Expect them.

"The Department of Justice website was back up Friday morning after the infamous hacker collective Anonymous claimed it had shut down access to it and the sites of the RIAA, MPAA, Universal Music and a French regulatory agency on Thursday to stake its opposition to the anti-piracy push in Washington." (source)

Judge Napolitano vs. Donald Rumsfeld

From March 4, 2011 FBN Interview "Freedom Watch":



The Two Debate The Legitimacy of War, Iraq's Questionable Threat to America, and the Judge Directly Asks If He via the Reagan Administration Sold Saddam His Chemical Weapons.

The Banality of Killing by Jacob G. Hornberger

The standard explanations for the Arizona killings are now being set forth, such as widespread violence in America and right-wing extremism. I’d like to weigh in with another possible factor, one that I can’t prove but one that I think Americans ought to at least consider: the fact that killing has now become an accepted, essential, normal, and permanent part of American life.

No, I’m not referring to the widespread gun violence in America that liberals point to as part of their gun-control agenda. I’m not even referring to the widespread violence that accompanies the decades-long drug war, especially in Mexico. I’m instead referring to the U.S. government’s regular killing of people thousands of miles away in Afghanistan and Iraq, killing that has now gone on regularly for some 10 years and that has become a fairly hum-drum part of our daily lives.

Six people were killed and 14 were injured in the Arizona shootings, including a woman who was shot through the head and a 9-year-old girl whose life was snuffed out. Everyone is shocked over the horror, which is detailed on the front page of every newspaper across the country.

But let’s face it: Such killings go on every week in Afghanistan and Iraq and have for some 10 years. Parents, children, brothers, sisters, cousins, grandparents, friends, brides, grooms, and wedding parties. People are killed in those two countries every week, and the killing has now expanded to people in Pakistan.

We don’t see those deaths on the front pages of American newspapers. They’re buried on page 14 of the papers in small news reports, if at all.

Why don’t those killings get front-page coverage?

One, the killings have become commonplace. They’re now just considered normal. Massive death on a massive scale, but normal. We just put all the deaths at the back of our minds. The football playoffs are this weekend. Got to pay the bills this month. Life demands our attention. Anyway, it’s not as if we, the American citizenry, are doing the killing. It’s the military and the CIA that are doing it.

Two, our public officials say that we’re at war and that people are always killed in war. Never mind that what we have in Afghanistan and Iraq are military occupations, not war. The idea is that a military occupation is a sort of war and, therefore, we shouldn’t let the daily killings affect our consciences. Moreover, since we’ve been told that the war on terrorism is considered permanent, we just have to get used to the fact that the weekly killings will be a normal and regular part of our lives for as long as we live.

Third, we are told that the people being killed are terrorists, enemy combatants, or unfortunate collateral damage. Never mind that our public officials have had 10 years to kill terrorists and enemy combatants to their hearts’ content but apparently still haven’t gotten them all. Never mind that the terrorists and enemy combatants might well now consist primarily of people who are simply trying to oust their country of a foreign occupier, like people did when it was the Soviet Union that was doing the occupying. Never mind that the number of terrorists and enemy combatants continues to rise with each new killing. It’s all just part and parcel of the new normality for American society.

In the process, life is cheapened – well, the lives of Afghans, Iraqis, and Pakistanis. The weekly killings of adults and children from those three countries are relegated to page 14 of the newspaper because they’re just Afghans, Iraqis, and Pakistanis. It’s not as if they’re Americans, after all, people who place a much higher value on human life than others.

We mustn’t forget how, for the last 10 years, the lives of Afghans and Iraqis have been expendable for the greater good of their society. How many times have we been reminded, for example, that the deaths of countless Iraqis have been worth the effort to bring democracy to Iraq? In fact, one of the most fascinating phenomena about the Iraq War, an illegal and unconstitutional undeclared war of aggression that the U.S. government waged against a country that had never attacked the United States or even threatened to do so, is that there has never been an upper limit on the number of Iraqi deaths that would justify the achievement of democracy in Iraq. Any number of Iraqi deaths, no matter how high, has been considered worth it.

We saw this same reasoning through 11 years of brutal sanctions on Iraq, which were imposed for the purpose of achieving regime change – the ouster of Saddam Hussein from power and his replacement by a pro-U.S. regime. When Bill Clinton’s U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Madeleine Albright, was asked by Sixty Minutes whether the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children had been worth it, her answer perfectly reflected the mindset of Washington officials for the past two decades: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price – we think the price is worth it.”

How much value is placed on the life of people, including children, who are sacrificed for the greater good of society? Not much value at all. Life is supposed to be sacrosanct. But then again, those are Iraqi people we’re talking about.

