Support Ted’s Work

Kickstarter Update

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Ted Rall

It’s a nice start: $2,508 raised so far. However, it’s not that long before the end of this campaign. Unless more contributions, especially some big ones, start rolling in, it’s not going to make it.

Therefore I’m adding additional incentive levels, including some really tasty ones. For example, I am seriously considering making the original artwork for my controversial “terror widows” and Pat Tillman cartoons among the rewards at the upper levels.

If you’re considering supporting the campaign, bear in mind that you don’t get charged at all unless I make the total $40,000 goal, and that the collapse of traditional print media enterprises means that the only way unusual and risky projects like this book about what a revolution would look like here can get done is with support of individual readers.

Thanks to all those who have donated.

And if you can’t donate, please tweet/Facebook/LinkedIn/Pinterest, etc.

Cartoon Auction Redux

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Ted Rall

After a hiatus I brought my cartoon auctions back last week. The winner paid $126, and will get to choose the topic of a cartoon. Not only that, he keeps the original artwork and has the right to reprint it online or in print in the publication of his choice.

Bidding was pretty active, so I thought I’d give everyone another chance.

This Is What Co-option Looks Like

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Ted Rall

This video was shot at Occupy the East End’s General Assembly in Sag Harbor, New York eight days ago. I have been active in many causes since I was a kid, but never have I witnessed such a brazen example of co-option.

PRESS RELEASE: Occupy the East End Rejects MoveOn.org Takeover Attempt

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Ted Rall

Please disseminate to everyone in and interested in the Occupy Wall Street movement. Thank you.

APRIL 8, 2012—FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

OCCUPY THE EAST END TO MOVEON.ORG:

WE WILL NOT BE HIJACKED!

We had been silent. We had hoped that the organizations that are attempting to co-opt and dilute the Occupy Wall Street movement would stop. The Occupy movements across the country are fighting for better lives of the 99% of Americans who work for a living. We had hoped that these interlopers would recognize that what they are doing is wrong.

But they have not done the right thing. Now it’s time to speak out and fight back.

A Democratic Party-affiliated organization, MoveOn.org, is actively attempting to hijack the Occupy Wall Street movement. This brazen co-option attempt began by mimicking the Occupy movement’s terminology and rhetoric, not to embrace it, but to channel our movement’s energies toward backing Democratic candidates and policies. MoveOn says: “MoveOn stands in solidarity with the brave protesters at Occupy Wall Street, but we’re not Occupy Wall Street and we’re not trying to become Occupy Wall Street.” If that’s true, why are they posting articles with titles like “Which Corporations Occupy Congress?” and sponsoring events with titles like “We Are The 99%?” This is “Astroturfing”* at its worst. MoveOn is creating confusion on purpose.

Ground Zero in MoveOn’s takeover attempt of Occupy is focused on the eastern end of Long Island in New York. Occupy the East End represents the OWS movement in the Hamptons and Shelter Island, which happen to be the most popular summer playground for the 1%.

Its most recent attempt to co-opt our movement is by scheduling a “99% Spring Training” by a MoveOn front group called “99% Spring” on April 15, 2012 at the same location and time where Occupy the East End has been holding its General Assemblies since the group formed in October of 2011. Occupy the East End delivered an unprecedented unanimous block—every OEE member at the GA issued a personal block—to a MoveOn representative who “asked” OEE to participate—after MoveOn had scheduled the event. The MoveOn rep refused to change the date or time and informed OEE that “you will be taken over [by MoveOn] whether you like it or not.”

We cannot be bought! We will not be co-opted!

Moveon.org is a political lobbying organization that routinely backs Democratic candidates and was originally funded by the billionaire George Soros. MoveOn.org is considered the “lead lobbying group” for Obama’s reelection campaign, and has overt ties to various Wall Street entities.

Occupy the East End is in no way affiliated with MoveOn.org, nor does it wish to become so. The attempt to take over OEE is a hostile takeover attempt to capitalize on the Occupy movement as a whole. Occupy Wall Street and Occupy the East End as a movement rejects the political system as a broken structure that needs to be overhauled from the bottom up.

Call To ACTION

Occupy the East End urgently requests the support of all Occupations and occupiers to rebuff this attempt to CO-OPT OUR movement. All Occupiers are asked to join us at the Windmill on Long Wharf in Sag Harbor, NY on April 15, 2012 at 12:30 pm to make your voice heard at the General Assembly of the REAL Occupy movement!

