By Ramzy Baroud

Writers often romanticize their subjects. At times they even manipulate their readers. A book - or any piece of writing for that matter – is meant to provide a sense of completion. Sociological explanations are offered to offset the confusion caused by apparent inconsistency in human behavior. At times a reader is asked to take a stance, or choose sides. 

This is especially true in writings which deal with compelling human experiences. In Behind the Wall: Life, Love and Struggle in Palestine (Potomac Books, 2010), Rich Wiles undoubtedly directs his readers, although implicitly, towards taking a stance. But he is unabashed about his moral priorities and makes no attempt to disguise his objectives.

As I began reading Wiles’ book, various aspects struck me as utterly refreshing in contrast to the way Palestine is generally written about. We tend to complicate what was meant to be straightforward and become too selective as we construct our narrative. And we tend to consider the possible political implications of our writings, and thus compose the conclusions with only this political awareness in mind.  

Much of this is understandable. The situation in Palestine is appalling, and also worsening. If our writing is not meant to influence positive change, then why bother? But a hyped awareness of the consequences and over-politicization of narratives and texts can prove limiting and intellectually confining. Worse, at times it provides a particular contextualization of the conflict – with all of its internal offshoots and external outcomes – that does much injustice to other important contexts. It neglects facts and paints an unrealistic picture of a subject already confused in the minds of many readers.

Thus when the conflict is deciphered by a writer, all players take positions. Israel is pitted against ‘the Arabs’. Palestinians are often sliced off into two competing parties, while Israel is largely shown as maintaining a sense of political and institutional integrity. Palestinians are radicals or moderates, Islamists or secularists. The ‘conflict’ is right in the center, and within it are the sub-topics: the peace process, the occupation, the settlements and numerous others. Without such lucid configuration there is no structure. Publishers get frustrated. The writer is urged to revisit and restructure his work.

But real life is not a well-organized academic argument. It can be, and often is chaotic, strange and puzzling, but it is real. Only by understanding reality the way it is - not the way we feel that it ought to be for any reason - can we meaningfully position ourselves to appreciate the subject at hand.

Can we understand the conflict in Palestine and Israel without subscribing to the same language, confronting the same political and historical milestones? Can Palestinians be understood outside the confines of political and ideological affiliations?

That is what Rich Wiles attempted to do in Behind the Wall, and in my opinion, very much succeeded.

Wiles relocated the conflict historically, geographically and sociologically to the side most affected by it: the Palestinians. The book is located in the West Bank, mostly Aida refugee camp, where Wiles spent years dedicating his time and efforts as an artist and a writer to help children share their stories and talents with the rest of the world. The writing is a non-elitist, part and parcel, which is a prerequisite to a factual understanding of the struggle in Palestine. Equally important, Wiles provides a depiction of the Palestinian not as the victim, despite the protracted process of victimization that Palestinians have endured for generations. Wiles’ subjects might have been imprisoned or deeply scarred by war, but they are confident and complex human beings.

A chapter entitled “A Child and a Balcony” starts with this line: “‘On Friday, December 8, 2006, I was shot.’ Miras is unemotional as he tells his story.” Miras should be emotional, but he is not, and Wiles doesn’t attempt to rectify the seemingly inconsistent behavior. It turns out that Miras, a child (now a promising young photographer, thanks to Wiles’ help) almost died when a bullet carved its way through his body and penetrated his abdominal from one end and emerged from the other. He was playing with his siblings and cousins at a balcony in the refugee camp, when an Israeli sniper hit him from the watchtower. The story is short, but rich in emotionally powerful detail: the father’s panic and near hallucination, the mother confusion, the sense of solidarity that unifies the refugees and strengthens their resolve even when their situation seems so helpless.

Wiles is not an anthropologist or a detached ethnographer, and he doesn’t pose as one. He is part of the story, at times an important character. In “Memories”, he accompanies a young Palestinian boy on the journey of his life, from the confines of the small refugee camp to Jerusalem. The boy is visiting his very ill grandfather at a hospital in the Arab side of the city. (No other member of the family was granted an Israeli permission to make the short journey, thus the need for Wiles’ intervention). Wiles provides an extremely honest and vivid account, bringing to life the bravery of the boy and the sense of freedom he experiences as he crosses the checkpoints into Jerusalem.

At the same time, Wiles does not attempt to assemble the perfect, heroic and infallible character of the Palestinian. He includes the story of a son of drug user who was mysteriously killed (perhaps by a Palestinian group that suspected him as a collaborator with Israel). The son became involved in the resistance to redeem the family’s honor. His impulsive resistance (an attempt to burn a hole in the Israeli wall that surrounded his refugee camp) earned him time in an Israeli prison. Yasser Jedar (known as Yasser ‘Wall’ owing to his obsession with trying to bring down the Israeli wall) was certainly not a poster child revolutionary. But he is refreshingly real, which is what should matter the most to an inquisitive reader.

Wiles’ work is an important contribution to what I insist on referring to as a ‘People’s History of Palestine’. In order for this genre to endure and flourish, it must remain honest, and duty-bound to the truth - to reality as it is, not how we wish it to be.

- Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an internationally-syndicated columnist and the editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story (Pluto Press, London), now available on Amazon.com.

WASHINGTON, DC – The legal pursuit of WikiLeaks, a trans-national website devoted to publishing secret government documents worldwide, is reaching a boiling point. After publishing tens of thousands of classified U.S. documents revealing details of the war in Afghanistan, the group is now promising to publish more of the same.

The alleged actions of the leaker, reputed to be U.S. Army PFC Bradley Manning, are likely violations of the U.S. Espionage laws. Manning was already charged under the Espionage Act with the submission to WikiLeaks earlier this year of a classified video showing the death of two journalists in Iraq.

But what about WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange? Is a website that actively encourages people to leak classified information immune from prosecution? The answer is more complicated than one may think, largely due to the jumbled and archaic system of laws that currently protect classified information and criminalize its dissemination.

There is no clear answer as to whether WikiLeaks and Assange are liable for espionage. Precedent, most notably the Pentagon Papers case, would seem to indicate that WikiLeaks is protected from publishing leaked documents by the First Amendment. The government rarely attempts to prosecute a member of the media for publishing the fruits of someone else’s leaks.

But is WikiLeaks truly part of the “media?” Can a website that devotes itself exclusively to leaking documents compare itself to the New York Times? Clearly the Justice Department is reexamining whether or not Assange and his website can face criminal prosecution under U.S. law.

There is wording in some Espionage statutes suggesting that anyone who “publishes” information that relates to the national defense is liable for an espionage act violation. So even if WikiLeaks qualifies as “media,” Assange still might not be protected by the First Amendment. Even in the Pentagon Papers opinion, Supreme Court Justice Byron White stated that in certain situations, the publication of national defense information could subject media outlets to espionage prosecutions, despite First Amendment protections.

