Larry Flynt's Blog, page 18

Inside the Koch Brother’s War Room

by Brad Friedman

A thank-you card seems like the appropriate response for having reaped a cool $18 billion under the administration of President Barack Obama, especially during the worst economy in nearly a century. But that’s not the Koch brothers’ style. Because Obama, no matter how Republican he acts, is actually a Democrat. And, dammit, being two of the richest people in the entire nation just isn’t rich enough for either of the far-right Republican Koch boys.

Instead, the brothers—worth $25 billion each, tying them for fourth place on the latest Forbes list of the 400 wealthiest Americans— want more. And they’re declaring “war” to get it—not just any war but the “Mother of All Wars,” states Charles Koch, co-owner with brother David of Koch Industries, the massive oil and chemical conglomerate they inherited from their daddy.

You can hear his declaration yourself thanks to covert audiotapes, which I obtained from a source, that recorded the brothers’ secret political-strategy and fundraising powwow held last summer at a ritzy resort near Vail, Colorado. The Kochs—corporate funders of the fake “grassroots” Tea Party and Republican front groups like Americans for Prosperity—have been convening these biannual, ultraexclusive, ultraconfidential soirees for years. You and I aren’t invited. Neither are the workingclass chumps and suckers they’ve hoaxed into calling themselves members of the Tea Party. Those patsies are just doing the dirty work for the very dirty Koch Industries—this country’s second-largest private company, a major polluter and (surprise!) a leading climate change denier.

Over the years, the Kochs have been forced to pay some $400 million in fines, penalties, settlements and judgments; have stolen nearly 2 million barrels of oil from native Americans, according to former Koch Industries officials; and have allegedly bribed their way into at least half a dozen foreign countries.

One is Iran, where the company’s German subsidiary made millions in petrochemical sales despite a long-standing U.S. trade ban. The Kochs are not patriots. They are profiteers. So who exactly was invited to the Kochs’ conclave? Folks like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, all manner of elected officials with Rs after their names—like Governor Rick Perry (R-Texas), Governor Chris Christie (R-New Jersey), Governor John Kasich (R-Ohio), Representative Paul Ryan (R-Minnesota)—and even a pair of U.S. Supreme Court justices, namely Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

You can go to BradBlog.com for the transcripts and audio recorded inside the Kochs’ 2011 Summer Seminar at the Ritz- Carlton Beaver Creek Resort in Bachelor Gulch, Colorado. As usual, the brothers went to extraordinary measures to keep the affair private, going so far as to mount huge speakers to blast static “pink noise” into the surrounding mountains to keep outsiders from listening to their plans.

One theme came up, time and again, by speaker after speaker: the need to collect enough money to fund “the Mother of All Wars we’ve got in the next 18 months,” as Charles Koch explained in his opening remarks, “for the life or death of this country.” He even seemed to compare the President of the United States to the former dictator of Iraq. “We’ve got Saddam Hussein,” Charles Koch proclaimed to the 300 or so corporate barons and political bigwigs in attendance. It was his warm-up for what would be the first of many pleas for still more “war” money over the three-day conference.

After I broke the story, Koch Industries— which refused to respond to my request for an explanation beforehand— claimed Charles wasn’t comparing President Obama to Saddam Hussein. His remarks, according to a statement issued in haste by Koch spokesman Philip Ellender after the story came out, were just “taken out of context” by “far-left groups.”

“Far-left groups” like myself, an independent citizen, journalist and blogger, I guess. For the record, here’s the context: After taking the mic before the first night’s dinner, Charles Koch made a quick joke about Koch Industries leaving him, the CEO, to do the “dirty work that needs to be done.” He then offered the following thoughts: “But we’ve been talking about—we have Saddam Hussein,” Charles said. “This is the Mother of All Wars we’ve got in the next 18 months for the life or death of this country. So I’m not going to do this to put any pressure on anyone here, mind you. This is not pressure. But if this makes your heart feel glad, and you want to be more forthcoming, then so be it.”

Charles then announced he wanted to “recognize not all of our great partners but those partners who have given more than a billion—a mill-, no, billion.” The crowd went wild with hoots and applause at his gaffe. He meant “a million,” but when you’re personally worth $25 billion, it’s an easy mistake to make. That was the context.

What did he mean in his reference to Saddam Hussein? In his ass-covering statement, Ellender struggled to justify it: “To be clear, Mr. Koch was not referring to President Obama in his remarks. The ‘Mother of All Wars’ is a common phrase frequently attributed to Saddam Hussein on the eve of the first Gulf War. Amid record U.S. unemployment, continued economic decline and loss of liberty, the U.S. has been plunged into its own ‘Mother of All Wars.’”

As for the “record U.S. unemployment” Ellender mentioned, let’s not forget to thank the Koch brothers for that as well. Even as their personal fortunes exploded by 40% over the past three years of Obama’s “tyrannical” and “antibusiness” rule, Koch Industries managed to lay off thousands of its own workers.

During his closing remarks, Charles would once again repeat the words of the Iraqi dictator. “We’ve had a lot of tough battles,” he stated. “We’ve lost a lot over the years, and we’ve won some recently. Set the stage for, as I’ve said, the mother of all battles coming up a year from [last] November.” Those remarks are also posted verbatim at BradBlog.com. Nothing is “taken out of context.”

Regarding “some” victories, Charles is most likely referring to the U.S. Supreme Court’s infamous 2010 Citizens United decision allowing for unlimited, secret spending on political campaigns by guys like Charles and David Koch, who have already spent some $100 million in support of their political causes. These include, among other things, buying Republican lawmakers ($11 million since 1989), creating an imaginary uprising after 2008 called the “Tea Party” (since “Sore Loser Party” doesn’t sound as good) and funding right-wing think tanks (Cato Institute, Americans for Prosperity, FreedomWorks) to the tune of $200 million since 1998.

