Month: December 2010

That Dhimmi Kid

by digby

I think this story perfectly sums up America in the year 2010:

Andy Sullivan, a construction worker and Brooklyn native, has been one of the loudest opponents of Park51, the planned mosque and community center near ground zero. Founder of the 9/11 Hard Hat Pledge — under which construction workers vow not to work at the mosque site — Sullivan has been a regular presence on television, known for wearing his signature American flag hard hat and talking tough about radical Muslims.

So it was quite a surprise this month to read that Sullivan has set his sights on a new target: Canadian teen pop superstar Justin Bieber.

Mosque foes recently started a boycott of Bieber after he made comments in support of the mosque project in an interview with Tiger Beat, a teen fan magazine, Sullivan told WYNC earlier this month. Now, his 8-year-old daughter and 11-year-old son have been banned from attending Bieber performances.

“I informed them, ‘Hey guys, guess what? Justin Bieber spoke out for the ground zero mosque,” Sullivan explained to Salon in an interview. “My little girl took down his poster and said she didn’t want to have nothing to do with him anymore. These are my kids. They’re living this thing.”

A Facebook page has been set up by an ally of Sullivan publicizing the boycott of Bieber and several other pro-mosque celebrities. It has attracted nearly 500 fans.

Who knew that Justin Bieber would throw himself into a volatile political issue like this. What’s next? The Jonas Brothers join Wikileaks?

But alas, much to everyone’s shock, it turns out that it isn’t true. Instead, it’s the work of a satirical (sort of) celebrity site that makes stuff up:

There is, however, a post on the website CelebJihad.com purporting to describe a Tiger Beat interview. It reads in part:

In an interview with Tiger Beat, the pop sensation stressed that freedom of religion is what makes America great, and went on to say that those who oppose the Mosque are motivated by bigotry.

“Muslims should be allowed to build a mosque anywhere they want,” the singer said. “Coming from Canada, I’m not used to this level of intolerance, eh.”

Bieber went on to say that Muslims are “super cool,” Christians are “lame-o-rama,” and that the mosque will help “start a dialogue” with all religions about which Justin Bieber song is the most awesome.

“I was like seven when September 11th went down, and frankly I’m surprised people are still going on about it. Move on, already!”

It sounds so real!

Undeterred by the fact that it’s a hoax, Bieber is now in the crosshairs of the brave defenders of America:

Cynthia Bloemer: That stupid dhimmi kid spoke out for the Mosque. Idiot kid!

Megan Alpert: That’s crazy Cynthia. I totally missed that all together.

Administrator: Justin took an adult position and spoke out in support of the mosque in tigar beat magazine. He one of the most influential teen sensations, reaching millions of impressionable kids. If he is going to play like the big boys he better expect some back lash…

Megan Alpert: Well then he is leading all the young teens into a funny way of thinking. He was just a baby when the attack came upon us. He has no clue what we are up against. He is very lost.

Walter H Steinlauf: Justin Beiber is “fishing in DEEP water” now. I eat people like that for breakfast.

Ignorant right wingers threatening manufactured teen-idols based on fake news. I think that says it all.

.

The worst of the worst

by digby

There are a lot of year-end lists out there today, but this one from The Week has got to be the most inane. It purports to list the “seven key questions to be answered” in 2011:

1. Who will emerge as the favorite to win the 2012 GOP nomination?

2. Will Afghanistan stabilize?

3. Will there be an NFL lockout?

4. Will health-care reform be hobbled?

5. Can Obama bounce back?

6. Will unemployment finally start to fall?

7. Will the Verizon iPhone live up to the hype?

Yep. Those are the “key” questions facing us in the next year. I don’t know why they included that dumb one about unemployment, but the rest are solid. I’m certainly on pins and needles about that Verizon iPhone thing.

Sadly, I think this may be a fairly decent overview of the media’s agenda for 2011. Depending on Palin of course.

Update: Dean Baker offers up a year-end dream. Maybe if we all dream it together, it will come true.

.

Wikilist

by digby

CBS News did something really, really unusual for a major news organization. It published an article about what Wikileaks has revealed. Evidently, CBS is not of the opinion that their job is to conceal these things from the public, which is fairly unique.

Ask yourself why it is that our governing institutions and major corporations believe they have a right to keep all this from you.

.

Crimes Against Inanity

by digby

This Ralph Peters review of a new book featuring interviews with 30 famous conservatives has to be one of the creepiest I’ve ever read. It starts out by saying that “the left” wants to kill all the interview subjects in a murderous rage:

If our extreme left maintained a kill-or-capture list for the morning after the revolution (before they started arresting and executing each other), the 30 subjects interviewed in “Showdown with Evil” would fill out the top of its roster. In the left’s view, the conservative and stubbornly independent voices captured in this book’s rapid-fire chapters are guilty of crimes against inanity on two counts: Not only are they boldly, proudly and deliciously politically incorrect, but – far worse – their positions are based on facts, common sense and a positive view of the United States of America.

