November 6, 2006

• Christians Growing Increasingly Dissatisfied With Amoral Public Education System  
• Sovereignty Grab: ‘American Union' Plot Confirmed  
• Jimmy Carter's New Book Blasts Zionist Racism and Power of Israeli Lobby  
• Middle Class Fights for Survival  

November 13, 2006

• Martial Law Made Easy  
• Editorial: Bush National Guard Power Grab Appalling  
• Thousands of U.S. Veterans May Die While Awaiting Disability Benefits  
• NAFTA Superhighway Bypassing Congress  
• FBI Probe of American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) Widens  
• Poll Shows Academics Fear Israel's Power  

November 20, 2006

• Grassroots America Wins; U.S. Voters Embracing Grassroots Initiatives  
• Immigration Crisis Won't Go Away  
• Zionist Call for Witch-Hunt  

November 27, 2006

• Were Dakota Voters Dupted?  
• U.S. Won't Condemn Mass Murder: America Supports Israel's Genocide of Palestinians  
• Flag Haters Trumped by Trump  
• Commentary: Time to Hang the War Criminals  

Charlton Heston, portraying Moses in Cecil B DeMille's classic movie "The Ten Commandments" declared to the Egyptians, "Let my people go!" Today, a similar rallying cry is being heard across the country as a growing number of southern Baptists are declaring: "Let our children go!"

That's what many Southern Baptists are saying to a public school system that they regard as an unsalvageable humanist experiment that is failing to teach kids reading and other academic essentials and, far worse, is fostering an amoral atmosphere that is turning their kids away from God.

Many Baptists and some people in other Christian denominations are having a difficult time reconciling their belief that they should raise godly offspring with their failure to educate their kids outside of the public school system.

This week, AFP interviewed Roger Moran who, along with two colleagues, represents the state of Missouri on the Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention.

According to Moran, there are around 16.3 million Southern Baptists in the United States. However, there are divisions among them on what to do regarding what they see as the corrosive influence of public schools.

Moran told AFP that while some Southern Baptists will "stay engaged" in the public schools and, in most cases, keep sending their children to them, many others are fed up with the school system. He blamed the growing dissatisfaction on the fact that the public schools exclusively promote the religion of secular humanism—a man-centered belief system that sees the creation of the universe and life as chance occurrences with no universal moral code.

Moran concedes that there are many Baptists who would pull their kids out of state-run schools if their financial status and other circumstances were less restrictive. But the trend is shifting toward those, like Moran and a number of other like-minded Baptists, who are calling for an exodus from the government schools.

It's going to be a long, hard fight, Moran said, admitting that this won't happen overnight.

"The point is to start the process of debate and to get people thinking about their worldview," Moran told AFP.

He asked, how can Baptists continue to send their kids to public schools if they truly believe that one of their central tasks as Christians is to make sure their children are "to be trained up and profess the name of Christ."?

A non-binding resolution passed on April 24 of this year is titled:

"Resolution on developing an exit strategy from the public schools that would give particular attention to the needs of orphans, single parents, and the disadvantaged."

Submitted by Moran and colleague Dr. Bruce N. Shortt, the resolution's opening statement is as follows:

Whereas, in June 2005 Dr. Albert Mohler, President of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, called for responsible Southern Baptists to develop an exit strategy from the government schools, stating further that there is no reason to believe that each year will not bring even more urgent concerns related to public education. . . .

In other words the mere passage of time is not expected to bring public school changes that will cast the school system in a favorable light.

The resolution makes 18 more assertions, criticizing the public schools for portraying homosexuality as acceptable and teaching "dogmatic Darwinism." It then resolves, in part, "that the 2006 Annual Meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention encourages each church associated with the Southern Baptist Convention to heed Dr. Mohler's call to develop an exit strategy from the government's schools."

It also urges that "agencies of the Southern Baptist Convention assist churches in the development of exit strategies from the government schools and help coordinate efforts, including partnerships with churches in low income areas, to provide a Christian educational alternative to orphans, single parents, and the disadvantaged."

Moran told AFP: "We've got people—many of whom are Baptists elected by their church to be messengers—who are going to submit this resolution in every state convention."

Those conventions begin in late October and run through November. Many states have their own conventions while other states are grouped into regions.

Moran cited the section in the resolution stating that 88% of children raised in evangelical homes leave the church at age 18 and never return. This relevant portion was among passages mentioned in an Oct. 18 press release from the Christian Newswire, which reported:

"The call for an ‘exodus' from the public schools continues to build momentum within the Southern Baptist Convention [SBC]. Although elements of the SBC leadership prevented the messengers at this year's SBC Annual Meeting from having the opportunity to vote on the Moran/Shortt "Exit Strategy" resolution, the same resolution has been submitted in every SBC state and regional convention in the continental United States, a significant increase over the number of states in which education resolutions were introduced in 2004 (conventions covering 15 states) and 2005 (conventions covering approximately 25 states)."

Mohler is president of the SBC's flagship seminary, the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., and is also considered one of the SBC's leading theologians. His call for this exodus is based on his view that the public schools foster spiritual, moral and academic decay. Other Baptist activists point out that the result is an unsafe environment, among other issues.

Moran, speaking with AFP, is incensed that students in public schools cannot be given a true assessment of America's Founding Fathers—particularly that most of them were Christian and built the nation's founding documents on a basic Christian worldview.

"None of this stuff is being passed on to the next generation," he said. "These kids are oblivious to what made this nation great."

And, speaking of Christians who "talk the talk" but rarely "walk the walk," he added, "We've got things that we say we would die for. We just won't live for them. What good are 16 million Baptists if we don't live like Christians?"

Watch AFP for updates on this and many other important domestic issues across the nation. AFP correspondent Mark Anderson can be contacted at truthorelse@msn.com.

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By James P. Tucker Jr.

A government plot to surrender U.S. sovereignty to a "North American Union" through agreements with Mexico and Canada has been confirmed by documents obtained under the freedom of Information Act. Strong opposition to the proposed "North American Union" and the "NAFTA Superhighway" was announced in Washington Oct.25 by traditional conservative Howard Phillips and several of his colleagues.

"Documents recently obtained through the Freedom of Information Act reveal details of the plan to merge the U.S. with Mexico and Canada, creating a ‘North American Union' which would erase our borders, replace the dollar with the ‘amero,' lead to unlimited immigration, and render the Constitution of the United States meaningless," Phillips and colleagues said in a statement.

They endorsed House Concurrent Resolution 487, introduced by Republican Reps. Virgil Goode (Va.), Walter Jones (N.C.), Ron Paul (Tex.) And Tom Tancredo (Colo.). The resolution opposes such a measure.

"The bush administration plan is to create a North American Union along the model of the European Union," said Phillips. The ultimate goal, as expressed repeatedly by the secretive bilderberg group over the last several years, is for NAFTA to expand as the ‘American Union" throughout the Western Hemisphere.

That the common currency would be called the "amero" was first reported in American Free Press on June 26, 2006, by reporter Ralph Forbes. Bilderberg had initially planned for the "dollarization" of the hemisphere, making the dollar the common currency.

The House resolution opposed the "NAFTA Superhighway" which is to run from Mexico through the U.S. heartland to Canada.

"The NAFTA super corridor plan is ultimately to reduce the transportation cost of using cheap labor in China, south Korea and Indonesia to produce goods for American markets," Phillis said. "Containers can be moved trough the U.S. by Mexican nationals, again bypassing Teamster Union wages and benefits typically paid to U.S. truck drivers."
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By Michael Collins Piper

" This comment alone has been condemned by Zionist voices as reflection an old-fashioned "anti-Semitic conspiracy theory."

