Monsters in Media. I was appalled tonite to see, on two different late-nite shows, hideous, inhuman callousness paraded as "humor".
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First, Jay Leno introduced some clown who purported to have made a time machine, in which he traveled back to Ford's Theater on the nite Lincoln was (to be) shot. He sees the President, alive, and realizes he can save him by going over and warning him. Then an attractive young blonde woman sits down next to him, and he is so distracted with making moves on her that he completely forgets about Lincoln, and remembers only as a shot rings out. That is Jay Leno's idea of humor? Monstrous. The vile fool who performed that ugly, subhuman bit should be stripped naked, tied to a post, and flogged a minimum of 50 lashes with a cat-o-nine-tails. Jay Leno should also be stripped naked and flogged. As to whether more lashes are warranted for Leno and the producers who approved that hideousness than the moron who played the bit, I'm open to input. Everyone responsible for this crass, ugly, inhuman "comedy" should be banished from media for life.
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I then turned, in disgust, to Jimmy Kimmel Live! Kimmel offered a pre-recorded "humorous" bit with Canadian comic actor Ryan Reynolds, in which Reynolds is working a couple of doors down, so stops in to see Kimmy. Jimmy tells him he has a staffer who is a big fan, and asks Reynolds to stop by her cubicle to say hello, which would give her a thrill. Jimmy then tells Reynolds that she is going to be fired in an hour, and a visit from Reynolds would make her firing sting less. Reynolds consents, and stops by her cubicle. She is thrilled. As Reynolds is talking to her, Kimmel comes up and instructs Reynolds to tell her for him. He is uncomfortable, but does. She is stunned, shouts in anguish, repeatedly, "Why? Why?", then leaves, devastated. That is Jimmy Kimmel's idea of humor. He and Reynolds should as well be flogged, then banished from media for life. Reynolds, a f*king foreigner who takes work away from Americans in their own country, should also be deported, and banned from visiting or even overflying the United States for the rest of his ugly life.
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It is times like this that I can sympathize with the revulsion that decent people in the decent countries of the world feel for "Hollywood" (shorthand for America's deformed entertainment media). If this cruel, vile trash were truly representative of American culture, the United States would indeed deserve to be totally destroyed. How are people who don't live here supposed to know that we are not remotely like that? Alas, we are BECOMING like the monster society we are endlessly attacked by in television and films. We are losing our humanity, and becoming a vicious, unfeeling, brutal society of uncaring bullies, due to mind-poisoning by the toxic waste we are endlessly assailed by via TV, film, and the Internet.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,424 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM

 
Clintonian Idiocy: Whitewashing Roofs! Bill Clinton, the pseudo-Democratic former President, was on Letterman tonite, in part to promote the idea that people should whitewash tar roofs all over the Nation, in order to cut air-conditioning bills. Astounding. What a complete jackass he is. In a large portion of the urban areas of the United States where there would be black, flat, tar roofs, most people do not HAVE air-conditioning, and their greatest expenditure for energy is NOT in the summer but in the WINTER. Thus, if the roof of a building plays any part in the energy use of urban residents, especially poor urbanites, the saving more important by far to make would be winter energy use, for HEATING. If a black roof in summer increases people's energy use — for people who have air-conditioning, which not remotely everyone in large parts of American cities has — then it follows that a black roof in winter would reduce people's energy use, and EVERYONE in the cities of the North has heating in the winter. So if they whitewash their roof, they will INCREASE their energy consumption in the winter, and LOSE money. What a moron.
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Then the idiot talked about increased costs of natural disasters being a consequence of "climate change", which in today's parlance actually means "man-made climate change", a fantasm of the feeble-minded. Clinton admitted that the Haiti earthquake (listed by Letterman among the disasters we have seen in recent times) was not due to climate change, except he didn't SAY that it was not at all due to climate change but "not so much" due to climate change! Astounding. People are supposed to take seriously this Republican in Democrat's clothing when he says such endlessly stupid things?
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Albedo. Many people are unfamiliar with this term from climatology. It is a hugely important term that we need to understand.
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Albedo is the reflectivity of a surface. In climatological terms, the more of the surface of the Earth that is white or very lite in color, the more of the sun's energy is reflected out into space rather than absorbed. The effects of a change in albedo may be self-magnifying. That is, if, over the past 150 years, the proportion of the Earth's surface covered in highly reflective ice and snow has gradually decreased, the temperature of the Earth might be increased disproportionately. How?
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If the energy from the sun does not change, year to year, but the percentage of the surface of the Earth that reflects solar radiation (heat) decreases and the area that absorbs solar radiation increases, the temperature of the surface of the Earth will increase. That in turn further reduces the area covered in snow and ice, for much or all of the year, and thus reduces the reflection out into space of solar heat, which in turn increases the surface temperature, which again reduces the percentage of the surface covered in snow and ice. Onward and onward, absent a reduction of solar radiation, each year a little more of the surface is darkened, as snow and ice retreat, so more of the surface increases in temperature. Winds move heat from dark surfaces to lite surfaces, melting more of the snow and ice, increasing the area that can then absorb a lot more heat, and melting even more of the snow and ice, which produces more dark surface to absorb more heat. This is because the effects of absorption of heat by dark surfaces are greater than the effects of solar radiation on a lite surface. That is, black or even brown (bare dirt), absorbs MUCH more heat than does white, so one square mile of newly darkened soil will absorb many times as much heat as a square mile of ice. It's not a one-for-one exchange. One unit of dark absorbs much more heat than the same unit of white, then puts part of that absorbed heat out where it can melt ice in the vicinity. By contrast, a unit of ice puts out almost NO heat to melt other ice, at or below freezing. Above freezing, a unit of ice absorbs some heat, but not nearly as much as does a dark area of the same size. To put this another way, a unit of bare ground increases temperature by, say, 6X, whereas a unit of ice may decrease surrounding temperatures by 2X. (Figures are indicative, not arithmetically precise.)
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This process requires no input from human activity in order to self-intensify. Nor can human activity reverse it unless, for instance, we paint large areas of the planet's surface white that are now dark. Not a few hundred thousand tar roofs, but millions of square miles. If we are to whitewash roofs, it should be in areas that are hot year-round, not those that EVER get cold. We could also change the material for roads in hot areas from blacktop to concrete or some other whitened surface. Is it possible to change asphalt from black to white? There is "glasphalt", of course, but it is not significantly more reflective, except at nite, than regular asphalt. How much could we increase the beaded-glass component to increase the albedo of our roads without blinding drivers?
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Turning dark, ant/arctic areas white would probably be more productive of such little change as we could make in natural processes than would painting more temperate areas white, because the low angle of the sun in polar regions for much of the year would intensify the effect of reflectivity in affecting temperature, and thus "store up cold" in the polar regions' respective winters to "play out" during summers. Contrast the Sahara desert to Greenland and you may see my point. If the albedo of Greenland and the Arctic Ocean is increased, ice will be formed at higher rates. If, however, you increase the albedo of the Sahara desert (which is already very high, because desert sand is very reflective, even tho the desert is very hot), you might reduce the temperature by a (very) few degrees, but it would be a transitory and inconsequential difference. No ice will form there, and the next day's heat will resume quickly and spread out with the winds, with no long-term cooling to the planet.
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All of which is to say what? The seemingly non-linear rise in planetary temperatures is almost certainly NOT a result of increased human activity. That's another way to say that "man-made [or "anthropogenic"] global warming" is almost certainly NOT REAL.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,421 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM

 
Self-Defeating Liberals. I am really ticked off by the current Congressional election cycle, not so much at the GOP as at the POP (the Democratic "Party of Pussies" — tho most of my kitties are nowhere near as timid as Democrats are, but will actually fite if threatened). There are many self-confuting and self-defeating "ideas" out among Democrats. Let's take two, as examples.
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(1) The pretense is now heard that voters will not favor a hard-and-fast Democratic insistence on letting the Bushian tax breaks for the rich and super-rich expire, but that voters are SO stupid and SO deluded by the propaganda of the Radical Right that they will think that seeing the budget deficit balloon by $700 BILLION over the next decade in order to give the rich a tax break is a good thing. NO. Democrats are entirely wrong in avoiding the populist "soak the rich" class war that has heretofore been fought on only one side, BY the rich against The Rest of Us. Why can't Democrats point out that the Richpublicans have been fiting a "Soak the Poor and Middle Class" war, and fite back? How many votes do the rich have? How many votes do the middle class and poor have? The answers to these questions show why Democrats who refuse to "soak the rich" are FOOLS.
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Yes, the Republican Party, prostrate servants of the rich, pretend that the rich are the "engine of the economy", and you "can't" raise taxes on even the SUPER-rich without injuring the economy. This is the latest version of the Radical Right "trickle-down" scam, Reagan's "voodoo economics" — two terms that Democrats need to resurrect for the current political dialog, and in a hurry, since both are truly apt. Why are Democrats so reticent to take on the rich? Is it because they are fundamentally corrupted by the power of money in this disgusting age, in which servants of the rich on the Supreme Court have ruled, utterly dishonestly, that money is speech? That ruling, by the way, can be reversed by a simple act of Congress that at once restores McCain-Feingold AND adds that no judge may review that legislation, on pain of death.
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The Supreme Court doesn't have any power except what it is given. If we take away misused powers, the Court has no recourse but to fuss and rant impotently. The Supreme Court has no army, no police force, no power whatsoever to enforce its bizarre and ridiculous decisions. The Executive Branch, however, does have an army, and police forces, that can arrest any judge who rises in insurrection against the duly constituted legal authority of the Congress and President in enacting legislation in accordance with the process mandated by the Constitution — the only condition to the full effectiveness of legislation that the Constitution itself put upon the legislative powers of the Congress and President, acting together, or Congress alone, acting over the head of the President by overriding a veto. The Constitution gives NO role to the Supreme Court in passing or vetoing legislation. The Supreme Court is not a third house of Congress; it is not co-President as regards vetoing legislation. The Constitution gives the Supreme Court NO role in legislation, so the Congress and President must act together to STRIP the Supreme Court of the power it SEIZED, unconstitutionally, to void laws passed by Congress (and, usually, the President). Congress and/or the President CAN do so, thru simple legislation, not a Constitutional amendment, by writing into any legislation it wishes that no judge may review or attempt to void that legislative act, on pain of death by hanging — a new and improved sense for "hanging judge".
