by Nat Hentoff
from HUSTLER Magazine December 2010

OUR PRESIDENT SEEMS INTENT ON TELLING
US WHAT TO EAT AND WHEN TO DIE!

Some of our President’s critics say he is “cold,” but he is so concerned with our cost-efficient well-being that on June 10, 2010, he issued an executive order (not requiring Congressional approval) that inserts into the Obamacare law yet another regulatory committee. Never before has there been anything like this governmental shaping of our lifestyles. As Bob Unruh of WorldNetDaily reported, the new committee will “make recommendations about and establish rules for everything from how people exercise to whether they smoke to the food they eat and the medicines they use. And it specifically requires the committee list the priorities for lifestyle behavior modification that the government will pursue.”

On White House stationery, Obama’s historic executive order is listed as “Establishing the National Prevention, Health Promotion, and Public Health Council.” Among the behavior deciders on this advisory board—a brain trust that 1984 author George Orwell never thought of in his futuristic novel—are the chiefs of the Agriculture, Labor, Health & Human Services, Transportation and Homeland Security departments. Oh, yes, also the director of the National Drug Control Policy.

To indicate how seriously the Obama Administration intends to control how you take care of yourself, Bob Unruh earlier reported a Department of Justice brief to dismiss a lawsuit by the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, which was opposing the Food and Drug Administration’s ban on the interstate sale of raw milk.

Here is the unequivocal statement by our government that the claim by the plaintiffs in this lawsuit “of a ‘fundamental right to their own bodily and physical health, which includes what foods they do and do not choose to consume for themselves and their families’ is…unavailing because plaintiffs do not have a fundamental right to obtain any food they wish.” You have been warned by your government.

The Obama regime will tell you what’s good or what’s bad for you to eat and drink. How come the Founders never thought of that? Some of them were not very careful of what they ate or drank.

Are any of us going to be punished for not obeying this unprecedently benevolent government? An answer comes from Constitutional lawyer and former law professor Herb Titus, the 1996 Vice Presidential candidate on the Constitution Party (a/k/a the U.S. Taxpayers Party) ticket: “It’ll be criminalized. Ultimately that’s where it’s headed. That’s what this is designed to do. Ultimately bring everything under the federal umbrella. The only way they can accomplish that is through force.”

Depending, of course, on whether this administration stays in office. The vital list of reasons for voting in the midterm elections— let alone on the 2012 decision for a second Obama term—keeps getting longer and longer.

Consider the Behavior Modification Executive Order’s Section 3G, which basically mandates that the council in charge of our lifestyles will “carry out such other activities as are determined appropriate by the President.” There are no limitations on how our maximum leader can intervene, all by himself, in our personal lives.

And keep in mind this future date, as underlined by WorldNetDaily columnist David Limbaugh (Rush’s quieter younger brother). The “Advisory Group” in this executive order “in consultation with the council, must submit, by March 23, 2011, a ‘national strategy’ to ‘set specific goals and objectives for improving the health of the United States through federally supported prevention.’ ” Who knows what they, or the President alone, will come up with?

Meanwhile, we’re learning a lot more about how the Obamacare law will decide how long some of us—whose continued health, and therefore lives, are too costly for the government to sustain—will live. Not only the elderly are imperiled.

We already know that Obama has appointed Dr. Donald Berwick to the single most powerful healthcare position, the head of Medicare and Medicaid. Dr. Berwick has publicly declared his “love” for Britain’s National Health Service and its rationing of British healthcare and lives. But now the New York Times’ preeminent reporter on all of this, Robert Pear, has discovered that “Dr. Berwick has championed efforts to ‘reduce the total supply of high-technology medical and surgical care.’” They’re too damn expensive to be permitted by a President committed to reduce our deficits.

I am alive to write this because quadruple bypasses were invented and perfected in time for me to have one 16 years ago, when my cardiologist said that my life was “hanging by a thread.” Many of us, of all ages, are still here because of continually invented high-technology medical and surgical care. And many more lives can be saved in the years ahead, unless Obama and Dr. Berwick manage to cut off more and more of the expensive research these advances require.

