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by digby

It looks like the big money boyz are starting to get nervous:

The United States ranks worst in welcoming foreign business travelers and tourists, due to bureaucratic headaches and rude immigration officials, a survey showed.

The survey by the Discover America Partnership, a business group from the travel and tourism industries, said the cold welcome for visitors could hurt the US economy.

“The US entry process has created a climate of fear and frustration that is turning away foreign business and leisure travelers from visiting the United States — and damaging America’s image abroad,” the group said in a statement.

The study was based on a survey of more than 2,000 travelers worldwide, asked to rate their experience in 16 countries in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and South America, in addition to the United States.

However, it also found that those with experience visiting America are 74 percent more likely to have an extremely favorable opinion of the country versus those who have not visited recently.

“This study should be a wake-up call for the US government,” said Geoff Freeman, Executive Director of the Discover America Partnership.

“Visiting the United States and interacting with the American people can have a powerful, positive effect on how non-US residents see our country. Unfortunately, perceptions of a ‘rude’ and ‘arrogant’ entry process are turning away travelers and harming America’s image.”

The survey found that the US entry process is considered the “world’s worst” by travelers, by more than a two-to-one margin over the next-worst destination area.

The US ranks with Africa and the Middle East when it comes to traveler-friendly paperwork and officials, the survey concluded, with 54 percent of international travelers saying that immigration officials are rude.

The survey found that two-thirds of travelers surveyed feared they would be detained at the border because of a simple mistake or misstatement.

“Foreign travelers are in agreement: the US entry process is unpredictable and unfriendly to foreign visitors, it is hurting America’s image abroad and deterring many from visiting the US,” said Thomas Riehle, partner, RT Strategies, which conducted the poll.

“These survey results help to explain the 17 percent decline in overseas travel to the US over the past five years and the 10 percent decline in business travel to the US over the past year.”

I heard recently that a lot of financial industry business is shifting to Europe because it’s just too much trouble to get into the country. The visa process is a nightmare even for people who come back and forth regularly. And treatment at the airports is downright frightening. I’m reminded of this story:

Somewhere in central Los Angeles, about 20 miles from LAX airport, there is a nondescript building housing a detention facility for foreigners who have violated US immigration and customs laws. I was driven there around 11pm on May 3, my hands painfully handcuffed behind my back as I sat crammed in one of several small, locked cages inside a security van. I saw glimpses of night-time urban LA through the metal bars as we drove, and shadowy figures of armed security officers when we arrived, two of whom took me inside. The handcuffs came off just before I was locked in a cell behind a thick glass wall and a heavy door. No bed, no chair, only two steel benches about a foot wide. There was a toilet in full view of anyone passing by, and of the video camera watching my every move. No pillow or blanket. A permanent fluorescent light and a television in one corner of the ceiling. It stayed on all night, tuned into a shopping channel.

After 10 minutes in the hot, barely breathable air, I panicked. I don’t suffer from claustrophobia, but this enclosure triggered it. There was no guard in sight and no way of calling for help. I banged on the door and the glass wall. A male security officer finally approached and gave the newly arrived detainee a disinterested look. Our shouting voices were barely audible through the thick door. “What do you want?” he yelled. I said I didn’t feel well. He walked away. I forced myself to calm down. I forced myself to use that toilet. I figured out a way of sleeping on the bench, on my side, for five minutes at a time, until the pain became unbearable, then resting in a sitting position and sleeping for another five minutes. I told myself it was for only one night.

As it turned out, I was to spend 26 hours in detention. My crime: I had flown in earlier that day to research an innocuous freelance assignment for the Guardian, but did not have a journalist’s visa.

Since September 11 2001, any traveller to the US is treated as a potential security risk. The Patriot Act, introduced 45 days after 9/11, contains a chapter on Protecting The Border, with a detailed section on Enhanced Immigration Provision, in which the paragraph on Visa Security And Integrity follows those relating to protection against terrorism. In this spirit, the immigration and naturalisation service has been placed, since March 2003, under the jurisdiction of the new department of homeland security. One of its innovations was to revive a law that had been dormant since 1952, requiring journalists to apply for a special visa, known as I-visa, when visiting the US for professional reasons. Somewhere along the way, in the process of trying to develop a foolproof system of protecting itself against genuine threats, the US has lost the ability to distinguish between friend and foe. The price this powerful country is paying for living in fear is the price of its civil liberties.

