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Christopher Hitchens gets to the heart of it with these words from a Slate column titled “White Fright:”

In a rather curious and confused way, some white people are starting almost to think like a minority, even like a persecuted one. What does it take to believe that Christianity is an endangered religion in America or that the name of Jesus is insufficiently spoken or appreciated? Who wakes up believing that there is no appreciation for our veterans and our armed forces and that without a noisy speech from Sarah Palin, their sacrifice would be scorned? It’s not unfair to say that such grievances are purely and simply imaginary, which in turn leads one to ask what the real ones can be. The clue, surely, is furnished by the remainder of the speeches, which deny racial feeling so monotonously and vehemently as to draw attention.

Mr. Fish doesn’t need words.

And take a look at this video that was embedded in the Hitchens column. 

This guy looks like he’s trying to be Benjamin Franklin, but he’s no Benjamin Franklin.

Benjamin Franklin was enlightend.  This guy is not.  Neither are most of the other people interviewed in this video.

Protesters from both sides met in New York City on Sunday at the site where a Muslim community center may be built two city blocks away from where the twin World Trade Center towers once stood.  The New York Times reports:

Other protesters insisted that while they supported religious freedoms, the location of the planned Islamic center was an incursion on the rights of those who deemed ground zero a hallowed space. “It’s a disgrace to have a mosque at this sacred site,” said Kali Costas, who said she was a member of the Tea Party.

But how hallowed is the block where the center would be built?  What sort of establishments are there now and how would the addition of the Cordoba Initiative’s Park51 Center desecrate the memory of those slain on September 11th?

Kathy Gill at The Moderate Voice reports:

First, I knew that the neighborhood included the New York Dolls “Gentlemen’s Club” — courtesy of Jean Marbella at the Baltimore Sun. According to its website, it is “The Ultimate Ny Strip Club.” As you can see, it’s around the corner from Ground Zero. It’s next door to “Uncle Mike’s” where the bartenders “make amazing CockTails” and “wear Sexxy & Naughty Costumes EVERYDAY!”

The Burlington Coat Factory that is to be the new home of the community center is next door to the Amish Market (misnamed) and the Dakota Roadhouse, “Where too much is never enough.” Miller Lite is only $3.00 from Opening-5PM from Monday-Wednesday and on Thursday
 “BUCKETS OF BUD AND BUD LIGHT $13.00 ALL DAY AND NIGHT!”

Yes, the “sacred site” two blocks from Ground Zero is no place for a community center that will have recreation facilities, an auditorium, a restaurant and culinary school, a daycare facility, a library, and a mosque open and accessible to all.

If there were plans for another bar, strip club, or even a Starbucks, would they be protesting?  Would these types of businesses be honoring the memory of the victims of the attack?

Opposition to the Park51 project is contrary to what many of those who protest against it claim to stand for:  The Bill of Rights.  The very document that grants them the right to assemble and peacefully protest against the mosque gives Muslims the right to practice their religion.  The anti-mosque crowd claims they believe in religious freedom and that they oppose the Park 51 project only out of reverence for the location.  If they could be honest with themselves they would have to admit that the 2-1/2 block radius around where the twin towers once stood is not hallowed ground.  If it was, it wouldn’t be home to bars and strip clubs.   So if the “hallowed ground” argument doesn’t hold up, what’s the real basis of their opposition?  I would have to say it’s bigotry and religious intolerance.  Same as it ever was…

Al Qaeda bombed the World Trade Center towers, not Muslims.  But the members of al Qaeda are Muslims!  They follow the teachings of the prophet Muhammad and worship the Islamic god Allah! 

And that’s supposed to be the reason for halting the development of a Muslim community center two blocks away from Ground Zero?

Are you familiar with the Army of God?  It’s a Christian terrorist organization that’s responsible for attacks against doctors that perform abortions.  In 1998, Eric Rudolph, one of their members, bombed a clinic in Birmingham, Alabama.  The explosion killed a security guard and maimed a nurse.  Because the Army of God is a Christian organization, shouldn’t we use the same logic the anti-Ground-Zero-Mosque people are using to ban all Christian churches built near medical clinics that perform abortions?

And what about Fred Phelps?  Because Westboro Baptist Church is made up of xenophobic, homophobic, Jew hating, Catholic hating, Muslim hating followers of Phelps, then aren’t all Christians, regardless of their interpretation of The Bible, tainted by the hateful actions and beliefs of the members of Westboro Baptist Church?   If they are, then Christian organizations should be banned from building churches or community centers anywhere near the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. or any memorial to a slain homosexual.