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Democrats, given their enormous majorities in both Houses of the present Congress, and control of the White House, could have passed comprehensive campaign-finance legislation to provide full public financing of campaigns, with rigid spending limits. That legislation could, again, have included a final provision that no court may review or void that legislation, on pain of death. But they didn't, and won't. Nor will they pass universal-voting legislation, as to require everyone to vote. Because they are content to beg from the rich and their lobbyists who contribute to campaigns, and they don't WANT just-everybody to vote, because then they would have to consider everybody's best interests, and they don't want to do that. They prefer to pander to the audiences they know and understand, rather than speak to the disaffected they don't know, or understand at all, because they've never voted before. And so we continue to pretend to have a democracy, even tho only half of eligible voters vote, even in the heaviest turnouts, so only a minority on the order of one-FOURTH of the potential electorate controls the Government. That is NOT democracy. The first step to giving us true democracy is to admit that what we have now is MINORITY government, not democracy (majority rule) at all. In the immortal words of Dr. Phil, "You can't change what you don't acknowledge."
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People presently in office are TERRIFIED of the idea of elections in which everyone is required to vote AND in which a binding "None of the Above" vote would defeat everyone named on the ballot and require a second-round vote with ALL new candidates. At present, all a candidate needs is to be perceived as "least worst" by however many voters as do turn out, despite their disgust with The System. Voters are presently expected to vote negatively, against the worst candidate, rather than positively, for someone they can actually believe in. But if "None of the Above" were on the ballot, and everybody had to turn out, how many of the people now in office do you think would be returned to office? 90%, 50%, 7%? Who knows? Certainly the people now in office have no desire to find out.
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If the poor and disaffected, who now stay home in droves, instead came out in droves, The System would be shaken to its core. And the candidate, or party, that ran on "If we soak the rich, we can afford everything we ought, as a Nation, to be doing — EVERYTHING!", would win HUGE majorities, so great that they could ram thru any program they wanted. Even with our present despicable system that is practically designed to keep most people home, especially in midterm elections, if the Democrats ran on the stance that "The only reason we keep hearing that we 'can't afford' to do this, that, and the other is that the Republicans won't let us raise taxes on the obscenely rich — NOT the middle class, and certainly not on the poor, but on the rich and super-rich", Democrats would not merely preserve their present wide majorities but DEMOLISH the Republican Party as an effective Opposition.
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Might Democrats really be afraid of having a "bulletproof" majority? Might they fear that an effective Party of the Opposition is the only thing that keeps them listening to their "better angels", and without it, they would do terrible and abusive things that would ruin society? We should not have in Congress or any other position of public trust, people whose behavior is controlled not by their own conscience, but only by effective political opposition. If you are afraid of your demons within, don't go into politics. If you are already IN politics and scared of your demons within, resign. Tell people that fear of your own worst instincts is your reason for retiring from public life, and insist that only someone who is fundamentally decent and well-controlled should replace you.
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(2) The other issue I wish to raise today in connection with things Democrats do now and will forever keep them from having the power to do the truly good things that this Nation needs done, is Puerto Rico statehood. We have a HUGE imperialist scandal that everybody who cares about human rights and wrongs knows about but which is never presented to the American public. Puerto Rico was taken as "spoils of war" from Spain in the Spanish-American War of 1898. It has been held in colonial subjection, by the one country, born of mistreated colonies, that should never, ever, have had colonies, for 112 years — and counting. Right alongside the Colony of Puerto Rico ("Commonwealth" is the lying euphemism that is actually used in politics) is the Colony of the U.S. Virgin Islands. Puerto Rico has about 4 MILLION residents who are SECOND-CLASS citizens of the United States. They are not allowed to vote for President, nor send voting representatives to Congress, either house.
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PR (the convenient, and fully respectful, postal abbreviation, like NJ) has one delegate ("Resident Commissioner", not "Representative") in the House of Representatives, who can vote in committee but not on the floor. If Puerto Rico were a State, it would be entitled to two Senators and between 6 and 7 VOTING members in the House of Representatives. The Virgin Islands has another 109,000 U.S. citizens who are also denied the right to vote for President or Congress. Add that 109,000 figure into a combined State of Puerto Rico (and the Virgin Islands, tho the name would probably not include "Virgin Islands"), and Puerto Rico would be entitled to 7 Representatives in the House.
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How important are two votes in the U.S. Senate and 7 in the House? HUGELY. And everyone expects that the bulk of a State of Puerto Rico's elected members of both houses would be Democrats. So Democrats, who are scared sh*less that Republicans will retake at least one House of Congress, must be agitating to admit Puerto Rico as a State, right? Wrong. NO ONE in the Democratic leadership has even TALKED about ending Puerto Rico's colonial subjection and bringing it into the Union as the 51st State.
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You see, some people are so good, so unselfish, that they project onto others feelings they don't really have. Since Democrats are glad to be citizens of their own country, they project onto Puerto Ricans the 'understanding' — but actually MISunderstanding — that of course they would want to be citizens of their own, independent country. They have accepted the notion disingenuously (manipulatively) foisted upon Americans by independentistas that Puerto Ricans see Puerto Rico as their "country", in the sense that mainlanders see the United States as THEIR "country". Never mind that the words "pais" and "country" both have various meanings, and that in Spanish "pais" means more like "homeland" than "nation-state", so "mi pais" may NOT mean what we mean in English by "my country".
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This is an interesting bit of Them-against-Us trickery whereby people who are our fellow-citizens are turned into foreigners.
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Whereas we might assume that fellow-citizens who are denied the right to vote for President and Congress would OF COURSE want the vote, if Puerto Ricans are recast as foreigners who aspire to their own "pais" — whatever that might mean — we will on the contrary assume that they do NOT want to vote in OUR "country" but in their own "country": an independent Puerto Rico. Independentistas will not disabuse mainlanders of that delusion. I will.
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Are some Puerto Ricans afraid that statehood would lead to the inevitable extinguishment of Puerto Rican culture? Sure. Are they right to fear that? Depends on whether you see all human cultures that interact with others as inevitably influenced by other cultures, or if you think it is possible for a small culture to put itself into a mason jar and preserve itself exactly as it was 100 years ago, or 50, or 25, or now. Or whether you accept that worthy cultures will survive in some form despite intense interaction with others. For instance, when I was born, 65 years ago in New Jersey, the Deep South was segregated; no one in the bulk of the Nation had ever heard of a taco, much less a chimichanga, or the word "machismo"; there was no such thing as "Gay Pride" (a term I put forth in 1970), but homosexuality was "The love that dare not speak its name"; terms like "nigger", "spic", "wop", and "dago" were commonplace and unapologized-for (NJ is heavily Italian); American cities were predominantly white; etc., etc., etc. Now, the town I first lived in is over 36% Korean, Super Bowl parties feature taco chips and salsa (there was no Super Bowl when I was young); the bulk of Chinese restaurants are takeout only rather than sitdown family restaurants with menus that featured Column A and Column B; etc., etc., etc. The U.S. is, in short hugely different, culturally, now from what it was in late 1944, when I was born, or 1950, when I was in school and very aware of things around me. But no one but the Radical Right sees the culture of the United States as having been destroyed, and even most of the Radical Right thinks what has happened up till now is OK, but they oppose what they fear is ABOUT to happen.
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So, will the culture of Puerto Rico proper change under the impact of Statehood, especially statehood in which dominantly English-speaking Virgin Islanders participate in the state legislature? Of course. Will young Puerto Ricans see the change, or just accept it as the way things are?
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More to the point, how does colonial status protect Puerto Rican culture from the currents of transnational culture, ALL of which are dominated by the United States? The language of the WORLD culture now emerging is not, after all, Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, or Swahili, but English — American-accented English. Resilient cultures accept the good, reject the bad, and thrive.
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There is even a more fundamental question that I have never heard anyone discuss, about Puerto Rico or even Quebec, another area the U.S. might very usefully annex as a state: does the culture depend on the language? or can a culture change languages and still be seen as surviving?
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That is, there are aspects of culture like the kinds of housing people live in, religion they practice, the cultural attitude toward extended family as against nuclear family, the cars people drive, the music they listen to, the food they eat, clothing they wear, sports they watch or participate in, jobs they work at, and leisure-time activities they participate in (TV, Internet activities, texting, dancing) that have little to do with language. Scrabble in Spanish is still Scrabble, and salsa or merengue music with English lyrics is still salsa or merengue.
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In any case, Democrats by and large have NOT become ardent advocates of statehood for Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, even tho a joint 51st State would completely remove the condemnation of the U.S. as a colonial overlord in the Caribbean (the Pacific, however, would retain some U.S. colonies) by the United Nations — and by ourselves, in the case of Americans who are appalled that we who should never have had colonies in fact not only DO have colonies, but that one of them (PR) is the oldest colony on Earth. Why is that?
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Well, you see, there are a lot of Democrats who feel guilty about Puerto Rico's colonial condition, and think that it would be better for the people of Puerto Rico if they were an independent country. Not better for the United States, which you would think should be the first consideration of members of Congress and the President, but better for the people of Puerto Rico. But would it?
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Puerto Rico is a small, overcrowded island (3,459 square miles, smaller than Connecticut but larger than Delaware, which would make it the 49th of 51 states). It was, in the period for 50 years after the U.S. takeover, regarded as the hellhole of the Caribbean.

"What I found appalled me," John Gunther wrote, in Inside Latin America (1941 [43 years into U.S. rule]), about his visit to Puerto Rico. "I saw native villages steaming with filth — villages dirtier than any I ever saw in the most squalid parts of China . . . . I saw children bitten by disease and on the verge of starvation, in slum dwellings — if you can call them dwellings — that make the hovels of Calcutta look healthy by comparison." Gunther reported that more than half of Puerto Rican children of school age didn't go to school, that the island had the highest infant-mortality rate in the world, and that it was the second most densely populated place on earth, after Java.

