Oppressing Ward Churchill for over a 25th of a century

CNews 31October06, Part II

Grant Crowell has generously provided us with transcripts of the four speakers at the recent "Academic Freedom Under Fire" conference (links to the audio from which the transcripts are taken are available in our original post)
Here's an excerpt from Tom Auxter's speech (Auxter is president of the United Faculty of Florida, and teaches philosophy at the University of Florida):

[I]f you look at the way in which the funding for higher education all around the country is decreasing as a proportion of the education budget and the education budget is decreasing as a proportion of the overall state budgets, and you take a look and it’s interesting to see how much it’s shifted from education to criminal justice state by state and you’ll see where the real priorities lie, if you take a look at that, what you see is there has been an economic squeeze play on higher education and the result has been that we have to scramble for all the resources we get and it subjects us to their game of productivity and testing as a measure of productivity because we have so little resources to go for.

CNews 31October06

Somehow, this slipped by us yesterday: Churchill to sue CU today (ht gdw). Interesting that none of the other media in Denver have reported the actual filing of the lawsuit. Could this be more of Churchill's legal sock-puppet sabre-rattling?

In a two-hour address that veered off on many tangents, Churchill, a professor of ethnic studies at at University of Colorado at Boulder, railed against everything from his own critics to Canadian policy towards natives, to contemporary North American society, which he likened to "a plastic dome they place over your head."

He told his audience that Western society is characterized by "abject ignorance" and condemned those who turn a blind eye to the crimes committed by government, which he said include genocide against indigenous peoples and the murder of Middle Eastern Muslims.

There is not too much more to say about this writer, David Horowitz, who would most enjoy a kind of Schadenfreude against professionals. This author not only criticizes the 101, but also inserts, in many cases, many diatribes with regard to Professor Ward Churchill. He starts on Churchill even in the Introduction to this book. This professor is mentioned so very often that it would make one wonder why. Surely, it would seem that this book has been put together with an abundance of animosity and loathing. Calling some of these people Communist or Marxist or Maoists is clearly uncalled for. Marxism as I understand, is just another type of economy unlike Capitalism.

That someone (a journalist, yet!) with an advanced degree writes so poorly is appalling, but how someone can achieve a masters degree in education and view Marxism as "just another type of economy unlike Capitalism"—akin to saying cannibalism is just another type of sustenance unlike agriculture—defies reason.

Update: The above-linked essay by Carol Rae Bradford is labeled Part II and Part III, with no link to a Part I extant. We've discovered Part I (second item) in the Al-Jazeerah letters to the editor section from October 20, 2006. BTW: Bradford has been quite the Al-Jazeerah correspondent over the years.
Excerpt from Part I:

As we speak, we are seeing some of these professors [that Horowitz criticizes] being stopped in their tracks--in their speeches, in their writings, books, other publications, such as journalistic articles. Worse, they are either being fired, asked to leave or even placed into court or jail. This is analogous to what Europeans are facing at present, where laws are being passed that would jail a person for refusing to accept Israel or for bearing an anti-Israel bias or an array of research showing the Holocaust to be a bit trumped up.

CNews 29October06

After a month of inactivity, the TDS 'Unfire Ward Churchill' petition has added six new signatures, bringing the total signatories to 487. The latest additions include:

• Adam Jones (a post-doctoral fellow in Yale University's Genocide Studies Program)
• Kirsten Mikkelsen (her Anishnabe name appears to be Miskui Niibi Ikwe; she's a masters student who lists her school as "University of Victoria, Unceeded Coast Salish Territory"—that's in British Columbia, Canada, for all you unrepentant colonizing scum)
• Lauren Ream (another student, DePaul University)
• Sheldon Noel (one of TDS's ever-popular "independent scholars")
• Nile Stanton (an attorney who teaches something called "Distance Education" for the University of Maryland University College, Asia)
• ...and most interestingly, Nadia Sindi, who lists no affiliation with an institution of higher learning, but instead, her affiliations with AAI (Arab American Institute), ADC (American-Arab Anti-Descrimination Committee), CAIR (Council on American -Islamic Relations), AIUSA (Amnesty International USA), and the ACLU (do we really need to spell this one out?).

