The Murican Conservative Wife

Founding Fathers’ Words Reveal 2nd Amendment Was… To Preserve Slavery?

We’ve all heard the arguments from the gun manufacturers lobby: “The 2nd Amendment was about freedom!” “The 2nd Amendment was to ensure that men could stand against their government” or other similarly absurd thoughts. But, what did the Founding Fathers think of the 2nd Amendment? It turns out, thanks to research done by Thom Hartmann, the 2nd Amendment was about slavery.

What is ignored in the NRA’s arguments is that, at the time the U.S. Constitution was written, the militia in the south was known by another name: the slave patrol, and virtually all men of age served in its ranks at one point or another. As far back as 1680 in Virginia, the militias were organized to prevent:

“…the frequent meetings of considerable numbers of negroe slaves, under pretence of feasts and burialls is judged [to be] of dangerous consequence.” (sic)

In other words, the Virginia Militia was tasked with breaking up slave rebellions by busting any slave who might be organizing one. It even gave ‘incentive’ to men to serve on the militia: any freed colored person (black, Native American, or any other), if caught fleeing by the Militiaman, would be turned over to them as property, enslaved. A very effective incentive in colonial Virginia.

By 1755, the Militia was established not only as a foundation to enforce slavery in the south, but it was a structure which it could be expanded if need be. Countless records of captured free people of color, even people such as the Irish, were pressed as slaves under the system.

With the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, there was concern among slave holders that their militias, their slave patrols, would be usurped by the new federal government using the provisions outlined in Article 1, Section 8. Patrick Henry in particular was quite vocal on the subject, saying:

Let me here call your attention to that part [Article 1, Section 8 of the proposed Constitution] which gives the Congress power to provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States. . .

By this, sir, you see that their control over our last and best defence is unlimited. If they neglect or refuse to discipline or arm our militia, they will be useless: the states can do neither . . . this power being exclusively given to Congress. The power of appointing officers over men not disciplined or armed is ridiculous; so that this pretended little remains of power left to the states may, at the pleasure of Congress, be rendered nugatory. [Source]

He also is quoted as saying:

If the country be invaded, a state may go to war, but cannot suppress [slave] insurrections. If there should happen an insurrection of slaves, the country cannot be said to be invaded. They cannot, therefore, suppress it without the interposition of Congress . . . . Congress, and Congress only, can call forth the militia. [Source]

He was not alone either, with George Mason joining him in concern:

The militia may be here destroyed by that method which has been practised in other parts of the world before; that is, by rendering them useless, by disarming them. Under various pretences, Congress may neglect to provide for arming and disciplining the militia; and the state governments cannot do it, for Congress has an exclusive right to arm them. [Source]

In other words, the U.S. Congress could disarm the patrols needed to keep slaves in line, eliminating slavery with one bold and quick move overnight. The 2nd Amendment itself was purposefully designed to empower the states to manage and handle their slave patrols, their militias. Which is why when Thomas Jefferson had James Madison draft up the 2nd Amendment, he had the language changed, from this:

The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed, and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country: but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in person.

To the language we know today:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. [Source]

A serious redesign, would you not say? The focus shift from a civil, non-conscripted force to a state-regulated entity which can be conscripted into service fit the needs of the slave holders. In a stroke of irony, when Abraham Lincoln did free the slaves, he used the very power which Patrick Henry and George Mason feared the government would, only at that time, by the Confederate states acting in revolt, they had abandoned their voting positions within the United States and therefore were unable to block the legislation. Their petty revolt resulted in their institution of slavery being wiped away. It still was a bloody civil war, but their “right to bear arms” destroyed what they had hoped to preserve.

When people call themselves patriots, or say they’re standing for what the founding fathers stood for when it comes to the 2nd Amendment, they are, in fact, doing nothing of the sort. Unless, of course, they’re arguing for the right to press people into involuntary, lifetime-indentured servitude, passed from parent to child in perpetuity. Or perhaps, that was, in fact, the plan all along.


SOURCE: Nathaniel Downes; AddictingInfo

Right Wing Snake Oil Salesmen

It does well to step back once in awhile and remember that the leaders in the conservative movement see their followers not as fellow travelers working towards a common political goal so much as marks. Which isn’t to say that the leaders don’t actually buy into the bigoted worldview. In fact, I’d say that the contempt for humanity that causes them to want to ban abortion, slash the social safety net, support people who murder unarmed kids in the streets, and start wars for the hell of it allows conservative leaders to view their followers as just one more group of people who don’t deserve your sympathy if they can’t see through your bullshit. Conning your followers is seen as just one more strike against those who are perceived as weak.

