posted July 12, 2007 12:52 PM            

Leftists are a cult of death. Leftist policies produce death and destruction of peoples and societies.

So, it's no surprise to hear or read leftist death talk.

In this case, a leftist wants George Bush dead...such nice talk for a so called "peace activist". In my experience, peace activists are anything but "peaceful". These morons are the ones who burn down buildings, ram boats into other boats on the seas, who revile those who eat meat, who are adamant about not killing animals but are even more adamant about their right to kill babies.

So these death cultists are not hard to figure out at all. Clinically, they're simply insane by the standards of any civilized society.

Oh, and these leftists get standing ovations by other leftists when they talk their death cult talk in public. Nothing surprising about that either. We have Bill Maher and now a so called "peace activist" hack...along with many others who have let slip where they're really coming from.

Nobel laureate calls for removal of Bush

Irish peace activist's speech at Dallas event gets standing ovation

10:52 AM CDT on Thursday, July 12, 2007
By JAMES HOHMANN / The Dallas Morning News

Nobel Peace Prize winner Betty Williams came from Ireland to Texas to declare that President Bush should be impeached.

In a keynote speech at the International Women's Peace Conference on Wednesday night, Ms. Williams told a crowd of about 1,000 that the Bush administration has been treacherous and wrong and acted unconstitutionally.

"Right now, I could kill George Bush," she said at the Adam's Mark Hotel and Conference Center in Dallas. "No, I don't mean that. How could you nonviolently kill somebody? I would love to be able to do that."

About half the crowd gave her a standing ovation after she called for Mr. Bush's removal from power.

"The Muslim world right now is suffering beyond belief," she said.

"Unless the president of the United States is held responsible for what he's doing and what he has done, there's no one in the Muslim world who will forgive him."

When an audience member told Ms. Williams that Vice President Dick Cheney would become president if George Bush were impeached, she said, "Can't you impeach them both?"

"It's twisted. It's all wrong," she said. "There are so many lies being told. It's hard to be an American and go out into the world right now."

Ms. Williams started her speech by asking every member of the audience to hug everyone around them. Then she cut to what amounted to both a call for peace and a stinging rebuke of the American government.

Conference organizers have said that the conference is nonpartisan and that no one was invited to speak about the war in Iraq. After Ms. Williams finished her speech, conference chairwoman Carol Donovan took the podium to say that Ms. Williams did not speak for the conference – only herself.

"It's important for us to separate the opinion of the person and the position of the conference," Ms. Donovan said.

Two other Nobel Peace Prize winners, American activist Jody Williams and Rigoberta Menchú Tum of Guatemala, will speak this week as part of the conference. Jody Williams, who was in the audience Wednesday, has also indicated she would speak about Mr. Bush.

"We believe very strongly it was important to have the opportunity to hear these three peace prize winners," Ms. Donovan said.

Betty Williams won the Nobel Prize in 1976 for creating a group that helped start peace talks in Northern Ireland.

In 1992, Texas Gov. Ann Richards appointed Betty Williams to the Texas Commission for Children and Youth.

Many in the crowd found out that Lady Bird Johnson had died when Jan Sanders, the wife of U.S. District Judge Barefoot Sanders and a close friend of the former first lady, gave an impromptu eulogy.

posted July 12, 2007 01:23 PM            

The Leftist Mind: The Reasons of Treason

Greetings puny Earthlings. It is I, Remulak MoxArgon, Usurper of the Court of a Thousand Galaxies, Ruler of the Known Universe, yadda, yadda, yadda.

Today is the beginning of what I hope will be a new feature here with the MoxArgon Group. I call it The Liberal Mind, where we dip our toes into the writhing snakepit of modern liberal/leftist thought.

Today, we look at the concept of treason.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary TREASON is...

• noun the crime of betraying one’s country, especially by attempting to kill or overthrow the sovereign or government.
Sounds pretty clear cut, doesn't it.

Now here's a recent quote about treason by a prominent liberal politician and 'activist':

"This is treason. And we need to start treating them as traitors." -Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Now that's a pretty strong accusation.

Who was he talking about?

posted July 12, 2007 01:24 PM            

Was it....?

The New York Times...
For not finding a covert anti-terrorist operation it didn't feel the need to expose, and turning the CIA into an organization with more leaks than the Titanic?

Nope.

Could he have been talking about....

Lynne Stewart: A lawyer and "civil rights activist" knowingly passed messages from her client, a convicted terrorist, to his followers on the outside. Actions that resulted in people getting killed in the name of radical Islam?

Was Robert Kennedy Jr. talking about her?

posted July 12, 2007 01:31 PM            

Could it have been....Newsweek Magazine:
whose bogus story of "flushed Korans" story sparked worldwide riots leading to hundreds of deaths around the world and giving propaganda fuel to Islamic extremists which is still being used to this day?

Nope.

Was he talking about....Medea Benjamin: Professional anti-war activist whose group Code Pink gave $600,000 in aid to pimp turned Al Qaida terrorist kingpin Abu Musab Al Zarqawi in a direct violation of American law and common decency?

posted July 12, 2007 01:32 PM            

Mr. Kennedy wasn't talking about any of them, or anyone like them.

In fact he was talking about people who refuse to worship Al Gore

Yep.

According to Kennedy not wanting to give your complete loyalty, unquestioning obedience, and, most importantly, money to Al Gore, who is not the leader of any sovereign nation, is a betrayal of Mother Earth and must be treated as treason.

That kind of says something about where their heads are at, doesn't it?

posted July 12, 2007 02:43 PM              

quote:

---

...who revile those who eat meat, who are adamant about not killing animals but are even more adamant about their right to kill babies.

---

conservative vegan group website ~

AUDIENCE:
Geared toward politically conservative vegans

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Vegan_News/messages

website for liberal pro-lifers ~

Left Out Haven

posted July 12, 2007 03:19 PM              

I don't see anything contradictory about being a hawkish conservative who rescues kittens and doesn't eat meat

Published: Monday, April 03, 2006

I have received, in the past two weeks, three messages from Paul and Heather McCartney, asking me to sign petitions against the East Coast seal hunt. It is easy to mock celebrities who involve themselves in politics -- I often do so myself -- but I have signed these petitions. The seal hunt is barbaric, and among the things that make me ashamed of my country would have to tie for first place with "lacklustre participation in the war on Islamofascism."

That both human and animal welfare concern me, a conservative, makes perfect sense. But others find it curious. I do volunteer work for animals, and when I speak to most of my co-volunteers of my support for the war in Iraq, and for the presence of Canadian troops in Afghanistan, the reactions are almost always wide-eyed. I will inevitably be subjected to a, "So, you care about animals, but not people?" No, I reply. I care very much about people. That's why I was happy to see Saddam taken down.

A libertarian friend recently said to me, "You don't fit the conservative mould. You've got the two Vs. You have a vagina, and you're a vegetarian." The former seems less out of place on today's right than the latter. But why should, I wonder, a desire to not live under the edicts of jihadists mean I think it's OK for animals to be clubbed to death? Why should a desire for less government intrusion in my life mean I think it's acceptable to subject livestock to cruelty? Why should my belief in free expression, or lower taxes, or my desire to see the likes of Slobodan Milosevic stopped mean I should find the various ways animals are abused acceptable? Does. Not. Compute.

I should make clear the kind of animal-rights advocate I am. Though I do not eat meat, fowl, fish or seafood, I don't mind if you do. But I think it should matter to you how the creatures you eat were treated in life, and were killed. I offer up, for example, my love/hate relationship with eggs. Sometimes I cannot get beyond the fact that I am eating fetuses, sometimes I crave them to no end. When the latter overtakes me, I shell out the extra money for free-run eggs. And, while I am no hunting fan, I see a difference between a deer hunt, say, where the animal will be eaten, and the hunting of an animal for "sport." I would also like to see animal cruelty treated as a criminal offence.

I should make clear the kind of conservative I am. I am the kind who wishes to be kept free from religious dictatorship, Islamist and otherwise. I don't care who you sleep with, or marry, for that matter. Knock yourself out. Buy a gun, if you want. I believe in help for those who truly need it, including animals. They feel pain, they suffer and they are, all too often, the victims of human greed and stupidity.

It is a fact of my life that among many of my animal-rights friends, and my vast-right-wing-conspiracy friends, I am an oddity. Two nights a week, I wander through skanky alleyways in some of Toronto's worst neighbourhoods, feeding feral cat colonies. The woman I feed with wears a button that says, "War is not the Answer." I have tried to get her to tell me what she believes the answer to be (and, for that matter, what she believes the question to be). She hasn't managed to articulate that much, but she has stated that "George Bush's war" is about profiteering and contempt for Islam. My attempts to point out to her that the Taliban, and Saddam, were not averse to profits, nor were they particularly eco-friendly, nor friendly to many of their fellow Muslims, fall on deaf ears.

One night, we spotted a cat in distress, right front leg crushed (probably by a car), bleeding and hobbling on three legs. He managed to slink under a fence into someone's yard. As it was well past midnight, and no lights were on in the house in question, we decided to climb the fence and enter the property without permission. Not an ideal choice, but leaving the cat was unthinkable. Our actions woke up the homeowner, a man who came out yelling (understandably), abaya-wearing wife behind him. We apologized, and explained the situation ... to no avail. He told us to leave.

We went back the next morning and, fortunately, found the missus alone. She was kind, and allowed us the run of the yard. Eventually the cat was trapped (and is now a three-legged kitty amputee, living in a loving home). I believe my co-volunteer failed to see the disconnect between her button and her comments when, afterwards, she chuckled that "that had to be a Muslim man's worst nightmare. Two women climbing his backyard fence to save an animal. And then going behind his back to talk to his wife."

Alongside the seal hunt petitions I received was a list of "top petitions" people on my animal advocacy e-list were signing. Among them: "Stop the campaign of defamation and distortion against Islam" (regarding the Danish cartoons), "Support Paradise Now," (regarding the movie about Palestinian suicide bombers), and "The Complaint of Wiccan Rights to George W. Bush."

