Saturday, August 21, 2010

Quote of the Day

By Creature

"We keep on hearing from the far right that America is Germany in the 30’s. It may be coming true only there won’t be brown shirts, they’ll be wearing red, white and blue and carrying crosses." -- GregB, commenting over at Balloon Juice.

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Sharia in Flori-Duh

By Capt. Fogg

I used to bridle at the popular smear: Florid-Duh -- after all I live here, but perhaps it's time to recognize that this smelly shoe fits pretty well and we can't avoid wearing it. My suspicion began back when a State Representative balked on passing a bill mentioning Animal Husbandry for fear it would lead to legalizing marriage between people and animals and now that I read about Daniel Webster, candidate for the US Congress, who is endorsed by the Orlando Sentinel and former Governor and Presidential brother, Jeb Bush as well, I have to confess. We're not just the Sunshine State; we're Flori-Duh.

Webster is no political neophyte and hardly an outsider to the Republican Party. He was Speaker of the Florida House, Majority Leader of the Florida Senate and was in the State Legislature for 28 years. While there, he introduced a bill which was meant to create something he calls "covenant marriage" and others have called the "Roach Motel Marriage." You can check in, but you can't check out. Under this law, so closely resembling what one sees only in Taliban controlled areas, there is no excuse for divorce except for the infidelity of one partner. If both are unfaithful, you don't check out. If your partner beats hell out of you, sets you on fire or molests your children, you live with it for the rest of your life. So much for the Republican fable that it's the Liberals looking to institute Sharia law in the US.

Certainly, the history of bizarre Congressional proposals is rich with idiotic attempts such as this, but remember, Dan Webster is not considered beyond the pale of modern conservatism, he's a favorite son of what's left of the Republican Party; a party not satisfied only to roll back all progress in human rights since the 1960's, but the 1860's and perhaps the 1760's. Don't forget the recent and still popular Vice Presidential candidate who spoke of Witches as a real problem or the elected officials who don't believe in evolution and think Geology and Archaeology are fraudulent.

If there are many of them who can smell the idiocy, they're too partisan to mention it and indeed, the ride they've been taking on the wave of superstition, suspicion and stupidity has taken them a long way and they're along way from giving it up. The wave never seems to break and it won't until we break it.

(Cross posted from Human Voices)

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Friday, August 20, 2010

Beck's dangerous idea

By Capt. Fogg

It's marvelous that Charles Darwin still scares the hell out of people. Marvelous that is, if you're not convinced that our species has little survival potential because the peculiar adaptation to a changing world we share with no other species, is beginning to make it impossible to adapt to the changing world brought about by that adaptation. Human intelligence is a very new development and far from making us the pinnacle of evolution, it may yet prove to be another example of overspecialization making us vulnerable to extinction as our existence depends ever more on coping with an ever more complex world.

That we may have risen to the level of our incompetence, beyond the level of the average person's capability to understand invokes the Peter Principle. That there are people like Glenn Beck who thrive on breaking the tools we've used so get us this far, subduing intelligence and reason and critical facilities as well as the body of information we've accumulated, assures the eventual end of civilization and without civilization, we're not exactly the fittest things in the jungle, are we?

It may seem strange to cite Glenn Beck when talking about matters of intelligence, but it's no stranger than listening to him make that old and silly and certainly illegitimate claim that Charles Darwin is the "father of modern racism." It's an argument that can't be seen as such by anyone familiar with the modern, scientific concept of evolution or indeed someone smart enough to realize that Darwin didn't invent that process any more than Newton invented gravity or inertia making him culpable when someone hits you over the head with a rock. It takes, in fact, something more than Beckian stupidity and something more like mens Rea, as the lawyers call it: evil intent. Evil intent is a distinctly human property as Mr. Beck amply demonstrates. Darwin didn't invent humans.

Ask the moron on the street what Darwin was all about and he'll likely say "survival of the fittest" and he'll be wrong. He'll be unlikely to revise his opinion since the natural algorithm that produces speciation and biodiversity is more complex than he's willing or able to assimilate and the body of evidence might as well be buried on Mars for all he knows of it. Survival of the fittest is a flattering concept anyway, since we've survived so far and therefore can call ourselves fit and masters of all we survey.

It's a fairly short non-sequitur from there to "only the fit should survive" which of course is not Darwin and certainly not Dan Dennett but Republican, Conservative, Libertarian, Glenn Beckian. How better to describe the contempt and lack of concern for the helpless and unfortunate than to link it to the Scroogian "let them die and decrease the surplus population?" It's not Liberals after all who decry compassion when it costs us anything, it's Conservatives.