Carter also riled supporters of Israel by suggesting that "Israel's continued control and colonization of Palestinian land have been the primary obstacles to a comprehensive peace agreement in the Holy Land."

Speaking on behalf of a high-level clique of Democratic Party fund raisers who are focusing on generation Jewish campaign contributions to the party's coffers, U.S. congressman Steven J. Israel, a glib New Yorker with presidential aspirations, denounced Carter, attacked the Palestinians and added that the Nobel Peace Prize winner's concerns don't reflect the direction of the Democratic Party. "It reflects the opinion of one man," asserted Israel.

This is not the first time that the former president has come under fire for his criticism of Israel. Following the recent Israeli assault on Lebanon, carter upset Israel's partisans when he said, "I don't think Israel has any legal or moral justification for their massive bombing of the entire nation of Lebanon."

But the truth is that carter's problems with Israel and its American lobby go back to virtually the earliest days of his presidency - a point that many Americans have never reeally understood. In fact, as far back as March 2, 1978, little more than a year after carter was sworn in as president The Wall Street Journal was already noting that even though Carter had just won 75% of the Jewish vote in the presidential election, "various events and occurrences" in Carters administration had "disturbed Jews."

The Journal pointed out that many key leaders in the American Jewish community were "rethinking their commitment to Jimmy carter" and that some were eve "talking privately about a ‘betrayal' of Israel by Carter.

The American Zionists were disturbed that Carter had put pressure on Israel to stop colonizing occupied arab territories and had made the decision to sell advanced warplanes to Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Carter had also dared to use the term "homeland" in reference to Palestinian aspirations - something that, in those days - was considered a major offense to Israel's geopolitical demands upon the world.

Citing the harsh words about Carter by several top Jewish democrats, the Journal said that this criticism "could mean a great deal," pointing out that San Francisco developer Walter Shorenstein, one of the Democratic Party's major fund raisers (and a well-known supporter of Israel) had gone so far as to ask: "Is Israel being sold down the river by the Carter administration?"

These questions were being raised as early as 1978, as noted, and by the spring of 1980, when Carter was seeking renomination and re-election, the war against Carter by Israel and its partisans was well under way.

Things were so bad, from carter's perspective that - according to veteran journalists. Andrew and Leslie Cockburn - Carter was heard to tell senior political advisors in a private meeting in the family quarters of the White House that "If I get back in, I'm going to [expletive deleted] the Jews."

According to the Cockburns, writing in a little-noticed passage in their 1991 book, Dangerous Liaison: The Inside Story of the U.S.-Israel Relationship. Carter's anger at Israel and its American supporters stemmed not only from increasing attacks on Carter from that corner, but, in particular from the fact that carter had discovered - through intercepts made available to him by the National security Agency - that Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin was interfering in American domestic political affairs. Begin had been overheard advising New York Mayor Ed Koch on how to undermine carter's reelection hopes.

In fact, Koch later went on to endorse Carter's Republican challenger, former California Gov. Ronald reagan whose own early rise in both the entertainment industry (and later the political arena) came as a consequence of his close relationship with financial forces and organized crime interests, who were prime movers behind the Israeli lobby in America. For more on Reagan's little-known criminal Zionist connections, see the shocking new book, Supermob,* by investigative journalist Gus Russo.

In addition, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger - who became a key advisor to the Reagan campaign (and later the Reagan White House, just as he advises George W. Bush today) - was huddling with the Israeli ambassador to the United States, urging Israel to "organize forces in the U.S. and Israel" against Carter.

In the end, with Israeli lobby forces and financial contributors coalescing at the highest levels around Reagan, Carter was dislodged from the White House. Since then, Carter has won many accolades for his frank talk about the Middle east defying the mass media and the Israeli lobby in the process.

* Supermob (hardback, item #1516, $38.95 - just for members of The American Free Press Readership Council) by Gary Russo is available from First Amendment Books, 645 Pennsylvania Ave. SE, Suite 100, Washington, D.C. 20003. Call 1-888-699-6397 to order by Visa or MasterCard.
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Our government has lost its moorings and, disturbingly, has become a predator, acting against the interests of the people it is supposed to serve under the Constitution. Its special target is the all-important middle class, or "yeomanry," a class without which the United states cannot survive.

Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class by Thom Hartmann, author of some 19 books so far, shows how the U.S. yeoman class is shrinking. Our democratic republican form of government, too, is at ebb tide. Both are threatened with extinction by an omnipotent "corporatocracy" that seeks to destroy the very system of government on which our nation was founded.

Those in power today, the "establishment regime" if you like, want to destroy what the Founding Fathers believed in and handed down for their posterity. In its place, our self appointed rulers want to replace that vision with an imperial presidency hardly different from the monarchy the American Revolution threw off. The nation's Rounders no longer wanted to be ruled by a greedy king and Parliament and instead sought a system of government never tried before, a blend of the democracy of ancient Athens and the confederacies of Switzerland and the Iroquois tribes.

You will recall that the Athenian system was destroyed in the war between Athens and the oligarches of Sparta - who believed, like President bush and his "neo-con" allies (or simply "cons," as the author appropriately prefers to call them) that war is good (except, of course, for the people on its losing end and the soldiers in the ranks, who are likely to be wounded or killed).

Hartmann is an astute observer and critic of American history and policies gone awry under 25 years of corporatocracy, beginning with the Regan administration. Our government has been corrupted by the phony notion that whatever serves the interests of business elitists in the corporate boardrooms benefits ordinary people in some mysterious "trickle-down" manner. But that is all propaganda. It never has benefited the yeoman, and is not really intended to.

It's a system of government described by some as "the best democracy money can buy." Those who can pay can play, but those who can't have no say or sway.

Hartmann's book begins by recalling a past time some living today grew up in, when working people earned a living wage, had good health insurance, secure pensions and needed only one family wage-earner to get by. Those days ended when Reagan was elected president with the dubious mandate of about 25 percent of the eligible voters.

That America of the good old days is disappearing fast. Megacorporations now run everything, controlling what we eat and drink, what we wear, where we live, how we get most of our essential services, and the information that influences how we think. They decide who governs, and at whose expense.

Corporatocracy has taken a severe toll. Workers today earn less, in terms of purchasing power, than 30 years ago. Outrageously, the ratio of CEO pay to the average working person's compensation rose from 42 times in 1980 to 85 times in 1990 and 431 times in 2004.

The age of George W. Bush is the closest thing to what corporate America has wanted since the time of the original robber barons. For war profiteers, It's an age of a permanent war against terrorist threats that hardly exist and vast levels of spending on the military and "homeland security."

It's a time of legalized torture, endless wars, big tax cuts for the rich and for the megacorporations at the expense of public welfare, crackdown on freedom at home, contempt for the environment, and big cuts in social services.

At the end of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Benjamin franklin reportedly said in answer to what form of government the nation now had: "A republic, if you can keep it." Hartmann explains if we want a vibrant middle class and a healthy democratic republic, we have to work for it.
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By James P. Tucker Jr.

A little-noted provision of the recently passed Defense Authorization Act allows President Bush to send in the military to police any trouble spot in this country regardless of the wishes of state governors.

On Oct. 17, President Bush signed the John Warner National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2007.

The act grants the military the authority to seek from Congress $462.8 billion. In addition, Senate and House conferees added another $70 billion in supplemental defense spending bringing the overall total of the act to an unprecedented $532.8 billion. The supplemental funding provides billions of dollars to help "reset" Army and Marine Corps equipment, which is wearing out faster than planned because of the war in Afghanistan and the occupation of Iraq.

