Catholic League: Church Abuse Scandal Is A Crisis
Of ‘Homosexuality,’ Not ‘Pedophilia’

Recently, the Catholic Church — and even the Pope himself — have been coming under increasing criticism for failing to appropriately discipline church officials who had sexually abused thousands of children. On March 24th, the New York Times characterized “Pope Benedict XVI?s latest apology for the emerging global scandal of child abuse by predatory priests,” as inadequate, noting that Benedict “made no mention of the need to discipline diocesan leaders most responsible for shielding hundreds of priests from criminal penalties by moving them from parish to parish to continue their crimes.”

The Catholic League responded the op-ed by running an ad in the New York Times criticizing the paper for its editorial and blaming the scandal on homosexuality:

The argument itself is confusing and contradictory. If “homosexuality does not cause predatory behavior” then why is is the “pedophilia crisis” a “homosexual crisis”? Most of the molesters were also over the age 30 but the Catholic League does not rename the “pedophilia crisis” an “older man crisis” or an “white older man” crisis or anything of the sort. But all this misses the point. What the Catholic League is trying to do is imply that there is a connection between homosexuality and molestation, just like segregationists once accused African Americans of raping white women, and Jews were accused of murdering Christian babies.

In reality, pedophilia has little to do with the gender of the child or the orientation of the molester; pedophiles are attracted to youth and control. “Accessibility is more the factor in who a pedophile abuses,” psychotherapist Joe Kort writes. “This may explain the high incidence of children molested in church communities and fraternal organizations, where the pedophile may more easily have access to children.”

Last night on Larry King Live, Catholic League President Bill Donahue tried to dismiss this argument by claiming that “it?s not a pedophilia” because “most of the victims were post pubescent,” as old as 12 or 13 years of age. Anything older than that is the fault of gays.

Read The Full Article:
http://thinkprogress.org/2010/03/31/catholic-league-pope/

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Initial reactions to the President's new offshore
oil drilling proposal

Hat tip Josh Nelson for pulling these together.

Morgan Goodwin ? Our Generation Screwed Over by Obama?s Offshore Drilling Plan :

Obama inspired our generation to turn out to the polls, and he can do it again if he moves to actually inspire us. But youth across the South East have longer memories than this short-sighted political thinking. Under this proposal the first lease sales for drilling would be held in 2012, a year that Obama will be hoping to connect with us and convince us he stands for our interests. If young people don?t believe him, they aren?t going to be inspired to vote. That?s not change we can believe in.

MSNBC?s First Read:

The announcement is stunning for those of us who paid close attention to the presidential race. And it will be yet another test for Obama?s Democratic base ? in this case, environmentalists.

Matthew Yglesias ? Drill, Baby, Drill:

I don?t understand this at all. Increased coastal drilling would be a small price to pay in exchange for actual congressional votes for an overall energy package that shifts us to a low-carbon economy over time. But any price is too high a price to pay in exchange for nothing at all. This isn?t the greatest environmental crime in human history, but it sure does seem like poor legislative strategy.

Duncan Black ? Drill, Baby, Drill:

Who?d we elect again?

Natasha Chart ? Morning No: Different Priorities:

How?s that hopey changey stuff working out? I don?t know about for me, but I think there are going to be some drill happy Alaskans who feel better about it.

Greg Sargent ? The Morning Plum:

Just about every news org, reporting on the news that Obama will approve significant offshore drilling, used the headline: ?Drill, baby drill.? Time to check you-know-who?s Facebook page?

Steve Benen ? In Exchange for What?:

Obama has already effectively given Republicans what they wanted on energy. What is he getting in return?

Kevin Drum ? Obama Opens Up the Coast:

When it comes to energy, conservatives are crazy about two things: nuclear power and offshore drilling. Now Obama has agreed to both. But does he seriously think this will ?help win political support for comprehensive energy and climate legislation?? Wouldn?t he be better off holding this stuff in reserve and negotiating it away in return for actual support, not just hoped-for support? What am I missing here?

Mark Thoma ? Obama to Open Offshore Areas to Oil Drilling:

Increasing the risks to the environment in an attempt to save the environment seems like a less than optimal strategy.

Aaron Weiner ? Obama to Open Atlantic Coast to Offshore Drilling:

If Obama?s goal here is to win support for a climate bill, wouldn?t he have waited to use this leverage until negotiations in the Senate had actually begun in earnest?

But hey, at least it will make Republicans happy, right? Not just yet: Boehner Rebukes Obama Offshore Drilling Plan.

Update ? Greenpeace has released the following statement via email:

Is this President Obama?s clean energy plan or Palin?s drill baby drill campaign? While China and Germany are winning the clean energy race, this act furthers America?s addiction to oil. Expanding offshore drilling in areas that have been protected for decades threatens our oceans and the coastal communities that depend on them with devastating oil spills, more pollution and climate change.

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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Americablog/~3/b6iR38gJCtw/initial-reactions-to-pr
esidents-new.html

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Drill, Baby, Drill

The winner gets to implement the platform they ran on, right?Or, the platform of the losing side.He (Obama) said that his plan to allow drilling along the Atlantic coastline, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the north coast of Alaska - ending a[...]