This is so woven into the fabric of the right that it’s hard to even notice sometimes. See: The way that right wing media blatantly lies to its audience, clearly indicating that they think the audience is stupid and gullible. (Why people fall for that is a topic for another post entirely.) But it was really driven home to me by this Family Research Council mailing that might as well have been titled “We’re Going To Pump You Up With Scary Lies So You’ll Give Us Money Which We Will Not Improve Any Lives But Ours”.* The mailer was sent from Tony Perkins

"If a foreign enemy had plotted to infiltrate America, I’m not sure an army of undercover subversives could have done more damage than our government-run schools….
Leftists don’t want a single American child to escape their thought control.  And they are crowding out true education."

See, I don’t believe that Tony Perkins actually thinks that American public education exists as a leftist reeducation camp. In general, the heated warnings about how “leftists” control everything should be treated as the conspiracy theories they are—”leftists” don’t even control the Democratic Party, and the Democratic Party doesn’t control the nation, so the chain of command issues here pretty much put a kibosh on this conspiracy theory. He’s just whipping people up with obvious lies, and there’s not a little projection going on with the “thought control” thing. What’s more “thought control”-oriented than telling people deliberate lies in an effort to keep them in your thrall?

Perkins then went on to complain that the U.S. is not a global leader anymore in….wait for it….the sciences. To blame? Teaching children accurate science in schools.

"Today’s science classes often feature big-government political propaganda, taking time and focus away from true science. Not to mention attacks on the Bible and arrogant censoring of any theories like intelligent design that challenge their Darwinism."

The claim that the way we need to improve our nation’s standing in the sciences is to cease teaching science and instead teach students a bunch of magical stories about Jesus riding dinosaurs is such egregious bullshit that one has to wonder if there’s some kind of intra-wingnut competition between orgs to see how far they can take it and still get donations.

Who doesn’t want to believe that all we need to make dramatic advances in science is to, uh, believe in magic? That’s an attractive belief! Believing in magic is easy to do (for most people, anyway) and it’s a lot less work than actually reworking our education and incentive system to improve scientific research, which also costs money, by the way. But it’s bullshit just like other magical and implausible “too good to be true” claims, but unfortunately, the social cost of right wing con jobs is even higher than it is for your typical snake oil sales.

SOURCE: An article by Amanda Marcotte at RawStory.com

The Arrogance of Fascism ... Nestle CEO: Water Is Not A Human Right, Should Be Privatized

I worked for Nestle' for six years and even them, forty-five years ago, it was always about what Nestle' wanted. Even then, they acted as if national laws did not apply to them.

Is water a free and basic human right, or should all the water on the planet belong to major corporations and be treated as a product? Should the poor who cannot afford to pay these said corporations suffer from starvation due to their lack of financial wealth? According to the former CEO and now Chairman of the largest food product manufacturer in the world, corporations should own every drop of water on the planet — and you’re not getting any unless you pay up.

Watch the video below for yourself:

The way in which this sociopath clearly has zero regard for the human race outside of his own wealth and the development of Nestle, who has been caught funding attacks against GMO labeling, can be witnessed when watching and listening to his talk on the issue. This is a company that actually goes into struggling rural areas and extracts the groundwater for their bottled water products, completely destroying the water supply of the area without any compensation. In fact, they actually make rural areas in the United States foot the bill.

As reported on by Corporate Watch, Nestle and former CEO Peter Brabeck-Letmathe have a long history of disregarding public health and abusing the environment to take part in the profit of an astounding $35 billion in annual profit from water bottle sales alone.

[Read the full story by Anthony Gucciardi at NaturalSociety]

10 worst examples of Christian or Far-Right terrorism

[Salon.com] Conservatives claim that all terrorists are Muslim, but most violent attacks in the US are carried out by white men.

From Fox News to the Weekly Standard, neoconservatives have tried to paint terrorism as a largely or exclusively Islamic phenomenon. Their message of Islamophobia has been repeated many times since the George W. Bush era: Islam is inherently violent, Christianity is inherently peaceful, and there is no such thing as a Christian terrorist or a white male terrorist. But the facts don’t bear that out. Far-right white male radicals and extreme Christianists are every bit as capable of acts of terrorism as radical Islamists, and to pretend that such terrorists don’t exist does the public a huge disservice. Dzhokhar Anzorovich Tsarnaev and the late Tamerlan Anzorovich Tsarnaev (the Chechen brothers suspected in the Boston Marathon bombing of April 15, 2013) are both considered white and appear to have been motivated in part by radical Islam. And many terrorist attacks in the United States have been carried out by people who were neither Muslims nor dark-skinned.

