The Chosen People

By Distributorcap

from her blog....

Karen Hanretty is a political and communications strategist who specializes in strategic communications, issue advocacy and political campaigns. Over the past decade, Hanretty has developed a strong reputation for taking complex issues and creating news coverage that explains the underlying political motivations that drive public policy.

On The Ed Show - Monday, June 7, 2010, Karen Hanretty and Laura Flanders were "discussing" (someone like Hanretty does not discuss - she talks over, yells and simply lies) Helen Thomas' remarks about Israel and her resignation. Hanretty, who nastiness just oozes from each pore, only had to say one line to demonstrate her strong reputation for taking complex issues and creating news coverage.

Hanretty (to Flanders): "Only a liberal would defend anti-semitism." 

Let's take a look at some of those "liberal" anti-semites and/or people who have said some incredibly horrendous things about Jews.

Richard Nixon, disgraced President
Prescott Bush, grandfather of a President
Father Coughlin, radio announcer
Charles Lindbergh, hero pilot
Henry Ford, car manker
H L Mencken, writer
Theodore Dreiser, writer
Elizabeth Dilling, writer
Bamberg County, SC GOP Chairman Edwin Merwin
Orangeburg County, SC GOP Chairman James Ulmer
Tennessee Republican Chairman Robin Smith
Former Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson
Fred Malek, Richard Nixon's "Jew Counter" (who was just hired by Gov. McDonnell of VA)
Ann "Jews should be perfected" Coulter

(please add some more)

so a little editing...

Karen Hanretty is a political and communications hack who specializes in strategic idiocy, anger advocacy, and political lies. Over the past decade, Hanretty has developed a strong reputation for taking complex issues and creating over-simplified sound bites that explains the underlying psychological motivations that drive Republicans, greed and selfishness.

There are certain words to describe someone like Hanretty... I leave it one's imagination.

Steven Chu, gamma rays, and the triumph of science

By Michael J.W. Stickings

The Obama Administration may not be home to the best, but it certainly includes some of the brightest. Take, for example, Energy Secretary (and Nobel laureate) Steven Chu, who is actually rather brilliant. the WaPo, via Ezra Klein:

Obama has also called in some of the many scientists on the federal payroll, led by Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist. Chu at one point pushed the unusual idea of using gamma rays to peer into the blowout preventer to determine if its valves were closed, a technique he experimented with in graduate school while studying radioactive decay.

The suggestion at first elicited snickering and "Incredible Hulk" jokes. Then they tried it, and it worked. "They weren't hot on his ideas," a senior White House official said of BP's initial reaction to Chu's suggestions. "Now they are."

Whatever else we may say about Obama, one thing that distinguishes him clearly from his predecessor is his respect for science (and therefore for the search for truth). Where Bush and his administration undermined it (for example, with respect to climate change), turning instead to theocratic Christian moralism, Obama, who (admirably) lacks Bush's self-righteous sense of absolute certitude, seems more than willing (perhaps often to a fault) to reach out to those who have a sense of what's actually going on and who can, with their expertise, propose meaningful solutions to the challenges of the real world, such as the disaster in the Gulf.

Lest we forget, we've come a long way from the Dark Ages of Dubya.

Craziest Republican of the Day: Haley Barbour

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I think we can all agree that it doesn't get much crazier, or blowhardian, than Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, a man who is as Republican as they come (and who therefore really ought to be the GOP presidential candidate in '12). On Fox News yesterday, Barbour said that "we have had virtually no oil" along the coast of his state, other than the usual "tar balls":

The average viewer to this show thinks that the whole coast from Florida to Texas is ankle-deep in oil... So it may be hard for the viewer to understand, but the worst thing for us has been how our tourist season has been hurt by the misperception of what is going on down here. The Mississippi Gulf Coast is beautiful. As I tell people, the coast is clear. Come on down!

I'm not sure what the "average viewer" thinks, but I think it's fair to say that most people who are paying any attention to the disaster in the Gulf are seized of its severity. No, the oil isn't "ankle-deep," but there still a lot of oil coming ashore, mostly (thus far) in Louisiana. Barbour is right that Mississippi has been spared, for the most part, but his comments are ignorant, insensitive, and misleading.

