When was the last time you danced, either by yourself or with someone?Last week while one of our secretaries and I were taking turns at the copier, a Strauss waltz came on (I live-stream Classical South Florida at my desk). I bowed, she curtsied, and we did a few steps that would have made Mrs. Brown (dancing school in 1963) very proud.
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As kids head back to school, conservative Christian media ministry Focus on the Family perceives a bully on the playground: national gay-advocacy groups.Gee, I wonder why anyone would ever think that labeling an entire class of people as an "abomination" was bigotry?
School officials allow these outside groups to introduce policies, curriculum and library books under the guise of diversity, safety or bullying-prevention initiatives, said Focus on the Family education expert Candi Cushman.
"We feel more and more that activists are being deceptive in using anti-bullying rhetoric to introduce their viewpoints, while the viewpoint of Christian students and parents are increasingly belittled," Cushman said.
Public schools increasingly convey that homosexuality is normal and should be accepted, Cushman said, while opposing viewpoints by conservative Christians are portrayed as bigotry.
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Glenn Beck promotes a false gospel. However, many of his political ideas can help America.What's really going on here has very little to do with "false gospels" or whether or not "Mormonism" is a cult. (We're getting really close to Pot/Kettle territory here.) What the real issue is that the evangelicals see Mr. Beck horning in on their side of the street: "Hey, those are our pigeons you're trying to pluck."
Our country was founded on Judeo-Christian values. Mormonism is not a Christian denomination but a cult of Christianity.
The country needs to get back to the simplicity of the Bible. The reason our country is in bad shape is that ministers for the most part do not share the truth. Many endorse false gospels including Mormonism.
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Republicans are now twice as likely as Democrats to be "very" enthusiastic about voting, and now hold -- by one point -- the largest such advantage of the year.But then the Democrats have done a really bad job of selling the successes they've had -- healthcare, Wall Street and banking reform, rescuing the auto industry, and keeping the economy from falling off the cliff -- and the GOP knows that even if they have nothing to offer, they can still rely on fear and loathing. That always works.
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U.S. officials said the two appeared to be travelling with what were termed "mock bombs" in their luggage. "This was almost certainly a dry run, a test," said one senior law enforcement official.Yeah, it's still a dangerous world and there are still people out there who are up to no good. But not everyone. And at least to the credit of the current administration, they didn't go on TV and raise the threat level to puce.
A spokesman for the Dutch public prosecutor, Ernst Koelman, confirmed the two men were arrested this morning and said "the investigation is ongoing." He said the arrests were made "at the request of American authorities."
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Politics is funny sometimes in Florida.It's the old "rally 'round the winner" routine, and it's Politics 101; the party is desperate to win, toadies want a job or the limelight, and somewhere, somehow, someone is planning on making a bit of a fortune off of it.
One day people call you a fraud who ripped off taxpayers and financed smut, the next day they hail you as a visionary leader, job creator and good friend. One day you're denouncing special interest and lobbyist money, the next day you are courting it.
Such is the case with Rick Scott, the mega-rich businessman who stunned the GOP establishment last week by beating Bill McCollum for the Republican gubernatorial nomination. Only a week ago, state and national party leaders treated Scott as a dangerous pariah, but now they're eagerly embracing him and hoping for forgiveness.
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There’s nothing in the world more tired than a progressive blogger like me flipping out over the latest idiocies emanating from the Fox News crowd. But this summer’s media hate-fest is different than anything we’ve seen before. What we’re watching is a calculated campaign to demonize blacks, Mexicans, and gays and convince a plurality of economically-depressed white voters that they are under imminent legal and perhaps even physical attack by a conspiracy of leftist nonwhites. They’re telling these people that their government is illegitimate and criminal and unironically urging secession and revolution.I'm glad Mr. Taibbi said "effective boycotts." I've never been convinced that just not buying something is a truly effective method of registering a complaint with a corporate entity. After all, it's an attempt to prove a negative: how can they know you're not shopping there if you're not shopping there? Rather, I think the active approach as demonstrated against Target last month works. A shopper in Minnesota went to Target, bought a couple of hundred dollars worth of stuff, and then turned around and returned it all showed the company her displeasure at the corporation's financial support of a right-wing anti-gay candidate. A debit/credit spreadsheet works better than a rant on a blog to these people.