That evolution occurs and is the process through which all existing life forms have differentiated themselves from other life forms, right down to whatever primitive life-like chemistry preceded them, is not conjectural. It's not in doubt and not without an overwhelming preponderance of evidence. It's more solid, I could argue, than Newtonian physics, but the important factor is that it's not about survival of the fittest and doubly not about the idea that one racial or ethnic group needs to enforce the fallacy by persecuting another. Darwin is about an inevitable natural process and inevitable and natural things don't need enforcement.

The Nazis did not seek to eliminate other "races" than their mythical Aryan brotherhood because of Darwin or Huxley or any of the countless archaeologists and geneticists who have cemented evolution as a basic science -- they used a fallacious and mendacious misstatement of it because they were racists seeking scientific basis, just as Glenn Beck does. Make no mistake, I give the comparison in all seriousness. Fake science, bad science and specious arguments lie behind many movements, most of which are highly dangerous. The public hasn't the brains or the knowledge to see through it and many who have have been hypnotized by one Svengali after another.

Using a fake simulacrum of science to bolster animal instinct, putting a stolen lab coat on greed, bigotry and racism does not serve to smear real science. In fact as Glenn Beck uses such tools to burn science in effigy he may be making stupidity an important survival factor.

(Cross posted from Human Voices)

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Thursday, August 19, 2010

Secret Muslim

By Creature

Sure it sucks that Americans can't get President Obama's religion right, and it sucks more that the religion they think he is so hated, but what really sucks is that we care at all.

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The ownership society

By Capt. Fogg

So now it's "Obama's Mosque" and why the hell not, since there appears to be no bottom at the deep end. All the hysteria about the "most far left liberal politician since Trotsky" has all the traction of a bald tire on a wet road as Obama panders to the right, the Birther blowhard, Orly Taitz, would up in contempt of our most conservative high court and the legion of dire prediction demons has failed to infect anyone but the swine. We didn't fall into a deep depression and slowly, most things are getting better. Half the TARP funds have been repaid at interest. No army has poured across our weakened borders into the arms of Obama, the flow of illegal aliens has diminished and deportations are up substantially despite all the howling. Obama isn't rounding up Republicans, we haven't turned the army over to the UN, and yes, his ratings although they've fallen since he was elected, are still better than Ronald Reagan's.

Of course the predictions of recession that were denounced as treasonous by the right wing chorus during the previous administration did come true, the reasons for the most expensive war in our history were false and the benefit of the radical tax cuts not only failed to materialize but produced no new private sector jobs and earned us a 8 trillion dollar loss. But enough of that liberal America hating treason -- it's Obama's fault for bailing out US business, even though Bush asked for more money and less oversight. It's Obama's fault and the Mosque that isn't actually a Mosque located in what isn't the World Trade Crater in a neighborhood with a substantial Muslim population and where there's already a Mosque must be shown to belong to Barack Hussein Obama.

And why not? They're already snickering that he isn't Jesus Christ and if he were, I'm sure they'd make sure the analogy was perfect. It's Obama's Mosque and when that blows over, there will be some other idiotic calumny and on and on, while there continues to be nothing useful and nothing that hasn't been debunked or proven disastrous coming out of the racist right wing rabble of hare brained hooligans posing as patriots.

So now it's Obama's Mosque as if his predecessor hadn't spent far more time in them, praising (to his credit) Islam and Muslims as a religion of peace and peaceful people and good Americans. It's Obama's fault and they'll take back America: xenophobic, imperialist, feudal, monopolistic, theocratic, undereducated, over opinionated, 'we're number' one America where Beethoven is a dog, Michelangelo is a virus and a Mosque that isn't a Mosque is Obama's and a recession that isn't Obama's is.

(Cross posted from Human Voices)

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Before The Memory Hole Gets Filled In

By Carl
 
Eight years. The longest war in American history. A war of aggression. 4400+ American soldiers dead. One million Iraqis dead. Who knows how many more displaced and chronically, perhaps fatally, un- or underemployed.
 
America's first official war of aggression. At least we didn't bother veiling this one behind an attack on a ship. Kofi Annan.
 
WMDs. NBCs. "They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat." Chemical Ali. Baghdad Bob. Spider trap. Embedding. Qatar.
 
