Courtesy of Robert Greenwald at Brave New Films. Just to be clear, I wasn’t born in San Francisco, but in Cali, Colombia and if Mr. Beck wants to deport me to North Korea, that’s okay because I’ve never been and have always wanted to visit.

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I am often asked as a foreigner living in the United States, what makes the United States different? How to explain the vast differences in societal norms between the United States and Europe, between the United States and Canada?

My answer generally takes the form about the deeply religious nature of many Americans. Among other advanced industrialized countries, only Ireland, Poland, Portugal and Italy have a higher rate of weekly Church attendance. But each of those have a mainstream Church, in case Catholic. What makes the US different is not just the higher rate of Church attendance but the type of religious services they attend.

While Catholics in the United States are the largest single denomination with about 50 million, but less than half of American Catholics attend services on weekly basis. The highest attending denominations are the Mormons (Church of Jesus Latter Day Saints) at 71 percent, the Assembly of God at 69 percent and the Pentecostals at 66 percent. Baptists are another high attendance group at just shy of 60 percent.

Cindy Jacobs is a self-proclaimed prophet and a nutcase who believes in supernatural creatures showing up in her bedroom. But her influence as evidenced by the above is unfortunately vast. It’s an act but it’s also a highly profitable one that preys on the wholly ignorant. The reality is that only in the United States is this sort of religious practice a multi-billion industry and it’s tax-free.

And her politics is very right-wing. She’s a regular on Pat Robertson’s, Christian Broadcasting Network. Here’s her take on the election of President Obama.

“The Holy Spirit spoke to me … and He said, ‘Cindy, you’re a general. Don’t let the prayer movement rupture over this election. … I thought back to when we were fighting for pro-life issues, as we have been now. And God is not a Democrat or a Republican. I’m very concerned about the Supreme Court, and people think ‘Oh, we’ve lost the Courts.’ No, we haven’t lost the Courts. We haven’t lost anything. Because the heart of the king is in the hand of the Lord. … And God said to me, ‘Remember what happened when the Clinton’s went in. And I’m not speaking negatively about the Clinton’s. I’m speaking ideologically, we are pro-marriage, one man and one woman. We are pro-life. We don’t want babies to be aborted. … So God said to me, ‘Speak to the people of God and say to them, it is not over.’”

“…The Lord showed me that there is a demonic oppression of depression trying to come against people in panic and fear. Satan wants to panic the troops. Satan wants to say to you, ‘It’s not gonna work. It’s over. You can’t do anything. We’ve lost the nation.’ I just see some people in panic, panic, panic. I just want to say, ‘Stop!’ Don’t do it. We can still pull this out.”

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The last time United States Congress passed a bill with the title “Declaration of War” was in June 1942, against Romania. Given that the United States military has engaged in actions that clearly meet the standard of war in Asia, Europe, Africa and Latin America, the question is why haven’t we had a Congressional declaration of war since then?

In this segment from a recent lecture from the Berkeley Arts & Letter Series, historian Garry Wills, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State, discusses the transformation of American politics, and of the Presidency itself, that occurred in the decades since the nuclear bomb was developed and the importance of the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 (pdf.) in understanding the development of the Imperial Presidency.

“The Bomb,” he writes, “altered our subsequent history down to its deepest constitutional roots,” redefining the presidency in ways that the Constitution does not intend. “It fostered an anxiety of continuing crisis, so that society was pervasively militarized. It redefined the government as a National Security State, with an apparatus of secrecy and executive control. It redefined Congress, as an executor of the executive.”

The Atomic Energy Act of 1946, also known as the McMahon Act after its chief sponsor Senator Brien McMahon of Connecticut, was signed by President Truman on August 1, 1946. While the primary purpose of the Atomic Energy Act was to establish the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) to safeguard and aid in regulating atomic resources, and to creat a five-person committee to oversee the activities of the AEC, the Act began to redefine the Constitutional powers of the Presidency usurping from Congress its Constitutionally mandated power to declare war by giving the President the extraordinary power to initiate and wage nuclear war.