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I'm beginning to wonder why effective boycotts against these hate-media channels, and particularly Fox, haven’t been organized yet. Why not just pick out one Fox advertiser at random and make an example out of it? How about Subaru and their unintentionally comic “Love” slogan? I actually like their cars, but what the f**k? How about Pep Boys and that annoying logo of theirs? Just to prove that it can be done, I’d like to see at least one firm get blown out of business as a consequence of financially supporting the network that is telling America that its black president wants to kill white babies. Isn't that at least the first move here? It's beginning to strike me that sitting by and doing nothing about this madness is not a terribly responsible way to behave.
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In a sense, Beck’s “Restoring Honor” was like an Obama rally through the looking glass. It was a long festival of affirmation for middle-class white Christians — square, earnest, patriotic and religious. If a speaker had suddenly burst out with an Obama-esque “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” the message would have fit right in.Ever since Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy started bringing in the rednecks and the euphemistically labeled "lower-educated" to the GOP, the upper crust old-line-country club-Palm Beach-Orange County-Winnetka Republicans have been greeting them with the fixed smiles and limp handshakes that they usually use to greet the relatives of their cleaning lady. They're grateful for the support for their party at the voting booth, but they are uncomfortable with the uncouthness of the monster truck rallies, NASCAR, Confederate flags, and televangelists in pomade and wide lapels. Their biggest fear is that somehow this kind of mean-spirited conservatism that brings with it the xenophobia and fear-mongering that they thought they were above -- after all, they now let Tiger Woods play at Augusta -- would come roaring back and, in their worst fear, turn on them.
But whereas Obama wouldn’t have been Obama if he weren’t running for president, Beck’s packed, three-hour jamboree was floated entirely on patriotism and piety, with no “get thee to a voting booth” message. It blessed a particular way of life without burdening that blessing with the compromises of a campaign, or the disillusioning work of governance.
For a weekend, at least, Beck proved that he can conjure the thrill of a culture war without the costs of combat, and the solidarity of identity politics without any actual politics. If his influence outlasts the current election cycle, this will be the secret of his success.
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Federal officials are investigating a fire that started overnight at the site of a new Islamic center in a Nashville suburb.It can only get worse, and the people at the alleged "news organizations" that provoke this stuff are going to say, "Hey, we didn't do anything except say that all Muslims are terrorists!" or "Well, what are they doing building a mosque in the heart of America anyway?"
Ben Goodwin of the Rutherford County Sheriff's Department confirmed to CBS Affiliate WTVF that the fire, which burned construction equipment at the future site of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro, is being ruled as arson.
Special Agent Andy Anderson of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives told CBS News that the fire destroyed one piece of construction equipment and damaged three others. Gas was poured over the equipment to start the fire, Anderson said.
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YouTube: Christopher Plummer as General Chang recites Shakespeare in battle.Don't you love that remarkable moment when roSenQatlh and ghIlDenSten exit the stage and Khamlet is left alone to deliver the immortal words: "baQa', Qovpatlh, toy'wl"a' qal je jIH"?
No? Well, it always kills on Kronos. That's the home planet of the Klingons, the hostile race that antagonizes the Federation heroes of "Star Trek." We learned back in '91 in "Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country" that the Klingons love them some Shakespeare. Or as he's known to his ridged-foreheaded devotees in the space-alien community: Wil'yam Shex'pir.
The line above might be more familiar to earthlings as "O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!" But now, we Terrans have an opportunity to savor Shex'pir as the Klingons do. The Washington Shakespeare Company, that Arlington outpost of offbeat treatments of classic plays, is going where no D.C. enterprise has ever quite gone before, offering up a whole evening of Shakespeare -- in Klingon.