These are just two examples of this game that anyone can play, including Jon Stewart, who did a fine job connecting Fox News to terrorism last night.  The point is that just as the followers of Christ are divided into hundreds of sects and denominations, some of which are hateful and violent, so are the followers of Muhammad.

As William Dalrymple pointed out in a column for The New York Times earlier this week, the Muslim group that plans to build the mosque two blocks from Ground Zero is lead by Abdul Rauf who is:

…one of America’s leading thinkers of Sufism, the mystical form of Islam, which in terms of goals and outlook couldn’t be farther from the violent Wahhabism of the jihadists. His videos and sermons preach love, the remembrance of God (or “zikr”) and reconciliation. His slightly New Agey rhetoric makes him sound, for better or worse, like a Muslim Deepak Chopra.

Dalrymple points out that Sufis are despised by Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, and that the Pakistani Taliban has attacked Sufi shrines with suicide bombers and rockets killing dozens of worshippers.

Sounds to me like Rauf and his followers are our allies in this “war on terror,” not our enemies.  Are we to deny them their right to freely practice their religion anywhere within our borders?  I don’t think so, and neither does the mayor of New York City or the neighborhood association that approved the mosque project.  But many Republican politicians are against it.  They love this conflict because it gives them yet another issue they can use to drive a wedge between conservatives and liberals. 

Just what is it with Republicans?  Why are they against religious freedom? Why are they against local control of commercial lands?  Why are they against the U.S. Constitution?

Why do Republicans hate America so much?

Americans need to face a hard fact: we almost certainly dodged another Great Depression by a hair’s breadth thanks to the combined efforts of Bush Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, the Obama administration and the much maligned Democratically-controlled Congress. But the fallout from the near economic collapse and financial meltdown is likely to endure for years and not months. The problems are deep and widespread, global and not merely national in scope

Whilst our government is not entirely helpless in the face of this recession, neither does it have in its bag of tricks a silver bullet or a magic wand to make it disappear. Unaccustomed as they are to an unemployment rate near 10%, Americans are unlikely to see a dramatic improvement any time soon no matter which party rules in the White House or congress.

In Europe, the harsh consequences of recession-induced joblessness is ameliorated significantly by a substantial social safety net that provides a livable income, retraining opportunities and housing assistance.  America’s Swiss-cheese version offers few such protections. The fact is Americans are just a pink-slip away from personal catastrophe, where a job lost can mean no health insurance (although thanks to Democrats that will change by 2014) and perhaps homelessness for themselves and even their children.

On NPR recently I listened to some bright spark from one of the right-wing think tanks explain why extending unemployment benefits is a disincentive to those who have been unemployed longer than a few months to search vigorously for a job – this despite credible estimates that there are five job seekers to every available job in the market. Is $300 a week a fortune to people who were earning $50K just year ago? Not on the planet most of us live on, that’s for sure. He went on to suggest more of the unemployed should be willing to uproot their families and move; or be prepared to take a job at McDonald’s at minimum wage, as though you can support a family that way.

Appalling, outrageous and shameful though it may be, this is the prevailing view on the right and among congressional Republicans. It highlights the extent to which most Republicans are completely out of touch with the way most Americans live, and lack any ability to empathize with those in distress.

So it does matter which party steers us through the hard times and best prepares the country to take advantage of the global recovery when it does come. And that, ladies and gentlemen, would be the Democrats.

American families that are hurting need help not platitudes. Yes, they need jobs. But these do not grow on trees nor appear on government demand. In the short term unemployed Americans need government assistance to ensure they have basic financial assistance, can keep a roof over their family’s heads and for re-training where that is feasible.

And as the economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman endlessly preaches, we also need to take advantage of the low cost of government borrowing to invest heavily in our human resources through increased spending in education, and on needed infrastructure improvements.   To cut spending now on these essential engines to our future prosperity as states struggle to balance their books is myopic and idiotic.

