I'm a little late to this party, but there's still some punch in the bowl. The Media Mutters crowd are trying to raise a stink over a Limbaugh comment on yesterday's show:
CALLER 2: No, it’s not, and what’s really funny is, they never talk to real soldiers. They like to pull these soldiers that come up out of the blue and talk to the media.
LIMBAUGH: The phony soldiers.
CALLER 2: The phony soldiers. If you talk to a real soldier, they are proud to serve. They want to be over in Iraq. They understand their sacrifice, and they’re willing to sacrifice for their country.
You can guess the take; "Rush is saying that if you don't support the war, you're a phony soldier."
Except that's not what he's saying. Read the exchange again, and see what Rush was responding to:
...they never talk to real soldiers.
(Italics added).
Well, if they're not talking to "real" soldiers, who are they talking to? Well, fake soldiers, and Rush goes on to elucidate:
Here is a Morning Update that we did recently, talking about fake soldiers. This is a story of who the left props up as heroes. They have their celebrities and one of them was Army Ranger Jesse Macbeth. Now, he was a "corporal." I say in quotes. Twenty-three years old. What made Jesse Macbeth a hero to the anti-war crowd wasn't his Purple Heart; it wasn't his being affiliated with post-traumatic stress disorder from tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. No. What made Jesse Macbeth, Army Ranger, a hero to the left was his courage, in their view, off the battlefield, without regard to consequences. He told the world the abuses he had witnessed in Iraq, American soldiers killing unarmed civilians, hundreds of men, women, even children. In one gruesome account, translated into Arabic and spread widely across the Internet, Army Ranger Jesse Macbeth describes the horrors this way: "We would burn their bodies. We would hang their bodies from the rafters in the mosque."
So Rush even brings up an example of a phony soldier. But of course the Left isn't really interested in what Rush meant; this is just a convenient club for the folks who want to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine.
Rush was not criticizing soldiers who are against the war. He's criticizing phony soldiers who are against the war and the media who accept their claims uncritically.
Sadly, a couple otherwise sane people seem to agree with the cranks on this one.
John McCain has released two new ads in New Hampshire, Live Free and One Man. I highly recommend them both, but keep some Kleenex handy as the emotions are strong, especially at the beginning of "One Man".
Krugman: Yes, Southern Whites Are Bigots, But Only the Rich Ones
That's what I get out of the combination of his column today combined with the blog. Starting from the column:
And yes, Southern white exceptionalism is about race, much more than it is about moral values, religion, support for the military or other explanations sometimes offered. There’s a large statistical literature on the subject, whose conclusion is summed up by the political scientist Thomas F. Schaller in his book “Whistling Past Dixie”: “Despite the best efforts of Republican spinmeisters to depict American conservatism as a nonracial phenomenon, the partisan impact of racial attitudes in the South is stronger today than in the past.”
In fact, if you look at voting behavior, low-income whites in the South are not very different from low-income whites in the rest of the country. You can see this both in Larry Bartels’s “What’s the matter with What’s the Matter With Kansas?” (pdf), Figure 3, and in a comprehensive study of red state-blue state differences by Gelman et al (pdf). It’s relatively high-income Southern whites who are very, very Republican. Can I get away with saying that rich white trash are the problem?
Of course you can, Paul. God only knows how Krugman manages to keep so many contrary thoughts in his head at one time. Democratic voters are smarter than Republicans, but poorer than Republicans and less likely to be racists. Got it?
This post over at the Daily Kos has gone around the blogosphere quite quickly.
Why I Have A Little Crush on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
I know I'm a Jewish lesbian and he'd probably have me killed. But still, the guy speaks some blunt truths about the Bush Administration that make me swoon...
That sort of thinking is seldom admitted to as frankly as in this statement by the Columbia Coalition Against the War.
As Columbia only very recently announced, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will be speaking in Roone Arledge auditorium this Monday. A number of students and student organizations have already announced plans for a protest rally the same day. We are not among them. We do not endorse Ahmadinejad or his views, many of which are inexcusable. However, as opponents of a US military strike against Iran, we have serious concerns with the content of some of the hostility that has been expressed to his presence, and specifically with the planned protest.
