Larry Flynt's Blog, page 26

Larry Flyntfrom HUSTLER Magazine November 2010If nothin...

Larry Flynt

from HUSTLER Magazine November 2010

If nothing else, the oil-drilling disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, in conjunction with the economic disaster caused by Wall Street, tells us one thing with certainty: Unless the CEOs of companies that have devastated this country are held personally responsible for their actions, nothing is going to change.

People who through negligence or indifference cause death or harm to others, whether it be economic or physical, should no longer be allowed to hide behind a corporation's protective wall. If the CEO of British Petroleum, Goldman Sachs or whatever company is put in jail, his successors will think long and hard before trying to save a buck by taking shortcuts or bending the law.

MIKE HUCKABEE

from HUSTLER Magazine September 2010

That can we say about a guy who fries squirrels in a popcorn popper? Well, as it turns out, we can say plenty more about the Republican, whose tenure as governor of Arkansas still causes a stink.

Aside from his squirrel-popping revelation, the Fox TV talk-show host admits that he likes to shoot animals. Okay, a lot of people like to hunt. But check out what he told one NRA group: "I'm pretty sure there will be duck-hunting in Heaven, and I can't wait!"

How odd. To Huckabee, Heaven is a place where you kill things. Not what most people think of when contemplating the Pearly Gates. And he was a Baptist preacher?!

But Mike isn't the only one in the Huckabee family who likes to kill critters. While he was governor of the Razorback State, his son David was accused of torturing and hanging a stray dog. Daddy defended the boy, who was 17 at the time, by saying, "There was a dog that apparently had mange and was absolutely, I guess, emaciated."Well, okay then, who wouldn't hang an emaciated dog by the neck, slit its throat and then stone it for good measure? We'll bet that David believes Heaven is filled with dead puppies.

Although Mike Huckabee denies any wrongdoing in regard to the foregoing, John Bailey claims the governor fired him as head of the Arkansas State Police for refusing to cover up David's crime. I.C. Smith, the former FBI chief in Little Rock, confirmed that Huckabee interfered in the investigation.

Also while serving as governor, Huckabee was accused of dipping into public funds. Investigated 16 times and cited five times by the Arkansas Ethics Commission, Huckabee is said to have pocketed $112,000 under questionable circumstances in 1999. He also claimed $70,000 worth of furniture at the governor's mansion upon leaving office in 2007. Moreover, he is said to have spent state funds on boat fuel, clothing alterations, dry cleaning, pantyhose, a doghouse and other non-jobrelated items. And let's not forget the personal use of State Police aircraft as transportation for Huckabee and his family.

Regarding the furniture at the governor's mansion, Huckabee agreed to leave it behind due to public outrage. But guess what? By the time he and his family moved out, the furniture had magically disappeared!

You think that's bad? How about this? In Arkansas it's illegal for a departing governor to accept more than $100 in gifts from appreciative citizens (or political benefactors). So what did Mike do? He and his wife, Janet, skirted the law by setting up bridal registries at several retail outlets for $7,000 in housewares and $1,000 in gift cards. In case you're confused, the answer is yes, the couple had already been married more than 30 years.

Huckabee, it should be noted, was good at lining his own pockets even before he became governor of Arkansas. As lieutenant governor he made $61,000 delivering speeches to a nonprofit organization called Action America.

Now get this: Huckabee founded Action America! And it's not at all clear that it has ever donated a penny to anyone else. However, none of the preceding qualifies him as an Asshole. He's garnered that award thanks to his extreme and farfetched opinions. Among those, nothing tops his denial of evolution and belief that Adam and Eve were real people.

What we know about the rest of Huckabee's religious views is limited. Apparently, just like the information stored on the hard drives that were destroyed at his behest when he left the governor's office, Huckabee's old sermons are nowhere to be found. But according to Mother Jones magazine, here's what Huckabee said during a failed run for the U.S. Senate in 1992: "Homosexuality is an aberrant, unnatural and sinful lifestyle, and we now know it can pose a dangerous public health risk."