Furthermore, could the fact that Assange actually solicits these leaks translate into liability for conspiracy to commit espionage? Hypothetically, if any evidence is uncovered that Assange, after receiving the initial Iraq video showing the death of these journalists, actually solicited additional information from Bradley or anyone else and encouraged them to leak, then he may face conspiracy liability. This would of course be difficult to prove, unless Manning agreed to testify.

Add to this the numerous jurisdictional problems posed by the fact that Assange lives overseas, and one can be sure that successful prosecution of Assange would be challenging.

If Assange and WikiLeaks are not liable for espionage, should they be?

For American politicians and the intelligence world, the question can be expanded: If Assange and WikiLeaks are not liable, should they be? This question begs a closer look at the current system of laws protecting National Security information. As U.S. Senator Ben Cardin said in May during Senate hearings on the topic, the current statutory framework is an outdated “patchwork” that has failed to change along with current technology and the digital information age.

As relics of WWI and the Cold War era, the Espionage laws generally target those who seek to disclose classified information to aid a foreign government, or who have reason to believe that the information will either injure the United States or aid a foreign goverment.

Most commentators agree that the current Espionage laws can still effectively punish and deter the classic nation v. nation spy cases, as proven by the successful prosecutions of Robert Hansen and Aldrich Ames. But problems arise when the government is faced with an actor who discloses classified information for other reasons, or to someone other than a foreign agent. This is the problem facing the government in prosecuting WikiLeaks.

The WikiLeaks case highlights the central flaw in espionage laws, namely that they are grossly outdated, drafted in an age when all information was tangible and not electronic. The laws never envisioned anything like the Secure Internet Protocol Router network (SIPRnet) that thousands of government personnel across the globe routinely use to access troves of classified documents. Manning is alleged to have accessed SIPRnet, which is essentially a private, classified world-wide-web, to find documents to leak to Wiki.

The other problem stems from inconsistencies in the various statutes criminalizing the misuse of national security information. Some statutes refer to materials “relating to the national defense” (which sometimes, but not always, refers to information deemed classified by the government). Other statutes refer only to information actually marked classified. Some statutes criminalize giving information to an agent of a foreign government, others only to those “not entitled to receive” the information.

WikiLeaks would argue that, no matter the language in the statute, it would enjoy First Amendment protection from all prosecutions. Assange considers WikiLeaks a whistleblower protection intermediary. Rather than leaking directly to the press, and fearing exposure and retribution, whistleblowers can leak to WikiLeaks, which then leaks to the press for them.

Ultimately, if Congress wants to shut down WikiLeaks, it may have to draft new legislation which more explicitly criminalizes the solicitation of leaks of classified information, if that is in fact what happened. But there is still no guarantee that such a law would be upheld by the Supreme Court. An antiquated intelligence law combined with the media protection laws, may make WikiLeaks invulnerable to prosecution.

By Stuart Littlewood –London

On the eve of the silliest peace talks in history, the big question is this. What makes Obama’s envoy George Mitchell, a negotiator of high repute, say there is ‘no role’ for Hamas?

The talks are silly because they seek to overturn what the United Nations has already decided for resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict and drive a bulldozer through the building blocks of justice.

It might be music to Zionist ears, but to people of good will it’s a cruel, futile and immensely damaging ploy.

The talks are also silly because they bring together two people who by no stretch of the imagination could qualify as partners for peace. And they sit down under the auspices of a third party with an appalling track record in the Middle East and whom no-one trusts to act fairly.

So Mitchell has been dealt a terrible hand. The former US senator, we’re told, has had an illustrious career in politics. Honours have been heaped upon him for his part in the Northern Ireland ‘Good Friday’ agreement.

Accepting one of those awards - the Liberty Medal in 1998 - Mitchell said: "I believe there’s no such thing as a conflict that can’t be ended… No matter how ancient the conflict, no matter how hateful, no matter how hurtful, peace can prevail. But only if those who stand for peace and justice are supported and encouraged, while those who do not are opposed and condemned. Seeking an end to conflict is not for the timid or the tentative. There must be a clear and determined policy not to yield to the men of violence…"

How about that? Conflict can be ended only by supporting those who stand for peace and condemning those who don’t. But does he know - has he really taken the trouble to find out - who actually stands for peace and justice in the ever-escalating obscenity of the Israeli occupation of Palestine? And is he absolutely clear who “the men of violence” are? Get it wrong and matters are made worse.

Mitchell is such an awesome peace-monger that he has become a visiting Professor at Britain’s Leeds Metropolitan University’s School of Applied Global Ethics, and the University is developing a new Centre for Peace and Conflict Resolution bearing his name.

If Mitchell is so clued up you have to wonder why he took the job - a veritable poisoned chalice. And you’d think a person with his vast experience would stick to accepted rules of engagement for conflict resolution and peace-making. I’ll mention just three:

• Talk directly with the people who are concerned or with whom there are concerns.
• Attack the issues, not the people with whom there is disagreement.
• No issue can be ‘off limits’.

There is no-one more concerned than Hamas. As the democratically elected authority they are the principle stakeholder on the Palestinian side. Obviously they must be allowed to represent the Palestinian case. It matters not one jot or tittle that the White House has "identified" Hamas as a terrorist organization. They have legitimacy. Besides, millions outside the White House can point to Israel’s much worse terror crimes.

Mitchell, besides barring Hamas, bends even further to Israeli prime minister Netanyahu’s demands and has ruled there must be no pre-conditions. Which means that Israel’s criminal conduct such as settlement construction, dispossession, ethnic cleansing, the land and sea blockade of Gaza, the occupation, the strangulation of the economy and their taste for piracy and extra-judicial killing, and their trampling of human rights including those of self-determination, are allowed to continue while the hapless Palestinians face them across the table.

And never mind that Netanyahu is permitted to enter these talks with his own pre-conditions, saying that the return of Palestinian refugees to the homes they were forced to flee, and the continuing occupation of East Jerusalem including the Old City, are not for discussion, and threatening to resume the (temporarily suspended) illegal settlement building.

If Mitchell is truly a person of integrity and a champion of “global ethics” how could he show such favour to one side?

What, I wonder, will he be saying to the Israeli team about UN Resolution 181 of 1947, which deals declares that "the City of Jerusalem shall be established as a corpus separatum“ administered by the United Nations?
 
What will he say to them about Resolution 242 (1967) by the Security Council and therefore fully binding? This insists on:

(i) withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict;
(ii) termination of all claims or states of belligerency, and respect for and acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force.

242 also emphasizes the need for:

(a) guaranteeing freedom of navigation through international waterways in the area;
(b) achieving a just settlement of the refugee problem;
(c) guaranteeing the territorial inviolability and political independence of every State in the area, through measures including the establishment of demilitarized zones.
 
Will Mitchell bang the table to demand long overdue action on Security Council Resolution 338 (1973), which called on the parties concerned to start immediate implementation of Security Council Resolution 242?
 