They also spent $33 million just in 2008 and 2009 on studies and front groups to create the impression that thousands of climate scientists who all agree about global warming don’t actually know anything about the phenomenon. (The University of Massachusetts dubbed Koch Industries the tenth-worst U.S. corporate air polluter.)

It wasn’t only the Kochs who spoke of the “war…for the life or death of this country.” The opening-night keynote speaker, Chris Christie (who kept the trip a complete secret from the press and his constituents alike), offered similar ideas. “Under this administration,” the New Jersey governor explained during his stemwinder of a speech, the future of this country “is at greater risk than it has been in my lifetime.” “Their ideas are wrong, and our ideas are right,” Christie declared.

“If we’re going to win this fight, it’s the people in this room that are gonna win it,” he went on to tell the collected billionaires. “It’s the people in this room who have enjoyed all the greatness that America gives us the opportunity to enjoy. They’re going to be the 21st-century patriots who are going to preserve liberty and freedom and opportunity for the next generation. … We’ve got to stand up and fight for the country we’ve inherited.”

Christie continued, “That’s why I’m here tonight. I’m here because it will be you, the people in this room, that are the modern-day patriots who will save this country or let it go by the wayside. It’s up to us. … We cannot let our children down. We cannot let our country down. We cannot let the world down.” After a Q&A session, the tough-talking Jersey governor finished with similar thoughts: “This is a huge moment of crisis and opportunity for our country. All of you are the people who are going to lead us back to American greatness— if you care enough to do it. I can tell you, if you do, you’ve got a friend in that fight.”

To be clear, Christie and the other speakers were warning that those in that room—many of them among the 400 richest Americans, with more combined wealth than the poorest 140 million citizens of this nation—need to take back control of the country in order to save it. These folks are not big believers in democracy— unless they can buy it away from all us poor saps who thought “one man, one vote” actually still applied in the good old U.S. of A.

The closing night’s featured speaker, Judge Andrew Napolitano of Fox News, rallied the assemblage with more of the same ideas but brought them up a notch. He explained how the Second Amendment had been adopted to ensure “the right to shoot at the government.” Really? That might be news to the Secret Service.

“If anybody tells you the Second Amendment is here to protect hunters,” the former federal judge instructed, “they are intentionally distorting history. It was written to let us attack tyrants!” A disturbing suggestion, given all of the rhetoric characterizing the Obama Administration as “tyrannical.”

Napolitano went on to let the “poor” billionaires and millionaires on hand know that they’d really be up against it if the dastardly Barack Obama continued his ways. (Ya know, his ways of extending the Bush tax cuts for the rich, continuing to allow record expansion of oil drilling, not to mention watching as corporate profits reached all-time historic highs while folks like the Kochs laid off thousands of American workers at the very same time.)

“So what do we do?” Napolitano asked. “We do what you’re doing here. We wage a lawful battle against the government. We amass the wealth that is necessary to take the government on.” In other words, the wealth necessary to flood the airwaves with right-wing propaganda.

“What does the government fear the most?” Napolitano said near the end of his speech, ratcheting up the fear and loathing to its scariest crescendo. “I think the government fears fear. I’m afraid the government is going to take the property and the freedom of everybody in this room.”

The titans fell silent. Not that! Not our property and freedom! Of course, for these people, “freedom” is the license to keep ripping off workingclass Americans with tax loopholes nobody else gets, offshore banking, outsourced jobs and Wall Street “capitalism” (privatize the profits and socialize the losses by making us bail them out).

“The government should fear that we will take its power away from it and put it into the hands of worthy custodians of our freedom,” Napolitano added as he finished with a quote by antisocialist John Basil Barnhill—one often misattributed to Thomas Jefferson, as the ex-judge once again did that night. (Hey, he works at Fox “News”; accuracy isn’t a high priority there!)

“Jefferson articulated this,” Napolitano uttered to the hushed room, “when he said, ‘When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. When the government fears the people, there is liberty.’” The crowd at the Beaver Creek Resort went wild. It was still abuzz as Charles Koch retook the stage to rally the troops for the final time, once again reminding them of the “Mother of All Wars” ahead. “We’re overwhelmed in a number of areas,” he said, “and one of those areas, of course, is the media—and we’re overwhelmed. The media’s 90- plus percent against us.”

Of course, many of these billionaires own the media, if not outright, then certainly through their ability to withhold advertising dollars.

Reminding his listeners what all of this is really about, Charles Koch asked them one last time to open their wallets. “I’ve pledged to all of you who’ve stepped forward and are partnering with us that we are absolutely going to do our utmost to invest this money wisely and get the best possible payoff for you in the future of our country.”

It may be war, but it’s all about the payoff. Theirs, not ours. As far as they’re concerned, you and I, the working class of this country—who’ve experienced the real pain over the past decade, who’ve died in the real shooting wars (as opposed to the Kochs’ pretend wars), who’ve seen our homes illegally foreclosed, our pensions wiped out, our jobs outsourced—can go straight to hell. Meanwhile, the very men in that pavilion at Bachelor Gulch have seen their own fortunes skyrocket to all-time historic highs.

But then again, as it’s said, war is hell. For us, not them. They just play toy soldier—at least when they think the rest of us aren’t actually aware of what they are up to. Brad Friedman is a Los Angeles-based investigative journalist and political commentator. Besides cohosting radio’s nationally syndicated Green News Report, he is the executive editor and publisher of The Brad Blog (BradBlog.com).

Ann Coulter

When the name Ann Coulter is mentioned, a flood of words comes to mind: mean, angry, extremist, conservative, inflammatory, hideous, arrogant, male. Regarding that last adjective, we are speaking specifically of a male who is angry because he looks like a woman—sort of. You could throw the adjective ugly into the mix, but that’s probably redundant. Seriously, how many men have you seen in a dress who are good-looking?