As for those of us who may need intervention at what could be the final chapter of our lives, Dr. Berwick wants to “reduce the use of unwanted and ineffective medical procedures at the end of life.” Your own doctor will not decide if they’re unwanted or ineffective; Dr. Berwick and his regulators will. Neither he nor they will have actually seen you.

Remember the fiery debate on whether Obamacare would result in “death panels”? They won’t be called that, but in addition to Dr. Berwick, there will be scores of bureaucrats on Obama’s regulatory commissions to rule on which American lives are no longer worth living. An accurate Obama campaign promise should have been “Death you can believe in!”

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 America?

by Robert Scheer
from HUSTLER Magazine November 2010

LURKING BENEATH THE GULF OIL CATASTROPHE IS THE CORPORATE CORRUPTION OF AMERICA’S POLITICAL CULTURE.

What’s with Barack Obama’s war analogy on the Gulf oil spill? It’s as if some extraterrestrial force had suddenly launched “The Invasion of the Slippery Sludge.”

“Abroad, our brave men and women in uniform are taking the fight to al-Qaeda,” the President said in his June 15 prime-time address from the Oval Office after weeks of being slammed for apparent passivity in the face of mounting disaster. “And tonight, I’ve returned from a trip to the Gulf Coast to speak with you about the battle we’re waging against an oil spill that is assaulting our shores and our citizens.”

What nonsense! The oil was minding its own business until some multinational corporations, enabled by a dysfunctional government regulatory regime, decided to wage war on the ecological balance of the oceans by employing technology that they were not prepared to control. Cleaning up the mess we made by raping the environment to satiate our consumer gluttony is not a glorious battle against evil but rather obligatory penance for the profound error of our ways.

You wound Mother Nature by punching a hole deep in her pristine waters, where you have no business going, and when she bleeds uncontrollably, you dare blame her for the assault? This from a President who, shortly before this disaster, had given the oil companies permission to pillage in the deep seas at will.

At least Obama now admits to having been extremely naive in his belief that they knew what they were doing: “A few months ago, I approved a proposal to consider new, limited offshore drilling under the assurance that it would be absolutely safe—that the proper technology would be in place and the necessary precautions would be taken. That obviously was not the case on the Deepwater Horizon rig, and I want to know why.”

The President already knows why! It’s the same ideological obsession that led to the deregulation of the banking industry—a policy based on the assumption that the unfettered pursuit of multinational corporation profits would somehow serve the public good. In every area of federal governance, the story is the same: The mammoth corporations, through their lobbyists and campaign contributions, end up controlling the government agencies ostensibly regulating the activities of the military-industrial, health, financial and communications complexes. Why be surprised that the oil conglomerates are also in bed with their pretend Washington regulators?  Obviously, Obama cannot be blamed for the bipartisan endorsement of the Reagan Revolution’s siren song, a call to make the world safe for multinational corporations. The radical antiregulation campaign—endorsed by Bill Clinton as well as the father-and-son Bush team—corrupted rather than improved the efficiency of the entire private sector, and what happened with the oil industry was the rule and not the exception.

In explaining the failure of the Minerals Management Service, whose responsibilities include regulating oil drillers, Obama stated: “Over the last decade, this agency has become emblematic of a failed philosophy that views all regulation with hostility—a philosophy that says corporations should be allowed to play by their own rules and police themselves. At this agency, industry insiders were put in charge of industry oversight. Oil companies showered regulators with gifts and favors, and were essentially allowed to conduct their own safety inspections and write their own regulations.”

That damning indictment of the corporate corruption of our political process should stand as a cautionary tale to everyone, but particularly to the citizens of those red states now suffering, thanks to offshore drilling previously approved by the majority of their voters. Hopefully they, and the President who catered to such impulses, will take away from this very costly mess a justifiable skepticism about the risk assessments of plunderers that treat natural treasures as nothing more than potential profit centers.

The public goes along because, as with the jobs created by military spending and the false wealth of financial bubbles, it is blinded by lavishly funded corporate PR that cloaks the true costs of such reckless corporate behavior.