Apparently President Bush is denying Wiccans their rights. I wasn't aware of that. But I figure they can look after themselves. They're Wiccans. They've got spells. And they're humans. They can speak for themselves. Unlike say, animals.

Rondi Adamson is a Toronto-based freelance writer and recent winner of the Montreal Economic Institute's Journalism Prize for 2005.

posted July 12, 2007 03:24 PM              

Doug Curran

Many recent studies have shown that the current young adult demographic is more pro-life than past generations - a reality due in part to advances in medical technology. "As technology like the ultrasound has progressed," Georgetown Right to Life president Becca Danis (SFS '06) explains, "people are better able to understand the true human nature of the unborn child."

Because of this and other factors, young people are simply more conservative when it comes to abortion-rights issues than they have been in the past. Many of these young people, however, take decidedly liberal stances when it comes to issues such as gay marriage and social justice, creating an apparent contradiction. Are they political conservatives because they champion pro-life ideas, despite their liberal views across other parts of the spectrum? When it comes to electing representatives, will these people cast votes for Republican candidates simply because of the abortion issue? Perhaps so, but, if the pro-life liberals have their way, this will not be the case for long.

As Kristen Day, executive director of Democrats for Life of America (DFLA), said at the recent Cardinal O'Connor Conference on Life at Georgetown University, "There are people out there who agree with 99% of what the Democratic Party stands for, but they vote Republican because of the abortion issue. These are the people we want to reach out to. These are the people we want to welcome back into our party."

The emergence of a young demographic that holds liberal values but is also pro-life is complemented by a movement within the Democratic Party itself that is backing away from the party's traditional pro-choice stance. Day asserted, "[Democrats] are beginning to think that maybe it's not such a good idea to be in bed with NARAL. They're beginning to realize that NARAL has taken control of our party and it's time to kick them out."

According to Day, Democrats first recognized the existence of this problem at the 1996 Democratic National Convention when former Governor Robert Casey (D-PA), a pro-life member of the party, was refused an opportunity to speak. Instead, according to Day, a staff member from his opponent's campaign, a pro-choice Republican, was invited. It was clear that the DNC, said Day, valued a pro-abortion stance over loyalty to and membership in the party. Pro-life Democrats were unwelcome in their own party and were rendered essentially powerless.

In this context, pro-life Democrats began jockeying for a position at the bargaining table, and Day's organization, DFLA, was founded in 1999. But, despite its relatively recent creation, DFLA has grown from a small operation to one boasting nearly forty state chapters nationwide, and real influence with the heads of the Democratic Party. As Day put it, "We've made our way out of the basement and into middle management now, but we're still looking for a seat in the boardroom."

The liberal pro-life movement is not restricted to party politics, however. Feminists for Life of America (FFL) is an organization that emphasizes the reality that America's early feminists, including Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, were, in fact, anti-abortion. As FFL president Serrin Foster said, "Feminism is a philosophy that embraces the rights of all human beings, without exception." It is for this reason, she explained, that early American feminists "condemned abortion in the strongest possible terms." This philosophy guides Foster and FFL as the organization works to "systematically [eliminate] the causes that lead to abortion because women deserve better. That's what Susan B. Anthony asked us to do."

Like DFLA, FFL has achieved great success in recent years by focusing much effort on its College Outreach program. According to a 1996 Gallup Poll, only 37% of high school-aged girls are pro-choice, while 59% of women who have completed some college are pro-choice, and a full 73% of women with a four-year college degree are in favor of abortion rights. According to FFL, this is because college-aged women are constantly exposed to a "one sided message: abortion is essential to women's equality. It's empowering. It's your choice."

In Foster's view, since many beliefs are formed and solidified during the college years, it is possible to make substantial headway among this demographic. This in mind, the College Outreach program works to bring resources to campuses for pregnant students to emphasize that abortion is not the only recourse for a woman facing an unplanned pregnancy. Because of these and other efforts, abortion rates among college-educated women have dropped by an astonishing 30% since FFL began the program in 1996.

Although FFL has been in existence since the time of Roe v. Wade, its recent successes mirror the emergence of DFLA, and reflect a greater trend: it is no longer a contradiction to be both pro-life and liberal. According to Georgetown Right to Life's Danis, it is a movement that is "gaining ground and is really catching on with our generation. Liberals pride themselves as being a voice to the voiceless and this is the ultimate instance of that."

Change is in the Air for the DNC

As the movement progresses and becomes more prominent in the public consciousness, it will become increasingly less likely that pro-life liberals are ignored or written off as anomalies. The DNC leadership that in the past refused to return phone calls to the DFLA office and generally ignored the existence of the pro-life branch of the party is now beginning to embrace it. As Day argues, "Democrats will be released from an abortion litmus test...The time is now for the party to release the stranglehold and allow members to vote their consciences."

Day points out that, despite common perceptions, the vast majority of the party - regardless of members' stances on the legality of the procedure - believes abortion itself is wrong. Despite the original intent of the thirty-two year old Roe v. Wade decision to make abortion safe, legal and rare, attempts to make it rare have been all but abandoned by the Democratic Party, Day said.

In the past, many prominent pro-choice Democrats including President Bill Clinton, Senator Tom Daschle, Representative Richard Gephardt, and Senator Ted Kennedy have publicly made statements declaring their pro-life stances, Day said. She referred to a letter written to voters in the final days of Daschle's 1978 Congressional campaign in which he wrote, "I am opposed to abortion. I do not support it. I have never supported it. It is an abhorrent practice." Day explained that because of pressures from within the party, Daschle, like many other politicians, was forced to change his public views on abortion to coincide with the party's official stance.

DFLA board member Janet Robert, however, believes that this practice is a relic of the past, pointing to the recent selection of Harry Reid (D-NV), a pro-life Democrat, as the Senate Minority leader as evidence. "I think those days [of being forced to take a pro-choice stance] are over. If anything, pressure will turn in [the pro-life] direction."

Much of this optimism stems from the attributes of the field of candidates vying for the DNC Chairmanship. Of the six men running, only three have taken a public stance on the welcoming of pro-life Democrats into the party; each of these have been nothing but supportive of the idea. In fact, former Congressman Tim Roemer (D-IN) is himself pro-life, and has received the backing of both House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senator Reid.

Former Governor Howard Dean (D-VT) is also a candidate and, while he is pro-choice, is strongly in favor of inclusiveness. He said on NBC News' Meet the Press, "I have long believed that we ought to make a home for pro-life Democrats. The Democrats that have stuck with us, who are pro-life, through their long period of conviction, are people who are the kind of pro-life people that we ought to have deep respect for." The only other candidate who has publicly addressed the issue, Simon Rosenberg, founder of the New Democratic Network, has also spoken in favor of welcoming pro-life members into the party without reservation.

This gives great hope to the DFLA and others, including students like Tim Foley (COL '06), the former Georgetown Right to Life vice president and coordinator of the 2005 Cardinal O'Connor Conference. He hopes to see a more inclusive DNC whose members are not subjected to the pro-choice "litmus test" that Day described. He said, "It's clear the Democratic Party is thinking about abortion... If a viable Democratic candidate came along...I would probably vote for him. But I just couldn't get myself to vote for John Kerry because of his track record of voting pro-choice. I feel like a lot of people felt the way I did."

Day is hopeful that with a new DNC Chair - who will replace Terry McAuliffe, the current Chair who has been less than receptive to the pro-life members of his party - DFLA will enjoy new success. "We hope to earn a permanent seat in the Democratic Party," she said.

As the leadership of the DNC changes, so too do grassroots efforts on the local level. As DFLA's Janet Robert explained, "Where the change is occurring is in the states," as opposed to in the national leadership. Robert's claim is substantiated by a July 2004 CBS/New York Times poll that found that "Almost twice as many Democratic delegates as Democratic voters think abortion should be permitted in all cases." Further, a December 2004 Zogby International poll showed that a full 43% of Democrats agreed that "abortion destroys a human life and is manslaughter."

The results of these polls show that, on the whole, the Democratic Party's leadership is disproportionately pro-choice when, in fact, almost half of Democratic voters define abortion as the destruction of a human life. The change is being affected from the bottom of the party up, as the disconnect between the voters and the representatives becomes increasingly significant.

Because of the pressure from its members, the leadership of the Democratic Party is beginning to recognize that, as Howard Dean stated, "We're not the party of abortion," and there is plenty of room for pro-life liberals among their ranks.

"Pro-Woman, Pro-Life"

"We are going to welcome children into this world by welcoming women...because women deserve better than abortion," FFL's Foster said at Georgetown's O'Connor Conference. The goal of her organization is to redefine the feminist movement to abandon its ties to abortion. Foster said, "Abortion is a betrayal - a betrayal of feminism, a betrayal of women." This message is not always received well within feminist circles that are, by and large, pro-choice. Although many women's rights organizations embrace abortion rights as central to feminism, the otherwise liberal movement's pro-life branch is occupied by the FFL, much the way the DNC's is by the DFLA.

As the FFL continues to expand, especially through its College Outreach program, its message becomes increasingly well-received. After hearing Foster speak, a student from Villanova remarked, "When you have speakers who point out why abortion actually exploits women and hurts them along with the child, then it really starts to all make sense. Serrin Foster really showed us by being pro-life you can genuinely help women."

Foster explained that the liberal pro-life movement is gaining ground because, "People are beginning to realize this isn't an issue of Right or Left; it's an issue of right or wrong." She said that in order to succeed, groups like FFL need to saturate the pro-life movement with liberals who "refuse to choose between the woman and the child." DFLA's Robert agreed saying, "We really feel we need pro-woman legislation."

Foster asserted that, "Access to abortion became central to the feminist movement because it 'leveled the playing field' by making women more like men." But, she said, to resolve the problem, the answer is not to allow for the termination of a pregnancy, but to work to change the culture of the corporate world. Foster suggested that when a working woman is faced with discrimination, she needs to declare, "We have children, get over it! Women deserve better!"

A Pro-Life Future?

