113 'Witchdoctor' satire on Obama's healthcare policy angers Papua New Guinea

The doctored photo of Obama as a Witchdoctor is very funny, even though it's being used for a foul purpose: visit the link in item 7.

In item 2, Confederates portray themselves as "Libertarian". In items 3 & 4, a writer of the "Libertarian" Mises laissez-faire line depicts the Bank Bailout as "Socialist".

It's obvious that in the US the words "Freedom" and "Socialist" are catchwords juxtaposed as opposites, and conjure up emotive associations. Americans brand enemies "Socialist" as Jews brand enemies "Nazis".

But it's not intellectually credible. Socialism is not rule by the Banks, but the nationalization of the banking system - as happened to a large degreee in Australia from the 1940s, when the Reserve Bank, the Commonwealth Savings Bank, the Commonwealth Trading Bank, the Rural Bank, and the state savings banks in each state, were publicly-owned and operated.

This was before Privatization and Deregulation in 1991.

That Public Ownership was Socialism - not the Bailout of the Banks engineered by the Banks & Wall St themselves.

The Mises "Libertarians" support Privatization and Deregulation. What they stand for is Capitalism - Freedom for the upper classes ONLY.

That's also the only sort of Freedom the Confederates stood for.

(1) Patriots & the Race issue
(2) Confederates say they're not Racists but Jeffersonian Libertarians
(3) & (4) Austrian/Mises "Libertarians" brand Bailout of Banks "Socialist"
(5) Anti-Public Health lobby portrays Obama as a Witchdoctor
(6) Obama as witch doctor: Racist or satirical?
(7) 'Witchdoctor' satire on Obama's healthcare policy angers Papua New Guinea
(8) Presidential Letter found that led to Indians' 'Trail of Tears'
(9) Senate Finance Committee rejectes "public option," ie government-run health insurance plan

(1) Patriots & the Race issue

From: The Patriot Dames <subie-sisters@thepatriotdames.net> Date: 01.10.2009 12:08 AM

Peter,

> The divide over the Confederacy is as alive today
> as it was during the Civil War.

Oh, so you are suggesting, no saying, that Americans are supposed to LIE and pretend that when Civil Rights gave government jobs to many blacks through quotas and Affirmative Action, that those government institutions like the IRS, Social Security and the BMV didn't deteriorate? That mistakes didn't abound and service didn't deteriorate? Must be my imagination or could be my memory of when it worked efficiently.

That when you go to the courthouse to file a motion, those blacks wearing flip flops behind the counter that take forever to wait on a person are okey dokey? And everyone waiting in line that rolls their eyes are 'the problem?'

You're wrong on this one, Peter. This isn't a racial war we are fighting here in the U.S.; it is against Jewish domination and one of their ploys was to USE the American black. American blacks knew what the Jews were doing way before the rest of us so this isn't a new 'white' concept.

If you recall, when all this globalization began after the Civil Rights movement, nations began to become nationalistic. Each nation closed ranks to protect their people. New terms such as nationalist began to pop up. Now, that could be a coincidence or it could be, just could be, that people don't like being torn apart. They like their safe neighborhoods, safe schools, nuclear families and yes, even flags.

This isn't about a flag, Peter. It is about this great nation trying to survive over communism, liberalism and Marxism. As Americans are attacked by the liberal left they tend to do human things.....become AMERICAN again. If that means flying a Confederate flag, so be it. I don't fault them for that but you, as an Australian, do.

What is a sub-human? In my opinion it is someone who does not have a clue as to what it means to be human. Heaven forbid that some hapless soul finds out he is smarter than his neighbor, his boss or his president.

I still like you a lot, Peter. Not many people can disagree and still do that.
Susie

(2) Confederates say they're not Racists but Jeffersonian Libertarians

From: The Patriot Dames <subie-sisters@thepatriotdames.net> Date: 02.10.2009 05:33 PM From: Ray Goodwin [mailto:goodwinr@suddenlink.net] Sent: Wednesday, September 30, 2009 10:47 AM
To: ''The Patriot Dames'' Subject: Hamilton's Betrayal

Susie - can you send this to Peter Myers? He needs to read it, after his slap at "Confederates." I don't think my e-mail address for him is valid.

