James Howard Kunstler: The banking system is just blowing smoke up the shredded ass of what's left of the economy

kunstler takes on the rantings of the unhinged repubs and compares them to the equally unhinged democratic denials of reality...

[I]t's especially gratifying to see the Republicans sail off the edge of their own flat earth on the winds of religious idiocy. For forty years it has not been enough for them to just be a conservative party. They had to enlist the worst elements of ignorance and reaction, and they found an endless supply of it in the boom regions of the Sunbelt with its brotherhood of TV evangelist con-artists and a population fretful with suburban angst.

[...]

Just as there is a place for conservatism in civilized life, there is also a place for the progressive impulse, let's call it - for making bold advance in step with the mandates of reality and an interest in justice for all those along on the journey.

The Democrats under Obama don't want to go to that place. They want to really go to the same place as the fretful Sunbelt fundamentalists, but by a different route - and that place is yesterday, by means of a campaign to sustain the unsustainable. Mr. Obama is pretending that an economic "recovery" is underway when he knows damn well that the banking system is just blowing smoke up the shredded ass of what's left of that economy. He pretends to an interest in the rule of law in money matters but he's done everything possible to prevent the Department of Justice, the SEC, and a dozen other regulatory authorities from functioning the way they were designed. He has never suggested resurrecting the Glass-Steagall act, which kept banking close to being honest for forty years. He never issued a peep of objection about the Citizens United case where the Supreme Court tossed the election process into a crocodile pit of corporate turpitude (he could have proposed a constitutional amendment redefining corporate "personhood."). He declared he'd never permit a super-PAC to be created in his name, and now he's got one. Mr. Obama represents a lot of things to a lot of people. He is mainly Progressivism's bowling trophy, its symbol of its own triumphant wonderfulness in overcoming the age old phantoms of race prejudice. Alas, that's not enough. Where exactly is the boundary between telling "folks" what they want to hear and just flat-out lying?

when people are afraid, they will listen to just about anything that they think can reduce their fear...

if the world as i had always known it was coming down around my ears and i had no idea what was going to happen next, i would be VERY receptive to anyone and everyone who presented themselves as having a solution at hand...

whether it's the repubs promising that they will vanquish all society's great "evils" - brown people, gay people, non-christian people, poor people, uppity women, uppity presidents, uppity countries, the list goes on - or the dems promising a return to the go-go economy, people who live in fear will be very responsive...

the one thing fearful people DON'T want to hear is anyone spouting reality...

Submit To Propeller
Tweet

[Permalink] 0 comments

Islamophobia rears its ugly head again in the attack on the TV series, All-American Muslim

The Jaafar family, one of the participating families in the Learning Channel's
'All-American Muslim' reality TV show.
Photograph: TLC

i first heard about this upcoming series while listening to an npr interview with a commentator who wrote a piece about it in the guardian...

wajahat ali...

I think it's refreshingly bland. It's honest, it's real, it's human. And it's nice to see a show where Muslims aren't terrorists, taxi cab drivers or potential terrorists, you know? They're just people.

i've actually been hoping for a show like this for quite a while... i had thought that maybe a sitcom a la the cosby show might do it but i was very pleased to hear about "All-American Muslim" and thought it might give a real push toward mitigating some of the more rampant islamophobia that has been plaguing the country...

guess not...

The cable channel TLC may have thought it was promoting the cause of ethnic and religious harmony by running a program that sympathetically examines the lives of five ordinary American Muslim families. But now the show itself has become a source of conflict, with the conservative Florida Family Association urging advertisers to boycott it and at least one major retail chain complying.

Media critics are already issuing scathing criticism of the decision by home retail giant Lowe’s to respond to the Florida Family Association’s campaign against the program. Gawker, for example, writes, “American Muslim, a TLC reality show that depicts the lives of Muslims in dangerous anti-American professions like ‘police officer’ and ‘high school football coach,’ is obviously the most egregious example yet of creeping Sharia. So thank (the Christian) God that all-American retailer Lowe’s has decided to pull advertising from the show!”

[...]

As viewed by the Florida Family Association, however, the normality and all-American quality of the families profiled is in itself a cause for suspicion.

“The Learning Channel’s new show All-American Muslim is propaganda clearly designed to counter legitimate and present-day concerns about many Muslims who are advancing Islamic fundamentalism and Sharia law,” the group writes at its website. “The show profiles only Muslims that appear to be ordinary folks while excluding many Islamic believers whose agenda poses a clear and present danger to liberties and traditional values that the majority of Americans cherish.”

in response, the home improvement chain, lowes, has pulled its advertising...

