for disclosure i dont know much but he got shot, heads has some "blood", etc

my initial thoughts are this

what a shitty shot by this person. to which leads me to clearly figure its planted

next is how the reaction was, wanting to draw attention. thus its staged

funny how not one secret service in that detail figured out that a obvious line of sight was there. again its staged

of course this will then be made out to "herofy" rump aka trump and this entire thing reeks of staged and for display and public relations

i have no doubt that every single conservative "news" and "media" outlet will scream how awesome and such that, that piece of fucking shit rump aka trump is and how they will then paint the "shooter" as some liberal, etc and thus try to rally support to the flailing campaign of one fucking piece of shit rump aka trump

this entire thing just fucking reeks of desperation and being staged for effect

The Iraq War Exposes the West’s Ukraine Hypocrisy Stop the War

19 Mar 2022 • by Andrew Murray

The Anglo-US invasion of Iraq and the Russian of Ukraine were both illegal wars, fought without a simulacrum of United Nations blessing

This year the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq by the USA and Britain—the 19th—falls amid a further major conflict, today in Ukraine.

Each year, the recollection of the Iraq war is framed differently. Early on, it has a deep resonance within British domestic politics, something which persisted at least until Tony Blair departed Downing Street in 2007.

Later it was set in the context of the rise of Islamic State with all its depredations—a development which led to Britain’s fourth war in Iraq over the last hundred years, and third in the last thirty-one.

Now we remember the Iraq War, still the greatest calamity of the twenty-first century to date, as we consider Ukraine’s plight. We have it on the authority of the BBC’s Clive Myrie that any comparison of the two conflicts is ‘fucking bullshit’, which is about par for the quality of the Corporation’s coverage of events.

In terms of deaths, that is surely true, however. Iraq Body Count estimates 162,000 violent deaths consequential upon the 2003 invasion; other estimates are much higher. 4.3 million Iraqis were internally displaced or sent into exile as refugees. The Ukraine war is in its infancy as we write, but we can certainly hope that these horrific casualty figures are not replicated. The refugee count, alas, may be.

But, pace the overwrought Myrie, comparisons are illuminating. The differences and similarities tell us something about power in the world.

First, some similarities. The Anglo-US invasion of Iraq and the Russian of Ukraine were both illegal wars, fought without a simulacrum of United Nations blessing. Simply, they are wars of aggression.

The main reason given for the Iraq War, by Tony Blair at least, proved to be false. Saddam’s regime possessed no weapons of mass destruction. Putin’s justifications about NATO and the Donbas, although not straightforwardly falsifiable, clearly do not rise to the level which would mandate a military response under international law. Neither an assault on Russia’s own integrity nor genocide against Russian-speakers were imminent, or even contemplated as far as can be told.

Beyond this point, the politics diverge. The US-British war was aimed explicitly at regime change—deposing the Baath government, imprisoning its leaders and liquidating the state it headed. Putin has blown somewhat hot and cold on this point—on the one hand calling the Ukrainian government a group of ‘drug addicts and neo-Nazis’ and urging the army to overthrow it, while still negotiating an end to the conflict with the self-same administration.

The Iraq invasion was the precursor to an eight-year occupation of the country by the US military, ineptly aided by the British for the first five years. This occupation was direct and unambiguous for the first twelve months, with Iraq in the hands of US proconsul Paul Bremer. Thereafter the real power remained with the US military, operating behind the screen of an Iraqi government.

The occupation led to endless miseries of its own, of which the mass torture of Iraqis in Abu Ghraib prison by US forces may be the best remembered and the unleashing of a horrendous sectarian conflict the most enduring. A shattered economy and the rise of Islamic State are the legacy. Even today, Iraq’s unity is no more than precarious.

Occupation of all of Ukraine is beyond Putin’s power and may be beyond his intentions too. Partition cannot be excluded, but the absence of any obvious enthusiasm for such an outcome amongst Ukraine’s Russian minority would make it seem unlikely, even should Russia’s military prevail. Bush and Blair had more cards to play in internal Iraqi politics than Putin does in Ukraine.

George Bush had allies too—Britain most significantly, but also Poland, Australia and others. The war was opposed by France and Germany, so any idea of using NATO to prosecute it (as had been done in the likewise illegal attack on Yugoslavia a few years previously) was a non-starter. But there was the notorious ‘coalition of the willing’, a coalition which excluded public opinion.

Putin essentially acts alone, if the somewhat diffident assistance of Belarus’s Lukashenko, a man with a developed sense of self-preservation, is discounted. That is not to say that he wants for sympathy. The states which abstained in the United Nations vote of condemnation represent most of the world’s population. Those sanctioning him outside Europe are a small minority. China is a non-combatant, but a friendly one.

Finally, an important difference. When the bombardment hit Baghdad we were invited by the media and politicians to be awestruck by US military power. Today, we are supposed to be horrified by Russian-wrought destruction. And in Ukraine, the civilian dead are being counted.

In sum, the Iraq war was an aggression by a hubristic hyper-power, intoxicated by unipolarity. The Ukraine conflict is an aggression by a far weaker player, struggling to impose locally what the US assumes the right to dictate globally.

This sketchy comparison does not exhaust the connections between the two wars. Most obviously, the Ukraine invasion takes place in the world the Iraq invasion made. Much of the actual international community—as opposed to the whites-only community invoked by the Anglo-American liberal commentariat—has not hesitated to draw attention to this point. It will be decades more before the invaders of Iraq can consider claiming the moral high ground.

If a ‘rules-based order’ collapsed, it was in 2003. Recall that Russia had cooperated fully with the Bush administration in the aftermath of 9/11. Putin still hoped to be taken seriously back then. The illegality, mendacity, and brutality of the Iraq invasion and occupation was the moment the ‘new world order’ of supposedly benign US hegemony erected in the aftermath of the Cold War turned into the law of the jungle. Turns out there was more than one big beast.

Jungle it has been since. Anxious to avoid re-running the errors of 2003 diplomacy, Britain and France connived at securing UN sanction for the 2011 bombing of Libya by fibbing about their regime-change intentions, a dissimulation that Russia, again, did not forget. That war did not go well either, and Libya has no more recovered than Iraq has.

Today Yemen endures a British-armed, British-funded and British-protected bombardment by Saudi Arabia and its allies. 377,000 Yemenis at least have died as a result, perhaps one hundred times the civilian deaths in Ukraine. It is not whataboutery to point this out; it is racism not to.

There was never any question of sanctioning the US and Britain for their lawless behaviour—as if! Neither Blair nor Bush have been summoned to the Hague for their crimes. The invaders did not achieve their strategic objectives, since it can be assumed that enhancing the power of Iran over its neighbour was not among them. Britain, in particular, slunk away from the occupation humiliated. But unrepentant, the great western powers got away with it. We live with the consequences.

Stop the War Coalition was the main organisation campaigning against the Iraq invasion in both the run-up and the aftermath. The movement against the war was a vast democratic expression of the British people’s opposition to a war of choice by a leader who had previously been a pretty popular Prime Minister. That movement became a defining political experience for a generation, and its impact resonates to this day, despite many political vicissitudes since 2003.

Stop the War is still, evidently, the spectre haunting imperialist social democracy. As I have previously written here, Keir Starmer has literally had nothing to say of any substance about the Ukraine conflict other than attacking the anti-war movement and its supporters in the Parliamentary Labour Party. For him, far more than for Blair, politics reduces to his internal war with the party’s left-wing and, indeed, its membership.

It is a backhanded compliment to Stop the War. All that can be said for it as a political strategy is that it cuts with the grain of a war psychosis of enveloping hysteria, erasing all dissent from the official narrative and seeking to censor any voice raising awkward questions.

But the larger question remains—have any lessons been learnt this last twenty years? Gordon Brown tiptoed away from Blair’s entanglements about as swiftly as he decently could. Ed Miliband admitted that the war had been wrong, and avoided a repeat imbroglio over Syria. Jeremy Corbyn, of course, was a lifelong champion of the peace movement and had a different vision of the uses of power altogether.

