Activist Obert Madondo’s Hunger Strike Against Canada’s New Draconian Crime Bill

April 10, 2012

Activist Post

By AP

“Canada is following the USA trend of taking away its citizen’s freedoms.” –KTRN

At 12:01am on Wednesday, March 14, Ottawa-based activist and progressive blogger, Obert Madondo, started an indefinite hunger strike to protest PM Stephen Harper and the Conservative government’s new cruel Safe Streets and Communities Act (formerly omnibus crime Bill C-10).

The new law will violate Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, particularly: the right to equal protection before the law; the right to be protected from cruel and unusual punishment; the right to liberty; and the rights of Canadians convicted overseas.

Changes to the youth justice system will victimize and punish our youth: Young offenders will now get stiffer sentences that potentially turn them into hardened criminals, instead of rehabilitating and reintegrating them into society.

The Act will punish the weak and marginalized. The majority of those who will face tougher sentences, extended periods in custody before trial, and extended ineligibility for parole are those with mental health issues, blacks and Aboriginals, who are already oversubscribed in the jail population.

The law’s mandatory minimum sentence requirements will weaken and undermine the Canadian judiciary. The Act will divide society. It will cost Canadian taxpayers at least $15 billion.

Obert’s demands are:

1. The Parliament of Canada should repeal the Safe Streets and Communities Act in its entirety.
2. Former Ottawa Police chief and newly-appointed Conservative Senator, Vernon White, should immediately resign.
3. The federal government should make a commitment to invest 100 times the cost of monitoring and dismantling Occupy encampments across Canada last fall to institute a national inquiry into the case of 600+ missing and murdered aboriginal women and girls.
4. The House of Commons should immediately democratize and improve transparency and accountability.
5. Harper and the Conservatives must stop their war on Canadians and Canadian democracy.

Click here for the report.

Rush Limbaugh Apologizes Again, But Advertisers Continue To Sever Ties

March 6, 2012

Washington Post

By Paul Farhi

Rush Limbaugh offered more contrition Monday for his comments about a Georgetown law student, but the conservative radio talk-show host continued to lose advertisers as a result of outrage over his characterization of the woman as a “slut” and a “prostitute.”

“Those two words were inappropriate and uncalled for,” Limbaugh said at the start of his show on Monday, referring to Sandra Fluke, a student who had spoken out in behalf of insurance coverage for contraception. “They distracted from the point I was actually trying to make and again I sincerely apologize to Ms. Fluke for using those two words.”

The apology reinforced a statement Limbaugh posted on his Web site Saturday in which he said that his “choice of words was not the best” and that he was attempting to be humorous in his attack on Fluke on two programs last week.

Many thought Limbaugh’s initial apology was inadequate, and their outrage helped compel advertisers to pull their commercials from Limbaugh’s program.

Click here for the full report from the Washington Post

Ron Paul: Limbaugh Isn’t Really Sorry

March 5, 2012

Huffington Post

By Alana Horowitz

“Here is just another example why Ron Paul is the man. Not many republicans would go against their party and criticize Limbaugh, but then again, Ron Paul is not like most republicans. This is just one reason why he needs to be president. He’s an independent at heart.”  –KTRN

Rush Limbaugh may be sorry he called student advocate Sandra Fluke a “slut,” but Ron Paul isn’t buying it.

“He’s doing it because some people were taking their advertisements off of his program. It was his bottom line he was concerned about,” Paul said. “I don’t think he’s very apologetic. It’s in his best interest, that’s why he did it.”

Limbaugh is facing intense backlash after ranting calling Fluke, a Georgetown University law student who testified in Congress in support of Obama’s birth control rule, a “slut” and a “prostitute.” Several advertisers have pulled ads from his show and a slew of journalists and politicians have spoken out against his remarks. Even President Obama called Fluke to express his support for her.

Though Limbaugh apologized for his comments, the damage may be done. Several sponsors who backed out have said they won’t reverse course in light of his apology.

Paul also called Limbaugh’s comments “over the top,” though he maintained that he did not support Obama’s mandate.

Click here for the full report.