Kristen Day is quick to point out that without the support of pro-life Democrats no anti-abortion legislation could pass into law. Because a handful of Republicans are pro-choice, a Republican majority does not translate into a pro-life Republican majority, she explains. "Pro-life Democrats are essential to the [pro-life] cause" Day says.

But they are also essential to a Democratic Party that is looking for support wherever it can. According to Newsweek's December 20, 2004, issue, many of the Democratic leaders are beginning to think that the party's staunchly pro-choice stance is responsible for at least some of its recent political decline. In a post-election meeting with supporters, as reported in the magazine, Senator John Kerry (D-MA) explained that the party "needed new ways to make people understand that they didn't like abortion." The former presidential candidate went on to tell his audience that "Democrats also [need] to welcome more pro-life candidates into the party."

As the Democrats are beginning to discern that not all of their members are pro-choice, the pro-life liberal movement is beginning to cause concern among conservative political opponents. As Ken Black of Iowa's Times-Republican writes, "[The pro-life Democratic movement] scares the bejeezers out of me as a loyal Republican. The Democrats are starting their own little clique... This group could spell doom to the GOP at a time when that party's power has never been greater."

Likewise, the pro-abortion rights Planned Parenthood federation of America has said that FFL's College Outreach program is "the newest and most challenging concept in anti-choice campus organizing" and could have a "profound impact" on Planned Parenthood's "advocacy efforts."

As liberals begin to acknowledge the reality that many within their ranks are not, in fact, pro-choice, the Democratic Party and feminist groups, along with other liberal and traditionally pro-choice organizations, may soon see a shift away from abortion-rights advocacy towards a more pro-life stance. What this will mean for the nation remains to be seen. But, according to Foster, because of the "Forty-five million or so American children aborted since Roe v. Wade...this country is oozing grief under the radar screen," causing people and organizations to reevaluate their pro-choice stances. "I really feel like now the door's opening," Day adds.

posted July 12, 2007 03:46 PM              

July 10 - Matthew Scully, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, is the most interesting conservative you have never heard of. He speaks barely above a whisper and must be the mildest disturber of the peace. But he is among the most disturbing.

If you value your peace of mind, not to mention your breakfast bacon, you should not read Scully's essay ''Fear Factories: The Case for Compassionate Conservatism—for Animals." It appeared in the May 23, 2005, issue of Pat Buchanan's magazine The American Conservative—not where you would expect to find an essay arguing that industrial livestock farming involves vast abuses that constitute a serious moral problem.

The disturbing facts about industrial farming by the $125 billion-a-year livestock industry—the pain-inflicting confinements and mutilations—have economic reasons. Ameliorating them would impose production costs that consumers would pay. But to glimpse what consumers would be paying to stop, visit factoryfarming.com/gallery.htm. Or read Scully on the miseries inflicted on billions of creatures ''for our convenience and pleasure":

"... 400- to 500-pound mammals trapped without relief inside iron crates seven feet long and 22 inches wide. They chew maniacally on bars and chains, as foraging animals will do when denied straw... The pigs know the feel only of concrete and metal. They lie covered in their own urine and excrement, with broken legs from trying to escape or just to turn..."

It is, Scully says, difficult, especially for conservatives, to examine cruelty issues on their merits, or even to acknowledge that something serious can be at stake where animals are concerned. This is partly because some animal-rights advocates are so off-putting. See, for example, the Feb. 3, 2003, letter that Ingrid Newkirk, president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals—animals other than humans—sent to the terrorist Yasir Arafat, complaining that an explosive-laden donkey was killed when used in a Jerusalem massacre.

The rhetoric of animal "rights" is ill-conceived. The starting point, says Scully, should be with our obligations—the requirements for living with integrity. In defining them, some facts are pertinent, facts about animals' emotional capacities and their experience of pain and happiness. Such facts refute what conservatives deplore—moral relativism. They do because they demand a certain reaction and evoke it in good people, who are good because they consistently respect the objective value of fellow creatures.

It may be true that, as has been said, the Puritans banned bearbaiting not because it gave pain to the bears but because it gave pleasure to the spectators. And there are indeed degrading pleasures. But to argue for outlawing cruelty to animals because it is bad for the cruel person's soul is to accept, as Scully does not, that man is the only concern.

Statutes against cruelty to animals, often imposing felony-level penalties, codify society's belief that such cruelty is an intrinsic evil. This is a social affirmation of a strong moral sense in individuals who are not vicious. It is the sense that even though the law can regard an individual's animal as the individual's property, there nevertheless are certain things the individual cannot do to that property. Which means it is property with a difference.

The difference is the capacity for enjoyment and suffering. So why, Scully asks, is cruelty to a puppy appalling and cruelty to livestock by the billions a matter of social indifference? There cannot be any intrinsic difference of worth between a puppy and a pig.

Animal suffering on a vast scale should, he says, be a serious issue of public policy. He does not want to take away your BLT; he does not propose to end livestock farming. He does propose a Humane Farming Act to apply to corporate farmers the elementary standards of animal husbandry and veterinary ethics: "We cannot just take from these creatures, we must give them something in return. We owe them a merciful death, and we owe them a merciful life."

Says who? Well, Scully replies, those who understand "Judeo-Christian morality, whose whole logic is one of gracious condescension, or the proud learning to be humble, the higher serving the lower, and the strong protecting the weak."

Yes, of course: You don't want to think about this. Who does? But do your duty: read his book ''Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy." Scully, a conservative and hence a realist, knows that man is not only a rational creature but a rationalizing creature, putting his intellectual nimbleness in the service of his desires. But refraining from cruelty is an objective obligation. And as Scully says, ''If reason and morality are what set humans apart from animals, then reason and morality must always guide us in how we treat them."

posted July 12, 2007 03:48 PM              

From The American Conservative, Pat Buchanan's Right Wing Magazine

Fear Factories: The Case for Compassionate Conservatism – for Animals

By Matthew Scully
May 23, 2005

A few years ago I began a book about cruelty to animals and about factory farming in particular, problems that had been in the back of my mind for a long while. At the time I viewed factory farming as one of the lesser problems facing humanity—a small wrong on the grand scale of good and evil but too casually overlooked and too glibly excused.

This view changed as I acquainted myself with the details and saw a few typical farms up close. By the time I finished the book, I had come to view the abuses of industrial farming as a serious moral problem, a truly rotten business for good reason passed over in polite conversation. Little wrongs, when left unattended, can grow and spread to become grave wrongs, and precisely this had happened on our factory farms.

The result of these ruminations was Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy. And though my tome never quite hit the bestseller lists, there ought to be some special literary prize for a work highly recommended in both the Wall Street Journal and Vegetarian Teen. When you enjoy the accolades of PETA and Policy Review, Deepak Chopra and Gordon Liddy, Peter Singer and Charles Colson, you can at least take comfort in the diversity of your readership.

The book also provided an occasion for fellow conservatives to get beyond their dislike for particular animal-rights groups and to examine cruelty issues on the merits. Conservatives have a way of dismissing the subject, as if where animals are concerned nothing very serious could ever be at stake. And though it is not exactly true that liberals care more about these issues—you are no more likely to find reflections or exposés concerning cruelty in The Nation or The New Republic than in any journal of the Right—it is assumed that animal-protection causes are a project of the Left, and that the proper conservative position is to stand warily and firmly against them.

I had a hunch that the problem was largely one of presentation and that by applying their own principles to animal-welfare issues conservatives would find plenty of reasons to be appalled. More to the point, having acknowledged the problems of cruelty, we could then support reasonable remedies. Conservatives, after all, aren’t shy about discoursing on moral standards or reluctant to translate the most basic of those standards into law. Setting aside the distracting rhetoric of animal rights, that’s usually what these questions come down to: what moral standards should guide us in our treatment of animals, and when must those standards be applied in law?

Industrial livestock farming is among a whole range of animal-welfare concerns that extends from canned trophy-hunting to whaling to product testing on animals to all sorts of more obscure enterprises like the exotic-animal trade and the factory farming of bears in China for bile believed to hold medicinal and aphrodisiac powers. Surveying the various uses to which animals are put, some might be defensible, others abusive and unwarranted, and it’s the job of any conservative who attends to the subject to figure out which are which. We don’t need novel theories of rights to do this. The usual distinctions that conservatives draw between moderation and excess, freedom and license, moral goods and material goods, rightful power and the abuse of power, will all do just fine.

As it is, the subject hardly comes up at all among conservatives, and what commentary we do hear usually takes the form of ridicule directed at animal-rights groups. Often conservatives side instinctively with any animal-related industry and those involved, as if a thing is right just because someone can make money off it or as if our sympathies belong always with the men just because they are men.

I had an exchange once with an eminent conservative columnist on this subject. Conversation turned to my book and to factory farming. Holding his hands out in the “stop” gesture, he said, “I don’t want to know.” Granted, life on the factory farm is no one’s favorite subject, but conservative writers often have to think about things that are disturbing or sad. In this case, we have an intellectually formidable fellow known to millions for his stern judgments on every matter of private morality and public policy. Yet nowhere in all his writings do I find any treatment of any cruelty issue, never mind that if you asked him he would surely agree that cruelty to animals is a cowardly and disgraceful sin.

And when the subject is cruelty to farmed animals—the moral standards being applied in a fundamental human enterprise—suddenly we’re in forbidden territory and “I don’t want to know” is the best he can do. But don’t we have a responsibility to know? Maybe the whole subject could use his fine mind and his good heart.

As for the rights of animals, rights in general are best viewed in tangible terms, with a view to actual events and consequences. Take the case of a hunter in Texas named John Lockwood, who has just pioneered the online safari. At his canned-hunting ranch outside San Antonio, he’s got a rifle attached to a camera and the camera wired up to the Internet, so that sportsmen going to Live-shot.com will actually be able to fire at baited animals by remote control from their computers. “If the customer were to wound the animal,” explains the San Antonio Express-News, “a staff person on site could finish it off.” The “trophy mounts” taken in these heroics will then be prepared and shipped to the client’s door, and if it catches on Lockwood will be a rich man.