The notes to the lecture:

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Garry Wills examines how the atomic bomb transformed our nation down to its deepest constitutional roots — by dramatically increasing the power of the modern presidency and redefining the government as a national security state — in ways still felt today. A masterful reckoning from one of America’s preeminent historians, Bomb Power draws a direct line from the Manhattan Project to the usurpations of George W. Bush.

The invention of the atomic bomb was a triumph of official secrecy and military discipline — the project was covertly funded at the behest of the president and, despite its massive scale, never discovered by Congress or the press. This concealment was perhaps to be expected in wartime, but Wills persuasively argues that the Manhattan Project then became a model for the covert operations and overt authority that have defined American government in the nuclear era. The wartime emergency put in place during World War II extended into the Cold War and finally the war on terror, leaving us in a state of continuous war alert for 68 years and counting.

The bomb forever changed the institution of the presidency since only the president controls “the button” and, by extension, the fate of the world. Wills underscores how radical a break this was from the division of powers established by our founding fathers and how it in turn has enfeebled Congress and the courts. The bomb also placed new emphasis on the President’s military role, creating a cult around the commander in chief. The tendency of modern presidents to flaunt military airs, Wills points out, is entirely a postbomb phenomenon. Finally, the Manhattan Project inspired the vast secretive apparatus of the national security state, including intelligence agencies such as the CIA and NSA, which remain largely unaccountable to Congress and the American people.

Wills recounts how, following World War II, presidential power increased decade by decade until reaching its stunning apogee with the Bush administration. Both provocative and illuminating, Bomb Power casts the history of the postwar period in a new light and sounds an alarm about the continued threat to our Constitution.

The full lecture is at Fora TV.

From Raw Story:

Prolific Mexican politician and intellectual Jorge Castañeda believes that a greater North American community — a “North American Union” — with economies tied together under a European Union-style system, complete with open borders and a unified currency, is the wave of the future.

In a new interview with Web site BigThink.com, Castañeda, Mexico’s foreign minister from 2000-2003 and a global distinguished professor of politics at New York University, said that with nearly 11 percent of Mexicans living in the United States, he has stopped seeing his nation as a Latin American country.

“Well, my sense is that we’re moving closer and closer to forms of economic integration with the United States and Canada and conceivably Central America and Caribbean could become part of that in the coming years,” he said. “I don’t see Mexico as a Latin American country. Too much of trade, investment, tourism, immigration, remittances, absolutely everything is concentrated exclusively with the United States. So, Mexico has to be part of a North American community, a North American union, which at some point probably should include some type of monetary union along European lines with a free flow of labor, with energy being on the table, etc.”

Often demonized as some type of “conspiracy theory” in mainstream American press, the so-called North American Union proposals have actually existed for some time. In May of 2005, the Council on Foreign Relations released a document entitled “Building a North American Community” in which it calls for an EU-like integration of Canada, the United States and Mexico.

While the document does not specifically call for the ceding of sovereignty between the three nations — as some vocal opponents of the idea have suggested — it does recommend the formation of a North American Advisory Council and a multinational inter-parliamentary group to facilitate mutual cooperation. Though the group originally set out to achieve this goal by 2010, few in mainstream America are even aware of it today.

The CFR’s full proposal is available online. [PDF link]

“Economic and social citizenship in North America implies the ability of citizens to exert pressure for the implementation of an inclusive economic policy at home and to be engaged in the international economy,” wrote CFR member Carlos Heredia. “To the extent that citizens of the three partner countries see that North American integration brings concrete benefits, a new constituency will be galvanized to support these efforts in the years to come.”

“How far away are we from that?” Castañeda asked, rhetorically. “Quite far, but so did it seem back in Europe in the 1950’s and very little time later they came around and understood that that was their future lay. My sense is that the Mexican society is voting with its feet. We have a higher share of Mexicans living in the United States than we have ever had in our history. One out of every nine Mexicans, Mexican citizens, people born in Mexico, live in the United States today.”

