In New Year’s Eve 2011, President Barack Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act into law. This bill further erodes our civil liberties by allowing the President to indefinitely detain—hold without legal counsel—anyone he declares to be a terrorist, including American citizens. Even though President Obama, in a signing statement, claimed he would never use this power, he now has that ability. And so will any future President.

Back in 1945, at the end of World War II, American journalist Milton Mayer went to Germany to find out why the Nazis had been allowed to destroy that country’s civil liberties. One of the Germans Mayer interviewed for his book They Thought They Were Free explained it like this: “To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it…each step so small, so inconsequential, so well explained…one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.”

So I ask you: Regarding the gradual erosion of America’s civil liberties, how high is the corn in the field?

INDIVIDUAL LIBERTIES CONTINUE TO BE COMPROMISED AS FEW AMERICANS ACKNOWLEDGE THE ANNIVERSARY OF A MAJOR EVENT IN AMERICAN HISTORY

by Nat Hentoff

This nation did not have a complete Constitution from September 17, 1787— when the document began awaiting ratification by the states—until December 15, 1791, when the first ten amendments—the Bill of Rights— were added. On December 15, 2011—220 years later to the day—there were scarcely any mentions in the media regarding that historic event, let alone celebrations. With so many schools eliminating civics classes, few members of the New Generation have even learned about our fundamental individual liberties protecting us against government overreaching.

And since there are no crusades for educational reform to combat adult learning deficiencies, how many young Americans remain aware that few of these guarantees of a self-governing citizenry are still being honored?

Ah, but on December 18, 2011, President Barack Obama did issue, about Bill of Rights Day, a Tele- PrompTer-like proclamation glorifying, he said, “these fundamental liberties [that] have shaped our national character and stirred the souls of all who dream of a freer, more just world.” Have you heard any such stirrings for quite a while?

Intent on securing a second term as our leader, Obama pledged “to pass to our children an America worthy of our Founders’ vision…that we can have both liberty and security.”

The President, of course, ignored his administration’s continuing disembowelment of the Bill of Rights’ most crucial guarantees as he keeps extending—and even deepening—Bush-Cheney’s destructive blueprint. Their regime’s legacy was cemented by the erroneously titled USA PATRIOT Act, which has so reshaped America that it would be unrecognizable to our Founders.

The Fourth Amendment’s unmistakable “right of the people to be secure…against unreasonable searches and seizures” is continually and eagerly violated by the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, other intelligence agencies and the police (at both the local and state levels).

Unmanned drone aircraft aren’t just being flown in Pakistan, Afghanistan and other nations harboring suspected terrorists and those “associated” with them. Predator drones are also now keeping track of us right here. Oh, the planes aren’t firing Hellfire missiles at us on our own land, but they are keeping a record of those of us involved in what the government believes are disloyal or suspect associations. As you look up to the sky, you may be a “person of interest” to these tireless digital investigators as they add to the nests of hidden cameras in our midst.

Remember the Fifth Amendment? “No person shall…be deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law.” But what does that mean these days? The also-useless Sixth Amendment tells you and your kids that every American shall enjoy the right to a “speedy and public trial” and “be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation [and] to be confronted with the witnesses against him.”

Do you enjoy how that vital part of the Bill of Rights is disappearing when citizens are held in preventive detention without having first been allowed to see a judge, let alone even know who the witnesses against them are—or if they even exist?

Meanwhile, the military personnel controlling killer drones being operated in other lands are authorized to assassinate even U.S. citizens deemed a threat to our national security without their first being given an opportunity to defend themselves in an American courtroom. Worse yet, in December 2011—while the National Defense Authorization Act was debated— a bipartisan Congress voted for the executive branch’s power to indefinitely imprison citizens with alleged ties to terrorism. What hope do we have for a regeneration of the Fifth and Sixth Amendments under a Republican President after Congressional Republicans vigorously joined in that desecration of the Bill of Rights?