Very much like animal farming today, the hunting “industry” has seen a collapse in ethical standards, and only in such an atmosphere could Lockwood have found inspiration for this latest innovation—denying wild animals the last shred of respect. Under the laws of Texas and other states, Lockwood and others in his business use all sorts of methods once viewed as shameful: baits, blinds, fences to trap hunted animals in ranches that advertise a “100-percent-guaranteed kill.” Affluent hunters like to unwind by shooting cage-reared pheasants, ducks, and other birds, firing away as the fowl of the air are released before them like skeet, with no limit on the day’s kill. Hunting supply stores are filled with lures, infrared lights, high-tech scopes, and other gadgetry to make every man a marksman.

Lockwood doesn’t hear anyone protesting those methods, except for a few of those nutty activist types. Why shouldn’t he be able to offer paying customers this new hunting experience as well? It is like asking a smut-peddler to please have the decency to keep children out of it. Lockwood is just one step ahead of the rest, and there is no standard of honor left to stop him.

First impressions are usually correct in questions of cruelty to animals, and here most of us would agree that Live-shot.com does not show our fellow man at his best. We would say that the whole thing is a little tawdry and even depraved, that the creatures Lockwood has “in stock” are not just commodities. We would say that these animals deserve better than the fate he has in store for them.

As is invariably the case in animal-rights issues, what we’re really looking for are safeguards against cruel and presumptuous people. We are trying to hold people to their obligations, people who could spare us the trouble if only they would recognize a few limits on their own conduct.

Conservatives like the sound of “obligation” here, and those who reviewed Dominion were relieved to find me arguing more from this angle than from any notion of rights. “What the PETA crowd doesn’t understand,” Jonah Goldberg wrote, “or what it deliberately confuses, is that human compassion toward animals is an obligation of humans, not an entitlement for animals.” Another commentator put the point in religious terms: “[W]e have a moral duty to respect the animal world as God’s handiwork, treating animals with ‘the mercy of our Maker’ … But mercy and respect for animals are completely different from rights for animals—and we should never confuse the two.” Both writers confessed they were troubled by factory farming and concluded with the uplifting thought that we could all profit from further reflection on our obligation of kindness to farm animals.

The only problem with this insistence on obligation is that after a while it begins to sounds like a hedge against actually being held to that obligation. It leaves us with a high-minded attitude but no accountability, free to act on our obligations or to ignore them without consequences, personally opposed to cruelty but unwilling to impose that view on others.

Treating animals decently is like most obligations we face, somewhere between the most and the least important, a modest but essential requirement to living with integrity. And it’s not a good sign when arguments are constantly turned to precisely how much is mandatory and how much, therefore, we can manage to avoid.

If one is using the word “obligation” seriously, moreover, then there is no practical difference between an obligation on our end not to mistreat animals and an entitlement on their end not to be mistreated by us. Either way, we are required to do and not do the same things. And either way, somewhere down the logical line, the entitlement would have to arise from a recognition of the inherent dignity of a living creature. The moral standing of our fellow creatures may be humble, but it is absolute and not something within our power to confer or withhold. All creatures sing their Creator’s praises, as this truth is variously expressed in the Bible, and are dear to Him for their own sakes.

A certain moral relativism runs through the arguments of those hostile or indifferent to animal welfare—as if animals can be of value only for our sake, as utility or preference decrees. In practice, this outlook leaves each person to decide for himself when animals rate moral concern. It even allows us to accept or reject such knowable facts about animals as their cognitive and emotional capacities, their conscious experience of pain and happiness.

Elsewhere in contemporary debates, conservatives meet the foe of moral relativism by pointing out that, like it or not, we are all dealing with the same set of physiological realities and moral truths. We don’t each get to decide the facts of science on a situational basis. We do not each go about bestowing moral value upon things as it pleases us at the moment. Of course, we do not decide moral truth at all: we discern it. Human beings in their moral progress learn to appraise things correctly, using reasoned moral judgment to perceive a prior order not of our devising.

C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man calls this “the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.” Such words as honor, piety, esteem, and empathy do not merely describe subjective states of mind, Lewis reminds us, but speak to objective qualities in the world beyond that merit those attitudes in us. “[T]o call children delightful or old men venerable,” he writes, “is not simply to record a psychological fact about our own parental or filial emotions at the moment, but to recognize a quality which demands a certain response from us whether we make it or not.”

This applies to questions of cruelty as well. A kindly attitude toward animals is not a subjective sentiment; it is the correct moral response to the objective value of a fellow creature. Here, too, rational and virtuous conduct consists in giving things their due and in doing so consistently. If one animal’s pain—say, that of one’s pet—is real and deserving of sympathy, then the pain of essentially identical animals is also meaningful, no matter what conventional distinctions we have made to narrow the scope of our sympathy. If it is wrong to whip a dog or starve a horse or bait bears for sport or grossly abuse farm animals, it is wrong for all people in every place.

The problem with moral relativism is that it leads to capriciousness and the despotic use of power. And the critical distinction here is not between human obligations and animal rights, but rather between obligations of charity and obligations of justice.

Active kindness to animals falls into the former category. If you take in strays or help injured wildlife or donate to animal charities, those are fine things to do, but no one says you should be compelled to do them. Refraining from cruelty to animals is a different matter, an obligation of justice not for us each to weigh for ourselves. It is not simply unkind behavior, it is unjust behavior, and the prohibition against it is non-negotiable. Proverbs reminds us of this—“a righteous man regardeth the life of his beast, but the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel”—and the laws of America and of every other advanced nation now recognize the wrongfulness of such conduct with our cruelty statutes. Often applying felony-level penalties to protect certain domestic animals, these state and federal statutes declare that even though your animal may elsewhere in the law be defined as your property, there are certain things you may not do to that creature, and if you are found harming or neglecting the animal, you will answer for your conduct in a court of justice.

There are various reasons the state has an interest in forbidding cruelty, one of which is that cruelty is degrading to human beings. The problem is that many thinkers on this subject have strained to find indirect reasons to explain why cruelty is wrong and thereby to force animal cruelty into the category of the victimless crime. The most common of these explanations asks us to believe that acts of cruelty matter only because the cruel person does moral injury to himself or sullies his character—as if the man is our sole concern and the cruelly treated animal is entirely incidental.

Once again, the best test of theory is a real-life example. In 2002, Judge Alan Glenn of Tennessee’s Court of Criminal Appeals heard the case of a married couple named Johnson, who had been found guilty of cruelty to 350 dogs lying sick, starving, or dead in their puppy-mill kennel—a scene videotaped by police. Here is Judge Glenn’s response to their supplications for mercy:

“The victims of this crime were animals that could not speak up to the unbelievable conduct of Judy Fay Johnson and Stanley Paul Johnson that they suffered. Several of the dogs have died and most had physical problems such as intestinal worms, mange, eye problems, dental problems and emotional problems and socialization problems … . Watching this video of the conditions that these dogs were subjected to was one of the most deplorable things this Court has observed. …

“[T]his Court finds that probation would not serve the ends of justice, nor be in the best interest of the public, nor would this have a deterrent effect for such gross behavior. … The victims were particularly vulnerable. You treated the victims with exceptional cruelty. …

“There are those who would argue that you should be confined in a house trailer with no ventilation or in a cell three-by-seven with eight or ten other inmates with no plumbing, no exercise and no opportunity to feel the sun or smell fresh air. However, the courts of this land have held that such treatment is cruel and inhuman, and it is. You will not be treated in the same way that you treated these helpless animals that you abused to make a dollar.”

Only in abstract debates of moral or legal theory would anyone quarrel with Judge Glenn’s description of the animals as “victims” or deny that they were entitled to be treated better. Whether we call this a “right” matters little, least of all to the dogs, since the only right that any animal could possibly exercise is the right to be free from human abuse, neglect, or, in a fine old term of law, other “malicious mischief.” What matters most is that prohibitions against human cruelty be hard and binding. The sullied souls of the Johnsons are for the Johnsons to worry about. The business of justice is to punish their offense and to protect the creatures from human wrongdoing. And in the end, just as in other matters of morality and justice, the interests of man are served by doing the right thing for its own sake.

There is only one reason for condemning cruelty that doesn’t beg the question of exactly why cruelty is a wrong, a vice, or bad for our character: that the act of cruelty is an intrinsic evil. Animals cruelly dealt with are not just things, not just an irrelevant detail in some self-centered moral drama of our own. They matter in their own right, as they matter to their Creator, and the wrongs of cruelty are wrongs done to them. As The Catholic Encyclopedia puts this point, there is a “direct and essential sinfulness of cruelty to the animal world, irrespective of the results of such conduct on the character of those who practice it.”

Our cruelty statutes are a good and natural development in Western law, codifying the claims of animals against human wrongdoing, and, with the wisdom of men like Judge Glenn, asserting those claims on their behalf. Such statutes, however, address mostly random or wanton acts of cruelty. And the persistent animal-welfare questions of our day center on institutional cruelties—on the vast and systematic mistreatment of animals that most of us never see.

Having conceded the crucial point that some animals rate our moral concern and legal protection, informed conscience turns naturally to other animals—creatures entirely comparable in their awareness, feeling, and capacity for suffering. A dog is not the moral equal of a human being, but a dog is definitely the moral equal of a pig, and it’s only human caprice and economic convenience that say otherwise. We have the problem that these essentially similar creatures are treated in dramatically different ways, unjustified even by the very different purposes we have assigned to them. Our pets are accorded certain protections from cruelty, while the nameless creatures in our factory farms are hardly treated like animals at all. The challenge is one of consistency, of treating moral equals equally, and living according to fair and rational standards of conduct.

Whatever terminology we settle on, after all the finer philosophical points have been hashed over, the aim of the exercise is to prohibit wrongdoing. All rights, in practice, are protections against human wrongdoing, and here too the point is to arrive at clear and consistent legal boundaries on the things that one may or may not do to animals, so that every man is not left to be the judge in his own case.