What reason have we to assume that in independence, cut loose from U.S. aid of many types, from food stamps for individuals to Department of Transportation highway funds for the island's government, and, critically, from U.S. disaster-area designation after a hurricane, would be not just self-supporting but also prosperous? No reason whatsoever. But Puerto Ricans would rather be poor but proud as an independent country rather than prosperous but part of the United States, right? Wrong.
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Wikipedia reports that:

The [independence] party has elected some legislative candidates, but has yet to win more than a few percentage points of the vote in gubernatorial elections (2.04% in 2008) or the legislative elections (4.5-5% of the island-wide legislative vote in 2008).

In short, Puerto Rico independence is much more popular among mainlanders of Puerto Rican ancestry — who would not have to live with any of the adverse consequences that independence would assuredly bring — and among naive American Liberals who think that Puerto Ricans would have to value independence over prosperity and personal liberty (Latin America is not an area congenial to liberal democracy), than it is among Puerto Ricans on the island themselves.
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I was reviewing tonite a presentation I put up many years ago, and revised in 1999, about bringing Mexico into the Union as perhaps 10 states, when I thought to write to a Liberal U.S. Congressman, Luis Gutierrez, about Puerto Rico statehood. Gutierrez is of Puerto Rican ancestry but, like so many naive mainlanders, thinks Puerto Rico should be independent, even tho islanders themselves don't want independence. So I sent him this short message via feedback form at his Congressional website.

I have seen you a number of times on MSNBC's COUNTDOWN but never heard you address the need to end the colonial status of Puerto Rico and increase Hispanic representation in Congress by two Senators and several Representatives. In this time when gridlock keeps the Nation from marching forward, surely it is imperative that the U.S. citizens of Puerto Rico finally do their duty by joining the good fite for all the right things in Congress. YOU need to give up the teenage-naive ideal of independence for Puerto Rico, and admit that PR is too small and too poor to fend for itself, esp. in its Hurricane Alley location. Instead, you must lead the fite to bring the relative few Hispanic members of Congress -- including only ONE Senator (from my state, NJ), representing 1% of the Senate, for 16% of the Nation's population, whereas a State of Puerto Rico (with the U.S. Virgin Islands incorporated therein) would give the Senate TWO -- into agreement that we canNOT dispense with 4 million Latino votes [oops: s/b 2.5M or 3M, since not all 4M Puerto Ricans are of legal age] in this time when the worst forces in the Nation are making a powerplay to bring down the Obama Administration and return us to the 1950s. THINK for a minute. How ELSE can we increase Latino voters by over 2 MILLION in a single year?

Hispanics are now 16% of the U.S. population, and are represented by ONE Senator, who represents 1% of the Senate, since it presently has 100 members. If Puerto Rico were made a State, Senator Menendez would be joined/outnumbered by the Senators from Puerto Rico, and instead of 16% of the Nation being represented by 1% of the Senate, that 16% would be represented by 3%. That is plainly still inadequate, but Latino representation in the U.S. Senate would be tripled simply by making Puerto Rico a state.
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So why isn't anyone in the Democratic leadership talking about bringing Puerto Rico into the Union? We don't have to sit around waiting to be asked by the island's political leadership. What are Democrats, teenage girls sitting on one side of a middle-school gymnasium waiting to be asked to dance? Find your balls and make Puerto Rico a state. That state, which could destroy two colonies (PR, VI) in one statehood bill, could serve as the core of a wider Caribbean state to be formed from the bits and pieces of the British empire in the Caribbean and Atlantic, from Trinidad thru Jamaica to the British Virgin Islands and on thru the Bahamas to Bermuda.
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There are other ways the Democrats in particular and Liberals more generally could change the United States permanently for the good thru national expansion. Can we all agree that it is a terrible thing that the regressive South plays a powerful part in national politics, but only because it is a large part of the electoral vote for both President and Congress? We CAN reduce the South's relative weight by admitting more states, of more Liberal disposition.
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I mentioned, above, admitting Mexico as perhaps 10 states. We could also admit Canada as 7 states. MSNBC's Rachel Maddow said, on the occasion of President Obama's visit to Canada shortly after taking office, that if there were ever a time to try to annex Canada, this would be it. (I almost never watch her show, tho I did hear that comment. I do regularly watch Keith Olbermann, whose biting and entertaining show precedes hers.) There are many other places the U.S. could annex, to the entire world's benefit: the United Kingdom as 5 states, the Philippines as 3 states, Taiwan as 1 state, reunited Ireland as 1 state, Australia and New Zealand as 6 states, and so forth. Republicans would have to recast themselves as a party of moderation in order to survive as a significant force in national politics in a larger Union, and stop seeing themselves as captive to the most reactionary forces in the Deep South. Everybody would win, including a planet that depends upon enlitened policy pronouncements from and actual practice by the United States.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,421 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM

 
A Few More Comments-Area Remarks (Different Story). I spent a little time adding a comment and responding to other people's comments at a Politics Daily story today, "Congress Returns to Washington With Everything on the Line". A few responses to others' remarks appear below, and my own comment on the story itself appears at the end of this short post. "Comments Moderation" was turned on, so I did not see some of my remarks actually added. My placing them here ensures that they can be read somewhere on the Internet.

Mark Twain was a bitter, bitter, miserably unhappy old man, as his biography now being published shows.
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And how is Government to do anything without taxes? Oh, I know: Government shouldn't do anything. We should all put our lives and health in the hands of the corporations!
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It truly is amazing that so many people would disapprove of tmtee4four's obviously correct observation. These must be the people who love recessions and what they do to decent people.
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Your figures for how much Republicans increased the national debt are WAY LOW. Actually, Reagan TRIPLED the national debt, and Bush I added another third to what Reagan had already increased, so at the end of the Reagan-Bush years, the national debt had QUADRUPLED. During the 8 years of Bush II, the national debt again DOUBLED. So in the 20 years of Republican misrule, the national debt QUADRUPLED. [Oops. S/h/b "OCTUPLED".] But you are quite right: why do Democrats allow themselves to be tarred by the tired accusation of "tax and spend Democrats" but not BLAST the irresponsiblde "don't tax but still spend" Republicans?
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The Bush Administration controlled the regulators, and the regulators REFUSED to regulate "derivatives" of any kind. They didn't even understand them. Nor did the investors.
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Congress does NOT pass budgets over the head of the President. The PRESIDENT submits the budget; the President signs the budget legislation. I do not recall Bush EVER vetoing any budget and being overridden by Democrats.
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The corrosive nature of the whole process, including the corrupting and exhausting need to raise millions of dollars for elections every two years, has produced disgust by many Representatives who decide they do NOT want to stay in office.
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So you want the rich to get richer and the poor and middle class to make up the shortfall. Do you make $400,000 a year? If not, why would you want people who have more money than you will ever see in your lifetime to get even more obscenely rich? Of course, if you do make over $250,000, you are just concerned about yourself, not this Republic.
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The Senate is NOT authorized by the Constitution to operate on anything but simple majority rule for any step in the preparation and passage of ordinary legislation. That is, the 60% supermajority to override a filibuster is insanely UNCONSTITUTIONAL. Vice President Biden, who is President of the Senate, should simply rule that 50% + 1 is all the Constitution requires, so the Democrats can ram thru what the people want them to do, and the "Party of No" can cry themselves to sleep at nite. Democrats should also warn EVERYONE, in every part of the Nation, that if the no-no-1,000-times-no behavior of the Republicans works, and produces a shift in power toward the Party of No, the Democrats will in the next Congress learn their lesson and become the Party of HELL No, and block every single thing the Republicans try to do, and use the same fierce rhetoric against Republicans that Republicans have used against them.

(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,418 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 12:52 PM

 
"Hussein". Richard Wolffe, an MSNBC commentator, was speaking on Countdown Friday about a significant portion of this country's population that doesn't want to hear anything President Obama says about religious tolerance or even issues of national security (if anything at all). In casting about for reasons why that is, Wolffe spoke to this ludicrous but powerful problem: Obama is a President, "let's face it, whose middle name is 'Hussein'."
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"Hussein". Where have I heard that before? Ah, yes: King Hussein of Jordan, an enlitened monarch who married an American, Lisa Halaby, who became Queen Noor. Hussein bin Talal was a goodlooking, personable charmer who ruled the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan for 47 years, from 1952 until his death in 1999. "Hashemite" means descended from the Prophet Muhammed. He was a trusted friend of the United States who could speak frankly about the bad choices U.S. Administrations were making, and a very popular figure in this country, which he visited many times. He spoke English fluently, and of course his wife spoke absolutely perfect English, since she was born in Washington, DC. So why doesn't anyone associate "Hussein" with King Hussein of Jordan and his American wife, the blond and beautiful Queen Noor? And why aren't Liberals doing anything to renew that fond mental association?
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It seems to me that Arabs and Arab-Americans have been entirely too timid and low-profile for their own good. Couldn't Queen Noor and her half-American children — and think about that: half-American children who are descended from the Prophet Muhammed! — step up their activities to bridge the dangerous gap between the Arab world and the United States? It's almost as tho the thinking is "Don't draw too much attention to yourself, or you will be targeted for attack." Americans don't understand people who could have the limelite but won't step into it, even for a good cause. Americans love fame, and think that privacy is for people who can't get publicity.
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I'm not saying that Queen Noor should be attending Hollywood parties, and her sons and dauters with the King (who range in age from 30 down to 24), and the Princes' small dauters, should be seen in the glitziest and most glamorous settings, say in harem pants in the audience in Fashion Week — but why not royal princesses wearing some refined designers' clothes on the fashion runway? More generally, why aren't American Arabs, Iranians, Pakistanis, and the like working to change the stereotypes and bring some high-profile dignity and glamor to the image of Moslems abroad who are friendly to the United States, and of American Moslems as being as American as apple pie? Speaking of pie, Americans don't even know Arab food, or music, or any type of dance but bellydancing, which surely cannot be the whole of Arab dance. Step it up, people. The quickest way to a man's heart may not be thru his stomach, but a chain of Middle Eastern and Indo-Pak fast-food joints could open minds, not just mouths and a few top buttons.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,418 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 10:53 PM

 
Answering the Rightwing Crazies Again. I found an opinion piece featured on AOL News today by Jeff Biggers entitled "After 9/11 -- When Will We Reach the Tipping Point?" (at which violent rhetoric turns into actual violence). There were a bunch of comments at the end, filled, as so often happens with online comments boards, with insane and dishonest propaganda by Radical Rightwingers. I decided to respond to some of them, and ended up, nearly 12 hours later, having posted over 100 comments, a fourth of the total 402 comments that had been posted when I stopped. I'm only one man, but I do what I can do.