Security Council Resolution 446 (1979) leaves absolutely no wriggle room. It "determines that the policy and practices of Israel in establishing settlements in the Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied since 1967 have no legal validity and constitute a serious obstruction to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace… Calls once more upon Israel, as the occupying Power, to abide scrupulously by the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention, to rescind its previous measures and to desist from taking any action which would result in changing the legal status and geographical nature and materially affecting the demographic composition of the Arab territories occupied since 1967, including Jerusalem, and, in particular, not to transfer parts of its own civilian population into the occupied Arab territories."
 
It’s all there, Mr Mitchell, in black and white. The UN has set it out. The world is waiting for the UN to implement it.
 
Israeli foreign policy is driven by manifesto promises like:

• "The Palestinians can run their lives freely in the framework of self-rule, but not as an independent and sovereign state.” 
• “Jerusalem is the eternal, united capital of the State of Israel and only of Israel.” 
• The claim to a national and historic right to the Land of Israel “in its entirety” and the pledge to keep Jerusalem and the settlements.

Netanyahu’s belligerent coalition government probably won’t survive unless he uses all means to achieve these unlawful and hugely provocative aims and resists demands to give back Israel’s ill-gotten gains. A thief is clearly no partner for peace.

Neither is the PLO’s Abbas, who dances to America’s tune and whose authority is in question. Any agreement he makes will be open to challenge by his own people.

Obama is US president courtesy of the pro-Israel lobby. He is like putty in their hands. And he’s so ill-informed that he told AIPAC it’s OK for Israel to grab the hallowed City of Jerusalem and turn it into the permanent headquarters of the Zionist regime. Jerusalem "will remain the capital of Israel and it must remain undivided," he blurted. When it dawned on him that he’d made a monumental blunder he tried to wriggle out: "Well, obviously, it’s going to be up to the parties to negotiate a range of these issues. And Jerusalem will be part of those negotiations… And I think that it is smart for us to work through a system in which everybody has access to the extraordinary religious sites in Old Jerusalem, but that Israel has a legitimate claim on that city."
 
A legitimate claim? Who says? And negotiate what? Has the President forgotten that the UN decided long ago that Jerusalem, along with Bethlehem, was to become an international zone?

And how can it be right for weak, unarmed and impoverished Palestinians to have to negotiate with a brutal, lawless military regime for their universal rights and freedoms, which are supposed to be guaranteed by the international community but have been denied them for decades?

Obama is clearly no genuine peace-broker.

And George Mitchell, despite his awesome reputation elsewhere, has so far failed in the Holy Land. He and his boss are getting desperate. Staging farcical, lopsided talks in order to achieve a fake, temporary peace will no doubt save a few worthless political skins for the timebeing. But they benefit no-one else. And they don’t do an envoy of Mitchell’s calibre any credit. He would be better employed banging heads together at the United Nations, to finish the unfinished business there and ensure all the resolutions they have passed and all the other solemn declarations they have endorsed are implemented. No need for conflict resolution, judgment has already been handed down.

Then peace talks can begin, if genuine partners and an honest broker can be found.

It’s called justice, Mr Mitchell. There’ll be no real peace until justice is delivered.

- Stuart Littlewood is author of the book Radio Free Palestine, which tells the plight of the Palestinians under occupation. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. Visit: www.radiofreepalestine.co.uk.

For days, as thousands of pounds of oil washed up on the Florida coast, BP officials stuck to an “Oil? What oil?” stance. Despite howling by local officials, fishermen and laid-off cleanup workers, BP officials denied all knowledge of the existence of oil in the area.

On Friday, though, the Coast Guard said that an oil
slick roughly a quarter of a mile long lurked just 50 to 60 feet off of
the beach at the Pensacola Naval Air Station. Then on Saturday a BP spokesman finally acknowledged the slick,
saying that the company had “spent considerable effort to get people to
concentrate” on cleaning it up.

A local fisherman employed by BP in the cleanup effort told the Pensacola News Journal that the oil giant is trying to sweep the oil under the proverbial rug.

“They’re just trying to keep it quiet,” he said. “Out of sight, out of mind.”

One of the more interesting moments of the 2008 presidential campaign came when Politico revealed that the Republican National Committee had spent over $150,000 on clothes and accessories from luxury stores for Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin and her family. The high-end shopping spree conflicted with Palin’s image of a modest hockey mom. When confronted with the news, a campaign spokesperson replied, “It was always the intent that the clothing go to a charitable purpose after the campaign.”

But in an online-only companion piece to his big new profile of the former Alaska governor, Vanity Fair’s Michael Gross reports that internal emails and other records reveal that this claim and others about the fate of the clothes were false:

The records of those purchases also reveal that Palin’s later claims—that “we had three days of using clothes that the R.N.C. purchased” (at the Republican National Convention) and that she understood the clothes to have been “loaned to us during the convention”—were completely false. So was the spin of Palin’s campaign spokesperson, who stated on October 22 that “it was always the intent that the clothing go to a charitable purpose after the campaign.” On October 23, in a previously unpublished e-mail (quoted below), Palin wrote that she had no idea the clothes would eventually need to be returned, and suggested that she believed the items were being given to her and her family as gifts.

There was at least one other incident in which the campaign misrepresented purchases for Palin. The day before daughter Bristol’s birthday, Palin aides exchanged emails about buying her a birthday present, with one saying they had “picked up a few dress options at saks during the event today.” That staffer charged $1,312.94 at Saks 5th Avenue in Cincinnati the same day. However, that charge was later mislabeled “as if it were made not for Bristol but for the candidate’s appearance on Saturday Night Live. (The memo line reads ‘Clothes-SNL.’).”

Yet, the spending continued. Throughout October, Palin staffers bought more than $9,000 worth of items for Palin and her family that “would seem to stretch the boundaries of what constitutes a legitimate campaign expense,” including a jersey for Palin’s daughter Piper, a $316.94 pair of Bose headphones, “Intimates” and “Workout Clothes,” and a “Jewelry case.”

At first, Palin was wary of accepting the new clothes, writing of a $3,500 jacket, “I don’t spend that much money on my clothes in a year.” However, Palin “grew accustomed to the privilege of a designer wardrobe—not only for herself but also for her family,” and tired to hold onto some of the items when the campaign eventually made good on its promise to donate them. When an aide came to Alaska to collect the wardrobe, she said, “all of a sudden, [Palin] couldn’t find stuff.” Indeed, as ThinkProgress has noted, Palin seems to appreciate the finer things, requiring that for speaking engagements, she be treated with chaffered SUVs, first class airfare or private jets, and “deluxe” hotel suites.

By Stephen Lendman

On August 25, Yale University ended a three day global anti-Semitism ‘crisis’ conference promoting the notion that Israeli criticism is "anti-Semitic," no matter how justified.

Boola boola, for shame, mighty Yale displaying the same type anti-Islamic hatred virulent throughout America, raging daily in headlines over the proposed New York City Islamic cultural center, falsely called a mosque, but does it matter?

