Republicans are supposed to be the party of "law & order" and "family values."  Yet throngs of them are flooding the polls to vote for Hillary Clinton, whom they believe to be the Democratic party's weakest presidential candidate.  Rush Limbaugh and other right wing pundits are actively encouraging republicans to crossvote for Sen. Clinton not just to disrupt and prolong the Democratic primary race, but also because if Clinton wins the nomination, she will engage and energize their base in the general election.

Limbaugh's "Operation Chaos" encourages willful violations of the law, and he as well as his followers should be called on this fraudulent undermining of our democracy.  Voting is a privilege and a right for which Americans have fought and died in order to obtain.  Operation Chaos isn't funny or clever.  It's illegal and traitorous; and should be treated as such.

Indiana election law IC 3-10-1-6  Eligible voters
Sec. 6. A voter may vote at a primary election:
(1) if the voter, at the last general election, voted for a majority of the regular nominees of the political party holding the primary election; or
(2) if the voter did not vote at the last general election, but intends to vote at the next general election for a majority of the regular nominees of the political party holding the primary election; as long as the voter was registered as a voter at the last general election or has registered since then.

Rush, your reign of gutter radio commentary has embedded you into the public consciousness as one of the ultimate slime wallowers in our nation's history.

You show no sign of letting up.  In fact, perhaps an air of desperation has finally reached you as the taste for your style of "political analysis" is receding.

To say that you embrace hypocrisy is letting you off far too gently.  Yours is the mammoth category of hypocrisy that would have to be carried to the realm of infinity and beyond.

Remember Rush, you were the one who took the stern and unrelenting view that anyone caught consuming drugs under any circumstances should sustain one of two punishments: 1) execution; 2) be dismissed from America without ever receiving a future opportunity to return.

Oh how the Senate Republican leadership squirmed once again the other day.  The individual causing the squirming was none other than King Rush Limbaugh, the head of the realm of blatant hypocrisy which they serve as loyal members of a kingdom operating on duplicity and bombast.

When MoveOn.org in an ad against the Iraq War dared to use a play on words regarding General David Petraeus and used the term "betray us" the Republicans mobilized.  They promptly secured passage of a condemnatory resolution.  "This is an attack on the brave men and women of our armed forces!" was the loud lament.

It turned out that the very term that Republicans found so objectionable came from none other than the right's patron saint of the radio airwaves, blustery Rush Limbaugh.  This, however, was only the beginning as far as Limbaugh's participation in the continuing drama was concerned.

Limbaugh lashed out at members of the armed forces who had actually served in Iraq, some of whom were decorated with distinguished service citations.  Limbaugh, a noted Chicken Hawk who opted out of service in Vietnam with the same disqualifying "handicap" his father had when he served in World War Two, went to work and called these individuals who were exercising their rights of free speech "phony soldiers."

The Progressive Democrat Newsletter grew out of the frustration of the 2004 election. Having organized protests against the Republican Convention, I found I had a core of activists who were looking to me for support after Bush "won" re-"election". My carefully thought out suggestions as to where we could go from that defeat led to this more-or-less weekly newsletter.

This week I discuss a very personal conflict with Homeland Security, which involved first bad news, then, on appeal, excellent news. Sometimes our court system works! I also cover the response our troops have for Rush Limbaugh, responses to Bush's opposition to healthcare for American children, and I discuss the situation in Burma. I also am finally getting back to some more local stuff including local events in NYC, a brilliant plan for winning in Colorado, and some local Virginia and New Jersey stuff. If you go to any of these articles, please click on some advertisements because that helps me keep doing this!

Rush Limbaugh as a vessel of hate is a reliable barometer of where the Republican right that preaches about Christian virtue and compassionate conservatism really stands.  Limbaugh seemingly cannot go long without making tasteless comments laced with venom, a pattern as habitual as a duck taking to water.

Limbaugh's latest disgrace is his verbal attack on Michael J. Fox for having the sheer audacity to make a commercial favoring a Democrat running for political office, as the popular actor did when he endorsed Claire McCaskill for the Senate in Missouri.  