He went on to say that AIDS victims should be isolated and that he's against spending government money in search of a cure. His asinine proposal? "An alternative would be to request that multimillionaire celebrities, such as Elizabeth Taylor, Madonna and others who are pushing for more AIDS funding, be encouraged to give…increased amounts for AIDS research." In other words, let the fags die.

However, in terms of pure ugliness, nothing compares to Huckabee's just plain stupid, insensitive and unforgivable decision, while governor, to secure the parole of serial rapist and self-confessed murderer Wayne DuMond. DuMond, whom Huckabee claimed had gotten a "raw deal…and hadn't been treated fairly," was a real piece of work. One victim testified that DuMond held a butcher knife to her throat while he raped her and that he threatened to come back and rape and kill the woman's three-year-old daughter, who'd been asleep in bed beside her during the assault, if she told anyone.

DuMond's crimes also included helping beat a man to death with a claw hammer, but Governor Huckabee released him anyway because the prisoner claimed to have been "born again." And maybe because one of the rape victims, a 17-year-old, was a distant cousin of Bill Clinton, who, as Arkansas governor, had previously denied DuMond's release. In fact, Huckabee pardoned or reduced the sentences of 1,033 prisoners, including 12 murderers—twice as many as his three predecessors combined! He seemed especially inclined to free cons who claimed to be bornagain Christians, played in a prison band or worked in the governor's mansion.

Perhaps most of those who'd been released went legit, but DuMond went on to rape and kill two more women. And before being gunned down himself, Maurice Clemmons—whose sentence had also been commuted by the religious zealot—was the only suspect in the 2009 slayings of four police officers in Washington State. All those murders stain Huckabee's hands.

Finally, it would be wrong not to mention that the former fatty, who penned the book Quit Digging Your Grave With a Knife and Fork, is once again gaining weight—a lot of weight! (But not as much as his son, David.) If Mike Huckabee doesn't get it under control soon, we won't have to worry about him being a Presidential nominee in 2012. , Asshole!

CNN HITS BOTTOM

by Alex Bennet

from HUSTLER Magazine October 2010

AS THE SAYING GOES, "THE BIGGER THEY ARE, THE HARDER THEY FALL."

There was a time not so long ago when CNN was the only game in town. But that was then, and this is now.

Ted Turner, an Atlanta media mogul and visionary, didn't mind being called nuts. So on June 1, 1980, he launched a crazy notion: the 24/7 Cable News Network. I remember watching CNN when it first lit up. The newscaster opened by announcing: "This is CNN signing on for the very last time." He was right; it hasn't signed off since.

Even so, CNN limped along for years. There was some extensive live coverage of the space shuttle Challenger explosion, but CNN didn't get on everyone's radar until the Baby Jessicatrapped- in-the-well story. Then, with its 24/7 coverage of the first Gulf War, CNN suddenly morphed into the most important television news organization of them all. It was where the world turned to get the news. Saddam Hussein watched the daily bombing of his country on CNN.

The network became the gold standard for quality news reporting and fairness. It was hard to define where CNN stood politically, and that's the way a news organization should be. That's precisely why it was so good.

Alas, today CNN is the lowest-rated cable news network, and its reputation for quality and fairness has vanished along with the numbers. What the fuck happened?!

Turner Broadcasting was gobbled up by media giant Time Warner. Soon Ted Turner, who had been the soul of the network, was gone. What was left was a corporate bureaucracy ruled by unimaginative bean counters. Sure, other operations like Fox News entered the scene as competitors, thus peeling off viewers. But it was CNN's lack of focus and purpose that led to its downfall.

CNN has the worst anchors in the business. Let's start with Ali Velshi at 1 p.m. (Eastern Time). This bald-headed creep started out as a financial reporter. CNN decided to compound the error by handing him an anchor slot as well. Given Velshi's apparent discomfort in front of the camera, not to mention all the really good newspeople who are out of work, I can't figure why he is even there. At 3 p.m. (ET) the brainless Rick Sanchez goes on the air. This is the guy who, while covering the Chilean earthquake, asked a scientist, "By the way, nine meters in English is what? Meters is an English word, you dope! On the same newscast, Sanchez pointed to an island chain off the coast of South America and said, "This is Hawaii, where the tsunami is headed." In fact, he was indicating the Galapagos Islands, more than 4,500 miles southeast of Honolulu.

