DEFEAT THE RIGHT IN THREE MINUTES
by Joseph Lyles
Have you got three minutes. Because that's all you need to learn how to defeat the Republican Right. Just read through this handy guide and you'll have everything you need to successfully debunk right-wing propaganda.
It's really that simple. First, you have to beat their ideology, which really isn't that difficult. At bottom, conservatives believe in a social hierarchy of "haves" and "have nots" that I call "corporate feudalism". They have taken this corrosive social vision and dressed it up with a "respectable" sounding ideology. That ideology is pure hogwash, and you can prove it.
Tea Party Hypocrisy
Editorial
February 11, 2010
"Energy. Budget Tax cuts. Lift American spirits." This was the infamous list of talking points scrawled on Sarah Palin's palm when she stood to address the first-ever Tea Party Convention in Nashville. It's fitting, given that the agenda of Palin and the movement for which she has become a tribune is short on details about how to govern the country. "Lift American spirits" is about as substantive a description of their agenda as you're likely to hear.
Such vagueness has served the movement well, allowing it to claim to be many things it is not. There has arisen in some quarters a quaint and dangerous notion that the tea party movement is an entirely new phenomenon--a bipartisan, organic channeling of broad (and rational) distrust of and disgust with America's main institutions, particularly Wall Street and Washington, which seem to have formed a perfectly closed loop of rent-seeking and self-dealing. According to Tea Party Patriots national board member Mark Meckler, "Although we are conservative in political philosophy, we are nonpartisan in approach. Both parties need to re-dedicate themselves to the principles of our founding fathers and remember that this should be the government of 'We the People' and not of special interest groups or pork-laden politics." While the energy and outrage may be genuine and organic, we should not fool ourselves into seeing this as anything but a right-wing reactionary movement, one whose themes (jingoism, militarism and a cult of victimhood at the hands of sundry nefarious betrayers) are as old as the John Birch Society. And yet, because the details of the tea party's worldview remain obscure, it's startlingly popular with the broader public. Forty-one percent of respondents in a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll have a positive opinion of the tea party movement. According to the same poll, the Democratic Party was viewed favorably by only 35 percent. The Republican Party fared even worse with 28 percent.
Esther Kaplan on Massey Energy and mine safety; John Nichols on WikiLeaks and collateral murder
These photographs of albatross chicks were made on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.
To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world’s most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent. View more from Chris Jordan’s series here.
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Now, I'm not naive and no one has ever driven a dump-truck full of money up to my house and asked to buy my integrity. I am certain however, that no amount of money can remove that crushing feeling in your soul Mr Shyamalan, when your children look at this film and wonder why they look like the bad guys. This is sad more than anything as a glorious opportunity to show children of ALL color that they can be a hero too. Too bad your kids won't be able to look at you that way when they grow up to see what money does to a person.
I'll leave you with a choice quote from another 'Avatar' directed at you Mr Shyamalan - 'How does it feel to betray your own race?'
I'm going to be boycotting this movie. As the above article states, the whole story of Avatar revolves around Buddhism, Eastern Martial Arts, and East Asian themes in general. To have Caucasians play the main role, then insert a South Asian to try to appease the audience just doesn't cut it for me. I'm tired of Hollywood's blatant racism and refusal to admit to it.
As a children's movie, Avatar would be perfectly fine with Asians in the lead role. Who knows? Maybe it will even influence them into believing that you don't need to be white to be a hero.
Glenn Beck excels at expressing adventurous thoughts in memorable language, but he outdid himself when, one morning last summer, he offered a diagnosis of President Obama. He said, “This President, I think, has exposed himself as a guy, over and over and over again, who has a deep-seated hatred for white people, or the white culture. I don’t know what it is.” (The context was one of the summer’s most entertaining reality shows—the one starring the black Harvard professor and the white police officer who arrested him.) In September, Beck sat for an interview with Katie Couric, and she asked him a deceptively simple question, which had been posed by a Twitter user named adrianinflorida: “what did u mean white culture?” Whatever adventurous thoughts this query inspired, Beck did not seem eager to share them. “Um, I, I don’t know,” he said. Finally, after two minutes of temporizing, he arrived at a nonresponsive response that was both honest and sensible: “What is the white culture? I don’t know how to answer that that’s not a trap, you know what I mean?”Often, the most appropriate answer to that question is a joke, or a series of jokes. In 2008, a canny young white Canadian named Christian Lander started a blog called “Stuff White People Like,” which soon became a best-selling book bearing the same title; it listed a hundred and fifty of white people’s favorite things, from recycling to the Red Sox. (This magazine made the list, too, at No. 114.) Lander’s tone is faux-anthropological but wide-eyed: “Bike shops are almost entirely staffed and patronized by white people!”; “After learning that a white person is pregnant, it is a good idea to provide a list of recipes for placenta.” His “white people” are wealthy, urban, youngish, and thoroughly blue—they “hate” Republicans, and although Obama hadn’t yet won the Democratic nomination, he placed eighth on the list. (Coffee was No. 1.)
