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3. Obama: “Change you can believe in, but…”

Oct-29-2010 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Heading into midterms, it seems that the POTUS can’t get his mojo working. Part of that is the unprecedented money being spent by the rich to convince the poor that socialism is stalking the land. The NY Times has an interesting perspective on Obama, reality, and perception, and Jon Stewart brings Obama onto the Daily show. Why does that matter? Because it is the first time Obama has answered critiques from the left, as opposed to Republican right.

* Midterms: money changes everything Al Jazeera English

“I went to the crossroad, fell down upon my knees.” This was the powerful first line of “Cross Road Blues” by 1930s blues legend Robert Johnson. It was later adapted into the song “Crossroads” by Eric Clapton’s Cream and a movie of the same name, starring the serially pre-pubescent Ralph Macchio. The song and movie were infamously about going down to a crossroads in the Mississippi Delta, to sell your soul to the Devil. [Editor’s note: hear the Cream version here]

Today, meeting Mephistopheles is much simpler: You can simply turn over barrels of cash in unmarked bills to American Crossroads or Crossroads GPS, the two appropriately named groups formed by one of the most wretched, sebum-stained forces of evil at the current American political crossroads: Karl Rove.

What Happened to Change We Can Believe In? – NYTimes.com

PRESIDENT Obama, the Rodney Dangerfield of 2010, gets no respect for averting another Great Depression, for saving 3.3 million jobs with stimulus spending, or for salvaging GM and Chrysler from the junkyard. And none of these good deeds, no matter how substantial, will go unpunished if the projected Democratic bloodbath materializes on Election Day. Some are even going unremembered. For Obama, the ultimate indignity is the Times/CBS News poll in Septembershowing that only 8 percent of Americans know that he gave 95 percent of American taxpayers a tax cut.

* Did Jon Stewart’s Audience Ruin His Obama Interview?

Jon Stewart’s interview of Barack Obama last night was a good one, with the comedian not shying away from pointed questions about the first two years of his presidency. But there was one aspect of it that just about ruined it: the audience.

Having a crowd cheering and clapping, interrupting both Obama and Stewart multiple times, turned what should have been a thoughtful debate into an arena battle. A crowd makes sense for something like a sporting event or a comedy show. You want an audience to provide energy, to react where reactions are warranted.

But the trouble with having a live audience at what is supposed to be a relatively serious discussion is that it forces everything to be dumbed down to soundbites. Any subtlety is removed, as who cheers for a nuanced argument? A crowd wants to cheer for big proclamations, for sweeping statements.

Watch the show from Canada or from the US. Sorry, everyone else: you’re on your own.

11. Quote of the Week

Oct-29-2010 | Comments (0)

“Some people say I’m extreme, but they said the John Birch Society was extreme, too.” Kelly Khuri, founder of the Tea Party Patriots

October 1st, 2010 :: Year 7, Issue 32

Oct-01-2010 | Comments (0)

Followups

* France Faces European Action after Roma Expulsions NYTimes After an acrimonious dispute over its expulsions of the Roma, France was told on Wednesday that it would face legal proceedings for failing to meet minimum European Union safeguards to protect the rights of the bloc’s citizens.

* Security: Update on German Terrorist Plot A clear and balanced report from Juan Cole on the plan’s goals and implications: The plot is alleged to have been hatched by young Muslim-German men who had been attending the same mosque in Hamburg where the 9/11 hijackers attended. … A Mumbai-style attack is inexpensive and logistically unchallenging. If the attackers are willing to die, they can shoot up hotels and malls and set off some bombs. Doing several cities at once would spread panic and is an al-Qaeda MO…. It can be said that such operations are hard to forestall and that also they are a comedown for al-Qaeda, since they don’t accomplish anything at all. You will note that Mumbai is doing just fine and PM Manmohan Singh declined to take the bait and go to war with Pakistan, as the Lashkar-i Tayyiba had hoped. The point of 9/11 for Bin Laden was to drag the US into Middle Eastern quagmires. Not everyone is as gullible as George W. Bush and fringe terrorist groups should be dealt with quietly and effectively, not with big multi-trillion dollar wars

* Tea Party Updates Poe’s Law says satire of the right wing is indistinguishable from the real thing. Which of these is satire? Christine O’Donnell asks why we don’t see monkeys becoming humans today if evolution is true; Christine O’Donnell puts out “Young Abstinence” comics for teenagers. Tough call….

