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Moderate nominee leaves House race in Upstate New York
Dede Scozzafava leaves voters a choice between Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman and Democrat Bill Owens, shown here. (AP)
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By Karl Vick and Philip Rucker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 1, 2009
PLATTSBURGH, N.Y. -- The moderate Republican nominee for a vacant U.S. House seat here unexpectedly withdrew from the race Saturday, bowing to a revolt led by conservative activists that badly split the national GOP leadership and is likely to influence the shape of the party heading into next year's midterm elections.
With campaign funds drying up and support in public polls eroding significantly, Dede Scozzafava suspended her campaign three days before Tuesday's special election in New York's 23rd Congressional District. Her move paves the way for a more conservative third-party candidate, Doug Hoffman, in his effort to deny Democrats a seat that has been in the Republican column for more than a century.
Scozzafava's sudden departure represented a clear victory for the right flank of a fractured Republican Party that is trying to rebuild itself nationally after consecutive losses in 2006 and 2008 left the White House and both branches of Congress in Democratic hands.
The sudden turn of events in this Upstate New York district sends a signal to Republican candidates across the country that the populist forces are prepared to exercise their muscle against GOP candidates they regard as insufficiently conservative.
"The grass roots of the conservative movement just claimed a scalp before anyone even voted," said party strategist Mark McKinnon, a former senior adviser to President George W. Bush and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). "The conservative movement is alive, well, kicking hindquarters and taking names. And if you don't measure up, look out."
Right sends a message
For weeks, conservatives had assailed Scozzafava, the handpicked candidate of local party leaders, over her relatively liberal positions on fiscal issues and her support for gay rights and abortion rights. Her withdrawal underscored the potency of the conservative populist movement that has risen up to challenge President Obama's domestic agenda and shape the future of a Republican Party lacking in strong leadership and a clear agenda.
Former House speaker Newt Gingrich, who was one of Scozzafava's most prominent supporters, said her experience delivered a message to 2010 candidates and to those considering presidential campaigns in 2012.
"It says that you had better have a willingness to take on the establishment and a willingness to represent conservative values if you're going to have the energy and the capacity to create a Republican Party that's able to hold together a coalition," he said.
Already, conservative activists have zeroed in on the 2010 race for Florida's open Senate seat, in which the party campaign committee has endorsed moderate Gov. Charlie Crist but the more conservative Marco Rubio, a former state House speaker, is mounting a strong challenge.
"If I were Charlie Crist in Florida, what's happening in New York 23 would make me extremely nervous," said GOP strategist Todd Harris an adviser to Rubio. "A lot of the establishment Republicans underestimated the grass-roots anger across the country about spending and the expansion of the federal government. The anger is boiling over now, but a lot of the seeds of discontent were planted over the last five to six years."
For the rebounding party, however, the grass-roots discontent comes with risks.
"Because of what's happened, we're going to have some mischief-making, which is not positive for a party that needs to really focus on other fundamentals in order to make a comeback," Republican strategist John Weaver said.
With this New York district holding the only congressional election in an off-year cycle, much of the nation's political attention has gravitated here to the state's remote crown, an area so close to the Canadian border that highway signs are in English and French. The district covers so much territory that canvassers pack a bag before setting off from Plattsburgh, a city of 19,000 nestled on Lake Champlain beside Vermont, for the six-hour drive to the next great cluster of voters, sprinkled like pine cones along Lake Ontario.
"We still have a type of isolation up here compared to the cities, so we still have the old traditional American values," Hoffman, who is running as the Conservative Party candidate, said in an interview here. "And that's why the majority of the people in this district are so conservative."
Since Obama's nomination of Rep. John McHugh as secretary of the Army, the race to fill his seat has become a microcosm of the struggle within the Republican Party between conservative activists and the moderate establishment.
"This is entirely a battle over the definition and winning formula for Republican candidates going into the midterm elections of 2010 and beyond," GOP strategist Paul Erickson said.
Several likely 2012 presidential contenders, including former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, bucked the party leadership to endorse Hoffman. Even Richard K. Armey, the former House Republican leader, traveled here in late October with strategists from his Freedom Works network to help Hoffman, a rail-thin, bespectacled accountant making his first run for office.
The conservative Club for Growth financed a barrage of negative advertisements in recent weeks casting Scozzafava as a closet liberal, and the state assemblywoman's support among likely voters dropped to 20 percent in a Siena College poll released Saturday. Hoffman and Democrat Bill Owens were in a dead heat, with 36 percent and 35 percent, respectively.
On Wednesday night, Scozzafava found herself on a Plattsburgh stage after a debate Hoffman had skipped, visibly perspiring as she recited her conservative credentials before a crew from Fox News Channel.
"I believe in the Republican Party that stands for less government interference in the lives of individuals," Scozzafava said. "I believe in lower taxes, less government regulation. . . . I believe in all those core principles of the Republican Party. I believe in the First Amendment of the Constitution, the Second Amendment of the Constitution, all the amendments."
"People don't know who I am," Scozzafava implored. "My background and my record has been totally lied about."
But Scozzafava's pleas were not enough, and on Saturday she released a statement:
"The reality that I've come to accept is that in today's political arena, you must be able to back up your message with money -- and as I've been outspent on both sides, I've been unable to effectively address many of the charges that have been made about my record."
She released her supporters to "transfer their support as they see fit" but did not directly endorse Hoffman. Within hours, however, Republican leaders in Washington mobilized the party apparatus around Hoffman.
"This selfless act of releasing her supporters provides voters with the opportunity to unite around a candidate who shares Republican principles and will serve the interests of his constituents in Congress by standing in opposition to the liberal policies of President Obama and Speaker Pelosi," said Republican National Committee Chairman Michael S. Steele.
A blow to Democrats?
Democrats thought the three-way race could result in Owens winning a plurality of votes in the district, where the last non-Republican to win the seat "was a Whig," joked a local councilman. Still, Obama won the district last year and Hillary Rodham Clinton carried it in her 2006 Senate reelection victory.
Political strategists said Scozzafava's departure is likely to benefit Hoffman, who has been attracting independent voters as well as conservatives.
"While the circumstances in this race are unusual, the one constant factor at play -- both locally and nationally -- has been that independent voters continue to peel away from the Democrats and gravitate toward the right," said Ken Spain, a spokesman for the National Republican Campaign Committee.
When Hoffman visited McSweeney's Red Hots here last week, he told folks that he entered the race "because it's principle over party." As he polished off a chili dog, Pam Murray Wojtowicz asked from across the counter: "You know why I got involved? Joe the Plumber! I met him at CPAC in Washington. He said, 'You've got to get involved.' And now I'm a City Council member in Saratoga Springs."
"I'm a Ronald Reagan Republican," she added, "and we don't need another wishy-washy, let's-be-like-the-Democrats candidate."
Rucker reported from Washington.
http://www.therightperspective.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Tom_Lantos_2008.02.12-300x206.jpg
Former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds has testified before Congress that the late California congressman Tom Lantos disclosed “highest level” intelligence and weapons technology to both Israel and Turkey.
Edmonds made headlines in the wake of September 11, 2001 after she came forward with claims that Bush Administration officials Douglas Feith and Richard Perle helped pass defense secrets to foreign agents, or provided names of knowledgeable Pentagon officials who were vulnerable to blackmail or co-option, during the 1990’s.
Feith became head of the Office of Special Plans, and Perle would become chairman of the Defense Advisory Board during the Bush Administration.