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Some of my comments do not appear below, being only things like drawing attention to the comments-area moderators that some comments were repeats that should be deleted. The 97 comments I do show below amount to about 10,300 words. I do NOT show the original comments to which I reply, but you should be able to infer their gist. You might not have the patience to read thru all of them, but they address a multitude of topics from a multitude of angles. If you yourself participate in comments areas, you might like to make mental note of some of these points for your own retorts to Rightwing crazies. Now, my comments.
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How is requiring people to buy insurance from PRIVATE companies "takeover of healthcare"? What government "takeover of transportation" is there? None. Such takeovers as have occurred have been by cities and STATES, of bus lines and subway and interstate train systems that didn't work as private enterprises (as laissez-faire capitalism has NEVER worked), and those LOCAL takeovers were done DECADES ago. What "takeover of energy" has there been? ALL the major energy companies are PRIVATE, including FOREIGN companies that are allowed to march across our borders and victimize our citizens. Beckites keep talking total, paranoid nonsense as tho it is proven truth. And Beck DOES talk insurrectionary violence; snippets of his incendiary rhetoric have been captured and shown on, among other places, MSNBC's "Countdown with Keith Olbermann". The phrase "our sacred honor and our lives" is a mangled and inelegant version of the end of the Declaration of Independence, in which the signers pledged "our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor" to the cause of independence -- which had to be won by VIOLENCE. No one is fooled by the code the Radical Right uses. And some don't even bother with code. There was that Tea Party candidate who had an actor costumed as George Washington council "Gather your armies." He was defeated, by the way, as will the would-be insurrectionaries against racial and social justice, because this is the United States, and we are better than that. Alas, that doesn't mean that no one will be killed by sad and deranged individuals pushed over the edge by irresponsible rhetoric from the Radical Right.
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This President who "wants to be a dictator" had 60 votes in the Senate and a huge margin in the House but REFUSED to push thru single-payer universal healthcare, or even a public option as alternative to private insurers. Again and again he let the numerically feeble Republican MINORITY stop everything he tried to do. That is not the behavior of a dictator. That is the behavior of a FOOL who keeps trying to win his enemies over, when everyone except him knows that they will NEVER be won over, so should instead be trampled into the dust so we can do what the people who elected Democrats to the White House and majorities in both houses of Congress WANTED them to do. Now, because the Democrats did NOT act dictatorially or even democratically -- allowing minority rule is the opposite of democracy -- they risk losing their majority in at least one house. What then? Oh, I know: instead of the Republicans' "Party of No", we will have a Democratic "Party of HELL no!", and the entire government will grind to a halt -- except for Republican hearing after hearing and investigation after investigation into everything the White House tries to do. If you loved the Clinton years of millions of wasted hours on investigations into nothing, you will love this country over the next two years if Republicans gain control of the House. Instead of holding hearings on how to solve our economic problems, conduct foreign policy, provide national security, or anything else we need Congress to focus on, we will have all the energies of government wasted on mutual recriminations and refusals to work together. Without an energetic and unified government, what will happen to the economy? Oh, I know, it will drop from Great Recession into Depression, and the Beckites can wait for 12 years or more for the free market to save us!
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At the beginning of this republic, only people who owned property were allowed to vote, and only men. Voters were expected to be literate, moderate, and well-informed. Cincinnatus was the ideal public person, who rose to an emergency, then retired to private life. As for theft of the land from Amerindians, the issue is not who is in control but how they treat the defeated. American Indians have ALL the rights of other Americans, including the right to vote for President and Congress, and seek work outside the reservation as of right, PLUS rights others do not have, such as defying state laws against gambling, evading sales tax, having lands of their own that cannot be sold to outsiders, etc. There are at least A BILLION people around the world who would LOVE to have, here, the rights of American Indians. As for slavery, it was abolished in most of the North shortly after independence, and the Constitution of 1787 provided that the importation of slaves could be ended at any time after January 1, 1808 -- and it was indeed ended that very day. Why does no one remember that it cost the Union over 360,000 dead to end slavery? What other country has ever paid so high a price to do the right thing?
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NO ONE bears responsibility for 9/11 but George W. Bush. He was told that Islamist extremists intended to hijack airliners and use them as flying bombs, and he KEPT IT SECRET. Had he just TOLD air travelers that they CANNOT permit a hijacking because they will all be killed, they would have done what the passengers on flite 93 did -- stopped the hijackers from flying into the WTC or Pentagon. Even better, the passengers on the doomed planes would have PREVENTED the hijacking to begin with, not fought back after the lunatics had already taken over the cockpit. It is not hypothetical that passengers would have prevented hijackings if they had known to watch out for hijacking. They DID stop the hijackers on flite 93. Tragically, they reacted too late, only after they had been warned by a cellfone call from a private person, NOT a public warning by the Government. Bush was warned, but refused to warn us. ALL the death, and ALL the devastation of that day is HIS FAULT.
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Why don't you write what really has the Radical Right upset? A black man is now the Boss Man, and you can't STAND it.
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Burning a book is not speech. Speech is the production of sounds by the vocal apparatus, and NOTHING more. Amplified speech isn't really "speech", since the sounds are not produced by a human being but by a device. When the First Amendment was written, the loudest SPEECH was shouting thru a megaphone. THAT is what they protected, private speech that could be heard only a short distance away. Gestures are not protected speech; gestures are not speech at all. Nor are acts nor gestures "the press", which is also constitutionally protected. Nor is art (paintings, posters, statuary), performance art, dance, choice of clothing, nudity, public sex, piercings, tattoos, and a host of other forms of "expression" constitutionally protected. They really are NOT. There are reasonable extensions to the concept of "speech", such as amplified speech or broadcasting; and unreasonable extensions, such as asserting that public nudity is constitutionally protected "speech". Burning a Koran -- or Bible -- is not speech, and thus NOT constitutionally protected. Further, permitting or banning it is properly decided according to the "fiting words doctrine", so government can suppress it if it seems highly likely to 'inflame' passions and produce violence.
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U.S. foreign poicy toward Moslems, particularly Arabs, has been monumentally monstrous. The U.S. Government has given Israel over $114 BILLION of taxpayer money over the years, and U.S. Administrations of both parties have backed Israel in every atrocity it commits. Madeleine Albright was asked by "60 Minutes" in May 1996 if the death of HALF A MILLION Iraqi children in a decade of "sanctions" was 'worth the price' and she DID NOT DENY that that horrendous, nitemarish toll had occurred, but merely said she thought that it was indeed worth the price. 500,000 dead Iraqis from U.S. sanctions, BEFORE the second war against Iraq -- both ordered by Israel. How are we innocents, much less angels? Someone -- indeed, lots of "people" -- here definitely deserved to die on 9/11, for the horrendous crimes against Arabs committed by our Government in our name, and with our silent assent, but it wasn't the office workers in the Twin Towers. In the days that followed, did we ask ourselves, in pained honesty, "Why would anyone want to do that?" Of course not. That would have been the behavior of DECENT people. We already KNEW why we were attacked: because we had been participating in mass killings and grotesque discrimination against Arabs by our dear Israeli "allies" for decades. You don't ask yourself questions the answers to which you know. 2,777 dead Americans does not BEGIN to even the score for a bedrock minimum of 1.5 MILLION Arabs killed by the U.S. on behalf of Israel. But we see ourselves as the aggrieved party? No, we are the monsters, and we don't even have the integrity to admit to our sins and repent, the only condition upon which we could begin to expect forgiveness. Would "Islam" (the 1.5 billion people around the world who adhere to that religion) hate us if we didn't support Israel and make excuses for all its crimes, continue to kill Moslems, yet pretend to be saints? I don't think so. The very first step in countering terrorism is to STOP INCITING terrorism against you, by ending your own misdeeds and APOLOGIZING for past crimes. But if we keep pretending to [be] angels, to Islam's devils, we will continue to have to fite "extremists". Yes, people who kill 2,777 Americans in a single day are "extremists". U.S. Administrations and armies that have killed over a MILLION AND A HALF Moslems are -- what? -- "moderates"? I don't think so.
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To move the Islamic center would be an ADMISSION OF GUILT, to say, practically in so many words, "Yes, Islam DID attack the WTC. It was NOT the act of 19 individual madmen but of the religion Islam itself. Islam is NOT a religion of peace but of war, and we are making war against YOU. This move of a few blocks is not a surrender, nor even an armistice, but only a tactical retreat. We will attack again, and you will not be prepared. We will catch you by surprise then, as we gloriously did on 9/11, and the next time will be worse." If you are truly a Moslem yourself, you CANNOT want anyone to make such an 'admission' about Islam.
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The people selling out the United States are the free-traders who have ended all protection for U.S. businesses from unfair competition, and exported over 14 million jobs. Free trade without conditions is the program of the REPUBLICANS, not Democrats.
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Further to howwil's correct observation, all of the (ostensible) Moslems who committed that individual crime are DEAD. Let it go. There IS, however, a problem with Islam, that we also have with nonhierarchical Protestantism, as shown by how one silly man with a congregation of only 50 people, can effectively set himself up as THE authority on what Jesus would do, and BILLIONS of people around the world can hear his crazy claims. Islam, like Protestantism, has no Pope -- or Caliph -- to pronounce authoritatively what Islam IS and is NOT. So every lunatic with a Koran can claim to speak for Islam; and every sad, demented loser who blames someone else for his failures in life can launch a terrorist attack and blame it on Islam.
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"What is right" is to let people believe in all the ridiculous religions they want, as long as they don't hurt anybody. If you want to believe that Adam and Eve were the only two people at the beginning of the world, but their children married outside the family, you go right ahead and believe it. And if you want to believe that someone who died, rose three days later (unlike anyone else in history), walked the Earth and then ascended to the heavens, and that the Trinity isn't polytheism, you go right ahead. And if someone else wants to count Saturday as the Christian Sabbath, so what? And if Jews want to deny Jesus as Messiah, that's their right too. On and on, thru all the religions that existed before the U.S. was created or have been invented since, we can let people believe what they will, or fite uncountable religious wars. Americans believe in religious tolerance, not religious war. And that is what we are standing up for now.
