Sleeping With the GOP
by Wayne Barrett with special reporting by Adam Hutton and Christine Lagorio
February 5th, 2004 8:20 AM
Roger Stone, the longtime Republican dirty-tricks operative who led the mob that shut down the Miami-Dade County recount and helped make George W. Bush president in 2000, is financing, staffing, and orchestrating the presidential campaign of Reverend Al Sharpton.
Though Stone and Sharpton have tried to reduce their alliance to a curiosity, suggesting that all they do is talk occasionally, a Voice investigation has documented an extraordinary array of connections. Stone played a pivotal role in putting together Sharpton's pending application for federal matching funds, getting dollars in critical states from family members and political allies at odds with everything Sharpton represents. He's also helped stack the campaign with a half-dozen incongruous top aides who've worked for him in prior campaigns. He's even boasted about engineering six-figure loans to Sharpton's National Action Network (NAN) and allowing Sharpton to use his credit card to cover thousands in NAN costs—neither of which he could legally do for the campaign. In a wide-ranging Voice interview Sunday, Stone confirmed his matching-fund and staffing roles, but refused to comment on the NAN subsidies.
Sharpton denounced the Voice's inquiries as "phony liberal paternalism," insisting that he'd "talk to anyone I want" and likening his use of Stone to Bill Clinton's reliance on pollster Dick Morris, saying he was "sick of these racist double standards." He did not dispute that Stone had helped generate matching contributions and staff the campaign. Asked about the Stone loans, he conceded that he "asked him to help NAN," but attributed the financial aid to his and Stone's joint "fight against the Rockefeller drug laws," adding: "If he did let me use his credit card to cover NAN expenses, fine." The finances of NAN and the Sharpton campaign have so merged in recent months that they have shared everything from contractors to consultants to travel expenses, though Sharpton insists that these questionable maneuvers have been done in compliance with Federal Election Commission regulations.
Sources in Washington D.C. have revealed that Bush 2 administration officials are again seeking to "stimulate" a regime change in Venezuela after a USA-backed coup d'etat against democratically-elected President Hugo Chavez Frias failed when US puppet dictator Pedro Carmona Estanga moved to dissolve parliament, the judiciary and the constitution in one fell swoop.
Our sources (which must remain confidential, but have been verified) say that Venezuelan nationals, recruited on the promise of fast-track US citizenship and benefits, have been trained in the arts of USA terror tactics at the US Army School of Americas-SOA (renamed 3 years ago as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation-WHISC) at Fort Benning (Georgia) were relocated to training camps at Iquitos in the northern jungles of Peru under the direction of US Southern Command (Latin America & Caribbean) regional HQ at Fort Buchanan (San Juan, Puerto Rico).
SOA/WHISC commanders are said to be "smarting" over their failure to impose a US-backed military/civilian dictatorship in Venezuela in April 2002 when democratically-elected President Hugo Chavez Frias was swiftly returned to power after US-puppet dictator Pedro Carmona Estanga dissolved parliament, the judiciary and Venezuela's constitution in one fell swoop. Carmona Estanga was not able to control the massive surge against him as millions of Venezuelans took to the streets repudiating his imposition and demanding the return of reformist Chavez Frias.
Covert US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operatives are already in place in Venezuela as the SOA/WHISC prepares for what it is calling "a second bite at the cherry." Bush 2 Latin America 'enforcer' Otto Reich has been holding top level meetings with strategists from the Venezuelan political opposition in Washington D.C. who also had meetings there last week with shadowy Venezuelan billionaire Gustavo Cisneros and former US White House insider Henry Kissinger.
Corrupt Venezuelan Confederation of Trade Unions (CTV) president Manuel Cova and Coordinadora Democratica (CD) representative Timoteo Zambrano have met with senior US State Department officials, including Reich, although both are attempting to whitewash their visit to D.C. as simply a round of information meetings they could equally have held with anti-Venezuelan US Ambassador Charles S. Shapiro at the Colinas de Valle Arriba bunker in Caracas. Cova and Zambrano were also meeting with Organization of American States (OAS) Secretary General, former Colombian President Cesar Gaviria and US congressmen, including Massachussetts Democrat Frank Barney, a member of the secretive US Select Committee on Homeland Security, where he serves on the Subcommittee on Infrastructure & Border Security and the Subcommittee on Intelligence & Counterterrorism.