What we’ve just said about the author and pundit would be out of bounds were it not for the fact that everything Ann Coulter says is out of bounds. Here are some examples:

“If I’m going to say anything about John Edwards in the future, I’ll just wish he had been killed in a terrorist assassination plot.”

“We should invade their [Islamic] countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.” “I think [women] should be armed but should not vote. … Women have no capacity to understand how money is earned. They have a lot of ideas on how to spend it…it’s always more money on education, more money on child care, more money on day care.’’

In the last quote, Coulter actually seems to acknowledge she’s not a woman. We presume the neocon believes she should have the right to vote. And her words make it crystal clear that Coulter knows she does not think the way women do.

It has long been postulated—by HUSTLER and others—that Ann Coulter is a hermaphrodite or is intersexed with scrambled genes. One disorder linked to intersexing is Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, which can cause males to be born with underdeveloped genitals or even female sex organs, including a vagina. Screwed up chromosomes could explain 6-foot-tall Ann’s boyish figure and Adam’s apple.

It’s worth noting that investigative reporter Brad Friedman, writing for this magazine in April 2008, stated that on June 15, 2005, when Coulter filled out an application to become a Florida voter, she left blank the section specifying sex. Supplying false information on such a document is a third-degree felony that could result in a $5,000 fine and/or five years in prison. But enough about Coulter’s mutant sexuality. The reason she appears here has more to do with her stated political beliefs. Let’s take a look at them.

Taxes: Coulter is against raising taxes on millionaires but is in favor of raising taxes on the poor. Specifically, she wants the 47% of American citizens who don’t pay taxes to start ponying up. Those are the people at or below the poverty line; they can’t afford to pay taxes.

Social Security: Coulter wants to end the FDR legacy—immediately. She’s said “there are the 39 million greedy geezers collecting Social Security. The Greatest Generation rewarded itself with a pretty big meal.” According to Ann, Social Security is a “Ponzi scheme” that she wants to “destroy…root and branch.” Of course, it’s not a Ponzi scheme. Social Security is a retirement program paid for by working people and their employers. What’s despicable is that the Republicans, including Coulter, would love to steal that massive trove of money to help pay down the national debt. It won’t bother Ann to see our streets clogged with senior citizens living under bridges and begging for food.

Afghanistan: Coulter wants the United States out of there the day after tomorrow if not sooner. Sounds good, right? But that’s only her position because President Barack Obama is for a slower withdrawal of troops. As recently as 2010, Coulter was saying “bombs are the answer.” Going back farther still, she said the war in Afghanistan was going “swimmingly,” and before that she justified the war because it was “against fundamentalism”— Islamic fundamentalism, not Christian.

Health insurance: Coulter wants insurers to be able to sell policies across state lines. Her thinking is that the resulting competition would drive down insurance rates. However, according to the Congressional Budget Office, while young people who are healthy would, in fact, pay less for their health insurance, older people—those most likely to get sick—would pay more. But the real problem is that health insurance providers would all flock to the state with the most favorable regulations. To put it another way, these companies would relocate to the state where they could most easily screw the people they insure.

We saw this with the credit card industry. Citibank literally wrote the regulations for the state of South Dakota as a requisite for basing its credit card operations there. No surprise: Other credit card issuers quickly set up shop in South Dakota as well. That’s why your credit card company is able to screw you with astronomical interest rates and hidden fees.

Regardless of her sex, Ann Coulter is a pig. She has absolutely no empathy and no concern for average working people. We annoy her. That’s largely because she was born into a life of privilege. Her father was an attorney for Phelps Dodge Corporation, a mining company believed to be responsible for as many as 13 toxic waste sites in violation of federal environmental regulations. (Ann’s dad was a pig as well.)

It’s not a big leap to say his daughter was raised to view all but the top 1% as worthless peasants. Looking at Ann through that lens, all of her positions and pronouncements finally come into focus.

Message to Ann Coulter: Blow yourself. Seriously. Put that thing between your legs into your mouth and suck on it until you come. It’s up to you if you want to swallow.

Immoral Values Republican

HOW THE HELL IS HOLIER-THANTHOU HYPOCRITE NEWT GINGRICH STILL A KEY PLAYER IN THE GOP?

by Robert Scheer

There’s hope yet for Larry Flynt. If a total sleazebag like Newt Gingrich can be embraced by the so-called Christian Right the way he has been in the Republican primaries, then a mere pornographer like Flynt should easily attain salvation or at least have a credible run for the Presidency. Even in his heyday, Larry may have been truly decadent, but he wasn’t ever the outrageous hypocrite that Newt—the darling of the “family values” Republicans— represents.

Can you imagine the gall of a politician, who claims to fear the judgment of the Almighty, going to the hospital to tell his cancer-stricken wife Jackie that he’s leaving her for another woman? Then, after 19 years of marriage to that other woman, demanding—as second jilted wife Marianne Ginther told ABC News in that famous January 2012 interview—that she consent to an open marriage so he could go on fornicating with one of the young Congressional staffers who was working for him during his reign as Speaker of the House? And then having sex with that much younger aide, Callista Bisek, in the very bed he had shared with wife Marianne, at the very time he was condemning the President of the United States (Bill Clinton) for merely getting a blowjob in the White House?

Gingrich has the arrogance to blame his infidelities, as he did in an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network, on his love not of women but of country: “There is no question at times of my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard, and things happened in my life that were not appropriate.” That’s one Clinton should have used to explain away his more muted dalliance with an intern.

At least Clinton stuck by his wife, as scripture dictates, but not so for Gingrich, who looked to marry arm-candy as a way of distracting from his own terminally frumpy appearance. Then he sought to shroud that sordid affair with the sanctity of the Roman Catholic Church by seeking an annulment of his marriage to Marianne to wed the never-married Callista in a Catholic house of worship.