What matters is racism, hate-mongering, and persecuting Muslims for political advantage - on display at Yale for a three day propaganda hate fest. Imagine what’s taught in its classrooms.

The Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism (YIISA)

Calling itself "dedicated to the scholarly research of the origins and manifestations associated with antisemitism globally, as well as other forms of prejudice, including racisms, as it relates to policy," YIISA presented its "Global Antisemitism: A Crisis of Modernity conference, at a time the supposed "crisis" is more rhetoric than reality.

Yet its mission statement states:

"Anti-Judaism (or) Antisemitism is one of the most complex and, at times, perplexing forms of hatred, (emerging) in numerous ideological(ly) based narratives and the constructed identities of belonging and otherness such as race and ethnicity, nationalisms, and anti-nationalisms." In modern globalized times, "it appears that Antisemitism has taken on new complex and changing forms that need to be decoded, mapped and critiqued."

What’s needed is debunking the relationship between legitimate Israeli criticism and anti-Semitism and notion of a serious anti-Jewish crisis when none, in fact, exists.

Last October 29, Reuters reported that:

"Anti-Semitic attitudes in the United States are at a historic low, with 12 percent of Americans prejudiced toward Jews, an Anti-Defamation League (ADL) survey found," based on September 26 - October 4 polling with a plus or minus 2.8% margin of error.

ADL said its level matched 1998’s as the lowest in the poll’s 45-year history. Yet in his 2003 book, "Never Again? The Threat of the New Anti-Semitism," national director, Abraham Foxman, said he’s:

"convinced we currently face as great a threat to the safety of the Jewish people as the one we faced in the 1930s - if not a greater one," contradicted by Cato Institute research fellow Leon Hadar (in the January 2004 Chronicles), saying that public opinion polls "indicate (racial and religious forms of) anti-Semitism (have) been in steep decline in most of Western Europe." The same holds for America, putting a lie to Yale’s "crisis" and need for a conference to hawk it.

Badly needed are efforts to expose and denounce anti-Islamic rhetoric, actions and persecutions of people for their religion and/or ethnicity, but don’t expect Yale to hold it or discuss it in classrooms.

YIISA stacked its conference with pro-Israeli zealots, omitting voices for sanity and the right of Palestinians to live free of occupation in their own land or in one state affording everyone equal rights, an apparent blasphemous notion at Yale and many other US and Canadian campuses, firing even distinguished tenured professors for supporting the wrong religion or people too vigorously.

Opening conference remarks were made by YIISA Director, Dr. Charles Small, Yale’s Deputy Provost, Frances Rosenbluth, Rabbi James Ponet, director of Yale’s Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life, and Aviva Raz Schechter, Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs Director for Combatting Antisemitism.

They all, of course, presented one-sided, pro-Israeli views, underscoring the notion that Israeli criticism is anti-Semetic, when, in fact, it’s principled, honest and more needed now than ever to expose and halt an Israeli/Washington partnership to conquer, divide and control the Middle East by force, stealth, deceit, intimidation, occupation, and political chicanery, common tools used by rogues and imperial marauders.

Hebrew University Professor Menahem Milson was the first of several keynote speakers. He’s also Chairman of the extremist Middle East Research Institute (MEMRI), whose board and advisors include a rogue’s gallery of pro-Israeli right-wing zealots, including:

– Oliver "Buck" Revell, former FBI Executive Assistant Director in charge of criminal investigative, counterterrorism and counterintelligence;

– Elliot Abrams, former Reagan and Bush administration official and convicted Iran-Contra felon, later pardoned by GHW Bush; and

– Steve Emerson, a notorious anti-Islamic bigot, well-known for using unscrupulous tactics to accuse innocent Muslims of terrorism and instill "Islamofascist" fear over the public airwaves.

Its board of advisors includes:

– Ehud Barak, former Israeli Prime Minister and current Minister of Defense and Deputy Prime Minister;

– Bernard Lewis, Princeton Professor Emeritus of near eastern studies, known for his anti-Islamic views;

– James Woolsey, neocon former CIA director;

– John Bolton, former neocon war hawk Bush administration UN ambassador, recess-appointed because Congress was too embarrassed to do it;

– Rabid Zionist Elie Wiesel, a man Professor Norman Finkelstein calls "vain, arrogant, gullible, naive about international affairs, (and defender of) the worst excesses of previous Israeli governments;"

– John Ashcroft, former Bush administration Attorney General, the man who indicted Lynne Stewart, famed human rights lawyer now imprisoned on bogus charges for doing her job honorably, what Ashcroft never did;

– Michael Mukasey, another Bush administration Attorney General, as bad as Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales; and

– many other disreputable members, known for their pro-Israeli bias, including Richard Holbrooke, a proponent of imperial wars, who stepped down temporarily to become Obama administration Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Other YIISA presenters included (among others):

– Itamar Marcus, a West Bank settler movement leader, connected to the New York-based Central Fund of Israel, raising money for it in America out of a Sixth Avenue/36th Street fabric store near Times Square;

– Canadian politician Irwin Cotler, who attacked the Goldstone Commission report viciously and unfairly;

– Harvard Professor of Yiddish Literature and Comparative Literature Rush Wisse, a pro-Israeli zealot this writer once had the displeasure of debating briefly by email;

– Barak Seener, Greater Middle East Section Director for the UK-based Henry Jackson Society, who believes Israeli Arabs are a fifth column threat to the state;

– Anne Bayesfsky, right-wing pro-Israeli supporter, senior fellow at the neocon Hudson Institute, associated with UN Watch devoted to attacking anti-Israeli criticism, and member of the Israel-based Ariel Center for Policy Research, a Likud Party-affiliated group supporting hardline writers in the Middle East, North America and Europe;

– Mark Dubowitz, Executive Director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, whose leaders and advisors include Newt Gingrich, former FBI Director Louis Freeh, James Woolsey, the senator from AIPAC, Joe Lieberman, neocon writer Charles Krauthammer, former Reagan assistant Defense Secretary Richard Perle, and Jeane Kirkpatrick, Reagan’s UN ambassador, among others;

– Anne Herzberg, NGO Monitor’s legal advisor, a notorious pro-Israeli group; and

– Samuel Edelman, board of director member of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, another Israeli advocacy organization.

Noticeably absent were notable figures from the Palestinian community as well as US truth and justice scholars and analysts who base their views on facts YIISA wants suppressed. There was no James Petras, Ilan Pappe, Jeff Halper, Joel Kovel, Norman Finkelstein, Rashid Khalidi, Phyllis Bennis, Uri Avnery, Neve Gordon, Nurit Peled-Elhannan, Ramzy Baroud, or any of the thousands of equal justice advocates listed on a so-called "Shit List," including this writer given three unsympathetic paragraphs.