Sept. 17th, 2010 :: Year 7, Issue 31

Sep-24-2010 | Comments (0)

Followups

* Islamophobia The latest Mark has an article by Catherine Frid about how media spun her play, Homegrown . “Homegrown is a play about Canada’s criminal justice system that got spun by the media into a work that glorifies terrorism. This fact raises the question: what does it tell us about our society when questioning government methods in the Toronto 18 case is taboo? The answer is that our society is Islamophobic – we think Muslims to not deserve the rights that protect the rest of us.”

* Elizabeth May, leader of Canada’s Green Party, talks about what should and what can be done about the oil sands in this excellent 11 minute broadcast, rehosted (with permission) from Alert! Radio (via Rabble). It’s the most persuasive talk by a political leader we’ve heard in a long time.

* Tea Party Glen Urquhart, Republican nominee for Congress, explains that “separation of church and state” is actually from Hitler. “So the next time your liberal friends talk about the separation of Church and State ask them why they’re Nazis.”

* Dude, You Have No Quran Act One: Jacob Isom rescued a Quran before it could be burned by Christofascists. Act Two: Video of this on Youtube goes viral. Act Three: Someone remixes video with autotune. Unbelievable.

5. Look To Your Right. No, Way Further Right….

Jul-16-2010 | Comments (0)

Bird’s-Eye: There’s a new party in town, a psychotic mix of folks who have transcended reason, who choose to navigate by their maps and ignore those pesky conflicts with the actual geography of the world. We examine the strange political alliances of the English Defence League, the American Tea Party, and add some Onion, just in case you weren’t crying yet.

* English Defence League: Inside The Violent World Of Britain’s New Far Right The Guardian

The English Defence League, which started in Luton last year, has become the most significant far-right street movement in the UK since the National Front in the 1970s. A Guardian investigation has identified a number of known rightwing extremists who are taking an interest in the movement – from convicted football hooligans to members of violent rightwing splinter groups. Thousands of people have attended its protests – many of which have descended into violence and racist and Islamophobic chanting. Supporters are split into “divisions” spread across the UK and as many as 3,000 people are attracted to its protests.

The group also appears to be drawing support from the armed forces. Its online armed forces division has 842 members and the EDL says many serving soldiers have attended its demonstrations. A spokeswoman for the EDL, whose husband is a serving soldier, said: “The soldiers are fighting Islamic extremism in Afghanistan and Iraq and the EDL are fighting it here … Not all the armed forces support the English Defence League but a majority do.”

* What If the Tea Party Were Black? Tim Wise, AlterNet (Thanks, Dave!)

Let’s play a game, shall we? The name of the game is called “Imagine.” …let’s begin.

Imagine that hundreds of black protesters were to descend upon Washington DC and Northern Virginia, just a few miles from the Capitol and White House, armed with AK-47s, assorted handguns, and ammunition. And imagine that some of these protesters —the black protesters — spoke of the need for political revolution, and possibly even armed conflict in the event that laws they didn’t like were enforced by the government? Would these protesters — these black protesters with guns — be seen as brave defenders of the Second Amendment, or would they be viewed by most whites as a danger to the republic? What if they were Arab-Americans? Because, after all, that’s what happened recently when white gun enthusiasts descended upon the nation’s capital, arms in hand, and verbally announced their readiness to make war on the country’s political leaders if the need arose.

* Area Man Passionate Defender Of What He Imagines Constitution To Be The Onion

Spurred by an administration he believes to be guilty of numerous transgressions, self-described American patriot Kyle Mortensen, 47, is a vehement defender of ideas he seems to think are enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and principles that brave men have fought and died for solely in his head.