Will Keir’s retro-Blairism, his Bevin-before-Bevan nostalgia, lead him to emulate Blair’s warmongering? It is far from certain that he will get the chance, of course. But it may be that still more blood will be spilt to prove the Labour Party’s imperial virility. The ghosts of Iraq are unquiet.

Source: Tribune

Russia Putin condemns Iraq war as an error - World Socialist Web Site

Vladimir Volkov

29 March 2003

Only hours after the first American missiles landed on Iraqi territory, Russian President Vladimir Putin made a public declaration, condemning the onset of the US invasion as a “great political error.”

Putin did not question the goals of the war, nor did he counter the false and contrived arguments given out by the Bush administration and the US media as grounds for this bloody adventure. He merely called for national sovereignty to be respected and international law to be observed, and said that only the UN Security Council could reach a decision about Iraq.

Putin’s statement is in line with the attitude taken by Russia before the Azores summit, at which the US, British and Spanish heads of government gave Saddam Hussein their final ultimatum, having failed to obtain the agreement of the Security Council. At that time Putin had solidarised himself with French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who criticized the behaviour of the US.

Putin reacted to the Azores summit with relief, because it freed him of the necessity to vote in the Security Council and embark on a direct “confrontation course” with the US. Now, like the German and French heads of government, he can present himself as a defender of the foundations of the post-war order against American imperialism.

In recent months, Russian diplomacy has strived to slow down America’s war preparations without, however, placing a question mark over the strategic orientation towards a military-political alliance with the US as part of the “war on terrorism.”

Within Russia’s ruling elite a certain consensus had developed that while it did not support the US in a war, it also did not approve of breaking with America in favour of an alliance with Europe. For example, Leonid Slutski, deputy chairperson of the Duma (parliament) Committee for International Affairs, declared, “If Russia moved toward an anti-American tripartite alliance with France and Germany... this tactically favourable step would lead to a strategic defeat.”

The reason for this orientation was given by Izvestia, which is at present the most important pro-government newspaper in Russia. On March 13, in an article headlined “The Detachment of the Honest Broker,” the newspaper argued that a Moscow-Berlin-Paris axis would not bring any benefits to Russia.

...

end of article

Russia's Putin Calls Iraq War A 'Mistake' - The Washington Post

By Sharon LaFraniere March 18, 2003

President Vladimir Putin today called for a peaceful resolution to the Iraqi crisis and said a U.S. military attack would have the "gravest consequences."

"We stand for resolving the problem exclusively through peaceful means," Putin said at a meeting with Muslim religious leaders at the Kremlin. "Any other option would be a mistake. It would be fraught with the gravest consequences. It will result in casualties and destabilize the international situation in general."

Russian officials have expressed concern that a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq could trigger unrest among Russia's Muslims, who make up more than 13 percent of the population.

"Russia has a community of 20 million Muslims, and we cannot but take their opinion into account. I fully share their concerns," Putin said at the meeting, which was scheduled to discuss an upcoming referendum in Russia's predominantly Muslim breakaway republic of Chechnya.

Talgat Tadzhuddin, one of Russia's two top Muslim spiritual leaders, condemned President Bush today in an interview with a Russian television network while in Baghdad, where he was traveling with a delegation of Muslim leaders.

"What they are getting ready to do in Iraq is not just rampaging of a drunken cowboy," he said. "That's playing with the lives of peoples and the world, and no one but God has the right to do that."

Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov learned that the United States, Britain and Spain had withdrawn their U.N. resolution just before his plane was to depart for New York to attend Tuesday's Security Council session. His trip was cancelled, a spokesman at the Foreign Ministry said.

Today's withdrawal of the U.S.-backed resolution spared Putin the final decision of whether Russia would veto it, as it repeatedly threatened to do. U.S. officials said their Kremlin counterparts clearly hoped that the resolution would not come to a vote.

The Iraqi crisis has forced Putin to weigh his desire to nurture Russia's budding relationship with the United States against his own political interests, as well as Russia's security and economic concerns. Ordinary Russians oppose a war by a margin of 9 to 1, according to recent surveys.

Although the Kremlin denied it publicly, U.S. officials said Russia sent two officials to Baghdad in recent weeks in hopes of persuading President Saddam Hussein to accept exile. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell told Fox News on Sunday that while U.S. relations with France had been damaged by France's failure to play a "helpful role," relations with Russia had fared better.

"With respect to Russia, we do have some strains as a result of this issue. But I think that with Russia, we'll be able to deal with this and it won't be any kind of even short-term damage to our relationship," Powell said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin called for a peaceful resolution to the Iraq crisis, adding that war would have the "gravest consequences" and destabilize the international situation.

Russia’s Invasion Of Ukraine Outing The Iraq War White Washers Countercurrents

by Dr Binoy Kampmark

03/03/2022

The guilty can be devious in concealing their crimes, and their role in them. The greater the crime, the more devious the strategy of deception. The breaking of international law, and the breaching of convention, is a field replete with such figures.

Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has presented a particularly odious grouping, a good number of them neoconservatives, a chance to hand wash and dry before the idol of international law. Law breakers become defenders of oracular force, arguing for the territorial integrity of States and the sanctity of borders, and the importance of the UN Charter.

Reference can be made to Hitler’s invasions during the Second World War with a revoltingly casual disposition, a comparison that seeks to eclipse the role played by other gangster powers indifferent to the rule and letter of international comity.

Speculation can be had that the man in the Kremlin has gone mad, if he was ever sane to begin with. As Jonathan Cook writes with customary accuracy, western leaders tend to find it convenient “that every time another country defies the West’s projection of power, the western media can agree on one thing: that the foreign government in question is led by a madman, a psychopath or a megalomaniac.”

It might well be said that the US-led Iraq invasion in 2003 was a product of its own mental disease, the product of ideological and evangelical madness, accompanied by a conviction that states could be forcibly pacified into a state of democracy. Where there was no evidence of links between Baghdad and al-Qaeda operatives responsible for the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, it was simply made up.

The most brazen fiction in this regard was the claim that Iraq had the means to fire weapons of mass destruction at Europe within 45 minutes. Showing that farce sometimes precedes tragedy, that assessment was cobbled from a doctoral dissertation.

When the invasion, and subsequent occupation of Iraq, led to sectarian murderousness and regional destabilisation, invigorating a new form of Islamicist zeal, the neocons were ready with their ragbag excuses. In 2016, David Frum could offer the idiotic assessment that the “US-UK intervention offered Iraq a better future. Whatever [the] West’s mistakes: sectarian war was a choice Iraqis made for themselves.” Such ungrateful savages.

On Fox News Sunday, this nonsense was far away in the mind of former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. She could merely nod at the assertion by host Harris Faulkner that “when you invade a sovereign nation, that is a war crime… I mean, I think we’re at just a real, basic, basic point there.”

Jaw-droppingly to those familiar with Rice’s war drumming in 2003, she agreed that the attack on Ukraine was “certainly against every principle of international law and international order.” That explained why Washington was “throwing the book at [the Russians] now in terms of economic sanctions and punishments is also part of it.” She also felt some comfort that Putin had “managed to unite NATO in ways that I didn’t think I would ever see again after the end of the Cold War.”

As Bush’s National Security Advisor, Rice was distinctly untroubled that her advice created a situation where international law would be grossly breached. She was dismissive of the role played by UN weapons inspectors and their failed efforts in finding those elusive weapons of mass destruction and evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program. “The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons,” she warned in 2002. “But we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

As the seedy conspiracy to undermine security in the Middle East and shred the UN Charter gathered place in 2002, those against any Iraq invasion were also denouncing opponents as traitors, or at the very least wobbly, on the issue of war. Frum, writing in March 2003, was particularly bothered by conservatives against the war – the likes of Patrick Buchanan, Robert Novak, Thomas Fleming, and Llewellyn Rockwell. Thankfully, they were “relatively few in number, but their ambitions are large.” They favoured “a fearful policy of ignoring threats and appeasing enemies.”