How did we get to this travesty—allowing those we elect to serve and protect our Constitution to disown the Bill of Rights? Or is that why we elect them?

Here is the naked truth from attorney John Whitehead, a tireless guardian of the Constitution whom I have described as the Paul Revere of our time: “Those responsible for the demise of the Bill of Rights are none other than the schools, the courts, the politicians and ‘We the People.’”

On April 18, 1775, Paul Revere warned of an impending advance by British troops in the New America. On December 15, 2011—note the chilling date—Whitehead’s article “Bill of Rights Day: Are Our Freedoms in Jeopardy?” was a warning posted on Rutherford.org. Whitehead—founder and president of The Rutherford Institute—rang the tyranny bell when he grimly declared that “if Americans don’t soon confront this stark reality about the state of their Constitutional rights, they will soon find themselves in an entirely different America.”

Actually, in real-time and real-life America, we are increasingly on the edge of that land of darkness. Here’s another key passage from Whitehead’s timely article: “Sadly, when all the glibly patriotic gestures and jargon are stripped away, I’m not even sure Americans really want freedom. What they really want is to be left in peace with their shopping malls, flat-screen TVs, cell phones and mindless entertainment. After all, how many Americans during the course of a day—even when they see fellow citizens under attack— ever think about their rights? If they did, surely there would be more resistance.”

As Occupy Wall Street has garnered so much attention from sea to shining sea with the movement’s hollow, self-ennobling, directionless rhetoric, it has said nothing to the 99% it is courting about our disappearing Bill of Rights.

What are you going to do? Get after your members of Congress? Take action—as Samuel Adams’s Sons of Liberty did during the Boston Tea Party? This is “a republic, if you can keep it,” Benjamin Franklin proclaimed. As truth-telling Justice William O. Douglas warned: “The Constitution and the Bill of Rights were designed to get Government off the backs of the people—all the people. … But that guarantee is not self-executing.”

———————————————–

Nat Hentoff is a historian of the Constitution, a jazz critic and a columnist for the Village Voice and Free Inquiry. His incisive books include The First Freedom: The Tumultuous History of Free Speech in America; Living the Bill of Rights; and the forthcoming Is This Still America?

Los Angeles, CA – May 24, 2012 – In response to the recent press surrounding the publishing of an Ad Parody featuring S.E. Cupp, Hustler Founder Larry Flynt offers the following statement:

“As a result of our publishing an ad parody of political pundit S.E. Cupp that depicted her having oral sex, the prudish and delusional right wing has accused me and my magazine of being sexist and waging a war on women,” says Mr. Flynt. “That’s absurd. The picture was clearly labeled as satire. It was intended as humorous commentary about her politics. We stated that no such image of Ms. Cupp actually exists. Secondly, the feature, which we run every month, has previously depicted such male luminaries as Mario Cuomo, Dan Rather and, most recently, my friend Bill Maher. How misogynistic or sexist is that?”

Mr. Flynt Continues:

“The ad parody was protected free speech as decided by unanimous decision by the Supreme Court in 1988, Flynt v. Falwell, which afforded parody protection under the First Amendment. So critics, get a life. Find another horse to beat.
We don’t know anything about Ms. Cupp’s personal life, but we do know that oral sex is practiced by the majority of adult Americans, both male and female. The fact that the picture of Ms. Cupp has generated so much flap says more about the sexual repression of the American people than it does anything else. Oral sex is a normal and healthy practice.”

RON PAUL BLASTS OBAMA’S GLUTTONOUS MILITARY BUDGET AND CONTEMPT FOR CIVIL LIBERTIES.

by Robert Scheer by HUSTLER Magazine

I know it will come as an outrageous stretch to some, but Presidential aspirant Ron Paul reminds me a bit of George Washington. That’s because, upon ending his two-term tenure as the nation’s first President, the great Revolutionary War hero warned his countrymen to be on “guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.” In Washington’s view, expressed all too clearly in that first Farewell Address, the most dangerous enemies of the new republic were not foreign armies but rather homegrown demagogues eager to betray our freedoms in the name of national security.