Simply put, the coast isn't clear, and it's only going to get worse over the summer and into fall as BP works to fix the leak. And the impact on wildlife, the environment, the fishing industry, tourism, and the economy, not to mention on the millions and millions of people affected by the disaster in one way or another, is immense. This is the reality of the horribly bleak situation along the Gulf Coast.

Meanwhile, as Think Progress notes:

Barbour has consistently refused to accept the gravity of the situation in the Gulf, and blamed the media for supposedly over-hyping the disaster. He's compared oil to tooth paste, said all the oil on Mississippi's beaches could barely "fill up a milk jug," and handed out gas cards to encourage tourists to "[c]ome on down here and play golf, enjoy the beach, catch a fish." Meanwhile, dead dolphins have washed ashore on Mississippi's beaches.

Barbour went on to suggest that President Obama was "destroying himself" by not adequately responding to the spill, but he had nothing negative to say of BP. Barbour -- who received $1.8 million from oil and gas companies for his gubernatorial campaign -- explained, "When we ask BP for something, they try to do it." The lobbying firm Barbour founded relied highly on oil industry clients, with Barbour personally lobbying for regulation changes to the Bush White House. 

Come on down? Please. I certainly don't wish harm on the people of Mississippi, who need their tourism and fishing dollars, but their governor's an idiot. (They need a real leader to help steer them through this crisis, not a right-wing cheerleader.)

Haley Barbour: a hyper-partisan, reality-denying ignoramus backed by the oil industry. He's a crazy blowhard, but he's pretty much your perfect Republican.

Truth in Comics

By Creature


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

Art for art's sake: Leonardo, Constable, Turner

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Well... back to blogging.

I got back from England on Thursday, late in the evening, and it's been a fairly busy couple of days since. And it doesn't help that I'm a bit jet lagged, certainly by this time of the night.

I'll get back to political blogging tomorrow, as I just don't have much to say tonight (and am too tired to think all that much), but I did want to post something, and I remembered recently that I haven't posted any art in a good long time. As some of you may remember, I used to break up the political posting with posts not just on music, mostly YouTube clips, but on art, a long-time passion of mine going back to childhood, not as an artist, as I seem to have little artistic talent of my own, but rather as a critic and historian. At Tufts way back when, I thought about double majoring in history and art history, but while I generally enjoyed the art history courses I took -- notably on expressionism and medieval illuminated manuscripts (both of which remain of great interest to me) -- I ended up shifting to political theory and becoming a Straussian (long story, some of which I've told here already).

Anyway, while in London last Friday, I went to the National Gallery, one of the world's greatest art museums. I'd been there many times before, but it had been several years since my last visit, and I wanted especially to see the Leonardo cartoon and the Turners and Constables, some of the most magnificent pieces in what is a truly magnificent collection. I usually comment on the art I post -- and you can find most of my past art posts here -- but for now I'll just let these stand as they are.

(Except to note that, to me, the Constable and Turner pieces, and the two artists generally, are deeply connected in terms of their relation to English social, political, and economic development in the 19th century. In a matter of just a couple of decades, the pastoral serenity of Constable's English countryside was overtaken by the technological dynamism of Turner's industrial modernity. Turner's train is literally speeding past, or through, Constable's hay wain, destroying it for good (or for evil). If you look closely at the Turner, you'll even notice a hare running for its life as the train bears down on it. The message is pretty clear. Now, Constable's England still exists, in a way. I was there, in the middle of it, out in the country between London and Oxford, but it is hardly what it once was, for better and for worse. In this particular work, Turner points the way to England's future, with Constable receding into the past, and it is that future that is the England of today, only much more so. It is a development that is common to much of the world, to all that has been touched by modern technology, with its high-speed transportation and high-speed everything, and so in these two works we see not just what is specifically English but what is increasingly universal in terms of the human condition.)

-- Leonardo da Vinci: The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist;

-- John Constable: The Hay Wain (1821); and

-- J.M.W. Turner: Rain, Steam, and Speed - The Great Western Railway (1844).

For more information, click on the links. I wrote about The Hay Wain, one of my favourite paintings, in July 2007. You can find that post here.

Needless to say, viewing these masterworks on a computer screen hardly does them justice.