At the company's annual benefit Sept. 25 in Rosslyn, selections from "Hamlet" and "Much Ado About Nothing" will be performed in the language that was invented for the Klingon characters of the "Star Trek" films. Actors will be speaking the verse in two languages, English and Klingon, and the lines in each will correspond to the Bard's signature meter: iambic pentameter. The translations are courtesy of the Klingon Language Institute, a Pennsylvania group that published "The Klingon Hamlet" several years ago, in addition to composing the Klingon version of "Much Ado About Nothing."
Of course, when considering this curious approach to Shakespeare -- eccentric even by the idiosyncratic standards of contemporary niche theater -- the question inevitably arises: Why? As it turns out, the troupe has an answer so logical it might satisfy Mr. Spock. The chairman of Washington Shakespeare's board just happens to be the man who invented Klingonspeak for the films: Marc Okrand, a longtime linguist at the Vienna-based National Captioning Institute.
Then, too, Shakespeare sci-fi style appeals to the whimsical impulses of the company's longtime artistic director, Christopher Henley. "It kind of fits into our company identity, of trying to breathe some fresh air into the classics, of doing something really, really different with them," he says. "It seems a way to say that we're not as reverent as other companies in town."
No kidding. This is the group that three years ago staged a really, really different version of "Macbeth" -- in the nude. On this occasion, its actors will simply be cloaking the famous lines in words from the Klingon dictionary that Okrand published 25 years ago. Lines like "taH pagh taHbe.' " Which perhaps you know as: "To be or not to be."
For a year and a half, we've seen rallies and town-hall shouting and attack ads and Fox News special reports. But I still haven't the foggiest idea what these folks actually want, other than to see like-minded Republicans winning elections. To be sure, I admire their passion, and I applaud their willingness to get involved in public affairs. If more Americans chose to take a more active role in the political process, the country would be better off and our democracy would be more vibrant.A Palin for the Left -- Anna Holmes and Rebecca Traister say the Democrats need to find their own Mama Grizzly.
But that doesn't actually tell us what these throngs of Americans are fighting for, exactly. I'm not oblivious to their cries; I'm at a loss to appreciate those cries on anything more than a superficial level.
This is about "freedom."
Well, I'm certainly pro-freedom, and as far as I can tell, the anti-freedom crowd struggles to win votes on Election Day. But can they be a little more specific? How about the freedom for same-sex couples to get married? No, we're told, not that kind of freedom.
This is about a fight for American "liberties."
That sounds great, too. Who's against American "liberties"? But I'm still looking for some details. Might this include law-abiding American Muslims exercising their liberties and converting a closed-down clothing store into a community center? No, we're told, not those kinds of liberties.
This is about giving Americans who work hard and play by the rules more opportunities.
I'm all for that, too. But would these opportunities include the chance for hard-working Americans to bring their kids to the doctor if they get sick, even if the family can't afford insurance? No, we're told, not those kinds of opportunities.
This is about the values of the Founding Fathers.
I'm a big fan of the framers' generation, who created an extraordinary nation. But if we're honoring their values, would this include their steadfast commitment to the separation of church and state? No, we're told, not those values.
This is about patriotic Americans willing to make sacrifices for the good of their country.
That sounds reasonable; sacrifices can be honorable. But if we're talking about patriots willing to sacrifice, does that mean millionaires and billionaires can go back to paying '90s-era tax rates (you know, when the economy was strong)? No, we're told, not those kinds of sacrifices.
This is about a public that, at long last, wants to hear the truth from those who speak in their name.
What a great idea. Maybe that means we can hear the truth about global warming? About the fact that health care reform wasn't a socialized government takeover? About Social Security not going bankrupt? About how every court ruling conservatives don't like doesn't necessarily constitute "liberal judicial activism"? No, we're told, not those truths.
Movements -- real movements that make a difference and stand the test of time -- are about more than buzz words, television personalities, and self-aggrandizement. Change -- transformational change that sets nations on new courses -- is more than vague, shallow promises about "freedom."
