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POPSThe degrading effects of terrorism fears Demands that genuinely inept government officials be held accountable are necessary and wise, but demands that political leaders ensure that we can live in womb-like Absolute Safety are delusional and destructive. Yet this is what the citizenry screams out every time something threatening happens: please, take more of our privacy away; monitor more of our communications; ban more of us from flying; engage in rituals to create the illusion of Strength; imprison more people without charges; take more and more control and power so you can Keep Us Safe.
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POPSWhere The Preaching Goes Too Far There is no war on evangelical Christians here and they are not being thrown to the lions. As this article states, they are childishly chafing against societal shifts. They don't want to see civil rights for us all because they believe God discriminates and it's their view of religion/politics or the highway. They will always find "token" gays to mimic their views because those poor souls think loving their oppressors will win them approval. But spreading these views to parts of the world with less freedom is downright dangerous and unconscionable.
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POPSANOTHER FINE EXAMPLE The problem is they are not citizens, they are illegals, for Gods sake when are we going to remove our heads from are arses??????
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POPSDanish Cartoonist Attacked OMG!!! This is awful! What we need to do now, is PANIC! We need to fear all foreigners! We need a "Homeland Security" Department! We need to give up all our rights and freedoms to be able to eradicate these evil-doers!! Why can't WE have a Patriot Act?!? Something needs to be done!! Muslims are gonna chop all our heads off!! Waaaah!! .:eek: Oh... wait a minute. We Danes are not as easily spooked as some and we kinda like our freedom of speech and civil rights, etc. Maybe we should just let law enforcement handle this. Yeah, I suppose a more calm, collected and sane approach would be better. .:) http://bit.ly/5CFMjr
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POPS'Suspected Enemy Combatants' are no Longer 'Persons' They will have no inherent rights, no human rights, no legal standing whatsoever -- save whatever modicum of process the government arbitrarily deigns to grant them from time to time, with its ever-shifting tribunals and show trials. Obviously, giving government the power to render whole classes of people "unpersons" was not an interesting subject for our media arbiters. It was news that wasn't fit to print. Channeling their predecessors in the George W. Bush administration, Obama Justice Department lawyers argued in this case that there is no constitutional right not to be tortured or otherwise abused in a U.S. prison abroad.
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POPSHow Leftist 'peace groups' are helping terrorists 
In Latin America, most of the peace groups involved in areas of conflict have a strongly Leftist orientation, which means they are eagerto make accusations against the United States and freely elected democratic governments, while maintaining relative silence about Leftist insurgents and the brutality of dictatorships in Cuba and Venezuela. This behaviour of Western peace groups follows a familiar pattern. During the 1970s and 1980s, Soviet bloc intelligence agencies were heavily involved in organising and directing the Western European peace movement. After the collapse of the East German regime in 1989, Western scholars were able to examine the files of the Stasi, the East German Intelligence Service, which provided a window into the thinking of many major Western Peace groups and the eagerness with which the peace groups accepted Soviet Bloc support and espoused the Soviet line. Many of the peace groups only protested about NATO policies while ignoring Soviet actions.
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POPSNineteen Eighty-Four As literary science fiction, 1984 is a classic novel of the social science fiction sub-genre, thus, since its publication in 1949, the terms and concepts of Big Brother, doublethink, thoughtcrime, Newspeak, et cetera, became contemporary vernacular, including the adjective Orwellian, denoting George Orwell's writings and totalitarianism as exposited in Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm (1945).
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POPSBackdoor Legislation: Obama Signs Hate Crimes Bill with Defense Bill How to Pass Unpopular Legislation 101: Attach them to Defense Spending. This is how Bush administration got through REAL ID. This is contrary to the purpose of Congress which should read and debate ONE BILL AT A TIME, instead of this fraudulent manipulation through "must pass" Defense bills. As for the bill itself, while a woman could slap a man for being too forward in a bar now normal men cannot do the same to a pressing homosexual who might "hit on them" without being charged with a new Federal "Hate Crime". Some are just "more equal than others" now and have Special Protection of the Federal government ABOVE all other U.S. citizens.