[…]

The queue for passport control was short. I presented my British passport and the green visa waiver form I had signed on the plane. The immigration official began by asking the usual questions about where I was staying and why I was travelling to the US. It brought back memories of another trip there to write a series of articles about post 9/11 America for the German weekly Die Zeit. I had written about commuters who preferred the safety of train travel to flying, and about a wounded New York that had become a city of survivors. I had seen a traumatised, no longer cockily immortal America in a profound state of mourning. But it had seemed to me that its newly acknowledged vulnerability was becoming its strength: stunned by an act of war on its own soil, Americans had been shocked into a sudden hunger for information about the world beyond their borders.

“I’m here to do some interviews,” I said.

“With whom?” He wrote down the names, asked what the article was about and who had commissioned it. “So you’re a journalist,” he said, accusingly, and for the first time I sensed that, in his eyes, this was not a good thing to be. “I have to refer this to my supervisor,” he said ominously, and asked me to move to a separate, enclosed area, where I was to wait to be “processed”. Other travellers came, waited and went; I was beginning to feel my jetlag and some impatience. I asked how long I’d have to wait, but received no reply. Finally, an officer said, noncommittally, “It seems that we will probably have to deport you.”

I’m not sure, but I think I laughed. Deport? Me? “Why?” I asked, incredulously.

“You came here as a journalist, and you don’t have a journalist’s visa.” I had never heard of it. He swiftly produced the visa waiver (I-94W) I had signed on the plane, and pointed to what it said in tiny print: in addition to not being a drug smuggler, a Nazi or any other sort of criminal, I had inadvertently declared that I was not entering the US as a representative of foreign media (“You may not accept unauthorised employment or attend school or represent the foreign information media during your visit under this program”).

My protestations that I had not noticed this caveat, nor been alerted to it, that I had travelled to the US on many occasions, both for work and pleasure, that I had, in fact, lived there as a permanent resident and that my husband was a US citizen, as was my New York-born daughter, all fell on deaf ears. He grinned. “You don’t care, do you?” I said, with controlled anger. Then I backtracked, and assumed a begging, apologetic mode. In response, he told me I would have to be “interviewed”, and that a decision would then be taken by yet another superior. This sounded hopeful.

Finally, after much scurrying around by officers, I was invited into an office and asked if I needed anything before we began. I requested a glass of water, which the interrogating officer brought me himself. He was a gentle, intelligent interrogator: the interview lasted several hours and consisted of a complete appraisal of my life, past and present, personal and professional. He needed information as diverse as my parents’ names, the fee I would be paid for the article I was working on, what it was about, exactly, and, again, the names of people I was coming to interview. My biography was a confusing issue – I was born in one country, had lived in many others: who was I, exactly? For US immigration, my British passport was not enough of an identity. The officer said, pointedly, “You are Russian, yet you claim to be British”, an accusation based on the fact that I was born in Moscow (though I never lived there). Your governor, went my mental reply, is Austrian, yet he claims to be American. After about three hours, during which I tried hard to fight jetlag and stay alert, we had produced several pages that were supposed to provide the invisible person in charge with enough material to say yes or no to my request to be allowed entry. My interrogator asked one last obligatory question, “Do you understand?”

“Yes, I understand,” I sighed, and signed the form. The instant faxed response was an official, final refusal to enter the US for not having the appropriate visa. I’d have to go back to London to apply for it.

At this moment, the absurd but almost friendly banter between these men and myself underwent a sudden transformation. Their tone hardened as they said that their “rules” demanded that they now search my luggage. Before I could approach to observe them doing this, the officer who had originally referred me to his supervisor was unzipping my suitcase and rummaging inside. For the first time, I raised my voice: “How dare you touch my private things?”