More than obligation, moderation, ordered liberty, or any of the other lofty ideals we hold, what should attune conservatives to all the problems of animal cruelty—and especially to the modern factory farm—is our worldly side. The great virtue of conservatism is that it begins with a realistic assessment of human motivations. We know man as he is, not only the rational creature but also, as Socrates told us, the rationalizing creature, with a knack for finding an angle, an excuse, and a euphemism. Whether it’s the pornographer who thinks himself a free-speech champion or the abortionist who looks in the mirror and sees a reproductive health-care services provider, conservatives are familiar with the type.

So we should not be all that surprised when told that these very same capacities are often at work in the things that people do to animals—and all the more so in our $125 billion a year livestock industry. The human mind, especially when there is money to be had, can manufacture grand excuses for the exploitation of other human beings. How much easier it is for people to excuse the wrongs done to lowly animals.

Where animals are concerned, there is no practice or industry so low that someone, somewhere, cannot produce a high-sounding reason for it. The sorriest little miscreant who shoots an elephant, lying in wait by the water hole in some canned-hunting operation, is just “harvesting resources,” doing his bit for “conservation.” The swarms of government-subsidized Canadian seal hunters slaughtering tens of thousands of newborn pups—hacking to death these unoffending creatures, even in sight of their mothers—offer themselves as the brave and independent bearers of tradition. With the same sanctimony and deep dishonesty, factory-farm corporations like Smithfield Foods, ConAgra, and Tyson Foods still cling to countrified brand names for their labels—Clear Run Farms, Murphy Family Farms, Happy Valley—to convince us and no doubt themselves, too, that they are engaged in something essential, wholesome, and honorable.

Yet when corporate farmers need barbed wire around their Family Farms and Happy Valleys and laws to prohibit outsiders from taking photographs (as is the case in two states) and still other laws to exempt farm animals from the definition of “animals” as covered in federal and state cruelty statues, something is amiss. And if conservatives do nothing else about any other animal issue, we should attend at least to the factory farms, where the suffering is immense and we are all asked to be complicit.

If we are going to have our meats and other animal products, there are natural costs to obtaining them, defined by the duties of animal husbandry and of veterinary ethics. Factory farming came about when resourceful men figured out ways of getting around those natural costs, applying new technologies to raise animals in conditions that would otherwise kill them by deprivation and disease. With no laws to stop it, moral concern surrendered entirely to economic calculation, leaving no limit to the punishments that factory farmers could inflict to keep costs down and profits up. Corporate farmers hardly speak anymore of “raising” animals, with the modicum of personal care that word implies. Animals are “grown” now, like so many crops. Barns somewhere along the way became “intensive confinement facilities” and the inhabitants mere “production units.”

The result is a world in which billions of birds, cows, pigs, and other creatures are locked away, enduring miseries they do not deserve, for our convenience and pleasure. We belittle the activists with their radical agenda, scarcely noticing the radical cruelty they seek to redress.

At the Smithfield mass-confinement hog farms I toured in North Carolina, the visitor is greeted by a bedlam of squealing, chain rattling, and horrible roaring. To maximize the use of space and minimize the need for care, the creatures are encased row after row, 400 to 500 pound mammals trapped without relief inside iron crates seven feet long and 22 inches wide. They chew maniacally on bars and chains, as foraging animals will do when denied straw, or engage in stereotypical nest-building with the straw that isn’t there, or else just lie there like broken beings. The spirit of the place would be familiar to police who raided that Tennessee puppy-mill run by Stanley and Judy Johnson, only instead of 350 tortured animals, millions—and the law prohibits none of it.

Efforts to outlaw the gestation crate have been dismissed by various conservative critics as “silly,” “comical,” “ridiculous.” It doesn’t seem that way up close. The smallest scraps of human charity—a bit of maternal care, room to roam outdoors, straw to lie on—have long since been taken away as costly luxuries, and so the pigs know the feel only of concrete and metal. They lie covered in their own urine and excrement, with broken legs from trying to escape or just to turn, covered with festering sores, tumors, ulcers, lesions, or what my guide shrugged off as the routine “pus pockets.”

C.S. Lewis’s description of animal pain—“begun by Satan’s malice and perpetrated by man’s desertion of his post”—has literal truth in our factory farms because they basically run themselves through the wonders of automation, and the owners are off in spacious corporate offices reviewing their spreadsheets. Rarely are the creatures’ afflictions examined by a vet or even noticed by the migrant laborers charged with their care, unless of course some ailment threatens production—meaning who cares about a lousy ulcer or broken leg, as long as we’re still getting the piglets?

Kept alive in these conditions only by antibiotics, hormones, laxatives, and other additives mixed into their machine-fed swill, the sows leave their crates only to be driven or dragged into other crates, just as small, to bring forth their piglets. Then it’s back to the gestation crate for another four months, and so on back and forth until after seven or eight pregnancies they finally expire from the punishment of it or else are culled with a club or bolt-gun.

As you can see at www.factoryfarming.com/gallery.htm, industrial livestock farming operates on an economy of scale, presupposing a steady attrition rate. The usual comforting rejoinder we hear—that it’s in the interest of farmers to take good care of their animals—is false. Each day, in every confinement farm in America, you will find cull pens littered with dead or dying creatures discarded like trash.

For the piglets, it’s a regimen of teeth cutting, tail docking (performed with pliers, to heighten the pain of tail chewing and so deter this natural response to mass confinement), and other mutilations. After five or six months trapped in one of the grim warehouses that now pass for barns, they’re trucked off, 355,000 pigs every day in the life of America, for processing at a furious pace of thousands per hour by migrants who use earplugs to muffle the screams. All of these creatures, and billions more across the earth, go to their deaths knowing nothing of life, and nothing of man, except the foul, tortured existence of the factory farm, having never even been outdoors.

But not to worry, as a Smithfield Foods executive assured me, “They love it.” It’s all “for their own good.” It is a voice conservatives should instantly recognize, as we do when it tells us that the fetus feels nothing. Everything about the picture shows bad faith, moral sloth, and endless excuse-making, all readily answered by conservative arguments.

We are told “they’re just pigs” or cows or chickens or whatever and that only urbanites worry about such things, estranged as they are from the realities of rural life. Actually, all of factory farming proceeds by a massive denial of reality—the reality that pigs and other animals are not just production units to be endlessly exploited but living creatures with natures and needs. The very modesty of those needs—their humble desires for straw, soil, sunshine—is the gravest indictment of the men who deny them.

Conservatives are supposed to revere tradition. Factory farming has no traditions, no rules, no codes of honor, no little decencies to spare for a fellow creature. The whole thing is an abandonment of rural values and a betrayal of honorable animal husbandry—to say nothing of veterinary medicine, with its sworn oath to “protect animal health” and to “relieve animal suffering.”

Likewise, we are told to look away and think about more serious things. Human beings simply have far bigger problems to worry about than the well being of farm animals, and surely all of this zeal would be better directed at causes of human welfare.

You wouldn’t think that men who are unwilling to grant even a few extra inches in cage space, so that a pig can turn around, would be in any position to fault others for pettiness. Why are small acts of kindness beneath us, but not small acts of cruelty? The larger problem with this appeal to moral priority, however, is that we are dealing with suffering that occurs through human agency. Whether it’s miserliness here, carelessness there, or greed throughout, the result is rank cruelty for which particular people must answer.

Since refraining from cruelty is an obligation of justice, moreover, there is no avoiding the implications. All the goods invoked in defense of factory farming, from the efficiency and higher profits of the system to the lower costs of the products, are false goods unjustly derived. No matter what right and praiseworthy things we are doing elsewhere in life, when we live off a cruel and disgraceful thing like factory farming, we are to that extent living unjustly, and that is hardly a trivial problem.

For the religious-minded, and Catholics in particular, no less an authority than Pope Benedict XVI has explained the spiritual stakes. Asked recently to weigh in on these very questions, Cardinal Ratzinger told German journalist Peter Seewald that animals must be respected as our “companions in creation.” While it is licit to use them for food, “we cannot just do whatever we want with them. ... Certainly, a sort of industrial use of creatures, so that geese are fed in such a way as to produce as large a liver as possible, or hens live so packed together that they become just caricatures of birds, this degrading of living creatures to a commodity seems to me in fact to contradict the relationship of mutuality that comes across in the Bible.”

Factory farmers also assure us that all of this is an inevitable stage of industrial efficiency. Leave aside the obvious reply that we could all do a lot of things in life more efficiently if we didn’t have to trouble ourselves with ethical restraints. Leave aside, too, the tens of billions of dollars in annual federal subsidies that have helped megafarms undermine small family farms and the decent communities that once surrounded them and to give us the illusion of cheap products. And never mind the collateral damage to land, water, and air that factory farms cause and the more billions of dollars it costs taxpayers to clean up after them. Factory farming is a predatory enterprise, absorbing profit and externalizing costs, unnaturally propped up by political influence and government subsidies much as factory-farmed animals are unnaturally sustained by hormones and antibiotics.

Even if all the economic arguments were correct, conservatives usually aren’t impressed by breathless talk of inevitable progress. I am asked sometimes how a conservative could possibly care about animal suffering in factory farms, but the question is premised on a liberal caricature of conservatism—the assumption that, for all of our fine talk about moral values, “compassionate conservatism” and the like, everything we really care about can be counted in dollars. In the case of factory farming, and the conservative’s blithe tolerance of it, the caricature is too close to the truth.

Exactly how far are we all prepared to follow these industrial and technological advances before pausing to take stock of where things stand and where it is all tending? Very soon companies like Smithfield plan to have tens of millions of cloned animals in their factory farms. Other companies are at work genetically engineering chickens without feathers so that one day all poultry farmers might be spared the toil and cost of de-feathering their birds. For years, the many shills for our livestock industry employed in the “Animal Science” and “Meat Science” departments of rural universities (we used to call them Animal Husbandry departments) have been tampering with the genes of pigs and other animals to locate and expunge that part of their genetic makeup that makes them stressed in factory farm conditions—taking away the desire to protect themselves and to live. Instead of redesigning the factory farm to suit the animals, they are redesigning the animals to suit the factory farm.

Are there no boundaries of nature and elementary ethics that the conservative should be the first to see? The hubris of such projects is beyond belief, only more because of the foolish and frivolous goods to be gained—blood-free meats and the perfect pork chop.