During coverage of Iceland's ash-spewing volcano, he erupted with this bit of Sanchezian wisdom: "When you think of a volcano, you think of Hawaii and long words like that. You don't think of Iceland. You think it's too cold to have a volcano there."This guy is anchoring a newscast for an outfit that calls itself "The Worldwide Leader in News"?

From 5 to 7 p.m. (ET) Wolf Blitzer, who has zero going for him, helms CNN's most-watched show, The Situation Room. (This, by the way, is an amazingly stupid name for a news program.) Every other word out of Blitzer's mouth is "um." His personality is that of a dead carp. If it weren't for the oddity of his name, absolutely no one would have ever paid attention to Wolf Blitzer. As a journalist, he is simply horrible. With Velshi and Sanchez, he rounds out a trio that accounts for six inept hours of "news" a day.

Meanwhile, anchors John King and Campbell Brown appear to have had a charisma bypass. Dull and uninspired, these anchors have hardly presented a challenge to the guys over at Fox, who at least know they're in show business as well as news. That, no doubt, explains why Brown recently parted ways with CNN.

Then there's Larry King. Do I have to say any more? The only thing interesting about King is his soon-to-be (or not-to-be) ex-wife. Let's move on. Anderson Cooper's only real accomplishment was being shot out of socialite Gloria Vanderbilt's twat. He constantly acts as if he's looking in a mirror. His newscasts are showy, and the globetrotter loves to fawn over orphans and stand in the rubble of some ravaged country. However, what looks like empathy is really just an ego freak getting in the way during trying circumstances. Rumor has it Cooper is the number-one choice to replace Katie Couric as host of the CBS Evening News. With thinking like that, CBS could be the next CNN.

My advice to CNN is simple: Fire everybody from the anchors to the newsroom staff to whatever idiot is at the helm of this unholy mess. Otherwise just close down and air cartoons. After all, the Cartoon Network has higher ratings than CNN.

Alex Bennett is a longtime HUSTLER contributor. The two-time Emmy winner, who broke into broadcasting as a teenager, can be heard on Sirius Left. 146 (9 a.m. to noon ET) and XM America Left 167 (midnight to 3 a.m. ET).

OBAMA COMMANDS: TRUST GOVERNMENT AND COOL IT

by Nat Hentoff

from HUSTLER Magazine August 2010

OUR LEADER AND WE THE PEOPLE SHOULD HEED THE ADVICE OF HIS PREDECESSORS AND THE FOUNDING FATHERS.

Between standing ovations at the University of Michigan on May 1, the President denounced those around the country who denigrate government as "inherently bad" and then lash his administration as "socialist," among other epithets. Sending the graduates out into the dangerous universe, he reminded them that in a democracy "government is us." But since his is the most secretive administration in our history, how much do We the People know about what he's doing in our name?

Obama did speak abstractly of preserving "individual freedom." As he solemnly intoned, "The question for your generation is this: How will you keep our democracy going and vibrant…at a moment when our challenges seem so big and politics seem so small?"

On the very night of Obama's commencement address, our democracy was frighteningly challenged when a naturalized American citizen, Pakistani-born and earner of two Connecticut college degrees, came close to murdering thousands in New York's Times Square. Faisal Shahzad is one of a growing breed of terrorists whom you would never know as a terrorist if you met them at their jobs or at a bar.

As former New York and then Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton warned, the lethal jihadists' focus "has shifted from the large-scale 9/11 type assault" with al-Qaeda now "leaning on its loose networks of affiliates…to do any attack, large or small, that will hit [the] U.S. at home." Bratton underlined, "That will not stop."

I live in Greenwich Village,halfway between the horror of 9/11 and the near-bloodbath this May at Times Square.I am not without fear,particularly now that more aspiring suicide bombers look and talk like me. If the next Faisal Shahzad succeeds, Obama will finally have a bipartisan Congress eager to pass a new USA PATRIOT Act with even more electronic handcuffs on our individual liberties. Already, as head of "us," as he puts it, Barack Obama has exceeded even Bush and Cheney in making our privacy obsolete while diminishing other individual liberties in the Bill of Rights, including a continuation, as I've reported in HUSTLER, of his predecessors' torture policy that al-Qaeda and jihad affiliates welcome as a robustly effective recruiting tool.

