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SYNDICATED COLUMN: The Last Civil Rights Struggle

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Ted Rall
Sluts of America, Arise! “A sitting United States president took sides in what many people consider the last civil rights movement,” Adam Nagourney of The New York Times wrote in reaction to Barack Obama’s endorsement of gay marriage. The last civil rights movement? No. Sadly, even as he belatedly championed equality for some, the president’s statement expressed a pernicious, widely accepted form of prejudice. Look for the caveat as you read: “I have to tell you that over the course of several years as I have talked to friends and family and neighbors, when I think about members of my own staff who are in incredibly committed monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together…at a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.” In Obama’s worldview, in other words, it’s okay to be gay. But only…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Leading From the Back

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Ted Rall
Obama Accepts 21st Century View of Gay Marriage In the BDSM world the phrase “topping from the bottom” means conditional submission: when the sub questions or disobeys the instructions of his or her dom. Subverting the submissive role defeats the whole purpose of a BDSM relationship; it is thus frowned upon. President Obama frequently engages in the political equivalent: leading from the back. True leaders lead. They declare what society needs and tells it what it should want. Leaders anticipate what is possible. They open the space where long-held dreams intersect with current reality, allowing progress. “Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail,” Emerson advised. The role of a leader has been clearly defined since the first time a member of a clan convinced his tribe they should follow him if they wanted to find more food. So why has it been so long since we Americans had…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: A Harsh Lesson

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Ted Rall
Obama Snubs Hard-Working College Students Shortly after becoming president, Barack Obama said that he strongly supports continuing education. “If we want to come out of this recession stronger than before, we need to make sure that our workforce is better prepared than ever before,” he said in 2009. “Right now, someone who doesn’t have a college degree is more than twice as likely to be unemployed as someone who does. And so many of the Americans who have lost their jobs can’t find new ones because they simply don’t have the skills and the training they need for the jobs they want.” Things change. Now it’s an election year. The president’s reelection team is making a play for the youth vote that was key to winning his first term. He’s visiting colleges and universities, trying to attract support from the 18-to-21 demographic by accusing Republicans of wanting to double the Stafford student loan interest rate from 3.4 to 6.8 percent.…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: The Pravda-ization of the News

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Ted Rall
No Context, But Propaganda Is Amusing Try as they may to make the news as boring as possible, U.S. media outlets keep churning out hilarious “news” stories. Hardly a day passes without the release of some piece whose content is so ridiculous, its tone so absurdly credulous, that it makes us feel as if we live in a bizarre reincarnation of the propaganda-soaked Soviet Union. Remember “Baghdad Bob”? Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, Iraq’s information minister during the 2003 U.S. invasion, kept denying reality, insisting that Saddam’s regime was winning even as attacking tanks appeared in the background of his camera shots. I had a Baghdad Bob flashback moment earlier this week while listening to NPR’s afternoon news program “All Things Considered.” “President Obama toured the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington today joined by Holocaust survivor, author and Nobel Laureate, Elie Wiesel. Mr. Obama said the U.S. must never again allow such atrocities to take place,” said Melissa Block. Whaaaaa…? The implication…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: A President Who Doesn’t Even Try

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Ted Rall
Is Obama Kowtowing to the Right? Or Is He One of Them? The President’s progressive critics blame him for continuing and expanding upon his Republican predecessor’s policies. His supporters point to the obstructionist, Republican-controlled Congress. What can Obama do? He’s being stymied at every turn. The first problem with the it’s-the-GOP’s-fault defense is that it asks voters to suffer short-term memory loss. In 2009, you probably recall, Democrats controlled both houses of Congress. By a sizeable majority. They even had a filibuster-proof 60-seat majority in the Senate. His approval ratings were through the roof; even many Republicans who had voted against him took a liking to him. The media, in his pocket, wondered aloud whether the Republican Party could ever recover. “Rarely, if ever, has a President entered office with so much political wind at his back,” Tim Carney wrote for the Evans-Novak Political Report shortly after the inauguration. If Obama had wanted to pursue a progressive agenda—banning foreclosures, jailing…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Why Are Americans Killing More Cops?

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Ted Rall
“Tough on Crime” Sentencing Laws Come Home to Roost It sounds like the plot of the dystopian movie “Robocop”: policemen are getting shot like they’re going out of style. Violent crime in general is decreasing. But more cops are being killed in the line of duty. According to the FBI, 72 police officers died under fire in 2011. That’s up 25 percent from 2010 and up 75 percent from 2008. “The 2011 deaths were the first time that more officers were killed by suspects than car accidents, according to data compiled by the International Association of Chiefs of Police. The number was the highest in nearly two decades, excluding those who died in the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001 and the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995,” reports The New York Times. According to a study by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, “In many cases the officers were trying to arrest or stop a suspect who had previously been…
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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…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Handicapped

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Ted Rall
Conventional Wisdom Is Wrong. It’s Romney’s To Lose. Catching Barack Obama in a rare moment of candor, an open mic found the president confiding to his Russian counterpart that he expects to win this fall. “This is my last election,” he told Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. Last, yes. But I wouldn’t bet on Obama winning. The corporate pundit class has largely conceded the general election to Obama, already looking ahead to 2016. The mainstreamers have their reasons. Their analysis is based on good, solid, reasonable (inside the box) logic. All things considered, however, I would (and have) put my money on Mitt Romney this fall. This isn’t wishful thinking. I voted for Obama last time and wanted him to succeed. He failed. His accomplishments have been few and have amounted to sellouts to the right. Even so, the prospect of watching Mitt Romney move into the White House fills me with as much joy as an appointment for a colonoscopy.…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: We Have Found the “One Bad Apple” And It Is Us

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Ted Rall
Excuses Ring Hollow in U.S.-Occupied Afghanistan Staff Sargeant Robert Bales is the man accused of going on a March 11th shooting spree that left 16 civilians dead in southeastern Afghanistan. As the New York Daily News put it: “The killings sparked protests in Afghanistan, endangered relations between the two countries and threatened to upend American policy over the decade-old war.” Why the fuss? This is nothing new. Not to the Afghans. Over the last ten years U.S. forces have been slaughtering Afghan civilians like they were going out of style. There have been countless massacres of supposed “insurgents” or “terrorists.” Who invariably turned out to have been ordinary men, women and children going about their daily routines. The only difference between the Bales massacre and other acts of bloodshed is that he acted on a freelance basis, minus orders from his commanding officer. Bales’ actions were so similar to the “normal” behavior of U.S. soldiers that Afghan witnesses weren’t surprised.…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: She Killed Afghans and Iraqis. Now She’s a Peace Child.

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Ted Rall
Susan Collins and the Precautionary Principle Susan Collins is a U.S. senator. She is a Republican. She represents the people of Maine. Senator Collins gets a lot of big things very wrong. Lots of people die because of Senator Collins. She voted for the invasion of Iraq. She voted for the invasion of Afghanistan. Lots of people are dead. Because of her. In 2007, four years into the Iraq War, when at least 100,000 Iraqis had been killed and the hunt for Saddam’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction had been called off, Senator Collins nonetheless voted to extend the war. She had another chance in 2008. Voted the same way. More deaths followed. Late last year, one or two million dead civilians later, most U.S. occupation troops finally pulled out of Iraq. Remember the main argument for staying there, that we were fighting “them” over “there” to avoid having to fight them in the streets of American cities? It’s only…
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