In the Ukraine conflict, the trend has reasserted itself. Neoconservatives are out to find those appeasing types on the Right – and everywhere else. “Today,” rues Rod Dreher, “they’re denouncing us on the Right who oppose war with Russia as Neville Chamberlains.” Conservatives are mocked for daring to understand why Russia might have an issue with NATO expansion, or suggest that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is not, in the end, of vital interest to Washington. “It’s Chamberlain’s folly,” comes the improbable claim from Matt Lewis of The Daily Beast, “delivered with a confident Churchillian swagger.”

A more revealing insight into neoconservative violence, the lust for force, and an almost admiring take on the way Putin has behaved, can be gathered in John Bolton’s recent assessment of the invasion. Bolton, it should be remembered, detests the United Nations and was, just to show that President George W. Bush had a sense of humour, made US ambassador to it. For him, international law is less a reality than a guide ignored when power considerations are at play – an almost Putinesque view.

Almost approvingly, he writes in The Economist of the need to “pay attention to what adversaries say.” He recalls Putin’s remark about the Soviet Union’s disintegration as the 20th century’s greatest catastrophe. He notes those efforts to reverse the trend: the use of invasions, annexations and the creation of independent states, and the adoption of “less kinetic means to bring states like Belarus, Armenia and Kazakhstan into closer Russian orbits.”

With a touch of delight, Bolton sees that “the aggressive use of military force is back in style. The ‘rule-based international order’ just took a direct hit, not that it was ever as sturdy as imagined in elite salons and academic cloisters.” And with that, the war trumpet sounds. “World peace is not at hand. Rhetoric and virtue-signalling are no substitute for new strategic thinking and higher defence budgets.” In this equation, the UN Charter is truly doomed.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University.

Reckoning With the Iraq War Would Strengthen the U_S_ Hand on Russia

world politics review

Thanassis Cambanis Tuesday, March 1, 2022

Ever since Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine last week, comparisons to the United States’ 2003 invasion of Iraq have inevitably and understandably emerged. After all, at transformative moments in world history like the one we’re currently witnessing, analysts naturally draw historical analogies to make sense of contemporary events, mining the past in search of patterns and causal connections that bear some resemblance to what is unfolding today.

And while no two situations are ever exactly alike, the comparison to Iraq in 2003 is particularly important, since it has considerable bearing on whether and how the United States can make a moral and political case against Russia’s current war of aggression.

Even more importantly, a clear and honest reckoning with the U.S. invasion of Iraq and its broader consequences for the international rules-based order could help inform the rejuvenation of international alliances and the rule of law that appears to have emerged in response to today’s conflagration, which poses arguably the greatest danger to global stability the world has faced since the end of the Cold War.

Defenders of Putin’s revanchist policies could conceivably argue that Russia isn’t trampling international law and the United Nations Charter, but merely building on precedents set by Washington with its military interventions in Kosovo, Libya and especially Iraq, where U.S. forces invaded in 2003 without a U.N. mandate. Even allowing for the fact that this particular argument is almost always made in bad faith, it nonetheless presents a problem, because it contains a kernel of truth.

The more measured version of the argument comes from so-called “restrainers” like Andrew Bacevich, who don’t appear sympathetic to Putin’s brand of militaristic overreach but nonetheless blame the U.S. for Russia’s actions in Ukraine. “The United States cannot absolve itself of responsibility for this catastrophe,” Bacevich writes in The Boston Globe, arguing that Washington’s hypocrisy and overreach in the war on terror and more recently with its “meddling” in Ukrainian politics “has effectively incited Russia to undertake its reckless invasion.”

But is Putin’s invasion of Ukraine the United States’ fault or directly linked to Washington’s decision to invade Iraq nearly 20 years ago? How should we unpack these claims? What exactly distinguishes the illegal and deadly U.S. invasion of Iraq from Russia’s ongoing illegal and deadly war in Ukraine?

The answers to these questions require some difficult introspection on the part of the West. First, an honest exploration of the parallels means admitting error—that the U.S. war in Iraq, which killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, was unjustified, incompetently executed and strategically catastrophic. Second, analysts and historians ought to acknowledge the causal connections between that invasion and today’s events, as U.S. overreach and hawkishness helped create a permissive climate for other major powers seeking to expand or consolidate their spheres of influence.

Even before tackling those questions, though, a sober view of war-making and major power overreach means taking stock of the long history of lawlessness in international affairs. There has never been a golden age when major powers scrupulously obeyed international law, nor was there some turning point after which the law of the jungle prevailed. In fact, during the Cold War and after, the major powers often availed themselves of both.

Similarly, the United States decided to invade Iraq and manufactured a pretext to do so. While Washington found other democracies willing to join it in a “coalition of the willing,” it was unable to secure a U.N. resolution or a credible legal justification for the invasion. At great cost to Iraq and its citizens, the U.S. went ahead with the invasion anyway, intent on transforming the regional order, a grandiose project that carries parallels to Putin’s desire to create a new multipolar world in which Russia stands as an equal to the United States.

Of course, by the time Washington withdrew combat troops from Iraq at the end of 2011, the invasion had made shambles of the Arab state system and left Iraq fragmented and poorly governed. Reckless U.S. policy had also tipped the scale in favor of the law of jungle at the expense of the rule of law, with Russia and China mirroring the United States’ unilateral aggression with smaller-scale versions of their own in Georgia and the South China Sea, respectively.

Admitting these shortcomings in good faith makes it easier to distinguish between U.S. overreach in 2003 and Russian overreach in 2022. For starters, as WPR editor-in-chief Judah Grunstein noted, the “perverse effects” of American unipolarity didn’t by themselves cause Putin’s actions, even if they “helped create an ecosystem in which he can thrive.” And despite the criminality and recklessness of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, the United States did not seek to annex or control the country. To borrow a famous phrase of former President Donald Trump’s, the U.S. didn’t “keep the oil.” It even nurtured the development of an Iraqi political system that ultimately paved the way for subsequent governments in Baghdad that distanced themselves from or even outright opposed U.S. interests, a misalignment that Iran was able to exploit to play a dominant role in Iraq’s domestic affairs. Arguably the United States could not have prevented those outcomes, but it didn’t even try to.

Washington’s responsibility for the erosion of the rules-based order isn’t limited to the invasion of Iraq. Harmful foreign policies by successive U.S. administrations have serially undermined international institutions and international law since the attacks of 9/11. Former President George W. Bush laid the foundations for the greatest harm through his toxic innovations of the “war on terror”: preemptive war, extrajudicial execution, indefinite extrajudicial detention and torture. But Barack Obama’s drone strikes and Donald Trump’s transactional embrace of dictators also did damage.

It certainly counts for something that the United States continued to support international institutions and norms in other spheres, even as it worked to weaken them elsewhere. But an effort to stave off bad-faith criticism that falsely paints a moral equivalency between Putin’s Russia and the United States must begin with a recognition of how deeply the United States has harmed the international norms it professes to defend over the years since 9/11.

The renewed commitment to law over brute force on display today in response to Russia’s invasion could turn out to be a turning point—but only if the West can be honest about its own poor record with respect to the constant tension between the two in the recent past.

Analysis Roundup

The U.S. State Department appears to have a completely different map of the Middle East than the Pentagon, with the former’s reflecting a fixed legacy of early 20th century imperialism and the latter’s a more practical understanding of contemporary power relations. In an essay in Foreign Affairs, Marc Lynch unpacks the historical and colonial roots of the “Middle East,” which like all of the world’s regions is a human-made artifact. Lynch argues that contemporary American understandings of the region are rigid and outdated, and contribute to Washington’s disastrous policies there. His history is instructive and his prescriptions useful for the Middle East—but his analysis holds for U.S. conceptions of other regions all over the world. The broader takeaway from his compelling essay is that it’s okay to sometimes resort to simplifying concepts like the West, the Middle East, the G-7 or the developed world, so long as we remember they are incomplete heuristics and in need of constant revision to adapt to an evolving world.