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POPSI Can Find A More Worthy Charity "But think about those numbers, think about the power of the Salvation Army. It is a massive Christian evangelical organization — with a quasi-military structure and raising $2 billion a year — and it promotes discrimination against gays and lesbians in its employment policy; at local levels of government, going so far as to threaten to close soup kitchens in New York if the city enacted domestic partnership legislation; and at the national level of government, including negotiating with the Bush administration to guarantee that faith-based groups could discriminate against gays and keep their federal funding. We can find charities more deserving of our dollars and our volunteer time."
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POPS"Comprehensive Immigration Reform for America's Security and Prosperity Act of 2009" (amnesty)
Provides temporary visas and work authorization for detained workers when they have been retaliated against by their employer for asserting their labor rights and they agree to pursue labor claims against their employer. Also expands U visas to provide for whistleblower protections with regard to worker exploitation, civil rights violations and retaliation for exercising labor rights. Not to repeat myself, but this is yet another chance to thwart enforcement, in this case affirmatively: by obtaining a work permit. Expect illegal aliens to file bogus claims and sympathetic members of the judicial system to more or less let them get away with it. Ending discrimination: Preempts any state or local law that discriminates against an individual based on immigration status or imposes sanctions on any individual or entity based on the immigration status of its clients, employees or tenants. This is one of the hidden gems, in which they try to prevent things such as the
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POPSVote at the General Assembly; Resolution Condemning “Defamation of Religion" of a radical Islamist ideology.” The text “recognizes that, in the context of the fight against terrorism, defamation of religions and incitement to religious hatred in general become aggravating factors that contribute to the denial of fundamental rights and freedoms of members of target groups,” and expresses “deep concern” that “Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and terrorism.” “Today’s resolution comes at the same time as an Algerian-chaired UN committee in Geneva is seeking to amend the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, by adopting a protocol that would conflate the existing post-war prohibitions on racism with the Islamist agenda of silencing religious dissent,” said Neuer. “A full measure of the perils of today’s resolution must account not only for intimidation of Western writers and cartoonists, but the growing international legitimization of medieval anti-blasphemy laws"in countries like Pakistan, Egypt
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POPSMaking People Disappear: Our Tax Dollars at Work
"In addition to publicly listed field offices and detention sites, ICE is holding prisoners in 186 unlisted, unmarked locations, many in suburban office parks or commercial spaces." Sounds kind of totalitarian, doesn't it? Alternet has had a BOOM week in great articles. Check it out! More from the article below: Alison Parker, deputy director of Human Rights Watch, wrote a December comprehensive report on ICE transit policies, "Locked Up Far Away." ...... violates the UN's Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which the United States is a signatory. She explained that the government must provide "an impartial authority to review the lawfulness of custody. Part and parcel is the ability of somebody to find the person and to make their presence known to a court." The challenge of being unable to find people in detention centers, documented in the Human Rights Watch report, is worsened when one does not even know where to look.....ICE has created a network of secret jails."
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POPSWhat It Takes to Make a Republican Mad
Republicans weren't mad when George Bush and Dick Cheney lied America into a war against a nation that didn't attack us and didn't have any Weapons of Mass Destruction. They weren't mad when George Bush and Dick Cheney pulled troops out of Afghanistan that was harboring the actual terrorists who did attack us. They weren't mad at George Bush taking a budget surplus of $128 billion when he came into office and turning it into a $455 billion deficit. They weren't mad, either, that George entered office with a national debt of $5.73 trillion and left with the national debt $10.7 trillion. A doubled increase of $5 trillion. They at weren't mad when George Bush and the Republican Party ignored the city of New Orleans being wiped off the map. They weren't mad when George Bush authorized warrantless wiretapping, reading private emails of American citizens and tearing down civil liberties and the Bill of Rights. The weren't mad when George Bush described the U.S. Constitutio
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POPSWhy is marriage a civil right? More: This is why refusing communion is not a violation of civil rights - because communion is not a civil contract, it does not confer civil rights or responsibilities, and is therefore not a matter of civil law. I will say it yet again. Your laws that say same-sex couples can't get married are the same laws that say they can't eat shrimp or cut their beards. Which is fine and well for you, but I'm going to continue to enjoy my crab louie salad bare-faced without even humoring the idea that I need to protect, defend, and preserve your "sanctity of brunch".