We fear the demonization of Ahmadinejad, because we think this demonization contributes to the likelihood of war. In the current climate, with many on the political right in the U.S. and Israel pushing for air strikes, a campaign against Ahmadinejad is dangerous, regardless of the intentions of most involved. A call to action, unless it prominently rules out war, implies military action.
It's a tough balancing act that "progressives" must face: how to maintain some credibility as human rights campaigners, while avoiding the endorsement of any action to improve the human rights situation in Iran.
The Rocky Mountain Collegian published an editorial on page 4 of the paper Friday which read "Taser this ... F*** Bush."
The expletive was spelled out.
The last two words were in bold type, larger than most headlines. A caption below said, "this column represents the views of the Collegian's Editorial Board."
Because, you know, they're standing up for Andrew Meyer's freedom of speech.
The editorial comes fresh on the heels of freedom of speech issues that arose from the Tasering of a Florida student at a Sen. John Kerry speech.
Collegian Editor David McSwane said a group of seven student editors discussed the statement for several hours before agreeing to publish it.
Apparently they missed the fact that the Tasering came at an event featuring a Democrat. As Ace of Spades put it at the time, it was pink on pink.
Of course, McSwane has discovered that free speech is not without consequences:
McSwane told 7NEWS that ads from the CSU Bookstore were pulled from the paper in response to the editorial. Bookstore managers declined to comment.
Suddenly, a young woman in a t-shirt reading "Troops Home Now" waded into the middle of the gun rights group, shouting "Bring the troops home!" and forcing McCain to stop speaking while she addressed the television cameras.
After a few seconds of camera time, a woman got up from her table at the NRA breakfast, wrapped the protester in an embrace and pushed her out of the limelight. A second protester was also lead out first by NRA members and then by security guards.
As the protesters left the room, McCain leaned into the microphone for the most emphatic thing he said all morning.
"Well, my friends, we beat you yesterday," he said. "We'll beat you today . . . And we'll beat you tomorrow!"
The crowd rose in an enthusiastic standing ovation, setting aside for the moment any past differences they may be holding against McCain.
An MIT student with a fake bomb strapped to her chest was arrested at gunpoint Friday at Logan International Airport and later claimed it was artwork, officials said.
She nearly became a Darwin award winner:
Simpson was "extremely lucky she followed the instructions or deadly force would have been used," Pare said. "She's lucky to be in a cell as opposed to the morgue."
Too bad that Andrew Meyer wasn't wearing a circuit board.
Well, as predicted long ago, the New York Times' effort to get people to pay to read Maureen Dowd and Paul Krugman has come to an end.
Krugman kicks off a new blog called "The Conscience of a Liberal" today with an article on income inequality. Krugman claims:
The great divergence: Since the late 1970s the America I knew has unraveled. We’re no longer a middle-class society, in which the benefits of economic growth are widely shared: between 1979 and 2005 the real income of the median household rose only 13 percent, but the income of the richest 0.1% of Americans rose 296 percent.
And yet, if you look at the graph he provides, it does not show this:
As you can see, it certainly appears that the great divergence he harps on appears to start after 1987, which is inconvenient as heck for Krugman, since you know damn well that he wants to blame it on Ronald Reagan and the Republicans. Indeed, it is quite apparent that a large part of the rise in inequality that he bemoans comes during the Clinton era.
Krugman also does his usual peak to non-peak comparison; no surprise there as we have seen him do this often in the past.
Eventually they start to believe kooky things like that John Kerry won the 2004 election, and they become irrational, and eventually have to be tased. He's a typical crank, getting into the "Skull & Bones" thing before being dragged off. Huge entertainment value!
This is what Al-Qaeda was responding to that day, revolting against the United States policies which have plagued the Asian continent for far too long, in particular in proliferating the Afghanistan civil war from 1979-1989 against the Soviets by funding the Mujahideen, drawing the Soviets offsides into the war. Our government is constantly meddling in the affairs of the Saudis and Pakistanis, which have real world ramifications on the lives of the neighboring Afghanis, and they were responding to this too. And it's all for oil and new markets to exploit, destabilizing other regions to ensure our own stability. That is what 9/11 was about, Al-Qaeda striking back against those waging economically inspired wars. What options have we left them? Our economy is devastating the globe, forcing poverty and instability onto the weaker nations of the world, with our government murdering to protect it's precious capital.