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Catholics are not a race. But Catholics did burn heretics at the stake in some countries, despite Jesus's Golden Rule. Puritan Protestants in British Massachusetts used to put people into stocks and throw garbage at them; and dunk people in ponds; and toss people weighed down with rocks into ponds to see if they were guilty or innocent (the innocent were said to sink!); and hanged "witches". Many crimes in England were punished by death until 200 years ago; and branding and other forms of mutilation were commonplace in Christian countries until the modern era. Islam began 600 years after Christianity (exactly 1500 years ago this year). Should we be so very surprised that it hasn't moderated as Christianity has in the last 200 years?
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There is no God. This world would be a lot more peaceful if everyone would just accept that fact.
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No one is advocating appeasing terrorists. This is what is called in logic a "straw man" that YOU invent and then attack.
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Stop talking nonsense. We fought one Civil War to preserve the Union. All the nutjobs who think they can secede should do some reading about the Civil War, and ask themselves if they want their town to look like Richmond after the Civil War.
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The Tea Party is Republican, even tho Republicans have OCTUPLED the national debt since Reagan. The only year we had a surplus reducing the debt rather than deficit contributing to the debt was under a Democrat, Bill Clinton. So why aren't the Tea Partiers attacking the Republicans and embracing the Democrats? And as for ingfp's suggestion that Islam is not a religion, saying so doesn't make it so. All the world, including all experts on religion, state uncategorically [oops; started as "unanimously" or "unambiguously" but got only partially changed in revision] that Islam is a religion. Stop lying. Liars destroy their credility in all things.
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I take it "towel-head" is a reference to turbans? Few Moslems, esp. in the west, wear turbans, which are more common for non-Moslems in the Indian Subcontinent. The 19 WTC hijackers did not wear turbans. Conversely, all devout Sikhs (a non-Moslem faith) wear turbans. Many Arabs wear a keffiyeh, which is NOT a turban. Many Moslems wear a cap of some sort, much as Jews wear a yarmulke or broad-brimmed hat. Would you call a Hassidic Jew a "felt-head" or "fur-head"? Maybe you would.
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The CONTEXT of everything means something, so plucking a few phrases from a very lengthy work can misrepresent the overall sense. For the warning about Christians and Jews, see footnote 75 on page 179 of the Koran distributed free by, I think, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (which has an ongoing program to distribute free Korans to Americans, so thoughtful, fair-minded people can judge Islam for themselves). That note says in part that Moslems should guard against the loss of their own RELIGIOUS IDENTITY by associating too closely with people of other belief systems. Remember, Islam was new; Christianity was 600 years old; Judaism, at least another 300 and maybe 1,200 years older, and those communities were well developed and influential in Arabia. The footnote goes on to say, "this prohibition of a 'moral alliance' with non-Muslims does NOT constitute an injunction against normal, friendly relations with such of them as are well-disposed towards Muslims. It should be borne in mind that the term WALI has several shades of meaning: 'ally', 'friend', 'helper', 'protector', etc. The choice of the particular term -- and sometimes a combination of two terms -- is always dependent on the context." As for a tax on non-Moslems in the area under Moslem rule (not then even one entire country), that tax was IN LIEU of the Moslem religious obligation to give alms. [A colleague in Britain advises me that the tax was actually in lieu of military service. But, either way, it was not an extraordinary imposition that specially victimized "dhimmis", non-Moslems allowed to live in Moslem societies. Instead it was a trade-off.] As for imposing upon religious minorities and making plain their inferiority, compare the insistence of American bigots in the recent era on putting "In God We Trust" on the money even of nonbelievers. The Founders of this Republic did NOT adopt any such motto, but "E Pluribus Unum" -- "Out of many, one". One of the many groups, not just states, that the Founders wanted to become united in a single nation, culturally as well as politically, is nonbelievers. But just try telling the religious to keep their religion to themselves and stop passing themselves off as the moral superiors of atheists who are actually FAR more moral than are Rightwing 'Christians'.
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That is EXACTLY the kind of VIOLENT rhetoric this article is talking about. Michael Moore, who is urging the people on his mailing list to send money to help build the Park Place (NOT "Ground Zero") community center and mosque, points out that 70% of Americans were initially in favor of the invasion of Iraq, even tho Iraq never attacked us and never had WMD, but the majority have now realized they were misled. Every single good thing about this country, starting with its very creation, was done by Liberals, who have had to overcome fierce resistance -- even armed resistance -- from Neanderthals defending our "traditions" -- such as slavery. History is now, always has been, and always will be, on the side of Liberals. The future of this country will be better than either its benited past or its contentious present. "We will overcome!" And it is the KNOWLEDGE that Liberals will inevitably win every contest, that has reactionaries threatening to reach for their guns. Go ahead. You might as well die by the superior power of the decent people of this country, because you are NOT going to like the future, when white people have no special privileges, gay people can marry (which threatens NO ONE ELSE's marriage), no one dies because s/he doesn't have health insurance, and the rich give back, thru progressive taxation, the money they have STOLEN from the poor and middle class by redistribution UP. Reactionaries will inevitably fail to stop progress, as Knute failed to sweep the tide back out to the sea. There is no Confederacy today, and 258,000 Neanderthals died for nothing. Alas, 360,000 patriotic Americans also died to create the future. We can kill off another quarter million reactionaries who rise in insurrection, if need be; let's just hope that nowhere near 360,000 decent Americans have to die to defend OUR future.
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We're not talking about actions by Moslems overseas. We don't control those countries. We do control our own. And WE will live by OUR rules: the First Amendment's freedom of religion. If you don't like freedom of religion, LEAVE.
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I doubt any such poll produced any such results, and you provide no link to any such news report. But there are a lot of morons in the United States, and not just in the South, tho that IS their homeland. (It must be very hard for smart people to live in the South.)
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dickn2000b, Mormons are NOT Christians as most Christians regard things. They do not believe in the Trinity (one God in three aspects) but in three separate entities acting together. That is not Christianity, any more than Arianism was (orthodox) Christianity.
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(To wergtlnbrgrs) Yes, there are some decent millionaires who embrace the Democratic Party. There were even decent rich Republicans, the "Rockefeller Republicans", until they were driven out of the Party. But Jay Rockefeller (a Democrat), John Kerry, and other rich Democrats do not want society to be turned over to the rich, do not want millions more jobs exported so that American corporations can pay higher dividends to their stockholders, do not want to keep taxes artificially low on megamillionaires so they can have 14 houses rather than 13. There has been a stark redistribution of wealth UPWARD in recent decades, in which money has been taken from the poor and middle class and given to the rich. And that is what the Republican Party today stands for: redistribution UP is terrific! redistribution DOWN is a crime against humanity! And the poor white trash who have been most hurt by plutocratic policy have been voting for their ENEMIES because those enemies dangle shiny objects like Abortion and Gay Marriage in front of their eyes to hypnotize them and simultaneously BLIND them to what the servants of the rich are doing to them.
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wergtlnbrgrs' comment about the major networks and the intemperate replies to it should be removed from this discussion. No one can give a single instance of how the major networks have in any way distorted any news story to promote a Liberal agenda. That is a mindless slander that is absolutely false.
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You are misstating -- be it from profound ignorance or knowing slander -- the teachings of Islam as regards nonbelievers. Christians and Jews (and even Zoroastrians and Hindus) are "Peoples of the Book", and Islam FORBIDS killing them for not accepting Islam. Islam's harsh sentences for theft and other crimes derive ultimately from the Old Testament's "eye for an eye" teaching -- Judaism. You may remember that the Jewish religious authorities of the day had one now-famous "blasphemer" (nonbeliever) put to death. His name was "Jesus", of Nazareth. So perhaps we should suppress Judaism? No one but YOU says that prosecuting terrorists is inhibiting freedom of religion. NO ONE. You have erected a straw man, then torn it down. But that 'man' was only straw, not real flesh and blood. Honest people do not create false stances for their opponents just to knock them down. If you cannot prevail with honest argument, perhaps you should just not try to argue at all.
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What Moslems do in foreign countries is not subject to our control. We control us. If we're lucky.
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The U.S. must not punish people in THIS country for the acts of total strangers in OTHER countries. If you can't see that, perhaps we should punish YOU for the 9/11 hijackings.
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The Rightwing Heritage Foundation defines "entitlements" as "middle class retirement programs, Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare". Which of those do you think we shouldn't have? I warrant YOU expect one or more of them to be there for YOU when YOU need them.
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Not even YOU can believe such nonsense. Glenn Beck got perhaps 87,000 people to attend his rally, and some of them were just tourists who happened to be at the Mall and wondered what was going on. Barack Obama got 69,456,897 votes in 2008. Who is more important a figure? Who speaks for more Americans? Hm. That's a tuffie. As to "all races" at the Beck rally? Ha!
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Tea Partiers have worn GUNS on their hips to their "peaceful" rallies, even outside a hall where the President of the United States was speaking. Guns, not rocks and bottles. And what rocks and bottles have been thrown by Liberals, at what events, where? In any event, the article at issue is NOT a news report (as should be plain from its mentioning an incident 155 years ago) but an OPINION piece that spoke to the risks inherent in using violent language, even when you don't mean it to be taken literally. What is done in some foreign countries, by mobs, has nothing to do with what the United States, acting thru Government, should do. Listen to the rhetoric of the Radical Right, and if you don't understand the violent implications and code words, perhaps you need some training in active listening.
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Direct democrac[y; oops] is unworkable in a country as large and diverse as the United States. We can't have people ignorant of the issues voting on laws they don't understand. People are too busy with their multitudinous responsibilities at work and at home to spend 1,000 hours educating themselves on every "social issue" that some manipulative people funded by millionaires might want to put on the ballot. In lowercase-r republican democracy, we hire somebody to vote for us after taking those 1,000 hours to educate him- or herself on our behalf. We have seen lots of bad results of public ballot measures, esp. measures couched in deceptive language (in which, for instance, if you are in favor of something you have to vote "No"). We can't have everybody on the bus telling the driver where to drive.
