No, this has nothing to do with sound economic policy. [It’s] about a dysfunctional and corrupt political culture, in which Congress won’t take action to revive the economy, pleads poverty when it comes to protecting the jobs of schoolteachers and firefighters, but declares cost no object when it comes to sparing the already wealthy even the slightest financial inconvenience.
To choose and be so adamant about this exact location just a block or two away from 9/11, again is that knife, it feels like.
Kevin Drum provides (perhaps) the most lucid explanation of the Social Security Trust fund I’ve ever read:
Group A overpaid and built up a pile of bonds in the trust fund. Those bonds are a promise by Group B to repay the money. That promise is going to start coming due in a few years, and it’s hardly surprising that Group B isn’t as excited about the deal now as it was in 1983.
Yep. Read the whole thing to be shocked and dismayed by who Group B represents (and is represented by)…
I think it basically explains why Palin believes that there’s something offensive about American Muslims building a community center on private property while [Dr. Laura] Schlessinger telling a black woman she should stay out of interracial relationships if she doesn’t want to have n-bombs lobbed at her every day is the height of free expression. The point is that Constitutional rights only apply to whomever conservatives arbitrarily place in the category of “real Americans,” and extending them to anyone outside that narrow circle is a threat to the freedoms only real Americans have a right to enjoy. As Keep America Safe’s Debra Burlingame said of the proposed Park 51 project, freedom of religion “is a Western concept.” Only “Westerners” need apply.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is what we here at Lemkin call: Nailing it.
(via savingpaper)
Don’t know how I missed Glenn Greenwald’s take on Jeffrey Goldberg’s idiotic spew in The Atlantic (Now! More neoconservative than ever paired with incisive stories about the End of Manliness!).
Jeffrey Goldberg, in the new cover story in The Atlantic, on an Israeli attack on Iran:
Israel has twice before successfully attacked and destroyed an enemy’s nuclear program. In 1981, Israeli warplanes bombed the Iraqi reactor at Osirak, halting – forever, as it turned out – Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions; and in 2007, Israeli planes destroyed a North Korean-built reactor in Syria. An attack on Iran, then, would be unprecedented only in scope and complexity.
Good news! Israel can successfully end a country’s nuclear program by bombing them, as proven by its 1981 attack on Iraq, which, says Goldberg, halted “forever, as it turned out – Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions.”
Jeffrey Goldberg, The New Yorker, 2002, trying to convince Americans to fear Iraq:
Saddam Hussein never gave up his hope of turning Iraq into a nuclear power. After the Osirak attack, he rebuilt, redoubled his efforts, and dispersed his facilities. Those who have followed Saddam’s progress believe that no single strike today would eradicate his nuclear program.
So good. Read the whole thing.
Perfection, except for the fact it’s not a mosque. I guess “Community Center containing a prayer room” is a bit hard to letter.
The central question raised by this controversy is the same one raised by countless similar controversies throughout American history: whether the irrational fears and prejudices of the majority should be honored and validated or emphatically confronted.
There’s no point in trying to do something good if it’s met with enormous resistance from a lot of folks.
Howard Dean, on the Park 51 Islamic community center
If this is what he truly believes, then really, to hell with him. (via savingpaper)
Agreed. This quote is so astonishing, it’s hard to believe it hasn’t been Breitbarted. But it hasn’t. If this building which, amongst many other features, also contains a prayer room isn’t broadly popular, then it shouldn’t be built and the First Amendment can go fuck itself along with the spirit of most of the rest of the Constitution.
Remember, this is coming from the man who proclaimed himself a representative of the “Democratic wing of the Democratic Party,” largely in direct response to this kind of horse shit. Assuming that quote is still operative, then we can only conclude that the Democrats now are entirely made up of Clintonian triangulators: never take a stand, never push for an idea, and never, ever lose sight of what is polling well, regardless of how that may fit with what you know to be right. Work instead to make progress around the margins, and always be willing to compromise even that if that’s what it takes to please Our Republican Overlords. And they wonder why Democratic enthusiasm is down. And think we’re all on drugs.
There really is no hope anymore. Total collapse, popular uprising, military coup…whatever it is, something is going to happen, but whatever that future something is it doesn’t seem likely to include a rebirth of a governing philosophy from either side that isn’t based upon rank ignorance and limbic-system politics. This is how empires crumble.
As Robert Altman once told me, “If you never gave me a bad review, what would a good review mean?” He was a great man. He thought over what he had said, and added: “But all your bad reviews of my films have been wrong.”
Lemkin 