When white males of the far right carry out violent attacks, neocons and Republicans typically describe them as lone-wolf extremists rather than people who are part of terrorist networks or well-organized terrorist movements. Yet many of the terrorist attacks in the United States have been carried out by people who had long histories of networking with other terrorists. In fact, most of the terrorist activity occurring in the United States in recent years has not come from Muslims, but from a combination of radical Christianists, white supremacists and far-right militia groups.


Ten of the worst examples of non-Islamic terrorism, that have occurred in the United States in the last 30 years, are listed in this article by Alex Henderson at Salon.

America .. Blaming the victims

American Women Pay More to Give Birth than British Royalty—But Receive Worse Care

This is a sad commentary on the myth of "American Excellence". Americans pay around double what the other industrialized nations pay, per person, for health care, yet America is ranked twenty-sixth in the World for the quality of health care it's citizens receive.

From Sy Mukherjee's article at Think Progress:


"On Tuesday, Elizabeth Rosenthal of the New York Times  tweetedout, “British royal born in fanciest ward :$15000. Average US birth: billed $30,000; paid $18,000. What’s wrong here?” Rosenthal has her numbers right — and to answer her question, what’s wrong is that the U.S. system of medical care charges patients on a fee-for-service basis without giving consumers transparent pricing information. Worse yet, Americans don’t even receive particularly high-quality maternal care in exchange for their outsized medical bills.

Rosenthal’s tweet leads to a  detailed analysis she did for the New York Times in June. She found that hospitals charge about $30,000 for a vaginal delivery and newborn care, and C-sections cost closer to $50,000. Insurers only pay $18,000 to $28,000 on average for those services — and out-of-pocket costs for women with insurance, which used to be almost nothing, have risen to an average of $3,400 today:

The biggest reason for this disparity is the American medical culture, in which doctors have a perverse incentive to perform as many procedures as possible since they can bill for each test and treatment.

For instance, the American Academy of Family physicians released a list of 90 most common unnecessary procedures that  includes expensive C-section deliveries for healthy women before 39 weeks of pregnancy. Consumer groups  point out that the rates of these C-sections have skyrocketed without many discernible health benefits, as have ultrasounds after 24 weeks of pregnancy, and early epidurals.

But for all the money that Americans spend on maternity care, newborns in the United States still die at a higher rate than babies in other industrialized nations. In fact, Save the Children  found that 11,300 U.S. babies die on their first day of life, which is a 50 percent higher first-day mortality rate than all other industrialized countries included in its study combined. 

[READ THE FULL STORY HERE AT ALTERNET]

The American Revolution and now

In 1776 a small group of rich landowners and businessmen, who wanted to protect their wealth, persuaded the anti-British 25% of the American population to commit treason and rebel against the other 75%, and against their legitimate government. They sought help on the ground and on the sea from the French, Dutch and Spanish, all enemies of the legitiate government … more treason. Today, it’s happening again, with the Kochs, et al, leading the Teabaggers and Republicans by the nose to commit political and societal treason against the American people, just to protect the wealth of the rich and large corporations.

Abuse of painkillers reaches epidemic levels in US

Abuse of prescription painkiller have reached "epidemic" levels in the US, a government report says.

Overdoses of pain relievers cause more deaths than heroin and cocaine combined, the report has found.

It says sales and prescriptions of the drugs rose sharply in recent years and this was linked to the rise in overdoses.

Narcotic painkillers are prescribed to relieve chronic pain but the drugs can be "highly addictive", the report says.

The report, published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said fatalities caused by narcotic pain relievers have more than tripled in the last 10 years - equivalent to 40 deaths a day.

Last year, a national survey on drug use and health showed that one in 20 Americans over the age of 12 said they had used painkillers for non-medical reasons.

Named as the fastest growing drug problem facing the US, narcotic painkillers are increasingly used recreationally - for the high they cause.

"Almost 5,500 people start to misuse prescription painkillers every day," said Pamela Hyde, administrator for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, a federal body.

Sales of the drugs to pharmacies and health care facilities have surged more than 300% since 1999, according to figures from the Drug Enforcement Administration.

But prescriptions of the drug have risen sharply too.

The report says enough medicine was prescribed last year to keep every American adult medicated for one month.

Florida was found to have the highest rate of sales of narcotic painkillers per person, almost three times the rate in Illinois, which had the lowest rate.

(Read the full report from BBC News here)