As always, we've added those names and associated links to our Usual Suspects.

BTW: Our own 'Fire Ward Churchill' statement of support continues to hold the lead with a total of two signatures (we are basing this on collective IQ, right?).

CNews 25October06

[I]t’s only certain groups that we’re told must have their actions or interpretations of the world placed outside the bounds of general standards of truth or knowledge, because somehow their consciousness is so fragile or alien that it cannot survive in anything other than a sheltered safe space of its own. If there is or are “Native American epistemolog(ies)” as Saitta suggests, it’s been produced in dialogue, not in isolation; it is part of the world we made together, not alien from it. Other ways of being and seeing don’t need separate-but-equal standards created solely on their behalf in order to exert a powerful humbling force on positivistic or empirical visions of scholarly truth.

As I suggested earlier, people who make that direct comparison [of any opponent to a Nazi] really don’t understand a great deal about the Nazis or Julius Streicher in general. And as I said, it tends to stop discussion because how to you respond to the accusation. It’s a kind of 'have you stopped beating your wife?' accusation. There’s no way to respond to that without in some way giving credence, and so, what do you say when someone says you’re a Nazi, you’re the new Hitler? 'Well, no, no I’m not?' The very defense in some ways gives it a kind of prominence.

And as I said, it also polarizes political discussion to the point where it’s very difficult to talk reasonably to someone who thinks you’re a Nazi or out to commit genocide or whatever.

So yeah, what it does is it rallies. It’s a technique of propaganda that the Nazis were very good at themselves. That is, you accuse your enemy of every possible offense and you don’t care if it alienates the enemy because you’re not really speaking to them. You’re speaking to your own followers. Your own followers cheer, “Yeah, he’s really giving it to ‘em.” The enemy is outraged but you’re not trying to convert them. The Nazis weren’t trying to convert the Jews. Okay? They didn’t want to. They wanted to get rid of them. So they didn’t care what the Jews thought about their rhetoric. They only cared about whether or not it worked on the target population.

We noted (or at least alluded to) this phenomenon back in February in our essay "The Imam of Indigenism" and in June '05 in "Ward Churchill's Ghost Dance."

After 15 years in academic life, I have concluded that the vast majority of faculty members are like the vast majority of any comfortable professionals in a corporate capitalist empire: Morally lazy, usually cowardly, and unwilling and/or unable to engage with critics. I say that with no sense of superiority; I can look at my own life and see examples of such laziness and cowardice.

I find much of the university with which I am familiar (the humanities and the social sciences) to be populated with self-important and self-indulgent caricatures. Much of the intellectual work is trivial, irrelevant, and/or flabby. Most components of the contemporary U.S. university have been bought off, and bought off fairly cheaply. As a result it is, in the words of my friend Abe Osheroff, the institution is generally "a fucking dead rock."

Elizabeth Hoffman is the poster girl for the Peter Principle in academic administration. After rising to her level on incompetence as president of University of Colorado for $400,000 a year, the brilliant powers that be at Iowa State somehow think they are going to buy LESS incompetence for $275,000 -- the salary she will be paid to step down to the second-highest level of incompetence she can attain in administrative academia -- ISU provost.

CNews 23October06

Cornell anthropology professor (and part-time useful idiot) Dominic Boyer accuses CU of McCarthyism
Excerpt:

Whatever short-term patriotic satisfaction you imagine that these actions will generate will soon be displaced, just as the original McCarthyism was, with a sense of deep embarrassment for the corruption of the spirit and principles of free expression.   Is this really the legacy that you  wish your name to be associated with as an administrator?  The negative effects on the morale and reputation of your institution will be profound — indeed I think you are condemning Colorado to third tier status for  many years to come.   I hope you have the foresight to realize that history will not treat your handling of the Churchill case kindly.