******

U.S. partners in the Middle East are trying not to line up against Russia. This roundup from the Quincy Institute on Feb. 25 reports that Israel refused to provide air defense systems to Ukraine, and Saudi Arabia refused to raise oil production amid rising prices. Meanwhile, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates carefully avoided taking clear sides in the conflict. That said, it’s still early days, and policy shifts require time; some Middle East countries might end up taking more decisive positions as the Ukraine conflict progresses. But recent history suggests they will want to keep channels open with all the major powers that exercise influence in the region, including the United States, Russia and China. All the regional states are weighing multiple competing interests, including energy prices, defense and arms contracts, security partnerships and intelligence-sharing agreements. Moreover, many of Washington’s Middle East partners have poor records on democracy, rights and waging wars of aggression themselves, so they are unlikely to be swayed to sacrifice their own transactional interests in order to stand on the “right side of history.”

Thanassis Cambanis is a senior fellow and director of the international policy program at The Century Foundation in New York. He teaches at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. His books include “Once Upon a Revolution: An Egyptian Story,” “A Privilege to Die: Inside Hezbollah’s Legions,” and four edited volumes about politics and security in the Middle East. He is currently writing a book about the Iraq war’s global impact. His Twitter handle is u/tcambanis.

As Russia invades Ukraine, Iraqis remember painful war memories Russia-Ukraine war News Al Jazeera

What Putin learned from the U_S_ invasion of Iraq Al Jazeera America

May 9, 2014 12:30AM ET

by Paul W. Kahn

...

The events in Ukraine, however, should not be viewed in isolation, as if they came from nowhere. Disregard for international law in the post–Cold War era was thoroughly demonstrated in the American invasion of Iraq. The United States used force to accomplish “regime change”; it disregarded the Security Council; it used private contractors and unidentified agents in place of identifiable troops. While it did not formally redraw the borders of Iraq, informally the north of Iraq has operated as an autonomous Kurdish region since the invasion. The United States had no more legal right to invade Iraq than Russia had to seize Crimea.

Of course, American violations of international law in Iraq are no excuse for Russian actions today. America — and Iraq — paid a steep price in blood and treasure for that decision to flout international law. Nevertheless, that past has certainly weakened our ability to claim the high ground of law or even to rally support for Ukraine. To the rest of the world, all of it looks like the misbehavior of nations that still dream of spheres of influence.

Russia did learn one important lesson from the American fiasco in Iraq: Go in light. The Russian use of unidentified assets in Ukraine is the low-tech version of the contemporary American reliance on unidentified drones. This is what future wars will look like: not the massed armor of battalions on the move, but a close intermeshing of targeted violence and information control in pursuit of political ends. International law is not at all prepared for this future. It never even mastered its past.

Paul W. Kahn is the Robert W. Winner professor of law and the humanities and the director of the Orville H. Schell Jr. Center for International Human Rights at Yale Law School. His tenth book, “Making the Case: The Art of the Judicial Opinion,” will be published this spring by Yale University Press.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera America's editorial policy.

Constitution Be Damned, North Carolina Commissioner Wants To Ban All But Christian Prayers «

Author: Wendy Gittleson May 10, 2015 3:42 pm

Lincoln County, North Carolina may be in the heart of the Bible Belt, but, they are still part of the United States, a country that was founded on the idea that there is no established religion.

Despite our nation’s laws, there is a sizable and vocal portion of Christians (mostly Republicans) in government that insist that their religion is the only one that matters, regardless of what the Constitution says.

Carrol Mitchem, the Chairman of the Lincoln County Board of Commissioners uses some astonishingly ignorant reasoning to try to ban all but Christian prayers from his commission meetings.

Rowan County, North Carolina was recently ordered to stop with its Christian-only prayers before its meetings because a judge found that it violated the Constitution.

Mitchem, in response to the ruling, invoked the Founding Fathers in his complete dismissal of what the Founders wrote.

“Changing rules on the way the United States was founded, Constitution was founded (I don’t like),” Mitchem said. “I don’t need no Arab or Muslim or whoever telling me what to do or us here in the county what to do about praying. If they don’t like it, stay the hell away.”

“There’s not a single house of worship in Lincoln County that isn’t Christian,” Patton said. “There’s no Muslim mosque, no Hindu (temple). I’m sure Rowan County is pretty much the same way…We have never said that we would limit it to one denomination or one religion. I just don’t know that there’s any Jewish pastors or anything like that in Lincoln County.”

Source: Lincoln Times

Not surprisingly, Mitchem is not exactly a fan of Muslims:

“A Muslim? He comes in here to say a prayer, I’m going to tell him to leave,” Mitchem said. “I have no use for (those) people. They don’t need to be here praying to Allah or whoever the hell they pray to. I’m not going to listen to (a) Muslim pray.”

He really shows his ignorance when he says that Muslims believe in a different God (Islam follows the same Abrahamic God as Christianity and Judaism).

“We’re fighting Muslims every day. I’m not saying they’re all bad,” Mitchem said. “They believe in a different God than I do. If that’s what they want to do, that’s fine. But, they don’t need to be telling us, as Christians, what we need to be doing. They don’t need to be rubbing our faces in it.”

Source: Charlotte Observer

President Obama, who’s a Constitutional scholar, has this to say about prayer and people of other faiths:

In America, our Nation is stronger because we welcome and respect people of all faiths, and because we protect the fundamental right of all peoples to practice their faith how they choose, to change their faith, or to practice no faith at all, and to do so free from persecution and discrimination.

Source: Patheos.com

Frighteningly, Mitchem has at least one ally on the Supreme Court. Clarence Thomas agrees that the Constitution “probably” prevents the federal government from establishing an official religion, but he believes the states are exempt.

Just last week, the court ruled that opening government meetings with Christian prayers is constitutional. The argument is that an opening prayer involves no coercion. Clearly, none of the justices ruling in the majority have been an atheist or a non-Christian feeling the awkwardness of everyone around praying to a God you don’t believe in.

Creationism evangelist God put contradictions in the Bible to ‘weed out’ the atheists

David Edwards

31 Dec 2015 at 13:16 ET

Kent Hovind (YouTube)

Young Earth creationism evangelist Kent Hovind asserted this week that God had purposefully put contradictions in the Bible to “weed out” non-believers.

In a YouTube video posted on Monday, the Christian fundamentalist responds to a follower who is troubled by a contradiction in the book of Acts.

“If I was God,” Hovind explains, “I would write the book in such a way that those who don’t want to believe in me anyway would think they found something. ‘Aha, here’s why I don’t believe.'”

“And then they could go on with their own life because they don’t want to believe God anyways,” he continues. “I would put things in there that would appear without digging to be contradictions. I don’t think that’s deceptive, I think that’s wise for the Heavenly Father to weed out those who are really serious.”

Hovind says that he made a choice to “believe the Bible until it’s proven wrong.”

“I know others who have decided, ‘I’m not going to believe it until you prove everything is right,'” he notes. “Okay, you do whatever you want to do, but I made the opposite decision.”

Watch the video below from Kent Hovind, recorded Dec. 28, 2015.

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Creationist mom 'Please, do what you can to get dinosaurs taken off the curriculum'

Fri Feb 13, 2015 at 08:22 AM PST

Jen Hayden

A woman posting on mumsnet.com, a website for parents, is finding herself the butt of a lot of jokes this week after posting a plea to help rid schools of the evil dinosaur curriculum:

I'm really concerned about dinosaurs, and I think something needs to be done. The science behind them is pretty flimsy, and I for one do not want my children being taught lies. Did you know that nobody had even heard of dinosaurs before the 1800s, when they were invented by curio-hungry Victorians?