Labor unions created a movement. Women's suffrage was a movement. The fight for civil rights is a movement. The ongoing struggle for equality for gays and lesbians is a movement. In each case, the grievance was as clear as the solution. There was no mystery as to what these patriots were fighting for. Their struggles and successes made the nation stronger, better, and more perfect.
The folks who gathered in D.C. today were awfully excited about something. The fact that it's not altogether obvious what that might be probably isn't a good sign.
The left’s failure to nurture and celebrate female politicians has had a significant effect on its policies. In recent years, Democratic majorities and progressive legislation seem to have been built on steady trade-offs of reproductive rights, culminating this year when the first female speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, was forced to push through health care reform with a compromise on abortion financing.Doonesbury: Summer dreams.
An older generation of female Democrats, including Mrs. Clinton and Ms. Pelosi, are about as eager to mount a Palin-style girl-powered campaign as they are to wear a miniskirt on the House floor. For them, proudly or aggressively touting one’s feminist credentials (if you’re actually a feminist, that is) is taboo. It’s considered too, well, female.
But as women of a different generation — of, gulp, Sarah Palin’s generation — we wonder if Democrats shouldn’t look to her for twisted inspiration, and recognize that the future of women in politics will be about coming to terms with (and inventing) new models.
Imagine a Democrat willing to brag about breaking the glass ceiling at the explosive beginning, not the safe end, of her campaign. A liberal politician taking to Twitter to argue that big broods and a “culture of life” are completely compatible with reproductive freedom. A female candidate on the left who speaks as angrily and forcefully about her rivals’ shortcomings as Sarah Barracuda does about the Pelosis and Obamas of the world. A smart, unrelenting female, who, unlike Ms. Palin, wants to tear down, not reinforce, traditional ways of looking at women. But that will require a party that is eager to discover, groom, promote and then cheer on such a progressive Palin.
If Sarah Palin and her acolytes successfully redefine what it means to be a groundbreaking political woman, it will be because progressives let it happen — and in doing so, ensured that when it comes to making history, there will be no one but Mama Grizzlies to do the job.
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| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Recap - Week of 8/23/10 | ||||
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| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| I Have a Scheme | ||||
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There's a lot of coverage about how New Orleans and the Gulf Coast are doing five years after Hurricane Katrina struck. But I also remember quite vividly that before it hit there, it came through South Florida. It was my first hurricane, and I blogged through it -- at least until the power went out -- and the aftermath.Fetch more...
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So be it.A Green Field
If there is to be a memorial, let it not be of stone and steel. Fly no flag above it, for it is not the possession of a nation but a sorrow shared with the world.
Let it be a green field, with trees and flowers. Let there be paths that wind through the shade. Put out park benches where old people can sun in the springtime, and a pond where children can skate in the winter.
Beneath this field will lie entombed forever some of the victims of September 11. It is not where they thought to end their lives. Like the sailors of the battleship Arizona, they rest where they fell.
Let this field stretch from one end of the destruction to the other. Let this open space among the towers mark the emptiness in our hearts. But do not make it a sad place. Give it no name. Let people think of it as the green field. Every living thing that is planted here will show faith in the future.
Let students from all lands take a sunny corner of the field and plant a crop there. Perhaps corn, our native grain. Let the harvest be shared all over the world, with friends and enemies, because that is the teaching of our religions. Let the harvest show that life prevails over death, and let the sharing show that we love our neighbors.
Do not build again on this place. No building can stand here. No building, no statue, no column, no arch, no symbol, no name, no date, no statement. Just the comfort of the earth, to remind us that we share it.
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An American activist imprisoned since January in North Korea was released early Friday and permitted to return to the United States, following a rescue mission by former president Jimmy Carter.This is getting to be a regular gig for North Korea. Some American steps over the line, they grab them, make a big fuss, we send some eminence gris in to get them released, apologize profusely, go home, end of story until the next one. I get the feeling that when Kim Jong Il feels the world isn't paying enough attention to them, they do something like this to say, "Hey, lookit me!"
Aijalon Mahli Gomes departed Pyongyang with Carter; they are expected to land in Boston on Friday afternoon.