Edmonds’ claims quickly became bogged down in partisan bickering as some Democrats used the revelations to attack neo-conservatives and the new Republican administration.
However, her August 8th testimony circumvents that by including the powerful Democrat congressman, who just happened to be a Holocaust survivor, as well as the American-Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC), a bi-partisan group, in the espionage scandal.
“They were 100 percent directly involved,” Edmonds told Military.com. “They were not in the Pentagon [in the late 1990s] but they had their people inside the Pentagon.” One of those people, she said, was Larry Franklin, an Air Force officer assigned to the Office of Special Plans who, in 2003, passed classified information to representatives of the American Israel Public Affairs Office, or AIPAC. By then Feith was leading the OSP.
According to Military.com:
Edmonds, who has degrees from George Washington University and George Mason University, speaks Turkish, Farsi, and Azerbaijani. She got into the world of FBI investigations and counter-intelligence after 9/11, when the FBI contacted her about coming to work as a Turkish translator. In short order she was on the job and translating documents going as far back as the mid-90s, as well as assisting special agents in the field who were monitoring both “foreign entities” and the public officials linked to them.
But not long after she joined the bureau another Turkish translator came on board – Malec Can Dickerson. And in December 2001 Dickerson and her husband, Douglas, then an Air Force major, tried to recruit her to join American Turkish Council — an organization that was actually being monitored by the FBI. Also, according to Edmonds, Douglas Dickerson had previously worked with Grossman in Turkey and, though assigned to the Defense Intelligence Agency, was working for Feith’s OSP and also as a coordinator with the State Department on the Turkey Republics in Central Asia.
Edmonds reported the attempted recruitment, but no action was taken. She said she soon found evidence that Malec Can Dickerson included false information on her FBI job application. Again, no response from officials, she said.
When the FBI finally did act, in March 2002, it was to fire her. When she appealed her termination and eventually sued, the Justice Department, then under John Ashcroft, invoked a “state’s secret’ privilege to prevent her from talking about what she knew. When Sens. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, looked into her case and found it credible, Ashcroft invoked the same gag order on them.
The Justice Department’s own Inspector General’s report was barred from release by Ashcroft, though when an unclassified version finally became available in 2005 it concluded that “many of Edmonds’s core allegations relating to the co-worker [Malec Can Dickerson] had some basis in fact and were supported by either documentary evidence or witnesses other than Edmonds.” And though the Justice Department’s IG found the evidence didn’t prove that the co-worker had disclosed classified information, it said the FBI should have investigated the claims more thoroughly.
Both Feith and Perle denounced Edmonds as “bizarre” and a “nutcase”. Defense Department spokesman Lt. Col. Eric Butterbaugh said any investigation into the allegations would be carried out by the FBI, although the bureau would not confirm or deny the existence of any such investigation.—
INTERACTIVE
Republican Rep. Joe Wilson is the latest in a long history of politicians from South Carolina who have an interesting way of expressing themselves.
1- The Sumner-Brooks Affairs
May 22, 1856; Rep. Preston S. Brooks (D-S.C.) beat and nearly killed Sen. Charles Sumner (R-Mass.) with a cane in the U.S. Senate chamber over a speech Sumner had made attacking Southerners who sympathized with pro-slavery violence in Kansas. Sumner was knocked out cold, and it would be three years before he returned to the Senate.
2- Senate-Floor Brawl
Feb. 22, 1902; During debate over whether to annex the Phillipines, Sen. Benjamin Tillman charged fellow South Carolina Democrat John McLaurin with succumbing to ''improper influences'' in changing his position. McLaurin denounced Tillman's statement and, in response, Tillman punched him. A brawl ensued, and the incident prompted members to change Senate rules to provide stricter guidelines for the decorum of floor debate.
3- Record Filibuster
Aug. 28, 1957; At 8:54 p.m., then-Democratic Sen. Strom Thurmond took the podium in the U.S. Senate for what would be a 24-hour, 18-minute-long tirade meant to stall voting on the Civil Rights Act of 1957. In the end, Thurmond persuaded no senators to change their vote on the bill. He did, however, set a new record for the longest filibuster in Senate history, which he still holds.
4- Wrestling Match
July 9, 1964; Thurmond wrestled Sen. Ralph Yarborough (D-Texas) in an attempt to block a committee vote on the nomination of LeRoy Collins to head the Community Relations Service, an office created under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to mediate local racial disputes. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Warren Magnuson (D-Wash.) ended the scuffle. Thurmond won the match, but lost that day's vote 16 to 1.
5- Capitol Steps
Late '70s; Rep. John W. Jenrette (D-S.C.) and his then-wife Rita engaged in a late-night amorous moment behind a pillar on the steps of the Capitol. Jenrette was later convicted for accepting a $50,000 bribe from an FBI agent posing as an Arab sheik in the Abscam congressional sting operation and served 13 months in prison. Capitol Steps, the D.C.-based satirical musical group, takes its name from the spot made famous by the Jenrettes.
6- Hiking in Appalachia
June 24, 2009; After going missing for seven days, South Carolina Republican Gov. Mark Sanford admitted he had secretly flown down to Argentina to visit a woman with whom he was having an affair. Sanford, who had been mentioned as a possible presidential candidate in 2012, resigned as head of the Republican Governors Association but has fought mounting calls to step down as governor.
7- Battle at Waterloo
July 17, 2009; During a conference call with conservative activists, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) likened President Obama's health-care fight to Napoleon Bonaparte's final defeat. ''If we're able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo,'' he said. ''It will break him.'' None of DeMint’s colleagues endorsed his Waterloo comment.
8- Heckling the President
Sept. 9, 2009; During President Obama's speech on health-care reform to a joint session of Congress, Republican Rep. Joe Wilson (S.C.) shouted ''You lie'' and ''Not true'' from the chamber floor when Obama said his plans would not cover illegal immigrants or provide funding for abortions. GOP leaders condemned Wilson's comments, and he later apologized.
Associated Press
WASHINGTON - Slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers will be honored Friday with a Navy supply ship named for him.
Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, a former governor of Mississippi, planned to announce the honor during a speech at Jackson State University in Jackson, Miss. The nearly 700-foot-long vessel named for Evers will deliver food, ammunition and parts to other ships at sea.
During the civil rights movement Evers organized nonviolent protests, voter registration drives and boycotts in Mississippi, rising to the post of national field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
In 1963 Evers was assassinated in the driveway of his home in Jackson after returning from a meeting with NAACP lawyers. His death prompted President John F. Kennedy to ask Congress for a comprehensive civil rights bill.
Evers was born in Decatur, Miss., in 1925 and served in the Army during World War II. He returned to Mississippi, earned a degree from Alcorn College in 1952 and became active in the NAACP and its civil rights work in his home state.
Thirty-seven when he was shot to death by a white supremacist, Evers was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. His killer, Byron De La Beckwith, was not convicted until 1994.
"The selection of Medgar Evers ... honors the pioneering spirit of the late civil rights activist from Mississippi who forever changed the face of race relations in the South," according to an administration statement. "At a time when our country was wrestling with finally ending segregation and racial injustice, Evers led civil rights efforts to secure the right to vote for all African-Americans and to integrate public facilities, schools and restaurants."
The Navy names ships in the support fleet to honor pioneers, explorers and other notables. The Navy ship honoring Evers is the first named for an African-American since President Barack Obama took office.