David Bloom: I miss him still. Peter Arnett.
 
Colin Powell in front of the UN with a vial of "anthrax". Bush said in a nationally televised White House speech. "Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within 48 hours. Their refusal to do so will result in military conflict commenced at a time of our choosing." "Axis of Evil". Three million Romans protesting war (there's an irony), the largest anti-war protest ever. Mohamed ElBaradei. Hans Blix. Scott Ritter. Connection to September 11 attacks. Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, allies. Muhammad Atta in Prague with high ranking Hussein official. 48% still believe that Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks.  
 
Yellowcake. Niger. Joe Wilson. Curveball. Valarie Plame. Scooter Libby. Karl Rove. Judith Miller. Ahmed Chalabi. Stephen Hadley. Robert Novak. Tim Russert. George Tenet. "Slam dunk". Paul Wolfowitz. PNAC. Douglas "The Stupidest Man In America" Feith.
 
Shock and Awe. Moqtada Al-Sadr. Sadr City. Ali Al-Sistani. Coalition of the "Willing". Coalition of the Bullied. Shi'a. Sunni. Kurds. Coaltion Provisional Authority. L. Paul Bremer. De-Ba'athification. Basra. Kirkuk. Halliburton. Humvees without armor. Karbala. Najaf. "Mother Of All Bombs". 
 
Operation Desert Fox (probably never a good idea to name a battleplan after a Nazi).  Operation Iraqi Liberation (OIL). Then, quickly changed to Operation Iraqi Freedom. Regime change.
 
General Tommy Franks. General David Petraeus. General Ricardo Sanchez. Linndie England. Abu Ghraib. Guatanamo Bay. Jessica Lynch, saved but not saved.
 
Abu Al Zarqawi. The statue in Fardus Square, Baghdad. Most Wanted playing cards. Looting. $9 billion dollars vanished in nine months. 
 
"MISSION ACCOMPLISHED" (seven years too early). "Commander Codpiece". Fedayeen. Insurgency. 
 
Amy Goodman. "Fahrenheit 9/11". "Michael Moore is fat". Downing Street memo. John Kerry. Vote irregularities in Ohio. Bush re-elected. Security Moms. Endless war. No war for oil.
 
"Nothing.... Nobody has ever suggested that the attacks of September the 11th were ordered by Iraq." "[T]he main reason we went into Iraq at the time was we thought he had weapons of mass destruction. It turns out he didn’t, but he had the capacity to make weapons of mass destruction."
 
Operation Option North and Operation Bayonet Lightning in Kirkuk, Operation Desert Thrust, Operation Abilene and Operation All American Tiger throughout Iraq, Operation Iron Hammer in Baghdad and Operation Ivy Blizzard in Samarra - all in 2003; Operation Market Sweep, Operation Vigilant Resolve and Operation Phantom Fury in Fallujah in 2004; Operation Matador in Ambar, Operation Squeeze Play and Operation Lightning in Baghdad, Operation New Market near Haditha, Operation Spear in Karabillah and the Battle of Tal Afar - all in 2005; Operation Swarmer in Samarra and Operation Together Forward in Baghdad in 2006; and Operation Law and Order in Baghdad, Operation Arrowhead Ripper in Baqouba and Operation Phantom Strike throughout Iraq - all in 2007.
 
Fallujah.
 
Purple thumbs. Jalal Talibani. Nouri al-Maliki.
 
 
Never forget. Never. We can never do this again. We must not let it happen. Ever.
 
(crossposted to Simply Left Behind

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Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Shameless

By Creature

I would usually reserve that word for Republicans, but Chris Dodd's working overtime for Wall Street these days in trying to keep Elizabeth Warren from the consumer agency job so the shoe fits. Dude, you'll get your payday when you leave regardless. Why must you hurt the rest of us on your way out the door?

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A preemptive plea against praising Karzai

By Peter Henne

I'm interested to see what the reaction will be to Afghan President Hamid Karzai's ban
on private security companies. Karzai is apparently tired of sharing the legitimate use of force in Afghanistan, and has ordered all such actors to cease operations within four months. This includes notorious US-based companies like Xe (formerly known as Blackwater), as well as Afghan groups.

The Washington Post covers the usual concerns. Many worry that this move will undermine what little stability the country has, strengthening the Taliban as the people turn to them for protection. At the same time, there have been notorious incidents of private security firms killing civilians and ignoring local regulations, so criticism of these groups is hardly unreasonable.