*Astroturfing: The creation of lobbying groups that appear to be separate from corporate interests, but that are actually funded by them. As opposed to “grassroots” political activism.

Obama’s Argument for Reelection

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Ted Rall

He didn’t do dick about foreclosures. He barely tried to stimulate the economy. His healthcare plan is shit. On human rights he’s worse than Bush, who wouldn’t have dared argue in favor of assassinating innocent U.S. citizens.

But fear not: the Dipshit-in-Chief has what Democrats think will be a potent argument to get liberals to turn out this fall: if Romney gets in, the Supreme Court will get even worse.

Which is hard to imagine. This, after all, is a Supreme Court that just legalized finger-rape by cop and strip-searching for any and all citizens arrested for any reason whatsoever. What will Romney’s right-wing SCOTUS do, approve finger-rape by a 6-3 majority instead of 5-4?

Still, no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of American voters (c.f., 2004).

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Every Policeman Is A Licensed Rapist

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Ted Rall

This week, you can read my column, or watch it!

Strip-Searching is Legal and Democracy is Dead

The text of Justice Kennedy’s majority is cold and bureaucratic. “Every detainee who will be admitted to the general population may be required to undergo a close visual inspection while undressed,” he writes for the five right-wingers in the majority of the Supreme Court.

There’s no looking back now. The United States is officially a police state.

Here are the basics, as reported by The New York Times: “The case decided Monday, Florence v. County of Burlington, No. 10-945, arose from the arrest of Albert W. Florence in New Jersey in 2005. Mr. Florence was in the passenger seat of his BMW when a state trooper pulled his wife, April, over for speeding. A records search revealed an outstanding warrant for Mr. Florence’s arrest based on an unpaid fine. (The information was wrong; the fine had been paid.) Mr. Florence was held for a week in jails in Burlington and Essex Counties, and he was strip-searched in each. There is some dispute about the details, but general agreement that he was made to stand naked in front of a guard who required him to move intimate parts of his body. The guards did not touch him.”

“Turn around,” Florence later recalled his jailers ordering him. “Squat and cough. Spread your cheeks.”

A court motivated by fairness would have declared this conduct unconstitutional. Fair-minded people would have ordered the New Jersey municipality to empty its bank accounts and turn them over to the man it humiliated. Everyone involved—the police, county officials—ought to have been fired and charged with torture.

Not this court, the U.S. Supreme Court led by John Roberts. Besotted by the sick logic of paranoia and preemption that has poisoned us since 9/11, it ruled that what happened to Albert Florence was perfectly OK. The cops’ conduct was legal.

Now “officials may strip-search people arrested for any offense, however minor.”

If you get arrested at an antiwar protest, the police can strip-search you. If you’re pulled over for a minor traffic infraction, as was the plaintiff in this case. For setting off fireworks on the Fourth of July.

Humiliation is the law of the land.

The Court heard examples of people who were strip-searched “after being arrested for driving with a noisy muffler, failing to use a turn signal and riding a bicycle without an audible bell.” They considered amicus briefs by nuns and other “women who were strip-searched during periods of lactation or menstruation.”

Body-cavity searches are now legal for anyone arrested for any crime, no matter how minor. As of April 2, 2012, finger-rape is the law of the land.

Think it won’t happen to you? 14 million Americans are arrested annually. One in three Americans under age 23 has been arrested. It happened to me a couple of years ago, for a suspended drivers license. Except that it wasn’t really suspended. I was lucky. My cops weren’t perverts. They didn’t want a lookie-loo at my private parts.

How did we get here? Preemptive logic.

Saddam Hussein is a bad man. He hates the United States. What if he has weapons of mass destruction? What if he used them against us, or gave them to terrorists who would? Can’t take that chance.

We don’t need evidence in order to justify bombing and invading Iraq. We have fear and the logic of preemption.

The logic of preemption flails, targeting anyone and everyone. A single plane passenger sets his shoes on fire. He never came close to causing real damage, but now everyone has to take off their shoes before boarding a plane. Infants. Old people. Veterans whose limbs got blown off in Iraq. Everyone.

Can’t take chances. What if your toddler is a member of Al Kidda?

The logic of preemption is indiscriminate. What if terrorists are stupid enough to use phones and emails to plot their dastardly schemes? We’d want to know, right? In the old days before 9/11, officials who suspected a person of criminal conduct went to a judge to obtain a wiretapping warrant.

