He's such a moral leader, isn't he? Thanks, Gov. Perry, for showing us the way life should be lived!

Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) said Sunday that he believes rejecting LGBT people is similar to fighting slavery during the pre-Civil War era.

Appearing on the Family Research Council‘s program “Stand With Scouts Sunday,” the arch conservative governor urged the Boy Scouts to stand strong against any impulse to “tear apart” the organization’s values and replace them with the “flavor of the month.”

“The fact is, this is a private organization,” Perry said of the Boy Scouts. “Their values and principles have worked for a century now. And for pop culture to come in and try to tear that up, which happens to be the flavor of the month so to speak, and to tear apart one of the great organizations that has served millions of young men, helped them become men and great fathers, that is just not appropriate and I hope the American people will stand up and say, ‘Not on my watch.’”

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I'm sure glad Fox News doesn't consider race an issue ever, because if they did, they might have seen Star Parker's remark on Hannity's show as a bit racist. The discussion was about the movie "Runaway Slave", which is a Freedomworks production originally intended to alienate African-American voters from the Democratic Party and Barack Obama during the election.

But Star Parker took it a step further, drawing a parallel between the plantations of the 1800s and today. Specifically, she said "the overseer is the Congressional Black Caucus. Their exclusive job today is to keep them on the plantation, keep them uneducated, and and keep them unarmed."

Really?

Parker is the president of CURE, the Center for Urban Renewal and Education. CURE's advisory board includes such Republican stalwarts as disgraced former Attorney General Ed Meese, crooked former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, the recently-famous blowhard Ben Carson, former Bush Attorney General John Ashcroft, and more.

Even better, Clarence Thomas' spouse Ginni Thomas, who now works for the Daily Caller but used to run her own billionaire-backed nonprofit, sits on the board of Parker's organization. That's cozy.

With an all-star advisory board like that, I was curious about what CURE actually does, so I checked out the last couple of years' tax returns (2010 and 2011 - PDF). After paying Parker her $167,000 or so, covering five-figure costs for travel and the like, paying her daughter $36,000 to handle the bookkeeping and shelling out almost $50,000 for the office expenses, most of the rest was paid to fundraisers. According to their returns, they mailed out some newsletters, networked with pastors and redesigned their website. Of course, there is the Fox contributor thing, too, which is described as "educating the public on television and radio."

I wouldn't stoop to Star Parker's level, but $700,000 per year to produce a large part of nothing other than a mass emailing now and then and accusing well-meaning legislators of being plantation overseers seems like projection.

Have you ever asked yourself why, whenever we have these battles over reasonable gun safety laws, the gun nuts huddle around the Second Amendment as if it were the Holy Grail? Say the word "militia" today and everyone thinks about those folks up in Idaho building their little fortresses, not anything resembling the "well-regulated militia" defined in the amendment. Thom Hartmann's been doing some research and surprisingly, the reasons behind it are not what everyone thinks:

The real reason the Second Amendment was ratified, and why it says "State" instead of "Country" (the Framers knew the difference - see the 10th Amendment), was to preserve the slave patrol militias in the southern states, which was necessary to get Virginia's vote. Founders Patrick Henry, George Mason, and James Madison were totally clear on that . . . and we all should be too.

In the beginning, there were the militias. In the South, they were also called the "slave patrols," and they were regulated by the states.

[...]

And slave rebellions were keeping the slave patrols busy. By the time the Constitution was ratified, hundreds of substantial slave uprisings had occurred across the South. Blacks outnumbered whites in large areas, and the state militias were used to both prevent and to put down slave uprisings. As Dr. Bogus points out, slavery can only exist in the context of a police state, and the enforcement of that police state was the explicit job of the militias.

If the anti-slavery folks in the North had figured out a way to disband - or even move out of the state - those southern militias, the police state of the South would collapse. And, similarly, if the North were to invite into military service the slaves of the South, then they could be emancipated, which would collapse the institution of slavery, and the southern economic and social systems, altogether.