Instead, numerous speakers discussed provocative topics, including:

– Radical Islam and Genocidal anti-Semitism;

– Christianity and anti-Semitism;

– The Islamization of Anti-Semitism;

– The Internet and the Proliferation of Anti-Semitism;

– Law, Modernity, and Anti-Semitism;

– the Central Role of Palestinian Anti-Semitism in Creating the Palestinian Identity;

– Islamism and the Construction of Jewish Identity;

– Global Anti-Semitism and the Crisis of Modernity;

–Genocidal Anti-Semitism: Ahmadinejad’s Regime as a Case Study;

– Contemporary Anti-Semitism and the Delegitimization of Israel;

– Discourse of Contemporary Anti-Semitism;

– Confronting and Combating Contemporary Anti-Semitism in the Academy;

– Anti-Semitism in the Aftermath of the Holocaust;

– Lawfare, Human Rights Organizations and the Demonization of Israel;

– The Islamist Islamization of Anti-Semitism;

– the Iranian Threat;

– Social Theory and Contemporary Anti-Semitism

– Discourses of Anti-Semitism in Relation to the Middle East;

– the Media and the Dissemination of Hatred;

– Global Anti-Semitism;

– An Uncertain Sisterhood: Women and Anti-Semitism;

– Hannah Arendt and Anti-Semitism: A Critical Appraisal;

– Approaches to Anti-Semitism;

– Models for Combating Anti-Semitism: The Case of the United Kingdom;

– Understanding the Impact of German Anti-Semitism and Nazism;

– 400 Years of Anti-Semitism: From the Holy Office to the Nuremberg Laws;

– Embracing the Nation: Anti-Semitism and Modernity

– Anti-Semitism and the United States;

– Variations of European Anti-Semitism;

– Anti-Semitic Propaganda in Europe;

– Self-Hatred and Contemporary Anti-Semitism;

– Discussions in the Study of Anti-Semitism; and

– YIISA Director Small’s concluding remarks.

Final Comments

On August 25, Mondoweiss co-founder Philip Weiss discussed the conference, quoting Charlotte Kates (writer, organizer, and National Lawyers Guild Middle East Subcommittee Co-Chair) saying:

the people invited "who attack Palestinian scholars’ academic freedom find conferences such as this to be perfectly acceptable and legitimate."

Weiss added that it’s not "possible to understand this conference without understanding the prominence of Zionist donors in prestige institutional life." He also quoted journalist/author Ben White, specializing in Israeli/Palestine issues, saying:

"What is the role of Yale/academia in this kind of exercise?" It’s particularly galling and hypocritical that "fighting anti-Semitism - an anti-racist struggle - is being openly appropriated by far-right Zionist groupings, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, lobbyists like the NGO Monitor, and Orientalist ‘Arab/anti-terror experts."

It’s especially disturbing that Yale lent its name to a three day hate fest, supporting:

– wrong over right;

– state terrorism over human rights and equal justice;

– colonizers over the colonized;

– what Edward Said called "the familiar (America, the West, us over) the strange (the Orient, East, them);" and

– Jewish "exceptionalism" over a "lesser malevolent" Islam.

Shamefully, presentations excluded discussions about:

Islam’s common roots with Judaism and Christianity, its tenets based on:

– love, not hate;

– peace, not violence;

– good over evil;

– charity, not exploitation; and

– a just and fair society for people of all faiths.

Also not addressed was the right of Palestinians to live freely like Jews. Yale apparently disagrees, why students against hate and bigotry should enroll elsewhere to be taught truths excluded from Yale’s curriculum.

- Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.

To say that the American people are angry is an understatement. The political brain of Americans today reflects a volatile mixture of fear and fury, and when you mix those together, you get an explosion. The only question at this point is how to mitigate the damage when the bomb detonates in November.

The bad news is that it’s too late for Democrats to do what would have been both good policy and good politics (and what the House actually did do), namely to pass a major jobs bill when it was clear that the private sector couldn’t keep Americans employed. The “Obama Doctrine” should have been that Americans who want to work and have the ability to contribute to our productivity as a nation should have the right to work, and that if the private sector can’t meet the demand for jobs, we have plenty of roads and bridges to fix, new energy sources to develop and manufacture, and schools to build and renovate so our kids and workers returning for training can compete in the 21st century global economy. From having spent much of the last four years testing messages on a range of issues, from immigration to taxes and deficits, I can say with some certainty that nothing John Boehner or Eric Cantor could say could come within 30 points of generating the enthusiasm — particularly among swing voters — of a message that began, “We don’t have a shortage of work ethic in this country, we have a shortage of work.” That message resonates across the political spectrum. And it isn’t even the strongest message we’ve tested in the last weeks or months that beats back the toughest deficit-cutting language the other side can muster.

But it’s too late for that. The administration opted for an alternative doctrine, which Larry Summers enunciated on This Week several months ago: that unemployment is going to remain high for the foreseeable future and eventually come down — as if there’s nothing we can do about it — and that they will push here and there for small symbolic measures whose symbolism tends to escape people who are out of work. It’s hard to be excited by symbolism when your children are hungry or the bank is repossessing your home — although you didn’t do anything to deserve it — while the people who did are once again making out like bandits.

Although the situation looks bleak for Democrats in November, it ain’t over ’til it’s over. Republicans are shooting themselves in the foot all over the country, running Tea Party candidates who are so far to the right you can’t see Middle America from their porch. And some endangered Democrats will likely see victory in November from theirs if they understand the public mood and speak to it.

What is that public mood? It can be characterized by a single phrase — populist anger — and it cuts across partisan lines. On the right, it is alloyed with racial anxiety and prejudice. On the left, it is alloyed with tremendous disappointment at what could have been if we had the kind of bold leadership for which times like these cry out. And among people in the vast political center, populist anger is alloyed with anxiety and uncertainty — about their jobs, their homes, and their children’s future.

How to Create a Populist Explosion: A Tragedy in Two Acts

So how did we get here? The story can be told as a tragedy in two acts.