I anticipate this action being cheered by many on the left. Private security forces have become a symbol of Bush-era failures. A move away from their use could be seen as correcting for international overstretch in US foreign policy; see my colleague
Fouad Pervez's useful analysis for more on this point.

I share these concerns about the use of private security forces. At the same time, anyone who has read anything I've written should not be surprised when I say I don't agree with criticisms of US military interventions; I think they are often necessary, if tragic, and am hesitant to join in a call for a withdrawal from Afghanistan. At the moment, my biggest criticism of the war is over whether our troops should be fighting to prop up this guy.


What worries me about Karzai's move is that the distaste for private security forces may lead some to perceive Karzai as a champion for seemingly-progressive values. Instead, this ban needs to be seen for what it is: the latest in a string of cynical and self-serving policies by a leader who seems more concerned about his own prosperity than the welfare of his people or the international forces fighting to secure Afghanistan. The 2009 Presidential election was widely seen as flawed--likely due to Karzai's efforts--and he has reacted to US calls to clean up his act since then by threatening to
join the Taliban. Now he is attempting to appear the Afghan nationalist while eliminating actors outside of his control. Whatever your views on the war, please don't praise Karzai.

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Quote of the Day

By Creature

"The big lesson of 2010 for Democrats will be that if you govern like a Blue Dog and put corporate contributors ahead of your constituents, you lose. If you listen to what progressives have been telling you all along and stand up to corporations on issues like the public option and Wall Street reform, you win -- especially among Independent voters." -- Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC) reacting to Charlie Cook downgrading the re-election chances for eight Blue Dogs.

Good riddance.

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The Paranoid Side

By Carl
 
I don't usually indulge in wild speculation, but an inner voice is tugging at me on this one.
 
What if the mortgage bubble was burst intentionally?
 
It is undeniable that it was a long time coming. Mortgage foreclosures ratcheted up in an orderly fashion, and the crisis was wholly foreseeable years before it occured.
 
The market conditions were perfect for the collapse. Low, low interest rates, extreme liquidity in the cash markets, and the revocation of Glass-Steagall in 1999 allowed the predators into the home mortgage market. NINJA loans abounded (no income, no job or assets), however. And there's the anomaly.
 
I've worked in commercial finance. I understand risk, I understand unsecured and secured debt. I lent money to businesses that had just been taken private under all sorts of wild scenarios, from leveraged buyouts to employee stock purchases.
 
In other words, I have a level of sophistication that surpasses your average loan officer at the branch on the corner.
 
It is impossible for me to believe that nearly one hundred percent of people with MBAs, people allegedly smarter than I, didn't see what I saw even in 2003 and 2004. Oh sure, some folks hedged against it and made a mint, but the number is truly very small. Very very small. But you mean to tell me that the assistant vice presidents at Lehman Brothers or Bear Stearns or even Goldman Sachs (who manages to thrive even in this shitty market today) didn't see this coming?
 
That JPMorgan Chase and Citibank and Bank of America suddenly developed a case of Trigg-inosis and went all Down's Syndrome in the very area they were expert in?
 
Yes, the securitized debt obligations that were repackaged, re-repackaged and in some cases re-re-repackaged were bloody impossible to trace. Which in your mind ought to be triggering bells and whistles.
 
Because someone was tracing them and knew exactly what was going on. No one develops a tool like that without understanding it so thoroughly that they can explain it comprehensively to someone authorized to approve its use. This isn't medicine where side effects happen. The quants have this stuff figured out to the nanosecond in some cases.
 
OK, so now...cui bono? Who benefits? That was the question that I could never get a handle on until today. See, apart from a handful of contrarians, no one really seemed to make a lot of money out of this. Yes, we TARPed and LARPed the hell out of the banking system, but that was all money that had to be paid back. Yes, it put banks on their feet, but it risked a helluva lot with little return apparent.
 
Then, this morning, I started to watch Crude Impact on LinkTV. And I started to think about peak oil. And in particular, oil prices.
 
See, starting in 2005, we should have been seeing price spikes on gasoline and other petroleum products, as demand began to surpass the annual production of all oil producing nations, by something on the order of 12 million barrels a year. Demand is driven by a growing economy.
 
Indeed, if you look at this chart, that's precisely what happened. But notice something else: by 2007, as the economy began cooling and people worldwide began contracting their purchases and going bankrupt in droves, the price of gasoline collapsed.
 