A highly controversial and little-known aspect of the act "contains a widely opposed provision to allow the president more control over the National Guard [by adopting] changes to the Insurrection Act, which will make it easier for this or any future president to use the military to restore order without the consent of the nation's governors," Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Ver.) said.

Americans "certainly do not need to make it easier for presidents to declare martial law," Leahy said. "Invoking the Insurrection Act and using the military for law enforcement activities goes against some of the central tenets of our democracy. One can easily envision governors and mayors in charge of an emergency having to constantly look over their shoulders while someone who has never visited their communities gives the orders."

The act "subverts solid, long-standing Posse Comitatus statutes that limit the military's involvement in law enforcement, thereby making it easier for the president to declare martial law," Leahy said. This had been "slipped in as a rider with little study" while "other congressional committees with jurisdiction over these matters had no chance to comment, let alone hold hearings on these proposals."

There is good reason, Leahy said, "for the constructive friction in existing law when it comes to martial law declarations. Using the military for law enforcement goes against one of the founding tenets of our democracy. We fail our Constitution, neglecting the rights of the states, when we make it easier for the president to declare martial law and trample on local and state sovereignty."

The law allows the president to "employ the armed forces, including the National Guard in federal service, to restore public order and enforce the laws of the United States when, as a result of a natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident, or other condition in any state or possession of the United States, that the president determines that domestic violence has occurred to such an extent that the constituted authorities of the state or possession are incapable of maintaining public order to suppress in any state, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination or conspiracy."

"Or other condition" is a critical line in the new law, skeptics say. The president can send the National Guard into any community for any—even frivolous—reasons, they argue.

The Founders, as expressed in the written history of the times—published speeches and letters—were anxious to never have a national police force for fear it would be used to centralize power at the federal level and weaken the role of states. The president can now, effectively, deploy a national police force to any location in the country on a whim.

The 1878 Posse Comitatus Act reads: "Whoever, except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or act of Congress, willfully uses any part" of the military "as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for not more than two years or both."

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On Oct. 17, in a quiet ceremony at the Oval Office, President Bush signed into law the 907-page John Warner National Defense Authorization Act of 2007. When it comes to defense spending, massive legislation such as this is sadly becoming commonplace, and most Americans simply shrug their shoulders when they hear of it, leaving it to the "experts." The primary purpose of this bill is to give the U.S. military the authority to ask Congress for a ridiculously huge sum of taxpayers' hard-earned money - more than half a trillion dollars - which will go straight into the waiting pockets of the already obscenely wealthy and powerful military-industrial-banking-political complex.

And as if this spending free-for-all is not bad enough, worse still is the frightening provision that was buried deep inside the legislation that hands the president the power to subvert the authority of states, call in the military to serve under his command and federalize law enforcement.

Up until Bush's signing National Guard units, according to law, had been excluded from the Posse Comitatus Act so long as they acted under the authority of the governor of a state. Now, whether bush understands it or not, he has stolen the National guard for the White House and has gone further than even Democratic presidents in centralizing power in this country.

It is not surprising that this blatant power grab has received scant attention from mainstream columnists, who have remained all but silent about the grossly unconstitutional implications of federalizing the role of law enforcement in this country.

But what of the conservatives in Congress? Have they raised a cry about this subversion of the Constitution? Incredibly, it took the far left wing in Washington to cast the spotlight on the danger to America of this provision. Had this measure been passed by a Democratic president like Bill Clinton, Republicans would have been up in arms over it. "Conservatives" in both the House and the Senate would have taken to the floor, citing previous troubles in our nation's history to voice the dangers of subverting Posse Comitatus. Instead only Patrick Leahy, the liberal Democratic senator from Vermont, stood up to chastise the White House for its blatant power grab. Conservatives right now seem to be too busy trying to save their seats as more and more Americans take them to task over their spineless support of Bush's illegal, aggressive war in Iraq.

Hey, conservatives: Do we have to draw you a picture? Think about it this way: If Hillary Clinton takes the White House in 2008, as some people predict she will, then she will have the power to take command of National guard unites in states under any condition where she feels it is necessary.

So when Charley Reese writes in this wwk's edition that the Republican Party is no longer a conservative party he is carving out the terrible truth.
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One out of every four combat veterans who served in Afghanistan or Iraq is filing for disability benefits, which means that unless Congress and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) take steps to reform the process, a large number may die before they receive the benefits that were promised them by their country.

This has been an ongoing and terrible problem plaguing the VA, but it has been compounded significantly by the wars initiated by the Bush administration.

Disability claims received at 57 regional Veterans Affairs offices totaled 788,298 in 2005 - a whopping 29% increase from the 578,773 in 2000. Although the figures are not complete for 2006, they are expected to show a continuing increase.

On average, the VA takes some 129 days to decide on claims at the regional level. This is only the beginning for thousands who have been denied benefits and have been forced to appeal. At this point the waits can get so longthat many veterans die before a decision is reached. The process is archaic, is mired in bureaucracy and creates unimaginable hardships to thousands of families.

Some veterans going all the way back to World War II are still waiting for decisions on disability claims.

"The Backlog has never been longer than now," said Randy Reese, national service director for the Disabled American Veterans.

The U.S. court of Appeals for Veterans Claims, the final arbiter, has only seven judges who are appointed by the president for 15-year terms. They review cases from the VA's Board of Veterans Appeals and determine if the VA erred in denying claims or in determining the percentage of disability.

Today, the court has a backlog of 6,080 cases and is receiving 300 new ones each month. During the past year a record 3,729 new cases were received by the court, but only 2,842 cases were decided. Some insiders have noted that it is impossible for seven judges to thoroughly vet each case before passing judgment.

Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho), chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, said the backlogged cases of the court could reach 10,000 in five years.

The bottom line is that if something is not done soon to reverse these trends," Craig said, "veterans seeking justice from the court may have to wait in a line several years long to get their cases in front of a judge."

Dan Krasnegor, a Richmond, Va. attorney, said about 40 of his clients died before their cases were decided by the Veterans Appeals Court

A former Air Force pilot, 75, who lives in Winston-Salem, N.C., is attempting to get his disability rating increased to 50 percent. He had been injured in an airplane crash. If he wins his claim and lives long enough, he will be able to receive free VA medical care and enough money to pay bills and maintain his home.

He doesn't qualify for Social Security benefits because, since leaving the Air Force, he has been unable to hold a job. He suffers from seizures because of head injuries suffered during the crash. He filed his claim seven years ago. It reached the Veterans Appeals Court in March 2005, where it lingers among thousands of others.

Today's modern battlefield surgical practices and body armor saves the lives of many who would have died years ago. But the percentage of wounded with lost limbs and severe head injuries has increased. As a result more and more injured vets are surviving. While this is a blessing to their families, it has seriously bogged down the VA.

So long as Washington continues to send hundreds of thousands of young Americans into unnecessary wars around the world, the fight for veterans' benefits and the cost to taxpayers will increase.
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By now many Texans have heard about the proposed "NAFTA Superhighway" which is also referred to as the trans-Texas corridor. What you may not know is the extent to which plans for such a superhighway are moving forward without congressional oversight or media attention.

The superhighway would connect Mexico, the United States and Canada, cutting a wide swath through the middle of Texas and up through Kansas city. Offshoots would connect the main artery to the West Coast, Florida and the Northeast. Proponents envision a 10-lane colossus the width of several football fields, with freight and rail lines, fiber-optic cable lines, and oil and natural gas pipelines running alongside.

