Bill Humphrey

About Bill Humphrey

Bill Humphrey is the primary host of WVUD's Arsenal For Democracy talk radio show and a local elected official.

Kony 2012: Never forget (the damage you did)

Remember when Invisible Children, a young American group with barely-concealed ties to U.S. evangelical organizations, tried to get everyone to lobby Congress to provide more support to the (undemocratic) Ugandan government, including increased military aid?

Not much policy action came of it, in part because the U.S. already provides the regime with a lot of weapons and military advisers anyway (and because Joseph Kony is nowhere near Uganda anymore).

But it was definitely great anyway to rally a bunch of American students to support the violent and regressive agenda of the U.S. evangelical-backed dictatorship in Uganda and its evangelical Christian president, Yoweri Musevini, who took power in January 1986. Nice boost of moral support for their agenda, which included seeking gay executions several years before the Kony 2012 campaign.

Oddly, that agenda of criminalizing homosexuality (along with a much more extensive multi-decade campaign of general repression supported by Westerners) didn’t disappear. And because I’m the Secretary of the Department of Told-You-So, I’ll just drop the latest on that here:

The anti-gay legislation cruised through Uganda’s parliament in December after its architects dropped an extremely controversial death penalty clause.

The measure, which has been greeted with international condemnation, would criminalize the promotion or recognition of homosexual relations.

Obama suggested that the Ugandan president — a key regional ally for both the United States and the European Union — risks damaging his country’s ties with Washington if he signs the bill into law.

“As we have conveyed to President Museveni, enacting this legislation will complicate our valued relationship with Uganda,” Obama said.

Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice wrote in a series of tweets on Sunday that enacting the law “will put many at risk and stain Uganda’s reputation.”

She added that on Saturday, she “spoke at length with President Museveni… to urge him not to sign anti-LGBT bill.”

Museveni, a devout evangelical Christian, has expressed the view that gays are “sick” and “abnormal.” He suggested in a letter to parliament that homosexuality was caused by a genetic flaw, or a need to make money.

 
So on the one hand, the pressure campaign advocated increasing support for this monstrous pseudo-democracy and provided visuals of thousands of young Americans rallying behind the regime and its agenda. On the other hand, they shook a strong finger at a coked-up self-styled prophet who hasn’t been in Uganda in years.

But, of course, that was probably the point.

bush-mission-accomplished

Egypt: Don’t speak your mind, kids.

In every mass arrest by Egyptian security forces at political protests, an estimated 10-30% of those detained now are children, whether teens or younger. They are held indefinitely and often beaten.

This is what it looks like when the military “saves” democracy. Everyone who cheered the coup d’état last July should be ashamed of themselves.

What if you threw a coup and nobody came?

libya-flagFormer longtime Virginia resident and past/present Libyan military general Khalifa Hifter attempted to seize power in Libya on Friday, claiming he had suspended parliament and initiated a military takeover to put the country back on the right path. Then what happened?

Then, nothing happened. Prime Minister Ali Zeidan called the supposed coup “ridiculous.” A military spokesman called it “a lie.” None of the Libyan Army’s few tanks or soldiers made any visible moves. The empty Parliament was quiet.
[…]
Mr. Zeidan, who has also struggled to organize and control a government, quickly shot down the idea. “Libya is stable,” he told Reuters. Parliament “is doing its work, and so is the government,” he added.

“The army is in its headquarters, and Khalifa Hifter has no authority,” Mr. Zeidan said. “No military units have moved to touch any institutions.”

 
Put another way: U tried it tho, buddy.
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Jamming the works in Indiana

After much suspense since Republican legislators in 2011 passed a bill to put a constitutional amendment against same-sex marriage on the Indiana ballot, marriage equality supporters could breathe a sigh of relief today. The legislature, still firmly Republican and opposed to marriage equality, blocked its own momentum on a technicality which will delay the effort by at least another two years — possibly giving more time to stop it for good.

Indiana requires legislators to pass exact same text in two different legislative assemblies before a constitutional amendment can go on the ballot. 2011’s measure, much like the North Carolina Amendment passed in May 2012, banned both same-sex marriage and civil unions. This was extreme at the time but seems to have been a bridge too far for legislators just a few years later. Earlier, the House passed a different version of the text (dropping the civil unions prohibition), and today the Senate approved that new text without amending it back. There did not appear to be significant objection within the legislative membership to keeping out the old version, even if it meant a delay.
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Egypt: If civilian men don’t get you, the state will

flag-of-egyptRegional experts agree (discussed here previously): Egypt is, by far, the worst place to be a woman in the entire “Arab World” right now.

They’ve hidden that nasty reputation by distractingly pointing to real but less substantive issues like driving bans and clothing requirements in the Gulf states. But in terms of basic human rights, being female in Egypt is a pretty heinous experience right now. And when anything bad happens, their families often abandon them.

The latest affront is state-backed “virginity tests” on women detained by security services. This euphemism itself hides the reality of the situation: members of state security and quasi-medical professionals aggressively and intrusively “examining” (read: violating, since it’s not optional) women they believe have crossed some moral boundary, usually after having been assaulted by civilian men (an extremely frequent and ever-present threat since the fall of the Mubarak regime). These examinations are neither medical in nature nor scientifically based (unfortunately, in the West, many myths persist also about the topic — so don’t feel too superior, American readers).

To top it all off, the new dictator and future president is a vocal supporter of this violation as a regular tactic. 
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House Republicans still really struggling with easy concepts

A majority of the House Republicans (169 of them) voted in favor of the Ryan-Murray budget deal in December — a deal which was not debt-neutral in the short term — but today only 28 of them voted to raise the debt limit.

I think these people must have been hit in the head too many times or something. You can’t vote through a package that increases the debt and then vote against raising the debt limit to accommodate that increase you already approved.

As a refresher, let’s check back in on part of a popular post I wrote in October, “Shutdown Myth 2: The Debt Ceiling Can Stop Spending”:

The debt ceiling is a limitation set by Congress on the executive branch’s ability to borrow money to pay for expenses Congress has already authorized. Failure to raise the debt limit does not prevent these authorized expenditures happening because the executive branch is constitutionally required to spend the money Congress has ordered to be spent.
[…]
Again, no new money is being spent when the ceiling is raised so this doesn’t somehow rein in the spending. It’s merely a cap on the ability to borrow to pay for expenditures Congress already directed the executive branch to make.

 
To recap: Six times more House Republicans voted to raise the debt itself last year than voted to raise the limit on that debt today.

Thank goodness the Democrats in the minority were allowed to vote through a debt ceiling increase in the absence of people who can add two and two.