It was a warning reiterated by another great general-turned-President—Republican Dwight David Eisenhower—who in his own Farewell Address sounded the alarm against the “military-industrial complex,” which jeopardizes our freedoms while playing the patriotism card in pursuit of profit. The last time you heard a major party’s Presidential candidate issue a similar warning was in 1972, when George McGovern, who had been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his heroism during Wold War II, was the Democratic nominee against that inveterate warmonger Richard Nixon.

Since then, Republicans and Democrats alike—particularly after the hysteria engendered by the 9/11 attacks—have cravenly catered to the whims of those beating the drums for bigger military budgets. Recently Barack Obama signed off on the $662-billion National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which also included provisions stripping away our fundamental freedoms in the name of stopping the terrorist enemy.

It remained for only one Republican primary challenger, the libertarian Ron Paul, to dare echo Eisenhower’s warning, telling an audience in Iowa soon after the Pentagon bill passed: “Watch out for the militaryindustrial complex—they always have an enemy. Nobody is going to invade us. We don’t need any more weapons systems.”

Why not? It has been almost two decades since the old Soviet Union collapsed, and then-President George H.W. Bush announced that the Cold War was over and ordered a one-third cut in defense spending as the springboard of a peace dividend.

It was a dividend we never got to enjoy because George H.W. Bush’s son George W. seized upon the trauma of 9/11 to increase the military budget to the point where we spend almost as much as the rest of the world combined on ever-more sophisticated— and therefore costlier—weapons to counter a terrorist enemy with a technologically primitive arsenal.

But the cost to civil liberties has been even greater. Beginning with the USA PATRIOT Act under George W. and continuing with the 2012 NDAA signed into law by Obama, we have surrendered our once-inviolate freedoms in the so-called war against terrorism.

Again quoting Ron Paul: “Little by little, in the name of fighting terrorism, our Bill of Rights is being repealed. The Fourth Amendment has been rendered toothless by the PATRIOT Act. No more can we truly feel secure in our persons, houses, papers and effects when now there is an exception that fits nearly any excuse for our government to search and seize our property.

… The recently passed National Defense Authorization Act continues that slip toward tyranny and in fact accelerates it significantly. … [It] does to the Fifth Amendment what the PATRIOT Act does to the Fourth. … The dangers in the NDAA are its alarmingly vague, undefined criteria for who can be indefinitely detained by the U.S. government without trial.”

Yet despite those warnings, President Obama—who, as a former Constitutional law professor, should be expected to know better—signed off on a massive defense authorization bill that threatens the fundamental rights of American citizens while continuing military spending at Cold War levels. Obama knew the bill was rotten on both counts. When the President betrayed his own earlier commitment to oppose this onerous provision in the military spending bill, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney conceded: “While we remain concerned about the uncertainty that this law will create for our counterterrorism professionals, the most recent changes give the President additional discretion in determining how the law will be implemented, consistent with our values and the rule of law, which are at the heart of our country’s strength.”

What bull. The point is not to hock our civil liberties to the discretion of the President, but rather to guarantee our freedoms even if a Dick Cheney or Newt Gingrich should attain the highest office. As Ron Paul warned: “The Bill of Rights has no exemptions for ‘really bad people’ or terrorists or even noncitizens. It is a key check on government power against any person. That is not a weakness in our legal system; it is the very strength of our legal system. The NDAA attempts to justify abridging the Bill of Rights on the theory that rights are suspended in a time of war and [that] the entire United States is a battlefield in the War on Terror. This is a very dangerous development indeed. Beware.”

————————————

Don’t say you haven’t been warned. Before serving almost 30 years as a Los Angeles Times columnist and editor, Robert Scheer spent the late 1960s as Vietnam correspondent, managing editor and editor in chief of Ramparts magazine. Now editor of TruthDig.com, Scheer has written such hardhitting books as The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America and his latest, The Great American Stick-Up: Greedy Bankers and the Politicians Who Love Them.