Coinciding with Obama’s June speech, one Republican congressman said British Petroleum— which took steps toward creating a $20-billion fund to pay for spill reparations— was the victim of a “shakedown” by the President. However, even financial experts noted that this may have been as much a crafty Wall Street move as anything, creating with the obligation a “poison pill” for potential “hostile takeover” predators.

Of course, it is quite possible BP could be chopped up and sold—its huge international oil reserves going one way to produce more billions in profits while a rump portion is left to languish through decades of liability litigation.  Ultimately, what must be fought and won is the war against corporate dominance of every important aspect of our political culture. The catastrophic Gulf oil spill is the wake-up call to fight corporate arrogance that we, and our President, desperately needed.

Before serving 30 years as a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, 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.

by Nat Hentoff
from HUSTLER Magazine August 2010

OUR LEADER AND WE THE PEOPLE SHOULD HEED THE ADVICE OF HIS PREDECESSORS AND THE FOUNDING FATHERS.

Between standing ovations at the University of Michigan on May 1, the President denounced those around the country who denigrate government as “inherently bad” and then lash his administration as “socialist,” among other epithets. Sending the graduates out into the dangerous universe, he reminded them that in a democracy “government is us.” But since his is the most secretive administration in our history, how much do We the People know about what he’s doing in our name?

Obama did speak abstractly of preserving “individual freedom.” As he solemnly intoned, “The question for your generation is this: How will you keep our democracy going and vibrant…at a moment when our challenges seem so big and politics seem so small?”

On the very night of Obama’s commencement address, our democracy was frighteningly challenged when a naturalized American citizen, Pakistani-born and earner of two Connecticut college degrees, came close to murdering thousands in New York’s Times Square. Faisal Shahzad is one of a growing breed of terrorists whom you would never know as a terrorist if you met them at their jobs or at a bar.

As former New York and then Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton warned, the lethal jihadists’ focus “has shifted from the large-scale 9/11 type assault” with al-Qaeda now “leaning on its loose networks of affiliates…to do any attack, large or small, that will hit [the] U.S. at home.” Bratton underlined, “That will not stop.”

I live in Greenwich Village,halfway between the horror of 9/11 and the near-bloodbath this May at Times Square.I am not without fear,particularly now that more aspiring suicide bombers look and talk like me. If the next Faisal Shahzad succeeds, Obama will finally have a bipartisan Congress eager to pass a new USA PATRIOT Act with even more electronic handcuffs on our individual liberties. Already, as head of “us,” as he puts it, Barack Obama has exceeded even Bush and Cheney in making our privacy obsolete while diminishing other individual liberties in the Bill of Rights, including a continuation, as I’ve reported in HUSTLER, of his predecessors’ torture policy that al-Qaeda and jihad affiliates welcome as a robustly effective recruiting tool.

With this nation in greater fear of actual instant terrorism than at any time since 9/11, Commander in Chief Obama would enthusiastically structure the next liberty-reducing PATRIOT Act tribute to George Orwell.

Obama did say one thing to the University of Michigan graduates with which I agree: “The practice of listening to opposing views is essential for effective citizenship. … If you’re a regular Glenn Beck listener [on Fox News], then check out the Huffington Post sometimes.” Similarly, when I used to teach at New York University, on the first day of class I would insist: “If you read The Nation or The New Republic, you must also read The National Review or The Weekly Standard.”

I also always gave my students a pocket edition of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, telling them: “That’s how you’ll judge whatever local, state and federal government is in power.” But, in counseling active citizenship to University of Michigan students, Obama left out the Constitution, an apparently bowdlerized version of which he used to teach at the University of Chicago.

As future suicide bombers doubling as U.S. citizens emerge, my advice to HUSTLER readers is that they confront their Congressional representatives and the White House with certain views opposing Obama’s from our history. Said Ronald Reagan: “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected and handed on for them to do the same.”

And from Dwight D. Eisenhower, if you’re old enough to remember who he was: “I read where members of the so-called intelligentsia…urge a strong President. They are deluding themselves… with the idea of an all-powerful Chief Executive. In this democracy a [truly] strong President is one who will be concerned about doing things in a Constitutional way, respecting the Legislature and the Judiciary”—and especially “us,” whom all of those in office purportedly represent.