The left’s problem with Guantanamo has never been what it is – leftists adore a good prison camp – but with who we put in it. The campus thought-police would love to round up and incarcerate these interviewees, who range from the courageous (Brigitte Gabriel, for example), through the venerable (Norman Podhoretz and the late William F. Buckley, Jr.), to the magnificently outrageous (Christopher Hitchens, an independent thinker of ferocious integrity). Elliot Abrams, Natan Sharansky, Richard Pipes, David Horowitz and dozens more. Dr. Glazov has gathered the most impressive collection of thinkers-in-freedom’s-cause available in a single volume

It’s interesting that Peters believes that he can see into the souls of the exterminationist American “left” to such an extent that he knows it wants to put conservative intellectuals in concentration camps. But then he (and the interview subjects in the book apparently) seem to be convinced that “the left” is the United States’ greatest enemy, at least as bad as Al Qaeda, and far more violent and dangerous (if not for their cowardice and sloth):

Today’s irresponsible leftists have more in common with the bloodthirsty French mob that alarmed Edmund Burke than with the theoreticians who, all good intentions and willful ignorance, destroyed the black American family with the cultural heroin of the Great Society. Of course, we may all be grateful that, unlike the mobs in the Place de la Concorde in the early 1790s, today’s campus leftists are physical cowards: Given a choice between manning the barricades and seeking tenure, they will always choose the latter. Nor do they protest the “hegemony” of big banks by refusing to pay their mortgages.

Still, the left’s rhetoric is sufficiently hateful (and self-adoring) to encourage nihilists, fascists and terrorists everywhere. Horowitz understands full well the cult-like thrall to which leftists enthusiastically submit, aggrandizing their own imaginary moral splendor by blaming others for all the world’s ills: “Their dementia is to believe that if only enough Israelis/Christians/neo-conservatives are eliminated, the world will become a livable and just place.” Of course, there will always be another “enemy of the people,” no matter how many are shot in the back of the head or starved to death…

Or, as William F. Buckley Jr., succinctly puts it in a capstone interview: “The left has priorities, and the priority this time around is to damage the United States.”

The mind reels.

I’m sure there are some Americans of all political stripes who have these violent fantasies, but the only people who seem to turn a profit by writing them down and sharing them with others in vivid detail are these right wingers.

And you have to just laugh at the final line:

In compiling this “greatest hits” volume from the countless splendid and valuable interviews he has conducted over the years, Jamie Glazov has revealed his own priority: The defense of intellectual, religious and physical freedom.

I don’t know anyone who’s agitating for the government to stop these people from publishing their paranoid tracts (or putting them in concentration camps) but I do know that they wouldn’t be able to sell them without the mass delusion that they are under siege from a fantasy leftism that only exists in their turgid imaginations. They remind me of those children who had their minds implanted with false molestation memories by crackpot police psychologists. It wasn’t true, but it didn’t matter — the kids “remembered” it as if it were.

.

[Note: Newer posts below]

Holiday Cheer

by digby

Thank you all so much for your generosity. It’s a wonderful affirmation and incentive to keep going.

Onward to the new year which, hopefully, will be one of clarity and purpose. Or not. But what ever it is, we can always gather here and talk about it and that’s something.

cheers,

digby

Subscribe buttons and snail mail address are to your left at the top of the column.

[This post will stay at the top of the page for a while. Please scroll down]

The Year In Crazy

by digby

You must read This Modern World’s “The year in crazy.” You just must.

Here’s a sample:

Read on ..
.

Mutually Beneficial Propaganda

by digby

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

A reader alerted me to this clip of Matt Taibbi with Sam Seder who was guest hosting on Countdown last night. They were discussing the sensitive bankers and their delicate feelings and Taibbi posited that this is mutually advantageous to the President and the bankers because it makes Obama looks like the scourge of Wall Street to his base when he really isn’t and it allows the bankers to have more leverage over Obama. He even speculated that the White House or the bankers may have planted the story for mutually advantageous propaganda.

I think there is some truth to this. The bankers don’t want to give an inch because they are making out like bandits. So, they are keeping the pressure on the White House in whatever way they can, most especially with the implied threat that they will withhold campaign donations. (Wall Street was the Obama campaign’s single largest sector donor after all.)

However, contrary to what Taibbi thinks, I also think they sincerely feel put-upon and wrongly demonized for doing what they consider to be “God’s work” by being “productive” and making it possible for the little parasites to live their meager, useless lives in the comfort they provide. They expect worshipful gratitude for being selfish scum and they aren’t getting it.