This will require coordinated federal and state eminent domain actions on an unprecedented scale, as literally millions of people and businesses could be displaced. The loss of whole communities is almost certain, as planners cannot wind the highway around every quaint town, historic building, or senior citizen apartment for thousands of miles.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) is a supporter of the superhighway project, and Congress has provided small amounts of money to study the proposal. Since this money was just one item in an enormous transportation appropriations bill, however most members of congress were not aware of it.

The proposed highway is part of a broader plan advanced by a quasi-government organization called the "Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America," or SPP. The SPP was first launched in 2005 by the heads of state of Canada, Mexico and the United States at a summit in Waco.

The SPP was not created by a treaty between the nations involved, nor was Congress involved in any way. Instead, the SPP is an unholy alliance of foreign consortiums and officials from several governments. One principal player is a Spanish construction company, which plans to build the highway and operate it as a toll road. But don't be fooled: the superhighway proposal is not the result of free market demand, but rather an extension of government-managed trade schemes like the North American Free Trade Agreement that benefit politically connected interests.

The real issue is national sovereignty. Once again, decisions that affect millions of Americans are not being made by those Americans themselves, or even by their elected representatives in Congress. Instead, a handful of elites use their government connections to bypass national legislatures and ignore our Constitution - which expressly grants Congress the sole authority to regulate international trade.

The ultimate goal is not simply a superhighway, but an integrated North American Union - complete with a currency, a cross-national bureaucracy and virtually borderless travel within the Union. Like the European Union, a North American Union would represent another step toward the abolition of national sovereignty altogether.

A new resolution, introduced by Rep. Virgil Goode (R-Va.) expresses the sense of Congress that the United States should not engage in the construction of a NAFTA superhighway, nor enter into any agreement that advances the concept of a North American Union. I wholeheartedly support this legislation, and predict that the superhighway will become a sleeper issue in the 2008 election.

Any movement toward a North American Union diminishes the ability of average Americans to influence the laws under which they must live. The SSP agreement, including the plan for a major transnational superhighway through the heartland of our nation, is moving forward without congressional oversight - and that is an outrage.

The administration needs a strong message from Congress that the American people will not tolerate backroom deals that threaten our sovereignty.
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While two executives of the powerful Israeli lobby group American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) await trial on charges of spying against the United States, the FBI has now broadened its investigation to look at whether the group tried to strike a deal with a leading member of Congress. In particular, federal investigators wish to know if AIPAC tried to reach a shady arrangement with Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.

According to a recent report in a mainstream magazine, the alleged deal was that, in the event Democrats took control of Congress, AIPAC would lobby for Harman, now a member of the House Intelligence Committee, to become the chair of that committee. In return she would be expected to press the White House and Justice Department to go easy on Keith Weisman and Steven Rosen, the two former AIPAC executives soon to be tried for espionage.

Weisman and Rosen were connected to a spy ring involving the self-confessed traitor, Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin. In January 2006, Franklin was sentenced to 12 years in prison for being part of a conspiracy to communicate America's national defense secrets to a foreign power, namely Israel.

According to Franklin's explosive indictment, his co-conspirators were not only Rosen and Weisman, but also Uzi Arad, a former Mossad agent, and Naor Gilan, the lead Mossad agent at the Israeli embassy in Washington. Gilan and Arad left the country before they could be interviewed by the FBI, but Rosen and Weisman were not so fortunate. It soon emerged that the FBI had a wealth of incriminating video and wire-tapped material on the two AIPAC executives and had also extracted information from Franklin about his links to them and how he passed them classified papers.

Through their lawyers, Rosen and Weisman argued that they were not guilty of treason and had been doing only what AIPAC had always done: They had pressured important people in the pentagon and Congress and passed whatever information and documents they got from them to Israel.

The latest claims that AIPAC has been meddling in intelligence circles in Congress will come as no shock to those who know just how powerful the Israeli lobby in Washington is. So far, Harman and AIPAC have denied a secret deal. However, to many insiders, such an arrangement is reasonable given AIPAC's stated goal of shaping U.S. foreign policy to suit Israel's agenda in the Middle East.

Many people suspect that the FBI investigations into AIPAC and Harman will go nowhere. However, the Israeli lobby cannot put the Rosen-Weissman espionage case under the rug. The evidence in the case shows conclusively that AIPAC has been the means by which Israel has acquired critical intelligence on America's Middle East policy, which it has used to influence American public opinion and White House policy.

The most staggering aspect of the Franklin conviction was that, even though it proved AIPAC was spying on the United States, the majority of members on both sides of the House turned a blind eye to that fact. In other words, Congress was nowhere near as concerned as U.S. courts were that America's national secrets were being acquired by a powerful special interest group on behalf of a foreign power.

From the moment news of the FBI investigation in AIPAC broke in 2004, the Israeli lobby in Washington called in powerful friends and started circling the wagons.

When it was leaked that Pentagon analyst Franklin had confessed to passing classified national security documents to the Israelis, the Anti-Defamation League called for a probe into FBI leads as though leaks were more important than espionage.

AIPAC used its powerful friends in the U.S. media and Congress to play down its role in the espionage conspiracy. To that end, it persuaded Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to deliver the keynote address to the May 2005 AIPAC convention in Washington. The event was also attended by Vice President Dick Cheney, Sen. Hilary Clinton (D-N.Y.) And leaders of the House and Senate.
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If members on both sides of the House have been so seduced by AIPAC that they refuse to see how much U.S. policy in the Middle East is shaped by AIPAC they might be interested in a recent poll by Zogby International. The national survey showed that a large percentage of Americans believe the pro-Israel lobby was a significant influence on the Bush Administration's decision to invade Iraq and take a hard line on Iran.

The poll by Zogby, conducted on behalf of the Council for the National Interest Foundation, showed that 39% of Americans believe the Israel lobby was a powerful influence on U.S. Middle East policy while 40% disagreed and 20% were unsure.

When those figures were further broken down, it was clear that half of Democrats believed the Iraq war decision was influenced by the Israeli lobby, while only 45% of Republicans did.

Broken down by demographic, almost 77% of Jewish Americans disagreed that the lobby was a powerful factor in U.S. decision-making whereas 55% of Hispanics took the opposite view.

One of the interesting findings of the survey was that more Americans in the 18 to 29 age group saw an Israeli hand in U.S. foreign policy.

In a more shocking national poll by Zogby, another study showed that a majority of academics believe the United States' link to Israel is a serious threat to global peace and stability.
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By Mark Anderson

On Nov. 7, voters in 37 states were asked to make decisions on 205 ballot propositions, up from 162 propositions just two years ago. Of the 205 on the 2006 ballot, 76 were initiatives - posed new laws that qualified for the balllot from grassroots citizen petitioning - five were referendums, which are proposals to repeal existing laws.

Though many measures were not passed, overall they broached subjects that legislators were afraid to touch, including illegal immigration, eminent domain and election reform.

In Arizona, which led the nation with 19 ballot proposals for the Nov. 7 election, voters were asked whether to approve Proposition 207 on eminent domain, to place stricter limits on the growing trend of government grabbing private land from the original owners and transferring it to private developers instead of using the land for a clearly defined public purpose - crooked process which often smacks of favoritism and corruption.

Arizona was one of 12 states that had eminent domain propositions on the ballot, an apparent ripple effect from the well-known Kelo v. New London Supreme Court ruling in 2005. In that case, the high court upheld a Connecticut court ruling which stated that the municipality of New London, Conn., could condemn private property in the city's Fort Trumbull area, taking the land from their current private owners through the force of law and giving the land to a private developer.

Colorado, with 14 propositions, was the next busiest state behind Arizona, followed by California with 13, South Dakota with 11, and Oregon and Nevada with 10 each. Louisiana had 21 propositions, but only eight were on the November ballot; the other 13 were voted on in September.