You can just hear Newt telling some archbishop, “Hey, she’s a heterosexual adult. And anyway, if you give me a hard time, I’ll tell my Republican buddies in Congress to go after your tax-exempt status.”

The issue is hypocrisy. If Gingrich hadn’t built a career on being holier-than thou and blasting secular liberals for destroying the moral fiber of the nation, I wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about his extramarital affairs. But to have this guy in the public eye—for decades!—blaming everything from the depressed state of the economy to our inability to win unwinnable wars (that he supported) on our loss of religious values represents the deep rot of this moralizing demagogue.

What better cover than to embrace the Catholic faith of his latest squeeze? Newt claims to have been deeply moved by the church’s teachings while he accompanied his mistress to Mass during the six years that he and Callista were having extramarital sex. Gingrich deems Catholicism important as a source of morality not because it might compel him to stop shtupping his mistress but rather because of “the crisis of secularism” that he maintains the Roman Catholic Church fought against as it swept through Europe and which now threatens the moral fiber of the United States.

To listen to the pope, you would think that the crisis was manifested precisely by the high rate of marital infidelity and divorce of which Gingrich was an avid devotee. But Newt is adept at turning history to his advantage, particularly when it involves those “elites” that fail to celebrate him.

In April 2011, as Gingrich was preparing to run for President, he delivered these words at a National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in the nation’s capital: “The American elites are guided by their desire to emulate the European elites, and as a result, antireligious values and principles are coming to dominate the academic, news media and judicial class in America.”

Even though Gingrich and others of his ideological ilk have dominated the selection of judges in recent decades, he singled out the “coercive secularism dominating our courts” as a major source of America’s downfall. The message must be that if only the Southern Baptist Church— to which Gingrich belonged for the first 66 years of his life—had been freer to erect crosses in public places, he could have been saved from his own sinful behavior.

Newt, a product of decades of hoary Baptists preaching on sin, needed to turn to Catholic priests for a sterner example of sexual restraint? Or is it that he just had to get it on with a blond chippy half his age, and the Roman Catholic Church is so besieged by criminal and civil lawsuits over its own sexual transgressions that its hierarchy was more than eager to whitewash this powerful politician’s sins so that he could have a shot at the Presidency?

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Before serving almost 30 years as a Los Angeles Times columnist and editor, Robert Scheer spent the late 1960s as Vietnam correspondent, managing editor and editor in chief of Ramparts magazine. Now editor of TruthDig.com, Scheer has written such hardhitting books as The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America and his latest, The Great American Stick-Up: Greedy Bankers and the

Politicians Who Love Them.

The End Of Habeas Corpus

In New Year’s Eve 2011, President Barack Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act into law. This bill further erodes our civil liberties by allowing the President to indefinitely detain—hold without legal counsel—anyone he declares to be a terrorist, including American citizens. Even though President Obama, in a signing statement, claimed he would never use this power, he now has that ability. And so will any future President.

Back in 1945, at the end of World War II, American journalist Milton Mayer went to Germany to find out why the Nazis had been allowed to destroy that country’s civil liberties. One of the Germans Mayer interviewed for his book They Thought They Were Free explained it like this: “To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it…each step so small, so inconsequential, so well explained…one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.”

So I ask you: Regarding the gradual erosion of America’s civil liberties, how high is the corn in the field?

Did You Remember Bill Of Rights Day?

INDIVIDUAL LIBERTIES CONTINUE TO BE COMPROMISED AS FEW AMERICANS ACKNOWLEDGE THE ANNIVERSARY OF A MAJOR EVENT IN AMERICAN HISTORY

by Nat Hentoff

This nation did not have a complete Constitution from September 17, 1787— when the document began awaiting ratification by the states—until December 15, 1791, when the first ten amendments—the Bill of Rights— were added. On December 15, 2011—220 years later to the day—there were scarcely any mentions in the media regarding that historic event, let alone celebrations. With so many schools eliminating civics classes, few members of the New Generation have even learned about our fundamental individual liberties protecting us against government overreaching.

And since there are no crusades for educational reform to combat adult learning deficiencies, how many young Americans remain aware that few of these guarantees of a self-governing citizenry are still being honored?

Ah, but on December 18, 2011, President Barack Obama did issue, about Bill of Rights Day, a Tele- PrompTer-like proclamation glorifying, he said, “these fundamental liberties [that] have shaped our national character and stirred the souls of all who dream of a freer, more just world.” Have you heard any such stirrings for quite a while?

Intent on securing a second term as our leader, Obama pledged “to pass to our children an America worthy of our Founders’ vision…that we can have both liberty and security.”

The President, of course, ignored his administration’s continuing disembowelment of the Bill of Rights’ most crucial guarantees as he keeps extending—and even deepening—Bush-Cheney’s destructive blueprint. Their regime’s legacy was cemented by the erroneously titled USA PATRIOT Act, which has so reshaped America that it would be unrecognizable to our Founders.

The Fourth Amendment’s unmistakable “right of the people to be secure…against unreasonable searches and seizures” is continually and eagerly violated by the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, other intelligence agencies and the police (at both the local and state levels).

Unmanned drone aircraft aren’t just being flown in Pakistan, Afghanistan and other nations harboring suspected terrorists and those “associated” with them. Predator drones are also now keeping track of us right here. Oh, the planes aren’t firing Hellfire missiles at us on our own land, but they are keeping a record of those of us involved in what the government believes are disloyal or suspect associations. As you look up to the sky, you may be a “person of interest” to these tireless digital investigators as they add to the nests of hidden cameras in our midst.

Remember the Fifth Amendment? “No person shall…be deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law.” But what does that mean these days? The also-useless Sixth Amendment tells you and your kids that every American shall enjoy the right to a “speedy and public trial” and “be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation [and] to be confronted with the witnesses against him.”