Act I: The GOP Sets the Country on a Course of Economic Destruction and the President Calls for Truth and Reconciliation without the Truth Part

• A strong economic downturn devolves into a Great Recession, as the stock market crashes and major banks fail. By October 2008, upper middle class moderate Republicans in the suburbs are so frightened by what’s happening to their assets that they’re willing to give Democrats a chance.
• A Republican administration that believes in neither government nor regulation creates a 700 billion bank bailout with no accountability. Unlike Republicans, who would say “no” in a situation like this and let a Great Recession turn into a Great Depression, Democrats do the right thing, but they don’t make it clear from the start that these are Bush Bailouts and remind Americans, over and over, that the cause of all the bankruptcies is the bankruptcy of Republican ideology.
• A charismatic young president raises people’s hopes and expectations, as he uniquely can. Americans are frightened, but they are willing and waiting to hear an alternative narrative to “government is the problem, not the solution” and a path back to economic recovery and security.
• The White House refuses to tell the American people three stories they desperately need to hear.
• The first is why the economy has gone into the ditch, and who did it. The president is steadfast in his position that we should “look forward, not backward,” even as the GOP is blocking his every initiative to clean up its mess. As conservative attacks on him and Democrats increase, he refuses to indict the Republicans in Congress or President Bush for having destroyed our economy and putting one in eight Americans out of work and one in five either behind on their mortgage or in the process of having their homes foreclosed by the same bankers who gambled them away. Why did he need to tell the American people who was responsible for their misery — and to repeat it again and again? Because otherwise, if the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression didn’t subside within a year and half, voters would start to associate it with him and his party. This is Neuroscience 101 — it’s how mental associations are formed. But the president never even uttered George W. Bush’s name in his first year in office, and the first time he did mention Bush was to appoint him, along with former President Clinton, to co-lead American relief efforts in Haiti. The president doesn’t like putting antagonists in any of his stories, but if forced to, he would cite unnamed “naysayers,” “Washington politics as usual,” or “Congress,” which was counterproductive given that Congress was held by his party. The guiding belief at the White House implicit in this messaging strategy was that Americans have a good grasp on economics and good memories.
• The second story the American people needed to hear from the president was why deficit spending is essential when the economy is spiraling downward. It’s not a hard story to tell, even in a sound bite. But one of the best educators to occupy the Oval Office in decades chose not to educate — he actually did it once, with prodding, but never repeated what was a superb explanation — nor did he remind voters every time his opponents attacked him for deficit spending that they had left him with a 1.2 trillion dollar deficit on the day he walked into office because of their unpaid-for tax cuts to millionaires and unpaid-for war on Iraq that called on no one to sacrifice except our soldiers and their families (and our kids and grandkids, who will be paying off this war for generations). A year later, with Democrats on the ropes, the president started to tell that story. It was the right move, but appeared defensive because it hadn’t been part of his guiding narrative from the start.
• The third story the president needed to offer was an alternative narrative on government. The president and his party were about to offer effective government as a solution to multiple problems after 30 years of solid branding by conservatives since Ronald Reagan about how government is the problem. But the narrative never came.
• The White House and Democratic Congress pass what virtually all economists outside the Goldman Sachs-to-Washington pipeline consider a half-stimulus that they predict will likely produce half-results. It fulfilled its promise. But the equally predictable political result was a discrediting of the concept of government intervention to stimulate the economy in the eyes of the public — enough to scare off Democratic lawmakers from doing what they learned about Keynesian economics in intro economics for the indefinite future. Instead of blasting the Republicans for having hurled the country toward an abyss that would now take drastic measures to avert and warning the American people that this could easily be the first of two or three trillion-dollar packages that might be needed to get Americans back to work and to get the gears of the economy grinding again before we could start returning to the kinds of surpluses Bill Clinton had left the last time a Democrat was in the White House, the president chose to compromise with a party that was so unpopular when he took office that only 20 percent of voters at that point would even admit to a pollster that they considered themselves Republicans — the lowest point for the GOP since the rise of public opinion polling 50 years earlier.
• The economy continues its free-fall, shedding 700,000 jobs a month. Meanwhile, Democrats don’t take the kind of dramatic steps necessary to stop the bleeding. Americans are becoming desperate, but they remain hopeful that this new president will turn things around, and that perhaps the jobs provisions of the new “stimulus” act will do cauterize the wound. Meanwhile, the stimulus is being portrayed by Republicans as a mixture of pork and fat, and no one is effectively answering the charges, creating increasingly negative associations to an act that was never adequately crafted or sold.
• The logical follow-up to a bill designed to pull the economy out of a ditch is to make such a bill unnecessary in the future, by attacking Wall Street for having thrown us into crisis and passing strong legislation to rein in the excesses that created the economic meltdown. This would have sealed the American people’s loyalty to the new president and Congress. (Heading into November, this is, in fact, the most popular piece of legislation the Democrats have passed, but it took them nearly a year and a half to get there, and by then, neither the president nor the Democratic Congress enjoyed the good will of the average American.) Instead, the same banks that received bailouts are foreclosing in record rates on the homeowners whose payroll taxes funded the bailouts but don’t seem to get the same kind of attention to their needs from the federal government. Adding insult to injury, the banks double and triple credit card interest rates to as high as 30 percent, including on people’s existing credit card debt — while continuing to receive no-interest loans from the federal government.
• Despite talk of accountability, no one is fired (except one auto executive), virtually no one is prosecuted or even investigated as far as anyone knows, and banks that received bailouts flaunt record bonuses.