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More of the False Equivalency Game from the Cast
of Morning Joe

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Here we go again with more false equivalencies from the media and pretending all sides are equal when it comes to the threats of violence we've seen escalating in the past year and egged on by Republican politicians and these Tea Party leaders. First Mika Brzezinski talks about a death threat that Eric Cantor received and conveniently omits the fact that this same man threatened a number of other politicians as well.

From TPM -- What To Make of Norman Leboon?:

The initial portrait emerging of the man charged with threatening to kill Eric Cantor and his family suggests he's made similar, if not criminally actionable, threats on dozens of occasions against an ideologically diverse array of public figures.

According to the federal complaint against him, Norman Leboon of Philadelphia has admitted making some 2,000 videos that contained threats. A sampling of his "work" reveals rambling incoherent videos that mix pseudo-religious incantations with random warnings and threats. In one video he addresses President Obama, Vice President Biden, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid by name and says, "Your punishment is coming, the swine, it will be severe, and you will beg for mercy to your god, it will be severe, you will know god's swine, god has warned you." (Some conservatives are already chortling over the fact that Leboon contributed to Obama's 2008 campaign, though it's not clear what that's supposed to signify.)

Pat Buchanan defends the Tea Party movement and says the left is just trying to demonize them for political reasons. Brzezinski goes on to read from some of Eugene Robinson's recent op-ed in the Washington Post -- The Hutaree militia and the rising risk of far-right violence:

It is dishonest for right-wing commentators to insist on an equivalence that does not exist. The danger of political violence in this country comes overwhelmingly from one direction -- the right, not the left. The vitriolic, anti-government hate speech that is spewed on talk radio every day -- and, quite regularly, at Tea Party rallies -- is calibrated not to inform but to incite.

Buchanan responds to Robinson's column by calling the L.A. riots after the Rodney King incident the "greatest act of anti-government violence" that he can recall "in recent years". Uh Pat... the name Tim McVeigh ring a bell? Hello. Then he starts howling about violence that took place in the 60's. And the hackery goes on from there. To his credit at least Dylan Ratigan corrects Pat Buchanan when he attempts to portray the stray bullet that hit Cantor's office as "someone firing at" the window. Joe Scarborough wasn't even there for this show but I'm not sure how he could have made this segment much worse. Brzezinski and Buchanan more than made up for his absence.

Read The Full Article:
http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/more-false-equivalency-game-cast-morn
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Ohmygosh, Doonesbury's Zonker Harris a Teabagger
Why not Naomi Wolf's signed on

DOONESBURY: Monday
[Don't forget to click on all the strips to enlarge]

"[A]s I was told by Fritz Stern, a scholar of fascism who has written about the origins of Nazism, 'In Germany there was a yearning for fascism before fascism was invented.' It is the yearning that we now see, and it is dangerous. If we do not immediately reincorporate the unemployed and the poor back into the economy, giving them jobs and relief from crippling debt, then the nascent racism and violence that are leaping up around the edges of American society will become a full-blown conflagration."
-- Chris Hedges, in an almost-important essay,
"Is America 'Yearning for Fascism'?"

by Ken

So President Obama is now a "Drill, baby, drill" guy. And Zonker's a Teabagger.

Chris Hedges posted the above-noted piece on TruthDig Monday, by coincidence the very same day that Zonker Harris made initial contact with the Teabaggers. (For the benefit of non-Doonesbury folk, the two-time Grand National Tanning Champion's website bio begins: "Few young Americans have so thoroughly savored the joys of college -- which he once referred to as 'the best nine years of my life' -- as Californian-American Zonker Harris.") I think Hedges is a serious writer, with a lot of on-the-ground journalistic observation (and he was a good journalist, for the record) to back up his theorizing. This piece begins:

The language of violence always presages violence. I watched it in war after war from Latin America to the Balkans. The impoverishment of a working class and the snuffing out of hope and opportunity always produce angry mobs ready to kill and be killed. A bankrupt, liberal elite, which proves ineffectual against the rich and the criminal, always gets swept aside, in times of economic collapse, before thugs and demagogues emerge to play to the passions of the crowd. I have seen this drama. I know each act. I know how it ends. I have heard it in other tongues in other lands. I recognize the same stock characters, the buffoons, charlatans and fools, the same confused crowds and the same impotent and despised liberal class that deserves the hatred it engenders.

?We are ruled not by two parties but one party,? Cynthia McKinney, who ran for president on the Green Party ticket, told me. ?It is the party of money and war. Our country has been hijacked. And we have to take the country away from those who have hijacked it. The only question now is whose revolution gets funded.?

The Democrats and their liberal apologists are so oblivious to the profound personal and economic despair sweeping through this country that they think offering unemployed people the right to keep their unemployed children on their nonexistent health care policies is a step forward. They think that passing a jobs bill that will give tax credits to corporations is a rational response to an unemployment rate that is, in real terms, close to 20 percent. They think that making ordinary Americans, one in eight of whom depends on food stamps to eat, fork over trillions in taxpayer dollars to pay for the crimes of Wall Street and war is acceptable. They think that the refusal to save the estimated 2.4 million people who will be forced out of their homes by foreclosure this year is justified by the bloodless language of fiscal austerity. The message is clear. Laws do not apply to the power elite. Our government does not work. And the longer we stand by and do nothing, the longer we refuse to embrace and recognize the legitimate rage of the working class, the faster we will see our anemic democracy die.