Indeed, we may yet be sucked by fear into a time like when the Bolsheviks taking over Russia resulted in a “Red Scare” here. In 1920, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer rounded up thousands of purported Communist aliens—among them American citizens with no connection to communism— for what Palmer called “a disease of evil thinking.” Many of the prisoners were summarily deported without any judicial intervention. One of the planners of Palmer’s raids on the radicals was Justice Department staffer J. Edgar Hoover, who later, as head of the FBI, increasingly shelved individual civil liberties as an obstacle to national security—a roundup term increasingly in use by Bush-Cheney-Obama.

Far too many Americans are just plain ignorant of their liberties and rights against government in the Constitution and will fearfully vote for pledges of national security rather than the Constitution. Our survival as a free people will depend on more of us taking heart and will from Samuel Adams, called by Thomas Jefferson the Father of the Revolution: “It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brushfires in people’s minds.”

And you ought not to forget Thomas Jefferson’s message to all Americans to come: “All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.”

Even if you’re not of what some would consider good conscience, but regard yourself as an independent American, keep Samuel Adams in mind as you vote in the midterm elections and thereafter. As Jefferson also kept repeating, only you can protect your liberties!

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 America?

From HUSTLER MAGAZINE – March 2010

America is obsessed with heroes. The Old West had Bat Masterson and Wild Bill Hickok. Later came President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, General George S. Patton, President John F. Kennedy, astronaut Neil Armstrong and, most recently, airline pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger.

Heroes are resilient, unflappable and, most of all, masculine. If someone doesn’t appear to be strong, Americans will back away.We tend to dislike people who are weak.

Barack Obama was elected President because he was seen as a hero. Now he has to build on that. If he can’t, he won’t win a second term.

- Larry Flynt

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You may purchase the hard copy of the March 2010 Issue of HUSTLER Magazine (with free shipping) at HustlerMagazine.com. Comes with full length DVD and free shipping!

You may purchase a digital copy of the March 2010 Issue of HUSTLER Magazine at UnderCoverMags.com.

What Pat Robertson says may surprise you. It’s refreshing to see independent thought, thinking about the actions of the candidates and not standing blindly with or against them just because of their party affiliation.

What do you think about what he said?

Beverly Hills, CA, November 5, 2008- “President-Elect Barack Obama’s authoritative win in yesterday’s historic election proves, if nothing else, that optimism in the United States is not dead. It was only tamped underfoot, squeezed hard beneath the weight of eight years of divisive national crisis and the steady erosion of the guarantees that made this imperfect Union an exemplar for the world.

“His work begins now in earnest. And what work it is! The restoration of our national luster will take more than hope, more than a contagious zeal for change. Real transformation requires achieving the nearly impossible: snapping the bonds of hate and the polarization it fosters.

“This overwhelming victory for the Democratic Party represents an utter rejection of the toxic and failed policies of the Bush Administration, leaving us with a glimmer of hope for the restoration and preservation of our most precious rights.

“The American people demanded this change. And we will all be watching closely as the President-Elect takes these first steps into what could be the sunlight of a new American dawn.”

Larry Flynt

From HUSTLER columnist Robert Scheer, “Morning Again in America”:

It’s time to gush! Later for the analysis of all the hard choices faced by our next president, Barack Obama, but for now, let’s just thrill, unabashedly, to the sound of those words. Heck, both he and we deserve a honeymoon, at least for a few paragraphs of this column.

It is “Morning Again in America,” to reclaim and revise the slogan from the 1984 campaign of President Ronald Reagan, only this time the promise of an American renewal is in the hands of a moderate post-Cold War leader who embraces, rather than denies, the diversity and complexity of the modern world. It is difficult to imagine Obama ever asserting the arrogant jingoism that has come to mark Republican stewardship of this nation in the eyes of the world.