Certainly the Obama administration does benefit from being seen as an enemy of Wall Street even as they deal with the sensitive whiners with an extremely light hand. He has a high approval rating from Democrats so you have to assume that’s working for him. The problem is that the policies aren’t good and are likely to result in an anemic economy going in to 2012. It’s hard to see how that benefits him or the Democratic party which will bear the brunt of the blame after four years.

.

“Die Quickly”

by digby

Alan Grayson took a lot of grief for saying that the Republican health care plan was “Don’t get sick, and if you do get sick, die quickly.” But he was right.

Here’s Gene Lyons, who begins his essay with the sad tale of having to euthanize his sick horse because it would be too expensive to keep him alive:

Long introduction, brief polemical point: Observing Republicans gear up to try to undo “Obamacare,” I suspect the only thing that will satisfy some is to make medical care in the United States work like veterinary care. You get what you can pay for. Otherwise, tough luck.

Who would have thought that after Sarah Palin’s imaginary “death panels” — chosen by Politifacts.com, the fact-checking website, as its 2009 “Lie of the Year” — Arizona Republicans would be denying heart, lung and liver transplants to Medicaid patients because Gov. Jan Brewer says the state can’t afford them?

To save a lousy $1.4 million (out of a $9 billion budget), Arizona’s Health Care Cost Containment System has decreed an end to organ transplants. Maybe the bitterest irony is that the inhumane policy won’t actually save any money. One of the roughly 100 citizens affected explained to Arizona Republic columnist E.J. Montini:

“I can’t work anymore, and we ran out of (insurance) coverage a while back,” he said. “It’s terrible needing help. It’s not what I wanted. But when you run out of money, what can you do? If I don’t get a transplant, I guess the state won’t have to pay for me or worry about me until I walk into an emergency room close to dying. They can’t turn me away then.”

No, they can’t. Human hospitals can’t refuse patients for lack of cash. Meanwhile, not a peep of protest from Palin, Rep. John Boehner or any of the Republicans who waxed hysterical over the absurd allegation that “Obamacare” would lead to government-sponsored euthanasia.

But if people die for lack money, that’s the GOP way.

That’s correct. And his piece draws attention to one of the most problematic aspects of a private insurance system — when you get sick and can’t work, you can’t pay your premiums. The way we deal with this now is to require that people lose everything they have so they can apply for public assistance — which puts them at the mercy of Jan Brewer and her death panels.

The new health care reform will mitigate this by keeping the premiums somewhat stable, but being unable to work is going to make many sick people poor no matter what and with Medicaid (“medical welfare”) funding at the mercy of yearly appropriations battles, it’s hard to believe that the same people who face these issues today won’t be facing them tomorrow. And the sad fact is that many of the people who are screaming about death panels are among those who will face it.

Of course their own misfortune will just prove in their minds that government doesn’t work and motivate them to cut it even more…)

Update: In case you missed it, this report on the Newshour about California’s early implementation of the health care reforms in quite interesting. This is a state that’s actually trying to get it done and it’s very difficult. I can’t imagine what kind of roadblocks are being put up in the Republican strongholds.

.

We’re A Plutocracy, In Case You Didn’t Notice

by tristero

A chart from this article illustrating the dramatic increase since the 30’s in the percentage of American income hoovered up by the wealthiest Americans:

I usually don’t like what Fukuyama has to say (The End of History was one of those classic Big Ideas that explains nothing concrete but still had the potential to generate lots of very real mischief ), but this is spot on. Writing about Plutocracy, the theme of the latest issue of The American Interest hes says:

This is not, however, what this issue of The American Interest means by plutocracy. We mean not just rule by the rich, but rule by and for the rich. We mean, in other words, a state of affairs in which the rich influence government in such a way as to protect and expand their own wealth and influence, often at the expense of others. As the introductory essay to this issue shows, this influence may be exercised in four basic ways: lobbying to shift regulatory costs and other burdens away from corporations and onto the public at large; lobbying to affect the tax code so that the wealthy pay less; lobbying to allow the fullest possible use of corporate money in political campaigns; and, above all, lobbying to enable lobbying to go on with the fewest restrictions. Of these, the second has perhaps the deepest historical legacy.

This isn’t too bad, either:

Scandalous as it may sound to the ears of Republicans schooled in Reaganomics, one critical measure of the health of a modern democracy is its ability to legitimately extract taxes from its own elites. The most dysfunctional societies in the developing world are those whose elites succeed either in legally exempting themselves from taxation, or in taking advantage of lax enforcement to evade them, thereby shifting the burden of public expenditure onto the rest of society.

h/t, Why Evolution Is True.

Housekeeping Note

by digby

Miracle of miracles, I think I’ve converted the comment threads back to oldest first, chronological order. Many thanks to Atrios, who remembered how he did it on his blog and sent me a note.

Huzzah.

.