INDIVIDUAL LIBERTIES CONTINUE TO BE COMPROMISED AS FEW AMERICANS ACKNOWLEDGE THE ANNIVERSARY OF A MAJOR EVENT IN AMERICAN HISTORY

by Nat Hentoff for HUSTLER Magazine

This nation did not have a complete Constitution from September 17, 1787— when the document began awaiting ratification by the states—until December 15, 1791, when the first ten amendments—the Bill of Rights— were added. On December 15, 2011—220 years later to the day—there were scarcely any mentions in the media regarding that historic event, let alone celebrations. With so many schools eliminating civics classes, few members of the New Generation have even learned about our fundamental individual liberties protecting us against government overreaching.

And since there are no crusades for educational reform to combat adult learning deficiencies, how many young Americans remain aware that few of these guarantees of a self-governing citizenry are still being honored?

Ah, but on December 18, 2011, President Barack Obama did issue, about Bill of Rights Day, a Tele- PrompTer-like proclamation glorifying, he said, “these fundamental liberties [that] have shaped our national character and stirred the souls of all who dream of a freer, more just world.” Have you heard any such stirrings for quite a while?

Intent on securing a second term as our leader, Obama pledged “to pass to our children an America worthy of our Founders’ vision…that we can have both liberty and security.” The President, of course, ignored his administration’s continuing disembowelment of the Bill of Rights’ most crucial guarantees as he keeps extending—and even deepening—Bush-Cheney’s destructive blueprint. Their regime’s legacy was cemented by the erroneously titled USA PATRIOT Act, which has so reshaped America that it would be unrecognizable to our Founders.

The Fourth Amendment’s unmistakable “right of the people to be secure…against unreasonable searches and seizures” is continually and eagerly violated by the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, other intelligence agencies and the police (at both the local and state levels).

Unmanned drone aircraft aren’t just being flown in Pakistan, Afghanistan and other nations harboring suspected terrorists and those “associated” with them. Predator drones are also now keeping track of us right here. Oh, the planes aren’t firing Hellfire missiles at us on our own land, but they are keeping a record of those of us involved in what the government believes are disloyal or suspect associations. As you look up to the sky, you may be a “person of interest” to these tireless digital investigators as they add to the nests of hidden cameras in our midst.

Remember the Fifth Amendment? “No person shall…be deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law.” But what does that mean these days? The also-useless Sixth Amendment tells you and your kids that every American shall enjoy the right to a “speedy and public trial” and “be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation [and] to be confronted with the witnesses against him.”

Do you enjoy how that vital part of the Bill of Rights is disappearing when citizens are held in preventive detention without having first been allowed to see a judge, let alone even know who the witnesses against them are—or if they even exist?

Meanwhile, the military personnel controlling killer drones being operated in other lands are authorized to assassinate even U.S. citizens deemed a threat to our national security without their first being given an opportunity to defend themselves in an American courtroom.

Worse yet, in December 2011—while the National Defense Authorization Act was debated— a bipartisan Congress voted for the executive branch’s power to indefinitely imprison citizens with alleged ties to terrorism. What hope do we have for a regeneration of the Fifth and Sixth Amendments under a Republican President after Congressional Republicans vigorously joined in that desecration of the Bill of Rights?

How did we get to this travesty—allowing those we elect to serve and protect our Constitution to disown the Bill of Rights? Or is that why we elect them?

Here is the naked truth from attorney John Whitehead, a tireless guardian of the Constitution whom I have described as the Paul Revere of our time: “Those responsible for the demise of the Bill of Rights are none other than the schools, the courts, the politicians and ‘We the People.’”

On April 18, 1775, Paul Revere warned of an impending advance by British troops in the New America. On December 15, 2011—note the chilling date—Whitehead’s article “Bill of Rights Day: Are Our Freedoms in Jeopardy?” was a warning posted on Rutherford.org. Whitehead—founder and president of The Rutherford Institute—rang the tyranny bell when he grimly declared that “if Americans don’t soon confront this stark reality about the state of their Constitutional rights, they will soon find themselves in an entirely different America.”

