“The President is not Our Father; he’s a politician who, like all people wielding political power, is in great need of constant critical scrutiny and adversarial checks — from all citizens, but especially media figures. Relating to him as some kind of guiding paternalistic authority is, I’m sorry to say, really quite warped. But it’s far from uncommon, and that explains a lot.” – Glenn Greenwald, “Andrew Sullivan’s father figure.” “The power of a president’s words did surprise me. The president is the head of state. When he speaks, history is being made. When a president uses that authority to express solidarity with gay citizens and their families, and to assert his belief in their core equality, for the first time ever, I’m not going to apologize for being moved, just as I was moved by the sight of an African-American being sworn into the presidency in the first place. And forgive me, but if someone had told me two decades ago that by 2012, a black president would be endorsing gay marriage, I would have asked where he got that stuff he was smoking.” – Andrew Sullivan, “The Greenwald Pounce.” Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Sullivan had an interesting exchange about President Obama’s endorsement of gay marriage in which they gave different insights into American political life, especially the public display of presidential worship.

Following the adoption of legislation by the government of Quebec to roll back civil liberties and prevent students from protesting against tuition hikes, Montreal experienced two nights of violence over the weekend. Three hundred people were arrested on Sunday night. Although the Fédération étudiante collégiale du Québec and the Fédération étudiante universitaire du Québec plan to challenge the draconian law this week in court, its implementation by the National Assembly Friday night reveals that the Quebec government is determined to shut down protest over severe tuition increases. “This is much larger than just tuition fees, this law attacks our freedom and the foundation of our society,” said Marc Antoine Cloutier. More than 150,000 people have signed a petition opposing the new police state legislation. “We have serious concerns about this bill and the bill infringes many of the fundamental rights of our citizens,” added Louis Masson, Bâtonnier of the Bar.

Presidential candidate Ron Paul swept the board at the Minnesota State convention this past weekend, winning 12 of the 13 delegates to the Republican National Convention and effectively taking complete control of the party in the state. Congressman Paul would have won all of the open delegate slots, for the fact that the 13th went to former presidential candidate and U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, only after a Paul supporter withdrew his name from the ballot. Earlier in the year, a well organized cadre of Paul supporters won 20 of 24 delegates at district conventions, meaning that in total the Paul campaign has secured 32 of the state’s 40 national delegates. The achievement once again affirms Paul’s delegate-attainment strategy, and substantially increases the prospect for the Congressman to be able to greatly influence the party platform at the National Convention in Tampa this August.

The US financial system and, probably, the financial system of Europe, like the police, no longer serves a useful social purpose. In the US the police have proven themselves to be a greater threat to public safety than private sector criminals. I just googled “police brutality” and up came 183,000,000 results. (Here are two recent brutal assaults, one deadly, by police on hapless individuals: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/05/kelly-thomas-video-dad-they-are-killing-me-.html and http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article31364.htm ) The cost to society of the private financial system is even higher. Writing in CounterPunch (May 18), Rob Urie reports that two years ago Andrew Haldane, executive Director for Financial Stability at the Bank of England (the UK’s version of the Federal Reserve) said that the financial crisis, now four years old, will in the end cost the world economy between $60 trillion and $200 trillion in lost GDP. If Urie’s report is correct, this is an astonishing admission from a member of the ruling elite. http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/05/18/the-true-costs-of-bank-crises/print Try to get your mind around these figures. The US GDP, the largest in the world, is about 15 trillion. What Haldane is telling us is that the financial crisis will end up costing the world lost real income between 4 and 13 times the size of the current Gross Domestic Product of the United States. This could turn out to be an optimistic forecast.

