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Supreme Court Forces GOP to Seek New Bogus Issues for 2016 |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=9160"><span class="small">Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker</span></a>
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Monday, 29 June 2015 13:19 |
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Borowitz writes: "With gay marriage and Obamacare effectively taken off the table, the Republicans now find themselves without a signature phony issue to disingenuously flog for the next sixteen months."
The Supreme Court. (photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)
Supreme Court Forces GOP to Seek New Bogus Issues for 2016
By Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
29 June 15
 The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report." 
 ith its landmark decisions this week, the United States Supreme Court has sent the Republican Party scrambling to find entirely new bogus issues to pound away at during the 2016 campaign.
With gay marriage and Obamacare effectively taken off the table, the Republicans now find themselves without a signature phony issue to disingenuously flog for the next sixteen months.
But according to the Republican National Committee chairman, Reince Priebus, the Party is already conducting an exhaustive search to find “fresh new spurious positions” to shamelessly distract voters during the upcoming campaign.
“Twenty-foot border fence, national voter I.D. cards, abolition of the I.R.S., mandatory transvaginal ultrasounds,” Priebus said. “Back at R.N.C. headquarters, we’ve got a wall of three-by-five cards filled with crap like that.”
Priebus acknowledged that the loss of Obamacare and gay marriage as issues had dealt a serious blow to the G.O.P.’s supply of meaningless talking points, but he claimed that the Party would come back with even more insincere rhetoric than before. “Anyone who thinks we’ve run out of b.s. is sorely mistaken,” he said.
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FOCUS: No, GOP, Biblical Marriage Was Not Between One Man and One Woman |
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Monday, 29 June 2015 10:49 |
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Cole writes: "In any case, the Bible doesn't actually say anything at all about homosexuality, since it is a form of identity that only came into being in modernity. (Same-sex intimacy has been there all along, but in most premodern societies it was not a subculture, though medieval male bortherhoods were common and in South Asia there were hijras)."
Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee. (photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)
No, GOP, Biblical Marriage Was Not Between One Man and One Woman
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment
29 June 15
 he freak-out by the Republican presidential candidates over the Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage provokes me to revise and reprise the points below. Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee have formally pledged: “We will not honor any decision by the Supreme Court which will force us to violate a clear biblical understanding of marriage as solely the union of one man and one woman.” Sen. Ted Cruz also called on Americans to ignore the SCOTUS ruling.
Does that mean the rest of us can repudiate the decision making W. president in 2000, and can refuse to recognize corporations as persons?
In any case, the Bible doesn’t actually say anything at all about homosexuality, since it is a form of identity that only came into being in modernity. (Same-sex intimacy has been there all along, but in most premodern societies it was not a subculture, though medieval male bortherhoods were common and in South Asia there were hijras).
But wackiest of all is the idea that the Bible sees marriage as between one man and one woman. I don’t personally get how you could, like, actually read the Bible and come to that conclusion (see below). Even if you wanted to argue that the New Testament abrogates all the laws in the Hebrew Bible, there isn’t anything in the NT that clearly forbids polygamy, either, and it was sometimes practiced in the early church, including by priests. Josephus makes it clear that polygamy was still practiced among the Jews of Jesus’ time. Any attempt to shoe-horn stray statements in the New Testament about a man and a woman being married into a commandment of monogamy is anachronistic. Likely it was the Roman Empire that established Christian monogamy as a norm over the centuries. The Church was not even allowed to marry people until well after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, since it was an imperial prerogative.
Ancient scripture can be a source of higher values and spiritual strength, but any time you in a literal-minded way impose specific legal behavior because of it, you’re committing anachronism. Since this is the case, fundamentalists are always highly selective, trying to impose parts of the scripture on us but conveniently ignoring the parts even they can’t stomach as modern persons.
1. In Exodus 21:10 it is clearly written of the husband: “If he takes another wife to himself, he shall not diminish the food, clothing, or marital rights of the first wife.” This is the same rule as the Qur’an in Islam, that another wife can only be taken if the two are treated equally.
2. Let’s take Solomon, who maintained 300 concubines or sex slaves. 1 Kings 11:3: “He had seven hundred wives of royal birth and three hundred concubines, and his wives led him astray.” Led him astray! That’s all the Bible minded about this situation? Abducting 300 people and keeping them immured for sex? And the objection is only that they had a lot of diverse religions and interested Solomon in them? (By the way, this is proof that he wasn’t Jewish but just a legendary Canaanite polytheist). I think a settled gay marriage is rather healthier than imprisoning 300 people in your house to have sex with at your whim.