RG _____

From: Dennis Joyce [mailto:dennisjoyce@sbcglobal.net] Sent: Wednesday, September 30, 2009 4:59 AM

Folks,

I don't, normally, send out book reviews but this one was an eye-opener! It caused an epiphany so profound it rocked my political views and my views of the constant war with the North.

Confederates aren't the racists portrayed by the racist ADL and their half-breed step children, the NAACP and SPLC. They are Jeffersonians and the sooner we realize that, the sooner we will run the Democrats ad Republicans out of office throughout the South.

Deo Vindice,
Dennis Joyce
Chairman
Federation of States <http://www.federationofstates.org/>

A proud member of the Confederate Alliance <http://www.deovindice.org/> and staunch advocate for a restored Christian CSA <http://www.csagov.org/.

"Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear-kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor-with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it ..."-- US General Douglas MacArthur, 1957

P.S.
Many of you have that flag wrapped to tightly around you and are cutting off circulation to your brain.
DJ ____

Hamilton's Betrayal

by George C. Leef <mailto:georgeleef@popecenter.org

http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0906f.asp

<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307382842?ie=UTF8&tag=lewrockwell&linkCod e=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=0307382842

Hamilton's Curse: How Jefferson's Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution - and What It Means for America Today

by Thomas J. DiLorenzo (Crown Forum 2008); 232 pages.

There is a tendency among Americans to think of the nation's Founders as a group of wealthy white men who owned property, didn't like British rule, and all thought pretty much alike. But it's certainly not the case that they all thought alike. Two of the most famous among them, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, held to profoundly different visions of the path the nation should take.

Jefferson believed in individual liberty and very limited government - the sort of tightly bound government that he thought the Constitution had established. He distrusted governmental power, whether in the hands of the British king's minions or fellow Americans. He maintained that people had the right to run their own lives and should not be pawns in grand social or economic schemes of government officials.

Hamilton's philosophy was diametrically opposed to Jefferson's. Hamilton thought that a strong central government was needed to bring about national prosperity and power. He was a mercantilist who rejected Adam Smith's idea that capitalism based on the individual pursuit of self-interest was the most efficient and progressive economic system. Instead, he favored state capitalism with all its concomitants, including government control over money and credit, business subsidies, and protective tariffs. That vision requires a central government that subordinates the liberty and property of the citizens to the supposed national interest.

Although Thomas Jefferson is the better known and more revered of the two, it is Hamilton's philosophy that has prevailed. It didn't happen consciously or all at once, but the last vestiges of Jeffersonianism were eradicated nearly a century ago. Hamilton's anti-capitalist, big-government philosophy reigns supreme in the United States and steadily concentrates more and more power in the halls of government.

Has that been a good thing? Economics professor Thomas DiLorenzo says emphatically that it has been a bad thing - in fact, a curse. Hence the title of his latest book, Hamilton's Curse. In it, he shows that we have paid a staggering price for having adopted Hamilton's philosophy.

Like so many other politicians who have held sway over the American people, Hamilton was a headstrong authoritarian who could not imagine progress unless it was directed by government officials such as himself. Politicians had to lead and the people had to obey. Early in the book DiLorenzo illustrates that point by recounting Hamilton's role in the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794. Farmers in western Pennsylvania objected to and refused to pay the excise tax that Hamilton (as George Washington's secretary of the Treasury) had worked to impose on the sale of one of their principal products - whiskey. When many farmers refused to pay the tax, Hamilton persuaded Washington to lead an army of 12,000 soldiers into the region to quell the "uprising." There was no fighting, but a small number of obstinate farmers were arrested, then dragged across the state during winter to stand trial in Philadelphia. Hamilton actually wanted the poor men to be hanged, but Washington disappointed his bloodthirsty young admirer by pardoning them. Hamilton looks pleasant enough in his portrait on our $10 bill, but he was an arrogant egomaniac.