How can all this massive, regular, permanent death and destruction not affect and infect a society? Sure, it all takes place thousands of miles away. Sure, it’s buried on page 14 of the newspaper. We don’t see the caskets or the burials. We don’t see the crying, the anguish, or the anger of the survivors. We just go about our daily business, deferring to authority. Our public officials know what is best. That is their job. We have to trust their judgment. If they say that American soldiers and CIA officials have to stay in Afghanistan and Iraq permanently and just go on killing people forever, then we, the citizenry, just have to accept that. If they say they have to expand the killing to Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia or wherever, then that is just the way things are. They are the experts. They are in charge.

In the process, everyone convinces himself that the people who are being killed are “bad guys” or people who just happened to be too close to the bad guys, including their wives, children, other family members, or friends.

Of course, the possibility that the U.S. government – the invader, the occupier, the interloper – is the “bad guy” doesn’t even enter into most people’s minds. The thought is too horrible, too terrifying. It might cause citizens to have to search their consciences. Easier to simply continue “supporting the troops” who are “defending our freedoms” by killing all those people on a regular, weekly basis.

The news media are reporting that the accused Arizona shooter, Jared Loughner, tried to join the U.S. military but was unsuccessful. The irony is that if he had been successful, he would have gone to Iraq or Afghanistan and participated in the weekly death-fest and, upon his return, public officials, pundits, media personalities, and even some church ministers would be hailing his heroism and thanking him for serving his country by killing Iraqis, Afghans, Pakistanis, and others in the “defense of our freedoms” here at home.

Did the normalization and trivialization of killing and the denigration and devaluation of life in Afghanistan and Iraq trigger something inside the apparently disturbed mind of the accused Arizona killer? I don’t know. But how can such actions not have a horrible long-term adverse effect on people whose government is permanently engaged in such evil?

Reprinted from The Future of Freedom Foundation.

Our Country Wasn't Founded By Christians or to be Christian

When will conservatives wake up and realize there is nothing conservative about denying the rights of a minority?

They are supposed to be the defenders of Jefferson, Washington, and Adams no?

Well, Jefferson wrote his own Bible (commonly known as the Jeffersonian Bible Source), which the Bible specifically states in the very last verse in Revelation the horrors of the crime of altering the “word of God” in any way. (Revelation 22: 18-22: "For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book: And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book. He which testifieth these things saith, Surely I come quickly. Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen.") He changed the entire Bible around and essentially made it, in his mind, believable and more philosophical not theological. Why is this heretical act ignored? Why does any modern right wing Christian support Thomas Jefferson, I've often wondered? The contradictions are endless beyond even theology (for example by the time of his Presidency he supported an estate tax and a progressive tax on the rich to prevent a plutocracy, changing his views from earlier in his life that are often used now to represent his ideology, yet it changed.)

George Washington once refused to go inside a relative’s wedding because it was being held inside a church. At his death bed he refused a “man of God” from entering the room, wanting nothing to do with it. Yes, he played the statesmen and wasn’t public about his disgust for the Church, but in private letters and conversations he truly despised them .The most basic of Washington biographers note this. Much more on Washington Below.

(Side tidbit: He also grew hemp, had the largest Whiskey distillery in America at one point, and took the opiate tincture Laudanum daily. In fact it’s near fact his famous portrait on the one dollar bill is while he was under tremendous influence of opiates because of tooth pain. Jefferson, of course, grew hemp too. He wrote the first draft of the Declaration of Independence on Hemp paper. He even smuggled seeds for hemp/marijuana strains out of China at the risk of death. I would ask any person who supports our founders openly, why they would advocate the criminalization of what a person consumes)

John Adams was a Unitarian, not a Deist as many have falsely claimed. In the records of John Adams letters to Thomas Jefferson he had this to say: "I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved — the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced! With the rational respect that is due to it, knavish priests have added prostitutions of it, that fill or might fill the blackest and bloodiest pages of human history.” Source: [Letter to Thomas Jefferson (3 September 1816), published in Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams (UNC Press, 1988), p. 488.]

Some founders were straight up Atheists (and the raunchy kind at that)! Benjamin Franklin belonged to the Hellfire Club. Surely this well documented fact is proof enough he had no belief in God. If you aren't familiar with the Hellfire Club, I'd sum it up in three words, secret ritualistic orgies. (Source)

Oh, and whatever happened about all the liberty talk before the election my sons and daughters of liberty…? How many of you even understand the philosophy of liberty and the, actually, HUGE nuances between republic representative governments and democracy? Our founders deplored democracy. John Adams wrote to John Taylor in 1814, "Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy. It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty." And Adams was the Federalist! He was anti-republican and the politics of Jefferson, and even they both agreed on this! Can anyone find a personal letter by a founding father speaking well or praising democracy? I'd like to see it.