I’m a bit of a Civil War buff — which is to say that I needed to check off the “knows about war” box in the manship handbook and I picked this one. I’m noShelby Foote (R.I.P.), but I’m conversant in most of the military and political history surrounding that war. Hey, it’s the war that (indirectly) set me free, and it’s easily the most interesting war America has ever been a part of.
I love and respect the history on both sides of the conflict. The Confederates fought with courage, pride, and tactical brilliance. Their fight is something to be remembered, something to be studied, something that deserves its place in the annals of American history.
It is not something to be proud of. Sorry Confederates (and modern sympathizers), you were on the wrong side. Not just on the wrong side of history, but also on the wrong side of morality. The often heroic deeds undertaken by Confederates on the battlefield were in furtherance of an evil cause. I repeat, an evil cause. Let’s not forget that Southern hero Robert E. Lee fought for a pro-slavery state. Sure, he seems to have been really uncomfortable with slavery, but when the chips were down he chose state over morality. Can we respect the man as arguably the best American general? Absolutely. Should we be proud that our greatest general chose the morally reprehensible side? No we should not. Love of country cannot and should not trump love of your fellow man. Unless you are an asshole. Lee, for all of his laudable qualities, failed the crucial moral test of his life. I respect him, but he was a dick. There’s a difference between respect and pride.
That difference is apparently lost on Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell…
Scandal
Ryanair Goes Forth with Pay-Per-Pee System
Discount airline Ryanair will begin charging passengers around $1.30 for bathroom use on flights shorter than one hour. The thought being that if passengers are discouraged from using the bathroom, there will be less of a demand for the bathroom, and therefore less of a supply will be necessary. Economics! Under the current plan, several restrooms will be replaced with seats, allowing the planes to fit six extra passengers but just one toilet for 189 antsy, thirsty people.
The small-bladdered are not the first victims of fiscally motivated airline discrimination: last year, several companies began charging overweight passengers for two tickets. (Director Kevin Smith was forcibly removed from a Southwest Airlines flight earlier this year after failing to do so. Angry Tweets, as they are wont to do, followed immediately after.) And just yesterday, the ironically named Spirit Airlines introduced a policy under which passengers must pay $45 for the great pleasure of jamming carry-ons in overhead bins.
Not even dead passengers can escape airlines' draconian rule: on Wednesday, two passengers tried to sneak the corpse of a 91 year-old man on-board an plane but were nonsensically forbidden. If you consider how few times the dead use the bathroom, and how unlikely it is they would require overhead storage, it's not the most financially sensible policy, is it?
By Casey Gane-McCalla April 8, 2010 10:36 am
NEW ORLEANS — A former New Orleans police officer told federal authorities he saw a fellow officer shoot and kick unarmed, wounded civilians in a deadly incident on a bridge in Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath, marking the first time an officer has provided federal authorities with an eyewitness account of the events.
The former officer, Michael Hunter, pleaded guilty Wednesday to helping cover up the shootings on the Danziger Bridge less than a week after the August 2005 storm.
A court filing Wednesday that describes Hunter’s account of the shootings contradicts a police report that said civilians shot at officers before the police opened fire, killing two people and wounding four others.
Seeing no danger to officers, Hunter says he shouted “Cease fire!” after an unidentified sergeant with an assault rifle and other officers opened fire on a group of unarmed civilians who took cover behind a concrete barrier on the bridge.
After they stopped firing, Hunter says he saw several civilians who appeared to be unarmed, injured and subdued.