North Korea's state-run news agency described the pardon as "a manifestation of [North Korea's] humanitarianism and peace-loving policy."
According to the news agency, Carter apologized for Gomes's behavior. In January, Gomes illegally entered North Korea from China. He was fined $700,000 and sentenced to eight years of hard labor.
U.S. State Department spokesman Philip Crowley said in a statement that "we welcome the release of Aijalon Mahli Gomes and are relieved that he will soon be safely reunited with his family. We appreciate former President Carter's humanitarian effort and welcome North Korea's decision to grant Mr. Gomes special amnesty."
Crowley added that "President Carter's trip was a private, humanitarian, and unofficial mission solely for the purpose of bringing Mr. Gomes home."
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- A Blog Around The Clock: do big cats like catnip?A recent QOTD spurred Labrys to think about when adulthood arrived.
- Summit Peace - All Facts and Opinions: Who's more gay-friendly, Target or MoveOn.org?
- archy is drawn to art.
- Bark Bark Woof Woof on Ken Mehlman's coming out.
- Bloggg: Moi's local library is safe ... for now.
- Dohiyi Mir: family fotos before Election Day.
- Echidne Of The Snakes: Happy Womens Equality Day!
- Florida Progressive Coalition Blog: Naming and shaming.
- Left Is Right on why housing is still in the tank.
- Pen-Elayne on the Web and a real mama grizzly.
- Rook's Rant with a flashback and an earworm.
- rubber hose: there's hallowed and then there's hallowed.
- Scrutiny Hooligans: you can't outrun greed.
- Stupid Enough Unexplanation reads the righties so you don't have to.
- WTF Is It Now?? responds to Alan Simpson.
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Former Republican Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming, who became an instant You-Tube star earlier this summer with a rant against senior citizens, is at it again big-time.Gee, I wonder why he never got that job in the Diplomatic Corps.
Evidently smarting mightily—and mighty belatedly—from an April 27th Huffington Post blog by Ashley Carson, Executive Director of the Older Women’s League (OWL), Simpson fired off an email Monday. He accused Carson of lying and “babbling into the vapors about disgusting attempts at ageism and sexism and all the rest of that crap.” Piling on the sexist rhetoric, he then instructed her to read a graph which “I hope you are able to discern if you are any good at reading graphs.”
Declining to address whether or not he accepts his own Social Security benefit (he’s pushing 80), Simpson saves the best for last: “And yes, I’ve made some plenty smart cracks about people on Social Security who milk it to the last degree. You know ‘em too. It’s the same with any system in America. We’ve reached a point now where it’s like a milk cow with 310 million tits! Call when you get honest work!”
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It would be nice to dismiss the stupid things that Americans believe as harmless, the price of having such a large, messy democracy. Plenty of hate-filled partisans swore that Abraham Lincoln was a Catholic and Franklin Roosevelt was a Jew. So what if one-in-five believe the sun revolves around the earth, or aren’t sure from which country the United States gained its independence?We are all creatures of habit. People choose what they want to believe if it fits into their little jigsaw puzzle of a mind; new information that doesn't meet with the pattern is disturbing and disorienting. We want a simple explanation for the randomness and complexity of life. It explains religion, superstition, and reality TV. Paradoxically, the people who don't do a lot of deep thinking are prone to believe complex theories of conspiracy and control by "others"; mysterious forces beyond our control that manipulate us from beyond, be it a magical superbeing in the clouds or a man in a glass booth who makes the noises coming out of a box on the table.
But false belief in weapons of mass-destruction led the United States to a trillion-dollar war. And trust in rising home value as a truism as reliable as a sunrise was a major contributor to the catastrophic collapse of the economy. At its worst extreme, a culture of misinformation can produce something like Iran, which is run by a Holocaust denier.
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The New York Police Department has confirmed to TPM that a cab driver in Manhttan was allegedly stabbed by a passenger who asked if the cabbie was Muslim, and says the incident is being treated as a hate crime. The suspect has been charged with attempted murder and other crimes.The Conventional Wisdom will tell us that this is just an isolated incident, that Mr. Enright is a nice guy who just got back from Afghanistan after making a documentary about life there, and that he has a problem with alcohol. None of this has anything whatsoever to do with the Park51 community center in lower Manhattan and it's just a sad coincidence.