These two possibilities worried southerners like James Monroe, George Mason (who owned over 300 slaves) and the southern Christian evangelical, Patrick Henry (who opposed slavery on principle, but also opposed freeing slaves).

So tell me again: Why do we have a bunch of people who practically worship at the altar of a constitutional amendment which was put there to protect slave owners -- when slavery has been outlawed for 150 years?

Oh, I see. Because there was some tension and mistrust between the states and the federal government.

Their main concern was that Article 1, Section 8 of the newly-proposed Constitution, which gave the federal government the power to raise and supervise a militia, could also allow that federal militia to subsume their state militias and change them from slavery-enforcing institutions into something that could even, one day, free the slaves.

This was not an imagined threat. Famously, 12 years earlier, during the lead-up to the Revolutionary War, Lord Dunsmore offered freedom to slaves who could escape and join his forces. "Liberty to Slaves" was stitched onto their jacket pocket flaps. During the War, British General Henry Clinton extended the practice in 1779. And numerous freed slaves served in General Washington's army.

Thus, southern legislators and plantation owners lived not just in fear of their own slaves rebelling, but also in fear that their slaves could be emancipated through military service.

Ultimately, it took a bloody war with guns and emancipated slaves to end the slavery in the South. But the Civil War is not quite completely in the past. We may not be fighting on open battleground with muskets, cannons and bayonets, but we are still fighting one, verbally and politically.

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Third graders in in Gwinnett County, Ga., were given math homework Wednesday that asked questions about slavery and beatings.

Christopher Braxton told ABC News affiliate WSB-TV in Atlanta that he couldn't believe the assignment his 8-year-old son brought home from of Beaver Ridge Elementary school in Norcross.

"It kind of blew me away," Braxton said. "Do you see what I see? Do you really see what I see? He's not answering this question."

The question read, "Each tree had 56 oranges. If eight slaves pick them equally, then how much would each slave pick?"

Another math problem read, "If Frederick got two beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in one week?"

Another question asked how many baskets of cotton Frederick filled.

According to the school district, the teachers had put together interdisciplinary coursework, incorporating what they had been studying in Social Studies into their math, but holy cow! What were they thinking in devising these questions for third graders? Did anyone...any person...have a gut check on the appropriateness of these questions? How many beatings did Frederick the slave get? Who thinks this is an acceptable way to introduce algebraic thinking to third graders?

A viral video advertising a fake game, Slavery: The Game, has been the talk of video game sites and other parts of the web in the last week. As seen in the trailer above, the game would've allowed players to become slave traders and buy and sell slaves in order to become the master slave trader.

In a lengthy explanation the creators of the video explain that it is not a real game and that the video was created to "raise awareness" of a new television program appearing on Dutch public television. The idea was to increase viewership for the show about slavery. The explanation falls flat, though, because the ad encourages players to "make a tremendous fortune," "buy slaves," "discipline them," and "exploit them," while also showing you a variety of weapons you can use to discipline your slaves, including a whip, a scourge, a rifle, and a spiked club. It's hard to imagine how the creators of the video thought such things would be an appropriate way to raise awareness for the video. Their explanation does, however, prove to be educational and it looks like the programs that will air on Dutch public television will help raise awareness of the Dutch role in the American slave trade.

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Ugh. Six years of this guy is six too many. If we're really lucky, maybe he'll implode before he finishes his first term. How can anyone sit there with a straight face and suggest that supporting health care as a right is to support slavery? It makes no sense.

PAUL: With regard to the idea of whether you have a right to health care, you have realize what that implies. It’s not an abstraction. I’m a physician. That means you have a right to come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery. It means that you’re going to enslave not only me, but the janitor at my hospital, the person who cleans my office, the assistants who work in my office, the nurses.

Basically, once you imply a belief in a right to someone’s services — do you have a right to plumbing? Do you have a right to water? Do you have right to food? — you’re basically saying you believe in slavery.