With this nation in greater fear of actual instant terrorism than at any time since 9/11, Commander in Chief Obama would enthusiastically structure the next liberty-reducing PATRIOT Act tribute to George Orwell.

Obama did say one thing to the University of Michigan graduates with which I agree: "The practice of listening to opposing views is essential for effective citizenship. … If you're a regular Glenn Beck listener [on Fox News], then check out the Huffington Post sometimes." Similarly, when I used to teach at New York University, on the first day of class I would insist: "If you read The Nation or The New Republic, you must also read The National Review or The Weekly Standard."

I also always gave my students a pocket edition of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, telling them: "That's how you'll judge whatever local, state and federal government is in power." But, in counseling active citizenship to University of Michigan students, Obama left out the Constitution, an apparently bowdlerized version of which he used to teach at the University of Chicago.

As future suicide bombers doubling as U.S. citizens emerge, my advice to HUSTLER readers is that they confront their Congressional representatives and the White House with certain views opposing Obama's from our history. Said Ronald Reagan: "Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected and handed on for them to do the same."

And from Dwight D. Eisenhower, if you're old enough to remember who he was: "I read where members of the so-called intelligentsia…urge a strong President. They are deluding themselves… with the idea of an all-powerful Chief Executive. In this democracy a [truly] strong President is one who will be concerned about doing things in a Constitutional way, respecting the Legislature and the Judiciary"—and especially "us," whom all of those in office purportedly represent.

Indeed, we may yet be sucked by fear into a time like when the Bolsheviks taking over Russia resulted in a "Red Scare" here. In 1920, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer rounded up thousands of purported Communist aliens—among them American citizens with no connection to communism— for what Palmer called "a disease of evil thinking." Many of the prisoners were summarily deported without any judicial intervention. One of the planners of Palmer's raids on the radicals was Justice Department staffer J. Edgar Hoover, who later, as head of the FBI, increasingly shelved individual civil liberties as an obstacle to national security—a roundup term increasingly in use by Bush-Cheney-Obama.

Far too many Americans are just plain ignorant of their liberties and rights against government in the Constitution and will fearfully vote for pledges of national security rather than the Constitution. Our survival as a free people will depend on more of us taking heart and will from Samuel Adams, called by Thomas Jefferson the Father of the Revolution: "It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brushfires in people's minds."

And you ought not to forget Thomas Jefferson's message to all Americans to come: "All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent."

Even if you're not of what some would consider good conscience, but regard yourself as an independent American, keep Samuel Adams in mind as you vote in the midterm elections and thereafter. As Jefferson also kept repeating, only you can protect your liberties!

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 America?

BEHIND ARIZONA'S IMMIGRATION LAW

by Greg Palast
from HUSTLER Magazine September 2010

GREG PALAST'S INVESTIGATION DISCOVERS THE REAL INTENT OF THE SHOW-ME-YOUR-PAPERS EDICT.

DON'T BE FOOLED. The way the media plays the story, it was a wave of racist, anti-immigrant hysteria that moved Arizona Republicans to pass a sick little law requiring every person in the state to carry papers proving they are U.S. citizens. I don't buy it. Anti-Hispanic hysteria has always been as much a part of Arizona as the Saguaro cactus and excessive air-conditioning. What's new here is the politicians' fear of a xenophobic "Teabag" uprising.

What moved GOP Governor Jan Brewer to sign the Soviet-style show-me-your-papers law is the exploding number of legal Hispanics, U.S. citizens one and all, who are daring to vote—and daring to vote Democratic by more than two to one. Unless this demographic locomotive is halted, Arizona Republicans know their party will soon be electoral toast. Or, if you like, tortillas.

In 2008, working for Rolling Stone with civil rights attorney Bobby Kennedy, our team flew to Arizona to investigate what smelled like an electoral pogrom against Chicano voters… directed by one Jan Brewer.