According to Detective Marc Nell, at 6:14 pm last night, the driver picked up Michael Enright, 21, of Brewster, NY, at the intersection of 24th Street and 2nd Avenue in Manhattan. The cab proceeded to drive north, and Enright asked the driver, who Nell identified as a 43-year-old Asian male, if he was Muslim. After the driver responded that he was, Enright allegedly stabbed him repeatedly with a Leatherman tool, according to police.
"[Enright] stabbed the driver in the throat, right arm, left forearm, right thumb and upper lip," Nell said.
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“It’s taken me 43 years to get comfortable with this part of my life,” said Mehlman, now an executive vice-president with the New York City-based private equity firm, KKR. “Everybody has their own path to travel, their own journey, and for me, over the past few months, I’ve told my family, friends, former colleagues, and current colleagues, and they’ve been wonderful and supportive. The process has been something that’s made me a happier and better person. It’s something I wish I had done years ago.”I'm all in favor of people keeping their personal lives to themselves as long as it doesn't harm others, and I don't like outing people for no other reason than to embarrass them. For one thing, there shouldn't be any stigma for being gay. I realize why Mr. Mehlman kept it under wraps: he was more interested in his career than in his own sense of self, and he knew that the GOP would never, ever accept an openly gay leader in the party structure. So he made that choice.
Privately, in off-the-record conversations with this reporter over the years, Mehlman voiced support for civil unions and told of how, in private discussions with senior Republican officials, he beat back efforts to attack same-sex marriage. He insisted, too, that President Bush “was no homophobe.” He often wondered why gay voters never formed common cause with Republican opponents of Islamic jihad, which he called “the greatest anti-gay force in the world right now.”
Mehlman’s leadership positions in the GOP came at a time when the party was stepping up its anti-gay activities—such as the distribution in West Virginia in 2006 of literature linking homosexuality to atheism, or the less-than-subtle, coded language in the party’s platform (“Attempts to redefine marriage in a single state or city could have serious consequences throughout the country…”). Mehlman said at the time that he could not, as an individual Republican, go against the party consensus. He was aware that Karl Rove, President Bush’s chief strategic adviser, had been working with Republicans to make sure that anti-gay initiatives and referenda would appear on November ballots in 2004 and 2006 to help Republicans.
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Do you buy state lottery tickets? If so, have you ever won anything?I used to buy them on a lark when I lived in Colorado. The most I ever won was five bucks. But not any more. It's odd the how people who carry on like a banshee if someone so much as suggests raising state taxes, but the same folks will crawl on their hands and knees over broken glass to slap down a buck to buy a state lottery ticket.
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| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
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The massive stimulus package boosted real GDP by up to 4.5 percent in the second quarter of 2010 and put up to 3.3 million people to work, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said on Tuesday.Which, in layman's terms, means that without the stimulus, we'd have been a lot worse off.
CBO’s latest estimate indicates that the stimulus effort, which remains a political hot potato ahead of the November congressional elections, may have prevented the sluggish U.S. economy from contracting between April and June.
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Here’s a thought: The 70% of Americans who oppose what amounts to an Islamic Niketown two blocks from ground zero are the real victims of a climate of hate, and anti-Muslim backlash is mostly a myth.But then again, he was also the genius who came up with the theory that Hitler was a liberal, so there you are.
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Rick Scott pulled off his one-man political revolution Tuesday night, narrowly defeating Attorney General Bill McCollum in the Republican primary for governor.Far be it from me to try to figure out the minds of the Republican voters, but this sounds to me more like a repudiation of Mr. McCollum than an embrace of a man who has a questionable past as the head of a health insurance company that had to fork over millions in fines. If the Democrats are worth their oppo research, I suspect we're going to hear a great deal about the inner workings of Columbia/HCA by the time November rolls around.