© Copyright 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
http://rebelreports.com/post/214963002/cindy-mccain-bankrolled-conference-that-called-for-ban
Friday, October 16th, 2009 | Rebel Reports
The ‘McCain Conference on Ethics and Military Leadership’ appears to be ahead of the senator when it comes to the US use of mercenary forces.
By Jeremy Scahill
A little-publicized US Naval Academy conference named after Senator John McCain and bankrolled by his wealthy wife, Cindy, issued a call earlier this year for the US government to ban the use of armed private security contractors like Blackwater in US war zones, stating bluntly, “contractors should not be deployed as security guards, sentries, or even prison guards within combat areas.”
“[T]he use of deadly force must be entrusted only to those whose training, character and accountability are most worthy of the nation’s trust: the military,” reads the executive summary of the U.S. Naval Academy’s 9th Annual McCain Conference on Ethics and Military Leadership, which was held in April at the Annapolis Naval Station. “The military profession carefully cultivates an ethic of ‘selfless service,’ and develops the virtues that can best withstand combat pressures and thus achieve the nation’s objectives in an honorable way. By contrast, most corporate ethical standards and available regulatory schemes are ill-suited for this environment.”
In 2001, Cindy McCain, who may be worth as much as $100 million, first endowed the McCain conference “in honor of her husband” with a $210,000 gift that was specifically intended to fund conferences that would “bring together key military officers and civilian academics responsible for ethics education and character developments.”
According to the Fall 2009 newsletter, “Taking Stock,” published by the US Naval Academy’s Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership—the host of the McCain Conference—among the speakers at the 2009 event was none other than Erik Prince, the owner of Blackwater. Prince’s company is the most infamous of those engaged in the type of armed activity explicitly condemned by the conference’s leadership.
The executive summary released by the McCain conference was recently highlighted in a report completed on September 29 by the Congressional Research Service on the use of private contractors. That report said that the US is “relying heavily” on armed contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan and suggests their use could continue to rise. The report also states that misconduct and the killing of civilians by armed security contractors “may have undermined U.S. counterinsurgency efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Despite the fact that the McCain conference, which publicly advocated against the use of armed contractors in combat areas bears Sen. McCain’s name and was bankrolled by his wife, when it has come to making this a major issue on Capitol Hill, the Arizona Senator has been largely silent. In 2007, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Jan Schakowsky introduced the Stop Outsourcing Security Act, which sought to do precisely what the McCain conference called for two years later: to ban the use of mercenaries in US war zones. McCain did not endorse or co-sponsor that legislation, which would certainly have benefited from his support (neither did then-Senator Barack Obama). Responding to a reporter’s question on the campaign trail in July 2008 about whether he believed that US troops and not private guards should protect US diplomats in Iraq, McCain said, “I’d like it, but we don’t have enough. Yes, and I’d love to see pigs fly, but it ain’t gonna happen.”
The McCain campaign hired people with deep ties to the mercenary industry to work on his presidential bid. Among these was senior strategist, Charlie Black, whose firm BKSH & Associates worked for Blackwater’s owner Erik Prince, helping to guide Prince through his appearance on Capitol Hill in the aftermath of the September 2007 Nisour Square massacre in Baghdad. McCain also brought on as a senior foreign policy advisor Richard Armitage, the former deputy Secretary of State. After leaving the government, Armitage served as a senior adviser for Veritas Capital from 2005 to 2007. Veritas owns the mercenary giant DynCorp, which holds billions of dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan security and training contracts.
Moreover, the International Republican Institute, which has deep ties to McCain, hired Blackwater as its private security force in Iraq, paying Blackwater an average of more than $17 million a year since 2005 for security services, according to records.
As the Obama administration weighs a substantial troops increase in Afghanistan, leading Democrats and Republicans are calling for an expanded role for US trainers for the Afghan military, which will mean more business for private contractors. Blackwater continues to play a central role in the CIA’s drone bombing program in Pakistan and Afghanistan, which vice president Joe Biden and others are suggesting should intensify. At present, there are 74,000 contractors on the DoD payroll in Afghanistan—roughly 10,000 more than the number of US troops. Thousands of other contractors work for the US State Department and other agencies.
The McCain conference raised questions about “the privatization of combat support functions,” including intelligence collection and analysis, as well as “advising/training for combat.” It concluded, “In irregular warfare environments, where civilian cooperation is crucial,” barring the use of armed contractors “is both ethically and strategically necessary.”—
Thanks George for this great African Americans reading list.
If you haven't received this fantastic list of must read books before, here it is...
PRINCIPAL KAFELE'S “MUST READ” BOOKS FOR
EDUCATORS OF AFRICAN AMERICAN CHILDREN
NOT JUST FOR EDUCATORS, FOR ALL PEOPLE SEEKING KNOWLEDGE
PRINCIPAL KAFELE'S COMMENTARY
To all educators (building level, central office level and consultants) who are responsible for the education of African American children, you have chosen a very noble profession in which to work. At the core of your practice must be reading. It doesn’t matter if your personal library is comprised of over 10,000 books in the field of education. If your personal library is not well stocked with books specifically written for educating African American children, your library is virtually worthless to your practice. If you are going to successfully educate African American children, you must read, study and apply culturally relevant, culturally appropriate and culturally responsive reading material that addresses the specific needs of African American learners. Anything less amounts to what Dr. Carter G. Woodson said many years ago - MISEDUCATION! Although it may not be possible to read all of the books listed below, it is incumbent upon all of us to read, study and apply as many as we can. The continued application of generic methodology for African American children will continue to produce the dismal and disappointing results that we see reflected in current state and national achievement data.
The biggest challenge will be obtaining many, if not most of these books. Mainstream bookstores typically either do not or will not carry titles of this nature. Their rationale is that there is no demand for them. It doesn’t take a wise man to figure out that there can’t be a demand for something that you don’t know exists! If the mainstream bookstores were to stock these books on their shelves, educators would be provided with the opportunity of learning of their existence and thereby the opportunity of making their own purchasing decision. I refer to the existing reality as the “deprivation of information.” The book industry, which we can refer to as the “information industry” is unfortunately reflective of many aspects of our society relative to unequal exposure and unequal opportunity. The way to correct this is by you, the reader of this commentary demanding that mainstream bookstores stock the shelves in their education sections with not only books that are written by non-African American writers, scholars and educators, but providing equal exposure to the works of African American writers, scholars and educators as well. Once educators of African American children are armed with a broader spectrum of research materials for raising the achievement levels of their African American students, then we will see African American children begin to make the breakthroughs in all walks of life that we know they are capable of making.
If the books you are looking for are not available in your local bookstore, you should be able to obtain them on the internet by simply typing the authors’ names in an internet search engine.