Brewer, then secretary of state, had organized a racially loaded purge of the voter rolls that would have made Katherine Harris blush. Beginning after the 2004 election, under Brewer's command, no less than 100,000 voters, overwhelmingly Hispanics, were blocked from registering to vote. In 2005, the first year of the Great Brown-Out, one in three Phoenix residents found their registration applications rejected.

That statistic caught my attention. Voting or registering to vote if you're not a citizen is a felony, a big-time, jail-time crime. And arresting such criminal voters is easy: After all, they give their names and addresses.

So I asked Brewer's office, had she busted a single one of these thousands of allegedly illegal voters? Did she turn over even one name to the feds for prosecution? No, not one.

Which raises the question:Were these disenfranchised voters the criminal, noncitizens Brewer tagged them, or just not-quite-white voters given the José Crow treatment, entrapped in document-chase trickery?

The answer was provided by a New Mexico federal prosecutor who was sent on a crazy hunt all over the western mesas looking for these illegal voters. "We took over 100 complaints, we investigated for almost two years, and I didn't find one prosecutable voter fraud case."

This prosecutor, David Iglesias, is a prosecutor no more. When he refused to fabricate charges of illegal voting among immigrants, his firing was personally ordered by the President of the United States, George W. Bush, under orders from his boss, Karl Rove. Iglesias told me that Rove and the Republican chieftains were working nationwide to whip up anti-immigrant hysteria with public busts of illegal voters, even though there were none.

"They wanted some splashy preelection indictments," Iglesias told me. The former prosecutor, himself a Republican, paid the price when he stood up to this vicious attack on citizenship.

But Secretary of State Brewer followed the Rove plan to a T. The weapon she used to slice the Arizona voter rolls was a 2004 law, known as Prop. 200, which required proof of citizenship to register. The Republicans' latest legislative horror show, sanctioning cops to stop residents and prove citizenship, is just one more step in the party's desperate plan to impede Mexican-Americans from marching to the ballot box.

(By the way, no one elected Brewer.Weirdly, Barack Obama placed her in office last year when, for reasons known only to the Devil and Rahm Emanuel, the President appointed Arizona's Democratic Governor Janet Napolitano to his cabinet, which automatically moved Republican Brewer into the governor's office.) State Senator Russell Pearce, the Republican sponsor of the latest ID law, gave away his real intent, blocking the vote, when he said, "There is a massive effort under way to register illegal aliens in this country."

How many? Pearce's PR flak told me 5 million. All Democrats too. Again, I asked Pearce's office to give me their names and addresses from their phony registration forms. I'd happily make a citizen's arrest of each one, on camera. Pearce didn't have 5 million names. He didn't have five. He didn't have one.

The horde of 5 million voters who swam the Rio Grande just to vote for Obama was calculated on a Republican Web site extrapolating from the number of Mexicans in a border town who refused jury service because they were not citizens. Not one, in fact, had registered to vote; they had registered to drive. They had obtained licenses as required by the law. The illegal voters, "wetback" welfare moms and alien job thieves are just GOP Web site wet dreams, but their mythic PR power helps the party's electoral hacks chop away at voter rolls and civil rights with little more than a whimper from the Democrats.

Indeed, one reason, I discovered, that some Democrats are silent is that they are in on the game themselves. In New Mexico, Democratic Party bosses tossed away ballots of Pueblo Indians to cut native influence in party primaries.

But what's wrong with requiring folks to prove they're American if they want to vote and live in America? The answer: Because the vast majority of perfectly legal voters and residents who lack ID sufficient for Ms. Brewer and Mr. Pearce are citizens of color, citizens of poverty.

According to a study by University of Washington professor Matt Barreto, minority citizens are half as likely as whites to have government ID. The numbers are dreadfully worse when income is factored in.

Just outside Phoenix, without Brewer's or Pearce's help, I did locate one of these evil un-American voters—that is, someone who could not prove her citizenship: 100-year-old Shirley Preiss. Her U.S. birth certificate was nowhere to be found, as it never existed.