Their religion is politics

By Mustang Bobby.

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) spoke up at at town meeting in Utah on the state of the GOP:

He said the Republicans need to organize and pull together just as unions, environmentalists, personal injury lawyers and gay rights activists do for Democrat candidates.

“Gays and lesbians don’t pay tithing, their religion is politics,” said Hatch.

Aside from the cultural stereotyping that gays and lesbians are not religious -- a statement not borne out by the facts -- he also assumes that all gays and lesbians are political; again, a statement not borne out by the facts. Not only that, Mr. Hatch is making this statement as a senator from the state of Utah, which is overwhelmingly dominated by a faith -- the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, aka the Mormons -- that is not only very powerful by its sheer numbers, it is deeply steeped in politics and the use thereof to get its way. The Mormons played a significant role in the passage of Prop 8 in California, rescinding the rights of same-sex couples to marry. So when Mr. Hatch speaks about tithing, he doesn't seem to have any objection to the money going to a political cause that he supports.

It's not just the Mormons. Religious leaders such as Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell have been the biggest mouths in leading the charge against gay rights and marriage equality, speaking out not on the basis of civil rights but on the imposition of their religious beliefs on the secular society. For these and a lot of members of the Religious Right, politics is their means of getting their religion into the laws and foundation of this country.

Mr. Hatch's sweeping generalization about gays, lesbians, and faith and practice is just as odious as the prejudices that percolate about the Mormon faith. His assumption that gay people can't be religious is on the same level that all Mormons practice polygamy, all Catholic priests are pedophiles, and all Muslims are terrorists. He's also equating an innate trait -- being gay -- with a conscious choice of belonging to a religious denomination. Perhaps he believes that being gay is just as much a choice as being Mormon or Catholic, but even if he does, it shows a stunning ignorance that he would make the sweeping assumption that all gays are atheists and are out to win over the country by forcing their Radical Homosexual Agenda onto the nation. And even if they were, they have as much of a right to do it as the Mormons or any other group that wishes to make their voices heard.

Perhaps Mr. Hatch is envious of the organizations that the Democrats have aligned with them that support them and he wishes that the GOP wasn't so self-destructive, i.e. the teabaggers that brought down Bob Bennett, his fellow Senator from Utah. Or perhaps he's just a sniveling bigot who can't pass up the chance to do a little gay-bashing.

(Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Jobs

By Creature

The report is not good. Get ready for another dip into the recession pool.

Want some gay fries with that?

By Capt. Fogg


It's never been clear to me why people like Bill O'Reilly think about gay people so often. Perhaps he really doesn't care but he knows that those grunting knuckle dragging Budweiser drinkers and super-size fries addicts who keep him in the money do care, but be that as it may or may not be, Bill's at it again, focusing his dull perceptions and limp wit on a French McDonald's commercial. With a passionate pose he hopes will remind you of Churchill's famous "we will fight them on the beaches" speech, he assures us that such a thing will never run here. Yes, the ad features a lad whose father doesn't know he's gay. It's a bit wittier than you'll see in the US market, so perhaps he right. I just wonder why he cares so much.

"We wanted to show society the way it is today, without judging. There’s obviously no problem with homosexuality in France today”

said the brand director for McDonald's France, but there sure as hell is in the Fox Nation.

"Do they have an Al Qaeda ad?"

asked O'Reilly. Do you think he dreams about bearded gay men with AK-47's?

(Cross posted from Human Voices)

Disservice

By Mustang Bobby.

There's some kind of karma going on when the Republicans raise a hue and cry over a Democrat being caught in a lie or a misstatement... and it turns out there are several examples of Republicans having done the same thing. The examination of Richard Blumenthal's history while running for the Senate in Connecticut led us to Rep. Mark Kirk (R-IL), who is trying to win the Senate seat once occupied by President Obama; it turns out he made some "misstatements" about his military record. And now Gov. Jan Brewer (R-AZ) is doing a little creative writing on her own.

Gov. Jan Brewer said in a recent interview that her father died fighting Nazis in Germany. In fact, the death of Wilford Drinkwine came 10 years after World War II had ended.

During the war, Drinkwine worked as a civilian supervisor for a naval munitions depot in Hawthorne, Nev. He died of lung disease in 1955 in California.