Hamilton was a determined opponent of Jefferson's laissez-faire philosophy at every turn. When it came to trade, he demanded high protective tariffs because he thought, in the mercantilistic tradition, that if a nation produced "its own" goods rather than purchasing them from "other countries" it would become stronger. Mercantilism was inseparable from economic nationalism - the foolish and destructive idea that political boundaries have great economic significance. (We still suffer grievously from this idiocy, of course.) Individual American consumers would be harmed by artificially high prices for items they might have bought less expensively from producers in other countries, but Hamilton was not concerned about the problems of individuals. His obsession was with "strengthening" the nation.

In the early years of the United States, Hamilton battled against Jefferson's reading of the Constitution as placing severe limits on federal authority. To Hamilton and his Federalist allies, the wording of the Constitution, especially the enumerated powers of Congress, meant nothing more than an intellectual game of trying to invent interpretations that gave the government "inherent" powers that it was not specifically given. Contrary to the sensible, restrictive reading of the Constitution defended by Jefferson, Hamilton insisted that the General Welfare and Commerce Clauses were meant to give the federal government almost limitless powers.

Perhaps the most illustrative battle between Hamilton and Jefferson concerned the creation of a national bank. When Hamilton proposed establishing one, Jefferson argued that not only was there no commercial reason to have such a bank, but that there was no constitutional authority for it. In reply, Hamilton wrote a report, expounding at great length his mistaken economic notions and his view that the Constitution was meant to be read as giving the government power to do anything that politicians might think to be in the national interest. Alas, the bank was created and did considerable economic damage. DiLorenzo provides an excellent history of the First and Second Bank of the United States, showing how they brought about economic dislocation and America's first national panic - the Panic of 1819.

Hamilton's legacy

Hamilton was killed in a duel with Aaron Burr in 1804, but his big-government philosophy was carried on by his many intellectual brethren. One was John Marshall, the famous chief justice on the Supreme Court who authored many decisions that undermined the authority of state governments to run their own affairs and concentrated power in Washington, D.C. Few lawyers will ever have encountered criticism of such decisions as Marbury v. Madison, Fletcher v. Peck, or Gibbons v. Ogden, since they accord with the prevailing view that it is a good thing to have more authority in the hands of federal judges and politicians. DiLorenzo shows them all to be a part of the Hamiltonian vision of the United States - not free individuals and sovereign states, but rather a nation strongly controlled and directed by the central government.

Another Hamiltonian was Henry Clay, who is usually regarded as a "great statesman" by historians. DiLorenzo's portrait is far less flattering. Clay was constantly angling for tariffs and subsidies that would benefit him personally; in short, he was just another conniving politician. Clay adopted Hamilton's belief in the supposed need for a powerful national government and sought federal funding for "internal improvements" - that is, government-financed canals, railroads, and other "infrastructure investments." Clay's theory was that the free market would not make such investments but that government could and would do so "in the public interest." DiLorenzo shows that thinking doubly wrong. The government projects were invariably costly failures that merely lined the pockets of a few, while consuming huge amounts of public funds; and entrepreneurs working in the free market did build roads, railroads, and other projects where it was profitable to do so.

Abraham Lincoln was another politician who accepted the Hamiltonian philosophy. He eagerly said he was a follower of Clay on the need for government-financed "internal improvements," especially railroad subsidies. He was a protectionist and believer in federal control of money and banking. With Congress nearly empty of Jeffersonians after the southern states left in 1861, the Republicans handed Lincoln all the power he wanted. Hamilton's big-government mania came to full flower under him. DiLorenzo mentions the shameful treatment of the Ohio Democratic congressman Clement Vallandigham, who was arrested and deported to Canada for having given speeches opposing the war and the Lincoln administration's authoritarian policies.

The country got a respite from the Hamiltonian policies of the postwar Republicans (most notably protective tariffs and subsidies for favored businesses) during the two, nonconsecutive terms of Grover Cleveland, a free-trade, hard-money, limited-government Democrat. Unfortunately, Hamiltonian thinking came thundering back under Teddy Roosevelt, who thought that the nation would be much better off if the president had almost unlimited power. During the constitutional convention, Alexander Hamilton had proposed a virtual monarchy for the country; with Teddy Roosevelt in the White House, the United States came close.