As for the deficit, we don’t need lessons on fiscal rectitude from a party that:

1. Drove us into two wars (and botched both of them),
2. Turned a budget surplus into a deficit quicker than you can say “Bush tax cuts for the rich,”
3. Passed into law an unfunded Medicare drug benefit to pander to and keep seniors in their political column,
4. Calls for fiscal austerity, but still wants extend Bush’s tax cuts for the rich even though their expiration would add hundreds of billions of dollars to the treasury,
5. Wants more spending on an already bloated Pentagon budget and on border fences with Mexico, and finally,
6. Whose deregulatory zeal got us into this mess in the first place.

Dick Cheney was wrong; deficits do matter – but not now.

I understand that Americans are unhappy with the Obama administration and congress for not fixing the economy. The fact is there are no easy answers or quick fixes to our economic doldrums, and much depends on what happens outside of our shores and beyond our control.  The impulse to hold someone, anyone, responsible for what ails us is strong.

Yet to elect more Republicans, a party bereft of ideas and only able to obstruct and impede government, is to invite paralysis to our policy making machinery and the infliction of more pain on those Americans who need our help in these times.  Please, let’s not cut off our noses to spite our faces in November.

From and advertisement in today’s printed edition of The Seattle Times:

My name is Abdul Maalik Hosseini, and I am running for US Senator representing Washington State. It’s not an accident that our nation is having so many problems at this time. Allah is trying to get our attention and if He doesn’t get it soon, our nation’s woes can get a lot worse. Allah has the answer for all our problems, but first He wants to correct our attitude, as a nation, toward Him. I believe the best way to do that is for us to understand our creator’s heart. Allah’s desire is to bless our nation to the point of making the rest of the world envious of the blessings He is bestowing on us. The catch is, we are tying his hands by our actions. When we allow sin to prevail over our nation, we open the door for evil to take hold. When we call what is evil, good, we cause Allah’s wrath to overshadow us. Our leaders and much of our nation are not seeing the connection between abortion, a homosexual agenda being pushed on us as an acceptable lifestyle, pornography that is invading our lives and the removal of prayer, the Quran and the teaching of Allah out of our schools systems. Allah is trying to get our attention through many of the problems we are having today in our healthcare, energy, economics, weather, debt and problems in our school systems. There is a disconnect through the human mind between these ideas but direct connection through The All Knowing One’s. Man’s plans will not fix our nation’s problems. Only Allah’s plans will. If I am elected for the U.S. Senate office, I will strive, with The Almighty’s help, to bring the changes that will bring Allah’s favor on our nation again. We need leaders that hear Allah’s voice and will follow His leadings.

What?  Really?  An Islamic fundamentalist is running for the U.S. Senate and wants us to vote for him because he will serve the citizens of Washington State through the will of Allah?

Not really…  I edited the text of the ad.  I replaced the name “Mike Latimer” with an Islamic name and replaced “God” with “Allah,” “Bible” with “Quran” and “His” or “He” or “Lord” with synonyms for Allah.  You can read the original text by visiting his website.

The point is that the real Mike Latimer or the fictional Abdul Maalik Hosseini has no business being a member of the U.S. Senate.  Anyone who campaigns as a religious fundamentalist who wants to impose the will of his god on the rest of us should automatically be disqualified from the election.

I never had any doubts that the federal government’s financial bailout and the stimulus bill were needed to weather the economic storm that hit us in 2008.  Many people disagreed, but as the New York Times reported this week:

Now, two leading economists wielding complex quantitative models say that assertion can be empirically proved.

In a new paper, the economists argue that without the Wall Street bailout, the bank stress tests, the emergency lending and asset purchases by the Federal Reserve, and the Obama administration’s fiscal stimulus program, the nation’s gross domestic product would be about 6.5 percent lower this year.

In addition, there would be about 8.5 million fewer jobs, on top of the more than 8 million already lost; and the economy would be experiencing deflation, instead of low inflation.

The paper, by Alan S. Blinder, a Princeton professor and former vice chairman of the Fed, and Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, represents a first stab at comprehensively estimating the effects of the economic policy responses of the last few years.

“While the effectiveness of any individual element certainly can be debated, there is little doubt that in total, the policy response was highly effective,” they write.

That’s right.  If those who wanted our government to act like some dumbass tightwad had gotten their way, we would be in a depression now instead of working our way out of a recession.

I was one, and still am one that thinks the stimulus bill wasn’t big enough.  More government spending on much needed infrastructure projects would help create jobs, which would in turn create demand for goods and services, resulting in more economic growth.  Obama requested just enough stimulus money to weather the storm, but the storm has not passed, and he needs to ask for more to pull us out of this mess, but he won’t in this highly partisan environment, especially in a mid-term election year.