South Dakota, the first state to adopt the statewide ballot initiative concept starting in 1898, has been considered a state to watch, as voters were asked to decide whether to approve Amendment E to alter the state constitution to create a special grand jury to reign in judicial corruption; and whether to uphold or repeal Referred Law 6 (RL 6), a law passed by the state legislature that, unless repealed by voters, would make South Dakota perhaps the most difficult state for a woman to get an abortion.

"South Dakota's referendum to repeal the abortion ban will be watched nationwide," noted a special report on the nation's 2006 ballot propositions by the Initiative and Referendum Institute (IRI) at the University of Southern California Law School. As it turns out, South Dakota voters did not support Amendment E. This measure faced well-funded opposition from the country's entire legal establishment as it was to guard against judicial abuse of power. This measure was defeated with 294,747 "no" votes (89%) to 35,640 "yes" votes (11%). And RL 6 did not stand - 185,948 "no" votes (56%) versus 148,666 "yes" votes (44%) means the nearly total abortion ban approved by the state legislature was overturned by voters.

California was another of the states with an eminent domain proposal. California's Prop 90 "restricts eminent domain for private projects" and "requires compensation for regulatory takings," IRI notes. According to The San Francisco Chronicle on Nov. 8, Prop 90 (a.k.a. the "Protect Our Homes Act") had 49.4% of the vote with 32.1% of the precincts were reporting.

"Proponents said Prop. 90 was a necessary reaction to the June 2005 Supreme Court ruling that allowed New London, Conn., to seize the home of Susette Kelo and others so a developer could build a hotel, condominiums and commercial space on the site," the Chronicle noted.

Ultimately, Prop 90 was defeated with 3,333,581 "no" votes (53%) to 3,015,151 "yes" votes (47%). Idaho and Washington were two other states where voters did not pass eminent domain restriction proposals. As Pacific Legal Foundation attorney Timothy Sandefur noted, the three states where eminent domain measures lost featured proposals that were "vaguely written and had complicated legal flaws. I think voters wanted to be sure that they got real reform on eminent domain."

As this article went to press, the overall outcome on statewide measures regarding eminent domain was good news. "Voters in nine states spoke with a single voice . . .demanding that bureaucrats respect their private property rights and stop abusing eminent domain," according to a Pacific Legal Foundation press release. The states in which voters passed ballot measures to restrict eminent domain powers were Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Dakota, New Hampshire, Oregon and South Carolina.

The eminent domain reforms passed Nov. 7 "received a landslide national average of 75% `yes' votes," concluded the foundation.

To get an idea of the kind of eminent domain limitations being sought, Nevada's official ballot language is clear: "Shall Article 1 of the Nevada Constitution be amended in order: to provide that the transfer of property from one private party to another private party is not considered a public use; to provide that property taken for a public use must be valued at its highest and best use; to provide that fair market value in eminent domain proceedings be defined as the `highest price the property would bring on the open market;' and to make certain other changes related to eminent domain proceedings?"

Michigan's ballot included Prop 2 to amend the state constitution to ban affirmative action programs that give preferential treatment to groups and individuals for public employment, university admissions or contracting for jobs. Special treatment for race, gender, skin color, ethnicity or national origin would be banned. And Michigan's Prop 4, like Nevada's proposal, was among the strongest anti-eminent domain measures among the states with such measures.

On Prop 2, voters in Michigan sent a clear message that affirmative action policies are biased. About 58%, or 2,131,488, said "yes" to amend the constitution to outlaw affirmative action. The "no" votes totaled 1,539,431, or 42%. And Michigan voters gave no quarter to land-grabbers - whopping 80% of the voters, or 2,896,521, said "yes" to stop government from taking and transferring property from the original private owner to another for alleged "economic development" or to "increase tax revenue." The "no" votes totaled only 716,738.

There was at least one voter-bribery measure: Arizona's Prop 200 asked voters whether to approve a measure to award a $1 million lottery prize to a randomly selected voter after each general election, in an effort to increase voter turnout, a gesture that seems to overlook the sentiments of many Americans who often don't vote because the two dominant political parties are essentially the same and feature candidates that do not represent distinct choices, not to mention deep suspicion of election fraud. Prop 200 was soundly rejected. The prize would have gone to someone who voted in either the primary or general election.

Another Arizona measure, Prop 205, calling for all Arizona voters to vote by mail - which would likely encourage widespread retail voter fraud with the same person sending in more than one ballot - defeated by a wide margin. It would have featured mail-in ballots with prepaid return envelopes sent to all registered voters, with a few countywide polling places remaining open on election days.

In South Dakota, Initiated Measure 4 would have legalized the use of marijuana for medical purposes. Voters rejected that 173,190 to 157,956, or 52% to 48%. Nevada's Question 7 and Colorado's Amendment 44 asked voters to legalize possession of one ounce of marijuana. Question 7, which would have regulated and taxed marijuana purchases with an age requirement of 21, was defeated 320,854 to 252,776, or 56% to 44%. Amendment 44 also was defeated, 819,234 to 557,532, or 60% to 40%.

Issues dealing with various aspects of the immigration of illegal aliens into the United States were plentiful in Arizona. Prop 100 to deny bail to illegal aliens under certain conditions was approved 886,628 to 252,687, or 78% to 22%. Prop 102, which prohibits illegal aliens from receiving punitive damage awards in lawsuits, was approved 837,403 to 288,510, or 74% to 26%. Prop 103 making English the state's official language also was strongly approved 846,650 to 294,590, or 74% to 26%; and Prop 300 to prohibit illegal aliens from getting state subsidies for education and child care was passed almost as overwhelmingly, 806,652 to 319,228, or 72% to 28%.

Colorado, though a non-border state, also included an immigration-related issue. Referendum H, to prohibit businesses from deducting wages paid to illegal aliens from their tax bill, evidently was narrowly approved 662,526 to 642,793, or 51% to 49%.

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The following is an excerpt from a speech on the illegal immigration invasion given by De. Virginia Abernethy at the 2006 Free Speech conference co-sponsored by American Free Press.

We are going to be up to a billion people in the United States before the end of this century if current trends continue. Well, that seems bad enough, but it's actually not as bad as what some people are predicting if current trends increase. The reality is, it's likely to get much worse.

Recent population growth has been increasing so quickly that we are now looking at 1 billion people in this country sometime before the end of this century if current trends continue.

The Census Bureau announced that we have 300 million as of October. The fact is that we actually passed the 300 million six years ago. So let's go back to the year 2000 to see what happened them.

In 2000 the Census bureau announced the results of the 10 year census, and they said at that time that we had 284.5 million people. That number is a smoking gun for two reasons: first off the Census bureau was saying that this number - 284 million plus - took into account all the illegal immigration in the country, which they said was between 5 million and 7 million illegal aliens.

Other sources, however - credible sources - were soon able to say that we had at least 18 to 28 million illegal aliens in the country six years ago. In other words, we had up to 20 million more illegal aliens than the Census Bureau admitted. So instead of reaching 300 million sometime this fall, we apparently had that large of a population by the year 2000.

Now who are these credible sources who said that we had as many as 28 million illegal aliens some years ago? For one, the Mexican government was boasting that 18 million of its citizens were in the United States illegally. Besides that, we know we have illegal aliens from the Philippines, India, China, Haiti and Korea. There's another source: In the year 2002, a retired U.S. Border Patrol supervisor testified before Congress that 24 to 28 million illegal aliens were in the United States. And another source from Bear Stearns Asset Management Company; using financial and business records, concluded that 18 to 20 million illegal aliens were in the United States.