Lowe’s actions are already being described as “a public relations disaster” and have aroused anger among the American Muslim community.

The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, for example, has issued a statement saying, “Sadly corporations, such as Lowe’s, have succumbed to the idiocracy of such garbage campaigns, which are orchestrated by groups and organizations which lack credibility, legitimacy, and are founded on the basic notions of bigotry and racism reminiscent of a shameful era in this country’s history.”

personally, i think this kind of attack is both disgusting and shameful... i've said repeatedly here that i have a fair number of islamic friends and count them among some of the finest people i know... they're people trying to make it just like the rest of us and to demonize them as a few brutally ignorant people in this country are trying to do is despicable...

here's the trailer for the series...



yes, bland, but also accurate... muslims in the u.s. live lives very much like everybody else... truth be told, muslims around the world live lives very much like everybody else... this overwhelming urge to demonize those whose beliefs, skin color, national origin, diet or surnames don't match our predetermined notion of what we think they SHOULD be needs to stop...

Submit To Propeller
Tweet

[Permalink] 0 comments

Juan Cole: Our news and their news

since i spend a great deal of my time outside the u.s., i am well aware of the sharp distinction professor cole draws between the drivel masquerading as news that we're fed in this country and the real news those elsewhere in the world receive...

Americans live in a late capitalist society where the rich have gotten many times richer and the middle class has gotten poorer, where Wall Street bankers have stolen us blind and blamed us for living above our means, where persistent unemployment is worse than in the Great Depression, where most politicians and some judges have been bought by corporations or special interests, where authorities actively conspire to keep people from voting, where the government spies on citizens assiduously without warrant or probable cause, and where the minds of the sheep are kept off their fleecing by substituting celebrity gossip, sex scandals, and half-disguised bigotry for genuine news.

In the Arab world, masses of 20-year-olds have challenged their corrupt politicians and manipulative billionaires in the streets, demanding transparency, an end to arbitrary secret police, and free and fair elections untainted by influence-peddling and plutocracy. I have Arabic satellite t.v. on in the background most of the day, with its dramatic stories of personal risk and human tragedy and bold challenge to a rotten status quo. And I channel surf over to the American cable news and mostly find fluff or de-contextualized reports or, frankly, propaganda.

patético...

Submit To Propeller
Tweet

[Permalink] 0 comments

Burning a Koran really pisses some folks off...

can't say as i blame 'em for being pissed altho' i do have a problem with mob psychology where innocent people end up dead...

it would be nice if the nutcase u.s. pastor who thought it necessary to perform such a reckless and intolerant act in the name of christianity had to face some serious consequences... at a bare minimum, he should be forced to go back and read the real message of christ in the gospels... i see people like him as evidence of the real evil afoot in the world...

Mob kills 8 U.N. workers in Afghanistan

Officials say a crowd of up to 1,000 people attacked the United Nations compound in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif, killing eight guards believed to be from the Philippines. The attack was sparked by a mosque sermon describing the burning of the Koran by an American pastor.

[...]

The rioting erupted after mosque preachers at Friday prayers -- the most important of the Muslim week -- sermonized against the burning of the Koran by an American evangelical pastor in Florida. After the service, up to 1,000 worshipers marched on the U.N. compound and overran it, police said.

believe me, i'm not recommending it, but i'm frankly somewhat surprised that the afghans haven't retaliated by burning a bible... can you imagine the kind of conflagration THAT would unleash here in the good ol' u.s. of a...?

meanwhile, here i sit at dulles airport in d.c., waiting for my flight to dubai where i will connect to a flight to kabul... woo-hoo...

Submit To Propeller
Tweet

[Permalink] 0 comments

Glenn does a great job dissecting the Juan Williams firing

read it here...

Submit To Propeller
Tweet

[Permalink] 1 comments

The really sad thing about Ted Nugent

ordinarily, i just dismiss this certifiable moron with a shake of the head and a shrug of the shoulders... i don't believe in giving his kind of idiocy any more bandwidth than it deserves, which is zero, zip, nada...

i'm breaking my own rule with this one, however, because as i was reading it, i had the sad, if somewhat obvious, realization that nugent is merely saying out loud what a lot of people in the united states say on a routine basis... the only difference between those people and ted nugent is that ted nugent has a megaphone to broadcast his hate... and, make no mistake... nugent's hate is of the same variety as that of rush limbaugh, just less prettified... in fact, you can find the same thing coming from the likes of bill kristol, lou dobbs, and congressmen such as steve king and eric cantor... being congressmen, of course, they would NEVER resort to such crudities as nugent, but the mindset is the same...