In Phoenix, I stopped in at the Maricopa County Jail, where Sheriff Joe Arpaio houses the captives of his campaign to stop illegal immigration. Arpaio, who under the new Arizona law will be empowered to choose his targets for citizenship testing, is already facing federal indictment for his racially charged and legally suspect methods.

I admit, I was a little nervous, passing through the iron doors. A big sign reads: "NOTICE: ILLEGAL ALIENS ARE PROHIBITED FROM VISITING ANYONE IN THIS JAIL." I mean, Grandma Palast snuck into the USA via Windsor, Canada. We Palasts are as illegal as they come, but Arpaio's sophisticated deportee- sniffer didn't stop this white boy from entering his sanctum.

But that's the point, isn't it? Not to stop noncitizens from entering Arizona—after all, who else would care for the country club lawn?—but to harass folks of the wrong color: Democratic blue.

Greg Palast, whom the Chicago Tribune has called "the most important investigative reporter of our time," has covered the illegal disenfranchisement of voters for Rolling Stone (with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.), Harper's, The Nation and TruthOut.org (which first published the preceding article). Palast, whose investigative reports can be seen on BBC Television's Newsnight, is a Nation Institute/Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow and the author of Armed Madhouse and the New York Times best-seller The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. For more, visit GregPalast.com.

Palast Investigates on DVD

Greg Palast's ass-kicking exposés for BBC and Democracy Now! are collected on the newly released DVD Palast Investigates: From 8-Mile to the Amazon—On the Trail of the Financial Marauders. Featuring Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Mike Papantonio, these are the original reports—uncut and uncensored! The DVD also features music by Willie Nelson and Foo Fighter guitarist Chris Shiflett with Jackson United. For more info or to order Palast Investigates, visit GregPalast.com.

AN APPAULLING STATE OF AFFAIRS

Larry Flynt
from HUSTLER Magazine September 2010

For about five minutes I actually thought that Rand Paul of Kentucky might be the kind of antigovernment senatorial candidate the people could get behind. We're all looking for someone who will take on the status quo in Washington, D.C. Then Paul showed his true pro-business colors. First he admitted to "having problems" with the 1964 Civil Rights Act because it prevented private businesses from discriminating against blacks and other minorities. Then, when referring to the Gulf oil spill, he said "accidents happen" as a way of dismissing BP's culpability.

Mr. Paul seems oblivious to the kind of horror blacks experienced in the South due to segregation. And he ignores the fact that the aforementioned "accident" appears to be negligent homicide (11 workers perished) and that it may ultimately kill all marine life in the Gulf.

To those voting in Kentucky this November, please take note: Rand Paul is the kind of libertarian who will always side with Big Business over labor. Remember that when you enter the voting booth.

LIBERAL HERESY: I'M OKAY WITH THE PAUL PARTY

by Robert Scheer
from HUSTLER Magazine October 2010

FATHER AND SON ARE IRASCIBLE POPULISTS, AND WE NEED MORE LIKE THEM IN BOTH PARTIES.

Count me as one lefty liberal who is not the least bit unhappy with the victory by Rand Paul in Kentucky's Republican primary for the U.S. Senate. Not because it might make it easier for some Democratic Party hack to win in the general election, but rather because he seems to be a principled libertarian in the mold of his father, Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas), and we need more of that impulse in the Congress.

After all, what's wrong with cutting back big government that mostly exists to serve the interests of megacorporations? Of course, for me it would be better if that challenge came from populist progressives of the Left, in the Bernie Sanders mold, but this is Kentucky we're talking about.

Rand Paul, like his dad, is worthy of praise for standing in opposition to the Wall Street bailout, which will come to be marked as the greatest swindle in U.S. history, and which was, as he noted on his Web site, an unconstitutional redistribution of income in favor of the undeserving rich:

"Federal bailouts reward inefficient and corrupt management, rob taxpayers, hurt smaller and more responsible private firms, exacerbate our budget problems, explode national debt and destroy our U.S. dollar. Even more importantly, any bailout of private industry is in direct violation of the Constitution. It is a transfer of wealth from those who have earned to those who have squandered."