That depends, of course, on whether frauds such as Ward Churchill write the "history." We noted over a year and a half ago that academia would attempt to recast the argument:
Excerpt:

Do not let academia cast this as a "freedom of speech" issue. Churchill has every right to stand on a street corner and spew whatever venom he wants. He does not have the right to a cushy tenured taxpayer-supported teaching job from which to spew. He is an academic fraud and a race fraud. Academia should be furiously checking his past statements for veracity and scholarship [and when they did, they found ample evidence of academic and historical fraud. -ed.]. The MSM should be checking records to verify his race affiliations (and they are, thanks in part to the blogosphere's unwillingness to let this whole thing blow over). Write to the various academics and media associated with the Churchill debacle. Let them know you expect objectivity and zealous pursuit of the truth--if just this once.

[Hoffman] acknowledges she had troubled times in the past, but said she kept looking ahead.

"What really happened at Colorado was lack of funding for higher education," Hoffman said this week. "What I take away from that is public funding for higher education is our future."

CNews 20October06

From our Makes You Say 'Hmmmmmmm' department: Yesterday's CU faculty organ Silver & Gold published an odd quote in the news briefs (October 19, 2006, right-hand column): "[Privilege & Tenure Chair Weldon] Lodwick noted that faculty suspensions, even if they span decades, are subject to a less-stringent burden of proof than faculty dismissals, and the burden of proof for suspensions currently falls on the faculty member." (emphasis ours)

Faculty at colleges and universities of all kinds in America are overwhelmingly liberal in their political ideology, creating a strong campus political culture. Categorized according to both self-identification and voting patterns, faculty are heavily weighted towards the Left. Indeed, those who identify as independents and moderates actually vote more like liberals and Democrats.

CNews 18October06

Reason Online recently made available a pdf version of the sobering and hilarious "How Do I Fire An Incompetent Teacher?" as well as the accompanying article by John Stossel. See both, and despair.

What's next

• This week or next: Churchill's attorney plans to file a lawsuit to get the $20,000 [in legal fees that Churchill claims CU should pay].

• Nov. 6: The chairman of the faculty's Privilege and Tenure Committee will set a date for a dismissal for cause hearing, with or without Churchill. The hearing is expected to take five days.

• Within 60 working days: The five-member panel will hear the case, then issue a report, including its findings of fact and a recommendation on whether Churchill should be fired.

• Within 10 days: Churchill will have the opportunity to respond. The report and response then will be forwarded to CU President Hank Brown.

• If Brown and the panel agree Churchill should not be fired: The case is closed.

• If the president believes Churchill should be fired but the panel does not agree: The president may return the case to the panel for reconsideration.

• If the president and panel agree Churchill should be fired: The case will be forwarded to the Board of Regents.

• If the regents get the case: Board Chairwoman Pat Hayes must notify Churchill of Brown's recommendation. Churchill will then get 20 days to respond in writing to the regents. He may also request a hearing before the board, all in closed session.

The board will then take a public vote on whether Churchill should be fired.

What It Really Means To Be A Liberal

At the risk of appearing to go entirely off-topic, I came across an essay today entitled "What It Means To Be A Liberal", and it demands a response. In the essay, Geoffrey Stone, a law professor at the University of Chicago, laments that liberals such as he have somehow neglected to define their beliefs, and to remedy this perceived lack, he put together a list of ten beliefs that define liberals.

Stone's ten propositions (actually, an amalgamation of bromides and cheap political pick-up lines in use for centuries in the service of fraud and theft) are very instructive in that the goals of each are relatively transparent, and when they aren't, they tend to surrender their underlying intent under the slightest scrutiny. If Stone teaches law with the same dishonesty with which he illuminates liberal values, the University of Chicago should ask for a full refund.

Stone's points are in italics; my commentary on each follows:

1. Liberals believe individuals should doubt their own truths and consider fairly and open-mindedly the truths of others. This is at the very heart of liberalism. Liberals understand, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once observed, that "time has upset many fighting faiths." Liberals are skeptical of censorship and celebrate free and open debate.

