Conservative Icon Former Senator Jesse Helms Dead At 86 - Politics on The Huffington Post
RALEIGH, N.C. — Former Sen. Jesse Helms, who built a career along the fault lines of racial politics and battled liberals, Communists and the occasional fellow Republican during 30 conservative years in Congress, died on the Fourth of July.

He was 86.

“It’s just incredible that he would die on July 4, the same day of the Declaration of Independence and the same day that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died, and he certainly is a patriot in the mold of those great men,” said former North Carolina GOP Rep. Bill Cobey, the chairman of The Jesse Helms Center in Wingate, N.C.

Jesse Helms was an unrepentant anti-woman bigot and homophobe.  Good riddance to him. Besides the date of their deaths, the only thing Helms had in common with Jefferson was wishing he, too, could own slaves, and the only thing Helms had in common with Adams was wishing he, too, could jail ideological opponents without probable cause.

The media are whitewashing (pun intended) the racist, homophobic, misogynist legacy of Helms.  This was a man who called the University of North Carolina “the University of Negroes and Communists.” He once wrote “Crime rates and irresponsibility among Negroes are a fact of life which must be faced.” When Carol Mosely-Braun became the first African-American woman elected to the Senate, Helms would sing “Dixie” in the elevator at her, saying “I’m going to make her cry. I’m going to sing Dixie until she cries.”

And these are not archival incidents from the ’40s or ’50s that you might see used against Strom Thurmond or Robert Byrd, during a time when overt white racism was commonly accepted.  These are incidents from the late ’80s and ’90s!

He also was an avowed homophobe, reacting to President Clinton’s nomination of lesbian woman with “I’m not going to put a lesbian in a position like that…. If you want to call me a bigot, fine.” He reflected on the HIV/AIDS crisis by saying “There is not one single case of AIDS in this country that cannot be traced in origin to sodomy.”

And the cherry on top?  His support of Pinochet in Chile, the brutal dictator, and D’Aubuisson in El Salvador, the death squad leader.  When informed of D’Aubuisson’s involvement in the systematic murder of innocent civilians, Helms replied, “All I know, is that D’Aubuisson is a free enterprise man and deeply religious.”

Humanity has one less hater today.

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My post on “Laminin: God’s Cross-Shaped Glue” elicited this comment:

I decided you are right I nor anyone else will ever convince you that God exists. I can’t explain how “I” know in any way or form that you would understand, just as you would never be able to explain to a person who has been blind from birth all the colors of a rainbow. Everything you could tell them about it would never make sense because they could never prove you right or wrong. They could never believe because they will always be blind except that they had a miracle and their vision restored . You see my friend you are that blind person and the only way I know that is because I once was blind until the miracle of salvation opened my eyes to know why I believe.

Oh, how many times have I heard that one.  The old “atheists are just blind to God” analogy.

Here’s the problem with that analogy.  You can prove to a blind man that rainbows exist.  Sure, he’ll never see the subtle shades that fade from red to orange to yellow to green to blue to indigo to violet… but mathematically and through physics you can prove the refraction of electromagnetic wavelengths in the visible spectrum.  He might not truly “get it”, but it can be proven to him that it exists.

I prefer this theme: “Religionists are allergic to their own insignificance.”  The thought that we are one of the rather ordinary results of nearly infinite interactions of hydrogen atoms and complex carbon molecules, and not the special center of creation and personal reflection of the creator, freaks out the Religionist.  When I see a massive universe, billions of years old, where homo sapiens are just one form of life on a tiny rock around a puny sun in a ordinary galaxy in a frightfully huge universe, when we are insignificant mammals who spend a few decades here then die, with no magical “afterlife” to speak of, I just accept mortality and existence as it is, endeavor to enjoy as much of it as I can.

To the Religionist, though, there is an allergy, an itch, a nagging psychological defect that says there must be something there where nothing is.  “This can’t be it, the end,” they think, “it can’t all just be accident!”  And to scratch that itch, the Religionist will answer all the unknowable questions with the soothing Lanacaine of “God did it”.