Actually, in real-time and real-life America, we are increasingly on the edge of that land of darkness. Here’s another key passage from Whitehead’s timely article: “Sadly, when all the glibly patriotic gestures and jargon are stripped away, I’m not even sure Americans really want freedom. What they really want is to be left in peace with their shopping malls, flat-screen TVs, cell phones and mindless entertainment.

After all, how many Americans during the course of a day—even when they see fellow citizens under attack— ever think about their rights? If they did, surely there would be more resistance.” As Occupy Wall Street has garnered so much attention from sea to shining sea with the movement’s hollow, self-ennobling, directionless rhetoric, it has said nothing to the 99% it is courting about our disappearing Bill of Rights.

What are you going to do? Get after your members of Congress? Take action—as Samuel Adams’s Sons of Liberty did during the Boston Tea Party? This is “a republic, if you can keep it,” Benjamin Franklin proclaimed. As truth-telling Justice William O. Douglas warned: “The Constitution and the Bill of Rights were designed to get Government off the backs of the people—all the people. … But that guarantee is not self-executing.”

—————————

Nat Hentoff is a historian of the Constitution, a jazz critic and a columnist for the Village Voice and Free Inquiry. His incisive books include The First Freedom: The Tumultuous History of Free Speech in America; Living the Bill of Rights; and the forthcoming Is This Still America?

WOULD JESUS VOTE FOR REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE NEWT GINGRICH?

by Robert Scheer for HUSTLER Magazine

If not for the well-established fact that most Republican primary voters are breathtakingly stupid, a columnist could safely assume that the Presidential campaign of Newt Gingrich would have collapsed by the time this is read. But never underestimate the ability of this particular blowhard to stick around. He has turned political hypocrisy into an art form and the debate over moral values into a carnival of competing sexual indulgences.

After all, Newt’s campaign only took off last fall because of the revelations of Herman Cain’s serial infidelities, exposing the then front- running family values candidate as a hypocrite who had allegedly sexually harassed several work colleagues. That sort of scandal is a difficult one for the Republican base to accept since its political theology proceeds from the notion that the second coming of Ronald Reagan was betrayed when the diabolical Bill Clinton was orally serviced by a lowly White House intern. There went the God-given City on the Hill to be replaced by gay marriages, the 9/11 attacks and the housing meltdown, all plagues cast upon us by that instrument of the devil, Representative Barney Frank (D-Massachusetts), a former chairman of the mighty House Financial Services Committee.

Not Bill Clinton, who—while devilish enough—had the saving grace of being a good ol’ white hetero Southern boy like George W. Bush and Newt on the Republican side. That expectation of white male depravity, as Confederate as pecan pie, is what allowed Gingrich to take Cain’s place as the front-runner in Republican primary polls last December because, in the deepest of Southern scripture, there is the assumption that when a “colored fellow” even looks at a woman, he’s already committed rape. But for a white dude, there is really no such thing as a sexual crime. Unless, of course, he marries a man.

Gingrich has kept his Christian values scorecard sufficiently high enough with most right-wing moral wing-nuts to be taken seriously as a Presidential contender. As to why some women have been willing to share their most intimate gifts with this despicable lout is for one of their gender to explain. But despicable Gingrich has been, with a trail of philandering so indelibly defined that it, on its own, obliterates any GOP claim to the moral high ground.

Don’t ever forget that in 1995 the Republican majority elected Newt Speaker of the House, third in line to succeed the President, when his sordid personal life was already known. That includes—in order to marry the woman with whom he was having an affair—discussing divorce terms with his cancer patient wife Jackie (Newt’s high school math teacher) while visiting her in the hospital a day after she had surgery. And Gingrich didn’t stop with betraying just one wife. No indeed, he was just getting started, hypocritically cheating on his second wife with an employee while he was leading the charge against Bill Clinton for doing the same thing. Although Newt was truer to Southern tradition, grabbing his satisfaction in the backseat of an American-made car.

