Month: March 2012

The Secular Sharia Scrolls revealed

by digby

The Ten Commandments of the Judeo-Christian tradition supplied the foundation for the American political experiment. As George Washington said, “Of all the disposition and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and morality are indispensable supports.”

By “Religion,” Washington meant Christianity, and by “morality,” he meant the Ten Commandments. In other words, according to the Father of our country, it is impossible to have political prosperity without building on the platform of the Christian religion and Christian morality.

Well that’s that. Would you like to know what our 10 Commandments of Secular Sharia are so you can print it out and carry it with you at all times?

1. “Government, not Yahweh, is God.” Secular fundamentalists want us to look to government for everything we we were once taught to look for from God. Government is all knowing, all powerful, all wise, all caring. You know, all the things God used to be.

2. “You shall have no gods, period.” The goal of secular fundamentalists is the extermination of any and all mentions of God and Christ in the public arena. The only exceptions to the “no god” rule will be for Gaia and Allah. Gaia is to be worshiped, and any blasphemy against her, by plundering her for such things as the fuel on which the world runs, will be met with the severest punishment and condemnation.

3. “You shall not take the name of the homosexual agenda or Islam in vain.” If you do, we will land on you like a falling safe. Profanity, blasphemy, vulgarity, obscenity, pornography, all are fine. Criticize homosexual conduct, on the other hand, and we will cause the wrath of our god to descend upon you as a consuming fire. You will be silenced, marginalized and treated as a leper. We secularists have freedom of speech but you cretinous conservatives do not. If you have a problem with sexually deviant behavior, you are by definition a homophobic hatemonger and we don’t have to listen to you.

4. “Observe Halloween, Labor Day and Martin Luther King, Jr. Day as holy days. Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving, on the other hand, must be wiped off school calendars as if they never existed.”

5. “Honor your father and mother — by which we mean liberal politicians, since they have turned government into your mommy and your daddy.” No husband, no problem: government will be the head of your home. No father, no problem: government will be your provider and raise your children for you.

6. “You shall not murder — unless it’s a defenseless baby in the womb.”

7. “You shall not commit adultery — unless it’s with another man’s wife. Fornication and sodomy without repercussions and penalty are okay too. And we’re working on polygamy and pedophilia.” Anyone who disagrees, and says anything remotely critical of such behaviors, will be subject to the wrath of the holy and righteous prophets of secular Sharia in the out-of-the-mainstream media, who will call down fire and brimstone on those who dare to challenge the sexual orthodoxy of leftist libertines.

8. “You shall not steal — unless it’s to plunder from the producers what they have earned to give to the non-producers what they have not earned.” Anyone who complains about this involuntary transfer of wealth will be judged by the secular mullahs as evil, greedy capitalists and silenced. Right after they have been ripped off.

9. “You shall not bear false witness — unless it is to tell blatant lies about the Constitution, American history, the economy, unemployment figures and drilling for oil.” As long as you are lying to advance the power and reach of government, or get a leftist politician reelected, it’s okay. Secularists have their own version of taqqiya, just like the Muslims do.

10. “You shall not covet anything — as long as it belongs to people who are poorer than you. If they have more money than you, they are evil oppressors who must be plundered of their ill-gotten wealth by our government overlords so it can be redistributed to the lazy, shiftless and irresponsible.”

That’s exactly correct. I just want to know who gave him access to the Super Secret Secular Scrolls. We weren’t supposed to let those out until after the revolution. Oh well …

Bryan Fischer, by the way, isn’t some fringe lunatic howling into the void at 2 in the morning. He’s a big wheel in Tea Party, religious right circles. Here he is with Rick Santorum a week or so ago:

Bryan Fischer may have spent the last several days defending Rush Limbaugh from the “secular Sharia” that forced him to apologize and attacking Sandra Fluke as slut who has been “sleeping with so many guys she can’t keep track [and] doing it three times a day” but, as we have noted before, Fischer’s long record of unmitigated bigotry has never stopped leading Republicans and presidential candidates from joining him on his program for an interview.

Just last month, Fischer was gushing over Rick Santorum and praising him for sounding just like the hosts on American Family Radio … and so it was no surprise that today Santorum found the time to join Fischer for a discussion of his presidential campaign.

During the interview, Santorum declared that President Obama does not think that he is bound by the Constitution and “believes he is more of an emperor than a president”.

Fischer and Santorum are smack in the middle of the Republican mainstream.

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Don’t Freak Out or Anything

by David Atkins

Try not to panic, because that would be bad:

The world is close to reaching tipping points that will make it irreversibly hotter, making this decade critical in efforts to contain global warming, scientists warned on Monday.