Ms. Brewer's umbrage was triggered by people comparing the new Arizona immigration law to Germany in the Third Reich. While invoking the Nazis for everything is both gauche and trivialized the unbelievable horror of that regime, it's not an excuse to project your late father into the cast of Band of Brothers. That's like me saying my father made the ultimate sacrifice at Pearl Harbor. Aside from the fact that he was in the Navy during World War II, he wasn't at Pearl Harbor (he was fifteen at the time), he never saw combat, and he's still alive. Other than that, though....

The real offense here isn't that candidates are trying to mislead voters about their war record for the purpose of winning an election or shield themselves from criticism. Exaggeration and embellishment is a human flaw, more often than not harmless; "I caught a fish THIS big," and if all the people who claimed they were at Woodstock had actually showed up, there would have been a million of them on Yasger's farm in upstate New York in August 1969. What it does do, in this case, is diminish the service of those who actually did serve in Vietnam or helped liberate Europe on the ground in 1944. The embellishers can't speak for the real service done by those who were really there, and trying to horn in on it after the fact is a disservice to those who really served.

(Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Quote of the Day

By Creature

"So these calls for Obama to behave like a Big Daddy to rage and weep are worse than stupid and embarrassing. They're ignorant and dangerous. As I see it, it is to Obama's great credit that he has made a point, since he was president, not to play the populist rabble rouser." -- tristero.

Personally, I think the president should wear an emoticon lapel pin. That would solve the problem, but who am I.

Premeditated violence

By Capt. Fogg

So whether you agree with me or not that Israel's attempt to enforce the blockade of Gaza by boarding a ship which refused normal inspection procedures and the attempt at self defense of the IDF Navy when attacked, was not the outrage it was meant to look like, do you agree that it's all Obama's fault? Sure it was says John Bomb-Bomb McCain. If Obama hadn't insisted that Israel freeze it's West Bank settlement construction, this wouldn't have happened. (insert WTF here!)

Michael Savage tells us that Obama "pressured" Israel into it without offering any of the evidence one would desire to back it up.

"As far as I know, it was Obama's administration that told them how to do this attack. It was probably one of America's peace-loving generals, who knows which one of them did it."

The use of probably by a Fox News member of course is as good as proof to the willfully Foxed, as is "as far as I know." Probably means 'definitively' to the Savage audience. Only a Liberal would question it. Only a Liberal would wonder why "peace loving" should be the equivalent of stupid, duplicitous and incompetent -- if not treasonous.

Of course knees are jerking in the Liberal camp as well, as Dennis Kucinich has written to President Obama suggesting that the country needs to "redefine its relationship with Israel" in the wake of the Gaza flotilla "raid." I'd ask him his opinion on redefining the US Coast Guard's daily practice of stopping and boarding ships with armed gunboats and armed inspectors as "raids." I'd ask him if an attack on the Coast Guard by a vessel refusing to stop and be inspected in wartime or peacetime, would be supported by him or excused by him because we're certainly doing it now in the Atlantic, the Pacific and the Caribbean. I'd ask him whether our entire drug interdiction and human smuggling interdiction policies are " reckless, pre-meditated violence waged against innocent people." I'd try to do it without calling him an idiot and a hypocrite, but I doubt I could manage.

So if you still feel this was "premeditated violence" even when the violence occurred only after the "peaceful passengers" tried to kill the inspectors and threw one overboard, ask yourself what the US should do if a flotilla from Iran attempted to enter Iraq with an unspecified, un-inspected cargo, refused to heave to and be inspected and then brutally attacked our Navy when our Navy attempted to examine that cargo and passenger list.

(Cross posted from Human Voices)

Explaining the Oil Disaster to Kids

by Distributorcap

Shielding kids from the disaster in the gulf is not in their best interest. Some kids books are out to help wind your way through the mess

When the Steele man gets rusted (maybe we should also explain to kids that tin does not rust, only iron products do) - Sarathy and Scare911 hear the cries "drill baby drill."

Pro healthcare candidate wins primary vote

By Creature

While I realize this may not hold in a face-to-face battle with a Republican, I do think think it's very good news that an unabashed healthcare (and public option) supporter beat a denier. There's a lesson in here somewhere and I hope other Dems are paying attention.