3. Not only does the Bible authorize slavery and human trafficking, but it urges slaves to “submit themselves” to their masters. It should be remembered that masters had sexual rights over their property assuming the slave-woman was not betrothed to another, and so this advice is intended for concubines as well as other slaves. And, the Bible even suggests that slaves quietly accept sadism and cruelty from their masters: 1 Peter 2:18: “Slaves, submit yourselves to your masters with all respect, not only to the good and gentle but also to the cruel.” So a nice gay marriage between two legal equals with no acts of cruelty would be much better than this biblical nightmare.
4. Then there is Abraham, who made a sex slave of his wife’s slave, the Egyptian girl Hagar, and then abandoned her to cruel treatment.
Genesis 16:1-6:
“Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, had borne him no children. But she had an Egyptian slave named Hagar; 2 so she said to Abram, “The Lord has kept me from having children. Go, sleep with my slave; perhaps I can build a family through her.” Abram agreed to what Sarai said. 3 So after Abram had been living in Canaan ten years, Sarai his wife took her Egyptian slave Hagar and gave her to her husband to be his wife. 4 He slept with Hagar, and she conceived. When she knew she was pregnant, she began to despise her mistress. 5 Then Sarai said to Abram, “You are responsible for the wrong I am suffering. I put my slave in your arms, and now that she knows she is pregnant, she despises me. May the Lord judge between you and me.” 6 “Your slave is in your hands,” Abram said. “Do with her whatever you think best.” Then Sarai mistreated Hagar; so she fled from her.
So let’s get this straight. Abraham isn’t said to have married Hagar. Apparently he and Sarah had separate property, because Hagar remains her slave. So he slept with someone else’s slave and got her pregnant. And then when that caused trouble between his wife and her slave, he washed his hands of his property-lover and let his wife mistreat her. As we know from 1 Peter, Hagar was supposed graciously to put up with this, but she was made of fiercer stuff than that, and you really have to root for her in this rather sick family situation.
5. According Mark 12:19, guys, if your brother kicks the bucket, you have to marry your sister-in-law and knock her up. Since the Bible approved of multiple wives, you have to do this even if you’re already married. If you think in-laws are hard to get along with now, try being married to them.
6. So I don’t think this happens very much, but guys, in biblical marriage you might have to cut your wife’s hand off if she defends you too vigorously. That’s right. Say you’re at a bar and this big bald badass with tats starts smashing your face in. And say your wife likes you and wants to stop the guy from giving you a concussion. Say she reaches down and gets him by the balls. So the Bible would reward her for loyalty and bravery and fast thinking, right?
Nope. Now you have to cut off her hand. I mean have to. You’re not allowed to have a moment of weakness and think about how pretty her fingers are. Off with it, to the wrist
GOP, you think I’m making this up, right?
Deuteronomy 25:11-12: “11 If two men are fighting and the wife of one of them comes to rescue her husband from his assailant, and she reaches out and seizes him by his private parts, 12 you shall cut off her hand. Show her no pity.”
I’m not sure exactly what kind of weird marriage Deuteronomy is recommending, where certain actions taken by they wife to keep herself from being turned into a widow are punished by her husband by chopping off her hand.
7. The Bible doesn’t even approve of marriage at all! 1 Corinthians 7:8 “To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is well for them to remain single as I do.” So contrary to the GOP’s notion that the Bible authorizes only a single kind of marriage, of which it approves, actually it much prefers believers to die out in a single generation. Only the weak and unbiblical get married.
So this is the real problem. People like Huckabee and Cruz shouldn’t be married in the first place, much less holding up some imaginary ideal of biblical marriage for everybody. And if all the biblical literalists would just obey 1 Corinthians, the whole problem would be over with in just a generation. Then the rest of us could get some peace and make rational policy on social issues.
And as for getting married biblically, you can do that in all kinds of imaginative ways– take two wives and someone else’s sex slave as Abraham did, or 300 sex slaves as Solomon did (not to mention the 700 wives), or your brother’s widow in addition to your own wife. And remember, if your sex slave runs away because you’re cruel to the person, the Bible (Philemon) says that other people have the duty to return the slave to you, i.e. basically imposes the duty of trafficking slaves back to sadistic sex maniacs who exploit them. But if the owner is nice and a good Christian, he might consider letting the sex slave go. But he doesn’t have to.
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Think It's Cool Facebook Can Auto-Tag You in Pics? So Does the Government |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=29990"><span class="small">Trevor Timm, Guardian UK</span></a>
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Monday, 29 June 2015 08:28 |
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Timm writes: "Our own government, as well as police and intelligence agencies around the world, will likely mine facial recognition data or create their own databases."