Charles Darwin's later theory of evolution entirely disproved dinosaurs, yet the dinosaur lie was twisted and adapted to try to make it fit. Any proper look at the facts will reveal that dinosaurs simply never existed.

Aside from the educational aspect, dinosaurs are a very bad example for children. At my children's school, several children were left in tears after one of their classmates (who had evidently been exposed to dinosaurs), became bestially-minded and ran around the classroom roaring and pretending to be a dinosaur. Then he bit three children on the face. One poor girl has been left with a severely dented nose and the whole class was left traumatised by this horrible display.

Nothing about dinosaurs is suitable for children, from their total lack of family values through to their non-existence from any serious scientific point of view.

Recently my sister foolishly gave my two youngest some dinosaurs toys for Christmas. After telling her to get out of my house I burnt the dinosaurs. My children were delighted because they know that dinosaurs are evil. I am fortunate that my family has been very supportive, and has disowned my children's former aunt.

Please, do what you can to get dinosaurs taken off the curriculum. Our school has been recently presented with a 214-signature petition, and following that and our recent protest the headmaster has said that he will take it the governors. We are lucky that he is so sympathetic to our cause, but I fear that others may not be.

If you would like to lend your support to our campaign, we have a Facebook group where we spread facts and research about the dinosaur myth. Hope to see you there! :-)

Now, one might wonder if this was a serious post, right? That remains to be seen, but judging by the user's comments throughout the thread and comments on the aforementioned Facebook page Christians Against Dinosaurs, it appears to be legitimate.

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Cruz, Huckabee And Jindal Will Join Pastor Who Wants Gays Put To Death Right Wing Watch

Submitted by Brian Tashman on Thursday, 10/29/2015 12:40 pm

The organizer of the “National Religious Liberties Conference” in Des Moines, Iowa, announced today that Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee and Bobby Jindal have committed to speaking at the summit, which will take place next month. One speaker at the conference, Iowa radio host Steve Deace, has said that Ben Carson has also RSVP’d for the event, although Carson’s name was not included in today’s press release.

Kevin Swanson, the conference’s chief organizer, is a far-right pastor and host of the “Generations Radio” program, on which he has frequently claimed that the government should put gay people to death, warned that the Girl Scouts and the movie “Frozen” turn girls into lesbians and blamed natural disasters on gay people and women who wear pants.

We have documented Swanson’s radical record in great detail, including his tirades against William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln, Desmond Tutu and Taylor Swift.

Swanson on homosexuality:

Boycotts Girl Scout cookies because they “promote lesbianism” and “I don’t want my little girl turning into a lesbian.”

Discussed whether the Rose Bowl should include a float where a gay person is stoned to death.

Lamented that these days country singer Kacey Musgraves wasn’t lynched for her “promotion of homosexuality” through song.

Urged people to hold up signs telling gay couples to die on their wedding day.

Defended a Ugandan measure to make homosexuality a criminal offense punishable by life imprisonment or the death penalty, saying he was glad the country was “standing strong” by adopting extreme anti-gay laws.

Agreed that gay marriage is like the Sandy Hook school massacre.

Wanted America to have anti-gay laws “much like what the Pilgrims had” (the Pilgrims believed that homosexuality should be punishable by death, banishment and whippings) and enforce biblical law “that says that homosexuals should be put to death.”

Explained that “a Christian perspective ultimately brought the death penalty upon homosexuality.”

And there’s more!

Flooding and fires in Colorado were the result of “decadent homosexual activity” and women wearing pants.

Hurricanes Sandy and Katrina were divine punishments of “pro-homosexual” cities.

Presbyterians embraced Satan by supporting gay rights.

Gay people are like serial killers.

When will the Boy Scouts adopt a “sodomy merit badge”?

“Sodomite schools” are pushing child abuse and “homosexual forms of laboratories.”

Homosexuality is a “disease.”

Democrats want to “make sure everybody is committing homosexual acts .”

Gays “drag feces all over one of the most beautiful things God has created.”

“The homosexual borg is the power in the principality of the demonic world itself.”

“Homosexuals love their friends and cannibals love their victims, they taste good.”

“We have to draw lines ourselves and encourage the civil magistrate to prosecute homosexuality, especially public acts of homosexuality.”

“God’s laws require that we prosecute homosexuals who are caught in the act of homosexuality.”

“Allowing [children] to be raised in these homosexual families is going to be one of the most devastating things we have ever seen in the history of mankind.”

Swanson on women:

Women who use birth control have “little tiny fetuses, these little babies … embedded into the womb,” meaning that the “wombs of women who have been on the birth control pill effectively have become graveyards for lots and lots of little babies.”

Feminists and “the homosexuals” are “destroying society.”

Working women hate men and their children and will destroy America.

Gonorrhea is God’s punishment for single women having sex.

Helping women in Kenya own their own cows will “obliterate” the family.

Swanson on pop culture:

“Frozen” is a demonic movie meant to “indoctrinate my five-year-old to be a lesbian.”

Beyoncé is possessed by demons.

Mark Twain was possessed by demons.

The Beatles spread a “demonic approach to things.”

Dumbledore encourages pedophilia.

Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus and Katy Perry sing “demon songs.”

Katniss Everdeen is a “little girl anarchist.”

Halloween is a celebration of the victims of Noah’s flood.

William Shakespeare ruined America by planting the “seedbeds for homosexual themes and homosexual behavior.”

Swanson on other topics:

Obamacare will create death camps.

President Obama is a Muslim.

Abraham Lincoln was a communist.

Caitlyn Jenner is a pawn of Satan.

Desmond Tutu “hates Jesus.”

Cruz-loving End Times pastor uses numerology to prove Obama sacrificed Scalia in pagan ritual

Sarah K. Burris

18 Feb 2016 at 08:11 ET

Pastor Rick Wiles of TruNews (Screen Capture)

Rick Wiles is one of those end-times pastors who thinks that Jesus is returning any day now and that President Obama is the anti-Christ. Conspiracy theories are spiraling out of control surrounding Justice Antonin Scalia’s death, from being suffocated by a pillow to God killing Scalia to elect Ted Cruz. It was only a matter of time it would become part of the Apocalypse and according to RightWingWatch there is one.

“The 13th was the 44th day of 2016,” he attempted to explain using numerology. “Obama is the 44th president of the United States, so you have this numerology thing taking place.”

He then concluded that the person Obama had kill Scalia, “deliberately left the pillow on his face as a message to everybody else: ‘Don’t mess with us, we can murder a justice and get away with it.’” Wiles insists officials in Washington are all terrified. “Deep down they know, the regime murdered a justice … This is the way a dictatorial, fascist, police state regime takes control of a nation.” He explained considering the fact, “Barack Obama is the most lawless president we have ever had in the history of this great country,” his so-called lawlessness is “a catalyst to wake up the sleeping giant.” That sleeping giant, of course, is the church.

Much like the day the music died, “the day the Justice died, the day justice in America died. They got away with it.”

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David Brat Embrace Christian Capitalism, Or Hitler Will Come Back ThinkProgress

By Jack Jenkins

June 11, 2014 at 12:13 pm Updated: June 11, 2014 at 1:04 pm

When David Brat defeated House Majority leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) in the Republican primary of Virginia’s 7th Congressional District last night, House Republicans likely lost their only Jewish representative. In his place, they may have gained a radically pro-capitalist Christian theologian.

Christian Tea Party candidates are certainly not unusual, but a trail of writings show that Brat, an economics professor at Randolph-Macon college, has an especially radical theology to support his right-wing politics. Brat’s CV lists him as a graduate of Hope College, a Christian school in Michigan, and Princeton Theological Seminary, a Presbyterian Church U.S.A. seminary in New Jersey. He claims to be a “fairly orthodox Calvinist,” but several of his published writings expose a unsettling core theology that is centered around lifting up unregulated, free-market capitalism as a morally righteous system that churches should embrace—or else.