African History
1. Black Man of the Nile - Yosef ben-Jochannan
2. Introduction to African Civilizations - John G. Jackson
3. The African Origins of Civilization - Cheik Anta Diop
4. The Cultural Unity of Black Africa - Cheik Anta Diop
5. Stolen Legacy - George G. M. James
6. Destruction of Black Civilization - Chancellor Williams
7. World’s Great Men of Color, Vols. I and II - J. A. Rogers
8. Sex and Race, Vols. I-III - J. A. Rogers
9. Nile Valley Contributions to Civilization - Anthony T. Browder
10. Nile Valley Civilizations - Ivan Van Sertima
African American History
1. Before the Mayflower - Lerone Bennett, Jr.
2. From Slavery to Freedom - John Hope Franklin
3. Notes For An African World Revolution - John Henrik Clarke
4. African American History: A Journey to Liberation - Molefi K. Asante
5. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa - Walter Rodney
6. They Came Before Columbus - Ivan Van Sertima
7. Blacks in Science - Ivan Van Sertima
8. Black Inventors of America - McKinley Burt, Jr.
9. Great Negroes: Past and Present - Russell Adams
10. Introduction to Black Studies - Maulana Karenga
11. What They Never Told You in History Class - Kush
12. The Black Holocaust for Beginners - Sam Anderson
13. Peculiar Institution - Kenneth Stampp
14. Africa’s Gift to America - J. A. Rogers
15. Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey - Amy Jacques Garvey
16. Marcus Garvey, Hero - Tony Martin
17. Marcus Garvey and the Vision of Africa - John Henrik Clarke
18. Up From Slavery - Booker T. Washington
19. Life and Times of Frederick Douglass - Frederick Douglass
20. Harriet Tubman - Ann Petry
21. Autobiography of W. E.. B. DuBois
22. Autobiography of Malcolm X - Alex Haley *
23. Malcolm X Speaks - George Brietman
24. Malcolm X, The Man and His Times - John Henrik Clarke
25. King, A Biography - David Lewis
26. The Forty Million Dollar Slaves- William Rhoden*
African American Education
1. Miseducation of the Negro - Carter G. Woodson
2. Afrocentricity - Molefi Kete Asante
3. Black Students Guide to Positive Education - Zak Kondo
4. Issues in African American Education - Walter Gill
5. For the Children - Madeline Cartwright
6. Africa Counts - Claudia Zaslavsky
7. SBA: The Reawakening of the African Mind - Asa G. Hilliard III
8. Maroons Within Us - Asa G. Hilliard III
9. Young, Gifted and Black - Asa G. Hilliard III, Theresa Perry, Claude Steele
10. Infusion of African and African American Content in the School Curriculum - Asa G. Hilliard III, Lucretia Payton-Stewart, Larry Obadele Williams
11. The Failure of Public Education in the Black Community - Anyim Palmer
12. The Crisis and Challenge of Black Mis-Education in America - Gyasi A. Foluke
13. African-Centered Schooling in Theory and Practice - Diane S. Pollard
14. The Education of Black People - W.E.B. DuBois and Herbert Aptheker
15. Going to School: the African American Experience - Kofi Lomotey
16. Nationbuilding: Theory and practice in Afrikan-centered education - Kwame Agyei Akoto
17. Too Much Schooling, Too Little Education - Mwalimu J. Shujaa
18. Sailing Against the Wind: African Americans and Women in U.S. Education - Kofi Lometey
19. Educating Our Black Children: New Directions and Radical Approaches - Richard Majors
20. Unbank the Fire: Visions for the Education of African American Children - Janice E. Hale
21. The White Architects of Black Education: Ideology and Power in America, 1865-1954 - William H. Watkins
22. Improving Schools for African American Students: A Reader for Educational Leaders - Sheryl Denbo
23. Yurugu: An African-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior - Marimba Ani
24. African-Centered Pedagogy:Developing Schools of Achievement for African American Children - Peter C. Murrell, Jr.
25. Reversing Underachievement Among Gifted Black Students - Donna Y. Ford
26. Center Shift: An African-Centered Approach for the Multi-Cultural Curriculum - Joan D. Ratteray
27. Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria - Beverly Daniel Tatum
28. Learning to Survive: Black Youth Look for Education and Hope - Atron A. Gentry
29. A Black Parent’s Handbook to Educating Your Children (Outside of the Classroom) - Baruti K. Kafele
Teaching African American Children
1. A Handbook for Teachers of African American Children - Baruti K. Kafele
2. A Talk With Jawanza - Jawanza Kunjufu
3. Black Students/Middle Class Teachers - Jawanza Kunjufu
4. Black Children - Janice Hale
5. Learning While Black - Janice Hale
6. Marva Collins Way - Marva Collins
7. Ordinary Children/Extraordinary Teachers - Marva Collins
8. I Choose To Stay - Salome Thomas-El
9. Black Teachers on Teaching - Michele Foster
10. From Rage to Hope: Strategies for Reclaiming Black and Hispanic Students - Crystal Kuykendall
11. African-Centered Interdisciplinary Multi Level Hands-On Science - Bernida Thompson
12. Positive Afrikan Images for Children (Social Studies Curriculum) - Red Sea Press
13. African American Children: A Self-Empowering Approach to Modifying Behavior Problems and Preventing Academic
Failure - Carolyn M. Tucker
14. Heritage - Joyce Jarrett
15. How to Teach Math to Black Students - Shahid Muhammad
16. Motivating / Inspiring African American Children
17. Awakening the Natural Genius of Black Children - Amos N. Wilson
18. Developing Positive Self-Images and Discipline in Black Children - Jawanza Kunjufu
19. To Be Popular or Smart: The Black Peer Group - Jawanza Kunjufu
20. Motivating and Preparing Black Youth for Success - Jawanza Kunjufu
21. Harvesting New Generations: The Positive Development of Black Youth - Useni E. Perkins
22. Doing It My Way: Decision-Making for College Students – Matt Stevens
23. Doing It My Way: A Decision-Making Workbook for Today’s Youth – Matt Stevens
24. Other People's Children: Cultural Conflicts in the Classroom - Lisa Delpit
25. Culturally Responsive Teaching - Geneva Gay
26. The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African American Children - Gloria Ladson-Billings
Connecting With African American Males
1. Meeting the Classroom Needs of the African American Male Learner (forthcoming in 2009) - Baruti K. Kafele
2. Countering the Conspiracy to Destroy Black Boys, Vols. I-IV - Jawanza Kunjufu
3. Keeping Black Boys Out of Special Education - Jawanza Kunjufu
4. Raising Black Boys – Jawanza Kunjufu
5. State of Emergency: We Must Save African American Males – Jawanza Kunjufu
6. Teaching Reading to Black Adolescent Males: Closing the Achievement Gap - Alfred W.Tatum
7. Bringing the Black Boy to Manhood: The Hare Plan - Nathan and Julia Hare
8. Educating African American Males: Detroit’s Malcolm X Academy Solution - Clifford Watson & Geneva Smitherman
9. Educating African American Males: Voices From the Field – Edited by Olatokunbo S. Fashola
10. Educating Black Males: Critical Lessons in Schooling, Community and Power – Ronnie Hopkins
11. Coming of Age - Paul Hill
12. African American Males in School and Society - Vernon C. Polite
13. Practical Application of Social Learning Theories in Educating Young African American Males - George R. Taylor
14. Curriculum Strategies: Social Skills Intervention for Young African Males - George R. Taylor
15. Kill Them Before They Grow: The Misdiagnosis of African American Boys in America’s Classrooms - Michael Porter
16. The Trouble with Black Boys - Pedro A. Noguera
17. Wake Up Young Black Males – Steve Johnson
18. “Yo, Little Brother...”: Basic Rules of Survival for Young African American Males - Anthony Davis & Jeffrey Jackson
19. The Warrior Method – Raymond A. Winbush
20. Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity – Ann Arnette Ferguson
21. Letters to a Young Brother – Hill Harper
22. Beating the Odds: Raising Academically Successful African American Males – Hrabowski, III; Maton & Greif
23. Young, Black and Male in America:An Endangered Species – Edited by Jewelle Taylor Gibbs
24. The Estrangement of Black Male Youth From a Teacher’s Perspective – Jerald McNair
25. Empowering African American Males – Michael Wynn
26. Teaching, Parenting and Mentoring Successful Black Males – Michael Wynn
27. African Centered Rites of Passage and Education - Lathardus Goggins II
28. Why Should White Guys Have All The Fun- Reginald Lewis
29. King of the CATS, The Life of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.- Wil Haygood *
30. Eyes To MY Soul-The Rise/ Decline of A Black FBI Agent- Tyrone Powers
Psychology
1. Developmental Psychology of the Black Child - Amos N. Wilson
2. Chains and Images of Psychological Slavery - Na’im Akbar
3. African-Centered Psychology: Cultural Focusing for Multi-Cultural Competence - Daudi Ajani Ya Azibo
4. Post Traumatic Slavery Disorder – Omar Reid, Sekou Mims, Larry Higginbottom
5. Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome – Joy DeGruy Leary
6. Black Pain: It Just Looks Like We're Not Hurting- Terrie M. Williams **
7. Heal Thyself: For Health and Longevity- Sister Queen Afua
TAKE CARE - www.ggaffney.blogspot.com
"He's better positioned to set a new tone in a new era for Charlotte."