I’m a physician in your community and you say you have a right to health care. You have a right to beat down my door with the police, escort me away and force me to take care of you? That’s ultimately what the right to free health care would be.

A couple of things. When did food and water become "services"? And where does he get this crazy fantasy that establishing a right to health care means people can beat his door down and carry him away to force him to treat them?

Then there is the matter of the Hippocratic Oath, which I'm guessing Baby Paul doesn't even know, much less practice. (I doubt he actually signed anything like it, since he is self-certified). But for doctors who do sign it, this part might help keep people from banging down doors in the dead of night and carrying assistants away:

I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm.

Give me a break. Slavery? C'mon.

[h/t Think Progress]

Writing in Salon, Rick Perlstein examines "what Haley Barbour's amnesia tells us" about Southern conservatives' historical revisionism. But largely lost in the imbroglio over Barbour's literal white-washing of the Jim Crow era is that the Mississippi Governor and would-have-been 2012 White House hopeful has plenty of company among the leading lights of the Republican Party. From flying the Confederate flag to talking up secession and nullification, Republicans for years have been casually trafficking in antebellum nostalgia.

In May, Texas conservatives approved an overhaul of the state's textbooks which would remove the word "slave" from the term "slave trade." Of course, that omission was in keeping with two others, as Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell and Mississippi's Barbour celebrated Confederate History Month in their respective states, each without mentioning slavery. As Barbour put it:

"To me it's a sort of feeling that it's just a nit. That it is not significant. It's trying to make a big deal out of something that doesn't matter for diddly."

As for Michael Steele and the Republican National Committee, they apparently considered "nits" like the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to Constitution unnecessary, at least judging from the RNC's May memo attacking Obama Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan:

"Does Kagan Still View Constitution 'As Originally Drafted And Conceived' As 'Defective'?"

As the health care reform debate reached its climax in March, Rep. Paul Broun of Georgia was among those longing for the days of the ante bellum South. Missing the irony that health care is worst in those reddest of Southern states where Republicans poll best, Broun took to the House floor to show that he was still fighting the Civil War:

"If ObamaCare passes, that free insurance card that's in people's pockets is gonna be as worthless as a Confederate dollar after the War Between The States -- the Great War of Yankee Aggression."

If you thought you had heard that outdated term of Dixie revisionist history recently, you did. In February 2009, Missouri Republican Bryan Stevenson took exception to President Obama's support for the Freedom of Choice Act, legislation which would codify the reproductive rights protections of Roe v. Wade nationwide:

"What we are dealing with today is the greatest power grab by the federal government since the war of northern aggression."

That expression was also a favorite of former Senate Majority Leader and later Minority Whip (really, you can't make this up) Trent Lott. Lott was a speaker in 1992 at an event of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a successor to the White Citizens' Councils of Jim Crow days. Among its offerings in seething racial hatred is a "Wanted" poster of Abraham Lincoln. Lott's also offered his rebel yell in the virulently neo-Confederate Southern Partisan, where in 1984 he called the Civil War "the war of aggression." That was years before he lauded the legendary racist and 1948 Dixiecrat presidential candidate, Strom Thurmond:

"I want to say this about my state: when Strom Thurmond ran for President, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either."

As Americans learned this week, Trent Lott is not the only Mississippi Republican to support groups like the CCC and honor the Confederate flag. Former Republican National Committee Chairman and now Governor Haley Barbour wore a lapel pin with the image during his 2002 campaigns for the state house - and to keep the CSA emblem flying over it. And as the photographs show, Barbour literally broke bread with CCC racists at a barbeque in 2003.

Another neocon (that is, neo-Confederate) is former Attorney General John Ashcroft.

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I'm not sure who is more evil: Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin. Both have an uncanny ability to sound high-pitched shrill dog whistles for their fellow racists.