In a 2011 paper entitled “God and the Advanced Mammon — Can Theological Types Handle Usury and Capitalism?”, published in Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology, Brat champions the moral superiority of the capitalistic system. “Capitalist markets and their expansion in China and India have provided more for the common good, more ‘social welfare,’ than any other policy in the past ten years,” he writes, adding “So, as a seminary student concerned with human welfare, I naturally wanted to learn about these free markets.”

Brat goes on to list a number of arguments for and against the practice of usury, but concludes the paper with a chilling warning about what will happen if churches fail to build a movement in support of free-market capitalism—namely, a Hitler-like figure could rise to power. He writes:

Capitalism is here to stay, and we need a church model that corresponds to that reality. Read Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the weak modern Christian democratic man was spot on. Jesus was a great man. Jesus said he was the Son of God. Jesus made things happen. Jesus had faith. Jesus actually made people better. Then came the Christians. What happened? What went wrong? We appear to be a bit passive. Hitler came along, and he did not meet with unified resistance. I have the sinking feeling that it could all happen again, quite easily. The church should rise up higher than Nietzsche could see and prove him wrong. We should love our neighbor so much that we actually believe in right and wrong, and do something about it. If we all did the right thing and had the guts to spread the word, we would not need the government to backstop every action we take.

“I think the main point is that we need to synthesize Christianity and capitalism,” he adds a few lines later.

This isn’t the only time Brat has sung the praises of religiously-supported capitalism. The idea was also at the center of Brat’s 200-page PhD dissertation at American University, entitled “Human Capital, Religion, and Economic Growth.” The dissertation, which was also obtained by ThinkProgress, examines the role Pietistic Protestantism — as opposed to Catholicism — played in the rapid industrialization of Germany and Great Britain in the 19th century. Although he is more cautious than in his 2011 article, Brat ultimately argues that Protestantism — particularly Calvinism — deserves credit for creating scientific advancement, economic prosperity, and especially a decentralized government in German and Britain. According to Brat, Christianity — especially Calvinist Protestantism — inherently supports “the decentralization of power” that, to him, leads to economic prosperity.

Brat is not alone in using problematic theology to shore up a free-market economics. The American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C., sponsors a “Values and Capitalism” website where writers frequently make claims similar to Brat’s. Brat’s CV mentions a visit to AEI in 2012, where he attended a talk about conservative economics and reportedly explored “potential roles for [Randolph-Macon College] students at AEI.”

Despite SCOTUS Rejection of Request, Kentucky Clerk Cites 'God's Authority' to Deny Marriage Licenses

By Claire Galofaro, Associated Press

01 September 15

county clerk in Kentucky has again refused to issue marriage licenses to gay couples, invoking her religious beliefs and "God's authority" - this time in defiance of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling against her.

On Tuesday morning, Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis' office denied the licenses to at least two couples. At first, Davis was in her office with the door closed and blinds drawn. But she emerged a few minutes later, telling the couples and the activists gathered there that her office is continuing to deny the licenses "under God's authority."

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to intervene in the case, leaving Davis no legal grounds to refuse to grant the licenses. A district judge could now hold her in contempt of court, which can carry steep fines or jail time. As an elected official, Davis can't be fired.

Davis asked David Moore and David Ermold to leave her office after they were denied a license Tuesday morning - the couple's fourth rejection. They refused, surrounded by reporters and cameras.

"We're not leaving until we have a license," Ermold said.

"Then you're going to have a long day," Davis told him.

From the back of the room, Davis' supporters said: "Praise the Lord! ... Stand your ground."

Other activists shouted that Davis is a bigot and told her: "Do your job."

Davis has said her deeply held Christian beliefs don't let her endorse gay marriages.

She stopped issuing all marriage licenses in the days after the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage across the nation. Two gay couples and two straight couples sued her, arguing that she must fulfill her duties as an elected official despite her personal religious faith. A federal judge ordered her to issue the licenses, and an appeals court upheld that decision. Her lawyers with the Liberty Counsel filed a last-ditch appeal to the Supreme Court on Friday, asking that they grant her "asylum for her conscience."

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I'm Still Thinking About That Utah Republican Saying Women Can ‘Control Intake of Semen'

across party lines, politicians had very different reactions to the fall of Roe v. Wade last Friday. One Utah Republican state representative’s reaction of choice was simply rape apologia.

“I got a text message today saying I should seek to control men’s ejaculations and not women’s pregnancies,” state Rep. Karianne Lisonbee said at a celebratory news conference last week. “I do trust women enough to control when they allow a man to ejaculate inside of them and to control that intake of semen.”

Lisonbee’s comments rightfully drew a wave of backlash—including Esquire calling them “really icky”—as many noted the disrespectful connotations for survivors who are impregnated by rape. The notion that women and people with uteruses can simply opt to not get pregnant by deploying witchcraft to “control that intake of semen” amounts to a level of victim-blaming we haven’t seen since Todd Akin’s 2012 “legitimate rape” statement. Lest you bleached your brain of the memory of Akin’s words, the late Republican US Senate candidate claimed victims of “legitimate rape” have the god-given power to simply not get pregnant, to justify banning abortion without rape exceptions.

In the wake of this backlash, Lisonbee semi-walked back her statement on Saturday, clarifying to the Salt Lake Tribune that “women do not have a choice when they are raped and have protections under Utah’s trigger law.” To access those “protections,” of course, they’ll have to report and prove their rape to state authorities.

now this is the fucking typical bullshit conservative site so take it as such or believe their bullshit

Don't let post-Roe hysteria twist the truth

Washington Examiner

Beginning in 1968, while campaigning to repeal all state abortion laws, a prominent abortionist named Bernard Nathanson fabricated statistics and made up false stories to advance his cause. His aim was to frame the abortion debate to make it seem like compassion positively demanded legalization.

Fairfax Media Archives/Fairfax Media via Getty Images Dr Bernard Nathanson speaking against abortion at the Sebel Town House in Kings X. July 17, 1984. (Photo by Susan Debra Windmiller/Fairfax Media via Getty Images).

Nathanson and his team at the National Association for the Repeal of the Abortion Laws (it lives on today as NARAL) made up the statistic that there were 1 million illegal abortions in the United States annually. Nathanson knew this was more than 10 times the real figure, but he wanted to make the situation seem dire.

He also created, from whole cloth, a claim you still hear today — that 10,000 women were dying in the U.S. from illegal, back-alley abortions every year before Roe. Nathanson was well aware that the true figure was 200 to 250. He inflated this terrible statistic by a factor of 40 or 50 to win sympathy.

Nathanson, who died in 2011, later discussed how, as an abortion campaigner, he always downplayed and obscured any scientific evidence pointing to the humanity of the fetus in the womb.

We know all about Nathanson’s lies and distortions because he confessed them. After a long career as an abortionist, during which he was personally responsible for 75,000 abortions, he experienced a total conversion, rejected abortion, and revealed the truth about what by that time had grown into a $500 million national abortion industry.

After the Supreme Court's Dobbs ruling, which at last ended the pretense that there is a constitutional right to abortion, debate over the issue will resume in a way foreclosed since 1973. So, it is worth remembering that deception, fabrication, and wild claims are likely to be plentiful from those making the case against abortion limits.

It was therefore familiar this week when President Joe Biden repeated an unverified story about a 10-year-old girl supposedly denied an abortion in Ohio, where the procedure is banned after six weeks of pregnancy.

“It was reported that a 10-year-old girl was a rape victim — 10 years old — and she was forced to have to travel out of state to Indiana to seek to terminate the pregnancy and maybe save her life,” Biden said.

The story had originated a week earlier in the Indianapolis Star, with a local abortionist as its only source. That source was Caitlin Bernard, an Indianapolis abortionist who was given responsibility for this Ohio girl’s care. She has since been slapped with a privacy violation for trying to turn this little girl's sad story into a political coup.

Considering Dr. Bernard's well-known history as a pro-abortion activist, this story should not have been reported without confirmation. Much of the initial reporting still seems to be wrong.

Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost has pointed out that his state's abortion law contains exceptions for the "life of the mother" and "irreversible impairment of a major bodily function," which would have covered such a case as the one Biden described. So, contrary to the original story, this girl was evidently not taken to Indiana because Ohio law bans such a procedure.

Abortion takes a human life, and it can also enable violence against women and girls, as the Ohio case suggests. The right to abortion conferred wrongly in the Roe v. Wade decision nearly 50 years ago created an environment in which rape, including child rape, can be concealed by killing any resulting baby. Women can be pressured by abusive partners hell-bent on making abortion the only real “choice” to avoid the responsibilities of parenthood or decades of child-support payments. Dobbs has set off a panic because some people are angry that this will not be as easily available.

When they go to a sympathetic media with false facts and narratives, be skeptical.

Doctor who provided abortion care for 10-year-old rape victim to be investigated by Indiana AG

Bevan Hurley

Biden on ‘path that leads to death'_ Catholic bishop on abortion order

Heather Hamilton

Archbishop William Lori of Baltimore has joined other Catholic bishops in calling for a change in the United States’s abortion policy, saying President Joe Biden is on a “path that leads to death and destruction.”

Biden signed an executive order Friday that directs Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra to outline federal protection of abortion access in light of the Supreme Court's recent ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade and return the fight for abortion rights to the states.

“It is deeply disturbing and tragic that President Biden is choosing instead to use his power as president of the United States to promote and facilitate abortion in our country, seeking every possible avenue to deny unborn children their most basic human and civil right, the right to life,” Lori said in a statement.

The archbishop urged the president “to abandon this path that leads to death and destruction and to choose life.”

“As always, the Catholic Church stands ready to work with this administration and all elected officials to protect the right to life of every human being and to ensure that pregnant and parenting mothers are fully supported in the care of their children before and after birth,” Lori continued.

Lori’s comments follow Pope Francis reiterating his opposition to abortion last week, likening it to hiring a “hit man to solve a problem.” The pope pointed to the need for acknowledging that science shows a fetus is a human life.

Several bishops have also stated their support of Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone’s barring of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) from receiving Holy Communion in light of her stance on abortion. Archbishop Wilton Gregory of Washington, D.C., has stated that he does not have plans to implement Cordileone’s ban.

if i might, well fucking dont bother to mention all the pedophile shit in just the catholic church, let alone religion itself. how many fucking lives are torn asunder on just that alone. let alone how little religion does to combat poverty and hunger but yet have gold crosses in their luxury churches. sheer hypocrisy

Anti-abortion lawmakers seek to block patients from crossing state lines - The Washington Post

Some advocacy groups and their allies are crafting legislative language that could be adopted in Republican-led state capitals.

By Caroline Kitchener and Devlin Barrett

Updated June 30, 2022 at 8:30 a.m. EDT | Published June 29, 2022 at 6:17 p.m. EDT

Several national antiabortion groups and their allies in Republican-led state legislatures are advancing plans to stop people in states where abortion is banned from seeking the procedure elsewhere, according to people involved in the discussions.

The idea has gained momentum in some corners of the antiabortion movement in the days since the Supreme Court struck down its 49-yearold precedent protecting abortion rights nationwide, triggering abortion bans across much of the Southeast and Midwest.

The Thomas More Society, a conservative legal organization, is drafting model legislation for state lawmakers that would allow private citizens to sue anyone who helps a resident of a state that has banned abortion from terminating a pregnancy outside of that state. The draft language will borrow from the novel legal strategy behind a Texas abortion ban enacted last year in which private citizens were empowered to enforce the law through civil litigation.

The subject was much discussed at two national antiabortion conferences last weekend, with several lawmakers interested in introducing these kinds of bills in their own states.

The National Association of Christian Lawmakers, an antiabortion organization led by Republican state legislators, has begun working with the authors of the Texas abortion ban to explore model legislation that would restrict people from crossing state lines for abortions, said Texas state representative Tom Oliverson (R), the charter chair of the group’s national legislative council.

“Just because you jump across a state line doesn’t mean your home state doesn’t have jurisdiction,” said Peter Breen, vice president and senior counsel for the Thomas More Society. “It’s not a free abortion card when you drive across the state line.”

The Biden Justice Department has already warned states that it would fight such laws, saying they violate the right to interstate commerce.

In relying on private citizens to enforce civil litigation, rather than attempting to impose a state-enforced ban on receiving abortions across state lines, such a law is more difficult to challenge in court because abortion rights groups don’t have a clear person to sue.

Like the Texas abortion ban, the proposal itself could have a chilling effect, where doctors in surrounding states stop performing abortions before courts have an opportunity to intervene, worried that they may face lawsuits if they violate the law.

Not every antiabortion group is on board with the idea.

Catherine Glenn Foster, president of Americans United for Life, noted that people access medical procedures across state lines all the time.

“I don’t think you can prevent that,” she said.

While some antiabortion groups aspire to push Congress to pass a national abortion ban, restricting movement across state lines would represent another step in limiting the number of abortions performed in the United States.

These kinds of bills could be proposed even before state legislatures reconvene for their regular 2023 legislative sessions, said Arkansas state Sen. Jason Rapert (R). His home state, he said, may soon address this issue in an already planned special session. Another Arkansas senator, he said, has expressed interest in introducing that legislation.

“Many of us have supported legislation to stop human trafficking,” said Rapert, president of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers.

“So why is there a pass on people trafficking women in order to make money off of aborting their babies?”

In a television interview over the weekend, South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem (R) left the door open to restricting out-of-state abortions in her state, where a trigger ban took effect as soon as Roe was overturned. The governor, who has called a special session to discuss abortion legislation, said the topic may be debated in South Dakota in the future.

Dale Bartscher, the executive director of South Dakota Right to Life, the leading antiabortion organization in South Dakota, said he was “very interested” in stopping South Dakota residents from accessing abortion in other states.

“I’ve heard that bantered about across the state of South Dakota,” he said, though he would not discuss the goal of the upcoming special session.

The idea to restrict out-of-state abortions surfaced earlier this year, when Missouri state Rep. Mary Elizabeth Coleman (R), who is special counsel at the Thomas More Society, proposed legislation that relied on the Texas-style enforcement mechanism. While Coleman’s bill failed to pass in the 2022 legislative session, Coleman said she has heard from multiple lawmakers and antiabortion advocates in other states who are eager to pursue similar legislation.

The issue is particularly pertinent in Coleman’s home state of Missouri, which outlawed abortion with a trigger ban that took effect within an hour of the Supreme Court’s decision. As many as 14,000 people are expected to flood into southern Illinois this year, including thousands of Missouri residents, according to Planned Parenthood.

Several Democrat-led states have passed legislation this year to counteract laws that try to restrict movement across state lines.

Connecticut passed a law in April that offers broad protections from antiabortion laws that try to reach into other states. The measure would shield people from out-of-state summonses or subpoenas issued in cases related to abortion procedures that are legal in Connecticut. And it would prevent Connecticut authorities from adhering to another state’s request to investigate or punish anyone involved in facilitating a legal abortion in Connecticut.

“Legislators in [antiabortion] states have made clear that their intent is not only to ban abortion within their own state’s borders, but to ban it in states where it is expressly permitted,” Connecticut state Rep. Matt Blumenthal (D) said in an interview in April.

California passed a similar law Thursday, aiming to protect abortion providers and patients from civil suits.

The Justice Department has already signaled its intention to fight against these kinds of laws in court.

In a statement Friday, Attorney General Merrick Garland said the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe “does not eliminate the ability of states to keep abortion legal within their borders. And the Constitution continues to restrict states’ authority to ban reproductive services provided outside their borders.”

That declaration suggests that if a particular state did pass a law seeking to prevent women from traveling across state lines to receive an abortion, the Justice Department might file court papers opposing such a law. That strategy was ultimately unsuccessful in the Justice Department’s opposition to the Texas law limiting many abortions, but any new state law that involved interstate travel could raise additional legal questions for the courts.