In recent weeks, Castañeda also appeared on CNN’s Amanpour for a debate about the drug war. He explained that in his view, marijuana should be legalized in order to take away the drug cartels’ primary revenue source. However, “we can’t do it in Mexico if the U.S. doesn’t do it at the same time,” he said.

Speaking to BigThink, he carried a similar message.

“Having recklessly plunged the country into [the drug war] now, I think what Calderón and the United States should do is to sort of sit back for a second, think this through, see what they really want to achieve, what is achievable and what should be done that’s new,” he said. “For example, there are more and more states in the US that are moving towards decriminalization at least of marijuana. Mexico is still a very important producer of marijuana. Some people say that up to 60 percent of the profits of Mexico’s cartels come from marijuana. Well, if the United States or California’s de facto legalizing it through medical marijuana, what sense does it make for Mexicans to die to stop marijuana from entering the US when once it enters it can be sold legally at over 1,000 dispensaries in Los Angeles, more than the number of public schools there are in Los Angeles. That’s certainly one thing that we can do.”

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Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

With former Vice President Dick Cheney scheduled to appear on Sunday on on ABC’s This Week with guest anchor Jonathan Karl where the former Vice President is expected to repeat his long-standing criticism of the Obama Administration’s national security policies, Vice President Joe Biden played pre-emptive offense in a taped segment with Dick Gregory of NBC’s Meet the Press. NBC released this excerpt of the interview:

DAVID GREGORY: Let me ask you about some of the criticism that’s been leveled at this Administration by former Vice President Dick Cheney. He has argued that this Administration has failed to treat the fight against terrorists as war. He cites the decision related to Khalid Sheik Muhammad to offer him a civilian trail as one example. Giving the Christmas Day Bomber the privileges of the American criminal justice system is another example. The decision to shut down the Guantanamo Bay prison. What do you say?

VICE PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: Let me choose my words carefully here. Dick Cheney’s a fine fellow. He’s entitled to his own opinion. He’s not entitled to rewrite history. He’s not entitled to his own facts. The Christmas Day Bomber was treated the exact way that he suggested that the Shoe Bomber was treated. Absolutely the same way. Under the Bush Administration there were three trials in military courts. Two of those people are now walking the streets. They are free.

There were 300 trials of so-called terrorists and those who engage in terror against the United States of America who are in federal prison and have not seen the light of day. Prosecuted under the last Administration. Dick Cheney’s a fine fellow, but he is not entitled to rewrite history without it being challenged. I don’t know where he has been. Where was he the last four years of the last Administration?

DAVID GREGORY: What about the general proposition that the President according to former Vice President Cheney doesn’t consider America to be at war and is essentially soft on terrorism? What do you say about that?

VICE PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: I don’t think the Vice– the Former Vice President Dick Cheney listens. The President of the United States said in the State of the Union, “We’re at war with Al Qaeda.” He stated this– and by the way, we’re pursuing that war with a vigor like it’s never been seen before. We’ve eliminated 12 of their top 20 people. We have taken out 100 of their associates. We are making, we’ve sent them underground. They are in fact not able to do anything remotely like they were in the past. They are on the run. I don’t know where Dick Cheney has been. Look, it’s one thing, again, to– to criticize. It’s another thing to sort of rewrite history. What is he talking about?

DAVID GREGORY: You have often said, when I’ve asked you and others, that you never impugn a man’s motives. But why do you think Dick Cheney is speaking out and being so critical of the President and the Administration so publicly?

VICE PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: I don’t know. I– I– I’m not gonna guess about his motive. All I know is he’s factually, substantively wrong. On the major criticisms he is asserting. Why he’s insisting on that. He either is misinformed or he is misinforming. But the facts are that his assertions are not accurate.

DAVID GREGORY: You would not be this outspoken or critical when you’re out of office. Is that fair to say?