Michele Bachmann spoke in Colorado at the Western Conservative Conference over the weekend, and in Bachmann-like fashion, dropped a few claims that just made me shudder. This one, in particular:

"'We are determined to live free or not at all. And we are resolved that posterity shall never reproach us with having brought slaves into the world,'" Bachmann read from founding father John Jay , ending her reading with the statement, "We will talk a little bit about what has transpired in the last 18 months and would we count what has transpired into turning our country into a nation of slaves."

She then launches into the requisite Tea Party theme of tyranny, pointing specifically to health care reform as some sort of tyrannical monster threatening the nation. (Cue death panels.)

But really, it's worth looking at her agenda, because Bachmann is as wingnut crazy as Sharron Angle:

“We reform social security, then we reform Medicare, then we pare back welfare to the truly needy, for the truly disabled, because, yes, we can make that determination,” she said. “Close and secure American boarders, cut the budget, limit our foreign entanglements for America, then we massively cut spending first, then we cut taxes.” Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0710/39608.html#ixzz0tamKLmmS

A closer look, restated with real terms would read like this:

We privatize Social Security, then we privatize Medicare, then we starve those most needy, we let the disabled twist in the wind. Then we leave our troops twisting in the wind while cutting all social programs but not touching military spending. Then we give it all to our corporate masters.

In case you're curious, here's a list of Michele Bachmann's owners.

Tarryl Clark is within striking range. Let's push her over the top and send Michele home to commiserate with half-Governor Palin.

On this, the 4th of July, I, a Canadian, want to talk to Americans about their values. Perhaps that's presumptuous. Perhaps I should just shut it and say "it's none of my business."

I could argue that it's my business on purely pragmatic grounds: where goes the US, Canada often follows. We are a US subject state in all but name, and your failure to fix your problems makes it much harder and sometimes impossible to fix our problems.

But forget that. I don't primarily care about the US because of Canadian interests, I care about the US because I care about the American dream.

I sometimes think that many of us who aren't Americans believe in American ideals more than American citizens do. We imbibe, in other countries, a particularly pure form of the American civil religion. We hear about doing the right thing, about always giving the accused a day in court, about freedom of speech, about division of power and about rights that are rights not because they are given by government to its subjects, but because they are inalienable human rights.

Oh, as time goes by, you realize that America has always had problems with its virtues. You learn of the red scares, the Japanese internments, the genocide against the Indians, slavery and Jim Crow.

And yet... and yet, both people and countries are defined not just by their failures, but by the ideals they strive towards. America's ideals, and its striving towards them, were what gripped the world and gave others hope. If the American experiment in freedom, in rights, could succeed, then perhaps it could succeed in other places.

But what we see today is the American Dream dying. Not just the dream of every generation being better off than the one before, though that's dying, but the dream of a country where the citizens actually had rights, where they actually were free.

There are a number of reasons, but I think Jefferson's prescient phase sums it up best:

I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies

I'm not so sure that banks are more dangerous than standing armies, but certainly the two of them together have brought the US to where it is.

The problem with standing armies is simple enough: if you've got one, politicians are always tempted to use it. When it's a professional standing army, so the majority of the population is not effected by its use, that temptation increases. When the army is the most powerful (though not the most effective) in the world, well, that temptation increases even further.

War is an executive function. A war cannot be run by a legislature. As a result, during war the power of the executive grows. In the US the executive can now hold people without charge indefinitely, meaning President has the ability to lock people up without a trial. If he does bother to grant a trial, the accused does not have the right to face their accusers or to see the evidence against them and evidence obtained through torture can be used.

The President can spy on any American he wants, and you have essentially no recourse, since it is illegal to let you know that you're being spied on. The President can declare American citizens combatants and have them assassinated, which is capital punishment without a trial.

Meanwhile, instead of the whole country being a free speech zone, free speech is only allowed in small areas if anyone important is nearby. Lord save the important people from having to actually see the people whom their policies are impoverishing and whose rights they are destroying.