What does that amount mean in terms of your lives and your experience? At the end of World war II, we had less than half of that amount. We had fought and won world War II with 135 million people. And now we have over 300 million. That is very rapid growth; the fastest growth of any developed country in the world.

But the Census Bureau's announcement of the population in the year 2000 has a second problem. That problem is that the year 2000 population is given as 12 million people higher than they had had just one year before in 1999. The census forced the Census bureau to acknowledge a huge increase. Census officials have been bopping along saying each year that we were 2.5 million more, and then suddenly, to make the numbers work; they had to admit there were 12 million more. Not many people picked that up because all the media focus was on the results of the census itself. We didn't take notice that the Census Bureau was underestimating growth by at least 1 million people each year during the 1990's.

The same thing is happening now. If you look at the Census bureau's figures year after year. Officials are estimating growth of less than 3 million a year on average. But I am predicting that they will do the same thing in 2010 that they did in 2000. To catch up to somewhere approximating real numbers, they'll bump it up by 12 million, 15 million, and even by 20 million. And then if we did the computation, we would see that our growth rate was well over 1% a year and maybe even closer to 2%.

Now that again may not sound like very fast population growth but if you were growing about 1% a year, you will double your population in 70 years. If you're growing by 2% a year, you will double your population in 35 years. That's just a mathematical calculation.

So what is wrong with rapid population growth? To begin with, approximately 19% of the growth we are having now is the result of immigration. It is the annual flow of immigrants plus the descendants of recent immigrants. Annual flow plus the descendants of post-1970s immigrants.

Once third world immigrants are in the United States, they have much larger families on average than the average American family, black or white. This is not true across the board. It is not so true of the Chinese. They tend to small family size once they're here. But it is very true of Mexicans, Filipinos, and Vietnamese for example, which have enormous family sizes one here.

In Georgia, some recent statistics show between four and five children per woman from Mexican descent.

So this is relating to the second point which is that the immigrant flow has changed drastically from what it was before 1965. Before that date we had primarily immigration that matched the demographic composition of the population. Since 1965 we have had a different system called family unification and it set up to encourage people from every part of the world to come in approximately equal numbers. But once the first round of immigrants were here, they were able to bring in their relatives preferentially, and that is the reason that we now have overwhelmingly Mexican and Central American immigration.

Sometimes when other people come from other cultures, their culture is not that compatible with the one that they find here, which is primarily a European-American culture. And a prime example of that, which I will point out is our Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who is most likely the son of illegal aliens.

Gonzales has a different value system than the average American. Gonzales has supported torture in order to get information from prisoners - and concurrently Gonzales is supporting warrantless surveillance of citizens, which is also clearly unconstitutional.

Now the next thing that is worth with rapid growth from immigration is that the average native-born American or established immigrant has a real inflation-adjusted income.

Economist George Borjas, a professor at Harvard and a Cuban immigrant himself, observes that immigration depresses wages and displaces both Americans and established immigrants from their jobs. He says that current immigration is costing Americans approximately $193 billion a year in lost wages.

Borjas is not the only person to come to that conclusion. Stephen camarata of the Center for Immigration Studies says that although the number of adults working in the United States has increased in the last 5 or 6 years, all that increase has been filled by immigrants. Otherwise, our won children growing up are not getting access to the new jobs to the extent that they would have were immigration not occurring.

Organizations that I support, including the Population-Environment Balance and the Carrying Capacity Network, advocate a moratorium on all immigration. We say net zero immigration for a period of 5 to 10 years, to give us a breathing space to that we as a nation can discuss what is in our interest in terms of population size and levels of immigration and the source of immigration.
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By Michael Collins Piper

A leading voice of the pro-Israel lobby is pushing for an old-style "with-hunt" - under the guise of "homeland security" - to identify and expel individuals in the U.S. government and our military who are suspected of being hostile to Israel.

The call for a with-hunt is based on the outlandish thesis that "Islamo-facists" and Muslim "jihadist" operatives and, perhaps more particularly, their "sympathizers" - however loosely defined - have infested AAmerica's defense, national security and federal law enforcement community.

The witch-hunt was proposed in the fall 2006 issue of the small-circulation - but highly influential - Journal of Innternational Security Affairs JINSA has been one of the frontline forces in the fanatically pro-Israel "neo-conservative" circles directing foreign policy under George W. Bush.

Not only Vice President Dick Cheney, but also UN Ambassador John Bolton, former Deputy Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith and Richard Perle, former chairman of the Defense Policy board - to name just a few big Bush administration names - have all been associates of JINSA. University of Pennsylvania Prof. Edward Herman has described JINSA as "organized and run by individuals closely tied to the Israeli lobby and can be regarded as a virtual agency of the Israeli government.

What first appears as commentary in JINSA's Journal often leads to very real policies carried out by the Bush administration alone and sometimes in concert with Capitol Hill which some critics have been known to cynically call "Israeli occupied territory."

The JINSA call for a witch-hunt came in the context of a series of commentaries on "21st Century Allies...and Adversaries" for the United states and Israel, which two nations, of course, are seen in the JINSA world view as virtual extensions of one another.

Zionist publications regularly assert that "anti-Israel" sentiments must automatically be seen as "anti-American" and even as "anti-Christian" in nature, a theme first loudly propagated by the American Jewish committee's Commentary magazine.

The commentaries, not surprisingly, named such countries as Iran, Syria, Russia and Venezuela, as possible "adversaries" for the U.S.-Israel Axis. However, it was an article by Walid Phares - who is associated with a Zionist lobby from known as the Foundation for the Defense of the Democracies - which made the suggestion that there are very real "adversaries" on American soil, at high levels in the American military and intelligence establishment. In his article "Future Terrorism - Mutant Jihads." Phares asked:

"How deeply have jihadist elements infiltrated the U.S. government and federal agencies, including the Federal bureau of Investigation, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, and various military commands, either through sympathizers or via actual operatives?"

Although posed as a loaded question, Phares's implication was clear: he believes such a "threat exists. The JINSA writer then proclaimed the need for a "national consensus" that requires "confronting these forces" based on "knowledge of their ideologies, objectives and determination."

Since there are few Muslim Americans or even Arab Americans in any substantial numbers in the FBI, Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, etc., the suggestion that "jihadist" elements have "infiltrated" our government might seem silly to the average American.

But in the fevered minds of JINSA and hard-line Zionist elements, the real concern is that there are growing numbers of people high up in the FBI and the CIA and in the military who are getting "fed up" with Zionist power in America. Top military leaders openly dismissed the need for war against Iraq and Iran, both wars of which have been long-time policy plans of the Zionist lobby. And all of this, in the view of the JINSA sphere, constitutes effective collaboration with and sympathy for the dreaded "jihadist."

For example, on May 11, 2005, the New York-based Forward, a leading Jewish community newspaper, reported that Barry Jacobs of the Washington office of the American Jewish Committee said he believed there are high-ranking officials inside the U.S. intelligence community who are hostile to Israel and are waging war against pro-Israel lobbyists and their neo-conservative allies in the inner circles of the Bush administration.

Citing the ongoing investigation of espionage by officials of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the leading pro-Israel lobby group, Forward reported that Jacobs believes, in Forward's summary, that "the notion that American Jews and Pentagon neo-conservatives conspired to push the United states into war against Iraq, and possibly also against Iran, is pervasive in Washington's intelligence community.

Obviously, with such thoughts running rampant in pro-Israel circles, it is inevitable a leading pro-Israel policy group such as JINSA would raise the specter of "infiltration" by those who are seen as "sympathizers" and suggest that they be purged from their positions in government agencies.