Marianne Ginther, whom Gingrich had met at a 1980 Republican fund-raiser, said he asked her to marry him before his divorce from Jackie. He shed Marianne after learning his second wife had a disease that could lead to multiple sclerosis, she said, calling her on Mother’s Day 1999 to drop the Dbomb. In 2000, Gingrich wed Callista Bisek, a Congressional aide more than two decades younger than Newt, with whom he had a six year affair—while he was Speaker!

And Gingrich had the chutzpah to ask the Catholic Church to annul his 18-year marriage to Marianne because she reportedly had been previously married. Imagine the nonstop Fox News hysteria if the Democrats had elevated John Edwards to that level of national responsibility after the ugly truth was known of the Democrat’s comparable family betrayal.

While there are plenty of further salacious details that Gingrich will have to keep to himself during confessionals, I wonder if he converted to Catholicism in part because a church with so many sexual scandals of its own might be more forgiving of Newt’s sins. However, the Republican’s moral decadence in the economic arena should prove more problematic to a religion fond of invoking the example of Jesus.

Gingrich is all too typical of the corrupt moneychangers that Jesus threw out of the temple. As Newt was forced to acknowledge during the campaign, he received $1.6 million from Freddie Mac (the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation), one of the leading financial entities that enabled the greatest swindle of the poor whom Jesus sought to protect. Nor could Newt get away with saying that Freddie Mac was just one of them damn “guvnment banks” and that he was merely a humble historian warning the banksters of their errant ways.

On the contrary, Gingrich served as a false prophet for Freddie Mac, claiming at the height of the housing bubble that this “government-sponsored” financial institution should be the model for the nation’s major enterprises, including NASA. In reality, Freddie Mac is a privately owned company that is traded on the stock market and pays its highest-ranking executives in the $10 million-a-year range.

The government-sponsored angle meant only that the taxpayers would end up paying for all of Freddie Mac’s bad debts while the housing swindlers, from their own lucratively rewarded top execs to their banking partners among the biggest Wall Street banks, made out like bandits. Just like Newt Gingrich.

————————————–

Before serving almost 30 years as a Los Angeles Times columnist and editor, Robert Scheer spent the late 1960s as Vietnam correspondent, managing editor and editor in chief of Ramparts magazine. Now editor of TruthDig.com, Scheer has written such hard hitting books as The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America and his latest, The Great American Stick-Up: Greedy Bankers and the Politicians Who Love Them.

When we at HUSTLER think of Willard Mitt Romney—the former governor of Massachusetts and current Republican Presidential aspirant—T.S. Eliot’s poem The Hollow Men comes to mind. How else would you describe someone who has no discernible identity? Oh sure, flip-flopper kinda works, but does it really convey the truly empty and vacuous entity that is Mitt Romney? Of course not.

So just how hollow is Mitt Romney exactly?

That’s not an easy question to answer, given that it’s impossible to know what Mitt really believes in—if indeed he believes in anything at all. In less than ten years, the former CEO of Bain Capital has totally reversed himself on such issues as abortion, same-sex marriage, gun ownership, tax reform, climate change, healthcare and probably a few other issues we’ve forgotten about.

How is such a thing possible? Well, of course, Romney is lying about at least half and maybe even all of the positions he’s taken. It’s possible he doesn’t believe in anything except, perhaps, lying to get what he wants. But even with that, wouldn’t a person feel shame about being such a transparent liar? Or is it possible that the supposedly committed Mormon not only doesn’t believe in anything but also doesn’t feel anything? That would truly make him a hollow man.

Hollow men don’t care about other people. From his early adult years, when Romney served as a bishop in the Mormon church, we have this story reported in the New York Times : Carrel Hilton Sheldon, a married mother of four, was advised by her doctor to terminate her pregnancy because he feared a potentially dangerous blood clot. But Romney, she alleges, insisted—as a representative of his church— that she not go forward with the procedure. According to Mrs. Sheldon, “He was blind to me as a human being.”