With most precincts counted, it became clear that Scott had overcome the might of the Republican establishment, the special interests who dominate the Capitol and a longtime politician determined to tar his character.
Scott's win bears witness to his personal wealth -- he spent at least $50 million of it on the campaign -- as well as the thirst for political change in the Republican Party of Florida, which has been rocked by scandal and whose leaders worked to stop him cold.
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| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
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...the Kingdom Foundation, al-Waleed's personal charity, has donated a total of $305,000 to Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow, a leadership and networking project sponsored jointly by two of Rauf's organizations, the American Society for Muslim Advancement and the Cordoba Initiative. Al-Waleed owns a 7 percent, $2.3 billion stake in News Corporation. Likewise, News Corporation owns a 9 percent, $70 million stake — purchased in February — in Rotana, Al-Waleed's Saudi media conglomerate. Put another way: Rupert Murdoch and Fox News are in business, to the tune of billions of dollars, with one of the "Terror Mosque Imam's" principal patrons.How about that.
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When did the loudmouths of the American right become such a bunch of fraidy-cats and professional victims? Or is it all just an act?There's another part of this pattern. One of the oft-repeated memes from the right about the Park51 center was for the people building it to show some "sensitivity" to the feelings of the victims of September 11. Since when did the conservatives ever give a rat's ass about other peoples' feelings? Ann Coulter once labeled a group of 9/11 survivors as "professional widows," exploiting their losses for gain, and if you need any further proof of both insensitivity and the Culture of Victimhood, go to a tea party rally; they've got both on display.
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...the manufactured brouhaha over the Park51 project is part of a larger pattern in which the far right embraces victimhood and stokes fear. The faction that likes to portray itself as a bunch of John Waynes and "mama grizzlies," it turns out, spends an awful lot of time cowering in the corner and complaining about how beastly everyone else is being.
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Paladino laid out several plans that included converting underused state prisons into centers that would house welfare recipients. There, they would do work for the state — "military service, in some cases park service, in other cases public works service," he said — while prison guards would be retrained to work as counselors.To his credit, he left out the part about letting them die to decrease the surplus population.
"Instead of handing out the welfare checks, we'll teach people how to earn their check. We'll teach them personal hygiene ... the personal things they don't get when they come from dysfunctional homes," Paladino said.
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The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests. In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. And Greenpeace issued a report identifying the company as a “kingpin of climate science denial.” The report showed that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups. Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies—from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program—that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus.Compared to these guys, George Soros is small potatoes.
In a statement, Koch Industries said that the Greenpeace report “distorts the environmental record of our companies.” And David Koch, in a recent, admiring article about him in New York, protested that the “radical press” had turned his family into “whipping boys,” and had exaggerated its influence on American politics. But Charles Lewis, the founder of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan watchdog group, said, “The Kochs are on a whole different level. There’s no one else who has spent this much money. The sheer dimension of it is what sets them apart. They have a pattern of lawbreaking, political manipulation, and obfuscation. I’ve been in Washington since Watergate, and I’ve never seen anything like it. They are the Standard Oil of our times.”
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If you are on the subway stay on the Red line between Union Station and Shady Grove, Maryland. If you are on the Blue or Orange line do not go past Eastern Market (Capitol Hill) toward the Potomac Avenue stop and beyond; stay in NW DC and points in Virginia. Do not use the Green line or the Yellow line. These rules are even more important at night. There is of course nothing wrong with many other areas; but you don't know where you are, so you should not explore them.In other words, avoid the parts of town with Scary Black People. Does that include the 1600 block of Pennsylvania Avenue?
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After being dumped from a WorldNetDaily conference over her participation in the gay Republican group GOProud's "Homocon," Ann Coulter is attacking the far-right website.Don't you just love hearing someone from World Net Daily complain about ad hominem attacks from Ann Coulter? It's like they could sue for copyright infringement.
"These are fake Christians trying to get publicity," Coulter said on Fox News' "Red Eye." She's upset with WND not just for dropping her but for publishing quotes from her email exchanges with WND editor Joseph Farah.