Do you enjoy how that vital part of the Bill of Rights is disappearing when citizens are held in preventive detention without having first been allowed to see a judge, let alone even know who the witnesses against them are—or if they even exist?

Meanwhile, the military personnel controlling killer drones being operated in other lands are authorized to assassinate even U.S. citizens deemed a threat to our national security without their first being given an opportunity to defend themselves in an American courtroom. Worse yet, in December 2011—while the National Defense Authorization Act was debated— a bipartisan Congress voted for the executive branch’s power to indefinitely imprison citizens with alleged ties to terrorism. What hope do we have for a regeneration of the Fifth and Sixth Amendments under a Republican President after Congressional Republicans vigorously joined in that desecration of the Bill of Rights?

How did we get to this travesty—allowing those we elect to serve and protect our Constitution to disown the Bill of Rights? Or is that why we elect them?

Here is the naked truth from attorney John Whitehead, a tireless guardian of the Constitution whom I have described as the Paul Revere of our time: “Those responsible for the demise of the Bill of Rights are none other than the schools, the courts, the politicians and ‘We the People.’”

On April 18, 1775, Paul Revere warned of an impending advance by British troops in the New America. On December 15, 2011—note the chilling date—Whitehead’s article “Bill of Rights Day: Are Our Freedoms in Jeopardy?” was a warning posted on Rutherford.org. Whitehead—founder and president of The Rutherford Institute—rang the tyranny bell when he grimly declared that “if Americans don’t soon confront this stark reality about the state of their Constitutional rights, they will soon find themselves in an entirely different America.”

Actually, in real-time and real-life America, we are increasingly on the edge of that land of darkness. Here’s another key passage from Whitehead’s timely article: “Sadly, when all the glibly patriotic gestures and jargon are stripped away, I’m not even sure Americans really want freedom. What they really want is to be left in peace with their shopping malls, flat-screen TVs, cell phones and mindless entertainment. After all, how many Americans during the course of a day—even when they see fellow citizens under attack— ever think about their rights? If they did, surely there would be more resistance.”

As Occupy Wall Street has garnered so much attention from sea to shining sea with the movement’s hollow, self-ennobling, directionless rhetoric, it has said nothing to the 99% it is courting about our disappearing Bill of Rights.

What are you going to do? Get after your members of Congress? Take action—as Samuel Adams’s Sons of Liberty did during the Boston Tea Party? This is “a republic, if you can keep it,” Benjamin Franklin proclaimed. As truth-telling Justice William O. Douglas warned: “The Constitution and the Bill of Rights were designed to get Government off the backs of the people—all the people. … But that guarantee is not self-executing.”

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Nat Hentoff is a historian of the Constitution, a jazz critic and a columnist for the Village Voice and Free Inquiry. His incisive books include The First Freedom: The Tumultuous History of Free Speech in America; Living the Bill of Rights; and the forthcoming Is This Still America?

Larry Flynt Defends Ad Parody Featuring S.E. Cupp

Los Angeles, CA – May 24, 2012 – In response to the recent press surrounding the publishing of an Ad Parody featuring S.E. Cupp, Hustler Founder Larry Flynt offers the following statement:

“As a result of our publishing an ad parody of political pundit S.E. Cupp that depicted her having oral sex, the prudish and delusional right wing has accused me and my magazine of being sexist and waging a war on women,” says Mr. Flynt. “That’s absurd. The picture was clearly labeled as satire. It was intended as humorous commentary about her politics. We stated that no such image of Ms. Cupp actually exists. Secondly, the feature, which we run every month, has previously depicted such male luminaries as Mario Cuomo, Dan Rather and, most recently, my friend Bill Maher. How misogynistic or sexist is that?”

Mr. Flynt Continues:

“The ad parody was protected free speech as decided by unanimous decision by the Supreme Court in 1988, Flynt v. Falwell, which afforded parody protection under the First Amendment. So critics, get a life. Find another horse to beat.
We don’t know anything about Ms. Cupp’s personal life, but we do know that oral sex is practiced by the majority of adult Americans, both male and female. The fact that the picture of Ms. Cupp has generated so much flap says more about the sexual repression of the American people than it does anything else. Oral sex is a normal and healthy practice.”

True-Blue Patriot

RON PAUL BLASTS OBAMA’S GLUTTONOUS MILITARY BUDGET AND CONTEMPT FOR CIVIL LIBERTIES.

by Robert Scheer by HUSTLER Magazine

I know it will come as an outrageous stretch to some, but Presidential aspirant Ron Paul reminds me a bit of George Washington. That’s because, upon ending his two-term tenure as the nation’s first President, the great Revolutionary War hero warned his countrymen to be on “guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.” In Washington’s view, expressed all too clearly in that first Farewell Address, the most dangerous enemies of the new republic were not foreign armies but rather homegrown demagogues eager to betray our freedoms in the name of national security.

It was a warning reiterated by another great general-turned-President—Republican Dwight David Eisenhower—who in his own Farewell Address sounded the alarm against the “military-industrial complex,” which jeopardizes our freedoms while playing the patriotism card in pursuit of profit. The last time you heard a major party’s Presidential candidate issue a similar warning was in 1972, when George McGovern, who had been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his heroism during Wold War II, was the Democratic nominee against that inveterate warmonger Richard Nixon.

Since then, Republicans and Democrats alike—particularly after the hysteria engendered by the 9/11 attacks—have cravenly catered to the whims of those beating the drums for bigger military budgets. Recently Barack Obama signed off on the $662-billion National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which also included provisions stripping away our fundamental freedoms in the name of stopping the terrorist enemy.

It remained for only one Republican primary challenger, the libertarian Ron Paul, to dare echo Eisenhower’s warning, telling an audience in Iowa soon after the Pentagon bill passed: “Watch out for the militaryindustrial complex—they always have an enemy. Nobody is going to invade us. We don’t need any more weapons systems.”