Just not to levels of pre-peak oil. In fact, prices have inched upwards ever since.
 
The peak oil mark has been known for some time now. This was a predictable occurence, one with few options to either forestall or minimize. We could not avoid or reverse the demand curve, because while much of it is reliant on American demand, more and more of it was going to India and China which was driving the demand.
 
What could be done by the parties interested was to collapse the world economy from a demand point of view. Harder job? Not for a world that has an insatiable need for more and new. Indeed, the past forty years of marketing has shown us that anyone can get rich not by making a better product but by making a better marketing plan. All that was needed was a way to draw huge amounts of money out of the economy quickly.
 
Enter the single biggest asset anyone will own: their home. You might pay a year's salary, more likely less, on a new car. But a house, you take a 30 year mortgage out because you need something on the order of ten times your annual take home pay to purchase one, and who wants to wait until they are fifty or sixty to finally buy a dream home?
 
All that had to be done was to roll those loans out over and over again to people who would incrementally buy more and more house, loading up with more and more debt, then pull the rug out: force foreclosure.
 
Ever wonder why adjustable rate mortgages had five year rate locks? Why not one year (which is what mine has)? Or three? Or ten?
 
It was five years to specifically set a target date for the collapse of the world economy.
 
But why? Here's what my theory is:
 
Remember when gas was $4 a gallon and people actually started to notice? Started buying hybrids in droves? Started riding public transportation? Turning off lights? Turning down the air conditioning?
 
Look around you. How much of that is still going on? Not much. Maybe you cut back on electricity because you can't afford a $300 air conditioning bill, but for the most part, people are back buying SUVs and driving everywhere.
 
But note the price of gas: it's just above $2.50 a gallon. We've gotten comfortable with expensive gasoline. Just about two years ago, when all this hit, it was around $1.50 a gallon.
 
We're being fucked in the ass, slowly and comfortably, not rushed and roughly as in 2005. We're not making as much money (all income studies point to an actual loss of wages over the past ten years), and we're spending more on energy.
 
Does anyone wonder why we still haven't seen the minutes of the Cheney energy task force from the first Bush administration?
 
I'm no wild-eyed crazy tin-foil-hat wearing nutcase, but this stinks. This may be the story of the century.
 
(crossposted to Simply Left Behind)

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Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Yes you can, no you can't

By Capt. Fogg


Private morality does not seem to me to be the state’s business unless it compromises the public welfare.

-Bishop Shelby Spong-
_________

Yes you can, no you can't, yes you can, no you can't. It must be infuriating for California's same sex couples looking for stability and security in their lives. Gay marriage opponents have again succeeded in blocking further unions pending yet another appeal for reasons known only to themselves -- although most seem happy to tell you why they're against it.

Do the objections make sense or are they simply a reflection of a selective morality with perhaps a bit of personal anxiety adding a note of passion? The appeal that came quickly after the judicial decision to overturn the ban tells us that

"California, 44 other states, and the vast majority of countries throughout the world continue to draw the line at marriage because it continues to serve a vital societal interest."

And what would that social interest be? Why,

"to channel potentially procreative sexual relationships into enduring, stable unions for the sake of responsibly producing and raising the next generation."

Astonishing, isn't it that the conservatives behind this can still make a living challenging the right of the State to serve social needs while advocating it so vociferously in this instance. Doesn't Social Security and Medicare and welfare and don't income taxes serve a societal interest? Is there any evidence anywhere of a negative effect on the public welfare of allowing gay marriage?

Sure, I could ask silly questions about why older couples past child producing age are allowed to marry or people who don't want to or are unable to have offspring are exempt from the Biblical mandate to go out there and get pregnant. I could ask why the State of California can find a right anywhere in its constitution or the Federal Constitution to promote Christianity and I could snicker at the fact that it really doesn't matter whether people are married -- they make babies anyway and I could point out as well that stable, married gay couples seem to do as well if not better at raising children, but we both know I wouldn't get a sensible answer because the position isn't about any of those things. It's about a personal repugnance concerning the private behaviour of other people with its origins in a religious tradition not recognized or supported by the government of the United States. Preventing a social contract between same sex couples serves no more legitimate a societal interest than outlawing interracial marriage, segregating public facilities, keeping Jews out of Palm Beach hotels or preventing women from voting. Yet that same rhetoric was used to defend those things and worse.