There are a whole lot of people in this world with the allergy.  They must think that everyone else is like them.  I’ve heard the term “God-sized hole in the heart” to explain it.  So to meet someone who not only doesn’t have the allergy but also dismisses the scratch must feel, to them, like the sighted people describing the rainbows to the blind.  To us, it looks like heroin addicts kicking cold turkey picking invisible bugs off their skin that aren’t there.

Your allergy is to reason; your citation of “creation science” is more than enough proof of that.  Science will tell you that rainbows are the refraction of light through water vapor.  Your “creation science” will tell you that rainbows are a message from the Invisible Sky Wizard that he’ll never cover the entire earth with water again, a feat that is physically, geologically, archaeologically, hydrologically, and meteorologically impossible.

By the way, if you think the Bible is literally, without error or contradiction, true, then you’ve got a severe case of the allergy.  You can’t even get past the first two books of Genesis without encountering these contradictions from the infallible God:

Humans created before animals (Genesis 1:25-27), or animals created before humans (Genesis 2:18-19)?

Man and woman created simultaneously (Genesis 1:27), or man created first then woman (Genesis 2:18-22)?

Plants created before humans (Genesis 1:11-13, 27-31), or plants created after humans (Genesis 2:4-7)?

Did birds come from the water (Genesis 1:20-21) or from the ground (Genesis 2:19)?

Were humans made after the animals (Genesis 1:25-27) or before (Genesis 2:18-19)?

And that’s just Genesis.  Now, many Religionists will rationalize the obvious contradictions in the Bible, because to accept contradictions means to accept fallibility which means they must admit they’re scratching something that is not there.  One Christian debunker went as far as to say that Genesis 1 is a timeline and Genesis 2 shouldn’t be considered a timeline… I have to say, for a perfect, infallible God, He’s not a very concise or consistent writer.  If you were a Deity laying down a treatise to rule humanity, would you write it so confusingly as to require lengthy theological dissertations to untangle obvious contradictions and impossibilities?

One of the frustrating things about being an Atheist is that there even has to be a label called Atheist - a label to refer to people who don’t believe in something that is not provable.  You don’t call people “abunicornists” or “adragonists” or “asantaclausists” when they don’t believe in those fantastic fairy tales.  To be asked “why don’t you believe in God?” seems the silliest question; I like to answer, “why don’t you believe in gods?”  Any answer you give me for why you don’t worship Zeus is the same answer I’d give you for God.  We both don’t believe in gods, I just don’t believe in one fewer than you.

One other thing: it always seems to be the Christians that are most threatened by my Atheism.  I don’t get a lot of Jews, Hindi, Muslims, or Buddhists knocking on my door and lurking on my web site insisting I join their God Club.

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Why is the White House so afraid of letting our Constitutional system of justice work?  Now that the Supreme Court has ruled detainees can challenge their detention in court, the Cheneyburton Maladministration wants you to think that suddenly there will be terrorists walking the streets!  Yup, if we can’t hold them secretly without rights and trials and torture them from time to time, the only other option is to let the most dangerous killers in the world run free throughout small town America.

White House says ruling could free detainees in US - Yahoo! News
WASHINGTON - The White House said Thursday that dangerous detainees at Guantanamo Bay could end up walking Main Street U.S.A. as a result of last month’s Supreme Court ruling about detainees’ legal rights. Federal appeals courts, however, have indicated they have no intention of letting that happen.

“I’m sure that none of us want Khalid Sheikh Mohammed walking around our neighborhoods,” White House press secretary Dana Perino said about al-Qaida’s former third in command.

“We are in uncharted territory, and we have never had enemy combatants afforded constitutional rights like all of us have, so anybody who thinks that they know exactly what’s going to happen if a detainee challenges his detention — his or her detention — in court, they’re not being honest because we don’t know what’s going to happen,” Perino said.