1913: A fateful year for liberty

And yet, things soon got immeasurably worse! DiLorenzo points to three events in the disastrous year 1913 that radically transformed the United States, driving the last nails into the coffin of Jeffersonian liberty. First, there was the adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment, which requires that U.S. senators be elected by popular vote. Previously, they had been appointed by state legislatures, a constitutional provision meant to help protect state sovereignty. State appointment also helped to keep senators from catering to special-interest groups nationwide. Hamilton's Federalists had been trying to institute direct popular election of senators since 1826 and in 1913 they got their wish.

Second, in 1913 the country was shackled to the federal income tax. During the Civil War, the government had imposed an income tax, but it had been repealed in 1872. Special-interest groups eager to see growth in federal spending lusted after the resurrection of the income tax and briefly had one in 1894 when one was enacted into law. But it was declared unconstitutional in 1895 by the Supreme Court, so latter-day Hamiltonians set about procuring a constitutional amendment.

In that terrible year, 1913, a deal was struck in Congress, whereby representatives from the farm states would support the income-tax amendment in exchange for a reduction in tariff rates. DiLorenzo comments on this Faustian bargain:

American farmers would soon regret their support for the government's income tax; by 1930, tariff rates had risen to their highest rates ever - an average of 59.1 percent. Federal politicians realized that with all that tax revenue coming in, they could afford to enact prohibitive tariffs as a way to buy political support from various manufacturing industries.

The income tax gave the federal politicians a new stream of revenues that they could easily increase to meet the "needs" of the government. At first the rates were low and applied only to a few Americans. Opponents contended that the tax was dangerous - what would prevent politicians from increasing the rates to frightfully high levels, say 10 percent? Tax advocates scoffed and said those concerns were just scare tactics. And within 30 years, the highest income-tax rate reached 90 percent.

The third horrible decision in 1913 was to create the Federal Reserve System. For decades after the Civil War, a cabal of bankers, industrialists, and statist politicians had schemed to put the United States under the thumb of a central bank. The Panic of 1907 gave them the opening they needed. Under the leadership of Sen. Nelson Aldrich, a group of bankers and politicians hammered out the details of the central-banking system at a private meeting on Jekyll Island, Georgia, in 1910. President Woodrow Wilson was happy to sign the legislation in 1913 (Wilson was the first anti-Jeffersonian Democrat to occupy the White House) and "The Fed" set up shop the following year. DiLorenzo writes, "Washington, D.C., finally had a legal counterfeiting monopoly that could be hidden behind the guise of 'monetary policy' by clever academics and political activists." Few understood it at the time, but the people had been hoodwinked into an arrangement that enabled the government to manipulate the supply of money and credit, vastly expanding federal power to control the economy.

Hamilton's foolish ideas about economics and government power reign supreme in the United States today. What is left of the freedom Jefferson envisioned shrinks further every year as Congress passes more and more laws not permitted under any sensible reading of the Constitution, the president issues more and more executive orders never contemplated under the Constitution, and scores of regulatory agencies issue volumes of new diktats that trample on the Constitution.

Hamilton's curse costs us dearly. American lives are lost in wars the country would never get involved in if it weren't for its imperial presidency. The economy is far less prosperous than it would be if it weren't for the tremendous diversion of resources into political boondoggles instead of productive enterprises. Liberties would be much greater if it weren't for all the Hamiltonian laws and regulations telling Americans that they must do X and must not do Y.

How much different would America be if she had stayed with Jefferson's philosophy of government and given Hamilton's the cold shoulder? No one knows exactly, but I think that comparing the United States as it now is with a hypothetical, Jeffersonian United States would be like comparing life in the United States as it is with life in a country that has never known much liberty at all - Cuba for example. Just as most Cubans have no idea how much better off they would be if it weren't for Castro, most Americans have no idea how much better off they would be if it weren't for Hamilton.

Almost all American historical writing is done from the Hamiltonian perspective of government adulation. Tom DiLorenzo is to be congratulated for showing how wrong it is. Read this eye-opening book and get a copy for idealistic friends and relatives. They will thank you.