What is this "truths"? There are no conflicting "truths"; there are only conflicting opinions. In any disagreement, there can be only two possible scenarios: Both of the adversaries are wrong, or one of the adversaries is correct and the other is wrong. Both cannot be correct. If you say the balloon is red, and I say it is green, either you are wrong, I am wrong, or we're both wrong. If I am right, what value is there to me in considering your "truth"? If I am wrong, what value is there to you in considering my "truth"? Stone's unmistakable goal here is to get you to substitute the wishes of others for your own judgment. Guess to which "others" you must subordinate your judgment. See Point 6 below to learn what pay-off liberals expect for this fraud. By the way, it's appropriate that Stone lists this proposition first; without it, none of his other liberal swindles have a chance of succeeding.


2. Liberals believe individuals should be tolerant and respectful of difference. It is liberals who have supported and continue to support the civil rights movement, affirmative action, the Equal Rights Amendment and the rights of gays and lesbians. (Note that a conflict between propositions 1 and 2 leads to divisions among liberals on issues like pornography and hate speech.)

Which differences? If your skin is white, and mine is black, that is an inconsequential difference, and as such it requires no "tolerance" or "respect", no more so than the observation that your hair is red and mine is brown, or that you are right-handed and I am left-handed. What tolerance or respect should I give to your attempt to gain something of value from me by either promoting the color of your skin or denigrating the color of mine? Should you be "tolerant" or "respectful" of me when I gain the job we were both seeking by pointing out to the employer our difference in skin color? Should you be "tolerant" or "respectful" if my religion commands me to beat my wife?


3. Liberals believe individuals have a right and a responsibility to participate in public debate. It is liberals who have championed and continue to champion expansion of the franchise; the elimination of obstacles to voting; "one person, one vote;" limits on partisan gerrymandering; campaign-finance reform; and a more vibrant freedom of speech. They believe, with Justice Louis Brandeis, that "the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people."

Most of this has the odor of generic election-year posturing, as risky as being "anti-burglary" and as sincere as a con-man's smile, but note that a man who can support "campaign finance reform" and "a more vibrant freedom of speech" in the same sentence either hasn't bothered to examine the contradictory nature of those two beliefs (which makes him an unthinking oaf), or hopes you won't notice (which makes him a con-man).


4. Liberals believe "we the people" are the governors and not the subjects of government, and that government must treat each person with that in mind. It is liberals who have defended and continue to defend the freedom of the press to investigate and challenge the government, the protection of individual privacy from overbearing government monitoring, and the right of individuals to reproductive freedom. (Note that libertarians, often thought of as "conservatives," share this value with liberals.)

This is sheer hypocrisy, and a complete contradiction to the other nine points. If we are not the subjects of government but rather its governors, why then is it legitimate for the government to force some of us to subsidize the whims and wishes of others among us who can't be bothered to achieve for themselves?


5. Liberals believe government must respect and affirmatively safeguard the liberty, equality and dignity of each individual. It is liberals who have championed and continue to champion the rights of racial, religious and ethnic minorities, political dissidents, persons accused of crime and the outcasts of society. It is liberals who have insisted on the right to counsel, a broad application of the right to due process of law and the principle of equal protection for all people.

How does one protect another's dignity? Like self-esteem, dignity is a characteristic either intrinsically present or intrinsically absent in the individual. It can't be taken away, nor can it be given. Nor can it be faked. And note the clever use of the word "equality" rather than the more appropriate "equal treatment under the law", which is what government must guarantee. Again, a clever trick from anyone, but a conscious fraud from a law professor.


6. Liberals believe government has a fundamental responsibility to help those who are less fortunate. It is liberals who have supported and continue to support government programs to improve health care, education, social security, job training and welfare for the neediest members of society. It is liberals who maintain that a national community is like a family and that government exists in part to "promote the general welfare."