On President Obama, the southern rocker said he believes "Mao Tse Tung" had arrived, "and his name is Barack Hussein Obama."

"I wanna throw up," Nugent said.

He started off the interview by jabbing supporters of animal rights, claiming he wants to kill 100 more of something every time he hears the two words together in a paragraph.

"I'm not just killing them I’m fucking slaughtering them and I’m going to gut them and skin them, quarter them and butcher them and feed them to the soup kitchen and homeless shelters of America," Nugent said. "Not because I need to, because it will cause Bill Maher to shit blood. That’s my goal in life."

Oddly, while he boasts about wanting to feed the poor and hungry masses, Nugent's words for his fellow Americans who depend on food assistance are quite vulgar and surprising.

"Welfare isn’t supposed to be used for hairdos," he said. "If you need food stamps, eat the fucking pet!"

what i'd like to do with this guy and others of his ilk is to put them on a plane to afghanistan, not to fight or be killed, but to have to live and work on a daily basis with afghans in an organization like the international rescue committee or the aga khan foundation... yes, he'd have to be dragged there, kicking and screaming, but getting exposed to some of the brutal realities of extreme poverty and despair and having to live with it in your face every day might give assholes like this a different perspective... otoh, maybe not... assholes of nugent's age are pretty impermeable to letting go of their bullshit...

Submit To Propeller
Tweet

[Permalink] 0 comments

Bush mocks teenagers

In an act of monumental hypocrisy, Bush mocked teenagers, in a speech, Tuesday. (from ABC):

The president said Congress is like "a teenager with a new credit card" for wanting to spend $22 billion more than the White House would allow on nonwar-related funding bills."

Bush took the cheap shot at teenagers perhaps because he regards them as essentially powerless to object, as they are still largely denied suffrage and in most cases, cannot vote.

Bush seems to have overlooked better and much-closer-to-home examples of profligate spending such as that by those members of his own party, so notorious for sheer pork-style spending, such as that of Republican Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska's infamous Gravina Island "Bridge to Nowhere".

Bush did manage to avoid invoking the standard and shopworn cliché of "spending like drunken sailors". Presumably, most sailors can vote.

Bush seemed to ignore his own record deficit spending while showering his wealthy and elite supporters, again and again, with fabulous tax breaks. He didn't mention the billions and billions of dollars which have virtually gone missing in his war and on his watch. He didn't mention his affinity for doling out no-bid contracts so generously to his powerful friends, either.

It remains interesting that many prominent people such as HBO's comedian Bill Maher loudly call for amending Section 5 of Article II of the Constitution to allow for Austrian-born, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to run for President. The argument advanced, goes the same as by those that insisted that the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution should be repealed, in order to allow Ronald Reagan to run for a 3rd term: "The People should be allowed to choose anyone they want to be their president."

And yet if these same proponents were intellectually honest, they would include calls for repeal of the age requirement clause in Section 5 of Article II as well. But bigots in general do not often rise above hypocrisy. As evidenced by Bush's speech as recently as Tuesday, Ageism is still as popular as ever as rampant bigotry.

Submit To Propeller
Tweet

[Permalink] 0 comments

Radical Christian activist terrorism

this is what happens when you have fundamentalist christian ideologues attempting to impose their religious beliefs on an entire nation, beliefs fueled by rigid dogmatism, bigotry, homophobia, and intolerance of other religious beliefs, all implicitly sanctioned by the presidential administration and the republican party... even though it's been overused and abused, the correct term here is indeed the "american taliban..."

Three Burleson men who belong to a "radical Christian activist group" were in the Johnson County Jail on Friday night after a church deacon caught two of them attempting to ignite an explosive device on Independence Day at a church under construction in north Burleson [Texas], authorities said Friday.

[...]

Cmdr. Chris Havens, the Police Department spokesman, said the suspects boasted about belonging to a leaderless group of 10 or 15 who share a belief that society has become too focused on self-improvement and self-gratification and has lost focus on the glorification of God.

"They admit to being Christian and being brought up Christian, but they believe there should be one denomination and one church, not multiple denominations," Havens said.

at least they're putting these twisted young men into the proper category...

"We put them in the category of a domestic terrorist group," Havens said. "We hope to discover the names of other individuals involved and if other devices have been prepared along with any plans they may be talking about to further their cause."

needless to say, had these been muslim young men, there would have been 24/7 national news coverage for at least the next three days...

(thanks to atrios...)

Submit To Propeller
Tweet

[Permalink] 0 comments