Scientific estimates differ but the world’s temperature looks set to rise by six degrees Celsius by 2100 if greenhouse gas emissions are allowed to rise uncontrollably.

As emissions grow, scientists say the world is close to reaching thresholds beyond which the effects on the global climate will be irreversible, such as the melting of polar ice sheets and loss of rainforests.

“This is the critical decade. If we don’t get the curves turned around this decade we will cross those lines,” said Will Steffen, executive director of the Australian National University’s climate change institute, speaking at a conference in London.

Despite this sense of urgency, a new global climate treaty forcing the world’s biggest polluters, such as the United States and China, to curb emissions will only be agreed on by 2015 – to enter into force in 2020.

“We are on the cusp of some big changes,” said Steffen. “We can … cap temperature rise at two degrees, or cross the threshold beyond which the system shifts to a much hotter state.”

Six degrees Celsius. What does six degrees Celsius mean? Oh, nothing much:

If two degrees is generally accepted as the threshold of dangerous climate change, it is clear that a rise of six degrees in global average temperatures must be very dangerous indeed, writes Michael McCarthy. Just how dangerous was signalled in 2007 by the science writer Mark Lynas, who combed all the available scientific research to construct a picture of a world with temperatures three times higher than the danger limit.

His verdict was that a rise in temperatures of this magnitude “would catapult the planet into an extreme greenhouse state not seen for nearly 100 million years, when dinosaurs grazed on polar rainforests and deserts reached into the heart of Europe”.

He said: “It would cause a mass extinction of almost all life and probably reduce humanity to a few struggling groups of embattled survivors clinging to life near the poles.”

Very few species could adapt in time to the abruptness of the transition, he suggested. “With the tropics too hot to grow crops, and the sub-tropics too dry, billions of people would find themselves in areas of the planet which are essentially uninhabitable. This would probably even include southern Europe, as the Sahara desert crosses the Mediterranean.

“As the ice-caps melt, hundreds of millions will also be forced to move inland due to rapidly-rising seas. As world food supplies crash, the higher mid-latitude and sub-polar regions would become fiercely-contested refuges.

“The British Isles, indeed, might become one of the most desirable pieces of real estate on the planet. But, with a couple of billion people knocking on our door, things might quickly turn rather ugly.”

It’s obvious that our biggest political problem in America right now is too much government spending, overly high tax rates on financiers, and a President who won’t approve the Keystone Pipeline and more oil drilling. So don’t panic.

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I gotcher Progressive candidates for ya rightcheah

Here’s a nice concise history of the last decade in politics, by Linda Hirshman:

With this week’s Supreme Court hearings — which will end, liberals worry, with the justices overturning healthcare reform — we are nearing the apotheosis of conservative power. Let us recount how we got here: In 2000, a mob of conservative thugs stopped the vote recount in Florida. And that was before the court got involved, the five conservative justices seizing the election and handing the White House to George W. Bush. Secure in the tenure of their undemocratically selected president, the two older conservative justices, William Rehnquist and Sandra Day O’Connor, retired from the bench. Bush replaced them with two young conservatives, destined, by constitutional design and the miracles of modern medicine, to dominate the court into the foreseeable future. At the Supreme Court, it’s always winter (and never Christmas).

The stunningly inept performance by the Bush administration unforeseeably produced the first Democratic federal government since 1994. Immediately thereafter, the conservative Supreme Court majority ruled that the GOP’s wealthy sponsors could spend an unlimited amount of the money putting conservatives in office. Now, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, appointed, in part, by the conservative president they put in the White House, is preparing to wipe from the statute books the only piece of meaningful progressive legislation in the last half century, passed during the brief Indian summer of a two-year Democratic majority.

And it’s not just the federal government. In 2010, fueled, in part, by the money the conservative justices unleashed, the conservatives took over state legislatures across the country. In power, they enacted a series of measures that should make Hosni Mubarak blush. They redrew the legislative maps to guarantee that they would hold a majority of the legislatures, state and federal, regardless of whether they failed to gain a majority of actual votes. (The design of the Senate, favoring sparsely populated rural states, already way overrepresents the Republicans.) Using a panoply of legislative strategies, they made it infinitely harder for the Democrats to register their supporters and for the Democratic voters, even if registered, to vote. Voters must be reported within 24 hours of being registered or penalties will be levied on the laggard registrars. Would-be voters must produce a fistful of identity documents, notoriously more common among old white (Republican) voters than the youthful and nonwhite Americans likely to support the Democrats. If they run the registration gauntlet, they must again verify their identity on Election Day, with the same culturally skewed set of papers. In the swing state of Florida, the New York Times reports, the activists have given up registering new voters: Too perilous.