The fundamental fallacy here is: Who gets to define "less fortunate"; whose "truth" will be used to make that determination? Whose property will be forcibly taken in order to subsidize those "less fortunate"? And quite frankly, is luck (a more honest word for fortunate) the defining characteristic of a man? Is it simply luck that makes one man a medical doctor and another a high school dropout?


7. Liberals believe government should never act on the basis of sectarian faith. It is liberals who have opposed and continue to oppose school prayer and the teaching of creationism in public schools and who support government funding for stem-cell research, the rights of gays and lesbians and the freedom of choice for women.

If government should never act on the basis of sectarian faith, why then should government fund stem-cell research, which only a certain segment of the population (a sect, as it were) believes (with nary a hint of evidence) will usher in a new era of health and longevity? And what if the requirement of an objective standard of law happens to coincide with an article of sectarian faith, for example, "thou shalt not steal"? In any case, it's hypocritical to deny religious expression in schools while insisting on the teaching of other cultish beliefs, e.g., global warming. And there's a simple test to determine the relevancy of creationism (or global warming, or 9/11 conspiracy theories) to a school curriculum: Does it conflict with provable fact? If so, it has no place in school.


8. Liberals believe courts have a special responsibility to protect individual liberties. It is principally liberal judges and justices who have preserved and continue to preserve freedom of expression, individual privacy, freedom of religion and due process of law. (Conservative judges and justices more often wield judicial authority to protect property rights and the interests of corporations, commercial advertisers and the wealthy.)

Note in the first sentence the substitution of the word "liberties" where the word "rights" should be—a sly trick from anyone, but a conscious fraud when performed by a law professor. Stone does us a favor, however, by hinting broadly at the purpose of the substitution when he denigrates protection of property rights as something "conservative judges" do. US Courts exist to protect each citizen's property rights; the protection of each citizen's liberties is a natural result of that. What Stone and his philosophical brethren want is to grant liberties at the expense of rights—a logical contradiction in Stone's thinking, which by this point should come as something less than a surprise .


9. Liberals believe government must protect the safety and security of the people, for without such protection liberalism is impossible. This, of course, is less a tenet of liberalism than a reply to those who attack liberalism. The accusation that liberals are unwilling to protect the nation from internal and external dangers is false. Because liberals respect competing values, such as procedural fairness and individual dignity, they weigh more carefully particular exercises of government power (such as the use of secret evidence, hearsay and torture), but they are no less willing to use government authority in other forms (such as expanded police forces and international diplomacy) to protect the nation and its citizens.

Government's one legitimate task is to protect the property rights of the individual. For a law professor to say otherwise is unconscionable. Incidentally, how are "procedural fairness" and "individual dignity" competing values? Note also that Stone sees no problem with using government's power to achieve his goals (see Point 6). But you knew that already.


10. Liberals believe government must protect the safety and security of the people, without unnecessarily sacrificing constitutional values. It is liberals who have demanded and continue to demand legal protections to avoid the conviction of innocent people in the criminal justice system, reasonable restraints on government surveillance of American citizens, and fair procedures to ensure that alleged enemy combatants are in fact enemy combatants. Liberals adhere to the view expressed by Brandeis some 80 years ago: "Those who won our independence ... did not exalt order at the cost of liberty."

Like Point 3, most of this statement is so generic it could apply to any political position; its obvious purpose seems to be to qualify and apply conditions to Point 9, lest the reader suspect liberals of resoluteness in the face of danger. But it has a second, more insidious purpose: Note how Stone attempts to slip in the "truth" that enemy combatants taken in arms against the US nevertheless deserve the same rights of US citizens. Imprisoned enemy combatants have no rights; they have only those privileges granted them by their captors. That, Professor Stone, is an actual truth, regardless of who is the prisoner and who is the captor.



[My thanks to Dust My Broom, where I first discovered a link to Professor Stone's essay]

CNews 17October06

CNews 16October06

PB has new information that indicates CU's Department of Ethnic Studies is seeking to hire an "assistant or associate professor" to teach American Indian Studies in Boulder. Whether this is a case of filling the much-needed hole soon to be created by Ward Churchill's departure, or merely the department adding yet another useless Victim's Studies "scholar" to its roster, remains to be seen. We've contacted CU's Office of News Services to learn the truth; as always, we'll keep you posted if and when ONS responds.