“(The sergeant) suddenly leaned over the concrete barrier, held out his assault rifle, and, in a sweeping motion, fired repeatedly at the civilians lying wounded on the ground,” the filing says. “The civilians were not trying to escape and were not doing anything that could be perceived as a threat.
Moments later, Hunter saw two men later identified as Lance Madison and his 40-year-old mentally disabled brother, Ronald, running away near the bottom of the bridge.
Hunter’s statement said an unidentified officer shot Ronald Madison in the back with a shotgun.
“As Ronald Madison lay dying on the pavement, (the sergeant) ran down the bridge toward Ronald and asked an officer if Ronald was ‘one of them.’ When the officer replied in the affirmative, (the sergeant) began kicking or stomping Ronald Madison repeatedly with his foot,” the filing states.
Madison and James Brissette, 19, were killed by police.
U.S. District Judge Sarah Vance said Hunter participated in a “blatant and systematic perversion of justice” and shouldn’t be seen as a “hero” for taking responsibility.
“I don’t think you can listen to this account without being sickened by the raw brutality of the shootings and the craven lawlessness of the cover-up,” she said.
Hunter, 33, of Slidell, faces a maximum sentence of eight years in prison following his guilty plea to one count of conspiring to obstruct justice and one count of misprision of a felony. His sentencing is scheduled for June 30.
Dr. Romell Madison, one of Ronald’s brothers, said he didn’t know that police kicked his dying brother until he heard a prosecutor read the filing aloud in court.
“The cruelty that my brothers had to endure and the other victims had to endure was heartbreaking,” he said.
Hunter’s attorney, Townsend M. Myers, said in an emailed statement that his client made “a series of very bad decisions related to what happened on the Danziger Bridge, and what he did in the aftermath of those events. He accepts full responsibility for his bad decisions, and for their consequences.”
Two other former officers have pleaded guilty to helping cover up the fact that police shot unarmed people.
Less than a week after the Aug. 29, 2005 hurricane, Hunter drove several officers in a rental truck to the Danziger Bridge, where police shot and killed two people and wounded four others. Hunter allegedly provided a false account of the shootings when he testified before a state grand jury in 2006.
Former Lt. Michael Lohmann and Jeffrey Lehrmann, a former detective, have pleaded guilty to participating in the cover-up, which included a planted gun, phony witnesses and falsified reports.
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Ex-Cop Exposes Cover Up Of Katrina Killings
I was a victim of abuse. This is what the Pope must do to stop it'
Saturday, 20 March 2010
It was not being raped by a priest at the age of 14 that shattered my faith; it was the horrifying realisation that the Catholic Church had wilfully, knowingly abandoned me to it, the knowledge that they had ordained the priest who abused me despite knowing he was a paedophile and set him free to abuse with near impunity, ignoring all complaints.
And so it is difficult not to be cynical about the likely merit of the pastoral letter that Pope Benedict XVI will publish today.
Jonathan Chait and Robert Waldmann, in slightly different ways, highlight a crucial dynamic in American political debate: the extent to which public figures are punished for actually knowing what they’re talking about.
It goes like this: Person A says “Black is white” — perhaps out of ignorance, although more often out of a deliberate effort to obfuscate. Person B says, “No, black isn’t white — here are the facts.”
And Person B is considered to have lost the exchange — you see, he came across as arrogant and condescending.
I had, I have to admit, hoped that the nation’s experience with George W. Bush — who got within hanging-chad distance of the White House precisely because Al Gore was punished for actually knowing stuff — would have cured our discourse of this malady. But no. Why not?
Chait professes himself puzzled by the right’s intellectual insecurity. Me, not so much. Here’s how I see it: in our current political culture, the background noise is overwhelmingly one of conservative platitudes. People who have strong feelings about politics but are intellectually incurious tend to pick up those platitudes, and repeat them in the belief that this makes them sound smart. (Ezra Klein once described Dick Armey thus: “He’s like a stupid person’s idea of what a thoughtful person sounds like.”)
Inevitably, then, such people react with rage when they’re shown up on their facts or basic logic — it’s an attack on their sense of self-worth.
The truly sad thing, though, is the way much news reporting goes along with the condescension meme. That’s Waldmann’s point. You really, really might have expected that the Bush experience would give reporters pause — that they might at least ask themselves, “Isn’t it my job to ask whether a politician is right, as opposed to how he comes across?”
But NOOOO! [/Belushi]