Why not? It has been almost two decades since the old Soviet Union collapsed, and then-President George H.W. Bush announced that the Cold War was over and ordered a one-third cut in defense spending as the springboard of a peace dividend.

It was a dividend we never got to enjoy because George H.W. Bush’s son George W. seized upon the trauma of 9/11 to increase the military budget to the point where we spend almost as much as the rest of the world combined on ever-more sophisticated— and therefore costlier—weapons to counter a terrorist enemy with a technologically primitive arsenal.

But the cost to civil liberties has been even greater. Beginning with the USA PATRIOT Act under George W. and continuing with the 2012 NDAA signed into law by Obama, we have surrendered our once-inviolate freedoms in the so-called war against terrorism.

Again quoting Ron Paul: “Little by little, in the name of fighting terrorism, our Bill of Rights is being repealed. The Fourth Amendment has been rendered toothless by the PATRIOT Act. No more can we truly feel secure in our persons, houses, papers and effects when now there is an exception that fits nearly any excuse for our government to search and seize our property.

… The recently passed National Defense Authorization Act continues that slip toward tyranny and in fact accelerates it significantly. … [It] does to the Fifth Amendment what the PATRIOT Act does to the Fourth. … The dangers in the NDAA are its alarmingly vague, undefined criteria for who can be indefinitely detained by the U.S. government without trial.”

Yet despite those warnings, President Obama—who, as a former Constitutional law professor, should be expected to know better—signed off on a massive defense authorization bill that threatens the fundamental rights of American citizens while continuing military spending at Cold War levels. Obama knew the bill was rotten on both counts. When the President betrayed his own earlier commitment to oppose this onerous provision in the military spending bill, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney conceded: “While we remain concerned about the uncertainty that this law will create for our counterterrorism professionals, the most recent changes give the President additional discretion in determining how the law will be implemented, consistent with our values and the rule of law, which are at the heart of our country’s strength.”

What bull. The point is not to hock our civil liberties to the discretion of the President, but rather to guarantee our freedoms even if a Dick Cheney or Newt Gingrich should attain the highest office. As Ron Paul warned: “The Bill of Rights has no exemptions for ‘really bad people’ or terrorists or even noncitizens. It is a key check on government power against any person. That is not a weakness in our legal system; it is the very strength of our legal system. The NDAA attempts to justify abridging the Bill of Rights on the theory that rights are suspended in a time of war and [that] the entire United States is a battlefield in the War on Terror. This is a very dangerous development indeed. Beware.”

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Don’t say you haven’t been warned. Before serving almost 30 years as a Los Angeles Times columnist and editor, Robert Scheer spent the late 1960s as Vietnam correspondent, managing editor and editor in chief of Ramparts magazine. Now editor of TruthDig.com, Scheer has written such hardhitting books as The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America and his latest, The Great American Stick-Up: Greedy Bankers and the Politicians Who Love Them.

Did You Remember Bill Of Rights Day?

INDIVIDUAL LIBERTIES CONTINUE TO BE COMPROMISED AS FEW AMERICANS ACKNOWLEDGE THE ANNIVERSARY OF A MAJOR EVENT IN AMERICAN HISTORY

by Nat Hentoff for HUSTLER Magazine

This nation did not have a complete Constitution from September 17, 1787— when the document began awaiting ratification by the states—until December 15, 1791, when the first ten amendments—the Bill of Rights— were added. On December 15, 2011—220 years later to the day—there were scarcely any mentions in the media regarding that historic event, let alone celebrations. With so many schools eliminating civics classes, few members of the New Generation have even learned about our fundamental individual liberties protecting us against government overreaching.

And since there are no crusades for educational reform to combat adult learning deficiencies, how many young Americans remain aware that few of these guarantees of a self-governing citizenry are still being honored?

Ah, but on December 18, 2011, President Barack Obama did issue, about Bill of Rights Day, a Tele- PrompTer-like proclamation glorifying, he said, “these fundamental liberties [that] have shaped our national character and stirred the souls of all who dream of a freer, more just world.” Have you heard any such stirrings for quite a while?

Intent on securing a second term as our leader, Obama pledged “to pass to our children an America worthy of our Founders’ vision…that we can have both liberty and security.” The President, of course, ignored his administration’s continuing disembowelment of the Bill of Rights’ most crucial guarantees as he keeps extending—and even deepening—Bush-Cheney’s destructive blueprint. Their regime’s legacy was cemented by the erroneously titled USA PATRIOT Act, which has so reshaped America that it would be unrecognizable to our Founders.

The Fourth Amendment’s unmistakable “right of the people to be secure…against unreasonable searches and seizures” is continually and eagerly violated by the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, other intelligence agencies and the police (at both the local and state levels).

Unmanned drone aircraft aren’t just being flown in Pakistan, Afghanistan and other nations harboring suspected terrorists and those “associated” with them. Predator drones are also now keeping track of us right here. Oh, the planes aren’t firing Hellfire missiles at us on our own land, but they are keeping a record of those of us involved in what the government believes are disloyal or suspect associations. As you look up to the sky, you may be a “person of interest” to these tireless digital investigators as they add to the nests of hidden cameras in our midst.

Remember the Fifth Amendment? “No person shall…be deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law.” But what does that mean these days? The also-useless Sixth Amendment tells you and your kids that every American shall enjoy the right to a “speedy and public trial” and “be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation [and] to be confronted with the witnesses against him.”

Do you enjoy how that vital part of the Bill of Rights is disappearing when citizens are held in preventive detention without having first been allowed to see a judge, let alone even know who the witnesses against them are—or if they even exist?

Meanwhile, the military personnel controlling killer drones being operated in other lands are authorized to assassinate even U.S. citizens deemed a threat to our national security without their first being given an opportunity to defend themselves in an American courtroom.