“But there is considered judgment, from many federal government lawyers — all the way up to the attorney general of the United States_ that it is a very real possibility that a dangerous detainee could be released into the United States as a result of this Supreme Court decision.”

“The judge might say to the United States, ‘You don’t have enough evidence to hold this person,’” Perino said. “And then what do we do? … Is he allowed to leave? And if so, is he picked up by immigration? Even if that’s the case, they’re only allowed to be held for six months.”

Wait a minute, do you mean to say that if we can’t prove we even have enough probable cause to detain someone we suspect is a dangerous killer, much less be able to prove in a court of law that the detainee is a dangerous killer, then these people we just have a hunch about being dangerous killers will be stalking our kids at the swimming pool this summer?

Or could it be that most of the people rounded up into Guantanamo are not dangerous killers, but just poor losers who ended up on the wrong side of a tribal feud and were turned over for some bounty money?  Could it be you don’t have enough evidence to stand up in court because there was no evidence to be found, you just wanted to round up Ay-rabs and do unspeakable things to them in a “shock and awe” psychological campaign?

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My latest essay for NORML got picked up by LewRockwell.com:

The Drug Enforcement Administration was created by President Richard Nixon through an Executive Order [on] July [1,] 1973 in order to establish a single unified command to combat “an all-out global war on the drug menace.” At its outset, the DEA had 1,470 Special Agents and a budget of less than $75 million. Furthermore, in 1974, the DEA had 43 foreign offices in 31 countries. Today, the DEA has 5,235 Special Agents, a budget of more than $2.3 billion and 86 foreign offices in 62 countries.

So the DEA turns thirty-five today. That deserves a special celebration. Let’s bust out our handy-dandy calculator and the official government stats. Time to play Rate the DEA!

Today the DEA has twice the offices in twice the countries with four times the manpower than when it started thirty-five years ago. In 1973, the DEA had $0.075 billion to work with; today you have $2.3 billion. That’s an increase of 3,067%, or a greater than thirty-fold increase. Just what have the American People received for this $31.4 billion dollar, thirty-five year investment?

Are there thirty-times fewer drugs now? That’s hard to say, since nobody is out there taking official inventories of illegal drugs. But judging by the Office of National Drug Control Policy’s figures that show drug seizures from 1989-2003, it seems that there are plenty of drugs out there. In that time frame, marijuana and heroin seized by law enforcement about doubled and cocaine remained steady.

Well, those drugs have got to be harder to get, right? All those seizures and agents and arrests must mean the price of drugs has gone up thirty-fold! According to the ONDCP’s report on the Price and Purity of Drugs from 1981-2003, cocaine is one-fifth as expensive (pg 69), crack is about one-third as expensive (pg 71), heroin is one-sixth as expensive (pg 73), and meth is half as expensive (pg 75). However, the safest of all recreational drugs, marijuana, did double in price (pg 77).

OK, so there are more cheaper drugs that are easier to get, but surely they’ve got to be less potent! According to the survey previously mentioned, cocaine is about 50% more pure (pg 70), crack’s purity hasn’t changed much (pg 72), heroin is three times more pure (pg 74), meth purity is about the same (pg 76), and according to the recently released report from the Drug Czar’s (Marijuana) Potency Monitoring Project, marijuana potency doubled from 1985-2007 (pg 17).

Wow. After thirty-five years of escalating DEA budgets, we’ve got cheaper, more powerful, more plentiful drugs. But maybe we now have thirty-times fewer drug users? According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (multiple reports), in 1979 (first year of collected data) 31.3% of the population aged 12 or older had ever used drugs, by 2006 that figure increased to 45.4%. On a per-capita basis, the percentage of drug users increased by about half. In raw figures, people who ever used drugs doubled from 56 million to 111 million.