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Ah, there we have it, the inevitable Hitler analogy. This one is particularly clumsy. The world had no sympathy for defeated Germany, and sympathy played no part in their trying to appease Hitler. They had just been thru a horrible war that killed 10 million people, and they hoped to avoid another one. corbinchef's ignorance is astonishing when he says of "these countries", including LEBANON, that you'll never find a Christian! Lebanon is 39% CHRISTIAN! Lebanon was taken by the expanding Moslem empire by 636 A.D., and was dominated by Moslem rulers for over 1,300 years. Yet in all that time, a substantial proportion of the population has remained Christian. So much for Moslems destroying Christianity and forcing conversions. In similar fashion, Iraq had a substantial Christian community, and Saddam's Deputy Prime Minister, Tariq Aziz, was a Christian. The U.S. invasion has produced intergroup hostility that Saddam had suppressed, and the post-Saddam violence has driven many Christians out of the country. Let's not congratulate ourselves too loud for our tolerance of gay Americans. Wikipedia says of U.S. sodomy laws, "They were invalidated by the 2003 Supreme Court decision Lawrence v. Texas, though members of the U.S. Armed Forces may still be prosecuted for sodomy under special criteria." 2003. Wow, that is so long ago! In 1970 I put forward the term "Gay Pride" as it is now used, and I can assure you that gay men are NOT free in much of this country to this day, and certainly not in the U.S. military that is supposedly bringing freedom to Iraq and Afghanistan. But tolerance of homosexuality is NOT part of their 'civilizing mission'. To sum up, then, let me make my own Hitler analogy as to corbinchef's remarks: you dared to mention Lebanon in the same paragraph where you assert that Islam kills Christians, even tho Christians are 39% of Lebanon after 1,300 years of Moslem rule. That is a perfect example of the "Big Lie" technique, which says that if you're going to lie, lie big, because most people will not believe you would DARE to utter so outrageous a lie. Guess who came up with that technique, and its name? Adolf Hitler.
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Obama is not divisive. He tried endlessly to reach out to Republicans, but every time, they said NO. The divide is racial, and for young Americans, that divide is trivial. But for older people, esp. those raised in the days when Jim Crow was very much in power all over the South, the racial divide is wider than the Grand Canyon, and they want it to STAY that way, but see the other side getting closer and closer every day. They blame Obama not for pushing us apart but for hastening the day when there won't be so much distance between the races as the spacer cracks between blocks of sidewalk. They don't fear division; they LOVE division.
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I did a little math in the first several un-serious (and unamusing) tests of our memory. 1965, 1972, 1979, 1983 -- and then I stopped reading. 7 years between the first and second incidents; another 7 years between the 2d and 3d; 4 years between the 3d and 4th. Big friggin' deal. Let's deal with murder rates in the United States -- Christian-on-Christian violence that we don't ever express that way, of course -- EVERY year. Wikipedia says: "Ira M. Leonard has calculated that during the 20th century, more Americans were murdered by fellow Americans than soldiers died on active duty during the First World War, Second World War, Korean War and the Vietnam War combined." And notice Jim's suspicious refusal to mention that the athletes attacked in Munich were Israelis, not Americans.
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Imam Rauf is not a terrorist and is not a friend to terrorists. Again, the Big Lie is alive and well and living in the demented minds of Radical Rightwing bigots, and in comments area on the Internet. Both the Obama Administration and the BUSH Administration have sent Imam Rauf abroad to promote ANTI-terrorist attitudes in the Moslem world and bridge the chasm between disaffected young men in the Moslem world, and the American people.
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"carlton" just proves the point the Biggers article was trying to make: the crazies really are talking about violence, and hoping someone takes them up on their rhetoric.
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(To Herb) To the extent that Americans see their prosperity being subverted, it is the doing of REPUBLICANS' radical free-trade policies that put no barriers in the way of cheap imports and actively promote the export of jobs of every description. Cheap imports and fear of further job exports intimidate workers out of demanding better wages and working conditions, as employers use cheap Chinese labor to LOWER real wages and REDUCE benefits here, by putting us into a "global economy" in which all working people are in a race to the bottom, for the benefit ONLY of the rich -- who are certain they can survive as everyone around them is impoverished, pushing everyone else down so they can rise up. And as the RICH are slashing the wages and benefits of the middle class and working poor, they blame the Democrats, who are HOSTILE to the destruction of American working people, and shift all the attention they can away from their robber-baron behavior onto immigrants, Moslems, gay people -- everyone they can categorize as "Them". The REALITY is that Hispanic immigrants are learning English at a much higher rate than earlier waves of non-English-speaking immigrants (just watch any Spanish-language TV station for a while and you will see commercials for English-language courses) -- so much so that most Hispanics fear their grandchildren will have to study Spanish as a foreign language in high school, if they even care to do that rather than study French, German, or Chinese! Liberals do NOT blame the U.S. for all the problems of the world. Some Communist-influenced fools do assert that, but no one takes them seriously. American Liberals want to play a positive role in the world, thru education and technical assistance, helping establish non-Communist labor unions, etc. We also are not so arrogant as to believe we can learn nothing from other countries. No, we're willing to learn from France, Britain, even Canada how to provide quality healthcare to everyone at a reasonable cost. NO Liberal blames the United States for Moslem beheadings of their own people, and we are at war AGAINST the Taliban, under a Democratic President who INCREASED troop levels in Afghanistan. We aren't holding the victims still while the Taliban beheads them. We're trying to STOP the beheadings, honor killings, and all the other madness of savages around this planet. "Conservatives" are the ones willing to play pattycake with despots and turn a blind eye to barbarism on the grounds that "it's none of our business; we've got problems of our own".
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So you understand that the Republicans' devotion to radical free trade is destroying this country? Good for you.
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Liberals have their own, positive program, that old "Liberal agenda" thing, remember? We don't blame for the sake of distracting people from the real issues. We say that this country can and should be better, and we're trying to fix the problems. Rightwingers insist on blaming our problems on others, and REFUSING to fix them.
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No, Liberals demand tolerance from American Moslems too, and promote religious freedom everywhere. We don't have the power to change every country on Earth. We're having trouble enuf changing this country for the better, because there's always some Rightwinger who will say "white" if a Liberal says "black", or "night" if a Liberal says "day".
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There is nothing either Socialist or Communist about the Obama Administration, and NO ONE can point to a single Obama program that has ANY Socialist component whatsoever. In regard to healthcare, for instance, a common Radical Rightwing target, "Obamacare" requires Americans to buy health insurance from PRIVATE companies. There is not a single Government-owned healthcare service or co-op or anything else in the plan. Not one. So either the people who complain about "Obamacare" as Socialism don't have the faintest clue as to what Socialism is, or they just don't care, but use "Socialist" as a playground name, much like "poopyhead" or, if all is reduced to what is really meant, n* (the N-word).
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Actually "In God We Trust" wasn't put on any paper currency until 1957! (170 years after the Constitution). (To remartantiques) "Allah" is just the Arabic word for "God", just as Orthodox Jews write "G-d" and some people use "Yahweh". "Separation of church and state" is just a linguistic formulation for what the First Amendment actually says: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof". How would you express that? It says that Government will not support religion and will not suppress religion but stand apart from all religious controversies: thus the simple and universally understood phrase "separation of church and state". If you have a better way of putting that, pls enliten us.
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There are 8.4 million people in NYC, and the Mayor is a JEW. Moslems do not run Downtown, which is where the (Jewish) Mayor's office is. As for the price of the building, a building that had been vacant for years in an area with a high vacancy rate, that the price should not have been high is hardly a surprise. It was DAMAGED by falling debris on 9/11, and damaged property in an area with a high vacancy rate goes cheap. The only people who see something "shady" in people who buy a damaged building in a blited neighborhood and fix it up so they can use it for their own (thoroly legal) activities are people given to conspiracy theories. If you really live in NYC, why don't you go to the front door of the old Burlington Coat Factory on Park Place and carefully measure the distance to the nearest point of where any building of Ground Zero stood? You will not even be able to SEE Ground Zero from the front of the building, because there are buildings in the way, but will have to round a corner and walk some 500 feet to get to Vesey Street (the northern edge of the WTC plaza), and won't be able to walk to where either Tower stood because the former WTC plaza is a construction site.
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(To fishcove3) "Thug" is code for "the n-word". You cannot provide so much as a single example of anything "COMMIE-MARXIST-MAOIST" in Obama's legislative program, either to-date or announced. Your hatred for Obama is without basis in fact. So either you have a bias, probably racial, that blinds you to reality, or you need professional help.
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There are 1.5 billion Moslems on Earth. They control enormous wealth, including lots of a little thing called "oil", which is hardly worthless, so what they think, and feel, is important to U.S. interests and, even more importantly, to Europe, which is also important in the world. In the United States, there are perhaps 7 million Moslems, who are equally not "insignificant" or "worthless". Americans VALUE people, and do not dismiss 1.5 billion around the world and 7 million people in this country as "insignificant [and] worthless".
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Rightwingers are very good at blaming PAST Democratic Presidents for the failure of current Republican Presidents (e.g., Clinton for 9/11/2001, 8 months after he left office), but refuse all blame to Republican past Presidents even when they create a Great Recession that would under any circumstances take years to recover from.
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(To Herb) Liberals love the United States, but are sad that so many people have no respect for the ideals on which it was founded, and WITHOUT which it is nothing. Liberals love and defend the First Amendment's freedom of religion; Rightwingers hate it, and want to impose their lunatic religious nonsense upon everyone (note the "In God We Trust" they insisted on putting on money that everyone, including atheists, agnostics, and those millions of people who regard themselves as "spiritual but not religious", has to use). We don't "take up" for the Moslems specially but defend EVERYONE's right to believe in whatever religious idiocy they like.
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The Iraq war was for Israel, not oil.
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Your rights are not dependent on my "feelings".