(3) Austrian/Mises "Libertarians" brand Bailout of Banks "Socialist"

The Socialist Bailout of Wall Street

by Jacob G. Hornberger

2 Jun 2009

http://www.lewrockwell.com/hornberger/hornberger162.html - Cached - Similar

The massive federal bailout of U.S. financial firms reflects everything that's wrong with the economic system of welfare and interventionism under which the United States has operated since at least the 1930s. There are critically important lessons in the bailout that the American people ignore at their peril. While most politicians and mainstream pundits are viewing the bailout as a necessary “reform,” it is imperative that we place this “reform” in a much wider and deeper context. In doing so, we need to return to first principles.

Our nation was founded on the most unusual set of economic principles in history. It is impossible to overstate the radical, even extreme, nature of America's economic system from the founding of the republic to the early 20th century.

Imagine: No income tax, no capital-gains tax, and no estate tax. For the first time in history, people were free to accumulate unlimited amounts of wealth, and there was nothing the federal government could do to prevent it. People were going from rags to riches in one or two generations.

Imagine: No economic regulations. People were free to pursue occupations and trades and enter into mutually beneficial economic transactions without any government supervision, control, or regulation. What was meant by the terms “free enterprise” and “free market” was that economic activity – enterprise and markets – was free of government supervision, control, or regulation.

Imagine: No welfare. No Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, or education grants. Charity was voluntary. If people wanted to help others, they were free to do so. But people also understood that freedom entailed the right to say, “No.” Thus, government did not wield the power to take money from people in order to give it to other people.

Imagine: No immigration controls. People from all over the world were free to come to the United States. With the exception of a cursory health inspection for such things as tuberculosis, no one was denied admission, no matter how poor, illiterate, or uneducated.

Imagine: No systems of public (i.e., government) schooling. No compulsory-attendance laws and no school taxes. Education was left to the free choices of families and individuals.

Imagine: No Federal Reserve System. Banks were privately owned and there was no government central monitoring authority.

Imagine: No paper money. People believed in sound money, which is why they used the Constitution to establish a gold standard. People transacted their business with gold and silver coins.

I'm not suggesting that there weren't exceptions to these principles from time to time in the 1800s and early 1900s. Perfection is impossible to attain, but, by and large, these were the overall principles of the paradigm known as “economic liberty” to which our American ancestors subscribed and under which they lived. ... ==

(4) The Socialist Bailout of Wall Street, Part 2

by Jacob Hornberger
29 May 2009

http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0901a.asp

During the recent presidential race, Republican John McCain accused Democrat Barack Obama of being a socialist, owing to Obama's belief in using the federal government to “spread the wealth.” ...

The irony is that McCain called Obama a socialist during the very time that McCain was supporting the federal bailout of U.S. financial firms, banks, and insurance companies. What better example of socialistic redistribution of wealth than that? Equally ironic was the fact that the bailout plan entailed the federal government's taking partial ownership of banks and insurance companies.

While pure socialism entails complete government ownership of the means of production, there are important markers of socialist activity. They include: (1) the government takes money from one group of people and gives it to another group; (2) the government centrally plans economic activity; and (3) the government owns and operates business enterprises. Don't those three tenets describe perfectly some of the primary functions of the U.S. government ever since the New Deal in the 1930s? Isn't the welfare state a good example of government's taking money from some in order to give it to others?

An example of central planning is the Federal Reserve System, which plans the monetary affairs of the United States. ...

(5) Anti-Public Health lobby portrays Obama as a Witchdoctor

Conservative Activist Forwards Racist Pic Showing Obama As Witch Doctor

By Zachary Roth - July 23, 2009, 10:34AM

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/07/conservative_activist_forwards_racist_pic_showing.php?ref=fpa

The election of our first black president has brought with it a strange proliferation of online racism among conservatives.

And we've got the latest example.

On Sunday night, Dr. David McKalip forwarded to fellow members of a Google listserv affiliated with the Tea Party movement the image below. Above it, he wrote: "Funny stuff."