“How dare you treat an American officer with disrespect?” he shouted back, indignantly. “Believe me, we have treated you with much more respect than other people. You should go to places like Iran, you’d see a big difference.” The irony is that it is only “countries like Iran” (for example, Cuba, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe) that have a visa requirement for journalists. It is unheard of in open societies, and, in spite of now being enforced in the US, is still so obscure that most journalists are not familiar with it. Thirteen foreign journalists were detained and deported from the US last year, 12 of them from LAX.

I urge you to read the whole thing.

Nobody cares about foreign journalists, of course, and nobody in our current government is going to stand up for the principle of a free press.(They have reportedly streamlined the journalist visa process, at least.) These are people who are investigating the NY Times for publishing leaks, after all.

But now our terrible image and rude tactics are really starting to interfere with business — and that’s a problem that’s going to get some attention. I’m sure Karen Hughes is out there feverishly chatting up all the soccer moms on the planet telling them they shouldn’t hate us for our freedom, but somehow I don’t think it’s going to help. Being hated all over the world is not just bad for our physical security it’s bad for our economic security too.

I’m wondering if there’s any aspect of life in America (or the world, for that matter) that hasn’t been adversely affected by the Bush administration’s blunderbuss approach to governance. The American big money boyz were very short-sighted when they backed these people. But then, that’s one of their trademarks, isn’t it?

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Let Us Play

by digby

Look who’s going to be writing about religion for the Washington Post.

Of course, gossip, backbiting and social ruin are sacred rites in all royal courts, so I suppose it makes a certain amount of sense for the Mother Superior of the Order of Bored Trophy Wives to exploit some of that olde time religion. She will be joined in this venture by another member of the nfashionable, religious in-crowd, Jon Meacham, editor of Newsweek, who once wrote this in the magazine:

The uniqueness—one could say oddity, or implausibility—of the story of Jesus’ resurrection argues that the tradition is more likely historical than theological.

I’m sure this new WaPo feature will be a fascinating trek through the minds of the bosses wife and a trendy mainstream religion peddler. Naturally, they enter the scene just as it passes from hip to kitch and have no idea that it’s happened. This is not unusual among the DC cognoscenti.

Remember this?

On the evening of Nov. 14, Quinn took her message to the grass roots, addressing approximately 70 folks at a meeting of the Citizens Association of Georgetown. Speaking from the pulpit of St. John’s Episcopal Church, Quinn said that she had gathered enough information to “scare you a lot.”

[…]

Your N95 Mask: The Building Block of Emergency Prep. At her talk, Quinn held this particle-filtering device to her mouth and said that she’s “never without it.” She also stuffs one into the briefcase of her husband, former Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee, who she says “grouses” about the precaution.

Pick a Room and Stock It. You need water and food to last a week, a battery-powered radio and flashlight, planned emergency routes, contact numbers for the family, the antibiotics Cipro and doxycycline, a first-aid kit, and plastic sheeting and duct tape. Quinn herself keeps all these things in her home’s laundry room, because it’s “easy to seal off.” Also, her food supply is heavy on the beans, “because they’re nutritious.”

[…]

Two Words: Peanut Butter. Along with a supply of water, Quinn keeps a “large jar” of peanut butter in her car, primarily for the protein. Even a small amount of this staple, says Quinn, will sustain the terrorism victim for quite some time.

Keep the Kayak in the Garage. In a 2003 Post piece, Quinn advocated the use of inflatable kayaks as an evacuation mode for those who live near water. The mass hysteria following Hurricane Katrina, though, has apparently soured Quinn on riparian retreat. “Somebody would stick you up with a gun,” said Quinn of an evacuee headed to the river with a portable craft.

Don’t Bother Putting Masks on Your Dog. At the Georgetown speech, an audience member suggested placing masks on pets to keep them from spreading contagions. Quinn responded that she’d tried putting an N95 on Sparky, her now-deceased Shih Tzu, but it didn’t work.

In this new online feature, Meacham can be counted upon to continue to help us understand that the more implausible a thing is, the more likely it is to be true. And Quinn will hopefully put the same kind of serious thought into spirituality that she puts into risk management. Sounds like a winner.