Worse yet, in December 2011—while the National Defense Authorization Act was debated— a bipartisan Congress voted for the executive branch’s power to indefinitely imprison citizens with alleged ties to terrorism. What hope do we have for a regeneration of the Fifth and Sixth Amendments under a Republican President after Congressional Republicans vigorously joined in that desecration of the Bill of Rights?

How did we get to this travesty—allowing those we elect to serve and protect our Constitution to disown the Bill of Rights? Or is that why we elect them?

Here is the naked truth from attorney John Whitehead, a tireless guardian of the Constitution whom I have described as the Paul Revere of our time: “Those responsible for the demise of the Bill of Rights are none other than the schools, the courts, the politicians and ‘We the People.’”

On April 18, 1775, Paul Revere warned of an impending advance by British troops in the New America. On December 15, 2011—note the chilling date—Whitehead’s article “Bill of Rights Day: Are Our Freedoms in Jeopardy?” was a warning posted on Rutherford.org. Whitehead—founder and president of The Rutherford Institute—rang the tyranny bell when he grimly declared that “if Americans don’t soon confront this stark reality about the state of their Constitutional rights, they will soon find themselves in an entirely different America.”

Actually, in real-time and real-life America, we are increasingly on the edge of that land of darkness. Here’s another key passage from Whitehead’s timely article: “Sadly, when all the glibly patriotic gestures and jargon are stripped away, I’m not even sure Americans really want freedom. What they really want is to be left in peace with their shopping malls, flat-screen TVs, cell phones and mindless entertainment.

After all, how many Americans during the course of a day—even when they see fellow citizens under attack— ever think about their rights? If they did, surely there would be more resistance.” As Occupy Wall Street has garnered so much attention from sea to shining sea with the movement’s hollow, self-ennobling, directionless rhetoric, it has said nothing to the 99% it is courting about our disappearing Bill of Rights.

What are you going to do? Get after your members of Congress? Take action—as Samuel Adams’s Sons of Liberty did during the Boston Tea Party? This is “a republic, if you can keep it,” Benjamin Franklin proclaimed. As truth-telling Justice William O. Douglas warned: “The Constitution and the Bill of Rights were designed to get Government off the backs of the people—all the people. … But that guarantee is not self-executing.”

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Nat Hentoff is a historian of the Constitution, a jazz critic and a columnist for the Village Voice and Free Inquiry. His incisive books include The First Freedom: The Tumultuous History of Free Speech in America; Living the Bill of Rights; and the forthcoming Is This Still America?

Wayward Christian Soldier

WOULD JESUS VOTE FOR REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE NEWT GINGRICH?

by Robert Scheer for HUSTLER Magazine

If not for the well-established fact that most Republican primary voters are breathtakingly stupid, a columnist could safely assume that the Presidential campaign of Newt Gingrich would have collapsed by the time this is read. But never underestimate the ability of this particular blowhard to stick around. He has turned political hypocrisy into an art form and the debate over moral values into a carnival of competing sexual indulgences.

After all, Newt’s campaign only took off last fall because of the revelations of Herman Cain’s serial infidelities, exposing the then front- running family values candidate as a hypocrite who had allegedly sexually harassed several work colleagues. That sort of scandal is a difficult one for the Republican base to accept since its political theology proceeds from the notion that the second coming of Ronald Reagan was betrayed when the diabolical Bill Clinton was orally serviced by a lowly White House intern. There went the God-given City on the Hill to be replaced by gay marriages, the 9/11 attacks and the housing meltdown, all plagues cast upon us by that instrument of the devil, Representative Barney Frank (D-Massachusetts), a former chairman of the mighty House Financial Services Committee.

Not Bill Clinton, who—while devilish enough—had the saving grace of being a good ol’ white hetero Southern boy like George W. Bush and Newt on the Republican side. That expectation of white male depravity, as Confederate as pecan pie, is what allowed Gingrich to take Cain’s place as the front-runner in Republican primary polls last December because, in the deepest of Southern scripture, there is the assumption that when a “colored fellow” even looks at a woman, he’s already committed rape. But for a white dude, there is really no such thing as a sexual crime. Unless, of course, he marries a man.

Gingrich has kept his Christian values scorecard sufficiently high enough with most right-wing moral wing-nuts to be taken seriously as a Presidential contender. As to why some women have been willing to share their most intimate gifts with this despicable lout is for one of their gender to explain. But despicable Gingrich has been, with a trail of philandering so indelibly defined that it, on its own, obliterates any GOP claim to the moral high ground.

Don’t ever forget that in 1995 the Republican majority elected Newt Speaker of the House, third in line to succeed the President, when his sordid personal life was already known. That includes—in order to marry the woman with whom he was having an affair—discussing divorce terms with his cancer patient wife Jackie (Newt’s high school math teacher) while visiting her in the hospital a day after she had surgery. And Gingrich didn’t stop with betraying just one wife. No indeed, he was just getting started, hypocritically cheating on his second wife with an employee while he was leading the charge against Bill Clinton for doing the same thing. Although Newt was truer to Southern tradition, grabbing his satisfaction in the backseat of an American-made car.

Marianne Ginther, whom Gingrich had met at a 1980 Republican fund-raiser, said he asked her to marry him before his divorce from Jackie. He shed Marianne after learning his second wife had a disease that could lead to multiple sclerosis, she said, calling her on Mother’s Day 1999 to drop the Dbomb. In 2000, Gingrich wed Callista Bisek, a Congressional aide more than two decades younger than Newt, with whom he had a six year affair—while he was Speaker!

And Gingrich had the chutzpah to ask the Catholic Church to annul his 18-year marriage to Marianne because she reportedly had been previously married. Imagine the nonstop Fox News hysteria if the Democrats had elevated John Edwards to that level of national responsibility after the ugly truth was known of the Democrat’s comparable family betrayal.