Ron Paul, ‘The Only Candidate Speaking Of Lost Civil Liberties And Pending Illegal Wars’

February 22, 2012

RT

By RT

“Like Obi Wan Kenobi, Ron Paul is our only hope.”  –KTRN

United States presidential contender Ron Paul has warned that his country is slipping into a twenty-first century fascist system with a broke government ruled by big business. RT asked some experts whether they agree.

­Speaking to supporters in Kansas City, the Republican candidate said Americans’ individual liberties were being stripped away.

And, as Houston-based author Anis Shivani says, Paul is “the only candidate on the Republican side who is talking about the loss of civil liberties, pending illegal wars, making the connection between imperialism and the loss of rights at home.”

It now looks like Ron Paul could win the Maine caucus, and Shivani believes he could have more support with the American public but it seems that the media won’t allow it to happen:

“I think he does have hardcore support – maybe it could be 15 to 20 per cent of people on the conservative side. His support could be wider, but the media will never treat a candidate like him with seriousness, they will just dismiss him as a fringe candidate because of, for example, his very firm stance on Iran, he is saying ‘Let’s not get into another war on Iran, we just can’t afford it, and every time we do this, it makes governance at home more difficult.’ So the media will say he is just not interested in national security and dismiss him.”

­Jeff Steinberg, a national security expert from Executive Intelligence Review Magazine, told RT that while Congressman Paul is right to say the US is slipping to fascism, the reality is something more dangerous.

He states that since his first day in office, President Barack Obama was completely under the control of Wall Street and the City of London. Obama has gone beyond all the excesses of the Bush administration in “asserting a policy of unitary executive presidential dictatorship,” Steinberg claims.

Click here for the full report.

New Ron Paul 2012 Ad Slams Santorum As “Fake”

February 21, 2012

Info Wars

By Steve Watson

“Why would anyone in their right mind vote for Rick Santorum? It boggles the mind to think this man has supporters.” –KTRN

A new Ron Paul 2012 campaign ad has been released today that takes direct aim at GOP rival Rick Santorum’s voting record.

Entitled simply “Fake”, the 30 second spot makes the case that it is a myth that Santorum is in any way a fiscal conservative.

The concise ad crams in the facts that Santorum voted to raise the federal debt ceiling five times, voted to double the size of the Department of Education through No Child Left Behind, and voted for Medicare Part D — the biggest entitlement expansion since the ’60s.

The ad also highlights the fact that Santorum voted to send foreign aid to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il and also endorsed sending billions in tax dollars to the corrupt regime in Egypt.

Click here for the full report.

Republican Establishment Excludes Ron Paul From 2012 CPAC Event

February 2, 2012

Info Wars

By Paul Joesph Watson

“They exclude the only candidate who tells the truth.  Nice, really nice.”  –KTRN

Despite winning the event’s annual straw poll for the last two years running, Ron Paul has seemingly been excluded from this year’s CPAC conference, with Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich announced as keynote speakers but Paul appearing nowhere on the roster.

The exclusion of Paul is likely a maneuver by GOP insiders to re-align CPAC, the biggest annual conservative confab, with the Republican establishment and prevent an embarrassing straw poll defeat for likely presidential pick Mitt Romney, who Paul beat in 2010 and 2011.

According to the CPAC website, fellow presidential candidates Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum will all address the event scheduled to take place Feb. 8-11 in Washington, but Ron Paul will be absent.

“Although a combination of factors might be at play, including Paul’s focus on the Maine caucuses, a changing of the guard at the top of CPAC’s management team is likely behind Paul’s exclusion,” notes Stephen Woodward.

Indeed, the selection of former chairman of the Florida Republican Party Al Cardenas to lead CPAC has brought with it a decidedly neoconservative flavor to the 2012 event.

Besides Romney and Gingrich, the likes of Ann Coulter, John Bolton, Sen. Mitch McConnell, Herman Cain and Rick Perry will all speak at the conference.

During a post CPAC 2011 interview, American Conservative Union (ACU) chief Cardenas put Ron Paul supporters on notice by warning them that they would not be invited to the 2012 event if they failed to act with “civility” after previous speakers Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were booed by Paul activists.

Click here for the full report.

Is There A Zionist Plot Against Ron Paul?