The horror stories about the Transportation Security Administration are indisputable. In the post 911 environment, civil liberties are routinely ignored or eliminated, and become a mere memory in a country that once prided itself as the beacon of freedom for the entire world. The TSA is part of the Department of Homeland Security. FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is also an agency of DHS. The public relation spin for the purpose of such authorities is to protect citizens and guard the nation. The reality is that DHS bureaus have the same mission, keep the government safe from potential real or imaginary threats. Interpret threats to mean anyone who opposes the establishment regime, now known as, the military-industrial-financial-security complex. DHS is the third largest Cabinet department, after the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs. A Department of Homeland Security site acknowledges a FY 2012 Budget of $56,941,507,000, in the latest testimony of DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano before Congress, “The Fiscal Year (FY) 2013 Budget for DHS is $58.6 billion in total budget authority, $48.7 billion in gross discretionary funding, and $39.5 billion in net discretionary funding. Net discretionary budget authority is 0.5 percent below the FY 2012 enacted level. An additional $5.5 billion for the Disaster Relief Fund (DRF) is provided under the disaster relief cap adjustment, pursuant to the Budget Control Act of 2011 (BCA).”

The House of Representatives has approved an amendment to the draconian National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that will limit the Department of Defense from using data collected by unmanned spy drones against Americans. The Amendment, introduced by Congressman Landry (R-LA), will prohibit information collected by DoD drones without a warrant from being used as evidence in court. The amendment, was approved early Thursday afternoon along with 19 other en bloc amendments, reads: “Notwithstanding any other provision of law, information acquired by an unmanned aerial vehicle operated by the Department of Defense may not be admitted in a Federal court, State court, or court of a political subdivision of a State as evidence against a United States citizen unless such information was obtained by such unmanned aerial vehicle pursuant to a court order.”

Donna Summer, the 1970s pop singer known as the Queen of Disco, has died of lung cancer, an illness she believes she contracted from inhaling toxic particles released after the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York. In a 2008 interview with The Daily Telegraph, she said she had a premonition about the attacks a month beforehand. Afterwards she said she suffered from severe depression and could not leave her Manhattan flat. “I didn’t want to talk to anybody. I had to keep the blinds down and stay in my bedroom,” she said.

Damn and blast. The ACLU and New York Times have lost their lawsuit against the government that sought disclosure of the “secret interpretation” of the PATRIOT Act. District Judge William H. Pauley III of the Southern District of NY ruled that the government met its burden in claiming the requested memo was exempt from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act. So we, the people, remain in the dark about how the DOJ is interpreting Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act – a law passed by our representatives.

Gideon Rachman’s 2008 article titled ‘And now for a world government’ and, more recently, Scientific American editor Gary Stix’s piece Effective World Government Will be Needed to Stave Off Climate Catastrophe, illustrate a widespread and dangerous misconception. It also demonstrates the cunning of one world- propagandists in the crafting of their arguments. In Rachman’s article we are shown typical Palaeolithic artistry: horses, warriors, deer and, portrayed on the very same rocky surface, a globe. It is almost admirable were it not so deviously cunning, to bundle within a single image the primitive with the “modern” and by doing so, considering the latter as the logical conclusion of the former. Rachman explains: ‘For the first time since homo sapiens began to doodle on cave walls, there is an argument, an opportunity and a means to make serious steps towards a world government.’ This statement may be considered as the basic assumption out of which a lot of these globalists’ musings emanate. Point of departure is always the human journey, that once upon a time began with cave-scribbling tribes scattered aimlessly on the planet surface, in the course of time crystallizing into sophisticated city-states, in turn evolving into even more sophisticated nation-states- and finally, approaching present-day, culminating into one world-state, eclipsing all of the above.

The establishment media hastily seized on yesterday’s explosive story about a literary publication listing Barack Obama’s birthplace as Kenya in an effort to claim that the 1991 brochure was the “origin” of the entire ‘birther’ issue. In reality, evidence that Obama was born in the African country is abundant. A literary agent’s promotional text for a 1991 brochure released yesterday by Breitbart.com states Obama was “born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.” Yahoo News, along with a deluge of other mainstream news outlets, responded by reporting that the document was potentially the “source” of the birther controversy and had merely been a mistake. The literary agent who wrote the description, Miriam Goderich, now works with Dystel & Goderich agency, which lists Obama as one of its clients. Unsurprising therefore that Goderich hastily claimed listing Obama’s birthplace as Kenya was “nothing more than a fact checking error.”