Why do they hate America so much?

by digby

So you think there isn’t a real political, ideological tribal divide in America? Ask yourself if this rings true:

Fairness Meets Federalism In One Obama Campaign Chart. Supporters say: “Equality and fairness!” Opponents say: “Hey, what happened to all those state lines?”

Perhaps liberals should reframe their arguments: “are you an American first or do you identify as a Texan, a Floridian or an Alaskan?”

Jonathan Alter and the butterfly effect

by digby

I expect Villagers to blame the liberals for everything, but this one by Jonathan Alter — honestly — just floored me:

Oh, Ralph. If Ralph Nader hadn’t gotten under Lewis Powell’s skin, we wouldn’t be having these arguments over whether the individual mandate in Obamacare is unconstitutional.

And “stand your ground” laws — like the one at issue in the Trayvon Martin case — wouldn’t stand a chance in the rest of the country.

And free market conservatives would not be unconsciously defying police and doing the bidding of the National Rifle Association.

Yes, like Edward Lorenz’s “butterfly effect” (where the course of a tornado can be traced all the way back to the flapping of a butterfly’s wings thousands of miles away), it’s all connected, and in ways that should make us more conscious of how we associate ourselves with other political insects.

Of course. The liberals killed Trayvon. If we hadn’t been out there agitating for change in the 60s there wouldn’t have been a backlash and there wouldn’t be any racism or gun violence today. Why didn’t I think of that?

I have another theory. Alter goes way back to he 1970s to blame Nader for the consumer movement which allegedly scared Lewis Powell into writing his famous memo that inexorably led to the NRA and ALEC — and Trayvon’s death. But he doesn’t need to go back that far to feel the butterfly effect. There was a more recent insect buzzing around that led directly to our country becoming more a more violent, paranoid extremist state.

That insect’s name is Jonathan Alter, who wrote this in the wake of 9/11:

In this autumn of anger, even a liberal can find his thoughts turning to… torture. OK, not cattle prods or rubber hoses, at least not here in the United States, but something to jump-start the stalled investigation of the greatest crime in American history. Right now, four key hijacking suspects aren’t talking at all.

Couldn’t we at least subject them to psychological torture, like tapes of dying rabbits or high-decibel rap? (The military has done that in Panama and elsewhere.) How about truth serum, administered with a mandatory IV? Or deportation to Saudi Arabia, land of beheadings? (As the frustrated FBI has been threatening.) Some people still argue that we needn’t rethink any of our old assumptions about law enforcement, but they’re hopelessly “Sept. 10”–living in a country that no longer exists…

Actually, the world hasn’t changed as much as we have. The Israelis have been wrestling for years with the morality of torture. Until 1999 an interrogation technique called “shaking” was legal. It entailed holding a smelly bag over a suspect’s head in a dark room, then applying scary psychological torment. (To avoid lessening the potential impact on terrorists, I won’t specify exactly what kind.) Even now, Israeli law leaves a little room for “moderate physical pressure” in what are called “ticking time bomb” cases, where extracting information is essential to saving hundreds of lives. The decision of when to apply it is left in the hands of law-enforcement officials.

For more than 20 years Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz has argued to the Israelis that this is terribly unfair to the members of the security services. In a forthcoming book, “Shouting Fire,” he makes the case for what he calls a “torture warrant,” where judges would balance competing claims and make the call, as they do in issuing search warrants. Dershowitz says that as long as the fruits of such interrogation are used for investigation, not to convict the detainee (a violation of the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination), it could be constitutional here, too. “I’m not in favor of torture, but if you’re going to have it, it should damn well have court approval,” Dershowitz says.

Not surprisingly, judges and lawyers in both Israel and the United States don’t agree. They prefer looking the other way to giving even mild torture techniques the patina of legality. This leaves them in a strange moral position. The torture they can’t see (or that occurs after deportation) is harder on the person they claim to be concerned about–the detainee–but easier on their consciences. Out of sight, out of mind.

Short of physical torture, there’s always sodium pentothal (“truth serum”). The FBI is eager to try it, and deserves the chance. Unfortunately, truth serum, first used on spies in World War II, makes suspects gabby but not necessarily truthful. The same goes for even the harshest torture. When the subject breaks, he often lies. Prisoners “have only one objective–to end the pain,” says retired Col. Kenneth Allard, who was trained in interrogation. “It’s a huge limitation.”