Facebook. (photo: Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP/Getty Images)
Think It's Cool Facebook Can Auto-Tag You in Pics? So Does the Government
By Trevor Timm, Guardian UK
29 June 15
Our own government, as well as police and intelligence agencies around the world, will likely mine facial recognition data or create their own databases
 tate-of-the-art facial recognition technology, which had been the stuff of hypothetical privacy nightmares for years, is becoming a startling reality. It is increasingly being deployed all around the United States by giant tech companies, shady advertisers and the FBI – with few if any rules to stop it.
In recent weeks, both Facebook and Google launched facial recognition to mine the photos on your phone, with both impressive and disturbing results. Facebook’s Moments app can recognize you even if you cover your face. Google Photos can identify grown adults from decades-old childhood pictures.
Some people might find it neat when it’s only restricted to photos on their phone. But advertisers, security companies and just plain creepy authority figures have also set up their own systems at music festivals, sporting events and even some churches to monitor attendees, which is bound to disturb even those who don’t give a second thought to issues like the NSA’s mass surveillance programs.
Making matters worse, advertisers have apparently indicated that they have no intention of restricting their technology whatsoever. Their refusal caused nine major civil liberties groups to pull out of talks with the advertisers that were aimed to come to an agreement on how companies could institute voluntary protections for the people whose faceprints will inevitably be vacuumed up into their databases. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Jennifer Lynch wrote, “After 16 months of active engagement in the process, we decided this week it was no longer an effective use of our resources to continue in a process where companies wouldn’t even agree to the most modest measures to protect privacy.”
(While Facebook and Google rolled out their new facial recognition technology in the US, they haven’t attempted it in Europe, where privacy regulators already warned them they needed to let users opt-in before even experimenting with EU citizens’ photos. No such warnings were given in the US.)
Countless advertisers will undoubtedly use these sophisticated snooping capabilities to rake in dollars in stores, at events and on public streets. But the bigger, more troubling question is how our own government, as well as law enforcement and intelligence agencies around the world, will mine this data or create their own facial recognition databases to increase their already powerful surveillance apparatus.
We know they’ve already started. Last year, the FBI’s massive “next generation” facial recognition database went “fully operational.” But we’ve heard little about how it works and how it’s being used since; the FBI has, as is its modus operandi, attempted to keep it secret from the public. (A judge ruled last year in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that there was a “significant public interest” in the FBI becoming more forthcoming about its plans.)
The little public comment they have made has not exactly inspired confidence. As the National Journal reported, FBI Director James Comey “told Congress that the database would not collect or store photos of ordinary citizens, and instead is designed to ‘find bad guys by matching pictures to mug shots.’” He didn’t adequately explain why documents obtained by EFF showed that the FBI was populating its database with millions of completely innocent people’s photos.
When local law enforcement get their hands on the technology, it could have a devastating impact on low-income and minority communities when combined with technology that was supposed to make cops more accountable. Police body cameras could conceivably be combined with facial recognition technology to map the movements of whole towns of people just by having officers walk the streets.
Given how some municipalities are already preying on people in poverty by issuing untold number of warrants for arrests involving unpaid parking ticket fines and other minor crimes, this could only aid them in the rampant overcriminalization problem in this country. For example, in Ferguson – a town of 21,000 – there are 16,000 outstanding warrants for arrest. Now imagine all of the police officers who are going to be wearing body cameras that can identify every person they pass.
This may sound like a far-off science fiction, but at least one police force in Canada is already trying to implement facial recognition into their body cameras. So it begins.
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The Amazing Grace of Bree Newsome |
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Monday, 29 June 2015 08:27 |
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Taylor writes: "Just one day after President Obama eulogized a slain pastor and state senator, rousing a packed arena with a centuries-old hymn, it was the amazing grace of a young black woman that gave its lyrics a new and profound meaning."
Bree Newsome being arrested. (photo: Dante Berry/Instagram)
The Amazing Grace of Bree Newsome
By Goldie Taylor, Blue Nation Review
29 June 15
  mazing grace, how sweet the sound…”
Just one day after President Obama eulogized a slain pastor and state senator, rousing a packed arena with a centuries-old hymn, it was the amazing grace of a young black woman that gave its lyrics a new and profound meaning.
“For too long, we were blind to the pain that the Confederate flag stirred in too many of our citizens,” the president said Friday, becoming the first Commander-in-Chief to address the issue head-on. “By taking down that flag, we express God’s grace,” he said to deafening applause at the memorial service for Rev. Clementa Pinckney.
Grace, according to Scripture, is a divine promise. Brittany “Bree” Newsome delivered on that promise and, with her courageous act of civil disobedience, told a nation: We cannot wait. Not another day, not another hour.