The right of association has been severely crippled, since the executive can now declare any organization a terrorist organization without any trial and without any appeal. Any American who works with "terrorists" is a criminal. Even if they are, say, like Jimmy Carter, helping Hezbollah participate in fair elections.

To sum up, the President can do all of the following, in most cases without meaningful appeal or a trial: execute Americans, imprison people indefinitely, spy on anyone he wants, forbid people from flying, torture people, kidnap people, forbid people from associating with whoever they want, and deny them the right to speak freely anywhere except in small cordoned off zones.

This is America?

This is what the American dream has come to?

Your founders warned you about this. Warned you that standing armies and unrestrained banks would cost you your freedom.

And the sad thing is that most Americans are ok with it.

Are Americans who don't believe that everyone is endowed with inalienable rights still Americans worth the name?

That is my question to you on July 4th.

Happy Independence Day.

It started one day in the early '90s, when a white van stopped him in front of the Fruit Stand grocery store in Hastings and asked if he needed work. He did. But as soon as he met Evans he knew he had found trouble. Evans was mean in a way that made Goodman feel suddenly aware of how far out of town they were. There was no phone. Chain link and barbed wired surrounded the property. The crew leaders looked hardened, "like they just come out of prison." The field workers called them henchmen.

One of them gave him a pair of bloodstained work boots.

"He said 'These belong to the last guy who ran. If I catch you trying to get down that road, you're going to answer to me too.' " [read the rest...]

I don't really understand how this story has stayed so far under the radar. According to this article, 1000 migrant farm workers have been freed from slavery -- yes, SLAVERY -- in Florida in the past 13 years.

Did someone forget to tell Florida farmers that slavery's end was one of the outcomes to the Civil War?

The Ronald Evans case was one of the most evil and egregious. From the Coalition of Immokalee Workers:

Ron Evans recruited homeless U.S. citizens from shelters across the Southeast, including New Orleans, Tampa, and Miami, with promises of good jobs and housing. At Palatka, FL and Newton Grove, NC area labor camps, the Evans' deducted rent, food, crack cocaine and alcohol from workers' pay, holding them "perpetually indebted" in what the DOJ called "a form of servitude morally and legally reprehensible." The Palatka labor camp was surrounded by a chain link fence topped with barbed wire, with a No Trespassing sign. The CIW and a Miami-based homeless outreach organization (Touching Miami with Love) began the investigation and reported the case to federal authorities in 2003. In Florida, Ron Evans worked for grower Frank Johns. Johns was 2004 Chairman of the Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association, the powerful lobbying arm of the Florida agricultural industry. As of 2007, he remained the Chairman of the FFVA's Budget and Finance Committee.

The Palm Beach Post has done a remarkable series of reports on the slavery problem in Florida. I highly recommend it.

They slip across the Mexican border at great peril, cross the country in the dark hollows of vans, stay silent as they are "bought" and "sold" in fruit groves and rest stops dotting the American landscape.

A destitute minority in a wealthy, well-fed society, they are packed like prisoners into unfit housing, ferried to work in unsafe vehicles and compelled to labor long hours -- under fake names and numbers -- for substandard wages.

Enslaved by debt from the very moment they arrive, they contribute mightily to Florida's $62 billion agricultural industry, yet they earn little in return.

1,000 slaves freed in 13 years is not a small problem. It's organized crime intended to enrich the wealthy plantation owners of the 21st century by exploiting immigrants and the poor.

"The richest, most powerful people in the state are benefiting from this," says Rob Williams, director of the Migrant Farmworker Justice Project, a legal advocacy group in Florida. "They don't want it to change."

No wonder they oppose immigration reform.

Ron Evans is now serving a 30-year federal prison sentence, thankfully. It is at least the beginning of justice for such brutal and inhuman behavior.

Slavery. In 2010. It boggles the mind, and lights a fire of deep anger in me.

For more information, pictures and stories about this, visit http://ciw-online.org/