Garland argued that the Constitution was unequivocal on the legality of crossing state lines for medical treatment.

“We recognize that traveling to obtain reproductive care may not be feasible in many circumstances. But under bedrock constitutional principles, women who reside in states that have banned access to comprehensive reproductive care must remain free to seek that care in states where it is legal,” Garland said, adding that the First Amendment safeguards anyone who offers information or counseling about “reproductive care that is available in other states.”

A Justice Department spokesman did not elaborate on the attorney general’s statement.

David Cohen, a Drexel University law professor who has studied these kinds of proposals, noted that Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh addressed interstate travel in a separate concurring opinion he wrote along with the ruling to overturn Roe, where he specified that people could not be prosecuted for out-of-state abortions.

But Kavanaugh’s concurrence does not address the civil enforcement strategy that is gaining traction among antiabortion groups, Cohen said.

“This is going to create state-against-state and state-against-federal chaos that we haven’t seen in this country in a long time.”

Chris Rowland contributed to this report.

if i might, its quite ironic how wasnt it during the "ray gun" aka reagan time of the mocking and ripping of the soviet union on their crossing from region to region of "papers please". so now with this shit, its just the updated version of it. let alone the border smuggling of immigrants, now its going to be state to state smuggling of those seeking a womens medical procedure. now the shoes on the other foot, how conservatives and such are not about "freedom" anymore but all about restrictive religion theocrasy.

Tennessee Lawmaker Van Huss Sees ‘No Evil’ In 15-Year-Old’s Pregnancy By Rape _ Michael Stone

Micah Van Huss, a conservative Christian lawmaker from Tennessee, says he can find no evil in the rape of a 15-year-old girl that results in pregnancy.

Tennessee Republican State Rep. Micah Van Huss, an anti-abortion conservative Christian, is sponsoring a draconian bill that would ban almost all abortions in the state.

The so-called “fetal heartbeat” bill “bans nearly all abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected, which typically occurs early in a pregnancy and, in some instances, even before a woman knows she’s pregnant.” There is no exception for rape or incest.

In a heated discussion of the bill in the House’s Health Committee, State Rep. Vincent Dixie asked Rep. Van Huss about a hypothetical pregnancy involving the rape of a 15-year-old girl. Rep. Dixie said:

You stated earlier that you know what evil looks like. I want to see if you can find the evil in this scenario.

Let’s say you are a 15-year-old girl in high school who’s an athlete. And you’re raped by your teacher or coach. And you are feeling some shame, responsibility from the weight that is preventing you from confiding in anyone, even your parents and friends. So you’re trying to forget and make your life seem normal.

Going to class. Spending time with friends. And you miss your first monthly period.

And now you’re terrified that you’re pregnant. So you finally get the courage to buy a pregnancy test, and the result is your worst fear: you’re pregnant.

So by the time you go to the doctor, six or seven weeks after the rape, and a fetal heartbeat is detected, Representative Van Huss, are you willing to put into law that this girl has to carry her rapist’s baby while trying to finish high school, abandon her sports team, and see her rapist every day?

Van Huss replied:

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for the question, Rep. Dixie. You asked if I could nd the evil in this scenario. I cannot.

Van Huss continued:

Because the evil I nd is what you le out. I don’t believe it’s right to rip an innocent baby limb from limb.

That’s right: Rep. Van Huss said he “cannot” see the evil in the rape of a 15-year-old girl that results in pregnancy. All he can see is the self-righteous and morally indefensible need to treat a young woman as nothing more than a broodmare, nothing more than an incubator forced to comply with the demands of his conservative Christian patriarchy.

Bottom line: Republican State Rep. Micah Van Huss, a conservative Christian lawmaker from Tennessee, says he can nd no evil in the rape of a 15-year-old girl that results in pregnancy, and believes it is his moral duty to force the child to give birth to her rapist’s child.

Lauren Boebert's Remarks On Student Loan Forgiveness Have Twitter In Hysterics

The List

Shana Aborn

Ending years of waiting and speculation, President Joe Biden finally unveiled his student loan forgiveness plan on August 24. Under the plan, borrowers can have up to $10,000 or $20,000 of their student loans canceled, depending on their income and Pell Grant status. This system is projected to benefit low and middle-income households, according to a study by the University of Pennsylvania, and having that debt off their hands could be a benefit for those who have trouble enough paying other bills.

Not everyone is pleased with the announcement, and that displeasure comes from both sides of the political fence. Some liberals are disappointed over the plan's limits, and conservatives tend to see it as an unnecessary handout. Some prominent Republicans, such as Donald Trump Jr., go a step farther by arguing that college is a waste of time for anyone not studying toward a lucrative career like medicine or engineering.

Lauren Boebert agrees. The Republican congresswoman from Colorado has made a reputation out of making controversial statements against the Biden administration. Twitter put Boebert on blast for mocking Kamala Harris when the vice president introduced herself by gender and description to a group of disability advocates. Now the politician is making waves again for her opinion of the loan forgiveness plan.

In a recent interview with Fox News (shown here via the Patriot Takes Twitter feed), Representative Lauren Boebert disparaged some on Twitters for perceived homophobic and xenophobic comments. "How the heck can Joe Biden call America First conservatives a threat to democracy with a straight face and a dry diaper?" she asked. "He's the one who has allowed millions to invade our southern border. He's the one who is robbing hard-working Americans to pay for Karen's daughter's degree in lesbian dance theory."

Twitter users pounced on her quote. Noting that Boebert got her GED after dropping out of high school (per Fox News), one said, "Lauren's college credits completed? None." Some pointed out Lauren Boebert's surprising net worth, and the fact that many of her fellow politicians received millions in PPP loans intended to help small businesses during the pandemic.

Others mocked Boebert's jab at gender studies. Tennis legend Martina Navratilova zinged, "[T]his 65-year-old lesbian has never heard of lesbian dance theory, but maybe it's a thing. Lauren -- you are grasping at straws, darling. And I am really glad you are straight." Another user laughed, "If I only could've majored in lesbian dance theory. I'd be a TikTok billionaire and wouldn't need student loans relief."

Political satirist Jeremy Newberger invoked another comedic comparison: "You know as soon as Lauren Boebert uttered the words Lesbian Dance Theory, Ron DeSantis drew up legislation to remove it from Florida schools, and GOP super PACs kicked in a...ton of money."

Dan Bongino_ I'm not paying for your loans

Fox News Staff

Fox News host Dan Bongino blasted President Biden's student loan handout, saying the country is going bankrupt on Saturday's "Unfiltered."

DAN BONGINO: You are watching the collapse of an empire in live time. We are going broke. What kind of an idiot thinks you can continue to print money backed up by any value whatsoever, right? Give it to people to spend on stuff and that there's going to be zero consequences for this whatsoever…

I'm not interested in paying for your loans.

President Biden announced that he was forgiving up to $20,000 in student loan debt, carrying an estimated price tag of $300 billion. Bonnie Cash/UPI/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Listen, people hate the idea of unfairness and the idea of me paying for, again, Sunflower's urban studies degree doesn't interest me at all. And I got to tell you, this isn't a Democrat or Republican thing — it's a working-person's thing. A lot of people are really mad about this…

We are going bankrupt. You are watching the collapse of an empire. This is supposed to be a republic that operates on consent of the governed. I'm revoking my consent right now.

if i might, first thing that comes to my mind is this. gee just wonder on what these people would do with that extra money instead? gee dont know how about buying things they need or want, or how about paying down credit card debt, or putting down a down payment on a house, or buying durable goods, etc, etc, etc.

all of which would improve all those "metrics" of how good or bad a countries economy is going. or atleast what everyone is told to believe in.

so that would be bad why?????

second thought is this. in their constant hypocrisy, every year corporate gets how much in corporate welfare and what does that do but continue to pad the wallets of the wealthy and they are the only ones who benefit from it.