No one who does not profit from them can look at our modern factory farms or frenzied slaughter plants or agricultural laboratories with their featherless chickens and fear-free pigs and think, “Yes, this is humanity at our finest—exactly as things should be.” Devils charged with designing a farm could hardly have made it more severe. Least of all should we look for sanction in Judeo-Christian morality, whose whole logic is one of gracious condescension, of the proud learning to be humble, the higher serving the lower, and the strong protecting the weak.

Those religious conservatives who, in every debate over animal welfare, rush to remind us that the animals themselves are secondary and man must come first are exactly right—only they don’t follow their own thought to its moral conclusion. Somehow, in their pious notions of stewardship and dominion, we always seem to end up with singular moral dignity but no singular moral accountability to go with it.

Lofty talk about humanity’s special status among creatures only invites such questions as: what would the Good Shepherd make of our factory farms? Where does the creature of conscience get off lording it over these poor creatures so mercilessly? “How is it possible,” as Malcolm Muggeridge asked in the years when factory farming began to spread, “to look for God and sing his praises while insulting and degrading his creatures? If, as I had thought, all lambs are the Agnus Dei, then to deprive them of light and the field and their joyous frisking and the sky is the worst kind of blasphemy.”

The writer B.R. Meyers remarked in The Atlantic, “research could prove that cows love Jesus, and the line at the McDonald’s drive-through wouldn’t be one sagging carload shorter the next day …. Has any generation in history ever been so ready to cause so much suffering for such a trivial advantage? We deaden our consciences to enjoy—for a few minutes a day—the taste of blood, the feel of our teeth meeting through muscle.”

That is a cynical but serious indictment, and we must never let it be true of us in the choices we each make or urge upon others. If reason and morality are what set human beings apart from animals, then reason and morality must always guide us in how we treat them, or else it’s all just caprice, unbridled appetite with the pretense of piety. When people say that they like their pork chops, veal, or foie gras just too much ever to give them up, reason hears in that the voice of gluttony, willfulness, or at best moral complaisance. What makes a human being human is precisely the ability to understand that the suffering of an animal is more important than the taste of a treat.

Of the many conservatives who reviewed Dominion, every last one conceded that factory farming is a wretched business and a betrayal of human responsibility. So it should be a short step to agreement that it also constitutes a serious issue of law and public policy. Having granted that certain practices are abusive, cruel, and wrong, we must be prepared actually to do something about them.

Among animal activists, of course, there are some who go too far—there are in the best of causes. But fairness requires that we judge a cause by its best advocates instead of making straw men of the worst. There isn’t much money in championing the cause of animals, so we’re dealing with some pretty altruistic people who on that account alone deserve the benefit of the doubt.

If we’re looking for fitting targets for inquiry and scorn, for people with an angle and a truly pernicious influence, better to start with groups like Smithfield Foods (my candidate for the worst corporation in America in its ruthlessness to people and animals alike), the National Pork Producers Council (a reliable Republican contributor), or the various think tanks in Washington subsidized by animal-use industries for intellectual cover.

After the last election, the National Pork Producers Council rejoiced, “President Bush’s victory ensures that the U.S. pork industry will be very well positioned for the next four years politically, and pork producers will benefit from the long-term results of a livestock agriculture-friendly agenda.” But this is no tribute. And millions of good people who live in what’s left of America’s small family-farm communities would themselves rejoice if the president were to announce that he is prepared to sign a bipartisan bill making some basic reforms in livestock agriculture.

Bush’s new agriculture secretary, former Nebraska Gov. Mike Johanns, has shown a sympathy for animal welfare. He and the president might both be surprised at the number and variety of supporters such reforms would find in the Congress, from Republicans like Chris Smith and Elton Gallegly in the House to John Ensign and Rick Santorum in the Senate, along with Democrats such as Robert Byrd, Barbara Boxer, or the North Carolina congressman who called me in to say that he, too, was disgusted and saddened by hog farming in his state.

If such matters were ever brought to President Bush’s attention in a serious way, he would find in the details of factory farming many things abhorrent to the Christian heart and to his own kindly instincts. Even if he were to drop into relevant speeches a few of the prohibited words in modern industrial agriculture (cruel, humane, compassionate), instead of endlessly flattering corporate farmers for virtues they lack, that alone would help to set reforms in motion.

We need our conservative values voters to get behind a Humane Farming Act so that we can all quit averting our eyes. This reform, a set of explicit federal cruelty statutes with enforcement funding to back it up, would leave us with farms we could imagine without wincing, photograph without prosecution, and explain without excuses.

The law would uphold not only the elementary standards of animal husbandry but also of veterinary ethics, following no more complicated a principle than that pigs and cows should be able to walk and turn around, fowl to move about and spread their wings, and all creatures to know the feel of soil and grass and the warmth of the sun. No need for labels saying “free-range” or “humanely raised.” They will all be raised that way. They all get to be treated like animals and not as unfeeling machines.

On a date certain, mass confinement, sow gestation crates, veal crates, battery cages, and all such innovations would be prohibited. This will end livestock agriculture’s moral race to the bottom and turn the ingenuity of its scientists toward compassionate solutions. It will remove the federal support that unnaturally serves agribusiness at the expense of small farms. And it will shift economies of scale, turning the balance in favor of humane farmers—as those who run companies like Wal-Mart could do right now by taking their business away from factory farms.

In all cases, the law would apply to corporate farmers a few simple rules that better men would have been observing all along: we cannot just take from these creatures, we must give them something in return. We owe them a merciful death, and we owe them a merciful life. And when human beings cannot do something humanely, without degrading both the creatures and ourselves, then we should not do it at all.

(Matthew Scully served until last fall as special assistant and deputy director of speechwriting to President George W. Bush. He is the author of Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy.)

posted July 12, 2007 04:03 PM              

http://www.gopchoice.org/

June 27, 2007
New Survey Confirms that 72% of the GOP believes the government should not control personal decision on abortion. Majority of Republicans think Party is spending too much time on moral issues. 60% would support a Presidential Candidate who holds a different view of abortion if they agreed on other main issues.
Washington, D.C. - The Republican Majority for Choice (RMC), the nation's largest pro-choice, common sense Republican organization, today joined polling firm Fabrizio McLaughlin in announcing the results of a sweeping survey examining 2,000 self-described GOP voters.

Contrasting the prevailing notion that the GOP is monolithic in its support of government control on the issue of abortion, 72% of Republicans asserted that the government should not play a role in controlling choices for women, believing instead that the decision to have an abortion should lie with women, their doctors, and their families. Further, the majority of the Party, 53%, believes that the GOP has spent too much time focusing on moral issues such as abortion and gay marriage. An overwhelming majority, 76%, rank issues such as national security, balancing the budget and social issues including Social Security and education as the top priority for the GOP.

While the survey confirms that Rudy Giuliani still has a wide lead over his GOP rivals, with 73% of voters holding a favorable opinion of him, the myth that the GOP will only elect a staunchly pro-life candidate is clearly debunked. Sixty percent of GOPer's would vote for a candidate who disagreed with their position on abortion as long as they agreed on a majority of other issues. Moreover, within the 24% who comprise the moralist wing, more than one-third of those could support a candidate who differed with them of the issue of abortion if they agreed on other issues. Thus, only 15% of the GOP is comprised of the 'super-moralist' narrowly-focused, single issue voters for whom opposition to abortion is the primary issue driving their vote.

"This survey underscores the need for GOP leadership to reexamine the focus of the agenda that they are promoting. The extreme far-right rhetoric and focus of many presidential candidates speaks only to a fringe minority. The true beliefs of the real Republican majority show tolerance on moral issues and a clear demand that GOP leaders focus on areas where we unite as a Party," said Jennifer Stockman, RMC Co-Chair. "Without an infusion of new creative and broad-reaching ideas that truly reflect the sentiments of real Republicans, we have a dreary future with the American people, and we can expect losses at the ballot box to continue. On the other hand, if leaders take their cues from a majority of voters in their own Party and get back to the core issues we can gain back the confidence of voters. The formula for success in 2008 must include a return to a core agenda that reflects mainstream Republican values - real economic growth, cutting government waste and an understanding that solutions come through discussion and compromise," concluded Stockman.

Among many noteworthy findings, the survey shows that the core principles of the GOP dominate the beliefs of the rank and file Republicans, including the following: 78% believe that the budget deficit should be eliminated; 66% believe the government is too big and does too many things; 80% believe the federal government spends too much; and, 69% believe that federal taxes are too high.

About RMC

posted July 12, 2007 04:12 PM              

http://www.democratsforlife.org/

Who We Are

Democrats for Life of America, Inc. is a national organization for pro-life members of the Democratic party.

Our Mission

Democrats for Life of America exists to foster respect for life, from the beginning of life to natural death. This includes, but is not limited to, opposition to abortion, capital punishment, and euthanasia. Democrats for Life of America is one of over 200 member organizations of Consistent Life: an international network for peace, justice and life.

What We Do

We mobilize Democrats at local, state, and national levels to:

posted July 13, 2007 02:05 PM            

So called vegetarians choose to eat plants and forego the necessity of having animals killed to satisfy their need for food. Perhaps they are unaware of Linda Goodman's Star Signs and research done which shows plants are sentient on some level, preceive thoughts about them and react with abject terror when people are thinking about eating them or cooking them.

Either way or any way, there is hypocrisy and it's hypocrisy off the scale when morons move heaven and earth to protect animals but choose to defend the actual killing of babies.

Of course, leftists are so damned dense, so intellectually bankrupt, so caught up in their little fantasy land they just can't see it.

On a range of issues, a blanket of issues covering the earth, leftists exhibit hypocrisy and a head in the sand posture which leaves their as$es exposed.

Hitler's socialism, Hitler was a leftist...is just one of those issues leftists just can't bring themselves to come to grips with. Hitler was one of them. Saddam Hussein was another and the proof of that are the leftist protests by communists and socialists who moved heaven and earth to save Saddam...because Saddam was one of them. All those protests were by leftists..not a right wing fascist in the whole damned bunch. Oh, there were however, terrorists from Hamas and other terrorist groups marching with the leftists, drug dealer terrorists from South and Central America as well. A nice collection of "friends of Saddam".