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Shorthand

by digby

The other day I was listening to Al Franken and Jonathan Alter chatter about a speech they’d heard President Clinton deliver at a dinner for the 20th anniversary of Harvard University’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. (This is the speech in which he said “people didn’t give Democrats a mandate.They gave us a chance.”)

Franken made the interesting observation that in a room filled with journalists he was the only one taking notes — which explains why there was so little coverage of the event and the speech. Alter (one of the few who wrote about it) has an excellent memory, however, and described what Clinton said in some detail on Franken’s show, focusing on a specific point that Clinton made:

“America rejected shorthand, people are thinking again.”

This was, apparently (I can’t find a copy of the speech anywhere) a bit from a long passage explaining how this election reflects America’s return to empiricism. Alter doesn’t discuss this aspect of the speech in his piece, linked above, in Newsweek. And since virtually the entire elite press corps who were present didn’t bother to write about it, it’s hard to know exactly what he meant. But it certainly seems likely that he was at least obliquely referring to the press corps, considering the venue.

On Franken, Alter did not mention that possibility and instead went on to use Clinton’s theory that Americans had voted for empiricism as an opportunity to lecture liberals that they were in danger of becoming like conservatives because they hadn’t learned to rein in their own faith-based fanaticism. He used the teachers unions as an example of how the liberals refuse to admit empirical evidence that might endanger their power base. (I know. That’s right up there with denying global warming and saying that abortion causes breast cancer.)

As I listened to this I was once again struck by the lack of self-awareness in the media. You have the former president saying this to a crowd of elite journalists and they don’t seem to think it could apply to them — the very institution that is in charge of getting out the facts to the public. (The same institution that is now giving respect to such empirically nonsensical notions as creationism.)

I have long thought that one of liberalism’s biggest problems is its liberal pundits. Alter is a good guy who is more often right than wrong and so I don’t mean to pick on him here. But his comments are revealing. While he takes the opportunity to scold liberals for their own weakness in this area, he doesn’t acknowledge his own.

Sometime back I took him to task for his lazy adherence to the tired beltway theme about McGovernite retreads. But Alter is not one of the worst purveyors of this tired trope. A much better example of egregiously obtuse liberal punditry — the kind that would likely make me become a conservative if I were young and didn’t know better, just because I wouldn’t want to be associated with it — is Richard Cohen talking about the Vietnam and Iraq wars today:

I would have fought neither war.

Before you protest “of course, Cohen,” let me explain that the “I” in the foregoing sentence is really four people. There is the “I” who originally thought the Vietnam War was morally correct, that the communists were awful people and that the loss of South Vietnam (the North was already gone) would result in a debacle for its people. That’s, in fact, what happened. It was only later, when I myself was in the Army, that I deemed the war not worth killing or dying for. By then I — the second “I” — no longer felt it was winnable, and I did not want to lose my life so that somehow defeat could be managed more elegantly.

Things are precisely the same with Iraq, and here, too, I — No. 3 — originally had no moral qualms about the war. Saddam Hussein was a beast who had twice invaded his neighbors, had killed his own people with abandon and posed a threat — and not just a theoretical one — to Israel. If anything, I was encouraged in my belief by the offensive opposition to the war — silly arguments about oil or empire or, at bottom, the ineradicable and perpetual rottenness of America.

On the contrary, I thought. We are a good country, attempting to do a good thing. In a post-Sept. 11 world, I thought the prudent use of violence could be therapeutic. The United States had the power to change things for the better, and those who would do the changing — the fighting — were, after all, volunteers. This mattered to me.

But these volunteers are now fighting a war few envisaged and no one wanted — not I (No. 4), for sure. If at one time my latter-day minutemen marched off thinking they were bringing democracy to Iraq and the greater Middle East, they now must know better. If they thought they were going to rid the region of weapons of mass destruction and sever the link between al-Qaeda and Hussein, they now are entitled to feel duped by Bush, Vice President Cheney and others. The exaggerations are particularly repellent. To fool someone into sacrificing his life to battle a chimera is a hideous abuse of the public trust.