While, on the face of it, US State Department spokespersons are calling on all side in Venezuela's tumultuous electoral process to respect established norms and procedures, radical opposition meetings with USA-OAS Roger Noriega and Senator Charles E. Shannon have led IC operatives in D.C. to dig deeper into Beltway motives while senior diplomat Peter DeShazo (who recently visited Caracas to speak personally with President Chavez Frias) is seen as having a more mediative role in alliance with former US Ambassador and Latin America expert John Maisto.
Meanwhile, SOA/WHISC troops are hunkered down ready to be drafted into Venezuela as soon as opposition-inspired violence breaks out. US Air Force and Navy contingents are being made ready at a Southern Command base on the Caribbean island of Aruba (Dutch Antilles) to provide logistic and material back-up to an invasion force. A US Navy hospital ship is also said to be on standby to sail to a position off the Venezuela's northern coastline at first signal of "the balloon going up."
The remaining question is no longer IF, but WHEN!
From VHedline.com
I would like to make the arguments in the upcoming Supreme Court case of Unified School District v. Newdow but realistically I don't have the time and money to afford to file a brief. If I were to file - here's some of the arguments I would make.
The Pledge is a law. It is specified in federal code. It is an act of patriotism. "One Nation Under God" is a religious statement and with that statement there it marries patriotism with religion. It forces non-believers who whish to recite the pledge to make a religious affirmation that they don't believe in. The pledge is a statement of national identity. Its much more than a ceremonial or historic thing. It is more like an oath.
The Pledge is distinguished from other less important acts that include the mention of God. It is not merely ceremonial or historic. It is codified into federal law.
Lets look at mathematical sets. The big set is all people of all religions. This can be divided into to subsets - monotheists who believe in exactly one god - and everyone else who believe in multiple gods or no god. The argument is perhaps that there are so many monotheists that we can agree that this is a monotheistic country.
The flaw is that it excludes a class of people - non-monotheists. If it said "Under Jesus" or "Under Allah" or "Under Zeus" or "Under the Sacred Tree of Knowledge" then it would be more exclusive. They would argue that "Under God" is a sufficiently large subset to be close enough to be compliant. But because it is part of the phrase "One Nation - Under God" it ties our national identity to a religious affirmation.
Basically - to have "One Nation Under God" - in the context of the Pledge - is to have government make a determination that god exists. I would ask the court to be required to rule that god exists in order to include it in the Pledge. If the Pledge said "Under Peter Pan" then that would be right because Peter Pan is a fictional character and it would be wrong for the government to include a fictional character in the pledge laws.
God is a fiction character. He is no more real that Peter Pan. There is no logical difference between God and Peter Pan. Now - the court might not agree with that - but that brings up the real issue.
It is not up to the court or the government to determine if God exists. The first amendment prohibits the government from determining religious questions. Religious questions are for Religions to determine. It is up to Marc Perkel, Ferry Falwell, the Pope, the Dalai Lama, and individual citizens to decide that question. Judges and governments do not determine religious issues. It is not their place to do so. It is up to the people - not the government to decide whether or not to believe in God and that decision must be a separate act from pledging one allegiance to the nation.
The First Amendment of the Constitution "Establishment Clause" prohibits the government from establishing religion. Although the court recognized an exception for acts that have become the "fabric of society" in this case tying the pledge to a religious affirmation is designed to alter the fabric of society for the purpose of including government sponsored religious indoctrination to support infecting the fabric of society with the belief in the fictional character God. Including the phrase "One Nation Under God" establishes a government preference for monotheism over other religions.
Those who support the phrase "Under God" argue that is is a recognition of our national history, that the forefathers believed in God and referenced him in important documents. This is all part of the "fabric of society" argument that becuse we are all infected we should just accept the infection and declare we are a nation of people infected with a false belief and keep the infection in society.
As the founder of the Church of Reality I find this argument particulary offensive because the "fabric of society" argument basically say we are required to live the lie and to perpetuate the lie in the Tree of Knowledge. This precludes our Principle of Positive Evolution and the Principle of Bullshit and the very foundation of our church doctrine. To require our children to recite falsehood in order to make a patriotic statement is oppressive.