Some torture clearly works. Jordan broke the most notorious terrorist of the 1980s, Abu Nidal, by threatening his family. Philippine police reportedly helped crack the 1993 World Trade Center bombings (plus a plot to crash 11 U.S. airliners and kill the pope) by convincing a suspect that they were about to turn him over to the Israelis. Then there’s painful Islamic justice, which has the added benefit of greater acceptance among Muslims.

We can’t legalize physical torture; it’s contrary to American values. But even as we continue to speak out against human-rights abuses around the world, we need to keep an open mind about certain measures to fight terrorism, like court-sanctioned psychological interrogation. And we’ll have to think about transferring some suspects to our less squeamish allies, even if that’s hypocritical. Nobody said this was going to be pretty.

If you haven’t read that in a while, or if it’s your first time, read it again to make sure you get the full effect of what this man was saying.

I honestly don’t know any other liberals whose thoughts automatically “turned to torture” after 9/11. But in the Village he is what passes for one, so his endorsement of this heinous and immoral practice went a long way toward legitimizing it. And so, by his own logic, the paranoia that has permeated our society ever since, including the lax gun laws we now have in 38 states, should then be laid at his feet.

The idea of blaming Ralph Nader’s work to keep cars from blowing up and killing your children for right wing extremism is a new low. Lewis Powell was a paranoid and repulsive man who saw millions of Americans in the streets, including African Americans, and feared that the elites were under seige and needed to band together to preserve their privilege. Alter might as well have blamed Martin Luther King for Trayvon’s tragic killing and saved Pat Buchanan the trouble. After all, King was no friend of the wealthy elite either.

Update: This transcript of Alter on TV, years later, failing to admit his personal call for torture as everyone was blaming the Bush administration says everything you need to know about the Village “liberals.”

Update II: Alter has taken to twitter to say:

Hmmm. What’s “ironic” about this, do you suppose?

“it’s all connected, and in ways that should make us more conscious of how we associate ourselves with other political insects.”

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Romney’s Big Lie

by David Atkins

It’s not news that Mitt Romney lies constantly, about big things and little things alike. But the biggest lies, the most nefarious, are the lies of narrative. They’re the lies that Mitt Romney and his conservative allies get away with, because the narratives are never challenged in the press.

Case in point: a fundraising letter I got in the mail from the Romney campaign. It’s filled with lies of omission and commission, of course, but I want to focus on this bit especially:

President Obama has mortgaged our future, increased the budget by more than 20% and allowed our debt to skyrocket. In fact, by the end of his term he will add nearly as much debt as all the previous presidents combined. That’s right…all the previous presidents COMBINED.

Simply put, President Obama’s policies created a deeper recession and delayed the recovery. The consequence is soaring numbers of Americans enduring unemployment, foreclosures, and bankruptcies. The way I see it, this is a moral tragedy. Unemployment is not just a statistic…nearly 13 million Americans unemployed is not just a number.

Unemployment means kids can’t go to college. That marriages break up under the financial strain, that young people can’t find work and start their lives, and men and women in their 50s, in the prime of their lives, fear they will never find a job again.

Liberals should be ashamed that they and their policies have failed these good and decent Americans!

Without a paycheck, you can’t take care of your family. Without a paycheck, you can’t buy school books for your kids, keep a car on the road, or help an aging parent make ends meet. Without a paycheck, it can feel like there is no hope.

But there is hope–if we change course before it’s too late. America–quite literally–cannot afford another four years of fiscally irresponsible leadership in the White House.

Now, there are innumerable easily answerable “small” lies here. The Bush Administration did far more to increase the deficit than the Obama Administration. The stimulus did lower unemployment. Foreclosure rates are down, not “soaring”. To say nothing of the fact that it’s Romney who wants to foreclose on as many people as possible, and Romney who wants to repeal the Affordable Care Act, thus ensuring increasing numbers of medical bankruptcies. The list goes on and on.

But the biggest lie isn’t any of these. It’s the narrative. Romney is suggesting that President Obama’s “fiscal irresponsibility” has “deepened the recession and delayed the recovery.” Let’s ignore all the little lies that go into that claim for a moment. Let’s pretend that the stimulus did nothing to curtail unemployment. Let’s pretend that the President did seriously increase the deficit more than his predecessor. And let’s pretend that Romney’s preferred policies would not, in fact, do untold damage to the economy and the middle class.

The big lie still remains: under no circumstances whatsoever has the spending or the deficit hurt economic recovery. There’s not even a coherent argument based in economic fantasy to claim such a thing. In order for spending to hurt an economy, it would have to do so by causing a deficit. Spending alone has zero negative impact on an economy, unless it comes theoretically at the cost of increased taxes–also not harmful in the right proportions, but irrelevant since the President has actually lowered taxes since taking office.