January 25, 2012

InfoWars

By Christopher Bollyn

Ron Paul, a popular Southern conservative who supports states’ rights, supposedly came in fourth place in the South Carolina Republican primary on Saturday, January 21. The winner, according to the tally produced by the privately-owned voting machine company ES&S, was Newt Gingrich. Gingrich is supported by Sheldon Adelson, the Zionist casino billionaire who supports the most extreme hard-liners in the right-wing Likud in Israel. The Gingrich campaign received a $5 million donation from Sheldon Adelson the week before he “won” the South Carolina primary. Gingrich calls the indigenous Palestinian population an “invented” people and supports Israel’s right to attack Iran as “self defense”. Gingrich told CNN he would help Israel attack Iran and would move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem on his first day in office by executive order. These are the hard-line positions Adelson is paying Gingrich to espouse.

Mitt Romney is supported by the Crown family of Chicago, a Zionist family that is closely connected to Israeli military intelligence. Newt Gingrich, on the other hand, is supported by Sheldon Adelson, a Zionist billionaire who works closely with the same people. Are these different factions or is this a Zionist plot that has the same goal?

The Zionist strategy is to stop the very popular conservative Ron Paul. Because there is obviously no candidate that can beat Paul in popularity or on the issues, the Zionists are supporting a slew of venal candidates in order to steal as many votes as possible from Paul. These candidates are essentially a gang of Zionist-funded candidates who form the anti-Paul coalition. Using privately-owned and controlled electronic voting systems like ES&S, the South Carolina primary shows how the Zionists plan to block Ron Paul from being the Republican nominee …

From this event, one can state as fact – not theory, that Israel and its supporters in the US are actively working to derail Ron Paul’s race towards the GOP nomination, and the Presidency. This fact alone, should be cause for alarm from even the most moderate of public corridors. Should a foreign country, in this case Israel, be allowed to buy a significant influence through the media in American democratic elections? Should candidates be allowed to accept donations – even indirectly, from foreign interest PACs or agents thereof, thus creating a serious conflict of interest, and threat to national security?
- “Israeli Lobby launch new Super PAC effort to bring down Ron Paul” , by Patrick Henningsen, Global Research, 21 January 2012

After two weeks, the Republican Party of Iowa released its certified tally of the January 3 caucus. The certified final tally released on January 18 indicates that Mitt Romney did not win the Iowa caucus and that the results had been manipulated to give Romney the important first victory. The scale of the fraud in the Iowa caucus is so large that it suggests that there was a hidden hand manipulating the data from across the state as it was sent to party headquarters to give the victory to Romney. This suggests that the people behind Romney are likely to be the people behind the vote fraud, i.e. Lester Crown, Israeli intelligence, and the Zionist Fifth Column in the United States.

Click here for the full report from InfoWars.

Ron Paul Is Challenging The Conservative Establishment

October 25, 2011

Examiner.Com

By Kevin Kervick

Presidential Candidate Ron Paul is beginning to challenge the talk radio conservative hegemony. His appearance on yesterday’s Sean Hannity show was a case in point.

A few weeks ago I used the term, Conservative Establishment, to describe the mainstream conservative thinking promoted by popular giants in talk radio. The leading trio, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Mark Levin, are hugely popular among grass roots conservatives around the country. If one wants to add Glenn Beck to that mix, the airwaves are practically covered with highly opinionated conservative voices for almost an entire day. I called them idea sanctioners because people listen to these giants to have their conservative opinions validated. These gentlemen thus, have a lot of power across Conservative America.

Each of these gentlemen has been critical of Congressman Ron Paul in the past. Limbaugh has said he believed Ron Paul was destroying the Republican Party. Hannity has called Paul a kook and has often discounted his opinions. Levin, similarly, is disrespectful to Paul and refers to him as Ru-Paul, a confusing perjorative. In an on-line query of his listeners, Levin conspicuously left Ron Paul out of a list of presidential options. Glenn Beck has recently done some schticks ridiculing Paul’s supporters. These guys do not like Ron Paul.

Recently there have been a few cracks in the facade as Limbaugh and Hannity (above clip) have begun to signal that they may be open to Paul’s ideas. We are also starting to see the disagreement getting a little more personal. Hannity pointed out during the Paul interview last night that he did not appreciate Paul calling him a statist, a charge that Paul, who prefers dialogue to conflict, tried to deflect.