Pace the nauseous nattering of people like Sarah Palin and a large number of Republican hypocrites, there is no clause in the constitution saying "insert the Bible here." The objections are an excuse and nothing more and they are neither supported by facts or reason.

Another frequent argument is that the court which overturned the ban was " ignoring the will of the people" which of course is part of the job description of the legislative branch; that being another bulwark against the mob rule our founders were so rightly worried about. That is, or should be embarrassing to those who have made careers bloviating about "activist judges" since what they're calling for is a judge who rules on personal and political sentiment rather than a strict interpretation of the law. Is this hypocrisy or duplicity? Does it matter?

Marriage isn't about breeding, it's about property and responsibility and the right of one person to care for another without legal hindrance. The law isn't about bringing a Christian or Jewish or Muslim utopia to the world in preparation for it's destruction. I agree with bona fide Libertarians that the role of government in promoting some vision of public good needs to be limited and its ability to intrude into the most private and intimate parts of the human experience needs to be restricted to matters of the utmost need. There is no need or evidence of need here. There is no logical or factual consistency here and the allegedly conservative position isn't conservative. It's everything conservatives tell us they hate: an intrusion into life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness by a self appointed group of moralizers. Morality is not the government's business. Sin is not the government's business: It's God's business. God can handle it.

(Cross posted from Human Voices)

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There is no Ground Zero Mosque

By Creature

It's a damn community center and it's blocks away. I really need to stop hearing about this bogus story and I'm going to do my best to not blog about it from this point on (I hope). So, in that light, I'll give Keith the last word:


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Running The Anchor Leg

By Carl
 
You're starting to see the GOP campaign strategy for the 2010 midterm elections unfold here in August.
 
Take an issue of settled law, and ignite a fire under it, knowing full well that there are enough cowards in America to make hoopla over it. Such is the case with the Fourteenth Amendment's citizenship definitions.
 
The bonus, as I noted yesterday, is a chance to smear the President with a false accusation of being an unnatural citizen, or at the very least a totemic image planted deep in the American psyche that is both false and hurtful to the nation. 
 
As if they would ever care...but I digress.
 
About 8% of babies born in the US have at least one parent who is not a legal American resident. You'll note that means that many of those babies, let's assume half, have a legal American resident as a parent. So we're talking about 170,000 babies born here called "anchor babies", babies whose citizenship anchors the parents here in the US since courts would never allow a child to be separated from its birth parents over citizenship issues alone. If you're born here, the Fourteenth Amendment states, you are a "natural born American," with the full rights...including the right to build a mosque wherever you want...of any other American. 
 
There are eleven million undocumented Americans. The birth rate in America is about 1% of the total population. 170,000 babies means the birth rate of undocumented Americans is in line with the total birth rate of Americans.
 
In other words, this is hardly a cause for people to slip across a border to drop a litter in hopes of attaining residency status.
 
Indeed, evidence suggests just the opposite: that immigrants are determinedly avoiding pregnancy while here, as the birth rate in Mexico itself is much higher than it is in the US (20% v. 11% of the childbearing populations respectively...the world birth rate is something like 14%). 
 
Another reason the scare is utter bullshit is the process of obtaining citizenship for parents of "anchor babies". It is at least as complex and prolonged as the process of simply applying for citizenship:

A child must reach the ripe age of 21 before he can seek to right his parents’ illegal status. And the parents have to trek back to their native land. For many people illegally in the country, this trip back will also kick in a 10-year ban from returning. And visas have to be available, which can take decades. So by the time this “anchoring” payoff can happen, one or both parents could be dead.
 
  Add this to the pile of garbage about the  so-called "mosque" at so-called "Ground Zero," and watch the pile grow deeper and wider. Better get your hip waders. We have to dig a lot of horseshit.
 
(crossposted to Simply Left Behind)

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Monday, August 16, 2010

Symbols over substance

By Creature

TPM reader DE:

Republicans ALWAYS run on symbolic issues. Their substantive positions are not popular. People don't like tax cuts for the rich, they don't like endless military commitments, they don't like corporatism, they don't like lax regulations, etc. So Republicans always pick some symbolic, unimportant issue and make it sound like it's the most important thing in the world. This is nothing more than the flag factory, the swift boats, and Reverend Wright all over again. [...]

What ticks me off about this is they do this every election cycle. They never want to talk about substance, and they get their way-- every election cycle we talk about whatever they want to talk about. Our political system fiddles while America burns, and it's because the Republican message machine dictates the conversation

It's been this way since forever, the Muslim community center is just the latest twist.