Rarely in mayoral politics in America today are voters given two excellent choices. It's rarer still in Charlotte, where Republican Mayor Pat McCrory has rolled over his opposition for 14 years running.
But that's the happy circumstance facing city voters this fall. Democrat Anthony Foxx and Republican John Lassiter are vying to replace the retiring McCrory. Either could be an exceptional leader. Both are intelligent, hard-working, committed to Charlotte and are within the city's tradition of moderate, mainstream politics.
Charlotte would be well-served with either as mayor. In the end, though, we back Foxx. We think he is a better fit for what Charlotte needs at this point in its evolution as a city.
After decades of heady growth, Charlotte has hit a rough patch unprecedented in recent memory. Our booming economy is stalled, and the banks that have led the way for years have faltered. Uptown condo towers that were sprouting everywhere froze, unfinished. Tax revenues are down at every level of government, limiting the ability to build roads, beef up public transit and pay for schools, parks, jails and other projects. Our neighbors are unemployed, or fear they soon will be, and the nonprofit sector has seen donations drop while demand soars. A lack of affordable housing remains a stain on this city's reputation.
We believe the next mayor needs to be unusually adept at connecting with residents and uniting a diverse community. He needs to use the mayor's office as a bully pulpit. He should set the agenda and tackle our city's toughest problems with new solutions. He must reach out to our neighbors in the region, in Raleigh and in Washington to seek collaborative approaches. He needs to imbue the city with confidence that we can navigate through this daunting time and emerge stronger than before. He should not do things the way we've always done them.
We believe Foxx is best positioned to do those things and set a new tone. Throughout his life, he has shown an ability to relate with people from all backgrounds. He grew up fatherless in Charlotte. His own character and the grandparents who raised him deserve credit for keeping him from being another sad statistic. The resilience and determination he developed as a child served him well as Davidson College student president, then at New York University Law School. He served as a judicial clerk, worked in the Justice Department and was a congressional counsel.
He is a work in progress, to be sure. At 38, he is still honing his campaigning and governing skills. But we admire his philosophy on leadership, which is an inclusive brand that believes in listening and serving and being more bottom-up than top-down.
He and Lassiter are not wildly different on most of the issues facing city government. We do believe, though, there is a substantive difference in their approach to growth and development. Foxx works with the development industry while trying to make sure Charlotte grows wisely. Lassiter, by contrast, has shown less independence from development interests. He opposed the city's Bicycle Plan, the Transportation Action Plan (though he missed the vote) and the Urban Street Design Guidelines, and tried to delay each. Foxx supported all three.
Charlotte is fortunate to have two good choices. Lassiter's experience in public office is as deep as any Charlotte mayoral candidate in recent memory. He is fluent on just about any issue that comes his way, able to talk in detail about the nature of problems and their solutions. He has shown the ability to juggle many tasks at once, successfully weaving his personal and professional life with his civic involvement. He would make a good city manager.
The mayor's office, though, is about agenda-setting and image-shaping as much as it is policy implementation. And for that, we give the nod to Foxx.
http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/165/story/844811.html
BY ALAN RIQUELMY - ariquelmy@ledger-enquirer.com
A letter filed Friday and signed Capt. Connie Rhodes, who filed a complaint Sept. 4 in U.S. District Court that sought to stop her deployment to Iraq by arguing that President Barack Obama can’t legitimately hold office, states that she never authorized her attorney to appeal a Wednesday ruling against her.
Additionally, Judge Clay Land — who denied Rhodes’ request and threatened sanctions against her lawyer, Orly Taitz, a national figure in the “birther” movement — states that Taitz has two weeks from Friday to explain why he shouldn’t impose a $10,000 penalty against the California lawyer.
Both Land’s order and the letter came on the heels of a Thursday request from the captain that Land reconsider his Wednesday order against her. In that order, Land called Rhodes’ Sept. 4 complaint “frivolous,” and says Taitz could face sanctions if she ever again filed in his court a similar frivolous action.
In the Friday letter, it states that Rhodes never told Taitz to file for a reconsideration, and that she intends to formally complain about her attorney. “I became aware on last night’s local news cast that a motion to stay my deployment had been entered on my behalf,” the Friday letter to Land states. “I did not authorize this motion to be filed.
“Furthermore, I do not wish for Ms. Taitz to file any future motions or represent me in any way in this court. It is my plan to file a complaint with the California State Bar due to her reprehensible and unprofessional actions,” the letter states.
The letter says that Rhodes is currently deploying to Iraq, and that it’s evident her initial complaint was “full of political conjecture, which was not my interest. I had no intention of refusing orders nor will I. I simply wanted to verify the lawfulness of my orders.”
In that complaint, Rhodes had argued that some facts point to Obama not being naturalized or possibly an illegal immigrant. She added that she couldn’t in good conscience obey orders that came down a chain of command that started with Obama.
Ruling against her on Wednesday, Land states that Rhodes “has presented no credible evidence and has made no reliable factual allegations to support her unsubstantiated, conclusory allegations and conjecture that President Obama is ineligible to serve as president of the United States. “Unlike in ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ simply saying something is so does not make it so,” Land states.
Rhodes responded Thursday with an emergency request for stay of deployment and request to amend the judgment — a motion the letter states was never authorized by Rhodes. The Thursday motion states that “the United States District Courts in the 11th Circuit are subject to political pressure, external control, and ... subservience to the same illegitimate chain of command which plaintiff has previously protested.”
In his Friday order, Land called Taitz’ motion for reconsideration a “tirade.”
“She continues to file motions that do not address legal issues but that describe the president as a ‘prevaricator,’ allege that the president’s father was ‘disloyal and possibly treacherous’ to the ‘British Crown,’ accuse (Land) of treason, and suggest that the United States District Courts in this Circuit are ‘subservient’ to the ‘illegitimate’ ‘de facto President,’” Land’s Friday order states. “Although the First Amendment may allow plaintiff’s counsel to make these wild accusations on her blog or in her press conferences, the federal courts are reserved for hearing genuine legal disputes and not as a platform for political rhetoric that is disconnected from any legitimate legal cause of action.”
Land then states he is considering a penalty of $10,000 against Taitz, and that she has two weeks to explain why he shouldn’t impose it.—
Andrew M. Manis is associate professor of history at Macon State College in Georgia and wrote this for an editorial in the Macon Telegraph.