How refreshing for Americans to have elected a leader who was among the first to reject the imperial hubris that led this nation to invade Iraq over the objection of most of our allies. A leader who had the courage in the midst of a hotly contested primary election campaign to refuse to play the inveterate hawk in order to qualify as commander in chief, and instead had the audacity to advocate efforts at dialogue even with those we despise. The dead hand of Joe Lieberman has been lifted from the party that he betrayed. It is hoped it is also the end of the road for the neoconservatives who had rallied around John McCain as their last best hope for establishing a Pax Americana.

On the all-important domestic front, with our economy crumbling, it is reassuring that the man whom what’s-her-name from Alaska derided as a “community organizer” does indeed have that background. It is not a guarantee that he will be mindful of those suffering most in this economic downturn as he turns to deal with the banking mess, but it is a start.

The Reagan Revolution of rampant deregulation of the economy in the interest of big business is over. Not because Obama has anything to do with the “socialist” label that the Republicans attempted to stick on him, but rather because a decisive role for the federal government is at the heart of the Bush bailout and the vastly expanded military economy a President Obama will inherit.

Read Rest click here

It’s been said that the U.S. Senate is where good men go to die. That certainly seems to be the case with Barack Obama, the junior senator from Illinois, whose Progressive credentials are DOA.

The media had anointed the Democrat as the future figurehead of the Progressive movement. However, Obama gets our Asshole of the Month award because he is actually one of Bush’s most-prized pet Republicrats.

There are many who think this charismatic black man speaks the truth. They think he cares about the plight of the working class. In truth, whenever the co-opted Obama has an opportunity to make a real difference, he marches in stride with the Bush regime.

Obama has repeatedly waffled on the Iraq war. He refuses to denounce torture policies. Obama voted against the Coburn Amendment, which would have provided funds for rebuilding in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. He supports a preemptive nuclear strike against Iran. He does not support universal healthcare.

Although recognizing that Bush has broken U.S. law, the “Progressive” politician refused to cosponsor a resolution by Russ Feingold (D-Wisconsin) to censure the President. Obama even voted to confirm right-wing Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Now he is campaigning for Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut (Bush’s closest Democratic ally).

Like the scumbag Lieberman, Obama is working hard, albeit quietly, to block the Progressive movement. If you haven’t guessed yet, Obama is a conservative wearing a liberal’s suit. On top of it all, this wolf in sheep’s clothing is a liar and a fraud—a political abomination conning America.

Speaking at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Obama brought forth a claim he would later use repeatedly to drum up public support. “My father… grew up herding goats, went to school in a tin-roof shack.” In fact, Obama’s sob story about being the son of a goat-herder is complete bullshit. In his 1995 autobiography Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, Obama writes that his grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was a prominent and wealthy farmer who emigrated from Kenya.

Obama’s father was actually born into a privileged life, not one of “tin-shack” poverty. Baraka Obama was a well-rounded student with a scholarship at a college in Hawaii when his future-senator-son was born in 1961. The goat herder myth exposes Barack Obama as a charlatan trying to gain public empathy by portraying his family as poor. Don’t buy it, folks!

As a matter of fact, Obama’s lies are rampant. “My parents,” Obama said in his famous 2004 convention speech, “would give me an African name, Barack, or ‘blessed,’ believing that in a tolerant America, your name is no barrier to success.” As it turns out, both his father and grandfather were Muslims, and the name Barack has an Arabic origin.

Ultimately, Barack Obama would join the Trinity United Church of Christ, leaving his family’s Muslim roots in the dust.

So why did Obama lie about his name? Why is he covering up his family’s religious history? Why has he concealed the truth about his Muslim heritage as if it were some evil secret? Most importantly, what other issues has this deceiver been untruthful about?

You’d think Obama would be happy to stand up for his Muslim lineage. Apparently not, especially if it means losing the strong support the Senator has received from the Jewish community. Instead of being forthcoming about his roots, Obama continually lies through his teeth, all the while hoping that nobody will notice. Well, we noticed, and now it’s our duty to expose the sneaky bastard.

By trying to be Mr. Liberal while appeasing the right-wing power elite, Obama has helped shore up the Unitary Presidency. This is not what the Democratic Party needs. By ignoring the will of the people, Obama plays lapdog to the Bush Administration.

Screw you, Barack Obama, you coward. Your refusal to act on the behalf of America is unforgivable.