Sunday, September 24, 2006

Kline and Tiahrt stifle free speech

Under the disguise of trying to stop the truly obnoxious Fred Phelps, Attorney General Phill Kline and U.S. Rep. Todd Tiahrt are trying to curb civil liberties against legal protests.

According to an editorial in The Wichita Eagle, Sep. 23, 2006:

“Attorney General Phill Kline and a group of state legislators want to revive the Kansas protest bill next session. They have also enlisted U.S. Rep. Todd Tiahrt, R-Goddard, who is proposing a federal law that would prevent those who challenge funeral protest laws (read: the American Civil Liberties Union or the Phelpses) from being able to collect attorney fees if they win, as required under federal civil rights law.”




Of course this law could make it prohibitively expensive to challenge the Kansas government on anything. Kline and Tiahrt are actually able to make Fred Phelps look like a victim. And that’s not easy.

Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Tiahrt reacts to 9-11

So what did Rep. Todd Tiahrt have to say about 9-11. He just backed up what President George Bush said. He made a few statements about the troops then gave his blessings to the war effort.

According to Tiahrt’s own web page:
“America Must Continue to Stand Against Terror”
“Although I saw the destruction on television and from a few blocks away, words cannot adequately describe the scene or my feelings upon actually visiting the site,” Tiahrt said. “It is a horrible tragedy, but it is also obvious that the spirit of our nation’s military is strong.”
“I want to recognize the men and women who are fighting for all of us,” said Tiahrt. “We will never forget the brave soldiers who gave their lives to protect our freedom.”

Here are the latest revelations about President Bush:
Just last week it was revealed by our president that we have secret detention centers were the CIA tortures captured al Qaeda leaders for information. Bush claimed it wasn’t torture, but that depends on the definition of torture. Apparently if the rack isn’t used and there’s no visible scars when finished, it isn’t torture. To convince someone they’re drowning, stripping them naked and depriving them of sleep 48 hours is OK.Bush argued that lives were saved and terrorist acts prevented.“Were it not for this program," Bush said, According to the Chicago Tribune, "our intelligence community believes that Al Qaeda and its allies would have succeeded in launching another attack against the American homeland."

Yes torture has always been a useful tool for extracting information. Ask any dictator in the Middle East. Ask Saddam Hussein.And to reward these people for all the information they gave up, Bush is now planning their trials, so they can be executed. That must be the corner stone of democracy. It’s a little like the processed used at Democratic Kampuchea's S21 prison.
So we use torture, we have a concentration on Guantanamo and the Patriot act allows the government to spy on us at any time. We should feel real safe, unless we fall under suspicion of our government.
And let’s not forget the war which was planned before 9-11, even though Bush insisted they are related.
Yes, fascism is a safe form of government, except for the never ending war in Iraq and other parts of the Middle East.9-11 has changed us for the worse. In some ways the terrorist have succeeded. They have proven that our constitution is nothing but toilet paper anytime the American citizens are frightened.

Sunday, September 03, 2006

Mr. Tiahrt; Not all Kansans in history were idiots

Rep. Todd Tiahrt is one politician from Kansas who has constantly tried to re-write history. From pulling out statues of founding fathers who were Kansas Democrats, from the US hall of Statues, to renaming countless buildings after past Republi9cans, to trying to doctor film archive of marches in Washington D.C., Tiahrt has tried to make it look as if every one from Kansas’ history was a wing-nut or at least a Republican. Buthe can’t burry the truth for ever. There was a time when lively interesting people lived here and came from here. Few know that a major Communist figure came from Wichita itself, Earl Browder.

From

Wikipedia :


Browder was born in Wichita, Kansas. He joined the Socialist Party of America at the age of 15. During World War I he gave speeches urging the United States not to join the war, calling the conflict an imperialist conflict. When the US joined the war in 1917, Browder and other Socialist Party leaders were arrested and charged under the Espionage Act for opposing conscription. Browder was imprisoned but continued to campaign against the war after his release resulting in his second imprisonment in 1919.
The left wing of the Socialist Party split to form the Communist Party of America and the Communist Labor Party. The two parties fused in 1921 and Browder joined the unified party in 1921 becoming managing editor of the party newspaper, Labor Herald.
In 1928, Browder and his lover Kitty Harris went to China and lived together in Shanghai where they worked together on behalf of the Pan-Pacific Trade Union Secretariat, a Comintern organization engaged in clandestine labor organizing. The two returned to the United States in 1929.

CPUSA leadership
Browder became general secretary of the Communist party in 1930 and took over the top position of party chairman in 1932 after William Z. Foster suffered a heart attack.
Foster was the party's candidate for President of the United States in the 1936 presidential election but won only 80,195 votes. He tried to run for President in the 1940 presidential election but was forbidden by a court order from travelling around the country and won only 46,251 votes.
Browder was sentenced to prison in 1940, ostensibly due to passport violations, but was released after 14 months when the US joined World War II and became an ally of the Soviet Union. Browder embraced the popular front tactic and led the CPUSA's tactic of expressing cautious support for the New Deal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt while demanding that it should go much further than it did.
In 1944, Browder declared that communism and capitalism could peacefully co-exist. The Communist Party reconstituted itself as the Communist Political Association. With the end of the Great Power alliance at the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War, "Browderism" came under attack from the rest of the international Communist movement. In 1945, Jacques Duclos, a leader of the French Communist Party, published an article denouncing Browder's policy. With the Comintern having been dissolved during the war, the "Duclos letter" was used to informally communicate Moscow's views. William Z. Foster, Browder's predecessor and a staunch Stalinist, led the opposition to Browder within the party and replaced him as party chairman in 1945, with Eugene Dennis taking over as general secretary. Browder was expelled from the party in 1946.
Post-expulsion
Browder continued to campaign for his views outside the party and criticized the CPUSA's domination by Moscow, writing that "The American Communists had thrived as champions of domestic reform. But when the Communists abandoned reforms and championed a Soviet Union openly contemptuous of America while predicting its quick collapse, the same party lost all its hard-won influence. It became merely a bad word in the American language." [citation needed]
In April 1950, Browder was called to testify before a Senate Committee investigating Communist activity. Questioned by Joseph McCarthy, Browder was willing to criticize the American Communist Party but refused to answer questions that would incriminate former comrades. Charged with contempt of Congress, Judge F. Dickinson Letts ordered his acquittal because he felt the committee had not acted legally.
Browder's final public appearance was in a debate with Max Shachtman, the dissident Trotskyist, in which the pair debated socialism. Browder defended the Soviet Union and Stalinism while Shachtman acted as a prosecutor. It is reported that at one point in the debate Shachtman listed a series of leaders of various Communist Parties and noted that each had perished at the hands of Stalin; at the end of this piece of theatre, he remarked that Browder too had been a leader of a Communist Party and, pointing at him, announced: "There-there but for an accident of geography, stands a corpse!"
An attempt to reinstate Browder in the CPUSA following the Twentieth Party Congress and the move to destalinization failed. He remained outside of the party until his death in Princeton, New Jersey in 1973.




In addition to the above information, those who deviated from the Soviet line in Czechoslovakia where labeled Bowderists. In the last few years of his life Browder became a nihilist and died basically alone.
He did, however contribute significantly to the history of the American left.