Act II: An Anemic Economy Meets an Anemic Health Care Plan

• The public has been clamoring for health care reform. Over 40 million people don’t have health insurance at all, and the 85 percent of voters who do have health care have seen their costs double during the Bush years at the same time as real income has declined. Effective narratives on health care are widely available that win by a 2:1 margin against the toughest Harry-and-Louise anti-reform language from the other side. The opposition knows it, as evident in a leaked memo by Republican wordsmith Frank Luntz, who warns that this will be an uphill climb for opponents of reform, who would do well to accept some major elements of it.
• But instead of using any of the well-tested narratives that were highly effective during the campaign or devising any new ones of its own, the administration decides to try to “sell” health care without a narrative. (I wrote about this in detail a year ago and will not repeat that history here, except in telegraphic form.) The president refuses to state where he stands on any of the substantive debates about health reform for a year, such as whether we should have a “public option” (a term so ill-conceived it’s hard to believe the public supported it anyway; imagine the support it might have received if it had been called instead “the one health care plan the health insurance companies don’t get to control”). Instead, the White House uses phrases such as “bending the cost curve” while conservatives flood the airwaves with evocative phrases such as “government takeover,” “a bureaucrat between you and your doctor,” and “death panels.”
• Instead of using Big Pharma and the health insurance industry as the villains of the health care story, which would explain why we need an overhaul rather than a Band-Aid, the White House once again offers a story without protagonists or antagonists, and cuts secret deals with both industries that become public.
• Over interminable months of trying to get the votes of the same Republicans who fought against Medicare for seniors for 30 years until the program was just too popular to keep attacking it and who are still trying to gut Social Security despite its popularity, the public then watches what George Will describes as the “serial bribery” of Republican and Democratic Senators alike, as each gets to take his or her turn as the 60th vote.
• At the 11th hour, as a compromise plan is finally going to pass, the president nixes the idea of a Medicare-like alternative Americans can choose over a health-insurance industry plan if they so desire, despite 60 percent of even swing voters wanting it included in the bill.
• Instead of being the signature bill that demonstrates both that Democrats can govern effectively and that government can be a force for good for working and middle class Americans (who have just been told that the better plans they’ve negotiated or been offered for years by their employers are “Cadillacs” that are going to be taxed out of existence), the entire process proves to the average American that government can’t do anything right and scares moderate Democrats away from voting for any other bill that would ever put them on the record supporting government or spending.
• “Government” hits an all-time low in the polls, matching the popularity of big corporations, CEOs, and bailouts.
• Populist anger emerges as the primary emotion across the political spectrum, and the president’s job approval with swing voters drops into the high thirties.
• Following the conventional wisdom, Democrats return to their all-too-familiar defensive crouch, and conclude that when in trouble, tack right. On health care, the president and his Cabinet fan out all over television to “reassure” the public on health care that abortion won’t be covered (thanks for the reassurance, but most of us didn’t find that reassuring), that domestic partners won’t be covered, and that immigrants won’t be covered. None of these issues needed to be conceded. (I know this because I tested messages on them, and well- messaged progressive positions on them would have boosted the popularity of the bill with swing voters.)
• The White House starts adopting failed conservative policies and talking points that leave the public utterly confused about where the president, and by extension, his party, stands on the central issues of the day. The president talks about cutting deficits and increasing spending in the same breath, using the metaphor of families tightening their belt in tough times, which only strengthens resolve against stimulating a faltering economy; pledges support for massively expanding offshore drilling and “clean coal” (which doesn’t exist, by the way) in a speech on climate change; and sends in 1200 additional National Guards to Arizona as an apparent reward for passing “No Latino Left Behind,” while publicly objecting to the legislation.
• The underlying psychological assumption of these moves is that if you mix policies from the right and left in equal parts, you win the center. In fact, no one has ever won the center that way. It appears weak, opportunistic, and incoherent to the average swing voter, which is particularly problematic at a time when people in the center desperately want to know that their leaders have a vision and a coherent plan for what to do (which is why both FDR and Ronald Reagan were so effective in moving voters in the center). It doesn’t win any votes on the right. But it does have one predictable effect: It sucks the motivation out of your base, who feel demoralized and betrayed (if they’re part of the “professional left”) or less likely to vote (if they’re average voters who don’t follow politics carefully but just don’t feel very enthusiastic anymore, even if they don’t really know why).
• Capping it all off, the BP disaster occurs two weeks after the president has adopted the “drill here, drill now,” “all of the above” position of the Republican Party and the oil companies. This could have been the perfect opportunity to go on the offensive, contrast what Democrats stand for (common sense, protection of our safety, the land we leave our children, and key American industries and jobs, and sticking up for ordinary Americans against big businesses and their lobbyists) with what Republicans stand for; and connect the dots between what happened on Wall Street (with regulators owned and operated by the companies they were supposed to regulate) and what happened in the Gulf (where precisely the same thing happened). Instead, the administration finds itself on the defensive, increasingly sounding like a subsidiary of BP, allowing BP to call the shots and control information for weeks, defending increasingly hard-to-believe statistics, and issuing press releases that appear indistinguishable from those issued by BP but are inconsistent with assessments of independent scientists.

Where Do We Go from Here?

So that is where we find ourselves today: a Democratic Party and Democratic base that is demoralized and unlikely to vote in high numbers in November; a Republican Party that is selling replanted Bushes with tremendous enthusiasm; and a vast political center filled with voters who are utterly confused and unsure who to turn to but certain that things aren’t going well.

In January 2009 no one could have predicted that Democrats would be in this predicament today. Perhaps Democrats might lose a few seats lost in an off-year election, but certainly no more than that. We had just seen — and the American public knew we had just seen — the most disastrous performance by a president and party in living history, and the American people had elected a tremendously charismatic young president with enormous Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. They had given the president and Congress a strong mandate for whatever kind of change was necessary to get us out of economic free-fall and to put Americans back to work.

But there were red flags already by the end of Obama’s first week in office that led me to offer the following advice to the new administration: Tell the story of how we got in this mess or you’ll own it. Tell a coherent story about deficit spending. Re-brand government because there’s only one story out there now (Reagan’s), and it’s not one that supports a progressive agenda. Never let attacks go unanswered, because doing so only emboldens your opposition and leads the public to believe that you have no answers to them. And if you throw a bipartisan party and no one comes, don’t throw another one. All of what followed has been as predictable as it has been unfortunate. A year and a half later, the White House hasn’t consistently done any of these things, although the President is now intermittently doing some of them, and when he does, he does them well.

The question today is whether Democrats can channel the populist anger we are seeing around the country this late in the game. The answer is that we’d better try. Having recently tested messages on economics and jobs, including how to talk about deficits and taxes — widely assumed to be Democrats’ Achilles Heel, particularly now — there is little question that if Democrats and progressives from center to left simply say what they believe in ways that are evocative, values-driven, and speak to people’s worries and anger, many stand a good chance of surviving November, particularly when their opponents have nothing to say other than warmed-over rhetoric about cutting taxes to millionaires and multinationals and fiscal restraint except where it cuts into profits of their campaign contributors. Even the most evocative boilerplate conservative messages fall flat against honest messages that speak to the need to get Americans working again. And on issue after issue, no message is more resonant right now than one that sides with working and middle class Americans and small business owners against special interests, big business, and their lobbyists.

But actions speak louder than words, and Americans want to see action. It may be too late for the kind of jobs bill we should have seen a year and a half ago, but it isn’t too late for Democrats to go on the offensive against the Republicans — virtually all of them — who opposed extending unemployment insurance to millions of Americans who were thrown out of work by the Republicans’ corporate sponsors. It isn’t too late for Democrats to contrast their support for the highly popular aid to state and local governments that just saved the jobs of hundreds of thousands of teachers, firefighters, and police all over the country with Republicans’ desire to throw them out onto the street. It isn’t too late to make a voting issue out of the bill the Republicans are stalling that would give small businesses a fighting chance in an economy stacked against them, and to make clear that one party stands for small businesses, which create 75 percent of the new jobs in this country, and the other party stands for big businesses that outsource American jobs and offshore their profits to avoid paying their fair share of American taxes. It’s not too late to pass a bill that would limit credit card interest rates to a reasonable percent above the rate at which credit is made available to credit card companies. It’s not too late to pass the first badly need “fix” to the health care reform act to demonstrate to Americans that Democrats mean it when they say this was just the first step, namely a law that stops insurance companies from increasing their premiums by 40 percent while cutting the size of their networks by 50-75 percent, which violates the principles of affordability and choice that were so essential to efforts to sell health care reform to the public. It’s not too late to vow to change the rules of the Senate to prevent the use of the filibuster to give every special interest veto power over every important piece of legislation. It’s not too late to introduce legislation that’s been on hold in both the House and Senate to guarantee fair elections, so that the voice of everyday Americans is heard over the voice of the special interests that finance political campaigns.

On every one of these issues, a strong populist message trounces anything the other side can say. But Democrats need to play offense. They need to take up-or-down votes on bill after bill, including those they expect the other side to block, knowing that every one of those votes has the leverage of a campaign ad behind it. They need to change the narrative from what sounds to the average American like a whiny and impotent one — “the Republicans won’t let us do it” — to a narrative of strength in numbers shared with their constituents. And they need to make every election a choice between two well-articulated approaches to governance — and to offer their articulation of both sides’ positions and values.