Everything about that screams shallow, unsubstantial, flip-flopping fool. This is the face of liberalism that the right loves to use as an example of our dizzy, deer-in-the-headlights intellectual fecklessness. And if we were like him, they would be right.

It was one thing for Cohen to have followed that path the Vietnam war. He was a young man. He was also part of a culture that was drenched in the WWII ethos of American military dominance. Cohen’s journey during Vietnam is that of many Americans. What is not acceptable is that in middle age he shows exactly the same naivete as if the previous experience never happened — much like Bush and the Neocons who apparently never got past it either. This is the most embarrassing public confession I’ve read in a long time.

But that wasn’t the worst of it:

If anything, I was encouraged in my belief by the offensive opposition to the war — silly arguments about oil or empire or, at bottom, the ineradicable and perpetual rottenness of America.

On the contrary, I thought. We are a good country, attempting to do a good thing. In a post-Sept. 11 world, I thought the prudent use of violence could be therapeutic.

The “prudent use of violence could be therapeutic,” (for whom, he doesn’t say, but I must assume it wasn’t those who were on either the delivery or receving ends — I doubt it’s very therapeutic for them.) And in the same breath he says he was encouraged in his beliefs because of the “offensive” and “silly” opposition to the war which was “at bottom” a bunch of believers in the “ineradicable and perpetual rottenness” of America.

This isn’t just any Joe Schmoe. He’s a top liberal columnist in the national capitol’s premiere newspaper and he’s not only a trafficker in cliches so musty they smell like Robert Novak’s crypt, but he’s apparently so muddle headed that he doesn’t know when he sounds like a sociopath. (But I suppose sociopaths never know when they sound like sociopaths, do they?)

This statement actually does raise an important question: would the judgment of America as being “rotten” actually be all wrong if it were proven that most Americans were the type of people who think that the “prudent use of violence is therapeutic?” I think it might. It would certainly prove that most Americans are offensive.

As it is, I doubt that very many people really believe that a prudent use of violence is therapeutic. Only rich, rheumy-eyed, dissolute courtiers who live in a rarified world in which patriotic “volunteers” administer the beatings for them would think such a thing. (Or S&M porno afficionados, which I suspect may include many of the same people.)

If Clinton is correct and the American people are thinking again, it’s quite clear that Richard Cohen has not joined their ranks. He’s still splashing about in his own alternate reality, fighting the straw hippies he still sees around every corner and sharing a lifelong personal journey in which he managed to get from the toilet to the sink and back again. Jonathan Alter may be right that liberals have their own faith-based problems, but our much bigger problem is the total incoherence of people like Cohen who are paid big bucks to represent us in the media.

Update: Hilzoy says Richard Cohen should get a new job.
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Something Odd About This Story

by tristero

Something strikes me as truly weird about this story. See if you agree:

The Dyersburg Youth Minister accused of raping a 14 year old girl has resigned from his position as Youth Minister of Music at Springhill Baptist Church.

44 year old Timothy Byars submitted his resignation to the church’s pastor over the phone. Byars was released from jail in Knoxville Sunday November 19, 2006 on a $50,000 bond.

The teenage girl claims Byars raped her while she, Byars and three other young girls were attending a track meet in East Tennessee.

While the investigation continues in the case, Springhill Baptist Church Pastor, James Branscum says he and the church members will pray for Byars.

Police say Byars may have also raped another young girl in Nashville.

See what I mean? Pastor Branscum says he and his church members will pray for the accused rapist. And that is very Christian of them, I”m sure.

But I think they forgot someone else to pray for. Maybe two someone elses…

By the way, Here’s another story about the case::

A 14-year-old girl said Coach Timothy Byars, 44, raped her while at a tournament over the weekend in East Tennessee.

Knoxville Police said the attack happened in a parking lot, as Byars, his two daughters, the victim and her older sister slept in his SUV before a track meet. The girl text messaged her parents after the attack happened.

Her parents flew to East Tennessee to get their daughter. Soon after, Knoxville Police arrested Byars for rape.

A 19-year-old also accused Byars of inappropriate behavior, and said he touched her inappropriately as she drove the team van through Nashville.