Going further, anyone who supports a foreign war to spread democracy to another country is so in violation of what our founders believed it’s outrageous. Our founders did, still quite radical, assist France in it’s near simultaneous revolution ridding the country of their Monarchy. Thomas Paine was an honorary French Member of Parliament in fact, and spent most of his life after independence in France. There is certainly questions and decent arguments that could be made about this intervention, but it’s nothing like what we’re in now. This first intervention was warning to all of the founders who survived to see it though, that it was an absolutely horrid idea. We helped spawn Napoleon, without us he never would've come to power. He was friends with some of the founding fathers who felt betrayed when he showed his true self.

(Another fun fact: Napoleon wasn't short. It was a myth that spread. He was 5'7" inches. Small today yes, but the average Frenchman was 5'5"... he was actually taller than most. Funny how most things you learn through word of mouth are generally wrong. This is wise to keep in mind.) (Source)

Sorry but this distorting of our history needs to stop. We know now through personal letters and journals what they truly thought. Stop cherry picking quotes they said in public to appease people who were in near rebellion. It's truly naive or ignorant to try and re-write the beliefs of people who are dead. In fact it is immoral.

Now please stop acting like non-believers are usurpers. It's not factual nor very Christian.

Happy Holidays and a late Merry Christmas.

Written by R.R.
12/30/10

Updated 1/04/11:

More specifically on Washington:

His own words:

"We have abundant reason to rejoice that in this Land the light of truth and reason has triumphed over the power of bigotry and superstition ... In this enlightened Age and in this Land of equal liberty it is our boast, that a man's religious tenets will not forfeit the protection of the Laws, nor deprive him of the right of attaining and holding the highest Offices that are known in the United States."
-- George Washington, letter to the members of the New Church in Baltimore, January 27, 1793, in Anson Phelps Stokes, Church and State in the United States, Vol 1. p. 497, quoted from Albert J Menendez and Edd Doerr, The Great Quotations on Religious Freedom

Of all the animosities which have existed among mankind, those which are caused by a difference of sentiments in religion appear to be the most inveterate and distressing, and ought to be deprecated. I was in hopes that the enlightened and liberal policy, which has marked the present age, would at least have reconciled Christians of every denomination so far that we should never again see the religious disputes carried to such a pitch as to endanger the peace of society.
-- George Washington, letter to Edward Newenham, October 20, 1792, quoted from Albert J Menendez and Edd Doerr, The Great Quotations on Religious Freedom, also James A Haught, 2000 Years of Disbelief


Here's what Jefferson had to say about Washington's beliefs in his journal:

"Dr. Rush told me (he had it from Asa Green) that when the clergy addressed General Washington, on his departure from the government, it was observed in their consultation that he had never, on any occasion, said a word to the public which showed a belief in the Christian religion, and they thought they should so pen their address as to force him at length to disclose publicly whether he was a Christian or not. However, he observed, the old fox was too cunning for them. He answered every article of their address particularly, except that, which he passed over without notice."
-- Thomas Jefferson, quoted from Jefferson's Works, Vol. iv., p. 572.

"I know that Gouverneur Morris, who claimed to be in his secrets, and believed himself to be so, has often told me that General Washington believed no more in that system [Christianity] than he did."
--Thomas Jefferson, in his private journal, February, 1800, quoted from Jefferson's Works, Vol. iv., p. 572

Claude Blanchard wrote this about the rumors he heard about Washington and what he witnessed:

"There was a clergyman at this dinner who blessed the food and said grace after they had done eating and had brought in the wine. I was told that General Washington said grace when there was no clergyman at the table, as fathers of a family do in America. The first time that I dined with him there was no clergyman and I did not perceive that he made this prayer, yet I remember that on taking his place at the table, he made a gesture and said a word, which I took for a piece of politeness."
Commissary-General Claude Blanchard, writing in his journal, quoted from Franklin Steiner, The Religious Beliefs of Our Presidents, p. 23

And finally, the person who might know better than anyone:

"In regard to the subject of your inquiry, truth requires me to say that General Washington never received the communion in the churches of which I am the parochial minister. Mrs. Washington was an habitual communicant. I have been written to by many on that point, and have been obliged to answer them am as I now do you."
-- The Right Reverend William White, the first bishop of Pennsylvania, friend of Washington and bishop of Christ's Church in Philadelphia, which Washington attend for about 25 years when he happened to be in that city, in a letter to Colonel Mercer of Fredericksberg, Virginia, on August 15, 1835, quoted from Franklin Steiner, The Religious Beliefs of Our Presidents, pp. 27