Ron Paul is seeing a surge in popularity and he is accumulating a substantial money war chest. My guess is these commentators fear Paul’s power to influence and that could jeopardize their ratings if the winds begin to shift even further. Paul is showing signs that he is willing to engage in this battle of ideas. He has nothing to lose.

This rift reflects a philosophical difference that is being debated before the public at large. The talk radio heads are Reagan Conservatives who essentially believe one can be an economic libertarian and also a military interventionist. Congressman Paul, on the other hand, believes libertarianism does not end at a nation’s borders. Paul is an ideologically consistent libertarian. Paul believes militarism is statism in the same way that welfare is statism. Paul wants to defend the country without being adventurous overseas. He does not believe in nation building.

For the leaders of the Conservative Establishment to embrace Ron Paul’s platform they would need to adjust a significant aspect of their conservative identity. They would need to moderate their hawkish positions with respect to interventionism abroad. They would need to acknowledge that their unyielding support for unending military spending has to change. It is a difficult thing to do. Afterall, this military interventionist belief has defined who they are for decades.

For Paul to win the Republican nomination he either needs to change their opinions or build up enough of a base of support within the party outside of the talk radio establishment. My gusss is the radio heads fear the second option.

Click here for the full report from The Examiner.

State For Sale

October 3rd, 2011

The New Yorker

By: Jane Mayer

In the spring of 2010, the conservative political strategist Ed Gillespie flew from Washington, D.C., to Raleigh, North Carolina, to spend a day laying the groundwork for REDMAP, a new project aimed at engineering a Republican takeover of state legislatures. Gillespie hoped to help his party get control of statehouses where congressional redistricting was pending, thereby leveraging victories in cheap local races into a means of shifting the balance of power in Washington. It was an ingenious plan, and Gillespie is a skilled tactician—he once ran the Republican National Committee—but REDMAP seemed like a long shot in North Carolina. Barack Obama carried the state in 2008 and remained popular. The Republicans hadn’t controlled both houses of the North Carolina General Assembly for more than a century. (“Not since General Sherman,” a state politico joked to me.) That day in Raleigh, though, Gillespie had lunch with an ideal ally: James Arthur (Art) Pope, the chairman and C.E.O. of Variety Wholesalers, a discount-store conglomerate. The Raleigh News and Observer had called Pope, a conservative multimillionaire, the Knight of the Right. The REDMAP project offered Pope a new way to spend his money.

That fall, in the remote western corner of the state, John Snow, a retired Democratic judge who had represented the district in the State Senate for three terms, found himself subjected to one political attack after another. Snow, who often voted with the Republicans, was considered one of the most conservative Democrats in the General Assembly, and his record reflected the views of his constituents. His Republican opponent, Jim Davis—an orthodontist loosely allied with the Tea Party—had minimal political experience, and Snow, a former college football star, was expected to be reëlected easily. Yet somehow Davis seemed to have almost unlimited money with which to assail Snow.

Snow recalls, “I voted to help build a pier with an aquarium on the coast, as did every other member of the North Carolina House and Senate who voted.” But a television attack ad presented the “luxury pier” as Snow’s wasteful scheme. “We’ve lost jobs,” an actress said in the ad. “John Snow’s solution for our economy? ‘Go fish!’ ” A mass mailing, decorated with a cartoon pig, denounced the pier as one of Snow’s “pork projects.” It criticized Snow for “wasting our tax dollars,” citing his vote to “spend $218,000 on a Shakespeare festival,” but failing to note that this sum represented a budget cut for the program, which had been funded by the legislature since 1999.

In all, Snow says, he was the target of two dozen mass mailings, one of them reminiscent of the Willie Horton ad that became notorious during the 1988 Presidential campaign. It featured a photograph of Henry Lee McCollum, a menacing-looking African-American convict on death row, who, along with three other men, raped and murdered an eleven-year-old girl. After describing McCollum’s crimes in lurid detail, the mailing noted, “Thanks to arrogant State Senator John Snow, McCollum could soon be let off of death row.” Snow, in fact, supported the death penalty and had prosecuted murder cases. But, in 2009, he had helped pass a new state law, the Racial Justice Act, that enabled judges to reconsider a death sentence if a convict could prove that the jury’s verdict had been tainted by racism. The law was an attempt to address the overwhelming racial disparity in capital sentences.