“It was not a situation of it occurring just for a second or two. She said the inappropriate contact occurred for a time as they were on I-40, we believe in Nashville,” Metro Police spokesperson Don Aaron said.

This little detail leaped out at me:

In Dyersburg, people found the allegations against the father of seven hard to believe.

Sounds like maybe we got one of those staunch, pious Quiverfull patriarchs the press has been fawning over recently.

A perverse question. Let’s say the girl was in fact raped and becomes pregnant. Do you think Byars could win if he sued to prevent an abortion? After all, the rightwing has been shrieking for years on the subject of the father’s rights in re: abortion.

Like I said, a perverse question, but it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if someday it happens, even if not in this case.

Hand Off

by digby

Atrios links to this post by Robert Reich in which he says that McCain wants higher troop levels in Iraq because it will raise morale. Ok.

But he also says something else that I think is important and have been meaning to discuss:

I think McCain knows Iraq is out of our hands – it’s disintegrating into civil war, and by 2008 will be a bloodbath. He also knows American troops will be withdrawn. The most important political fact he knows is he has to keep a big distance between himself and Bush in order to avoid being tainted by this horrifying failure. Arguing that we need more troops effectively covers his ass. It will allow him to say, “if the President did what I urged him to do, none of this would have happened.”

This is obviously his plan. But from what I’m reading there is likely to be a plan that will do exactly what McCain wants and if it’s implemented it’s going to screw him good.

The Pentagon’s closely guarded review of how to improve the situation in Iraq has outlined three basic options: Send in more troops, shrink the force but stay longer, or pull out, according to senior defense officials.

Insiders have dubbed the options “Go Big,” “Go Long” and “Go Home.” The group conducting the review is likely to recommend a combination of a small, short-term increase in U.S. troops and a long-term commitment to stepped-up training and advising of Iraqi forces, the officials said.

I do not want to see anybody sent into that meat grinder and I’m not sure they can do it. But if they do, it will stab St. John right in the back. His rationale for winning in 2008 hinges on his calling for more troops and the Bush administration not listening. (Whoever wins the Republican nomination in 08 must run against both Bush and the Democrats.)

McCain made a tactical error when he asked for a specific number recently. If they give him what he wants and it fails, which it will, his rabid support for the war becomes a huge liability:

Mr. McCain contends that the war in Iraq is worth fighting and is worth winning. He has said consistently from the start of the conflict that the only way to prevail is to send enough soldiers to do the job. His current proposal is to send 20,000 additional troops in hopes of bringing Baghdad and the restive western provinces under control.

The alternative, he said, is humiliation for the United States and disaster for Iraq.

(Josh Marshall explains why this won’t work.)

He’s going to be left with no option but to call for even more escalation going into ’08 if they do this. I can’t help but wonder about the political implications. Perhaps it’s just a coincidence that the number is the same and that Abizaid famously said recently that the extra 20,000 weren’t necessary. If the Bush administration now “gives” McCain exactly what he’s asked for they are effectively passing off the war to him. McCain is positioning himself to be Lyndon Johnson in this thing without even becoming president.

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Olbermann

by tristero

I will confess something. About halfway through this brilliant, eloquent takedown of Bush’s remarks in Vietnam, my eyes teared up and I could barely continue. I remembered the horror of opening up Life Magazine, over 35 years ago now, I guess, that famous issue of photos of one week’s dead soldiers in Vietnam. You turned those pages of pictures with a combination of grief at the loss and fury at the sheer senselessness of it. Then my mind turned back to the rising death toll in Iraq. No matter how many times I’ve read about about the latest casualties, it still hits me in the gut, each and every time. And the same with the spotty coverage of the Iraqi dead, stories of the most horrific atrocities, all triggered by the lunatic orders of a sociopath who lied to his people, a people, terrorized by 9/11, who were all too willing to trust him. Atrocities for which all Americans, even those of us who devoted enormous effort to prevent the war, will be blamed by the communities Bush brutalized.

The tired question all of us have been asking for years now about America is, “Where’s the outrage?” Well, watch Olbermann, who can barely restrain himself. There’s the outrage.