For much of the last forty years, ever since America "fixed" its race problem in the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, we white people have been impatient with African Americans who continued to blame race for their difficulties. Often we have heard whites ask, "When are African Americans finally going to get over it?
Now I want to ask:
"When are we White Americans going to get over our ridiculous obsession with skin color?
Recent reports that "Election Spurs Hundreds' of Race Threats, Crimes" should frighten and infuriate every one of us. Having grown up in "Bombingham," Alabama in the 1960s, I remember overhearing an avalanche of comments about what many white classmates and their parents wanted to do to John and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King.
Eventually, as you may recall, in all three cases, someone decided to do more than "talk the talk."
Since our recent presidential election, to our eternal shame we are once again hearing the same reprehensible talk I remember from my boyhood.
We white people have controlled political life in the disunited colonies and United States for some 400 years on this continent.
Conservative whites have been in power 28 of the last 40 years. Even during the eight Clinton years, conservatives in Congress blocked most of his agenda and pulled him to the right. Yet never in that period did I read any headlines suggesting that anyone was calling for the assassinations of presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, or either of the Bushes. Criticize them, yes.
Call for their impeachment, perhaps. But there were no bounties on their heads. And even when someone did try to kill Ronald Reagan, the perpetrator was non-political mental case who wanted merely to impress Jody Foster.
But elect a liberal who happens to be Black and we're back in the sixties again. At this point in our history, we should be proud that we've proven what conservatives are always saying -- that in America anything is possible, EVEN electing a black man as president.
But instead we now hear that school children from Maine to California are talking about wanting to "assassinate Obama."
Fighting the urge to throw up, I can only ask, "How long?"
How long before we white people realize we can't make our nation, much less the whole world, look like us?
How long until we white people can - once and for all - get over this hell-conceived preoccupation with skin color?
How long until we white people get over the demonic conviction that white skin makes us superior?
How long before we white people get over our bitter resentments about being demoted to the status of equality with non-whites?
How long before we get over our expectations that we should be at the head of the line merely because of our white skin?
How long until we white people end our silence and call out our peers when they share the latest racist jokes in the privacy of our white-only conversations?
I believe in free speech, but how long until we white people start making racist loudmouths as socially uncomfortable as we do flag burners?
How long until we white people will stop insisting that blacks exercise personal responsibility, build strong families, educate themselves enough to edit the Harvard Law Review, and work hard enough to become President of the United States, only to threaten to assassinate them when they do?
How long before we starting "living out the true meaning" of our creeds, both civil and religious, that all men and women are created equal and that "red and yellow, black and white" all are precious in God's sight?
Until this past November 4, I didn't believe this country would ever elect an African American to the presidency. I still don't believe I'll live long enough to see us white people get over our racism problem.
But here's my three-point plan:
First, everyday that Barack Obama lives in the White House that Black Slaves Built, I'm going to pray that God (and the Secret Service) will protect him and his family from us white people.
Second, I'm going to report to the FBI any white person I overhear saying, in seriousness or in jest, anything of a threatening nature about President Obama.
Third, I'm going to pray to live long enough to see America surprise the world once again, when white people can "in spirit and in truth" sing of our damnable color prejudice,
"We HAVE overcome."
**************************************
It takes a Village to protect our President!!!
This is a long article but it is worth reading. Glenn Becks mind set is finally revealed.
Michael A. Lawson
Cleon Skousen was a right-wing crank whom even conservatives despised. Then Beck discovered him
By Alexander Zaitchik
Sept. 16, 2009 | On Saturday, I spent the afternoon with America's new breed of angry conservative. Up to 75,000 protesters had gathered in Washington on Sept. 12, the day after the eighth anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks, sporting the now familiar tea-bagger accoutrements of "Don't Tread on Me" T-shirts, Revolutionary War outfits and Obama-the-Joker placards. The male-skewing, nearly all-white throng had come to denounce the president and what they believe is his communist-fascist agenda.
Even if the turnout wasn't the 2 million that some conservatives tried, briefly, to claim, it was still enough to fill the streets near the Capitol. It was also ample testament to the strength of a certain strain of right-wing populist rage and the talking head who has harnessed it. The masses were summoned by Glenn Beck, Fox News host and organizer of the 912 Project, the civic initiative he pulled together six months ago to restore America to the sense of purpose and unity it had felt the day after the towers fell.
In reality, however, the so-called 912ers were summoned to D.C. by the man who changed Beck's life, and that helps explain why the movement is not the nonpartisan lovefest that Beck first sold on air with his trademark tears. Beck has created a massive meet-up for the disaffected, paranoid Palin-ite "death panel" wing of the GOP, those ideologues most susceptible to conspiracy theories and prone to latch on to eccentric distortions of fact in the name of opposing "socialism." In that, they are true disciples of the late W. Cleon Skousen, Beck's favorite writer and the author of the bible of the 9/12 movement, "The 5,000 Year Leap." A once-famous anti-communist "historian," Skousen was too extreme even for the conservative activists of the Goldwater era, but Glenn Beck has now rescued him from the remainder pile of history, and introduced him to a receptive new audience.
Anyone who has followed Beck will recognize the book's title. Beck has been furiously promoting "The 5,000 Year Leap" for the past year, a push that peaked in March when he launched the 912 Project. That month, a new edition of "The 5,000 Year Leap," complete with a laudatory new foreword by none other than Glenn Beck, came out of nowhere to hit No. 1 on Amazon. It remained in the top 15 all summer, holding the No. 1 spot in the government category for months. The book tops Beck's 912 Project "required reading" list, and is routinely sold at 912 Project meetings where guest speakers often use it as their primary source material. At one 912 meet-up I attended in Florida, copies were stacked high on a table against the back wall, available for the 912 nice price of $15. "Don't bother trying to get it at the library," one 912er told me. "The wait list is 40 deep."
What has Beck been pushing on his legions? "Leap," first published in 1981, is a heavily illustrated and factually challenged attempt to explain American history through an unspoken lens of Mormon theology. As such, it is an early entry in the ongoing attempt by the religious right to rewrite history. Fundamentalists want to define the United States as a Christian nation rather than a secular republic, and recast the Founding Fathers as devout Christians guided by the Bible rather than deists inspired by the French and English philosophers. "Leap" argues that the U.S. Constitution is a godly document above all else, based on natural law, and owes more to the Old and New Testaments than to the secular and radical spirit of the Enlightenment. It lists 28 fundamental beliefs -- based on the sayings and writings of Moses, Jesus, Cicero, John Locke, Montesquieu and Adam Smith -- that Skousen says have resulted in more God-directed progress than was achieved in the previous 5,000 years of every other civilization combined. The book reads exactly like what it was until Glenn Beck dragged it out of Mormon obscurity: a textbook full of aggressively selective quotations intended for conservative religious schools like Utah's George Wythe University, where it has been part of the core freshman curriculum for decades (and where Beck spoke at this year's annual fundraiser).
But more interesting than the contents of "The 5,000 Year Leap," and more revealing for what it says about 912ers and the Glenn Beck Nation, is the book's author. W. Cleon Skousen was not a historian so much as a player in the history of the American far right; less a scholar of the republic than a threat to it. At least, that was the judgment of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, which maintained a file on Skousen for years that eventually totaled some 2,000 pages. Before he died in 2006 at the age of 92, Skousen's own Mormon church publicly distanced itself from the foundation that Skousen founded and that has published previous editions of "The 5,000 Year Leap."