The emblem was initially raised in 1961 by South Carolina lawmakers, who joined other southern states to re-design state flags nearly 100 years after the Civil War and in defiance of civil rights gains sweeping the nation. Flown by the Klu Klux Klan and other hate groups, it was embraced by a terrorist– a 21-year-old white supremacist who assassinated Rev. Pinckney and eight others victims at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. His goal was to incite a “race war.” But, as the confessed shooter sat alone in jail unable to make a $1 million bond, the people of Charleston rose not in strife, but in solidarity. The fight to remove the flag from state grounds was reignited.
“It would be a betrayal to everything Rev. Pinckney stood for if we allow ourselves to slip into a comfortable silence again,” Obama said in a live broadcast. “To settle for symbolic gestures without following up with the hard work of more lasting change, that’s how we lose our way again.”
The Confederate flag, he said with nearly 50 members of Congress in the audience, is a symbol of “systemic oppression and racial subjugation.”
President Obama is in the second half of his second term and will, no doubt, never run for public office again. His grace and candor, even in these times, are welcomed yet amazing still. Others, it seems, were unable to muster the same political courage. Still others exploited the white nationalist fervor that surrounds it. Notably, former President Ronald Reagan, in an implicit—if not explicit– nod to the Confederacy, launched his 1980 campaign in Neshoba County, Mississippi, extolling the virtues of “states rights.” Reagan sailed into office on platform baked in white populism.
Thirty-five years later, a sitting black president implored an audience to acknowledge and fight racial prejudices that persist not only in private gestures, but those enshrined in societal structures—including housing, employment and the justice system.
“So that we’re guarding against not just racial slurs but we’re also guarding against the subtle impulse to call Johnny back for a job interview but not Jamal,” Obama said.
He began singing a centuries old hymn that has become a mainstay in historically African-American churches. But, if Obama stunned more than 5,500 mourners in singing “Amazing Grace”— the lyrics written by a former slaveholder who went on to become a staunch abolitionist—it was Newsome who shocked the conscience of a nation.
The hashtag #FreeBree has been trending worldwide since she scaled a metal pole, using a climbing harness. She quoted scripture on her way down. “You come at me with hatred, I come to you in the name of God,” Newsome reportedly said.
There was no Congressional delegation present, no booming sermon from a pulpit, no cheering crowds upon her descent, no waiting caravan protected by the Secret Service waiting to ferry her home, no cable news outlets there to capture the iconic moment.
The South Carolina state legislature faces the question now, as we did in Georgia more than two decades ago, whether to permanently remove the Confederate battle flag from statehouse grounds. Imbued with the grace of our ancestors, Newsome said in a statement, “We removed the flag today because we can’t wait any longer. We can’t continue another day. It’s time for a new chapter where we are sincere about dismantling white supremacy and building toward true racial justice and equality.”
In this hour, I cannot help but to believe that Newsome donned a harness and scaled that pole, not only in the cause of social justice, but also in honor of the martyred.
We should know and call them by name.
Pastor Clementa Pinckney
Cynthia Hurd
Rev. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton
Rev. Daniel Simmons
Tywanza Sanders
Ethel Lance
Susie Jackson
Depayne Middleton Doctor
Myra Thompson
Top Row: Rev Clementa Pinckney, Ethel Lance, Rev. Daniel Simmons, Rev. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Myra Thompson Bottom Row: Cynthia Hurd, Tywanza Sanders, Susie Jackson, Depayne Middleton Doctor
Tearfully, some 22 years after I led a coalition of 500 college students to the steps of the Georgia Capitol and burned a Confederate flag, I watched as Newsome quietly, yet powerfully, placed her hands behind her back to be arrested. In doing so, she embodied the very soul of a union not yet perfected. “It must come down!” I said in 1993, not knowing what manner and measure of grace would fill my shoes.
“Are you the Messiah we’ve been expecting, or should we keep looking for?” John the Baptist said from a prison cell. “Are You the Expected One, or shall we look for someone else?” John asked when he heard the works of the Christ.
It seems that, like John, we await a Savior when they stand plentiful in our midst.
“We are the ones we have been waiting for”, then U.S. Senator Barack Obama famously said in 2008. I cannot help but to believe he was talking about Bree Newsome and the many like her who take up the charge of social justice.
We cannot wait. Not another day, not another hour.
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t was one of those weeks, this past week. A week in which we witnessed profound history being made. A week when a large chunk was taken out of the wall of hate that criss-crosses this country, a nation founded on genocide and built on the backs of slaves. A people who pride themselves on being ignorant, and thus are easily manipulated with fear by those in power. We know the routine, we've tallied up the score. 