Rep. Tom Cole (R-BP) on oil spill: ‘Acts of God are acts of God.’

By Creature

Sure, if god cut corners and lobbied for lax regulations, then maybe.

The outrage machine

By Capt. Fogg

As a boater, I'm aware that the Coast Guard has the right to board and inspect my vessel at any time and that I'm required to comply. Upon probable cause and perhaps just suspicion, they have a right to impound and literally disassemble my boat looking for drugs or contraband. Sometimes, as I'm given to understand, they've been known to be rather demanding in their searches, and other completely innocent, law abiding yacht captains I know have complained of dirty footprints on the ivory carpeting or greasy hand prints on the cherry paneling and have suggested that too much protest or grouchiness can earn one an extra careful inspection of safety equipment that might entail a ticket.

Of course we have a real problem in our coastal waters and particularly on the Atlantic coast with illegal immigrants arriving rather often, and then there's always the drug smugglers, so when the Coasties hail you it's best to heave to and not make waves, so to speak. In fact the US has a policy of stopping and boarding vessels anywhere on the high seas and at any time they suspect contraband. For an honest captain or crew, the idea of going after the Coast Guard with a boat hook or marlinespike is pretty much as unthinkable as it is counterproductive.

Yesterday however, when I read about the Israeli raid on the blockade runners attempting to bring supplies to Gaza, I was truly angered at what seemed like a pointless and brutal attack on unarmed civilians, and the video then available seemed to confirm that first impression. The media were making charges of piracy and it seemed less than hyperbolic at the time. Then I saw the rest of the video.

Aside from the question of the embargo itself, it has to be mentioned that the "relief" expedition was required to pass inspection before landing in Gaza, there being good reason for Israel to make sure no weapons or explosives or ammunition were being carried, or fugitives, or any persons wanted for questioning. The word of some Turkish political group that it's a peaceful enterprise is scarcely enough, although reports so far seem to gloss over the obvious with a coat of shiny outrage. Of course the flotilla had no intention of complying or of allowing themselves to be boarded peacefully and inspected, which carries the implication that they had indeed something to hide. The Israeli Navy did what any country would have done and boarded them.

The video that was not shown, of course, was the brutal attack by the passengers, who mobbed the inspectors, threw them to the deck and began beating them with clubs and metal rods. One Israeli was thrown overboard. They were vastly outnumbered. They began to defend themselves. There were casualties. It started to look less and less like piracy or even aggression. It began to look like deliberate provocation. It began to look like assault. It began to look like a mission of strategic martyrdom designed to turn Israel's ally Turkey against them. It looks like a success so far.

As usual, those who have their reasons for hating Israel will not compare the incident to trying to run through passport control at the airport and complaining about being tackled and detained. Those who are quite sure Hamas is justified in any act whatsoever that brings about the total annihilation of all Israelis wouldn't care and might rejoice if the ships had been blown out of the water without warning.

There's not much middle ground, there's not much changing of minds and a fortune is being spent on further polarization. This, in my opinion, is just part of that enterprise. The drums of manufactured outrage will continue to boom about mistreatment of "peaceful" passengers so long as doubt remains as to whether their mission had anything do do with anything but creating provocation against "Zionist Aggression." To some, the passengers will continue to be "tourists" and the haters of Israel will use any opportunity to appear as martyrs, but try this, if you dare: load up a flotilla of ships and announce your destination as Turkey and your cargo as aid for Islamist patriots resisting secularist aggression and when it comes time for customs inspection -- refuse to stop and be boarded. Set your "tourists" on the Turkish coast guard and customs inspectors with fence posts and bits of deck railing and furniture and claim that the secular Turkish government is attacking Islam and peaceful Islamists. Go on -- I dare you.




(Cross posted from Human Voices)

Stagnation

By Mustang Bobby.

David Brooks is at it again, trying to convince us that it is fate that has brought us to this point where the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is a symbol of the "nasty stasis" where trying to balance the free market and government regulation is beyond the control of any one president or corporation. He offers a lot of historical comparisons to the Iranian hostage crisis and tries to use the moderate tone that while everyone means well, sometimes things are just too much for us to handle and we must learn our humbling lesson.