Now, Tea Party activists trafficking in racist imagery are pretty much dog bites man. But McKalip isn't just some random winger. He's a Florida neurosurgeon, who serves as a member of the American Medical Association's House of Delegates.

He's also an energetic conservative opponent of health-care reform. McKalip founded the anti-reform group Doctors For Patient Freedom, as well as what seems to be a now defunct group called Cut Taxes Now. Last month he joined GOP congressmen Tom Price and Phil Gingrey, among others, for a virtual town hall to warn about the coming "government takeover of medicine." And in a recent anti-reform op-ed published in the St. Petersburg Times, McKalip wrote that "Congress wants to create larger, government-funded programs for health care and more bureaucracy that ration care and impose cookbook medicine." ...

(6) Obama as witch doctor: Racist or satirical?

updated 9:28 a.m. EDT, Fri September 18, 2009

By Ashley Fantz
CNN

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/09/17/obama.witchdoctor.teaparty/index.html

(CNN) -- Posters portraying President Obama as a witch doctor may be racist, organizers of Tea Party protests say, but they reflect anger about where he is leading the country.

A Tea Party rally protester holds a sign with President Obama depicted as a witch doctor.

The posters, showing Obama wearing a feather headdress and a bone through his nose, have been popping up in e-mails, on Web sites and at Tea Party protests for weeks.

The image has stoked debate and cast attention on the rallies, which have drawn people Tea Party organizers describe as on the fringe and not representative of the overall movement. Their general viewpoint, leaders say, is that there's been too much federal government intervention, particularly concerning health care and taxes.

The witch doctor imagery is blatantly racist, critics contend.

Others remind that presidents get made fun off all the time, and the election of a black president has only made racially charged political satire more sensitive.

While not denying the crudeness of the image, Tea Party organizers stressed that those who carry the signs are a few "bad apples." Watch how poster put spotlight on racism »

"That [witch doctor] image is not representative at all of what this movement is about," said Joe Wierzbicki, a coordinator of the Tea Party Express, a three-week series of protests across the country.

The anger the image portrays, however, "says to me that a lot of people in this country are angry about the direction that the administration and Congress are taking us," he said.

"And you're going to see a wide expanse of those people," he continued. "Some are going to be more extreme. Most of them are going to be in the mainstream of American politics, as evidenced by Obama's falling poll numbers."

An incendiary image such as witch doctor detracts from any hope for a cohesive message at the rallies, where many appear not to be associated directly with either the Republican or Democratic parties, said W. Joseph Campbell, a media professor at American University. ...

Spelman College history professor William Jelani Cobb, who has written extensively about race and politics, points out the original Boston Tea Party was driven by colonists who frequently declared that they had been "enslaved" by the king of England. The men who led that revolt dressed up as Native Americans when they dumped the tea into Boston Harbor in 1773. <http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Boston_tea_party.jpg>

Hard to pin down and a seeming catch-all for general anger at the government, the modern Tea Party movement is grounded the belief that the federal government should stay out of state business. But "states' rights is also an argument with a history tied to racial segregation during the civil rights' era," Harris-Lacewell said. And so it comes full circle. ...

(7) 'Witchdoctor' satire on Obama's healthcare policy angers Papua New Guinea

'Witchdoctor' satire on Obama's healthcare policy angers PNG

23:14 September 28, 2009

http://pacific.scoop.co.nz/2009/09/witchdoctor-satire-on-obamas-healthcare-policy-angers-png/

{photo - very funny; visit the above link to see it} The controversial political image ... condemned as racist or satire. {end} Pacific.Scoop

By Sinclaire Solomon in Port Moresby

Papua New Guinea has been inadvertently drawn into US President Barack Obama's healthcare reform plan controversy which has now turned into a raging debate about racism.

At the centre of the controversy is a “doctored” – digitally altered – photograph from an image of a Huli wigman from the PNG Highlands in full traditional regalia.

It mischievously portrays the black president as an African witchdoctor.

It has been placed on emails, on websites and in the form of posters at anti-healthcare plan protests for weeks.

It was also published in The National's latest weekend edition.