I would hope, at least, with quadruple the number of agents and thirty times the budget, the DEA would at least have more arrests to show for it. According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, we did go from 628,000 drug law arrests in 1973 to almost 1.9 million arrests in 2006 - that’s about triple the number of arrests.

Has the increase in arrests at least helped to save people’s lives? According to the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, back in 1979, 513 Americans died from overdoses on opiates, cocaine, and meth. By 1998, nine-times more Americans died from those illegal drugs (4,942 Americans). (Data from 1999 and later is harder to quantify, as the CDC changed how they classify overdose deaths. In 1999, 19,128 Americans died of “drug-induced causes”; in 2005, 33,541 died. However, those figures include the rapidly-increasing deaths from prescription drug overdoses.)

Yikes! More people are dying from using more plentiful, more powerful drugs. Perhaps we’re not getting to them early enough. What about the children? Didn’t we at least end up with thirty-times fewer high school seniors using drugs? According to the Monitoring the Future survey (Table 5-2, pg 199), often cited by the DEA, in 1975 (first year of the survey), 45% of 12th graders had ever tried an illicit drug. In 2006 (most recent data), the number of seniors who tried drugs was 36.5% - a decline of less than one-fifth, not thirty times.

So, not only more adults using cheaper, more powerful, more plentiful drugs, but barely a dent in the kids using these drugs. But as the US population has increased, there are more teenage drug users overall. Has the DEA at least made it harder for the kids to get drugs? According to the Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration, in 1992, 60% of teenagers said marijuana was easy to obtain, 40% said the same about cocaine, and about a quarter said they could get heroin easily. In 2006, half of teenagers say it’s easy to get pot, one quarter say it’s easy to get cocaine, and about one seventh say it’s easy to get heroin.

All right, then, we’ve seen the use and availability of drugs drop by roughly one-fifth among teenagers in fourteen years. But when a third of kids have tried drugs and half of them say drugs are easy to get, I don’t think that’s much of a success story for a $31 billion 35-year effort.

Bigger budgets, more drugs. More arrests, more deaths. More seizures, more potency. More agents, more users. For their thirty-fifth anniversary, perhaps they should change their name to the Drug Encouragement Administration.

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General Wesley Clark is getting reamed all over the media for his statement on Face the Nation Sunday, questioning John W. McCain’s commander-in-chief qualifications.  Basically put, he said what I’ve been saying for a long time now:

Being a POW doesn’t necessarily make you a good president.  In fact, one might question mental fitness of someone tortured for five years in a bamboo cage.

Look, the guy graduated in the bottom 1% of his class, wrecked more than a couple planes, and is a tantrum-throwing little man pathetically trying to live up daddy’s and grandpa’s legacy… holy shit, HE IS the third Bush term!

If Obama’s campaign thought to put Clark out there to play some Rove-jitsu and turn McCain’s biggest strength into his biggest weakness, then well played, sir, well played!  I truly think that these thoughts have been rumbling in the heads of many an American, but not voiced by anyone in the timid traditional media.  The outrage is more that we questioned their narrative of their war hero, not that the statements by Clark were out of line.

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Just watching Meet the Press on my DVR when Andrea Mitchell is asked about the possibility of Sam Nunn of Georgia being Barack Obama’s vice presidential choice. After discussing the pluses of a Nunn veep pick, Andrea just can’t help but make me laugh out loud:

June 22: Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE), Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), political roundtable - Meet the Press, online at MSNBC- msnbc.com
Minuses, he is an anathema to the gay and lesbian community because of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” He’s tried to moderate his position, but it was he and Colin Powell who shoved that down a young Bill Clinton’s throat in 1993 as a new president.

This is example #5,298 of someone on my TV who can’t help but put “gay” and “shove down throat” in the same sentence. We now return you to you regularly scheduled programming, already in progress…

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I’ve been covering this issue of pharmacists who believe God’s law trumps their professional duty. Here are some samples from the archives:

A Preserver of Life (April 2005)

Anyway, the pharmacist’s point was that he is a preserver of life, and therefore could not in good conscience offer the morning-after contraception pill or birth control to women. That could be an arguable point on the former — there has been a conceived zygote and the pharmacist does not want to be a party to its “murder” — but the latter part is laughable. Birth control does not extinguish a life, it prevents it from occurring in the first place! He’s not a “preserver of life”, he’s an “enforcer of procreation“!