People would do well to not attempt to assign or affix the conservative label when they're actually talking to a conservative. George Will doesn't measure up to that label. Perhaps George Will is a conservative...to leftists but to conservatives, George Will is at best a luke warm body warming a conservative's chair.

Now, the word 'radical' has been used by acoustic here. The only radicals I know of are pure, unadulterated leftists. The very element which is attempting to overthrow the United States, give aid and comfort to America's enemies.

posted July 13, 2007 02:14 PM            

So, liberals love to discuss ideas, they're open minded, open to debate....not along rock throwing lines but debate with facts being the arrows in everyone's quiver.

Leftists on the other hand are closed minded, rock throwing accusers without proof of any wrong doing, leftists despise debate and shun all facts which don't align with their leftist ideology.

So, here's Hillary...and John Edwards..the Breck Girl. And what are John and Hill talking about?

Well they're not talking any liberal ideas or ideals here. Hill and the Breck Girl are talking about limiting talk...limiting debate.

All one need do is hang around long enough and leftists will out themselves...by what they actually say..or do. Usually, leftists put on the liberal face and say liberal things then do leftist things, pass or attempt to pass leftist legislation or get caught marching or speaking at a rally of leftists.

In this case Hill and Breck Girl Edwards were talking among themselves and got caught talking about their leftist goal of shutting others out of the debates.

Clinton, Edwards talk of limiting debate
July 13, 2007 2:23 AM ET

DETROIT (AP) - Democrats John Edwards and Hillary Rodham Clinton consider themselves among the top presidential candidates.

They were caught by Fox News microphones discussing their desire to limit future joint appearances to exclude some lower rivals after a forum in Detroit Thursday.

Edwards says, "We should try to have a more serious and a smaller group."

Clinton agrees, saying, "We've got to cut the number" and "they're not serious." She also says that she thought their campaigns had already tried to limit the debates and say, "We've gotta get back to it."

Others taking part in the forum sponsored by the NAACP were Senators Barack Obama, Chris Dodd and Joe Biden, Congressman Dennis Kucinich, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson and former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel.

posted July 13, 2007 02:16 PM            

That's the mode of operation of the "Progressive Caucus"...an outright socialist/communist organization with ties to international socialism...the mode of shutting everyone up who doesn't agree with them. Nancy Pee-losi is a member of the oh so "Progressive Caucus".

In this case...and since it's Dennis who is to be shut up ...Dennis is simply outraged.

Kucinich Camp Outraged by 'Overheard' Plans of Clinton and Edwards to Eliminate Candidates from Future Presidential Debates, Forums

Jul 13 12:16 AM US/Eastern

DETROIT, July 13 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Top campaign officials for
Ohio Congressman and Democratic Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich tonight expressed outrage that rival candidates Hillary Clinton and John Edwards were overheard collaborating on a strategy to eliminate other Democratic candidates
from future debates and forums.


According to the Associated Press, Fox News Channel microphones picked up Clinton and Edwards on stage discussing their desire to limit future joint appearances to exclude some rivals lower in the crowded field. "We should try to have a more serious and a smaller group," Edwards said into Clinton's ear following a Presidential Forum in Detroit hosted by the NAACP on Thursday.


Clinton agreed with Edwards, according to print reports and video footage of the exchange. "We've got to cut the number. ... They're not serious," she said. Clinton added that she thought representatives of her campaign and Edwards' had already tried to limit the debates, and "we've gotta get back to it," according to the AP.


"Candidates, no matter how important or influential they perceive themselves to be, do not have and should not have the power to determine who is allowed to speak to the American public and who is not," said Kucinich.


"Imperial candidates are as repugnant to the American people and to our Democracy as an imperial President."


The Kucinich campaign will immediately take steps to address the planned actions of the Clinton and Edwards campaigns.
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=prnw.20070713.CLF025&show_article=1

posted July 13, 2007 04:04 PM            

I think it's interesting when you talk about hypocrisy, especially where death is concerned. As naiad pointed out, there are people on the Left that are pro-life, but there are also people, and high-profile candidates and politicians on the Right, who are pro-choice. There are also people on the Right who very much love all animals. I'm afraid your attempts to lump people together are unrealistic.

This sort of black and white thinking is what characterizes the dictators you so often rail against. Just like middle-eastern radicals rail against the West, you rail against anything you perceive as being on the Left every opportunity you get. You engage in a regular propaganda campaign to try to get people to see things from your warped perspective.

posted July 13, 2007 04:06 PM              

quote:

---

Perhaps they are unaware of Linda Goodman's Star Signs and research done which shows plants are sentient on some level, preceive thoughts about them and react with abject terror when people are thinking about eating them or cooking them.

---

actually she says that plants will 'faint' when you lovingly inform them that you are about to cook or eat them. apparently they know to expect this.

and ultimately, according to LG, one would progress to the level of breatharian, and not consume living things at all.

posted July 13, 2007 04:14 PM              

Nazi Fascism and
the Modern Totalitarian State

Synopsis

The government of Nazi Germany was a fascist, totalitarian state. Totalitarian regimes, in contrast to a dictatorship, establish complete political, social, and cultural control over their subjects, and are usually headed by a charismatic leader.

Fascism is a form of right-wing totalitarianism which emphasizes the subordination of the individual to advance the interests of the state. Nazi fascism's ideology included a racial theory which denigrated "non-Aryans," extreme nationalism which called for the unification of all German-speaking peoples, the use of private paramilitary organizations to stifle dissent and terrorize opposition, and the centralization of decision-making by, and loyalty to, a single leader.

INSTRUCTIONAL OBJECTIVES

Students will learn:

1. The principal characteristics of totalitarianism.

2. The ways in which a totalitarian regime differs from a dictatorship.

3. The ways in which right-wing totalitarian regimes differ from left-wing totalitarian regimes.

4. The principal features of Fascism.

5. The principal features of Nazism.

CHAPTER CONTENT

Totalitarianism

Totalitarianism is a form of government in which all societal resources are monopolized by the state in an effort to penetrate and control all aspects of public and private life, through the state's use of propaganda, terror, and technology. Totalitarian ideologies reject the existing society as corrupt, immoral, and beyond reform, project an alternative society in which these wrongs are to be redressed, and provide plans and programs for realizing the alternative order. These ideologies, supported by propaganda campaigns, demand total conformity on the part of the people.
Totalitarian forms of organization enforce this demand for conformity. Totalitarian societies are hierarchies dominated by one political party and usually by a single leader. The party penetrates the entire country through regional, provincial, local and "primary" (party-cell) organization. Youth, professional, cultural, and sports groups supplement the party's political control. A paramilitary secret police ensures compliance. Information and ideas are effectively organized through the control of television, radio, the press, and education at all levels.

Totalitarian Regime vs. Dictatorship

Totalitarian regimes differ from older concepts of dictatorship or tyranny. Totalitarian regimes seek to establish complete political, social and cultural control, whereas dictatorships seek limited, typically political, control. Two types of totalitarianism can sometimes be distinguished: Nazism and Fascism which evolved from "right-wing" extremism, and Communism, which evolved from "left-wing" extremism. Traditionally, each is supported by different social classes. Right-wing totalitarian movements have generally drawn their popular support primarily from middle classes seeking to maintain the economic and social status quo. Left-wing totalitarianism has often developed from working class movements seeking, in theory, to eliminate, not preserve, class distinctions. Right-wing totalitarianism has typically supported and enforced the private ownership of industrial wealth. A distinguishing feature of Communism, by contrast, is the collective ownership of such capital.

Totalitarian regimes mobilize and make use of mass political participation, and often are led by charismatic cult figures. Examples of such cult figures in modern history are Mao Tse-tung (China) and Josef Stalin (Soviet Union), who led left-wing regimes, and Adolf Hitler (Germany) and Benito Mussolini (Italy), who led right-wing regimes.

Right-wing totalitarian regimes(particularly the Nazis) have arisen in relatively advanced societies, relying on the support of traditional economic elites to attain power. In contrast, left-wing totalitarian regimes have arisen in relatively undeveloped countries through the unleashing of revolutionary violence and terror. Such violence and terror are also the primary tools of right-wing totalitarian regimes to maintain compliance with authority.

Fascism

Fascism was an authoritarian political movement that developed in Italy and several other European countries after 1919 as a reaction against the profound political and social changes brought about by World War I and the spread of socialism and Communism. Its name was derived from the fasces, an ancient Roman symbol of authority consisting of a bundle of rods and an ax. Italian fascism was founded in Milan on March 23, 1919, by Benito Mussolini, a former revolutionary socialist leader. His followers, mostly war veterans, were organized along paramilitary lines and wore black shirts as uniforms. The early Fascist program was a mixture of left- and right-wing ideas that emphasized intense Nationalism, productivism, anti-socialism, elitism, and the need for a strong leader. Mussolini's oratorical skills, the post-war economic crisis, a widespread lack of confidence in the traditional political system, and a growing fear of socialism, all helped the Fascist party to grow to 300,000 registered members by 1921. In that year it elected 35 members to parliament.

The Philosophy of Fascism

The intellectual roots of Fascism can be traced to the voluntaristic philosophers who argued that the will is prior to and superior to the intellect or reason.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was a German philosopher who held that the will is the underlying and ultimate reality and that the whole phenomenal world is the only expression of will. Human beings have free will only in the sense that everyone is the free expression of a will and that we therefore are not the authors of our own destinies, characters, or behavior, he wrote. He theorized that space, time, and causality were not absolute principles but only a function of the brain, concepts parallel to the scientific discoveries of relativistic physics two generations later.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was a German philosopher and poet best known for "Thus Spoke Zarathustra." He theorized that there were two moral codes: that of the ruling class (master morality) and that of the oppressed class (slave morality). The ancient empires grew out of a master morality, and the religions of the day out of the slave morality (which denigrates the rich and powerful, rationalism, and sexuality). He developed the concept of the "overman" (superman) which symbolized man at his most creative and highest intellectual capacity.