Update: Jeannine Malmsbury of CU's University Communications has notified us that she is currently checking on the veracity of our information, and that we'll be informed of the results of that check.
Update II: Here's the same job listed on CU's own website.

Columbus should be honored, for in so doing, we honor Western civilization. But the critics do not want to bestow such honor, because their real goal is to denigrate the values of Western civilization and to glorify the primitivism, mysticism, and collectivism embodied in the tribal cultures of American Indians. They decry the glorification of the West as "Eurocentrism." We should, they claim, replace our reverence for Western civilization with multi-culturalism, which regards all cultures as morally equal. In fact, they aren't. Some cultures are better than others: a free society is better than slavery; reason is better than brute force as a way to deal with other men; productivity is better than stagnation. In fact, Western civilization stands for man at his best. It stands for the values that make human life possible: reason, science, self-reliance, individualism, ambition, productive achievement. The values of Western civilization are values for all men; they cut across gender, ethnicity, and geography. We should honor Western civilization not for the ethnocentric reason that some of us happen to have European ancestors but because it is the objectively superior culture.

Vox academiae, Vox populi

We spent the morning gathering diverse statistics from all over the web, and here are some of the more entertaining factoids we discovered: 

• There are virtually enough liberal college professors in the US to repopulate San Diego, California.
• There are virtually enough conservative college professors in the US to repopulate Peoria, Illinois.
• You are six times more likely to die of measles than you are to teach in the US at the college level from a conservative perspective.
• You are more likely to be fluent in one of the Athapascan-Eyak languages than you are to teach in the US at the college level from a conservative perspective.
• You are 575 times more likely to believe in reincarnation than to teach in the US at the college level from a conservative perspective.
• The annual pool of students that liberal professors can directly influence (i.e., have in their actual classrooms) is larger than the combined populations of Los Angeles and New York City.
• The annual pool of students that conservative professors can directly influence (i.e., have in their actual classrooms) is slightly less than the population of Dallas-Fort Worth.
• If you are between the ages of 18-24, you are 53 times more likely to be in college than to join the military.

Here's the statistics from which we derived the preceding conclusions (including a few estimates we derived from the reported statistics):

Number of students in high school (2002): 15.1 million  (source)
Number of students in college (2002): 15.5 million (source)
Estimated number of US citizens who believe in reincarnation: 75 million (source)
Ratio of liberal to conservative professors: 8:1 (source)
Number of college faculty: 1,173,556 (source)
Estimated students-to-faculty ratio: 13.2
Estimated number of liberal faculty: 1,043,161
    Population of San Diego, California: 1,255,540 (source)
Estimated number of students taught per year by liberal faculty: 13,769,724
    Combined population of Los Angeles and New York City: 11,988,026 (source)
Estimated number of conservative faculty: 130,395
    Population of Peoria, Illinois: 138,200 (source)
    Number of people who speak one of the Athapascan-Eyak (American Indian) languages at home: 157,694 (source)
Estimated number of students taught per year by conservative faculty: 1,721,215
    Population of Dallas-Fort Worth: 1,837,892 (source)
Number of annual worldwide deaths attributable to measles (2000): 805,000 (source)
Number of US military recruits (all branches) undergoing boot camp (FY 2006): 288,495 (source)
    Population of Anchorage, Alaska: 275,043  (source)
Number of students attending US law schools (2006): 140,298 (source)

CNews 14October06

CNews 13October06

Constitution Party candidate Douglas Campbell: To help part-time students, fire Ward Churchill and question why some CU administrators, like the President, make hundreds of thousands of dollars while the rest of the school goes underfunded. Also wants to make sexual abuse and pregnancy counseling mandatory for all freshmen, just as alcohol and diversity training already is.