Ever since Democrats passed the stimulus bill in early 2009, Republicans in congress have attempted to portray themselves as born-again deficit hawks, eschewing their profligate ways during the George W Bush years.  Fortunately, this fiction has not survived the question of what to do about the Bush tax cuts for the rich which are due to expire.

The Obama administration intends to let them expire, thereby saving the treasury some $697 billion over 10 years.  GOP leaders, however, support an extension of all the Bush tax cuts because (and they even manage to say this with a straight face) they don’t add to the deficit at all since they stimulate the economy and actually pay for themselves.  This nonsense has been disproved so many times you’d think even Republicans would be embarrassed to trot it out again; but it does highlight, in addition to a certain obtuseness, their hypocrisy on the deficit.  According to the GOP, extending unemployment benefits to those hit hardest by this recession must be paid for with offsetting cuts elsewhere in the budget, but the rule shouldn’t apply to tax cuts on the wealthiest Americans least touched by the downturn. Sweet!

McConnell and others in the GOP explain the difference in terms of their opposition to government spending adding to the deficit, but this hardly concerned them when they were passing the Medicare drug benefit or appropriations for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – none of which were offset with spending cuts elsewhere.  Even now when pressed to identify specific and significant cuts to government spending in programs such as Medicare or Social Security or the defence budget, GOP spokespeople dodge and weave and obfuscate shamelessly without ever giving a straight answer.  Indeed, if you listen to them in other contexts, they insist not enough is being spent on things like border security.

This incoherence is fundamental to today’s national Republican Party and is guided by an essential right-wing conviction:  that an unfettered free market is paramount, and that government has no business and is essentially ineffective in all but a few areas such as national security.  The party therefore has no incentive to make government work efficiently or effectively either when they are in power or in opposition, since this would undermine their guiding principal.  This explains, for example, the utter incompetence of the Bush years when the GOP controlled both the White House and the congress, and the intransigence of today’s congressional Republicans as they strive to thwart any and all initiatives of the Obama administration.  For Republicans gridlock is good.

Voters should remember this as they go to the polls this fall.  By any reasonable standard, the Obama administration and congressional Democrats have accomplished a great deal in the last two years, virtually all of which I happen to believe, will be to the long term benefit of the country.  In the short term, the stimulus really did soften the blow of this deepest of economic downturns.  Yet the number of jobless is still way too high and Americans are feeling unsettled and grumpy; Democrats, unfairly or no, are likely to feel the brunt of their ire.  Republicans will benefit simply by being the party out of power. But a party as bereft of ideas as the GOP and whose policies and ideological devotion to deregulation largely caused the mess in the first place should not be rewarded with increased power and influence.  That is simply a recipe for prolonged national pain.

The good news, potentially, was the release last week of new national standards for math and reading by a panel of experts convened by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. I say potentially because the standards have to be accepted and adopted by individual states, two of which (Texas and Alaska) have already refused to participate in the process.

The bad news is that to get to this point, it has taken us exactly ten years since the last effort, initiated by President George H Bush (America 2000)  continued under Bill Clinton (Goals 2000) and killed by George W Bush, who replaced it with the disastrous No Child Left Behind.  Where his predecessors’ efforts focused, in part, on encouraging all states to adopt rigorous educational standards while providing federally funded but independent reviews and assessments of the results, Junior’s NCLB has had the opposite effect. Its perverse incentives actually encouraged states to dumb-down their standards, and the tests that stem from them, so as to show illusory improvements in performance. Conversely, states that maintained high standards, such as Massachusetts, have been punished by NCLB.

The pace of reform in this country since ‘A Nation At Risk’ was released during the Reagan years makes a snail look like a sprinter.  It really is enough to make you want to scream in frustration. 

The issue of standards is a case in point. How can anybody actually think that it makes sense to have fifty different sets of standards to determine the appropriate reading level of our ninth-graders, or what our sixth-graders should know in math? Yet the move to national standards has been bitterly resisted, primarily by Republicans in congress who have clung to the manifestly erroneous belief that all educational decisions were best left to individual states and local school districts.  If states were competent to handle it alone, we wouldn’t be lagging most advanced countries in the educational performance of our children 25 years after ‘Nation at Risk’ sounded the warning bell.