Henri Bergson (1859-1941) was a French philosopher of Jewish parents who was the leading rejectionist of the concept that scientific principles can explain all of existence. He asserted that metaphysical principles also apply. He found credence in applying the biological theories of Darwin (which pointed to the "survival of the fittest" in biological systems) to social theory.

George Sorel (1847-1922) was a French social philosopher who had a major influence upon Mussolini. Sorel believed that societies naturally became decadent and disorganized, and this inevitable decay could only be delayed by the leadership of idealists who were willing to use violence to obtain power. His anti-democratic, anti-liberal views and pessimistic view about the natural life-cycle of a society were antithetical to most of his contemporaries.

Gabriele D'Annunzio (1863-1938) was an Italian politician, poet, dramatist, novelist and war hero who was a supporter of Mussolini.

Fascist Ideology

Fascist ideology was largely the work of the neo-idealist philosopher, Giovanni Gentile. It emphasized the subordination of the individual to a "totalitarian" state that was to control all aspects of national life. Violence as a creative force was an important characteristic of the Fascist philosophy. A special feature of Italian Fascism was the attempt to eliminate the class struggle from history through nationalism and the corporate state. Mussolini organized the economy and all "producers" - from peasants and factory workers to intellectuals and industrialists - into 22 corporations as a means of improving productivity and avoiding industrial disputes. Contrary to the regime's propaganda claims, the system ran poorly. Mussolini was forced into compromises with big business and the Roman Catholic Church. The corporate state was never fully implemented. The inherently expansionist, militaristic nature of Fascism contributed to imperialistic adventures in Ethiopia and the Balkans and ultimately to World War II.

Nazism

Nazism refers to the totalitarian Fascist ideology and policies espoused and practiced by Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist German Worker's Party from 1920-1945. Nazism stressed the superiority of the Aryan, its destiny as the Master Race to rule the world over other races, and a violent hatred of Jews, which it blamed for all of the problems of Germany. Nazism also provided for extreme nationalism which called for the unification of all German-speaking peoples into a single empire. The economy envisioned for the state was a form of corporative state socialism, although members of the party who were leftists (and would generally support such an economic system over private enterprise) were purged from the party in 1934.
Paramilitary Organizations
Nazism made use of paramilitary organizations to maintain control within the party, and to squelch opposition to the party. Violence and terror fostered compliance. Among these organizations were the:

S.A. (Sturmabteilung): Stormtroopers (also known as "brown-shirts") were the Nazi paramilitary arm under Ernst Rîhm. It was active in the battle for the streets against other German political parties.

S.D. (Sicherheitsdiest): the Security Service under Reinhard Heydrich.

S.S. (Schutzstaffel): Defense Corps, was an elite guard unit formed out of the S.A. It was under the command of Heinrich Himmler.

Gestapo (Geheime Staatpolizeil): the Secret State Police, which was formed in 1933.

Nazism also placed an emphasis on sports and paramilitary activities for youth, the massive use of propaganda (controlled by Joseph Goebbels) to glorify the state, and the submission of all decisions to the supreme leader (FÅhrer) Adolf Hitler.

VOCABULARY

Communism - A social, political, and economic system characterized by the revolutionary struggle to create a society which has an absence of classes, and the common ownership of the means of production and subsistence and centralized governmental control over the economy.
Dictator - A ruler having absolute authority and supreme jurisdiction over the government of a state; especially one who is considered tyrannical or oppressive.

Elitism - Philosophy that a narrow clique of the "best" or "most skilled" members of a given social group should have the power.

Fascism - A philosophy or system of government that advocates or exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with an ideology of belligerent nationalism.

Hierarchy - A body of persons organized or classified according to rank, capacity, or authority.

Ideology - The body of ideas reflecting the social needs and aspirations of an individual, group, class, or culture.

Left-wing - As used in this chapter, individuals and groups who desire to reform or overthrow the established order and advocate change in the name of greater freedom or well-being of the common man.

Nazism - The ideology and policies of Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist German Worker's Party from 1921 to 1945.

Propaganda - The systematic spreading of a given doctrine or of allegations reflecting its views and interests.

Right-wing - As used in this chapter, individuals or groups who profess opposition to change in the established order and who favor traditional attitudes and practices, and who sometimes advocate the forced establishment of an authoritarian political order.

Totalitarianism - A form of government in which all societal resources are monopolized by the state in an effort to penetrate and control all aspects of public and private life, through the state's use of propaganda, terror, and technology.

ACTIVITIES
In the United States, the president is also the commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Research how this is different from other countries. Discuss the issue of civilian control of the military.
Obtain a report from Amnesty International on human rights violations around the world. Also obtain the parallel report from the State Department. What are the factors which lead to human rights violations, such as age of the government, type of government, geographical location of the country, size of the country?
List the countries of the world by type of government. Find the democracies, right-wing dictatorships, left-wing dictatorships, monarchies, left- and right-wing totalitarian regimes, and categorize them by the number of years they have had that form of government. How many of these governments are headed by civilians, and how many are headed by the military? Which countries receive foreign aid from the United States? Which receive foreign aid from the Soviet Union?

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

Could an avowed racist or anti-Semite be elected President of the United States? If not, why not? If so, how might such an election come about?

When Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, comparisons were made between Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein and Adolf Hitler. Discuss the differences in the world situations and the world's responses to Hitler's annexation of the Sudetenland and Hussein's annexation of Kuwait.

If you were a citizen in 1933 Germany, how would you feel about your government? What options did you feel you had for expressing opposition to this government or to participate in it? How do these options differ from the options you have today in the United States?

EVALUATION

1. Define the following:
dictator
totalitarianism
elitism
left-wing
right-wing
propaganda
Fascism
hierachy

2. What are two differences between a dictatorship and a totalitarian regime?

3. What are three differences between right-wing and left-wing totalitarian regimes?

4. Who was Benito Mussolini, and what type of government did he lead?

5. What were three aspects of Nazi ideology?

6. How do totalitarian regimes foster compliance by those who disagree with the objectives of the regime?

7. Discuss two of the paramilitary organizations formed by the Nazi party.

8. How does a totalitarian regime control access to ideas?

9. Name two right-wing and two left-wing leaders of totalitarian regimes.

10. What developments in a society encourage a totalitarian regime to take power?

posted July 13, 2007 06:29 PM              

right wing radicals include supremacist terrorists and abotion clinic bombers. see very recent story ~

Feds: Right-wing terrorists were preparing machine-gun attack on Mexicans

Joshua Holland: The logical but ugly consequence of two years of steady immigrant "invasion" rhetoric.
May 3, 2007

Where might they have gotten the idea?

Five members of a self-styled Alabama militia were denied bond Tuesday after a federal agent testified they planned a machine-gun attack on Mexicans. A sixth man accused of having weapons and explosives components in his home was approved for release.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Robert Armstrong said he could not grant bond because of the agent's testimony and the large number of weapons ... that were seized in raids last Friday.

Fox News described it as "a small arsenal ... that included a rocket launcher, 130 hand grenades and 70 improvised explosive devices (IEDs) similiar to the kind used by insurgents against American GIs in Iraq," along with "enough live ammo to fill a U-Haul trailer." And David Broder thinks lefty bloggers aren't civil.

"I'm going to be worried if I let these individuals go at this time," the judge said.

The five are charged with conspiring to make a firearm. [...]

Adam Nesmith, an agent with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, testified that the five men planned an attack on Mexicans in a small town just north of Birmingham, and went there on a reconnaissance mission April 20.

Nesmith said one of the men told an informant that the group, which calls itself the Alabama Free Militia, saw government agents as "the enemy" and had a standing order to open fire if anyone saw government agents approaching.

It's not that the "anti-illegal-immigrant" set are mostly violent wackos like these guys -- fortunately, most aren't. But at the same time, it's fair to hold public figures acccountible for the predictable consequences of the arguments they choose to make, and this is one of those instances.

In a broad sense, as with the bomb found outside the Austin abortion clinic last week and as with hundreds of other acts of right-wing domestic terror -- a far more serious threat statistically than terrorism caused by Islamic radicals or foreign groups -- the fringe right's propensity to engage in terrorist tactics are a natural consequence -- a predictable consequence of their "eliminationist" rhetoric -- rhetoric based on the idea that your political opponents don't just disagree with you, but are undermining your culture/nation/race and threatening your existence, and therefore must be destroyed -- in one sense or another -- rather than compromised with (see Bruce Wilson, below, for more recent examples).

In terms of immigration specifically, given the choice -- the conscious choice -- to frame the issue as an "invasion" of marauding foreigners coming to "re-conquer" the U.S. -- a group that's supposedly unwilling to assimilate as previous generations of immigrants did but is bent on undermining our very civilization -- it should be no surprise that some would embrace that fiction to a degree that they'd take up arms to "defend" their country. It's the Minutemen taken to the next logical step -- if you can't stop 'em at the border, shoot 'em where they stand.

Where might they have gotten the idea?

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/51370/

fringe right "eliminationist" rhetoric ~

...rhetoric based on the idea that your political opponents don't just disagree with you, but are undermining your culture/nation/race and threatening your existence, and therefore must be destroyed...

hmmmmm....has a familiar ring.....

posted July 13, 2007 06:43 PM            

quote:

---

So, liberals love to discuss ideas, they're open minded, open to debate....not along rock throwing lines but debate with facts being the arrows in everyone's quiver.

---

Too bad in this area you leave much to be desired, Jwhop. You'd be doing youself a favor by learning from these liberals.

posted July 13, 2007 09:44 PM              

radical conservative vegan punk band...

Vegan Reich, formed in 1987, was one of the more controversial bands to emerge from the hardcore punk and metalcore scenes. They were also the first rock band to combine militant animal rights leanings, an extreme conservative stance against drugs, sex and abortion, a desire for anarchy to be preceded by a so-called "vegan dictatorship," a harsh stance against racism and sexism, and an almost religious intolerance of homosexuality.