So the threat of a witch-hunt happening is real. Despite differences between the Bush administration and its Democratic foes, both come together in one realm: satisfying the Israeli lobby which funds both Democrats and Republicans alike through a network of political action committees and exercising its clout on Capitol Hill through pressure groups such as the APIAC, the American Jewish committee, the American Jewish Congress and the Anti-Defamation League.

It is ironic that JINSA should be the source of a demand for an investigation of foreign agents and sympathizers inside the American government. The founder of JINSA, Stephen Bryen, a former Senate aide on Capitol Hill, faced certain indictment on charges of espionage for Israel until pressure on the Justice Department forced Justice to back off.

Not only Bryen, but several others in the JINSA sphere were under FBI investigation on similar charges relating to their possible misuse of American defense and intelligence information on Israel's behalf. They include:

• Richard Perle, investigated in the 1970s when he was a top aide to then-Sen. Henry Jackson;
• Douglas Feith, who - although later promoted to a high post in the bush administration in 2001 - was fired from the National security Council of President Ronald Reagan; and,
• Paul Wolfowitz, now head of the World Bank and former deputy secretary of defense in the bush administration, investigated in the 1970s by the FBI on suspicion of passing classified information to Israel.
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By Mark Anderson

Backers of a South Dakota initiative designed to reform the state's courts by holding judges accountable for their rulings are licking their wounds after the amendment's defeat at the polls. Organizers behind the measure said they had to contend with a well-funded propaganda mill that ran nonstop to defeat the proposed state constitutional amendment.

Still, backers say they will not give up and hope that this revolutionary measure will spread like wildfire across the country.

The onslaught against Amendment E, known officially as the Judicial Accountability Initiative Law, or JAIL, featured several key players. The South Dakota State Bar figured prominently in the anti-amendment movement, reportedly spending at least $1 million. The bar's allies included the insurance lobby, Citibank, which donated $50,000 and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which donated $15,000. All of the 105 state legislators signed a resolution opposing the amendment.

The legislators' resolution claimed that Amendment E would have prohibited summary judgment, which is considered a legal remedy for quickly and cheaply ridding courts of lawsuits. The legal-banking-insurance juggernaut against the amendment also claimed it would have permitted convicted felons, whose convictions were Supreme Court-affirmed, to sue the prosecutors, jurors and judges who convicted them.

As a result of the barrage of powerful opposition, it was defeated with 294,747 "no" votes to 35,640 "yes" votes. A recent poll_even with its questions based on the state attorney general's wording, which E backers considered flawed and unsuccessfully challenged in both the Circuit Court and Supreme Court_came out 51% to 40% percent in favor of the amendment. The results had been announced on a local television station on Nov. 4, three days before the election.

Six hundred people were polled. E organizer Bill Stegmeier said he wonders why the final vote was so lopsided. "Our Zogby Poll on Sept. 20 resulted in 67 to 20 percent in favor of passing," he said. Amendment E's plank No. 2, the crux of the amendment, said judges would be held accountable "for any deliberate violation of law, fraud or conspiracy, intentional violation of due process of law, deliberate disregard of material facts, judicial acts without jurisdiction, blocking of a lawful conclusion of a case, or any deliberate violation of the constitutions of South Dakota or the United States. . . ."

The amendment would create a 13-member special grand jury with statewide jurisdiction, independent of statutes governing county grand juries. This body's function largely would be limited to determining objectively whether a civil lawsuit against a judge is frivolous or whether it is a valid complaint.

Amendment backers argued that many judges were kicking proper court procedures to the curb, oftentimes abusing defendants' rights by preventing them from calling key witnesses or presenting crucial evidence. Feeling there was not a genuine mechanism in place to hold such judges accountable, amendment backers collected over 33,456 signatures to get their initiative on the ballot.

Besides the state bar, the state legislature and other groups, various county commissions and even local school boards went on record against it. In many cases these public bodies, which are supposed to stay neutral in their official capacities, broke state law by using public funds to fight the amendment, said Stegmeier.

South Dakota legislators claimed that Amendment E would have exposed the individual members of these boards and commissions to litigation. The backers answered: "County commissioners and school board members make decisions as a group, never as individuals. We have already established that Amendment E has no effect whatsoever on these groups, let alone their members. . .nobody gets sued for `just doing their job.' People get sued for wrongdoing. . . . These boards and commissions can already be sued, and do get sued quite often."

And as for opponents' claim that Amendment E's passage would have dried up bank credit overnight, the backers answered that this was a "ridiculous scare tactic" hatched by bankers who rely on not-so-honest judges in order to take advantage of the "little" guy. "Judicial accountability spells the end to their gravy train," backers said.

Backers say the added accountability would put a damper on developers grabbing land using the courts and eminent domain powers. Backers also noted that the insurance industry, with which banks are heavily involved, would have to deal honestly when paying claims, especially personal injury, workman's compensation and property claims, had E passed.

"They are terrified that if accountability comes to the judiciary, it may very well come to the banking and insurance industry next and force them to be honest," said backers.

Opponents also said that had Amendment E passed, a criminal could have sued jurors who helped convict him.

Backers answered that Amendment E was intended to have "specific and limited jurisdiction. It can only address certain classes of judicial misconduct. As a jury member, you cannot possibly engage in the types of judicial misconduct covered by the amendment. On the contrary, Amendment E will actually restore a lost right jury members once enjoyed.

And that is the right to vote your conscience, as opposed to how the judge wants you to vote."

Backers added that Amendment E would have ensured that if a law is being misapplied, or is a bad law, the jury may vote their conscience and overrule even the judge and the legislators by acquitting the defendant. This is called jury nullification.

As it is now, backers say that judges prevent juries from learning they have the right to nullification. Opposition groups also claimed that South Dakota's Judicial Qualifications Commission already disciplines bad judges. Backers said that instead of disciplining wayward judges, the commission covers for them. The commission, backers say, is nothing more than a "good ole' boys club, comprised of two judges, three lawyers, and two of the governor's politically connected cronies."

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On Nov. 11, the United States for the 38th time since 1972 used its veto in the UN Security Council to protect Israel from condemnation for murdering Palestinian civilians in the Gaza town of Beit Hanoun.

The deaths of the 19 civilians, who included nine children, four women and six men, all from one family, and the injuring of 40 others came at the end of a five-day Israeli military operation in which a total of 50 Palestinians were killed. The 19 who died were asleep in adjoining homes when Israeli artillery shells blew apart their dwellings.

The UN resolution condemning Israel for the atrocity had the support of nine members of the 15-member Security Council. Britain, Denmark, Japan and Slovakia abstained, but the United States used its veto power to prevent the resolution's passage.

Aside from a condemnation of Israel, the resolution called for the withdrawal of Israeli military forces from Gaza.

There had been several drafts of the resolution offered. The final one also condemned Hamas, calling for an end to the firing of rockets into Israeli territory.

Still, U.S. Ambassador to the UN John Bolton (right) claimed the last draft was "one-sided and politically motivated." He complained that it did not use the term "terrorism" to describe the Palestinian government of Hamas.

French Ambassador to the UN Jean Mar de Sabliere said he was disappointed by America's decision because the final draft resolution was a balanced one. Even the word "massacre" had been removed to make it more palatable to the United States and Israel.

Arab observers were quick to assail Bolton's use of the veto, describing it as a deliberate attempt to protect Israel. In their view, it sent the wrong message to the Arab world. Moderate Palestinians, who are opposed to Hamas, viewed the U.S. move as yet another example of its lack of concern for the killing of innocent Palestinians and its acquiescence to the Israeli government.