VICE PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: Well, I– I– I would hope I– look, it’s one thing to be outspoken. It’s another thing to be outspoken in a way that misrepresents the facts. And I– I guess– again, I– it’s almost like Dick is trying to rewrite history. I can understand where the– why that would be– you know, an impulse. And maybe he isn’t– literally, I’m not being facetious. Maybe he’s not fully informed of what’s going on. I mean, the progress we have made. There has never been as much emphasis and resources brought against Al Qaeda. The success rate exceeds anything that occurred in the last Administration. And they did their best. I’m not– I’m not impugning their effort. It’s simply not true that the President of the United States is not prosecuting the war against Al Qaeda with a vigor that’s never been seen before. It’s real. It’s deep. It’s successful.

The Vice President’s candor and frank assessment is a welcomed development. Dick Cheney and much of the GOP has been attempting to “rewrite history” and they need to be called on it.

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John Brennan, Assistant to the President For Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, speaks at “A Dialogue on Our Nation’s Security” held at NYU. This was a public forum co-hosted by the White House Office of Public Engagement and the Islamic Center at New York University on February 13, 2010.

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A clip from the World Economic Forum with Lawrence Summers in conversation with Charlie Rose.

Lawrence Summers, Director of the U.S. National Economic Council, laments the financial lobbyists on Capitol Hill, where they outnumber members of congress 3 to 1. “Our challenge now is to put in place a new system,” he says, “that will hold and substantially reduce the risk of crisis for a generation.”

Nice of Larry to find religion this late in life. You can, apparently, teach an old dog new tricks.

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The British game show Quite Interesting hosted by the comedic actor Stephen Fry tackles the subject of the American gaol (the Oxford Dictionary spelling of jail) population. As always, the erudite QI uncovers some statistical gems demonstrating how insane our criminal justice policy is.

• The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate in the world with nearly one percent of the US population behind bars. One in ninety-nine adults are behind bars. No society in history has imprisoned more of its citizens than the United States.
• There are more black 17 year olds in prison than in college.
• As a percentage of the population, we imprison more than twice as much as South Africa. Our rate of incarceration is more than three times higher than Iran’s and more than six times higher than China’s.
• As Stephen Fry notes, prisons are a big business going as far as suggested that we have re-invented the slave trade. While it is illegal to import manufactured goods made by forced prison labor, it’s not illegal to produce them domestically. Take the Federal Prison Industries (FPI), a
  self-sustaining, self-funded corporation established in 1934 by executive order, who employs more than 30,000 inmates in over 100 FPI factories in prisons across the US. UNICOR’s “employees” have grown by a third in the last decade. FPI, who manufactures under the trade name UNICOR, manufactures products such as office furniture, clothing, beds and linens, electronics equipment, and eyewear. It also offers services including data entry, bulk mailing, laundry services, recycling, and refurbishing of vehicle components. Twenty-one percent of US manufactured office furniture is produced by prison labor.
• Minimum estimate of annual value of prison and jail industrial output exceeds $2 billion dollars with FBI accounting for over a quarter. The minimum wage paid at a UNICOR plants is $0.23 an hour. By way of comparison, the minimum wage paid in Haiti is $0.30 an hour while the average hourly earnings of a non-prisoner U.S. worker making office furniture: $13.04.
• Nevada pays its prison work force $0.13 an hour. Georgia and Texas do not pay a wage at all.

Here are some other disturbing facts:

• The United States has five percent of the world’s population, but twenty-five percent of the world’s prison population.
• The People’s Republic of China ranks second with 1.5 million inmates, while having four times the population, thus having only about 18% of the US incarceration rate.
• On a per capita basis, the United States has the highest prison population rate in the world with 756 per 100,000 of the national population behind bars We are followed by Russia (629), Rwanda (604), St Kitts & Nevis (588), Cuba (c.531), U.S. Virgin Is. (512), British Virgin Is. (488), Palau (478), Belarus (468), Belize (455), Bahamas (422), Georgia (415), American Samoa (410), Grenada (408) and Anguilla (401).
• According to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS): “In 2008, over 7.3 million people were on probation, in jail or prison, or on parole at yearend — 3.2% of all U.S. adult residents or 1 in every 31 adults.
• The country’s prison population topped 2 million inmates for the first time in history on June 30, 2002 meaning that the US prison population has grown by nearly 50% in just eight years. At year end 2008, the total incarcerated population equaled 2,424,279 inmates.
• The majority (62.6%) of these inmates were held in state or federal correctional facilities. Another 32.4% of these inmates were held in local jails.
• 70% of prisoners in the United States are non-whites even though non-whites make up only about a third of the US populations. One out of every 20 black males over the age of 18 is in prison. That compares to one in 180 white males over the age of 18. In five states, between one in 13 and one in 14 black men is in prison. Over the course of their lifetimes, one in nine African-American males will have spent some time in jail.
• Most drug offenders are white – five times as many whites use drugs as blacks -yet blacks comprise the great majority of drug offenders sent to prison. Of the 253,300 state prison inmates serving time for drug offenses at yearend 2005, 113,500 (44.8%) were black, 51,100 (20.2%) were Hispanic, and 72,300 (28.5%) were white.
• The non-violent prison population, alone, is larger than the combined populations of Wyoming and Alaska.
• According to the American Corrections Association, the average daily cost per state prison inmate per day in the US is $67.55. State prisons held 253,300 inmates for drug offenses in 2005. That means states spent approximately $17,110,415 per day to imprison drug offenders, or $6,245,301,475 per year.
• States spent $42.89 billion on prison and corrections in 2005 alone. To compare, states only spent $24.69 billion on public assistance. From 1984 to 1996, California built 21 new prisons, and only one new university.
• Between 1979 and 2000, the number of additional prisons ranged from 19 prisons in Missouri to 120 prisons in Texas. The growth in Texas equates to an extraordinary average annual increase of 5.7 additional prisons per year over the 21-year period.

You can learn more at the Prison Policy Initiative and at Drug War Facts.
(more…)

Psychiatrists estimate that one in three US soldiers who served in Iraq or Afghanistan may develop Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The film, The War Within, addresses the US army’s Human Resources dilemma and features the stories of those who have had to come to terms with the physical and psychological wounds suffered from fighting a war that is increasingly unpopular in their home country and around the world.

Here are a few facts and figures:

The military suicide rate for 2009 was the highest level among soldiers since the Pentagon began tracking it three decades ago. Suicides among active US soldiers in 2009 rose for the fifth year in a row.

A Pentagon study revealed that 10% of the returning soldiers met the military’s criteria for PTSD.

The New England Journal of Medicine studied four combat units and found that 17% of Iraq war veterans and 11% of Afghanistan war veterans suffered from PTSD. In addition, 25% of returning soldiers were drinking excessively.

A study by the RAND Corporation revealed that 20% of veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan will suffer from PTSD or severe depression; sadly, only about 50% of these veterans will get the treatment they need.

An older study by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) discovered that only 20% of Afghanistan and Iraq war veterans who test positive for combat related stress disorders are actually referred by the Pentagon for mental health treatment.

On average, 18 US Veterans commit suicide each day. Veterans account for one in five suicides in the United States even though veterans account for only 8 percent of the US population.

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Markos Moulitsas of the Daily Kos has commissioned a poll that seeks to gauge the political views and socio-religious beliefs of the GOP base. Some of the results are quite simply stunning. Thirty-nine percent of Republicans want Barack Obama impeached, 36 percent do not believe that President Obama was born in the United States, 63 percent believe that he is a socialist, 21 percent believe that ACORN stole the 2008 Presidential election, 31 percent believe that Barack Obama is a racist who hates white people, 23 percent want their state to secede from the Union, 31 percent want all contraceptives banned, only 8 percent believe openly gay men and women should be allowed to teach in public schools, 77 percent believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible.

It is curious that of the nearly two score of blog stories on the Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll, not one looked at the sample though to be fair to Ezra Klein he at least did have the thought that “maybe just maybe the sample might off” cross his mind. A poll is only as good as its sample and this poll oversamples older (37.09 percent of the sample is over the age of 60), southern (42.24 percent of the sample hails from the old Confederacy plus Kentucky) men (56.16 percent of the sample are men). It is a great poll if we wanted to get insight into the views old southern men who vote Republican. While that’s certainly the stereotype, the face of the GOP is broader than that.