In observing that Fox, who suffers from Parkinson's Disease, was noticeably shaking during the commercial message in which he lauded McCaskill for her support of stem cell research, correlating it with efforts to combat diseases such as the one from which he suffers, Limbaugh made one of his sickest comments yet. Considering his extensive track record that encompasses significant ground.

Limbaugh made the observation that Fox in the ad for McCaskill appeared not to have taken his medication.  Later in the week, after being subjected to strong criticism for his tasteless observation, Limbaugh made a conditional apology.  "If I was really wrong then I apologize," Limbaugh responded.

Rush Limbaugh addressing assembled reporters outside his studio


Washington, DC (Rotters) - Right-wing radio pundit Rush Limbaugh held a televised news conference this morning in which he repeatedly refused to apologize for his refuted claims that Michael J. Fox was exaggerating  symptoms of his Parkinson's disease for political gain.  Limbaugh also addressed concerns, which had appeared overnight on the Internet in which medical experts reviewing screen captures of his purported imitation of Fox on his radio show questioned whether Limbaugh himself might be suffering some complex motor tics that can be associated with particular medications.

George W. Bush during a busy week following the Karl Rove strategy of dominating television land in an election cycle announced his latest spiritual quest.  He insisted that this new awakening is burgeoning and that a campaign is under way to achieve a triumph on behalf of the forces of good and defeat evil in the process.

While Bush lines up as self-proclaimed leader of the forces for good some mixed messages have been observed on the international scene.  They were not in evidence in the mainstream media during a week when Katie Couric made her well-publicized CBS anchor review and interviewed drug-addicted Rush Limbaugh.

Meanwhile, in the real world, away from the submissive Limbaugh Dittoheads and Fox Zombies, it was reported that the UN nuclear watchdog protested to the U.S. government over a report on Iran's nuclear program, which counted as major news and was duly reported by Britain's BBC.  

In a letter signed by Vilmos Cserveny, a senior director at the International Atomic Energy Agency that was sent to Peter Hoekstra, chairman of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, the charge was leveled that a congressional report contained serious distortions of the IAEA's own findings on Iran's nuclear activity.  

Next week, CBS plans to air a documentary about some of the events on 9/11/2001.  The documentary is controversial, even though it was shown before.  What makes it controversial is not revisiting the raw horror of that day,  it's that people -- some of them recorded live in the midst of these events -- curse.  After all, you have to remember 2/1/2004 changed everything.  Daring to let a four letter word through the nation's television speakers could cost CBS more than half a million dollars per offending syllable.

The Republicans, who so often poke the left as pushing a "nanny state," have made radical increases in fines for "indecency" part of their pretense at family values.  But as usual with the current crew in Washington, they've missed the target.  Not only have they failed to stop the real obscenity that threatens our country, the radical right has become the largest source for filth and indecency.  They've turned the Republican Party into the biggest pornographer in the world.

The current predicament of right wing talk show idol Rush Limbaugh symbolizes the hypocritical double standard of that group.  Analysis of Limbaugh and his legal problems demonstrates rightist cognitive dissonance at its most conspicuous.

Limbaugh's recent difficulties with the law stemming from a drug addiction problem have prompted faithful right wing followers to distort logic and reason to accommodate their unswerving loyalty to a badly tarnished idol.  

When media attention about Limbaugh's drug problems had reached zenith I had a conversation with one faithful follower doing his utmost to avoid reason.  I recalled those occasions not many years before when, at the very mention of Bill Clinton and his problems with Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky, this same person would beam with unbounded glee.

The source of any Clinton criticism or its liability never mattered.  The important thing was that Clinton was being accused.  Accepting all negative accounts came as an article of faith to this fervent Limbaugh enthusiast.

Just in case you haven't heard the good news:

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. AP -- The Palm Beach County, Florida, sheriff's Office says Rush Limbaugh has been arrested on prescription fraud charges.

Limbaugh turned himself in to authorities on a warrant issued by the state attorney's office, said agency spokesperson Teri Barbera.

The conservative radio commentator came into the jail about 4 p.m with his attorney, Roy Black, and was released an hour later on $3,000 bail.
The warrant was for fraud to conceal information to obtain prescription. Barbera said.

With this 'quiet time' will come some well deserved opportunities for reflection, so we've compiled a list of Rush's most memorable moments in the hope that he will see the error of his ways and repent.