Oh, crap. This passive-voice pablum about "the country’s core confusion about the role of government" is his way of backing away from the obvious conclusion that a generation's worth of hearing that "Big Guv'ment" is the problem and the free market is the Holy Grail of freedom and roses and rainbows for the whole world is bunk. If it hadn't been for a concerted effort on the part of the Republicans and their corporate allies to dismantle and defang any form of regulation of business since the inauguration of Ronald Reagan, not to mention the complicity of Democrats who knew a good source of campaign funding when they saw it, we wouldn't be in this mess to begin with, and if we were, there would be real-world consequences for those that caused them. It isn't "stagnation" when doing everything possible to do nothing -- vide the current GOP minority in Congress -- is your idea of how to run a government.

The supreme irony of all of this is that when the shit really hits the fan in Detroit and Wall Street or when the oil hits the shore in Louisiana, who do you think are the loudest complainers about the inefficiency of government and who are the ones standing there with their hands out demanding instant relief in the form of cash from the Feds to fix it? Yeah, the same people who were screaming about the Tenth Amendment, states' rights, secession, and complaining that oil-rig regulation stifles the free market and makes it tough for the "small business owners." Yeah, I think dead birds, stinky beaches, and no tourists makes it tough, too.

What is also the most maddening thing is that once this oil spill is contained -- whenever that is -- we will all firmly resolve to fix the problems that caused it and make sure that it never happens again. We will learn from our mistakes and go on, confident in the knowledge that we have covered every contingency, taken every precaution, sued everybody for the damages, and we can resume our lives again. Except whatever we learn from this and whatever regulations and laws we put in place will be so watered-down and loop-holed that those with the right kind of grease can slip through it until the next time. And there's always a next time.

We were supposed to learn from the Exxon Valdez and Hurricane Katrina and the Iranian hostage crisis and Vietnam and Watergate and Cuba and the Bay of Pigs and the Depression and Munich and any of the other hundreds of life-lessons of the past two centuries, and we rarely do. Or if we do, it's not the right lesson.

(Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Research this!

By Capt. Fogg

Sometimes it feels like trying to explain calculus to a deaf canary. The idea that permitting anything some religious group doesn't like is infringing on their self-given right to tell other people what to do or to punish them for doing or not doing it, seems impossible to counter no matter how obvious or how long you try. I've tried for a long time, but it's like the Shroud of Turin, even if you could show it's made from polyester and has a made in Taiwan tag its authenticity returns again and again.

In the interest of perpetuating the kind of de facto but illegal kind of control they have exerted over private and public affairs for so long, they have invented a mythology wherein our government really owes so much to 21st century esoteric Christianist philosophy, that it's best simply to let delusional perverts and enemies of freedom dictate to us regardless of contrary laws and public sentiment.

Take the Family Research Council whose President Tony Perkins, a man whose face seems to belie any assertions of straightness, insists that allowing such people in the military as offend his flock is -- wait for this -- infringing on the rights of those pretend Christians who also serve: the right to be a bigot that is. It would "undermine religious liberty."

Now I don't recall that the Constitution confers or protects or affirms any such rights. It only tells the government not to establish an official religion. It says nothing about protecting the prejudices of religious bullies with neurotic phobias about sex. It says nothing about creating an army that President Tony Perkins feels comfortable with at whatever the cost may be to the religious and personal freedom of others.

President Tony Perkins isn't likely to remember that when President Truman integrated the armed forces, it offended the "rights" of racists in the very same way. Anyone who simply couldn't bear the thought of being in the same barracks with one of those lesser races God wanted to keep separate from his own light skinned people, just had to leave and of course the same sort of people will be offended by sharing a foxhole with someone with different sexual preferences. You know -- that's just too damned bad, President Tony Perkins and I'm quite sure our military will cope quite nicely and for God's sake, give it up and call Rentboy.com -- you know you want to.

(Cross posted from Human Voices)

A watered-down UN Security Counsel response

By Creature

So, now that Obama has clearly backed Israel's escalating stupidity, will the delusional chants coming from the right that "Obama has abandoned Israel" stop?

Rhetorical question, of course.