Last May, the Gallup Organization did find that the Republican base was heavily white, conservative and religious based on a poll of 26,314 national adults, aged 18 and older, a sample size more than ten times larger than the Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll.

More than 6 in 10 Republicans today are white conservatives, while most of the rest are whites with other ideological leanings; only 11% of Republicans are Hispanics, or are blacks or members of other races. By contrast, only 12% of Democrats are white conservatives, while about half are white moderates or liberals and a third are nonwhite.

The results show clearly that the Republican Party today is first and foremost a political entity dominated by white Americans. Eighty-nine percent of rank-and-file Republicans are non-Hispanic whites, leaving just 5% who are Hispanic (of any race), 2% who are black, and 4% of other races.

Further, by well over a 2-to-1 ratio, whites who identify as Republicans claim a conservative, rather than a moderate or liberal, ideology (or have no opinion when asked about their ideology).

The ethnic mix the Daily Kos/Research 2000 did get right. Their sample is divided between 89.21 percent white and 10.78 percent non-white. This is certainly a problem for the GOP. While the rest of the country is increasingly multi-racial, the GOP remains overwhelmingly white. Just under four percent of Republicans are African-Americans. A little more five percent of the GOP is Hispanic but about half of those are Cuban-Americans. And only two percent are Asian.

But the poll oversamples men by about four percentage. While the GOP does face a gender gap, the composition within its own party is fairly even split. It is independents that account for the gender gap when election time rolls around. As Gallup noted in May 2009:

Women’s affinity for the Democratic Party looks even stronger when independents’ partisan leanings are taken into account. By this measure of party identification, Democrats currently enjoy a 22-point advantage over Republicans, with 57% of women identifying as Democrats or saying they are independent but leaning Democratic, compared with 35% who identify with or lean to the Republican Party.

But where the poll is really off the mark is in its age breakdown and its regional distribution. The Institute of Southern Studies correctly I think points to the distortion that this bias creates:

the poll has one big flaw: 42% of those polled came from Southern states — way out of proportion with their share of Republican voters nationally.

This over-sampling of Southern Republicans (846 total) skews the national results, but it also means the data is especially rich in giving us a picture of the views held by GOP voters in the South.

And the picture is unmistakable: On almost every issue, Southern Republicans are far to the right of their national GOP brethren. In fact, GOP Southerners appear to be the driving base for some of the most extreme views circulating in the Republican Party today.

To measure this, normally we’d compare the Southern results to the national average and see what the difference is. But since the poll disproportionately surveyed Southerners to start with, instead I looked at how the Southern answers compared to the next most conservative region.

For example, here are four questions the poll asked Republicans about President Obama, with the Southern poll numbers compared to the next-highest region (in each of these cases, the Midwest):

QUESTION: Should Barack Obama be impeached, or not?
South: 42% yes
Next-highest region: 38% yes
Southern difference: +4%

QUESTION: Do you believe Barack Obama was born in the United States, or not?
South: 43% no
Next-highest region: 33% no
Southern difference: +10%

QUESTION: Do you think Barack Obama is a socialist?
South: 67% yes
Next-highest region: 61% yes
Southern difference: +6%

QUESTION: Do you believe Barack Obama wants the terrorists to win?
South: 28% yes
Next-highest region: 22% yes
Southern difference: +6%

Here are the demographics used in the sample versus a more accurate picture of the composition of the GOP as compiled from various sources.

In short, the Daily Kos poll has a bias that oversamples Southerners who are more extreme in their views (the poll also drastically undersamples the generally more moderate Republicans in the Northeast by over eight percentage points) and thus paints the GOP as more extreme than they really are. The Daily Kos poll is an inaccurate reflection of the national GOP but likely an accurate picture of the views of its Southern base which does accounts for over one third of its electoral strength nationally.

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