Farah responded in a statement: "Coulter called me a 'publicity whore' for my decision. But look who is on television talking about this -- throwing mud, name-calling, smearing not only me but my entire staff. I will not engage in the kind of ad hominem attacks that have made Coulter so famous and that are making her even more of a media darling in this age of reckless anger and character assassination for the sake of entertainment."
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How many people do you know personally who follow the Islamic faith?I suppose that's a trick question because I really don't know. I know that at least four of my friends and co-workers are Muslim because they told me they are. I am sure that I work with quite a few more; Miami is a multicultural city, and I'm pretty sure I went to college with some over the eleven years I was at three different universities in three different parts of the country. I do know that by talking to them and getting to know them, they've enriched my life and view of the world.
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"Imprudent donations can potentially have a major negative impact on company reputations and business if they don't carefully and fully assess a candidate's positions," said Tim Smith, a senior vice president at Walden Asset Management, one of three asset management firms that this week filed a resolution asking the retail giant to overhaul its campaign donation policies. He cautioned that funding ballot initiatives, as many corporations have done, "can similarly backfire."So while we may have to live with the idea that corporations have as much a right to participate in the electoral process as a real voter, it might be a good idea to require them to report just how much money they're giving to campaigns and let the democracy of the marketplace prevail.
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You’re talking about current tax policy. Why did it all of a sudden become something that we, quote, ‘pay for’?And yet extending jobless benefits for the unemployed or sending money to the states to pay for teachers and police would "explode the deficit," so he filibustered against them. But the idea of actually paying for the tax cuts for the rich? Are you kidding?
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"What we're having here are debates about first principles," Wehner said. "A lot of people think he's trying to transform the country in a liberal direction in the way that Ronald Reagan did in a conservative direction. This is not the normal push and pull of politics. It gets down to the purpose and meaning of America."Basically what he is saying is that it was perfectly acceptable for the Republicans under Ronald Reagan to, as he put it, "transform the country" in a conservative direction, but if the liberals try to do it, it could destroy America.
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McDonnell’s “prudence” would be a shining example for the federal government if he hadn’t relied on one important contributor: the federal government. According to a Commonwealth Institute for Fiscal Analysis report released this week, last year’s Recovery Act provided $2.5 billion in stimulus relief to “maintain crucial services for [Virginia] citizens” and “help close the state’s budget shortfall in 2010-2012.” Virginia legislators relied on $1.3 billion in enhanced Medicaid funding, $1 billion in funding for K-12 and higher education, $39 million for public safety, and $200 million in general support to reduce “what would otherwise have been a $5.4 billion budget hole.”But remember, the stimulus was a complete failure.
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Estimates vary slightly, but the Washington Post, citing data from CBS's Mark Knoller, the unofficial keeper of such things, said Obama has taken 48 days off since his inauguration. At this point in Bush's presidency, he'd taken 155 days off.So the next meme will be that Mr. Obama isn't working half as hard as his predecessor to take time off.
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"I think the president's problem is that he was born a Muslim, his father was a Muslim. The seed of Islam is passed through the father like the seed of Judaism is passed through the mother. He was born a Muslim, his father gave him an Islamic name," Graham told CNN's John King in a televised interview that aired Thursday night.Like I said, I'd like to believe he meant nothing at all by that. But I don't believe it for a second, and the rest of Mr. Graham's answer confirms that fact: he's insinuating Mr. Obama's Christian faith is insincere and he's skeptical about his true beliefs, not to mention the fact that Mr. Graham couches the entire argument in his own Christian superiority. And, as Juan Cole points out, Mr. Graham is misinformed about Muslims and Islam in the first place. I know; I'm just as shocked as you are to find out that a Christian evangelist is passing along rumors and falsehoods as fact.
"Now it's obvious that the president has renounced the prophet Mohammed, and he has renounced Islam, and he has accepted Jesus Christ. That's what he says he has done. I cannot say that he hasn't. So I just have to believe that the president is what he has said," Graham continued, adding that "the Islamic world sees the president as one of theirs."
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Stop That Noise!