“The attacks just went on and on,” Snow told me recently. “My opponents used fear tactics. I’m a moderate, but they tried to make me look liberal.” On Election Night, he lost by an agonizingly slim margin—fewer than two hundred votes.

After the election, the North Carolina Free Enterprise Foundation, a nonpartisan, pro-business organization, revealed that two seemingly independent political groups had spent several hundred thousand dollars on ads against Snow—a huge amount in a poor, backwoods district. Art Pope was instrumental in funding and creating both groups, Real Jobs NC and Civitas Action. Real Jobs NC was responsible for the “Go fish!” ad and the mass mailing that attacked Snow’s “pork projects.” The racially charged ad was produced by the North Carolina Republican Party, and Pope says that he was not involved in its creation. But Pope and three members of his family gave the Davis campaign a four-thousand-dollar check each—the maximum individual donation allowed by state law.

Snow, whose defeat was first chronicled by the Institute for Southern Studies, a progressive nonprofit organization, told me, “It’s getting to the point where, in politics, money is the most important thing. They spent nearly a million dollars to win that seat. A lot of it was from corporations and outside groups related to Art Pope. He was their sugar daddy.”

Bob Phillips, the head of the North Carolina chapter of Common Cause, an organization that promotes campaign-finance reform, said that Snow’s loss signals a troubling trend in American politics. “John Snow raised a significant amount of money,” he said. “But it was exceeded by what outside groups spent in that race, mostly on commercials against John Snow.” Such lopsided campaigns will likely become more common, thanks to the Supreme Court, which, in a controversial ruling in January, 2010, struck down limits on corporate campaign spending. For the first time in more than a century, businesses and unions can spend unlimited sums to express support or opposition to candidates.

Phillips argues that the Court’s decision, in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, has been a “game changer,” especially in the realm of state politics. In swing states like North Carolina—which the Democrats consider so important that they have scheduled their 2012 National Convention there—an individual donor, particularly one with access to corporate funds, can play a significant, and sometimes decisive, role. “We didn’t have that before 2010,” Phillips says. “Citizens United opened up the door. Now a candidate can literally be outspent by independent groups. We saw it in North Carolina, and a lot of the money was traced back to Art Pope.”

Click here for the full report from The New Yorker

David Axelrod On Sanctioning Secretly Funded Groups: It’s Not Healthy ‘But It’s The System We Have’

May 9th, 2011

The Huffington Post

By: Sam Stein

David Axelrod, the president’s senior communications adviser, spent much of the 2010 election cycle warning against the rise of anonymously funded, conservative non-government groups, going so far as to frame them as a threat to democracy itself.

On Sunday, he blessed the emergence of those same organizations on the Democratic side of the aisle, calling it a bitter but necessary pill to swallow for both the party and campaign finance reformers.

“Let’s be clear,” Axelrod said on “Meet the Press.” “This independent group that was formed was formed in response to the ones that spent hundreds of millions of dollars in the last campaign to defeat Democratic candidates [with] undisclosed, large contributions. And we tried to pass a law [the DISCLOSE Act] through the Congress that would force … all groups to disclose who was giving them the money so the public could see. It got 59 Democratic votes in the United States Senate, 41 Republicans blocked it. And so, of course, now there’s a reaction to what happened, because Democrats are sitting there saying, ‘We can’t play under two sets of rules.’ … We should walk down to Capitol Hill and urge them to pass the law and that will govern both Republicans and Democrats and everybody will be playing under one set of rules.”

“I don’t think this is healthy,” he added. “I don’t think this is good. But it is the system we have. And you can’t expect one side to operate under one set of rules and the other side to operate under another.”

The idea that Democrats are leaning on outside government groups as a response to being flooded by them in 2010 does, in some respect, ignore the massive amounts of money union groups put into those midterm races. For campaign finance reform advocates — chief among them former Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisc.) — it also strikes a poor strategic note: forfeiting the political advantages that come with the moral high ground.

But for the White House and allied officials and campaign committees, it’s not all that difficult a decision. The potential to run tens of millions of dollars worth of television ads attacking Republican candidates is obviously alluring. But so is the capacity to sustain a major opposition research operation, which, according to officials familiar with the plans for these outside groups, will be an organizational imperative for the presidential cycle.

Click here for the full report from the Huffington Post

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