So spending isn’t a problem. What about the deficit? Well, deficits are only a problem if they lead to inflation and if they make it harder to borrow money–the latter only a problem because it causes forced austerity measures which weaken an economy (I needn’t mention that these would be the same austerity measures Mr. Romney would like to impose on us in advance.) The country doesn’t have a serious inflation problem (as Paul Krugman has been noting incessantly), and despite S&P’s bogus downgrade of U.S. debt, the Treasuries market hasn’t suffered. Not only has it not suffered, but one hedge fund manager “earned” (a word I’ll use very loosely) $3.9 billion last year mostly from investments in U.S. treasuries.

So we have low taxes, low inflation, and a strong Treasuries market. Under those circumstances, it is quite literally economically impossible for government spending to have “deepened the recession and delayed the recovery.” At worst it had no impact–and nearly every economist agrees that that itself is also untrue. Government spending had a considerable effect on lowering unemployment.

Sometimes it’s so tempting and so easy to get caught up in refuting all of Romney’s factual claims, that it’s easy to lose sight of the big lie that is his narrative. It would be nice if members of the press would call him or his conservative friends out on this whopper. But that might be difficult, as they’ve all been telling the same big lie in their way for years.

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Friday night adorable animal post

by digby

Some time ago Panchita was caught up in a net, which left deep cuts all over her body. She managed to make it to this hotel where animal advocates nursed her back to health for 3 months. Every day she returns to rest after being out to sea. She is now pregnant and expecting within a month.

I’m reminded of the summer there was a “red tide” problem in and around Santa Monica bay and a bunch of sea lions got sick and came on shore to rest. There were rescuers everywhere and many were rehabilitated.

Unfortunately, even though there were signs all over the place with instructions to leave the sea lions alone, people would pester them — and sometimes worse. And too often, foolish people with their hearts in the right place would do exactly the wrong thing by trying to push them into the water when they were just trying to rest on the shore.

The moral of the story is that when you see a sea lion on the beach, tell a lifeguard. They’re probably just taking a nap, but the lifeguards can call the marine rescue people to keep an eye on them. Stupid humans present their greatest natural danger in that situation.

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Pre-existing Pizza toppings

by digby

If you thought the questions before SCOTUS about government mandated broccoli were simple-minded and bizarre watch this libertarian pile of nonsense:

Evidently, libertarians think that everyone knows in advance what diseases they are going to get and boys should pay for boy diseases and girls should pay for girl diseases. They quite clearly don’t understand how insurance or markets work which is odd since they worship them as avatars of their “freedom.”

But then, they are very, very silly when it comes to economics. It’s more of a faith based thing.

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Yes, the pesticides are killing the bees. Surprised?

by David Atkins

Mother Jones reporting:

It’s springtime, and farmers throughout the Midwest and South are preparing to plant corn—and lots of it. The USDA projects this year’s corn crop will cover 94 million acres, the most in 68 years. (By comparison, the state of California occupies a land mass of about 101 million acres.) Nearly all of that immense stand of corn will be planted with seeds treated with neonicotinoid pesticides produced by the German chemical giant Bayer.

And that may be very bad news for honey bees, which remain in a dire state of health, riddled by large annual die-offs that have become known as “colony collapse disorder” (CCD).

In the past months, three separate studies—two of them just out in the prestigious journal Science—have added to a substantial body of literature linking widespread use of neonicotinoids to CCD. The latest research will renew pressure on the EPA to reconsider its registration of Bayer’s products. The EPA green-lighted Bayer’s products based largely on a study funded by the chemical giant itself—which was later discredited by the EPA’s own scientists, as this leaked memo shows.

I think what this proves is that the EPA is an out-of-control environazi organization that needs to be eliminated so that the job creators can make more money selling pesticides. If the bees all die off, well, that’s the price of economic growth and freedom. Do you love bees more than you love jobs and freedom? I didn’t think so.

Tom Philpott at Mother Jones asks the right question:

This accumulation of disturbing science raises a vital question: Does the Obama EPA have the backbone to take on the agrochemical industry during an election year and ban Bayer’s lucrative chemicals? The long-term status of the United States as a healthy habitat for bees, wild and cultivated alike, may hinge on the answer.

Call me crazy, but I would expect that anyone even the slightest bit open to voting for the President would understand banning a pesticide that is causing widespread death of bees. This one shouldn’t be a tough call, even in an election year.

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