“Right there in the preamble, the authors make their priorities clear: ‘one nation under God,’” said Mortensen, attributing to the Constitution a line from the Pledge of Allegiance, which itself did not include any reference to a deity until 1954. “Well, there’s a reason they put that right at the top.”

“Men like Madison and Jefferson were moved by the ideals of Christianity, and wanted the United States to reflect those values as a Christian nation,” continued Mortensen, referring to the “Father of the Constitution,” James Madison, considered by many historians to be an atheist, and Thomas Jefferson, an Enlightenment-era thinker who rejected the divinity of Christ and was in France at the time the document was written.

5. The Canadian Tea Party

May-21-2010 | Comments (0)

Bird’s-Eye: Increasingly, the world-view that drives the Tea Party in the US is crossing the border into Canada. Under Stephen Harper there has been a radical shift to the right. Marci MacDonald’s new book on the rise of “Christian Nationalism” highlights this, and she expands on her ideas in the two interviews we link to. As well, ex-pat Mallick bemoans how Canada looks abroad, and we juxtapose the curious decline of Canada’s centrist churches while the fundamentalist voices grow louder.

* Harper’s Christian Right Wing The Tyee

As Marci MacDonald points out in her new book, The Armageddon Factor: The Rise of Christian Nationalism in Canada, if you don’t take these people seriously you may be quietly contributing to the demise of democracy and all the social democratic programs it has created in the past 50 years. (See her 2006 article on the subject here.)

Stephen Harper takes them very seriously, to the point where he has encouraged and facilitated the rapid build-up of a powerful Christian right political machine on Parliament Hill and beyond, a machine that is getting its way more and more with the Conservative government. The way McDonald explains it, Harper suffered a serious erosion of support from the neo-liberal crowd when in 2008 he buckled to NDP and Liberal pressure to spend billions to stave off a serious recession — and brought the country its worst deficit situation in decades. To replace that part of his core vote, Harper had to reinforce and activate the other half: the Christian right. Attacks on science; excluding abortion from his maternal health program overseas; an escalation of his assault on women’s equality; more attacks on human rights institutions; the continuing get-tough-on-crime agenda (including a new law eliminating the concept of a “pardon”); a bare-knuckled assault on the godless CBC; the most fierce pro-Israeli policy of any Western country and his general contempt for the institutions of democracy all play to this extremist Christian constituency.

Editor’s Note: You can read interviews with Marci MacDonald in both The Walrus and on Rabble.ca

* A British Perspective on Canada Heather Mallick Guardian

Right now, Canada sucks, and all because we have a hung Parliament and no one’s done anything about it for years. We are ruled by Stephen Harper, a hard-right hick with a grudge who after serial elections cannot get a clear mandate from the voters…. Canada has a Conservative minority government right now that does have a core belief. It’s that Canadians deserve a good stomping, all of them. Conservatives can’t stand people, particularly if they’re female, or second-generation Canadian, or educated, or principled, or not from Alberta, which is the home of the hard-right belly-bulging middle-aged Tory male. Watch them at the G8, ostensibly fighting for women’s health internationally while blocking abortions for raped Congolese.

* Predeceased by their churches London Free Press

Deconsecrated, dissolved, disbanded, amalgamated — Christian churches from traditionally mainstream denominations are closing by the hundreds across Canada in a wave that shows little sign of receding. And it’s not only rural churches such as St. Patrick’s that are shutting down in an area of Southwestern Ontario where farms are increasing in size and families disappearing from the land. Small-town, suburban and inner-city churches are also closing and putting their buildings up for sale.

The United Church, Canada’s largest Protestant denomination, is now closing about one church a week. In the past decade, it has shut more than 400 churches. “We do have too many churches for the number of customers, to put it in purely secular terms,” said Rev. David McKane of First St. Andrews United Church in London.

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3. Obama: “Change you can believe in, but…”

11. Quote of the Week

October 1st, 2010 :: Year 7, Issue 32

Sept. 17th, 2010 :: Year 7, Issue 31

5. Look To Your Right. No, Way Further Right….

5. The Canadian Tea Party

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