I'd cut the right some slack if they actually believed the crap they spew, but they don't. It's all a cynical ploy to stoke fear and gain votes. A perfect example of this is Laura Ingraham. As Salon’s Justin Elliott discovered, when Ingraham first talked about the community center, with one of its founders no less, she was all for it, then, after the noise machine began whirling, with a finger to the wind, she now thinks the terrorists have won. Amazing.

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The limits of humanitarianism?

By Peter Henne

I started and stopped this post several times: writing, deleting, re-writing. What can one say about the horrific flooding in Pakistan? The flood has claimed 1500 lives and left 20 million homeless; the impact is likely to grow exponentially as disease sets in.
Telling people that they should care feels a bit preachy; it might work for the UN Secretary General, but not for someone who kept "forgetting" to donate after the Haiti earthquake. There isn't even much to talk about in terms of political debates; a Google News search on "Obama flood Pakistan" and "Republican flood Pakistan" turned up little. No calls for quick action, no criticism of transferring valuable resources out of Afghanistan, thus precluding a critique of the politicization of humanitarian crises.

One option is to discuss how this matters beyond humanitarian concerns.
US standing in Indonesia increased greatly after the military provided assistance to tsunami victims, and there are some signs Pakistani opinion of the United States has improved with US aid to flood victims. Humanitarian initiatives could thus help to undermine the popular appeal of militant groups. The flood also highlights the growing threat from climate change. But this is hardly original, and the Center for American Progress (CAP) covered this well with their excellent analysis last week.

Deploring the lackluster US response is another angle, but the United States is hardly ignoring the crisis. According to CAP, US aid has reached $76 million, and the military dedicated 19 helicopters to assist in rescue operations. US assistance has caught the attention of foreign media; the Hindustan Times reported on John Kerry's planned visit to the region, and Xinhua highlighted US helicopters' role in flood relief. Much more needs to be done to help the Pakistani people, and the UN may be justified in calling on the United States to provide more assistance. But it is a good start.

This does, however, beg the question of why there has been little attention paid in the United States to US efforts. Public apathy might be an explanation, but then why bother devoting resources to a mission voters don't care about? All sides could agree the United States must help, but are wary of focusing on it in an election year. Or maybe this is just the way it works: virtue reveals itself in subtle policies and hidden gestures, half-steps that never amount to a solution and are lost in the tumult of the news cycle and politicos' inboxes. And maybe that is the best we can expect.

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It's the "Buts" that get you.

By Mustang Bobby.

I've heard it all my life: "I'm all for equal rights (or freedom of speech, or freedom of religion), but...." That's followed by a statement that proves the speaker really is in favor of no such thing. For example, "I'm all for equal rights, but the coloreds really should stick to their own schools and neighborhoods." Or, "I'm all for freedom of speech, but burning the flag is anti-American and should be banned." Or, "I'm all for freedom of religion, but Islam isn't one."

That kind of mindset has been vocalized a lot in the last few years, and it's been brought to a head by the recent discussion -- if you can call it that -- about the plans of a group of citizens in New York to build an Islamic community center in an abandoned coat outlet within a couple of blocks of the site of the World Trade Center. It has stirred up a whole lot of passion from a wide range of people: those who are using it to exploit the fear and paranoia of Americans who are uninformed about the facts of the case ("Al-qaeda is building a mosque on Ground Zero!") or people who are exploiting it for political gain by playing off those who are misinformed, to those who are defending the basic premise that America's foundation rests on the fundamental rights of all the people to exercise all of their rights as enumerated by the Constitution of the United States in compliance with the laws.

There's not a lot of middle ground being sought, but in a case like this, it's hard to see that there is one. After all, rights are binary: you either have them or you don't. There is freedom of religion and the freedom from state interference in the lawful exercise of it, or there is not. You cannot come in and decide one religion is better than the other -- at least not on secular grounds -- nor qualify it based on the sensitivity or lack thereof of the people involved. (Ross Douthat tries to make the case for understanding both sides of the argument in his New York Times column today and basically says that in America today, there's always room for bigots.)

For a very long time a lot of people in this country; the Chinese, Italians, Irish, African-Americans, Japanese, Hispanics, Catholics, Jews, women, gays and lesbians, even the disabled, have had to endure the "But" clause in their basic rights. They have been told by ruling class -- usually by the white straight patriarchs -- such things as "the time isn't right," or "there's a lot of raw feelings" about some recent event, and that granting them the same rights as everyone else would "tear at the fabric of society" or even "destroy America as we know it." And these same people have exploited the unknown and the unfamiliar for their own political or financial gain without really caring whether or not they do more damage to the rights of their fellow citizens by their actions.

