Tolerance Is A Two-Way Street

5:15 pm EST November 28th, 2006 | Uncategorized | 11 Comments

The last couple of years there have been a lot of stories in Europe, America, Asia, and beyond about the friction between Christians and Muslims. Too often we see the storyline – especially here in America – of people finding the differences in culture (ie. Islamic prayer) being taken as terrorist behavior.

On the flip side, I think a lot of people on the Muslim side of things believe that everyone else has to bend over backwards for them. The idea of a free and open society is that while we all have a right to our own gods (or lack thereof) there is also the right to mock the hell out of sacred cows.

I embrace the idea of a culture that is free to make fun of Jews, Christians, Atheists and yes, Muslims (and any other belief system you can think of). The concept that you’re going to issue a fatwa on anyone who speaks harshly of your culture while also arguing about tolerance is just two-faced.

I don’t think anyone gets a sensitivity exception. In the eyes of a free society nobody’s God (or Allah) gets to beat out anyone else’s.

Topic: Religion

Bwahahaha

4:02 am EST November 28th, 2006 | News | 14 Comments

If he wasn’t doing so much damage to America and the world it would almost be fun to have George Bush to kick and point at for the next two years.

President Bush’s approval ratings fell to the second-lowest of his presidency, according to a new Harris Interactive poll.

According to the telephone poll, conducted between Nov. 17 and Nov. 21, 31% of U.S. adults called Mr. Bush’s job performance "excellent" or "good" — down from 34% who gave a positive assessment in a late-October poll; 67% said his performance is only "fair" or "poor," up from 63% in the previous survey. The president’s lowest approval rating in a Harris poll was 29% in May 2006.

Topic: George W. Bush

Tom Tancredo: Hero!

3:54 am EST November 28th, 2006 | Politics | 67 Comments

Hispanic voters, historically, have been pretty strong Democratic voters with the exception of one bloc: Cubans. Because of the GOP’s supposed hard line on Cuba (Quiz: Is Bush’s policy on Cuba really that different from Clinton’s? No, but people are a sucker for rhetoric over action.) the Cuban community in Florida bucks the trend and supports Republicans – they’re a big part of why Florida is less of a swing state than it used to be (though I have a feeling it will be in more play than people think in 2008). Along comes Rep. Tom Tancredo, running on a platform of hating the brown people from down south, and he’s beginning to do yeoman’s work in alienating Cubans from the GOP.

Rep. Tom Tancredo, the leader of the anti-illegal immigration faction in the U.S. House, spent a recent weekend at The Breakers in Palm Beach.

Ninety miles to the south, he found a symbol to bolster his belief that unfettered immigration is endangering the United States: Miami, he told a conservative online news site, “has become a Third World country.”

In South Florida to attend Restoration Weekend, a gathering of conservative activists, the Colorado Republican, whose district includes suburbs of Denver, pointed to Miami as an example of how ”the nature of America can be changed by uncontrolled immigration,” the story says.

I hope those comments are repeated at all the domino games down in Little Havana. This should be a message to the 2008 Republicans (I hope Tancredo becomes one of them): remember in your quest to out-winger each other to mention again and again and again how much you hate those freaking Mexicans and other brown skinned people. That should be worth a few points on election day.

For the Democrats.

Suggestion

11:47 pm EST November 27th, 2006 | News | 13 Comments

We black Americans need to get together and finally once and for all vote for the real black leadership, since we’re going to have it anyway. I know I’m not the only one who thinks that Jesse Jackson’s term expired a long time ago.

Topic: Race

Clearly The Marines Are Now Distributing Enemy Propaganda

11:35 pm EST November 27th, 2006 | News | 4 Comments

We liberated Iraq so they could do some ethnic cleansing.

The U.S. military is no longer able to defeat a bloody insurgency in western Iraq or counter al-Qaeda’s rising popularity there, according to newly disclosed details from a classified Marine Corps intelligence report that set off debate in recent months about the military’s mission in Anbar province.