I hope Olbermann’s comments spread like wildfire until every last person in this country hears them. Don’t miss this video.

ht, atrios.

Reality Is Strange, Love

by tristero

Reading Digby’s recent post finally jogged my memory. All this talk about compulsory breeding being good for the race – the race being “Christians” these days – where had I heard that before?

Oh, yeah:

General ‘Buck’ Turgidson:
Doctor, you mentioned the ratio of ten women to each man. Now, wouldn’t that necessitate the abandonment of the so-called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?

Dr. Strangelove:
Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious… service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.

Ambassador de Sadesky:
I must confess, you have an astonishingly good idea there, Doctor.

It’s a somewhat different solution to the problem than the quiverfulls, but the desired outcome is the same. And in this case, as the General points out, rather than forcing one woman to endure a lifetime of pregnancy, it is the man who would have to sacrifice the most, by giving up his monogamy.

It’s time, given the rise of islamofascistliberalvegetarian immigrant-type people, to have a serious, thoughtful discussion of the Dr.’s ideas. Not to be willing to do so just shows that liberals are truly small-minded and unwilling to entertain refreshingingly unusual ideas.

All Shook Up

by digby

Somebody needs a nice long rest.

The price for being a Christian…. in Indonesia…and soon to be Malaysia (allegedly reported in the local daily news yesterday and today.)

Death for abandoning (lapsing) Muslims and for Christians who preach in Malay.

Indonesia. An Islamic democracy. Is Islam compatible with democracy? These pictures were forwarded to me from a friend who knows a Christian in Indonesia……I cannot reveal too much or I will jeopardize the lives of those that smuggled these pics out. I am running them beneath the fold as they are too graphic to run on the main page. I am running them so the world will know and see that Indonesians are NOT the friend of anyone who is not Muslim.

The problem, as commmenters point out, is that the pictures have been on the internet for years and they depict tribal and ethnic violence that is only peripherally related to religion. If you read the whole post she goes into a total hysterical meltdown right on the page. Repeating over and over again

****THESE ARE GRAPHIC ********VIOLENT PICS*******WARNING WARNING WARNING**********

and then this:

UPDATE: I will have more details on these pics shortly. There is enormous fear in those I communicate with. Will post soon

Finally today, she acknowledges that the pics are from the early 90’s (no explanation about the “smuggling” or the “enormous fear”) but finds new evidence of Christian beheadings and writes this:

So what follows are photos from the late 1990s before the US went into Afghanistan and Iraq. Here we have Christian girls beheaded in Indonesia late last year. And here we have more Christian girls beheaded last week with the promise of more. It’s the jihad.

[…]

These pictures depict the cruel, oppressive existence that non Muslims live under in Islamic countries. No matter how the left twists and squirms to rationalize, this is the ugly truth. And the barbarism continues before the US intervened and after.

Hoookay. It’s the jihad.

Her followers are certainly convinced:

Atrocities like these will be commonplace in Europe probably within the next five years, and certainly within the next ten. 2012 will be a watershed year.

Normally, this wouldn’t be worth mentioning — just another slightly deranged rightwing blogger, right? Dime a dozen. But Atlas conducts long interviews with people like John Bolton and Benjamin Netanyahu. Shouldn’t their security people be a little bit concerned about this?

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Shake Your Floozy Patch

by digby

From Missouri:

A Republican-led legislative panel claims in a new report on illegal immigration that abortion is partly to blame because it is causing a shortage of American workers.

The report from the state House Special Committee on Immigration Reform also claims “liberal social welfare policies” have discouraged Americans from working and encouraged immigrants to cross the border illegally.

The statements about abortion, welfare policies and a recommendation to abolish income taxes in favor of sales taxes were inserted into the immigration report by the committee chairman, Rep. Ed Emery.

All six Democrats on the panel refused to sign the report. Some of them called the abortion assertion ridiculous and embarrassing.

“There’s a lot of editorial comment there that I couldn’t really stomach,” Rep. Trent Skaggs said Monday. “To be honest, I think it’s a little delusional.”

All 10 Republican committee members signed the report, though one of them, Rep. Billy Pat Wright, said Monday he didn’t recall it connecting abortion and illegal immigration.