Of course, the pharmacist ignores the fact that some women are prescribed birth control to regulate hormones, moderate their menstruation, or alleviate depression. That doesn’t matter to him, though. Because the real agenda here has so much to do with controlling women’s bodies (ready for the burqha, ladies?) and the belief that sex is dirty awful nasty and should be used for making babies only. If women are going to be so slutty as to actually enjoy sex for pleasure’s sake, they should be forced to suffer the consequences of shtupping, namely baby after baby after baby.

I’m wondering when the “conscience clause” argument gets to spread beyond the pharmacy. How about a vegetarian waitress at the Outback Steakhouse, does she not only bring you blooming onions? How about the Quaker heavyweight champion of the world, does he just talk you into a ten-count? Who’s ready for the radical lesbian feminist pharmacist (say that three times fast) who refuses to sell Viagra, Cialis, and Levitra? What about the Born Again™ store clerk who won’t ring up the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition? I know, let’s have racist cops who refuse to assist people of color (whoops, too close to reality on that one, Russ…)

My point is not that the man isn’t entitled to his backwater ideals of “conscience”, it is that if his “conscience” prohibits him from fulfilling his duty as a pharmacist, then go sell shoes or something. No one is forcing you to be a pharmacist! You don’t get to pick and choose which prescriptions to fill and which to ignore. (Or worse, deny; in many of the “conscience clause” cases, the pharmacists have not only refused to fill the prescription, they’ve refused to give the script back to the patient so she may fill the prescription elsewhere!) Soldiers don’t get to perform the spit-shining and the marching and the saluting, but refuse to fulfill the killing part because they’re pacifists. Firemen don’t get to choose to only save the houses of the nice rich people while letting the slums burn because they’re elitists. Teachers don’t get to teach biology, chemistry, and physics but skip over the evolution part because they’re Biblical Creationists (whoops, too close to reality again, Russ…)

You have a job — pharmacist — that holds the public trust. We have laws to prevent the abuse and misuse of prescription drugs and you are the arbiter of those laws. If the drug is legal and has been legally prescribed, it is your duty and obligation to fill that prescription. Don’t like it? Don’t be a pharmacist.

It’s really going to get this scary, people, as the theocrats reach for total control of our country. There are movements underway to allow doctors to have a “conscience clause” so they can refuse to treat gay and lesbian patients (because Jesus only heals lepers and whores, not fags). We already forbid federal funding of any overseas health clinics that even mention the word “abortion” to their clients. Public health, commonsense, and your morals mean nothing to the Rapture Right, it’s all about their morality and making sure you abide by it.

Boycott Albertsons - Corporate HQ gives OK to deny women’s birth control (June 2005)

2) But even the [prescriptions] that are for birth control are LEGAL prescriptions representing a private medical decision between a woman and her doctor. We have the doctors who decide which drugs are appropriate and we have the pharmacists who carefully monitor and distribute the drug supply. We do this as a “check and balance”; we don’t want the doctor to have direct access to the stash he might abuse and we don’t want the pharmacist to be able to distribute or withhold drugs at will. The pharmacist is the pill delivery boy, not the arbiter of medical decisions.

3) There isn’t always another pharmacy to go to. This could present an undue burden on a woman trying to execute her doctor’s medical advice. Especially with regard to the “morning after” emergency contraception; if a rural woman has to spend a couple of days arranging transportation to the big city because her small-town small-minded pharmacist won’t give her what the doctor ordered, it may be too late.