CNews 12October06

CNews 11October06

Over at WardChurchill.net, another useful idiot crawls out of the academic woodwork with a letter to CU Chancellor Phil DiStefano supporting the unfiring of Ward Churchill
Excerpt:

It is incontrovertible that your university has undertaken an unprecedented investigation of Churchill’s scholarship in the wake of a patently orchestrated media campaign attacking Churchill, precisely, on political issues of patriotism. This will be the context of the event that history will clarify long after the passions and fears deliberately ignited by this controversy have faded. For the University of Colorado to proceed with with its punitive policy while obfuscating, rather than making completely transparent, this context, and the political factors that so blatantly led to its investigations, will serve the future of all universities poorly. I can tell you that ACTA’s fear-mongering question “How Many Ward Churchills? ” is already being somberly echoed within scholarly communities themselves. While some might argue that Churchill’s case is an exception or an “extreme,” as scholars, we know well that it is through the exceptional cases that the parameters for freedom of expression are set. It is through the exceptional cases, and the subtle intimidation they effect, that the limits of what can and cannot be said are redrawn, and all too often reduced.

WardChurchill.net claims this is but the first of three letters from Cornell University professors (this first is from "Brett de Bary, Professor, Asian Studies and Comparative Literature, Director, Society for the Humanities, Cornell University").

CNews 10October06

successfully examined the targeting of Ward Churchill and other academics in the context of the national and international movements to silence and discredit scholars and activists who think critically about the manifestations of colonialism and contemporary expansions of empire.

The Summit was sponsored by the Center for Indigenous Peoples’ Critical and Intuitive Thinking and the Human Rights Research Fund, and endorsed by numerous scholars and activists. The sessions included insightful presentations 

...the Center for Indigenous Peoples' Critical and Intuitive Thinking? (and what conclusion are we to draw from the conspicuous absence of "Rational Thinking" in that name?). By the way, the event's other sponsor—The Human Rights Research Fund—was co-founded by Churchill's wife, Natsu Taylor Saito, and provided no-doubt thoroughly fact-checked COINTELPRO documentation to Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney for her presentation to the UN Human Rights Commissioner back in 2001.

Show of hands: Who thinks the same press agent writes for both "Think Critically" and for North Korea? Here's a recent release from the latter:

The field of scientific research in the DPRK ["Democratic People's Republic of Korea"] successfully conducted an underground nuclear test under secure conditions on October 9, 2006, at a stirring time when all the people of the country are making a great leap forward in the building of a great, prosperous, powerful socialist nation.

In any case, the "Think Critically" gang (or, at least, Ward Churchill's anonymous doppelgangers over at WardChurchill.net) promise to provide "information on emerging actions as well as recordings and transcripts of many of these presentations[....]" We can't wait.

Update: Along with reader Laurie, we wondered where Congresswoman McKinney got the idea that Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote "confidential memorandum 46" (which McKinney alleged to the UN Human Right Commissioner in 2001 "details the federal government's plan to destroy functioning black leadership in the United States"), so we emailed researcher Paul Wolf and asked about McKinney and memorandum 46. His reply:

"McKinney's a crackpot.  Several years ago she contacted me and I was flattered to have access to a member of Congress, and tried to work with her but it was a bad experience for me. She has been persistent in inviting me to things but I really don't want my name associated with her or her projects at all.  From my knowledge of her, someone told her about the document. That person heard about it from someone else, who read about it, and if you continue chasing the genesis of the document you will lose the trail at some point. Maybe it exists but I doubt if McKinney or her underlings really know."

CNews 7October06

CNews 3October06

"We hope that there's not a confrontation," said Glenn Spagnuolo, a member of the Transform Columbus Day Alliance, one of the protest organizers. "We hope that our assurances to the police that we will not harm the parade marchers will (let) us have this camp."

But the group will not ask permission to set up camp, Spagnuolo said.

"Asking an illegal colonizer for permission to be on land that doesn't belong to them doesn't work for us," he said.

CNews 2October06