As Beck knows, to focus solely on "The 5,000 Year Leap" is to sell the author short. When he died in 2006 at the age of 92, Skousen had authored more than a dozen books and pamphlets on the Red Menace, New World Order conspiracy, Christian child rearing, and Mormon end-times prophecy. It is a body of work that does much to explain Glenn Beck's bizarre conspiratorial mash-up of recent months, which decries a new darkness at noon and finds strange symbols carefully coded in the retired lobby art of Rockefeller Center. It also suggests that the modern base of the Republican Party is headed to a very strange place.
Willard Cleon Skousen was born in 1913 to American parents in a small Mormon frontier town in Alberta, Canada. When he was 10 his family moved to California, where he remained until he shipped off to England and Ireland for Mormon missionary work. In 1935, after graduating from a California junior college, the 23-year-old Skousen moved to Washington, where he worked briefly for a New Deal farm agency. He then began a 15-year career with the FBI, also earning a law degree from George Washington University in 1940. His posts at the FBI were largely administrative and clerical in nature, first in Washington and later in Kansas.
After retiring from the FBI in 1951, Skousen joined the faculty of Brigham Young University, the Latter-day Saints university in Utah. He then enjoyed a tumultuous four years as chief of police in Salt Lake City. During his tenure he gained a reputation for cutting crime and ruthlessly enforcing Mormon morals. But Skousen was too earnest by half. The city's ultraconservative mayor, J. Bracken Lee, fired him in 1960 for excessive zeal in raiding private clubs where the Mormon elite enjoyed their cards. "Skousen conducted his office as Chief of Police in exactly the same manner in which the Communists operate their government," Lee wrote to a friend explaining his firing of Skousen. "The man is a master of half-truths. In at least three instances I have proven him to be a liar. He is a very dangerous man [and] one of the greatest spenders of public funds of anyone who ever served in any capacity in Salt Lake City government."
During his stint as police chief, Skousen began laying the groundwork for his future career as a professional anti-communist. He published a bestselling expose-slash-history called "The Naked Communist." In the late '50s, America's far right began to bubble with organizations peddling stories about the true state of the Red Menace. Groups like the Church League of America and the John Birch Society organized to channel, feed and satisfy Cold War paranoia. Members of these groups were the original postwar "domestic right-wing extremist threat." Then as now, they were very much on the government's radar.
After his firing from the police force, Skousen became a star on the profitable far-right speakers circuit. He worked for both the Bircher-operated American Opinion Speakers Bureau and Fred Schwarz's Christian Anti-Communism Crusade. The two groups competed in describing ever more terrifying threats posed by America's enemies, foreign and domestic. As the scenarios became more and more outlandish, the feds grew concerned. In an internal memo, the FBI described Skousen's friend and employer Fred Schwarz as "an opportunist," the likes of which "are largely responsible for misinforming people and stirring them up emotionally ... Schwartz [sic] and others like him can only do the country and the anticommunist work of the Bureau harm."
How did Skousen become an expert on communism? He claimed, as his apologists still do, that his years with the FBI exposed him to inside information. He also boasted that he worked closely with J. Edgar Hoover. But both claims are open to question. Skousen's work at the Bureau was largely administrative, according to Ernie Lazar, an independent researcher of the far right who has examined Skousen's nearly 2,000-page FBI file. "Skousen never worked in [the domestic intelligence division] and he never had significant exposure to data concerning communist matters," says Lazar.
Skousen also trumpeted the insight he says he gained researching "The Naked Communist." But this research was as shaky as his résumé. Among the theories Skousen charged a healthy fee to discuss was the alleged treason of FDR advisor Harry Hopkins. According to Skousen, Hopkins gave the Soviets "50 suitcases" worth of info on the Manhattan Project, along with nearly half of the nation's supply of enriched uranium. This he told thousands of audiences across the country, sometimes giving five speeches a day.
When Skousen's books started popping up in the nation's high-school classrooms, panicked school board officials wrote the FBI asking if Skousen was reliable. The Bureau's answer was an exasperated and resounding "no." One 1962 FBI memo notes, "During the past year or so, Skousen has affiliated himself with the extreme right-wing 'professional communists' who are promoting their own anticommunism for obvious financial purposes." Skousen's "The Naked Communist," said the Bureau official, is "another example of why a sound, scholarly textbook on communism is urgently and badly needed."
Two years on the circuit made Skousen a nationally known figure. Aligned with the Birchers and Schwarz, he also founded his own Utah-based far-right organization, the All-American Society. Here's how Time magazine described the outfit in a December 1961 feature on what it called the "rightwing ultras":
The All-American Society, founded in Salt Lake City, has as its guiding light one of the busiest speakers in the rightist movement: W. Cleon Skousen, a balding, bespectacled onetime FBI man who hit the anti-Communist circuit in earnest in 1960 after being fired from his job as Salt Lake City's police chief ("He operated the police department like a Gestapo," says Salt Lake City's conservative Mayor J. Bracken Lee). Skousen freely quotes the Bible, constantly plugs his book, The Naked Communist, [and] presses for a full congressional investigation of the State Department.
By 1963, Skousen's extremism was costing him. No conservative organization with any mainstream credibility wanted anything to do with him. Members of the ultraconservative American Security Council kicked him out because they felt he had "gone off the deep end." One ASC member who shared this opinion was William C. Mott, the judge advocate general of the U.S. Navy. Mott found Skousen "money mad ... totally unqualified and interested solely in furthering his own personal ends."
When Skousen aligned himself with Robert Welch's charge that Dwight Eisenhower was a "dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy," the last of Skousen's dwindling corporate clients dumped him. The National Association of Manufacturers released a statement condemning the Birchers and distancing itself from "any individual or party" that subscribed to their views. Skousen, author of a pamphlet titled "The Communist Attack on the John Birch Society," was the nation's most prominent Birch defender.
Skousen laid low for much of the '60s. But he reemerged at the end of the decade peddling a new and improved conspiracy that merged left with right: the global capitalist mega-plot of the "dynastic rich." Families like the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds, Skousen now believed, used left forces -- from Ho Chi Minh to the American civil rights movement -- to serve their own power.
In 1969, a 1,300-page book started appearing in faculty mailboxes at Brigham Young, where Skousen was back teaching part-time. The book, written by a Georgetown University historian named Carroll Quigley, was called "Tragedy and Hope." Inside each copy, Skousen inserted handwritten notes urging his colleagues to read the book and embrace its truth. "Tragedy and Hope," Skousen believed, exposed the details of what would come to be known as the New World Order (NWO). Quigley's book so moved Skousen that in 1970 he self-published a breathless 144-page review essay called "The Naked Capitalist." Nearly 40 years later, it remains a foundational document of America's NWO conspiracy and survivalist scene (which includes Skousen's nephew Joel).
In "The Naked Communist," Skousen had argued that the communists wanted power for their own reasons. In "The Naked Capitalist," Skousen argued that those reasons were really the reasons of the dynastic rich, who used front groups to do their dirty work and hide their tracks. The purpose of liberal internationalist groups such as the Council on Foreign Relations, argued Skousen, was to push "U.S. foreign policy toward the establishment of a world-wide collectivist society." Skousen claimed the Anglo-American banking establishment had a long history of such activity going back to the Bolshevik Revolution. He substantiated this claim by citing the work of a former Czarist army officer named Arsene de Goulevitch. Among Goulevitch's own sources is Boris Brasol, a pro-Nazi Russian émigré who provided Henry Ford with the first English translation of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion."