Emery, who equates abortion to murder, defended the assertions.

“We hear a lot of arguments today that the reason that we can’t get serious about our borders is that we are desperate for all these workers,” Emery said. “You don’t have to think too long. If you kill 44 million of your potential workers, it’s not too surprising we would be desperate for workers.”

National Right to Life estimates there have been more than 47 million abortions since the Supreme Court established a woman’s right to abortion in its 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling. The immigration report estimates there are 80,000 fewer Missourians because of abortion, many of whom now would have been in a “highly productive age group for workers.”

As I wrote earlier, we have the DLC hiring crackpot sociologists to write articles about liberals outbreeding the conservative movement, David Brooks talking about “natalism,” Newsweek writing respectful articles about the Kooky Quiverfuls and now state legislatures connecting immigration to abortion and suggesting that the white women aren’t breeding enough. Anybody feeling the hot breath of a new conservative meme on their necks?

Good luck with that. Women are going to make their own choices and there is nothing these throwbacks can do about it. If some of them want to have 14 children it’s their right. Nobody’s going to stop them. (As long as they are white and married of course. Singles or women of color are just whores and parasites and must be stopped, the workforce be damned.) I have a feeling that this anti-birth control and brood-mare-for-Jesus thing isn’t going to catch fire.

I do have a good idea how these people can lead by example, however. Every woman who belongs to the forced childbirth movement should sign a contract agreeing to birth at least four snowflake babies and homeschool them. This way they could assure that each woman fulfills her patriotic duty by raising at least four children (more if she wants to pass on her own very special genes) and the nation will have a nice homegrown uneducated workforce to exploit with low wages and bad working conditions. They wouldn’t even have to fuck, which I’m sure would be a great relief for all concerned.

Oh, and in case anyone’s wondering, Ed Meese, one of the Horsenuts of the Apocalypse, explicitly says in his GQ interview that Roe is not the problem. It’s Griswald. I’m not sure why exactly, but recent wingnut “science” suggests that when females hang their “floozy-patch” out there for all to see, pick up strange men and get drunk on oxytocin they lose the capacity to love a good man. Or something.

Pandagon has been discussing this issue in detail and has lots of info on what is obviously a new front for the forced childbirth movement.

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Honest Abe The Newt

by tristero

So, Newt Gingrich wants to be president because, get this, he thinks he can be the new Lincoln:

In casting himself as the reluctant but critical-for-these-times candidate, the former history professor is looking back to 1860, and the wildfire support for Lincoln’s candidacy touched off by a series of speeches…. “I was fascinated by Holzer’s portrait of Lincoln spending three months at the Springfield state library, putting together the definitive argument about the Constitution, the Founding Fathers and slavery,” Gingrich says.

“He turns it into a 7,300-word speech – gives it once in New York, once in Rhode Island, once in Massachusetts, once in New Hampshire. Then he goes home. I was struck by the sheer courage of the self-definitional moment that said, ‘We are in real trouble, we need real leadership, and if that’s who you think we need, here’s my speech’,” Gingrich says, suggesting he intends to do the same thing.

So can we look forward to the 21st version of such immortal phrases as “the mystic chords of memory,” or “a house divided cannot stand,” or “the last best hope on earth?”

Well, Newt gives us a preview. When asked if he is running for president, Gingrich replied:

‘I’m going to tell you something, and whether or not it’s plausible given the world you come out of is your problem’ …. ‘I am not ‘running’ for president. I am seeking to create a movement to win the future by offering a series of solutions so compelling that if the American people say I have to be president, it will happen.’

What command of the language! What magnanimity of spirit! What perspective on his own ambitions!

Now if he’d only grow a beard, lose 250 pounds, buy those shoes with humongous soles teenage girls wear to make him 6’5″ – what else would he need? A brain and a heart, you say? Oh, don’t be snarky.

Sigh. It truly is amazing the slime that has access to the mainstream discourse these days.

(Btw, simply because Gingrich totally mangled Lincoln at Cooper Union, don’t prejudge the book. I read it when it came out and as I recall, it’s actually very good. )