Professors should beware.  That is any professors to the left of Fox News, since anyone failing to heed and speak the devout word is in the sights of David Horowitz, the self-anointed head of the Thought Police maintaining watchdog status over academia.

According to Horowitz there are 50,000 college and university professors currently endangering students with exposure to anti-American propaganda.  Since this is a tall order for even as devoted a right wing zealot as Horowitz to handle at one time, he has concentrated his efforts on those he deems to be the 101 leading malefactors.

The Horowitz crusade takes the form of a propaganda-laden book entitled The Professors:  The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America.  Assuming equal interest to the author's background and agenda is the identity of the publisher, Alfred Regnery, also known, and with good reason, as "the right wing publishing ghetto."  

One work that emerged as a gigantic bestseller released by Regnery was Unlimited Access, written by former CIA operative Gary Aldrich.  

Professors should beware.  That is any professors to the left of Fox News, since anyone failing to heed and speak the devout word is in the sights of David Horowitz, the self-anointed head of the Thought Police maintaining watchdog status over academia.

According to Horowitz there are 50,000 college and university professors currently endangering students with exposure to anti-American propaganda.  Since this is a tall order for even as devoted a right wing zealot as Horowitz to handle at one time, he has concentrated his efforts on those he deems to be the 101 leading malefactors.

One work that emerged as a gigantic bestseller released by Regnery was Unlimited Access, written by former CIA operative Gary Aldrich.  

The author disclosed that while in the White House Hillary Clinton decorated the national Christmas tree with pornographic ornaments while Bill snuck away from his Secret Service detail in the wee hours of the morning and walked by himself to the Marriott Hotel a few blocks away on Pennsylvania Avenue to engage in secret trysts with young women.  

Former right wing author-propagandist David Brock, who ultimately broke away from the Fox-Scaife-Limbaugh-Reveren d Moon axis, revealed that he was the "source" that Aldrich thought reliable enough to use for the Bill Clinton "disclosure."  

Brock explained that he disclosed to Aldrich that such a rumor was making the rounds, which was good enough for both the author and his publisher, even though Brock stressed that it was unconfirmed.  

When employees at the Marriott were interviewed in connection with the Aldrich charge by the media, raucous laughter was the response.  As one employee stated, "How could President Clinton come and go in the early hours when our lobby is virtually empty without being discovered?"

Despite no evidence being forthcoming to substantiate either absurd charge, Alfred Regnery stuck by both revelations and the work became a bestseller icon to the hate Clinton crowd.  Regnery also was noted for providing that historian of probity and incisive accuracy, Ann Coulter, with an early showcase to try out some of her earliest "traitor" lines in print.

Horowitz fits comfortably into the aforementioned tradition, a former Marxist firebrand who merely traded brands of extremist thought.  

It is significant how many times this occurs, only to find the right douse their newly devoted converts with an appropriate holy water welcome.  The right's leading voices assert that a watershed conversion has occurred when in reality a troubled fanatic has no more than begun reading from a different script.

Two of the accused professors have responded recently to Horowitz's charges while, in recent Amazon.com reviews, students have come to the defense of others, relying on a firsthand experience unknown to Horowitz.  

One of the professors Horowitz singled out was Professor David Barash of the University of Washington.  Considering the topic Barash chose for his latest book, Horowitz's suspicions are understandable.  

The psychology professor, who teaches a course in Ideas of Human Nature, dared to co-author a book on Peace and Conflict Studies, crossing paths with the neoconservative agenda embraced by Horowitz natural allies such as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle.  

"Some of the assertions in Horowitz's book are flat-out lies," Barash wrote in an e-mail, the contents of which were published in The Daily, Washington University's campus newspaper.  "He evidently didn't bother to read my Peace and Conflict Studies book, but simply took it as an occasion to agitate."

Barash tackled the crux of the issue in stating, "I've never made any bones about my personal politics, but I also think it's very important that I don't expect my students to agree with me."  Barash noted that, while it might be true that in social work and the humanities there might be a "left bias," he conjectures that "the exact opposite is true in engineering schools or business."

Taking up a related point was another individual singled out for rebuke by Horowitz, Professor Robert W. McChesney of the University of Illinois.  