That lack of concern for people followed Romney into the job market. As CEO of Bain Capital— a private equity investment firm specializing in leveraged buyouts—he bought companies, sold the assets and shipped the jobs overseas. In many cases, although the acquisition was eventually forced into bankruptcy, Bain Capital still made a huge profit. Romney later said if he had the opportunity to do it over again, he would “be more sensitive” to that issue. Notice he didn’t say he’d do things differently.
We all know about Romney’s “I like being able to fire people” quote. Those who defend the Presidential wannabe for that remark point out he was talking about healthcare companies that weren’t providing “good service.” But we’d like to note that most people would say they “changed companies” or they “like changing companies” when they don’t get good service.

Of course, in Romney’s case, he has had a lot of experience canning employees of the companies he took over at Bain Capital, so the words “I like being able to fire people” would seem to flow naturally from his lips. We wonder how many insurance companies he’s “fired,” if any. Additionally, most people are just stuck with their healthcare provider. Only the superrich like Romney can afford to shop around.

Continuing our analysis of Romney’s attitude toward people, let us not forget that this is the man who said “Corporations are people.” Again we have to ask, can he really believe that?

Because, right on the face of it, that’s nonsense.Yet he said it with no shame.You can see him saying it on YouTube. It’s clear he’s talking down to the people who have just challenged him. He is, in our view, once again a Mormon bishop telling people not what’s real but what to think. Mitt’s talking doctrine instead of facts.

We all know what Republican doctrine is. It’s for ending Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and it’s stringently against legalized abortion, same-sex marriage, tax increases for the superrich, banking regulation, the closing of corporate loopholes and, most notably, against Obamacare, which is based on Romneycare, the heathcare program implemented in Massachusetts when Mitt was governor. These Republican positions are all anti-people or at least antipeople who are not part of the 1%. And, of course, the 1% includes Romney with his $250-million nest egg.

It is worth noting that Romney’s 2010 tax return reveals he paid 13.9% in taxes. That is significantly lower than what the average working person pays. Additionally, Romney is hiding millions in the Cayman Islands, an offshore tax haven. The only question is, how many millions?

This is a man who, even though he wants to be President of the United States, doesn’t want to contribute to the well-being of his country by paying his fair share in taxes.

In essence, he’s screwing all of us. So for Willard Mitt Romney, we offer this T.S. Eliot-inspired poem:
You are of the hollow men
You are of the stuffed men
Looting together
Headpiece filled with greed. Alas!
Your dried avarices, when
You whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or vulture capitalists crawling over broken glass
To get to do their leveraged buyouts
This is the way your candidacy ends
This is the way your candidacy ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Beverly Hills, CA – May 1, 2012 – Hustler Magazine and its publisher, Larry Flynt, today achieved another victory in defense of the First Amendment. In a unanimous decision by a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, the court threw out a jury award of punitive damages in a lawsuit brought by Maureen Toffoloni, the mother of Nancy Benoit, the murdered wife of professional wrestler Chris Benoit. The lawsuit alleged that in publishing nude photographs of Ms. Benoit as part of an article about her murder, Hustler violated her right of publicity.

At trial in an Atlanta federal court, the jury awarded Ms. Benoit’s estate approximately $19.6 million in punitive damages for Hustler’s publication of Benoit’s images. The trial judge reduced that amount to the Georgia statutory maximum of $250,000, which the court of appeals decision vacated.

On appeal, Hustler argued that even if the nude photographs were not newsworthy, Flynt and his staff honestly believed that their publication was newsworthy and protected by the First Amendment. As a result, any award of punitive damages was unjustified. In agreeing with Hustler, the 11th Circuit panel found that Ms. Toffoloni had failed to refute the testimony of numerous witnesses establishing that Hustler’s staff honestly believed in the newsworthiness of the images, and that “no reasonable jury could find by clear and convincing evidence that punitive damages were warranted.”