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POPSJustice arrives: Three cops among five indicted for obstructing federal hate-crime investigation i The Ramirez case was a classic example of why we needed to pass a federal bias-crime law -- especially considering the outrageous circumstances in which the local jury slapped the young thugs on the wrist: his was a pretty clear-cut case of jury nullification: the weight of evidence against the accused was so powerful that it's clear the all-white jury -- like similar juries in the South during the Civil Rights struggle -- was not going to convict two young white men of murdering a Mexican. Even if, as Friedman says, "the only reason he is dead is because he was Mexican." As they poured out of courthouse, the teens' supporters shouted "I was right from the start" and "I'm glad the jury listened" at cameras that caught the late-night verdict.
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POPSThe Oligarchy and Their Minions
Chauvinistic nationalism is a real problem here in the US and will not go away any time soon. The media preaches it day and night as does the administration.The recruiters preach it to the young ones who can't find jobs. There is just too much of the population willing to cut your head off rather than listen to socialist ideas, too many willing to solve problems with the butt of a gun or the heel of a boot. Too many Ramboes! So, don't dismiss civil war because, yes, it can happen here. Every freedom we lose, no matter how small, brings us one day closer to a face-off between the haves and the have-nots, between those who have property and those who don't.Every wall we build like those in Vietnam,Mexico and now Gaza shows us how to build them here on our own soil. The country was established to protect the propertied. The Bill of Rights was voted down unanimously(Massachusetts abstained). It finally was squeaked into the first ten amendments by the power of the people. So,the people wer
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POPSThe US Bill of Rights was an Afterthought So the Bill of Rights was not a gift from that illustrious gaggle of rich merchants, land and currency speculators, and slaveholders known as our “Founding Fathers.” It was a product of class struggle. The same was true of the universal franchise. It took mass agitation from the 1820s to the 1840s by workers and poor farmers to abolish property qualifications and win universal White male suffrage. Almost a century of agitation and struggle was necessary to win the franchise for women. And a bloody civil war and subsequent generations of struggle were needed to win basic political rights for African Americans, a struggle still far from complete.
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POPSFeds Get Huge Pay Hikes While Taxpayers are Loosing Jobs
Okay folks it is time for some straight talk. We the people need to take back our country from the thieves and robber barons occupying capital hill. We can not longer sit back and allow this outrageous behavior to continue. We need to get to the polls and vote out all the incumbents and replace them with FISCAL conservatives and strict constitutional candidates. This country was made great by adhering to the founding principles outlined in the Constitution which safeguards the rights of the citizenry, and restricts the powers of the federal government. Today as we watch the daily newscasts we are being assalted by an out of control federal government with an insatiable appetite for more and more of our hard earned money which they squander on useless pork barrel projects designed to buy votes and nothing else. IN addition they continually vote themselves hefty pay increases and benefit packages and then give us the bill. It is high time congress gets a pay cut!
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POPSAn Eventual Reality Every person is entitled to explore and express their sexuality with another consenting adult without the burden of shame. But the "normal" process of exploration is inevitably influenced by our culture--a culture that is laden with negatively towards homosexuality. The good news is that as people become more educated and tolerant of differences in other's, our society slowly changes. However, some conservative Republicans would have us believe that young people are foolish and "will get with the program" and become bigots eventually. Well, it's complete hogwash and I don't buy it and I don't think most Americans do either. Googlet said in a comment on one of my clips that we probably won't see gay marriage accepted in my lifetime. That's ok--attitudes are slowly changing and it's so encouraging.
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POPSHealthCare for Dummies; A Felon's Handbook for Progressives This former Congresswoman from Colorado feels a little silly recommending a book by the husband of one of Congress's greatest progressive current representatives, Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky from Chicago! The real political experience of Robert Creamer makes "Listen to Your Mother, Stand Up Straight!" one of the best "how to do it" books around. Progressives are always accused of being policy wonks with no real political experience on how to deliver. Not the case here, you get the policy and but also how to make that policy a reality! -- Pat Schroeder, President Association of American Publishers, Former Member of Congress If Progressives are ready to move beyond the Age of W into a winning era, they can start with Stand Up Straight. This is more than a call to arms. This is a battle plan from one of the best campaign minds in America. Bob Creamer takes his readers from values to votes with practical tactics and insight gathered over decades of experience.
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POPScivil rights practically ignored under bush this goes on to state that civil rights were put well behind the enforcement of religious rights..........yeah- not a shocker- sadly we are all left to pick up the pieces of indifference ......hate...........fear...leaving many of us wondering if priorities and accountability can grow once again from this void...........?........
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