If there's anything we should learn from this most recent disgraceful row over the basic rights of Americans, including as well the ruling in California about equal protection under the law for citizens of California to marry those who they love, is that those who would qualify the rights and the freedoms of all citizens based on ignorance and cynicism can get their "Buts" out of here.

(Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

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Unilateral Race To The Bottom

By Carl
 
It's the kind of day here where you feel like you're stuck in a Dali painting: so muggy that your clothes practically drip off you. Paper flops over in your hand, the ink smearing down the page like tears. The air is thick with the musty closeness of someone with bad breath and worse body odor; each movement makes refreshes your agony.
 
Against this backdrop, you ponder the idiocy of people. You're wearing a suit to work at a job that makes some rich guy richer, the same jackass who's denied raises company wide for two years and cut bonuses for three. How dumb is that that you'd let yourself be this uncomfortable for him? Over there is a guy who's sipping a hot Starbucks...something...can't really call it coffee, because Starbucks sells a coffee experience, but no coffee. At least not coffee discernible by anyone who appreciates good coffee. It's more like vinegar strained through a hoop of magnesium. 
 
Over there is a woman who's carting a backpack big enough to contain her entire life's history, souvenirs included, straining against the straps to keep her balance. 
 
And then, there's the right wing. A President clearly states that the Constitution applies to all Americans equally, and the right wing has turned it into a referendum on Obama's endorsement of a Islamic "mosque" (more like a YMCA). 
 
I expect them to do this. After all, they've hammered away at the falsehood of Obama's Muslim identity since the election, hammering at the lie until it's become nailed into the American psyche like a railroad spike. Even people who don't believe it, fortunately most of us, refer to it regularly in jest, at least. That it's such a universal joke tells me we ought to take it more seriously and start defending it more vigourously. 
 
What is unexpected has been the subliminal effect it's had on people who don't believe it, but report it anyway: the mainstream media. There's an undertone, a twinge of anti-Islam sentiment in the telling of the tale of the "mosque" (more like a YMCA).
 
It's one thing to cheerlead a nation involved in a war. You want your country to win, but the truth must be told. So maybe you fudge a few details, saving them for the book you write later on. That's almost (and I stress almost) understandable for a journalist.
 
It's quite another thing to pass on the lies told by one side without context, without rebuttal, without analysis. If commonsense tells you something is nonsense, then report it as such. Stop enabling the opinions of others to enter the public dialogue. Start reporting the facts, not the "factsheet". 
 
So many of the undercurrent of lies told about Obama have infused the reporting of news that it's sickening to an aware person. Obama has made more than enough mistakes on his own, and indeed, I'd rather read criticisms of him on that basis than the false "American Idle"-- pun intended-- nonsense of his birth certificate (which is a shading of the "anchor baby" controversy), or his Muslim heritage, or his "vacationing at times of crisis". 
 
The Republican party is trying to start a race to the bottom of the cesspool we're all drowning in already. It would be nice if the MSM didn't have its scuba tanks on already. The idiocy, indeed.   
 
(crossposted to Simply Left Behind)

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Sunday, August 15, 2010

More on Gibbs' (and now Dowd's) lefty smear

By Creature

Steven D:

So my question to Maureen Dowd and Robert Gibbs is why is a "single payer" health care system a dirty word (for that is how Gibbs intended to use it in his attacks on the administration's critics from the left)? Because "lefties" want it? Ask any Canadian if they would prefer changing their system to one like ours. Whether they consider themselves left, right or middle politically, I'd bet the vast majority would say No! emphatically.[...]

But for a high Democratic administration official to criticize a progressive policy idea as somehow being "dirty" or "ridiculous" is absurd. And for Gibbs and Dowd to both agree with the negative connotations given to that term ("Canadian health care" or "single payer" -- take your pick) shows how far our political discourse has fallen, how detached from even suggesting government can be a primary force to solve critical human problems such as public health and how insane we must appear as a country to every other western developed nation who provides better health care to their citizens.

It's amazing how often words like "how far our political discourse has fallen" can be used in so many different contexts today.

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Truth in Comics

By Creature


If it's Sunday, it's Truth in Comics.

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