It’s heartening that a bipartisan consensus among the nation’s governors has prompted this very significant and long overdue step which could have enormous future benefits for our children. Rigorous national standards will, hopefully, lead to common if not identical curriculum and tests, and a measure of coherence may yet emerge from the patchwork quilt that is the American K-12 education system. 

 That’s definitely worth a loud cheer.

The New York Daily News reported last week that former President George W. Bush said:

Sure, we waterboarded Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, former President George W. Bush reportedly said on Tuesday.

And he would “do it again to save lives.”

Bush and his military advisors adhered to the morally misguided “intelligence at any cost” school of thinking.  Bush was too stubborn and dumb to realize that the costs of obtaining intelligence through torture was too high. 

There’s a very well researched article in Military Review by Major Douglas A. Pryer, U.S. Army, that examines the Bush way and the more dominant American tradition of the “shining city on the hill” way. 

The article includes a summary of email exchanges between military officers who approved of torture and those who opposed it.  The ethical side was represented by Major Nathan Hoepner, who wrote:

We have taken casualties in every war we have ever fought—that is part of the very nature of war.  We also inflict casualties, generally many more than we take.  That in no way justifies letting go of our standards.   We have NEVER considered our enemies justified in doing such things to us.  Casualties are part of war—if you cannot take casualties then you cannot engage in war.  Period.  BOTTOM LINE: We are American Soldiers, heirs of a long tradition of staying on the high ground. We need to stay there.

Pryer writes that  those who say that the use of torture saved lives (as Bush stated last week) are wrong:

Tragically, interrogators at Abu Ghraib, in the 3ACR, and at FOB Iron Horse had HUMINT leaders who felt morally justified in sanctioning enhanced interrogation techniques, and this belief led their interrogators to use techniques that slipped into truly serious abuse at Abu Ghraib and in the 3ACR.  Furthermore, due to personalities unique to Abu Ghraib, abuse descended further still into the sadistic, sexualized violence that shamed our Nation and nearly led to our defeat in Iraq.  In retrospect, it is ironic that, while these leaders had meant to save lives via enhanced interrogation techniques, their actions helped to destabilize Iraq.  This destabilization, in turn, created thousands more casualties than these leaders could ever have prevented through tactical methods.

Andrew Sullivan was on Real Time with Bill Maher Friday, and he observed that most former presidents advocate human rights, but this one advocates torture, proving he is truly a monster.

One of the loudest complaints about the Democratic-controlled congress is that it has done little for and is out of touch with ordinary Americans, particularly during these trying economic times.  The facts suggest otherwise.

First, congress passed and President Obama signed the much maligned but nevertheless effective stimulus bill that provided a much needed fiscal boost to the economy at a critical time in the form of aid to states, tax cuts, unemployment payments, funding for green energy and other worthy projects.  The bill was, alas, oversold by the Obama administration but there is no question that it saved between one and two million jobs that would otherwise have been lost, and ameliorated the need for Draconian cuts by state governments suddenly faced with enormous budget deficits.

Second, about a year ago Obama signed a bill that afforded consumers more protection from the predatory practices of the credit card industry.

Third, in April Obama signed into law the most far reaching reform of health-care since Medicare and in so doing significantly strengthened America’s tattered social safety net.

And last but not least, congress is on the verge of passing significant financial reform legislation that takes a giant step towards curbing the sort of practices by banks and investment houses that nearly drove our economy into another Depression.

They have done this in the face of vociferous opposition from the powerful industries involved.  Each of these bills benefited ordinary, hard working Americans and, in the cases of the credit card bill of rights, health reform and the regulation of the financial industry, did so at the expense of Big Business or the wealthiest Americans.  Now that’s a change.  And second, they moved forward against the obstructionist opposition of a GOP only too willing to do the heavy lifting for the financial and medical insurance industries.  Does anyone think it’s a coincidence, for example, that political PAC money contributions from the financial industry are flowing away from Democrats, despite the fact that they control Congress and the White House, and to the Republicans?

It has been less than eighteen months since the Democrats took control in Washington.  In that time they have confounded conventional wisdom and the usual Washington cynicism to pass legislation that makes the lives of ordinary Americans more secure.  And they have accomplished this over the objections of powerful business interests who have been used to getting their own way.

Obama and congressional Democrats may be fairly faulted on some issues from both left and right; but not fighting for ordinary Americans isn’t one of them.