That leads to a final point. What Democrats have needed to offer the American people is a clear narrative about what and who led our country to the mess in which we find ourselves today and a clear vision of what and who will lead us out. That narrative would have laid a roadmap for our elected officials and voters alike, rather than making each legislative issue a seemingly discrete turn onto a dirt road. That narrative might have included — and should include today — some key elements: that if the economy is tumbling, it’s the role of leadership and government to stop the free-fall; that if Wall Street is gambling with our financial security, our homes, and our jobs, true leaders do not sit back helplessly and wax eloquent about the free market, they take away the dice; that if the private sector can’t create jobs for people who want to work, then we’ll put Americans back to work rebuilding our roads, bridges, and schools; that if Big Oil is preventing us from competing with China’s wind and solar energy programs, then we’ll eliminate the tax breaks that lead to dysfunctional investments in 19th century fuels and have a public-private partnership with companies that will create the clean, safe fuels of the 21st century and the millions of good American jobs that will follow.

That’s what Democrats stand for. It’s time they said it.

Drew Westen, Ph.D., is Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at Emory University, founder of Westen Strategies, and author of The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation.

Yesterday, after soliciting input from the GOP base, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) announced that “the long-awaited Republican manifesto” will be released after lawmakers return to Washington in September. One part of that base that has been particularly vocal and influential is the Tea Party. But while some Republicans view the Tea Party as toxic to the GOP, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) has fully embraced the Tea Party’s input, stating that members “represent the same values, concerns” of “tens of millions of other Americans” and that “we should listen to them, we should work with them and we should walk amongst them.”

If Boehner “walked among” Tea Party members in Erie County, OH, they may provide interesting insight for his new “manifesto.” As the Guardian’s Leo Hickman reports, a local Ohio newspaper the Sandusky Register obtained an email sent out last week by a local Tea party group called The Freedom Institute of Erie County. According to the email, the Tea Party group is creating a “Conservative voter guide” on the positions of candidates seeking office in upcoming elections in order to “rate, recommend, and endorse candidates” based on how they answer 15 questions. While such surveys may be fairly “mundane,” it’s the questions outlining the group’s priorities that provide, as Hickman puts it, “a hearty serving of insight with a side order of jaw drop”:

Now let’s hear those 15 questions. (The document states that the respondents should give one of the following answers: A = Agree; D = Disagree; U = Undecided; A* = Pro-life with exceptions of Rape or Incest, * = Added comments; NR = No Response; CR = Incumbents Conservative Rating.)

1. The Right to Life is a Constitutional right, therefore innocent human beings should have legal protection from conception until natural death. If you hold any exceptions please state them.
2. The regulation of Carbon Dioxide in our atmosphere should be left to God and not government and I oppose all measures of Cap and Trade as well as the teaching of global warming theory in our schools.
3. Marriage is defined as being between a man and a woman, any other type of Union is not marriage.
4. Children should not be placed into foster homes where the parents are homosexual, bisexual, or transgender.
5. Parental consent should be required for sex education that teaches more than direct abstinence.
6. The second Amendment to the Constitution [the right to keep and bear arms] should not be weakened in any way.
7. Only US citizens should be allowed to vote and a photo ID should always be required to vote. (The Mexican government requires a photo ID and fingerprint).
8. I oppose Ohio’s State Income Tax.
9. I oppose the Obama Health Care Reform and would like to see more affordable healthcare through a competitive, open, and transparent system.
10. I oppose the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy of the military and believe that all same sex partners should be banned from combat duty in the military because of the propensity to transmit blood-borne diseases in the theatre of battle.
11. I support a law that will allow the people to place on a ballot all collective bargaining agreements of all government associations, unions, and guilds, for their expressed approval. Defeat of such an agreement would mean government workers would not be immune from the free market system.
12. I oppose card check for voting to implement a Union as this could give unions an unfair intimidation tactic to implement unionisation.
13. I am not an economic pacifist. I believe that we need to protect our economic borders in order to ensure free and fair trade. Tariffs should be used to stop the wealth and jobs of Americans from leaving her borders.
14. The Federal Reserve as it is currently conceived needs to be abolished or at the very least audited.
15. I advocated moving our currency to a debt-free supply-side labour-based currency.

The email’s author, the Freedom Institute Steering Committee member Jon P. Morrow, tells candidates to “please keep it short sweet and simple” as their answers will “reach 1,000+ Republicans and at least 4.000+ Independents that have a history of voting conservatively.”

According to its website, the Freedom Institute’s purpose is to act as the government’s watchdog and to “raise funds to advocate, advertise, educate, and inform the public on constitutionally conservative positions and conservative candidates we endorse.” Membership only requires taking “the Patriots Oath” constructed by Iran Contra operative Oliver North and right-wing Focus on the Family founder Dr. James Dobson. But ab endorsement, it seems, requires a rejection of LGBT rights and that environmental regulation be “left to God.”

While Boehner has not outright endorsed the group’s principles listed in the survey, significant bastions of the conservative establishment, including the Heritage Foundation and the Koch-funded Cato Institute, are listed as “partners” of the group. President Obama, however, gets his own separate tab and title: “the enemy.”

Yesterday on CBS’s Face the Nation, Alaska GOP U.S. Senate candidate Joe Miller suggested that both Medicare and Social Security are unconstitutional. When Bob Schieffer wondered whether Miller’s ideas — that Social Security should be privatized and that Medicare should be phased out — were too extreme, Miller shot back, citing the Constitution. “I would suggest to you that if one thinks that the Constitution is extreme then you’d also think the Founders are extreme,” he said.

Today on ABC’s Top Line, host Rick Klein asked Miller to expound. “Do you think those programs are constitutionally authorized?” Miller dodged, first — noting that his parents benefit from Social Security and Medicare — arguing that they should be preserved now, but “transition” to a privatization model in the future. Then, Miller again suggested the programs are not constitutional:

MILLER: I think we have to look at transferring power back to the states in such a way that states can then look at solutions that may be more appropriate. Then ultimately, when you look at the Constitution and you evaluate what the plan was originally, it was for states to take on more power than the federal government, particularly in the areas of, such as those things that may promote the general welfare. It was not a federal role.

Later on MSNBC, host Andrea Mitchell asked if Social Security and Medicare are “legal” and “should be mandated” by Congress and again, Miller dodged, saying, “I do believe that the Constitution mandates that we transfer power from the feds back to the states.” Watch the compilation:

Miller’s claim that the Constitution gives states the sole power to provide for general welfare is exactly wrong. In fact, Article I, Section 8 specifically states:

“The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.”

Miller appears to be embracing what the Wonk Room’s Ian Millhiser describes as “tentherism,” the belief adopted by many on the right that posits that progressive policies such as health care reform and entitlement programs are an unconstitutional infringement on states’ rights.