The Marines recently filed an updated version of that assessment that stood by its conclusions and stated that as of mid-November, the problems in troubled Anbar province have not improved, a senior U.S. intelligence official said yesterday. "The fundamental questions of lack of control, growth of the insurgency and criminality" remain the same, the official said.

The Marines’ August memo, a copy of which was shared with The Washington Post, is far bleaker than some officials suggested when they described it in late summer. The report describes Iraq’s Sunni minority as "embroiled in a daily fight for survival," fearful of "pogroms" by the Shiite majority and increasingly dependent on al-Qaeda in Iraq as its only hope against growing Iranian dominance across the capital.

The crack about the marines, of course, is a dig at the conservatives (especially on the blogs) attributing every negative news story about Iraq to devious terrorist propaganda working side-by-side with the dreaded MSM. It’s a defensive mechanism they use like when kids close their eyes and pretend away things.

See here for an example of Michelle Malkin doing her damnedst to prove that a guy with a website and the military’s PR arm are like the word of God himself (when they’re Republicans).

Topic: Iraq

GOP ’08: To The Right, The Right

6:39 pm EST November 27th, 2006 | News | 2 Comments

Last week we had the spectacle of Mitt Romney calling out Rudy Giuliani and John McCain for not being sufficiently anti-gay marriage, now Newt Gingrich ups the ante with John McCain on who can be the most hardcore on sending in people to die in Iraq.

Dudes, keep this up and come 2008 we’ll be talking about how by comparison Dennis Kucinich looks too moderate and middle-of-the-road to be a presidential candidate.

Topic: 2008 Election

Very Silly

5:36 pm EST November 27th, 2006 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Kind of dumb.

Governor-elect Martin O’Malley spent most of today waiting to see if he would be selected for jury duty in Baltimore.

He began his day in Baltimore court at about 8:15 a-m and was dismissed at about 4:30 this afternoon.

Topic: Martin O'Malley

Can I Get Mine In Extra-Extra Large?

4:37 pm EST November 27th, 2006 | Republicans | 17 Comments

I know you all are dying for the 2007 GOP calendar. If for no other reason than for Mr. August himself, Dick Cheney:

Will The Rest Of The Press Admit The Truth?

11:07 am EST November 27th, 2006 | News | 60 Comments

NBC admits what everyone with a brain has known, Iraq is in civil war. The usual whining is up on the right, but if anything NBC and the rest of the MSM is a couple months late to the game. Iraq has been in civil war for some time now, and no amount of conservative pretending will change that.

Topic: Iraq

The Folly Of Iraq

7:20 pm EST November 26th, 2006 | News | 101 Comments

Too much has been made by the right of the idea that to leave Iraq now would be a sign of weakness to Bin Laden. It’s too late for that. It’s already clear to the world that we are weak already, thanks to our leadership’s failure to plan. The same country that destroyed the Nazi and Japanese war machine is unable to secure a relative backwater like Iraq in the same amount of time. The same country whose military unleashed hell because we knew our cause was just and that our survival hinged on victory had leaders who went into Iraq on the cheap and let our troops get stuck in a civil war.

Justification for the war aside, this thing was winnable, if only President Bush, VP Cheney, Sec. Rumsfeld, and a host of others had not let hubris get in the way and set us up to fail.

3,000 Americans have died for no good reason, with no good strategy behind them and no matter the equivocation of the right-wing, that is a failure and we will all feel the consequences of it (and someone please tell the wingers who keep doing a 1:1 comparison of deaths that it is 2006, not 1944 and if we had the same amount of deaths it would be a heck of a failure of technology, and furthermore they should check out the thousands of injuries we’ve got that would be deaths in the past – and this in no way makes the current deaths somehow okay).

>> For those interested in the history of why we were set up to lose, read "Blind Into Baghdad"

Topic: Iraq