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Barack Obama became President because a LARGE MAJORITY of voters put him in office, not 26-29%. You're just making up numbers. Obama's overall approval rating is 44%, today, and goes up and down unpredictably. Your talk of Obama supporters resorting to violence is PROJECTION at best, and diversion at worst, exactly the tactic of the thief who cries "Thief!" and points off in the distance while he makes his escape. It is NOT Obama's supporters who have been talking nonstop since January 2009 about insurrection against the duly constituted government of the United States, but Radical Rightwingers, including one governor, Perry of Texas, actually threatening secession! So here we have again, in your comment, Hitler's wondrous Big Lie technique in play. But it won't work, because we now know that yes, some people WILL lie brazenly, and the bigger the lie, the bigger the fraud, period, not the more believable the statement.
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American Moslems did not attack the WTC. Quite the contrary, the Moslem community in Downtown Manhattan was traumatized by that attack. YOU weren't there. THEY were.
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Small point: the population of the United States is on the order of 308M, not 350M, as far as the Census Bureau knows. Yes, when you have that many people, you can expect a large number of every type of people, from geniuses to mental defectives, saints to sinners. The problem with telling people abroad that that one pastor does not represent the United States is that they live, for the most part, under authoritarian regimes that could STOP such a publicity stunt legally. They don't understand that some people think the First Amendment prevents us from stopping a Koran-burning, tho of course it does not, since burning a Koran is not speech nor the press, the only forms of "expression" protected by the First Amendment. The local fire department was poised to step in to stop that non-speech action, but we will never know if they would really have acted if the pastor had insisted on proceeding.
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When people all around the country are talking intemperately, as on comments areas and message boards all over the Internet, about resistance, revolution and, by implication, assassination, he has reason to be nervous.
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And a small government is too small to rein in the abuses of ENORMOUS corporations, each larger in economic size and power than many individual countries.
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How did Democrats ruin the housing market during a Republican Administration? Banks are not government. The REPUBLICANS started both of the 2 wars you complain about. Republicans under Dubya DOUBLED the national debt! And you're blaming Democrats?
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"Street scum" = the N-word. You're going to have to find a harder code for your hate words. Biggers addressed not the substantive political views of ANYONE, but the VIOLENT RHETORIC we see everywhere, including your comment! Obama supporters aren't threatening violence against anyone. Obama is President, and governs by law, not violence. Another Hitler reference against a BLACK man! Hitler called the United States "negrified", and I don't think most of Obama's supporters would like that very much, but MOST of Obama's 'critics' (slanderers) would LOVE it.
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(To leearenfro) You counted every single attendee? That must have taken you several days, by which time the crowd, of whatever size, would have dispersed. No, there were NOT hundreds of thousands of people at Beck's rally. CBS News hired a reputable crowd-counting corporation that took aerial fotos, imposed a grid, counted the people in a bunch of grid segments around the fotos, then multiplied the average number in each grid square by the total number of squares. They came up with 87,000. Why isn't that big enuf for you? It's a very respectable crowd. Why do you have to multiply it?
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(To bjcoastal777) Unemployment INSURANCE is not welfare but an INSURANCE fund that WORKING people pay into with every check. No work, no insurance eligibility. Obama wants to end tax breaks for the rich and super-rich, not for working people, but Republicans want to keep taxes low on the rich, because they don't think they live well enuf. No, John McCain's 8 to 10 houses and 13 cars aren't enuf! How many houses do YOU own? How many would you own if the super-rich get an extension of their tax breaks, which will add $700 BILLION to the deficit over ten years and force working people to make up the difference?
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ALL print newspapers are hurting, no matter their political leanings. It's a question of technological change, not change in political preference toward the Radical Right.
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You don't see that the intemperate remarks you make, with all their exclamation points, are exactly the kind of violent rhetoric that Biggers is talking about?
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Honor killing is not a Moslem teaching but a cultural oddity in a few countries. Do you see the irony in your complaining about a few "over the top" posters of comments on the Radical Right being mischaracterized as representative of the Tea Party movement, while at exactly the same time you characterize Moslems and immigrants on the basis of actions of a tiny minority?
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(To Danna) So you really think that China, India, Latin America, and Christian sub-Saharan Africa will all consent to be taken over by radical Islam? Stop fearmongering with nonsensical assertions. Deal with REALITY, if you are able to see it. You say America won't fite back, IGNORING the fact that we are in TWO wars in Moslem countries!
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Who is silencing WHOM? Glenn Beck was STOPPED from holding a rally in Washington? His TV show and radio show have been forced off the air? Rush Limbaugh is in prison? What are you TALKING about?
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The only way the Obama Administration and Democrats in Congress have ignored the will of the people is by trying to bring Republicans into bipartisanship. The people want the Dems to CRUSH Republican obstructionists and do what they were ELECTED to do. Your implied threat of violence is exactly the kind of intemperate rhetoric that Biggers is talking about.
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The piece is OPINION. It does not pretend to be reportage, so is NOT "posing as journalism".
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You jump from talking about Irish and German immigrants to asking if there are enemies -- anywhere on Earth -- plotting attacks upon the U.S. Apples and oranges. Now, if you are asserting that Moslem immigrants to the United States are plotting to destroy the United States from within, you need evidence, or you need to be calle[d] on your group slander. As for the anti-immigrant people in 1855 Louisville who were virulently anti-Catholic, they DID see Catholics as a threat against our (presumed Protestant) civilization. Biggers' comparison, unlike yours, is more or less exact.
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All "true believers" want to carry their message to the entire world. Christians are told that it is their duty to spread "the good news of our Lord, Jesus Christ" throughout the nations, and Christian churches have pursued missionary work -- and forced conversions -- for centuries. There are Christian missions funded by U.S. and European churches, everywhere on Earth where the local government does not suppress their work (as in Afghanistan and Israel). But Islam forbids FORCE to convert "Peoples of the Book", such as Christians and Jews, so you overstate the fervor of the Moslem missionary impulse. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights long ago stated that freedom of religion, including the right to convert, is a fundamental human right. Any Moslem country that signed that document must be held to observe it, and compelled to grant religious liberty. But how do you do that, short of war? How many wars, against how many countries, can the United States wage?
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(To onebluebrick) Immigrants do not come here for a "free ride", but work hard as hell for very little pay, and illegal immigrants are told to shut up and take it, or "La Migra" will deport them.
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Louisville, Kentucky (the site of the violent incident Biggers speaks to), is the largest city in that state, with over 700,000 residents. If any American has NOT heard of it, it is because s/he never went to school. Immigrants have ALWAYS had their own communities within the larger community. Do the terms "Chinatown" and "Little Italy" sound familiar? Immigrants are NOT refusing to assimilate, but in fact assimilating faster than ever before, thanks to mass media in the home. In 1920, it was very unusual for an adult immigrant from, say, Germany or Italy, to speak English other than very poorly. Adults relied upon their children to translate for them, and read newspapers in their own language. Now, adults learn English without embarrassment over their not being fluent, just by watching television, listening to the radio and records, etc. What you mean about Moslems not "assimilat[ing]" is they generally do not "convert" to Christianity. Religious bigotry is the great motivator in the furor over immigration, because the Radical Right knows that the children of immigrants learn English easily but convert out of their ancestral religion infrequently. Once a Catholic, always a Catholic (except for people like Glenn Beck, of course), and Protestants HATE the idea that if current trends continue, Protestants will be a minority within decades.
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You cannot be serious in pretending that the Tea Party, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and their ilk are NOT spewing hate rhetoric and threatening violence. If you don't know of the hate-filled rhetoric of the Radical Right, just read the comments in this area!
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If your son -- or daughter (a provocation to Moslems and most other people in the Third World, which is the bulk of this planet's population -- is in the military, it is because s/he chose to be. There is no draft, and the President sent more troops to Afghanistan to FITE the radicals. How is sending more troops, and supporting a total of 100,000 troops in Afghanistan, where al-Qaeda radicals were trained, 'sympathizing' with the very radicals (the Taliban) that Obama is FITING AGAINST? If you don't see the internal contradiction in your stance, you are either mentally deficient or mentally ill.
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There have been a number of polls, and about 70% of respondents have expressed themselves as hostile to the lyingly-misrepresented "Ground Zero" mosque, not necessarily to Moslems as such. But who cares what the polls say? Your rights don't depend on people's liking you. If 70% of Americans said that YOU don't have the right to your religion, or to have a house of worship in Anytown, on Any Street, in Any State, would you concede that you don't have any such religious right?
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Wow, shakesome, you went from good sense to lunacy in two sentences. Hitler was not an atheist. Quite the contrary, Nazism was rabidly anti-atheist. Wikipedia: "Hitler often associated atheism with Germany's communist enemy." Nor was either Nazism or Communism, "humanism" (a "system or mode of thought or action in which human interests, values, and dignity predominate"). Trying to vilify atheists as not just enemies of the United States but also as worse enemies than militant Islam is an astounding bit of insane bigotry.
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So you are saying that it's a good thing if the Republicans gain control of the house, because they will see to it that the tipping point is exceeded, and we can then visit violence upon each other? You willfully ignore a little thing called the "filibuster" which, tho completely unconstitutional, prevented the Democrats from passing their legislative program. You also seem not to realize that the filibuster will as well prevent Republicans from passing any legislation that Obama, who will still be President, doesn't want passed. Or do you think the tables will have turned so enormously that the Republicans will have a majority big enuf, in both houses of Congress, to override any Presidential veto? Or that Republicans will be able to impeach and expel Obama? You sure have a lot of very odd thinking going on in that little comment.
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Imam Rauf NEVER "issue[d] terroristic threats". That is an outrite lie. Quite the contrary, both the BUSH and Obama Administrations have sent him abroad to try to REDUCE terrorism. If you don't have cable and don't see any cable programming, you are in no position to say what has and has not been threatened, explicitly or in code, by the Radical Right on cable. But read the talk in this comments area about 'revolution', and 'fiting back', and taking out the 'cancer' that Liberals are, and if you still don't understand this all to be violent rhetoric, then you are a profoundly stupid or profoundly dishonest person.
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No one qualifies for welfare immediately upon arriving as an immigrant (as a refugee, perhaps). And people who speak about other people as "garbage" are not worthy of U.S. citizenship or even residency. We should deport YOU.
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(To soulflight9) You don't capitalize the first word of your post, which is a misspelling of "yeah", and don't put a comma before "right". You prove mrtim's point about ignorance being posted in this comments area.