While there are plenty of further salacious details that Gingrich will have to keep to himself during confessionals, I wonder if he converted to Catholicism in part because a church with so many sexual scandals of its own might be more forgiving of Newt’s sins. However, the Republican’s moral decadence in the economic arena should prove more problematic to a religion fond of invoking the example of Jesus.

Gingrich is all too typical of the corrupt moneychangers that Jesus threw out of the temple. As Newt was forced to acknowledge during the campaign, he received $1.6 million from Freddie Mac (the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation), one of the leading financial entities that enabled the greatest swindle of the poor whom Jesus sought to protect. Nor could Newt get away with saying that Freddie Mac was just one of them damn “guvnment banks” and that he was merely a humble historian warning the banksters of their errant ways.

On the contrary, Gingrich served as a false prophet for Freddie Mac, claiming at the height of the housing bubble that this “government-sponsored” financial institution should be the model for the nation’s major enterprises, including NASA. In reality, Freddie Mac is a privately owned company that is traded on the stock market and pays its highest-ranking executives in the $10 million-a-year range.

The government-sponsored angle meant only that the taxpayers would end up paying for all of Freddie Mac’s bad debts while the housing swindlers, from their own lucratively rewarded top execs to their banking partners among the biggest Wall Street banks, made out like bandits. Just like Newt Gingrich.

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Before serving almost 30 years as a Los Angeles Times columnist and editor, Robert Scheer spent the late 1960s as Vietnam correspondent, managing editor and editor in chief of Ramparts magazine. Now editor of TruthDig.com, Scheer has written such hard hitting books as The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America and his latest, The Great American Stick-Up: Greedy Bankers and the Politicians Who Love Them.

Mitt Romney

When we at HUSTLER think of Willard Mitt Romney—the former governor of Massachusetts and current Republican Presidential aspirant—T.S. Eliot’s poem The Hollow Men comes to mind. How else would you describe someone who has no discernible identity? Oh sure, flip-flopper kinda works, but does it really convey the truly empty and vacuous entity that is Mitt Romney? Of course not.

So just how hollow is Mitt Romney exactly?

That’s not an easy question to answer, given that it’s impossible to know what Mitt really believes in—if indeed he believes in anything at all. In less than ten years, the former CEO of Bain Capital has totally reversed himself on such issues as abortion, same-sex marriage, gun ownership, tax reform, climate change, healthcare and probably a few other issues we’ve forgotten about.

How is such a thing possible? Well, of course, Romney is lying about at least half and maybe even all of the positions he’s taken. It’s possible he doesn’t believe in anything except, perhaps, lying to get what he wants. But even with that, wouldn’t a person feel shame about being such a transparent liar? Or is it possible that the supposedly committed Mormon not only doesn’t believe in anything but also doesn’t feel anything? That would truly make him a hollow man.

Hollow men don’t care about other people. From his early adult years, when Romney served as a bishop in the Mormon church, we have this story reported in the New York Times : Carrel Hilton Sheldon, a married mother of four, was advised by her doctor to terminate her pregnancy because he feared a potentially dangerous blood clot. But Romney, she alleges, insisted—as a representative of his church— that she not go forward with the procedure. According to Mrs. Sheldon, “He was blind to me as a human being.”

That lack of concern for people followed Romney into the job market. As CEO of Bain Capital— a private equity investment firm specializing in leveraged buyouts—he bought companies, sold the assets and shipped the jobs overseas. In many cases, although the acquisition was eventually forced into bankruptcy, Bain Capital still made a huge profit. Romney later said if he had the opportunity to do it over again, he would “be more sensitive” to that issue. Notice he didn’t say he’d do things differently.

We all know about Romney’s “I like being able to fire people” quote. Those who defend the Presidential wannabe for that remark point out he was talking about healthcare companies that weren’t providing “good service.” But we’d like to note that most people would say they “changed companies” or they “like changing companies” when they don’t get good service.

Of course, in Romney’s case, he has had a lot of experience canning employees of the companies he took over at Bain Capital, so the words “I like being able to fire people” would seem to flow naturally from his lips. We wonder how many insurance companies he’s “fired,” if any. Additionally, most people are just stuck with their healthcare provider. Only the superrich like Romney can afford to shop around.

Continuing our analysis of Romney’s attitude toward people, let us not forget that this is the man who said “Corporations are people.” Again we have to ask, can he really believe that?

Because, right on the face of it, that’s nonsense.Yet he said it with no shame.You can see him saying it on YouTube. It’s clear he’s talking down to the people who have just challenged him. He is, in our view, once again a Mormon bishop telling people not what’s real but what to think. Mitt’s talking doctrine instead of facts.

We all know what Republican doctrine is. It’s for ending Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and it’s stringently against legalized abortion, same-sex marriage, tax increases for the superrich, banking regulation, the closing of corporate loopholes and, most notably, against Obamacare, which is based on Romneycare, the heathcare program implemented in Massachusetts when Mitt was governor. These Republican positions are all anti-people or at least antipeople who are not part of the 1%. And, of course, the 1% includes Romney with his $250-million nest egg.

It is worth noting that Romney’s 2010 tax return reveals he paid 13.9% in taxes. That is significantly lower than what the average working person pays. Additionally, Romney is hiding millions in the Cayman Islands, an offshore tax haven. The only question is, how many millions?

This is a man who, even though he wants to be President of the United States, doesn’t want to contribute to the well-being of his country by paying his fair share in taxes.

In essence, he’s screwing all of us. So for Willard Mitt Romney, we offer this T.S. Eliot-inspired poem:

You are of the hollow men

You are of the stuffed men

Looting together

Headpiece filled with greed. Alas!

Your dried avarices, when

You whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass

Or vulture capitalists crawling over broken glass

To get to do their leveraged buyouts

This is the way your candidacy ends

This is the way your candidacy ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.