Within the corridors of the UN, America's heavy use of its veto power to give cover to Israel is regarded as nothing new. Some recent vetoes included a U.S. refusal to pass a resolution condemning Israel for the building of a massive barrier wall. The International Criminal Court in The Hague and major human rights organizations worldwide have described the wall as a criminal act because it splits Palestinian villages and forces some Palestinians off their property.

In 2002, a resolution condemning Israel for the killing of three UN staff in Gaza and the West Bank was blocked by then U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte. In language now familiar in American vetoes he described the resolution as "one-sided and politically motivated" and added that its backers, especially Syria, were more intent on condemning Israeli occupation than protecting UN staff. Negroponte unsuccessfully lobbied Syria to remove a reference to Israel in the resolution and to use generalizations to describe the deaths of the UN staffers.

Most members of the Security Council felt Israel also deserved criticism for blowing up a World Food warehouse containing 500 tons of food in Beit Lahiya in the Gaza Strip. Only five permanent members of the Security Council have a right of veto - Britain, France, China, Russia and the United States - and while Britain has recently abstained on resolutions condemning Israel the United States has taken the lead in blocking resolutions.

Between 1972 and 1997, for example, the United States vetoed 29 resolutions critical of Israel. Had U.S. officials not done so the total number of resolutions condemning Israel throughout that period would have risen to 95.

The 66 resolutions that were passed in that time frame represented a unique number in UN history. As a rule, Israel has ignored the UN, always certain in the knowledge that its vassal state, the United States of America, will manage somehow to block any resolution that would require Israel to concede territory to the Palestinians or to negotiate on other disputes with neighbors like Syria or Lebanon.

The first U.S. veto in Israel's favor was cast in 1972 by the then-U.S. Ambassador to the UN George H. W. Bush. A year later, America again blocked a resolution that would have called for Israel to withdraw from Palestinian territories as part of previously recommended UN General Assembly proposal for a Palestinian-Israeli settlement.

Henry Kissinger, as secretary of state, was fond of using America's veto power, but his record in no way matched that of his successor, George Schultz, during the Reagan years. In fact, the Reagan administration, until this present one, stands alone in blocking 18 UN resolutions critical of Israel. In 1982 alone, Schultz promoted the use of the veto nine times to prevent the UN Security Council from condemning Israel's invasion of Lebanon, its killing of civilians and its unwillingness to give up parts of south Lebanon that were at the center of the recent conflict.

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Billionaire real estate mogul Donald Trump created a firestorm when he erected an 80-foot flag at his lavish Mar-a-Lago estate and club in Palm Beach, Fla. Local officials are crying foul. Saying Trump failed to get a permit. Residents are now waiting to see who blinks first over the flag flap.

Trump was notified by mail that he had until Nov. 27 to remove the flag or face a Dec. 21 code enforcement hearing that could result in a $250 fine for each day the flag remained.

Lee Hanley, vice chairman of the town's Landmark Commission, said the flag made the town look like "we have an Okeechobee car dealer." a reference to a strip of auto dealerships along Okeechobee Boulevard.

"The day you need a permit to put up the American flag, that will be a sad day for this country," Trump responded. In a letter to Hanley, Trump said "anyone who objects shouldn't in my opinion hold a public office of any kind - at least not in this country." The flag, he said, is "not going anywhere and that's final."

There have been various attempts over the years to ban flying the U.S. flag. Most have failed after an outpouring of citizen outrage, which appears to be building in Palm Beach.

Following recent demonstrations by illegal aliens demanding amnesty, a few schools in Colorado, Arizona and California banned flags, saying they might incite Latino students. But the bans met with citizen protests.

In Apache Junction, Ariz., the school superintendent banned flags on clothing. Within hours, and after dozens of protests by outraged parents, he lifted the ban. "There's a lot of tension with the immigration issue going on, but this transcends that issue," parent Mike Burk said. "You don't handle it by banning the American flag."

A few years ago, the Florida-based National Council of Compensation Insurance decided to bar employees from displaying flags in their offices. Some 850 employees received from chief executive officer Bill Schempf the following memo: "Divisive statements or actions, political or religious discussions and anything else that could be divisive or mean different things to different people are not appropriate in our work place."

The flag was banned from the employees' offices and management removed 10 flags. This caused protests from angry employees and a request from Florida Gov. Jeb Bush that the ban be reconsidered. Schempf sent a memo of apology and distributed miniature flags and flag lapel pins to the workers.
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Former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was sentenced to death - timed days before the elections. Former U.S. attorney General Ramsey Clark called the show trial of Saddam a "travesty." The judge threw him out of the courtroom. Saddam was found "guilty of crimes against humanity" for signing the death warrants of 148 Shiites found guilty of a terrorist plot to kill him. As governor, George "the Texecutioner" executed 152 people. Remember, this is the state where government goons burned almost that many women and kids to death in Waco - without even the pretense of a trial.

Incongruously, Saddam and his associates were never tried for real crimes, such as attacking other countries, slaughtering millions with weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), using terror as a pretext to taking away their rights and setting the stage for an age of terrorism, dictatorship and world destruction in a biological/nuclear holocaust.

The war criminals who supplied the WMDs and used them have the blood of tens of thousands of young Americans, dead and dying, on their hands. They are guilty of the mass murder of as many as 900,000 Iraqis and countless victims of deadly depleted uranium poison. They shouldn't be allowed to get away with mass murder.

By kicking in doors, attempting to disarm a proud people with a tradition of keeping and bearing arms, conducting mass arrests without warrant or charges, torturing, humiliating and raping innocent victims in dungeons, ad nauseam - Bush and his criminal cabal have created and inspired an endless army of zealots eager to fight the U.S. military to the death.

They have turned the world into a dangerous place where America and Americans are no longer loved, welcome and safe. Caught red-handed in lie after lie, they told Americans that we are fighting and dying to spread peace and "democracy." This from the Bush regime, which now has a 30% approval rating - in other words, Bush has been soundly rejected by 70% of his own people. They boast they don't care what the people want as they plunge deeper into the quagmires down their bloody warpath and make lots of money selling weapons.

These "democracy" pimps have shamelessly violated our Constitution and God-given rights in the name of "freedom." They have looted billions in war profits and chained us and our children to trillions of dollars in unpayable, unconstitutional debts.

Bush and the Zionist warmongers who pull his strings, aided and abetted by a compliant Congress and a prostitute press, lied and lied and lied us into an unconstitutional, un-American brutal attack against a defenseless country without any moral or justifiable reason. The Iraq war is an evil plot for a New World Order hatched in the deepest darkest bowels of Zionist fantasies by the Israel-first fanatics and the greedy Big Oil oligarches. Allegedly to "fight terrorism," it has created a vast army of millions who would rather die than submit to the cabal and their New World Order.

Today, Iraq is a vast graveyard and smoldering ruin, a shameful monument to New World Order criminal insanity. The neo-con warmongers are fleeing the sinking, burning ship like the rats they are. Now they say, "Iraq needs strong leadership with the political will to hold the country together and suppress anarchy and terrorism." In other words, after bloody years of "Mission Accomplished," they say Iraq can only survive under someone like Saddam.

It s three years past time to get our troops out of the Hell Bush and the neo-cons have created. Justice demands a real trial of real war criminal here - and if found guilty, bush Rumsfeld, all the neo-cons, the staff of The New York Times, about a hundred other so-called "newspeople" should be publicly hanged on every lamppost from Arlington National Cemetery to the Pentagon and to the site of their greatest crime, the killing fields of the WTC in NYC.
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