4) Where does this “conscience” shit end? Does the pharmacist who thinks homosexuality is an “abomination” get to withhold AIDS retroviral medications? If she’s against sexual promiscuity, can she withhold penicillin to treat syphillis? If she’s against pre-marital sex, can she withhold condoms from unmarried couples and teenagers? If she’s a recovering addict, can she withhold the strongest narcotic pain relievers?

You don’t get to pick and choose which parts of a job you’re willing to do. If you take the job, you have to do the good with the bad. I’m a big fan of the open-source software movement, but I still have to work on and support Microsoft products. Even when Microsoft was renegging on their support of gay rights, something I was morally offended by, I still had to do my job, or I could have chosen to pick another career.

Fill the prescription, pill boy, and STFU.

Wingnut pharmacists to rape victim: Sorry, we won’t help you. (October 2005)

(Arizona Daily Star) After a sexual assault one recent weekend, a young Tucson woman spent three frantic days trying to obtain the drug to prevent a pregnancy, knowing that each passing day lowered the chance the drug would work.

While calling dozens of Tucson pharmacies trying to fill a prescription for emergency contraception, she found that most did not stock the drug.

When she finally did find a pharmacy with it, she said she was told the pharmacist on duty would not dispense it because of religious and moral objections.

“I was so shocked,” said the 20-year-old woman, who, as a victim of sexual assault, is not being named by the Star. “I just did not understand how they could legally refuse to do this.”

“This (sex) was with someone I did not even know and did not want to have intercourse with, and I am in no place now to have children,” she said. “I just don’t think this should be the pharmacist’s decision.”

“He (the manager) said he would fill it himself if we could get there before his shift ended, within 10 minutes,” said Sabrina Fladness, a University of Arizona student and [friend of the assault victim].

“But we were more than 10 minutes away, so that was impossible. So he said we would have to come back the next morning” - after the shift of the refusing pharmacist ended.

“He made no provision for getting it that night,” she said.

And this is Tucson, Arizona, not exactly a rural backwater where there are only a few pharmacists available. What is the rape victim in Enid, Oklahoma or Girdwood, Alaska or any other remote town supposed to do in an emergency? And who are these idiot pharmacists who believe God prefers rapists to be fruitful and multiply?

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Our new toll-free number is in effect.  To call the show, dial 888 7 RADICAL (that’s 888-772-3422).

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We got another report from Jackie and Dunlap at Red State Update, we took a look at the Supreme Court 5-4 ruling affirming habeas corpus rights for detainees at Guantnamo, Hillary voters for McCain (WTF?!?), Southern Baptists wanting to exert more political control (tax ‘em!), and anti-smoking drug Chantix is seriously wack.

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McClatchy Washington Bureau | 06/18/2008 | General who probed Abu Ghraib says Bush officials committed war crimes
WASHINGTON — The Army general who led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison accused the Bush administration Wednesday of committing “war crimes” and called for those responsible to be held to account.

The remarks by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who’s now retired, came in a new report that found that U.S. personnel tortured and abused detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, using beatings, electrical shocks, sexual humiliation and other cruel practices.

“After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes,” Taguba wrote. “The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”

Taguba, whose 2004 investigation documented chilling abuses at Abu Ghraib, is thought to be the most senior official to have accused the administration of war crimes. “The commander in chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture,” he wrote.

The number one thing I will be watching for from the Obama Administration is whether they pull a “Gerry Ford” and decide to put this dark national nightmare behind us and in the “spirit of healing” decide to pardon or not prosecute the war crimes of this Administration.  The pardon of Nixon for raping the Constitution is what put us in this position in the first place, with many of the same traitorous thugs from that administration leading this one down the same “unitary executive” path.

Let the world see our Constitution in action.  Let us all regain the faith that no one, not a former president, not a former vice president, no matter how deeply in the pockets of big oil, is above the law.  Let us restore our reverence for the Constitution and mete out strong punishment for those who would violate it willingly and to act as a deterrent for the future administrations who’d usurp our rights given the chance.

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