about that?

THOMAS: No, no, no. We are having it now.

GIBBS: Well I’d be happy to have it now. Which question did you object to at the town hall meeting, Helen?

THOMAS: It’s a pattern. It isn’t the question. It’s a pattern of controlling the press. (END VIDEO)

HEMMER: Now, Chip Reid’s next to her from NBC. Look, people are talking about this today, not the town hall meeting. How does that hurt the cause and the message about health care reform?

ROVE: Well, look. I thought — I’m like Jonah Goldberg; I really find it unusual to be in agreement with Helen Thomas. But notice what Gibbs said. He said, in essence, you have the right to end in a question by e-mail and we have the right to determine whether or not we ask it, so what’s the problem? It was sort of like, it’s a free-flowing town hall meeting if you get to send in via Twitter or e-mail your question, not if we have free-flowing questions in the room.

This White House has carried pre-packaged, organized, controlled, scripted events to a new height, and they’re getting away with things that in any previous White House, the media would have eviscerated the press secretary and the White House for it.

HEMMER: And when something like this happens, you know, the credibility is shaken and the argument stands on weaker ground. It’s plain and simple.

ROVE: Well, they got what they wanted.

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"It is the duty of the patriot to protect his
country from its government."- - Thomas Paine

On Sibel Edmonds blog today, this heroic naturalized citizen reminds us "home-groaners" of our responsibilities:

Here comes our Fourth of July. Surely what is left of our Bill of Rights is worth celebrating, and just as surely what has been taken away is worth fighting for. So let us enjoy that cold beer, savor that hot dog, and while doing that let us reflect and renew our pledge to fight for those irreplaceable American liberties that have been taken from us; the fight against our 'real' foes. Are we prepared to make the same pledge those founding fathers made 233 years ago?

Edmonds was fired from her position as a language specialist at the FBI's Washington Field Office in March, 2002, after she accused a colleague of covering up illicit activity involving foreign nationals, alleging serious acts of security breaches, cover-ups, and intentional blocking of intelligence which, she contended, presented a danger to the United States' security. Since that time, court proceedings on her whistleblower claims have been blocked by the assertion of State Secrets Privilege. On March 29, 2006, she was awarded the PEN/Newman's Own First Amendment Award in recognition of her defense of free speech as it applies to the written word.[5]

Both Franklin and Jefferson, two of the smartest guys to whom we attribute the inspiration for the Founding, repeated sentiments like these (the rhyme is Franklin's, I believe): "Those who would be both safe and free desire that which never was, nor ever will be."  


Read The Full Article:
http://www.myleftwing.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=25153

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How Racism Works

Adding my thanks to Leonard for producing this timely and thorough book. I think mostly about how explicit, violent white supremacy relates to the more subtle ways in which racism works, as seemingly race-neutral policies like deregulation of the mortgage industry or immigration raids produce never-ending racial disparities. Those disparities segregate Americans and create the conditions for a racial divide into which white supremacists easily step.

In a piece called The White Supremacist in Us, which I wrote after the shootings of Dr. George Tiller and Stephen T. Johns, I note that our solutions to racist violence tend to focus on the individual - either punishment or education depending on how far gone the person is. But the policies that aren't obviously about hate crimes have the greatest potential to stop the perpetuation of racist ideas. Racial hierarchies show up in our policy debates every time we ask the question who deserves education/healthcare/legal status/prison. These are the policies that the Obama Administration will work to change, drawing even more ire from the white supremacist crowd.

I write about immigrants, race and the restaurant industry. The Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York has conducted studies revealing the hidden assumptions that create the industry's racial hierarchy. Employers want "tall, good-looking" people in the living wage jobs at the front of the house. They want "hard workers" who will put up with dangerous conditions and low wages in the back of the house. Even a cursory look around most high end restaurants makes it clear that to these employers, only white people look good enough, that the only people willing to put up with dangerous conditions for low pay are Latinos and Bangladeshis and that black Americans don't belong in there at all. We need policies, not just "education" for racist employers, to undo this hierarchy, but most Americans don't see the need as long as we think of racism as a problem that lives in individual rather than in systems.

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Where The Senate Stands On A Public Option

Based on the news reports, public statements, and grassroots voter contacts generated from Stand[...]

Read The Full Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OpenLeft-FrontPage/~3/wasKRF8UNiM/where-the-senate
-stands-on-a-public-option

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Who owns the rain

Yesterday a regional TV station ran a story about dumb state laws. You know the kind of idiotic legislation that's usually still on the books restricting such nefarious actions as crossing State lines with a chicken on your head or kissing on a train. Yeah, you know the kind.

Anyways, a whole wave of these laws were just reversed. Just in time for the summer Farmers Markets it is now legal to sell "ugly produce" on the street. Apparently, vendors couldn't sell bent cucumbers and misshapen mushrooms until now. What a relief!

But the most certifiable, and implicitly disturbing, overturned law was the one prohibiting the collection of rain water. What's the crime in that you ask? Well, in reality there's quite a sound chain of reason supporting this law. Legally, the state owns the rain so when you or I gather it then our crime becoems one of theft of government property.

I can't help but wonder does the state think it owns sunshine too?

As a famous philosopher once proclaimed: "Good grief!"

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