So much nonsense in that one paragraph that it's hard to know where to start. Al Qaeda certainly did not object to our "proliferating" the Afghan struggle against the Soviets, since we were backing the Muslims. The Soviets weren't drawn offsides, and we don't do enough meddling in the affairs of the Saudis and the Pakistanis.
He shows basic ignorance of the facts; for example consider his claim of Dick Cheney having a conflict of interest:
What about Vice President Dick Cheney's conflicting ties with Halliburton, a company which has received billions of dollars in lucrative no-bid government contracts during the wars we are waging in the middle east, which Dick Cheney used to be Vice President of, who is holding 100,000 shares of unexercised Halliburton stock?
Let's see, Cheney used to be CEO (not vice president) of Halliburton, and he does not have any personal financial stake in the company. Although Cheney does some unexercised stock options, he has pledged any proceeds from those to charity. He was owed deferred compensation from Halliburton, but they handled that by purchasing an insurance annuity, so that if Halliburton were to go bankrupt tomorrow, he'd still get paid.
Considering that she made her name by joking about anal sex, it seems a bit much to see her hyperventilating over John McCain's comment that MoveOn should be "thrown out of the country." One would think he was a judge sentencing MoveOn to become another "Man Without a Country". Let's see if we can get MooOn to demand an apology from Senator McCain.
According to Abbe Serphos, director of public relations for the Times, "the open rate for an ad of that size and type is $181,692."
A spokesman for MoveOn.org confirmed to The Post that the liberal activist group had paid only $65,000 for the ad - a reduction of more than $116,000 from the stated rate.
You know how it is; the Times should be free to charge whatever it wants for a full-page ad; that's not the issue. But this does mean that they can't turn around and claim that they're just running the ad, that they have nothing to do with the content. One is forced to conclude that they subsidized this particular ad because it fits their editorial policy.
Senator McCain began by reiterating his call for Democratic candidates to denounce the MoveOn.org advertisement which shamefully referred to General Petraeus as General "Betray Us".
Most of the calls this week, were not surprisingly on General Petraeus' presentation of the current status in Iraq. There is no doubt that Senator McCain sounded more upbeat and positive about the war and (no coincidence) his own political campaign, which is starting to benefit. Polls have been showing McCain in a strong rebound since the summer.
The new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that Giuliani's support has eroded ten percentage points since July, to 28 percent. In February, Giuliani enjoyed the support of 53 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents.
Trailing Giuliani is former Sen. Fred Thompson of Tennessee, who officially launched his campaign last week. He had 19 percent support, nearly double what he had in April, when he began to seriously consider a White House bid.
Sen. John McCain of Arizona, whose campaign has been beset by fund-raising difficulties, showed 18 percent support. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has 10 percent, which is about the level of GOP support he has had since April.
Thompson is getting a brief political honeymoon; we'll see how he looks after the next debate in Charleston. But for McCain to be back within 10 points of Guiliani is quite a Lazarus routine. Indeed, the real question is how long Romney can continue with such miniscule polling support.
Crackpot Corsi Claims NAU Drivers' Licenses in North Carolina
This NAU nonsense is the conservative equivalent of "Trutherism" among the Left.
Corsi did a fine job for the Republicans in 2004, with his co-authorship of Unfit for Command. But he's a thorough fruitcake with this North American Union nonsense. Let's grant him for a moment that the logo for the SPP is somewhat similar to the globe shown on the NC licenses. Why does the New World Order feel the need to put it on drivers' licenses? Wouldn't it be a whole lot smarter to just slap it on after the union is achieved?
This is typical of conspiracy nutbars. They think the evil people behind the scenes, while brilliant and (mwahahahaha) eeeeeeevil, always give the game away, but in ways that only the conspiracy kooks can see.