An opponent in hindsight of the Iraq War, Rand Paul is a bit more inclined than his father to waffle on his libertarianism when it comes to supporting an interventionist foreign policy. Yet while he deems a U.S. invasion of Afghanistan to be legitimate, since the 9/11 attacks allegedly were planned there under Taliban protection, he claims he would have insisted on a formal declaration of war, as called for by the Constitution, before he would have supported it.

"If I had been in the U.S. Senate, I would have stopped them and said no more; we will have a vote," he said. "We will declare war with Afghanistan. We will declare war with Iraq. I would have voted for a declaration of war with Afghanistan, but I would have voted against a declaration of war with Iraq. But I would have made them vote. And that's the problem; they no longer pay attention to the rules."

In any case, his Republican establishment opponent, Trey Grayson, attacked Paul for his opposition to an interventionist foreign policy as well as for favoring the legalization of marijuana. On both counts it is a good sign that Kentucky voters rejected Grayson's lines of attack.

True, to wax warmly about a potential Republican libertarian senator is an act of desperation for a liberal who still hopes that the federal government might be moved by the embattled band of progressive Democrats in Congress to put the power of the federal government at the service of the needy. But when has that happened recently?

With a commanding Democratic majority in Congress and a former community organizer as President, the focus of economic policy in this time of enormous economic pain has been on saving the bankers who created this mess. With the D.C. Democrats trusting our well-being to the likes of Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner, who under President Bill Clinton did so much to enable Wall Street greed, would it not be good to have at least one Republican senator questioning the Washington spending spree?

Yes, Rand Paul is bad on a lot of social issues I care about (such as his stance on civil rights legislation and whether it infringes on the rights of private businesses). And no, I don't embrace his faith in the social compassion of unfettered free markets. In this, he will likely follow the path of the "moderate" weightlifter-governor of my state of California, who is now telling us we must choose between honoring state pension plans or providing assistance to children living in poverty. We can't do both, because raising taxes, corporate or otherwise, is a nonstarter in the land of Prop. 13.

But the alternative we have experienced under Democrats is not one of a progressive government properly restraining free-market greed, but rather, as was amply demonstrated in the pretend regulation of the oil industry, of government as a partner in corporate crime. It is the power of the corporate lobbyists that is at issue, and it is refreshing that candidate Paul has labeled Washington lobbyists a "distinctly criminal class" and favors a ban on lobbying and campaign contributions by those who hold more than a million dollars in federal contracts.

Heresy, I know, but it is only thanks to Ron Paul, the father and hopefully the mentor of the potential Kentucky senator, that we got a Congressional mandate to audit the Fed's role in the banking bailout. How bad could it be to have another irascible Paul in the Congress? Not that bad at all.

Before serving 30 years as a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, 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.

LEGALIZE MARIJUANA!

by Larry Flynt
HUSTLER Magazine September 2010

This November, California voters will find a ballot initiative calling for the legalization of marijuana. If it passes, California will become the first state in the Union to make pot legal. In my opinion, marijuana should never have been outlawed in the first place.

California prisons are already choked with people convicted of marijuana-related crimes. How much sense does that make, especially given the cost of housing and feeding them at a time when the state is broke?

In that regard, taxing the sale of legal marijuana will go a long way toward solving California's crushing budget crisis. This is a no-brainer. Let's make the damn plant legal. And I strongly urge the other 49 states to do likewise.

THE UNITED STATES OF GOLDMAN SACHS

by Robert Scheer
from HUSTLER Magazine September 2010

THE INVESTMENT FIRM'S DOMINATION OF GOVERNMENT BANKING POLICY GREEN-LIGHTED DISASTER.

Goldman Sachs is right to claim innocence of any charges, criminal or civil, that the government brings against the financial conglomerate for banking fraud. Of course the firm is innocent, no matter the ugly facts of its hustling the unsuspecting, from New York to Athens and many other points worldwide. Sure, its CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, was paid $68 million in 2007, the year Goldman bet against its own customers with those phony "synthetic" derivatives. But you'd better believe it was all legal.