Now we’re paranoid. And the government is power-hungry. So government officials and their media lapdogs are exploiting our fear and paranoia, openly admitting that they listen to everyone‘s phone calls and read everyone‘s emails. Can’t take chances. Gotta cover all the bases.

What about the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures? Quaint relics of a time before the police state. Like the Geneva Conventions.

Here comes Justice Kennedy, amping up the perverse logic of preemption. Responding to the nasty cases of the finger-raped nun and the humiliated women on their period, Kennedy pointed out that “people detained for minor offenses can turn out to be the most devious and dangerous criminals.” Timothy McVeigh, who blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, was pulled over for driving without a license plate. “One of the terrorists involved in the Sept. 11 attacks was stopped and ticketed for speeding just two days before hijacking Flight 93,” he wrote, continuing with the observation that San Francisco cops “have discovered contraband hidden in body cavities of people arrested for trespassing, public nuisance and shoplifting.”

No doubt about it: If you search every car and frisk every pedestrian and break down the door of every house and apartment in America, you will find lots of people up to no good. You will discover meth labs and bombs and maybe even terrorists plotting to blow up things. But who is the bigger danger: a drug dealer, a terrorist, or a terrorist government?

This summer will be ugly. Cops will arrest thousands of protesters who belong to the Occupy Wall Street movement, which is fighting corruption and greed and trying to improve our lives. Now that police have the right to strip and molest demonstrators, you can count on horrible abuses. Cops always go too far.

Note to people about to be arrested: pop a laxative before they slip on the flexicuffs.

I don’t know about you, but I would rather live in a country that respects rights and freedoms more than the paranoid madness of preemption. In the old America where I grew up, we lived with the possibility that some individuals were evil. Now we face the absolute certainty that every policeman is a fully licensed finger-rapist.

(Ted Rall’s next book is “The Book of Obama: How We Went From Hope and Change to the Age of Revolt,” out May 22. His website is tedrall.com.)

New Kickstarter Project: “Congratulations! You Have Overthrown the Government of the United States of America”

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Ted Rall

It’s day one. Sporadic fighting continues. The Capitol is ablaze. Pumped with adrenaline and thrilled that the day of victory has arrived, revolutionaries storm into the centers of power of the former United States of America.

What will they find? What should they do?

This question looms large in the minds of everyone who tries to imagine a different political and economic system than the one we live under now. Few of us can think of anything new, much less better, much less how it would/will look like.

I am asking your support to help fund the research and writing of a follow-up to The Anti-American Manifesto with the title “Congratulations! You Have Just Overthrown the Government of the United States of America.” The idea is to walk through the early days, weeks and months of a theoretical American revolution: What should be done to make sure that what comes next is better, not worse?

If I get support, I will rely on historical precedents as well as the experience of actual leaders in parts of the world that recently came into the control of revolutionary movements to set up a sort of Revolution for Dummies book.

Please go to Kickstarter for the details and to watch a video.

FAQ: Why Am I Not In Daily Kos?

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Ted Rall

I know, I know.

Daily Kos has added just about every leftie cartoon in America except me and Stephanie McMillan. Lots of you have written to me asking me about this, and it’s gotten to the point that it’s probably easier for me to just post here.

Here’s the skinny:

Q: Is it some permission thing?
A: No. I’d be happy to have my work appear on Kos or any other website that wants me. Unfortunately, they’re not interested in my work. I’ve asked. My friend and colleague Tom Tomorrow is the editor over there. He pitched me but Markos (who runs Daily Kos) doesn’t like my work.

Q: Why doesn’t Markos like your cartoons?
A: Dunno. Never met the guy. I assume it’s politics. The only two major leftie cartoonists he excludes are me and Stephanie, neither of whom conform to his support of President Obama and the Democratic Party. But then, some of his cartoonists have criticized Obama (though not as much). I’m guessing here.

Q: How about running on some other liberal blog?
A: At this date there are no other liberal blogs that pay to run comics. Which is insane when you think about it. It’s the Web. This is a visual medium. Comics are popular with readers. I assume it’s only a matter of time.

At this point your energies would be better spent trying to get me and other cartoonists into sites like Firedog Lake than Kos. Even though Kos’ reader survey overwhelmingly called for me to be added, Markos ignored it. But a well-placed email and/or post to Firedog Lake, Real Clear Politics, etc. might be worthwhile.

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