Considering that McChesney has been an articulate critic of the current monopoly of the mainstream media by the likes of Fox and Clear Channel, and co-authored with John Nichols the incisive work Tragedy:  How The American Media Sells Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy, he would thereby loom as a conspicuous Horowitz target.

After all, don't O'Reilly, Hannity and their Fox colleagues insist that the network is objective and is criticized only because they refuse to sell out to the left?  This is the message that the propaganda machine, of which Horowitz plays an ardent part, has attempted to inculcate into the minds of Americans.

McChesney, in responding to Horowitz's attack on the website CommonDreams.org, cited the prevalence of staunchly conservative thought in an area where Horowitz has never treaded, that of the U.S. military.  

"Generals and military officers are far more important (than professors) to the functioning of a government," McChesney wrote, "and, as history shows in depressingly frequent detail, a much greater threat to democratic governance than anthropology professors.  In the United States the military is enormous, it is entirely funded by taxpayers, and the officer corps is significantly right-wing Republican.  There is hardly a liberal Democrat in the bunch, and I dare say probably not a single soul to the left of the Clinton-Kerry center of the Democratic Party."

McChesney, a shrewd media critic who knows undiluted propaganda when he observes it, finds it "revealing that Horowitz uses the term `dangerous' as a pejorative in his book's subtitle.  Dangerous professors are those with ideas with which Horowitz disagrees.  This is a ludicrously opportunistic and undemocratic framing.  The entire premise of a viable democratic public sphere is that what some perceive as `dangerous' ideas be protected, even encouraged, and permitted to be thrown into debate.  Especially, above all else, in universities."

If there is one thing that Horowitz and his ideological allies do not want it is a free marketplace of ideas.  What troubles Horowitz is that there are those that dare to think rather than fall into the tidy pattern of Fox zombies, docilely accepting the communicative Big Brother's message of the moment, whether it be disseminated by Horowitz, Limbaugh, Coulter or Hannity.  

The phrase "dare to think" is a toxic to the likes of Horowitz.  If you dare to stand up for the First Amendment and freedom to worship or not to do so without government interference, if you believe that the government has no right to intrude into an individual's thoughts or bedroom, known traditionally as a right of privacy, or if you believe that searches should be preceded by warrants from magistrates, or that the Nuremberg and UN charters along with the Geneva Code should all be followed under both U.S. and international law, then Horowitz and his thought police have news for you.

The foregoing used to be regarded as bedrock constitutional principles by both traditional John Stuart Mill liberals as well as Edmund Burke conservatives.  To adhere to these principles currently is to invite at least suspicion, perhaps investigation, and maybe prosecution under the dire Orwellian warning, "We are at war!  You are making the world safer for terrorists!"    

from the cpt website...
   

What would happen if Christians devoted the same discipline and self-sacrifice to nonviolent peacemaking that armies devote to war?

    Jesus said: "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you." - Matthew 5: 44 (NIV)

"The I Hate Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Sean Hannity Reader" has a title that bears on the hatred spewed by the radical right wing spokespersons evaluated.  Those who object to the title should reflect on the words of those individuals analyzed.  Their own words defy any claim to reason and decency as those who disagree with their viewpoints are savagely excoriated in the midst of diatribes bereft of reason.

A hilarious beginning point is Ann Coulter.  With seething ferocity Coulter attacked Bill Clinton's morality and still vehemently believes that he should have been removed from office for his sexual indiscretions.  When Coulter was cornered on the Geraldo Rivera Show for her lifestyle while living in Manhattan and dating successful pornographer Robert Guccione Jr. she replied, "I'm not married and I can sleep with as many people as I want!"

George Bush has been quick to preach sacrifice to the American people regarding Iraq.  His request harkens back to two statements I heard about war and peace that I never forgot, and that Bush has made germane.

I knew a Los Angeles travel agent who had been a World War Two member of General James Doolittle's crack Flying Tigers.  His Army Air Force plane was shot down during the war and he spent time in a Japanese POW camp.  "We people who have experienced and seen the destruction of combat are very careful about one thing," he told me.  "When we think people are too quick about advocating war we step back and study the issue very carefully.  When you've been there and seen the damage of war you're much more reluctant about advocating it and greatly concerned about seeking ways to prevent it."