The racist slant has made headline news in the US for the past three weeks and PNG expatriates there have emailed their friends and relatives in Papua New Guinea to voice anger that the photograph was not only racist but it also demeaned PNG culture.

“Many Papua New Guineans living in the United States and around the world are angered by the picture which was used by an opponent of President Obama's healthcare plan. The picture depicts a warrior from the Highlands who is in his traditional attire,” said David Ketepa from Detroit, Michigan.

{photo} The original image of a Huli wigman. {end}

“This is totally absurd and whoever did it needs to apologise to the people of Papua New Guinea for insulting us. This is our culture and we love it!” one Papua New Guinean said on his blog.

'Ignorant idiot'
“To the ignorant, racist idiot who distributed this picture, this is not an African witchdoctor's dress like you claim,” another said.

Yet another PNG writer said: “Keep my country out of your foolishness.”

The photograph shows the Huli wigman from the newly-created Hela province sitting outside a round house, holding a stone axe while another rests on his right side.

His feathered wig clearly shows a stuffed bird of paradise in the middle and on both ends. Through his nose is a pig tusk.

The bigger debate though came from Americans themselves on whether the doctored image was racist or satirical.

Most were of the opinion that it was the former.

However, the organisers of the protests, a group called Tea Party, said the portrayal might be racist but it reflected anger about where President Obama was leading the country.

Tea Party said there had been too much US government intervention, particularly concerning healthcare and taxes.

However, critics countered that the witchdoctor image was blatantly racist.

“Presidents get made fun of all the time, and the election of a black president has only made racially charged political satire more sensitive,” one US website commentary noted.

Sinclaire Solomon is a senior journalist on The National daily newspaper in Papua New Guinea

(8) Presidential Letter found that led to Indians' 'Trail of Tears'

From: IHR News <news@ihr.org> Date: 01.10.2009 04:40 PM

Philadelphia Inquirer

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/homepage/20090916_Letter_found_that_led_to_Indians___Trail_of_Tears_.html

Posted on Wed, Sep. 16, 2009

Letter found that led to Indians' 'Trail of Tears'

By Edward Colimore

Inquirer Staff Writer

Nearly 180 years ago, President Andrew Jackson handed a letter to a military officer with a message for two American Indian tribes: Leave Mississippi and Alabama, or else.

His direct language was the start of federal efforts that led to the forced relocation of five tribes and the infamous "Trail of Tears," as thousands of Indians died from starvation, exposure, and disease.

But historians have always had to depend on a draft of Jackson's message - not the final copy carried by Maj. David Haley to Choctaw and Chicasaw leaders. It was believed lost to history.

Until now.

Forgotten in a private family collection, the letter was discovered this summer, and sold to the Raab Collection, a Philadelphia-based dealer of autographs, historical documents and manuscripts.

It was resold last week by the Raabs to a "major collector of American documents" in New Jersey for a price "well into five figures," said Nathan Raab, vice president of the Raab Collection, who declined to identify the buyer.

"This is a once-in-a-lifetime find," said Raab. "It's one of the most important documents in American history. To discover it after nearly two centuries is nothing short of breathtaking."

Images of the letter will be posted today at www.raabcollection.com. Research-related inquiries about it can be directed to the collection through the Web site.

The find has enthralled academics, historians, and librarians.

"From a historical point of view, what it documents is a pivotal point in relations between the federal government and Native American tribes," said Leslie Morris, curator of modern books and manuscripts at the Houghton Library at Harvard University. ...

(9) Senate Finance Committee rejectes "public option," ie government-run health insurance plan

http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/Article_57058.shtml

In Obama setback, Senate panel rejects health 'public option'

By David Lightman

McClatchy Newspapers

Tuesday, Sep 29, 2009

WASHINGTON — The Senate Finance Committee on Tuesday rejected by 15 to 8 a "public option," or government-run health insurance plan — the first significant setback for the centerpiece of President Barack Obama's health care overhaul.

Five Democrats joined all 10 Republicans in opposing the plan, suggesting that more trouble lies ahead when the House of Representatives and full Senate consider the legislation in mid-to-late-October. Four committees, three in the House and the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, previously had backed the government-run option. ...