"The Naked Capitalist" does not seem like a text that would be part of the required reading list on any reputable college campus, but some BYU professors taught it out of allegiance to Skousen. Terrified, the editors of Dialogue: The Journal of Mormon Thought invited "Tragedy and Hope" author Carroll Quigley to comment on Skousen's interpretation of his work. They also asked a highly respected BYU history professor named Louis C. Midgley to review Skousen's latest pamphlet. Their judgment was not kind. In the Autumn/Winter 1971 issue of Dialogue, the two men accused Skousen of "inventing fantastic ideas and making inferences that go far beyond the bounds of honest commentary." Skousen not only saw things that weren't in Quigley's book, they declared, he also missed what actually was there -- namely, a critique of ultra-far-right conspiracists like Willard Cleon Skousen.
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DON’T Pay for White TeethLearn the trick discovered by a mom to turn teeth white w/ under $5 Get details... "Skousen's personal position," wrote a dismayed Quigley, "seems to me perilously close to the 'exclusive uniformity' which I see in Nazism and in the Radical Right in this country. In fact, his position has echoes of the original Nazi 25-point plan."
Skousen was unbowed. In 1971, he founded the Freeman Institute, a research organization devoted to the study of the super-conspiracy directed by the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds. (The institute later changed its name to the National Center for Constitutional Studies, which has offices in Malta, Idaho, and continues to publish Skousen's books, including Glenn Beck's favorite work of history, "The 5,000 Year Leap.")
By the end of the 1970s, the death of Skousen's biggest allies within the Mormon church hierarchy cleared the way for an official disavowal of his work. In 1979, LDS church president Spencer W. Kimball issued an order to every Mormon clergyman in the U.S. stating "no announcements should be made in Church meetings of Freemen Institute lectures or events that are not under the sponsorship of the Church. [This] is to make certain that neither Church facilities nor Church meetings are used to advertise such events and to avoid any implication that the Church endorses what is said during such lectures."
Skousen may have been too extreme for the Quorum of the Twelve in Salt Lake City, but he soon found rehabilitation on the intellectual margins of Reagan's Washington. In 1980, Skousen was appointed to the newly founded Council for National Policy, a think tank that brought together leading religious conservatives and served as the unofficial brain trust of the new administration. At the Council, Skousen distinguished himself by becoming an early proponent of privatizing Social Security. He also formed relationships with other evangelical church leaders and aligned the LDS church with an increasingly religious GOP.
"Skousen worked to change Mormonism from a new and unique American-born faith into an evangelical form of fundamentalist Christianity," says Rob Lauer, a leader of the Reform Mormonism movement. "By arguing that biblical principles were the basis of the U.S. government, he was among those most responsible for the LDS church becoming part of the religious right political establishment over the past 25 years."
In 1981, Skousen published "The 5,000 Year Leap," the book for which, thanks to Beck, he is now best known. But it wasn't that Skousen book that made the biggest headline in the 1980s. Toward the end of Reagan's second term, Skousen became the center of a minor controversy when state legislators in California approved the official use of another of his books, the 1982 history text "The Making of America." Besides bursting with factual errors, Skousen's book characterized African-American children as "pickaninnies" and described American slave owners as the "worst victims" of the slavery system. Quoting the historian Fred Albert Shannon, "The Making of America" explained that "[slave] gangs in transit were usually a cheerful lot, though the presence of a number of the more vicious type sometimes made it necessary for them all to go in chains."
Skousen spent the 1990s in semi-retirement. He spoke occasionally around the country and welcomed visiting politicians to his Salt Lake City home on Berkeley Street. His death in January 2006 was little noticed outside Mormon circles. If LDS members debated his legacy, it was in mostly hushed tones. But by then, he was already poised for a posthumous revival.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Glenn Beck's first public reference to anything Skousen seems to have occurred in 2003. In his memoir-cum-manifesto, "The Real America," was a chapter titled "The Enemy Within." It consisted of a list titled "Communist Goals of 1963." The list was originally published in Skousen's 1958 book "The Naked Communist," and was submitted to the Congressional Record by Florida Rep. Albert Herlong Jr., whom Beck identifies as the author. Beck asked readers of "The Real America" to ponder Skousen's list, then "check off" those goals already achieved by America's new enemies within. Replacing communists in Beck's view: "liberals, special-interest groups, [and] the ACLU."
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Charlotte Moms! Lose 47lbs, Follow 1 Rule!I Cut Down 47 lbs of Stomach Fat In A Month By Obeying This 1 Old Rule Explore now... It would be another few years before Beck really started boosting for Skousen's books. Apparently, around about 2007, a friend of Beck's sent him "The 5,000 Year Leap." In the column linked here, Canadian newspaper columnist Nigel Hannaford says the friend was a Toronto lawyer. Paul Skousen, Skousen's son, endorsed the outlines of the tale to Salon by e-mail, without giving dates: "As I understand it, Glenn Beck was given a copy of FYL by a friend in Canada. When Beck read it, suddenly the effusive and disembodied principles of freedom that he had been trying to dig up and put together all came together and he could make sense of them. He was so excited about the clarity it brought that he began mentioning it on his show."
Whatever the circumstances, Beck really began touting Skousen in the latter half of 2007. The first brief mention of Skousen in the online archives of Beck's radio show is Sept. 24, 2007. Less than two months later, Beck interviewed conservative pundit David Horowitz on his radio program. He asked him, "Have you ever read any Skousen? Have you read -- do you remember 'The Naked Communist'? I went back and reread that, it was printed in the 1950s. I reread that recently. You look at all the things the communists wanted to accomplish. It's all been done." Horowitz agreed.
The very next week, Bill Bennett appeared on Beck's radio program and received the same question. "Are you familiar with Skousen?" asked Beck. When Bennett replied yes, Beck gushed. "He's fantastic," he said. "I went back and I read 'The Naked Communist' and at the end of that Skousen predicted [that] someday soon you won't be able to find the truth in schools or in libraries or anywhere else because it won't be in print anymore. So you must collect those books. It's an idea I read from Cleon Skousen from his book in the 1950s, 'The Naked Communist,' and where he talked about someday the history of this country's going to be lost because it's going to be hijacked by intellectuals and communists and everything else. And I think we're there."
Beck continued to mention the book during 2008, but his Skousen obsession really kicked in as the 912 concept began to take shape. Even before Obama's inauguration, Beck had a game plan for a movement with Skousen at the center. On his Dec. 18, 2008, radio show, one month before Obama took office, Beck introduced his audience to the idea of a "September twelfth person."
"The first thing you could do," he said, "is get 'The 5,000 Year Leap.' Over my book or anything else, get 'The 5,000 Year Leap.' You can probably find it in the book section of GlennBeck.com, but read that. It is the principle. Please, No. 1 thing: Inform yourself about who we are and what the other systems are all about. 'The 5,000 Year Leap' is the first part of that. Because it will help you understand American free enterprise … Make that dedication of becoming a Sept. 12 person and I will help you do it next year."
By then, the Skousen family was ready to respond to the Beck-inspired demand. "We as a family," Paul Skousen told Salon, "were preparing to publish another edition, so I contacted his office with the request that Glenn write a foreword. He was gracious and kind and did just that. That is the version we're now publishing.