How could it be otherwise when Goldman got to help write the laws governing the selling of derivatives and other key aspects of financial deregulation that allowed it to grow too big to fail and thus be eligible for generous government bailouts? Its lobbyists, one of whom got to be chief of staff in the Obama Treasury Department, were the leaders in getting the government to make the regulations Goldman-friendly. If convicted of anything, Goldman's wiseguys have a right to the outrage of handcuffed Mafia bosses in the bad old days when they felt betrayed by judges and legislators they assumed had been properly bought.

That's more than a wild rhetorical point. The massive bank-lobbying effort that Goldman's big bucks helped pay for forced through the radical deregulation that ended effective government supervision of the big investment banks and resulted in the banking debacle that wiped out the home ownership and jobs of tens of millions of people worldwide. Under the presidencies of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, when laws enacted during the Great Depression were made moot, the Treasury Department was practically a subsidiary of Goldman Sachs. It was the most blatant takeover of the government by one firm in American history. Clinton named former Goldman Sachs Vice- Chairman Robert Rubin to be his Treasury secretary, and Bush did the same giveaway of power when he named Goldman Chairman Henry Paulson to fill that post in his administration. Goldman's total domination of the Bush Administration's banking policy was so widespread that the New York Times ran an article headlined "The Guys From Government Sachs."

As the Times story pointed out, "Goldman's presence in the [Treasury] department and around the federal response to the financial bailout is so ubiquitous that other bankers and competitors have given the star-studded firm a new nickname: Government Sachs."

Ex-Goldman CEO-turned-Treasury Secretary Paulson had an eager accomplice in Timothy Geithner, who was serving as head of the New York Fed before he replaced Paulson at Treasury in the Obama Administration. While at the New York Fed, it was Geithner who presided over the shameful payouts of taxpayer dollars to Goldman, as well as facilitating its overnight transformation into a bank holding company eligible for access to low-interest borrowing from the Fed and other profitable favors. If that privilege had been granted to Lehman Brothers, the company would still be with us instead of having disappeared through bankruptcy.

The closeness of the Geithner-Goldman connection was underscored by a Wall Street Journal report that concluded: "The Federal Reserve Bank of New York shaped Washington's response to the financial crisis last year [2008], which buoyed Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and other Wall Street firms. Goldman received speedy approval to become a bank holding company in September and a $10 billion capital injection soon after."

With friends like that running Washington's oversight of Wall Street, it's no wonder that Goldman traders got a bit wild in their greed and that the firm's top leaders gave them the green light to milk the system and, ultimately, we taxpayers for all it was worth. CEO Blankfein would later claim in testimony before a Senate committee that he "did not know" the details of those trades, but if that is true, it is obviously because he didn't want to know as long as the money was pouring in.

The synthetic deals now at the heart of various lawsuits against Goldman would have smelled rotten to an experienced trader like Blankfein if he had paid scant attention to the derivatives packages that his company's own internal e-mails described as "a shitty deal" and "a piece of crap" for the suckers buying them from Goldman. He didn't have to care, because those deals were expected to go sour. Goldman bet on that outcome even as it failed to inform its customers of that likely result.

When the Mafia played those kinds of games, it was called "loan-sharking," and the Mafiosi were put away behind bars for long stretches. But they didn't have the right lobbyists and their own shills on the inside of the federal government. Not so the guys from Government Sachs, who are never going to require the services of the Witness Protection Program.

Before serving 30 years as a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, 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.

FARTS IN THE WIND

A Subset of Asshole of The Months
From HUSTLER Magazine August 2010

REPRESENTATIVE BART STUPAK (D-Michigan) attempted to torpedo the healthcare-reform bill, lying that it provided federal funding for abortions. When this pathetic move backfired, the Blue Dog Democrat accused fellow Dems of being anti-baby only to later cast a yes vote for the healthcare bill! Antiabortionist Stupak was then treated to the ultimate insult (in his mind) when Texas Republican Randy Neugebauer yelled "baby killer" at him.

Ain't hypocrisy a bitch? Stupak is a member of Washington, D.C., religious frat house the Fellowship (a/k/a the Family), where his rent was subsidized by the Christians who run the secretive foundation. Stupak has outright lied that he doesn't have anything to do with the Family, even though it has been well established that he had resided in its C Street mansion for years.