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Religious intolerance is part of the Radical Islamist program we don't want here, but you DO want religious intolerance. Are you sure you're not a closet Islamic militant?
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Your unwillingness to accept the reality that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii shows that you have a serious mental problem. Seek professional help. And try to get an education so you don't put up semi-literate comments on the Internet.
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If you have read the Koran cover to cover, why don't you know that the spelling with a Q is Qur'an, not Qu'ran? Muhammed claimed to have been visited by an angel? So did Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism. Islam spread by forcible conversion? So did Christianity in the New World. As for the slander of pedophilia, in most of the world of that day, any girl who had reached puberty was regarded as an adult, as she in fact IS in nature. Women were regarded as the chattel property of their husband in all Western countries until very recent times. Slavery was hardly unusual in human history, including in the United States until 1865, a lot more recently than 632 A.D., when Muhammed died You are mixing and matching killing and paying a special tax -- in LIEU of the Moslem's religious obligation of giving alms. Pagans could be killed if they refused to convert; "Peoples of the Book", such as Christians and Jews, could not. Spain converted Amerindians to Christianity by threats of death. As for how many people were killed in Muhammed's conquest of what became the Caliphate, no one knows. It assuredly was NOT millions, because there were many fewer than 400 million people on the entire planet, a large proportion of them in areas Islam did NOT conquer, from China and India to the Americas and sub-Saharan Africa. Jews and Christians in Saudi Arabia were NOT killed off, not in "Saudi" Arabia (modern world), not in medieval Arabia. They converted or left. Islam does NOT require an oath to take over the world. You are just making this stuff up. And NOT all Moslems want sharia law over all of society, but are perfectly happy to see a separation of mosque and state. Your comment is a perfect example of the power of the half-truth. You want people to believe everything you say because SOME of what you say is true. What you DON'T want people to think is that MUCH of what you say is false, and the true parts don't make the false parts true.
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Isolated attacks by individuals who claim to be acting from an Islamist motive in no way prove your enormous contention that "Islam" wants to dominate the West. If we are to talk about who is dominating whom, how many Arab military bases are there on U.S. soil or in Europe or Latin America? How much foreign aid, with strings attached, comes to the U.S. from the Moslem world? How much of the world's media is owned and controlled by Moslems? And on, and on. What statistics do you have about rates of Moslem integration into American culture? I hear Moslems on TV speaking perfect American English, and I have worked with at least one Moslem (that I know of) whom you would never suspect of being Moslem except that she wore some pretty head-covering or other each day, tied into her outfit overall, which you might think mere feminine fashion. I live in Newark, NJ, a city with a substantial Moslem population, and Newark moslems do NOT isolate themselves in their own community but live dispersed across the city, peacefully with their Christian neighbors. As for Latinos, like every immigrant community, Latinos do start out in their own communities -- where they can speak to the grocer or doctor in their own language (not being able to speak to a doctor can KILL you) -- until they have learned the language and moved up economically enuf to move out to more prosperous areas. The Roman Catholic Church introduces adult immigrants, and, thru parochial schools and Catholic-youth activities, their children, to Catholics of other ethnicities (Irish, Polish, Italian), and their kids NEVER isolate themselves in any KIND of ghetto. In short, just about every single thing you say is so close to fully false as to be characterized as "false", with no caveat.
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Oh, exquisitely omnicient one, please do tell us exactly WHO these "terrorist, marxist, communist, radicals, socialist" are that the media won't tell us about. And please explain to us exactly what these "associations" consist of and have influenced Obama to do that he would not otherwise have done.
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Please place here a hyperlink to a reputable news organization's online report that Imam Rauf is a slumlord. Or did you just make that up?
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It is not that the Tea Party is for smaller government -- altho small government cannot possibly meet challenges from gigantic corporations, much less foreign powers -- or lower taxes -- unless the taxes are so low that we can't provide what we want to provide, and the benefits of lower taxes flow ONLY to the rich -- but that the Tea Party is partisan, Republican, while pretending to be independent. If it were evenhanded in condemning the Bush Administraton's DOUBLING the national debt, with the active complicity of the entire Republican Party, more people would take the Tea Party activists seriously. But when they say not one word about the role of Republicans, from Reagan thru Dubya, OCTUPLING the national debt, we have to dismiss their pretense to fiscal conservatism as fraudulent.
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The U.S., on orders from Israel, has killed over 1 1/2 MILLION Moslems, mostly Arabs. Why WOULDN'T they celebrate when someone finally managed to strike back? U.S. policy in the Middle East is a crime against humanity, but you don't think about that, do you? No, we're ANGELS. We NEVER did anything to THEM! No, of course not.
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Repeating the same chant may lull you to sleep, but it merely bores or irritates sensible people. You cannot point out ONE Socialist (etc.) Obama Administration policy, and are probably too uneducated to know what Socialism IS.
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Obama cannot speak to everyone, every day. He has work to do in his office. Nor can Biden, Pelosi, Hillary, or any other one person in the Government speak to every audience every day. When Obama DOES speak, he is accused of posing for publicity. When Biden speaks, Obama is accused of hiding from the press. In short, here, as in so many other areas, NOTHING Obama does can ever be right -- that is, (Radical) Right.
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You know what Obama is thinking? You're a mindreader? Amazing.
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Sharia law, like Jewish law and Christian teachings, is intended to steer people away from evil and toward good. Alas, some of the teachings of sharia, Jewish law, and Christianity are nuts, and themselves evil.
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As bad as the thoughts are, the semi-literate expression is even worse. I guess these Radical Rightwingers never finished school.
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The President is Commander-in-Chief during a time of TWO wars. Why shouldn't he be at the Pentagon, which was attacked, on 9/11?
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(To baruzamaruza) I guess you never heard any of those rags-to-riches stories that start, "When I arrived here, I had $2 in my pocket." Many of those people arrived in a period of OPEN immigration, when there was no such thing as an "illegal" immigrant. You seem to confuse two very different groups, Mexicans and Moslems, in speaking of "threat[en]ing Natural Homeland Americans with their religion". Most Mexicans are Catholic, as are a quarter of "Natural Homeland Americans". Are you suggesting that "Natural Homeland Americans" cannot be Catholic? If the immigration laws that were in place when most present-day Americans' ancestors came over, there would be no such thing as illegal immigration; and if the laws in place today were in place in those days, but their countries shared a land border with the United States, how many of the would-be immigrants of that era [would] have defied the law and just tried to get in any way they could?
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(To Dixel Do-Rights). I suppose you think that the 47% you mention doesn't include the CHILDREN of taxpayers, or the retired people who worked 40 and more years, or the people who pick our food, clean our offices, serve in the military -- the military, that bunch of overpaid welfare recipients! -- manufacture what little is still made in this country (like toilet paper; you'll see where I'm going with this), build our houses, install the toilets without which the rich would have to poop behind a bush and wipe their butts with leaves, dig the trenches for utilities, erect the cellfone towers, and do ALL the REAL work of society that the rich enjoy only because they PARASITIZE the rest of us. (To ggoo2266) The bulk of the credit-card problems people got into were NOT from irresponsible spending but from emergencies because of lost jobs or illness, and from usurious interest rates that would have put the lenders in PRISON for loan-sharking not so long ago. Did some people overspend? Sure. But they figured, "Why shouldn't I have nice things?" It really is a fair question. Why should some people have everything they could possibly want, without lifting a finger to earn it, but other people can't have much of anything they want, despite working very, very hard for many long years? And never forget that without consumer spending, much of it made possible by credit cards, the economy collapses. Perhaps you've noticed that as the credit crunch, brought on largely by medical emergencies not covered by health insurance, and by outrageous usury and fee after fee after illegitimate fee, the economy has collapsed, and isn't bouncing back.
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So you're saying that American Moslems in New York City, and Mexican immigrants DO cut off people's heads? Jan Brewer said that, but had to retract it. The Catholic Church has called itself the "Catholic and universal church", and at one time "Christian" MEANT "Catholic". To spread the word to the ends of the Earth is a general obligation of all the Christian faithful. The Papal States united church and state, just as did the Caliphate. Nowhere did Biggers even so much as imply that we should consent to forcible takeover by militant Islam. Christianity and Islam are NOT "totally oppos[ed] moral and ethical beliefs". Rather, some Christian tenets clearly made their way into Islam, because Muhammed knew of Christianity, and Islam honors Jesus. Extremists in Christianity fought horrible, bloody wars during the Protestant Reformation. Islam has had its own bloody schism, Sunni vs. Shia. All religion is bad to the extent it coopts a person's conscience and tells him/her to bow to God's will, no matter how vile that will might seem.
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Exactly what "enemies of [A]merica" is Obama supporting? How? The worst enemies this country has are all internal, and all on the Radical "Right". Obama hasn't increased taxes, but let the obscenely rich continue to get away with their outrageous theft from the poor and middle class for almost two years. When he DOES allow taxes to rise, as they are SCHEDULED to rise according to a law signed by President BUSH, the increase will fall on people who make MORE THAN $250,000 a year. I very seriously doubt that includes you or much of anyone else on the Radical Right slandering Obama in this comments area.
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The news plainly IS what the media make of it. The Koran-burning stunt became news only because it was covered by media. "Media" is plural; the media ARE, not IS. And reputable NEWS media are not Liberal or Conservative, but studiously neutral in covering the news. Limited government is fine, as long as all the challenges to society are limited. That is, we can have limited government if we have limited corporations and limited challenges from enemies abroad. But I don't hear anyone among "conservatives" talking about breaking up gigantic corporations into mutually competing smaller entities that Government won't have to control because competition will control them. And no one among Liberals says people should avoid personal responsibility. As for the Constitution, there are an awful lot of people on the Right who don't respect fundamentals of the Constitution, such as freedom of religion for Moslems.
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If Politics Daily does not permit abusive language, so much the better. It is possible to disagree in civil terms, not civil war. As for joe's calling the Park Place community center a "Ground Zero" mosque, that is an out-and-out, simpleminded LIE. It is 2 1/2 blocks, around the corner, from the nearest part of Ground Zero, and you can't even SEE Ground Zero from that building. Lying subverts your case, and shows you to be dishonorable.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,418 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:41 PM