Hedges offers as an example Yugoslavia, arguing: "The Balkan war was not caused by ancient ethnic hatreds. It was caused by the economic collapse of Yugoslavia. The petty criminals and goons who took power harnessed the anger and despair of the unemployed and the desperate."

Good stuff, no? I'm glad the piece has also been posted on AlterNet, which is actually where I saw it. It's also on AlterNet that Justine Sharrock posted a provocative interview with trendy left-wing sage Naomi Wolf: "Naomi Wolf Thinks the Tea Parties Help Fight Fascism -- Is She Onto Something or in Fantasy Land?" Sharrock posted her interview on Tuesday, which again by coincidence is the day that Zonker ran into a slight glitch establishing his against-the-man credentials with the Teabaggers:

DOONESBURY: Tuesday

Naomi Wolf is best known in political circles for her 2007 book The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot,in which she argued that the Bush regime had made great progress in advancing the U.S. along the "ten steps" to fascism.
She followed it up in 2008 with Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries,a manifesto on the loss of our liberties.

Sharrock notes in the introduction to her interview:

Now, under President Obama, Wolf's book is providing ammunition for the Tea Partiers, Patriots, Ron Paul supporters and Oath Keepers, who also warn of impending tyrannical government. Even when the book first came out pre-Obama, Alex Jones, Michael Savage and Fox News invited her on their shows, and agreed with her.

It?s not just her message. She speaks their language, referring to the Founding Fathers and American Revolution as models, admitting to a profound sense of fear, warning of tyranny, fascism, Nazism and martial law. When Glenn Beck warns of these things we laugh. When Wolf draws those same connections, we listen.

Sharrock asks if Wolf realized that her book "is being lauded within the Tea Party and patriot movements.

Since I wrote Give Me Liberty, I have had a new audience that looks different than the average Smith girl. There is a giant libertarian component. I have had a lot of dialogue with the Ron Paul community. There are [Tea Partiers] writing to me on my Facebook page, but I figured they were self-selective libertarians and not arch conservatives. I am utterly stunned that I have a following in the patriot movement and I wasn?t aware that specific Tea Partiers were reading it. They haven?t invited me to speak. They invited Sarah Palin.

Wolf was invited to speak to a Ron Paul rally last summer,

and I loved it. I met a lot of people I respected, a lot of ?ordinary? people, as in not privileged. They were stepping up to the plate, when my own liberal privileged fellow demographic habituates were lying around whining. It was a wake-up call to the libertarians that there?s a progressive who cares so much about the same issues. Their views of liberals are just as distorted as ours are of conservatives.

And thank goodness she set them straight about that! She also knows why "the sides don't understand each other":

Frankly, liberals are out of the habit of communicating with anyone outside their own in cohort. We have a cultural problem with self-righteousness and elitism. Liberals roll their eyes about going on "Oprah" to reach a mass audience by using language that anyone can understand even if you majored in semiotics at Yale. We look down on people we don?t agree with. It doesn?t serve us well.

Wolf has written that some of the Teabagger ideas are "ahead of their time." She provides for-instances:

I used to think ?End the Fed people? were crackpots. The media paints them as deranged. But it turned out we had good reason to have more oversight. Or take their platform about states? rights. Demographically, I?m a hippie from San Francisco and I?m not culturally inclined to be sympathetic to states' rights. My cultural heritage is FDR and Medicare and federal government solutions. But if you think through the analysis, strengthening state rights is a good corrective of the aggregation of an over-reaching federal power. Take California?s challenge of the Patriot Act or states like Vermont leading the way with addressing the corruption of the voting system. It?s a good example of the Tea Party thinking out of the box on how to address a problem.

Are you ready to scream yet? Is this apparently intelligent person really so deluded as to imagine that the right-wing (or Libertarian) hostility to the Fed or passion for states' rights has anything in common with what the vision of America she claims to believe in? Sharrock, an excellent interviewer, pursues this issue, asking, "How do you feel about your books bolstering a fight for policies you don?t agree with?"

If people are taking my book seriously and organizing, getting into office, caring about the constitution, and not waiting for someone else to lead them, I think, God bless them. All of us should be doing that. The left should be doing that. There is always the risk in advocating for democracy that the first people to wake up might not be your team, but that is a risk worth taking. I would rather have citizens I don?t agree with organized and active than an oligarchy of people that I agree with.

DOONESBURY: today

Which bring us back to Chris Hedges. As you'll recall, he's really concerned with the threat of imminent violence. Late in his piece, he writes:

When someone like [Sarah] Palin posts a map with cross hairs on the districts of Democrats, when she says ?Don?t Retreat, Instead -- RELOAD!? there are desperate people cleaning their weapons who listen. When Christian fascists stand in the pulpits of megachurches and denounce Barack Obama as the Antichrist, there are messianic believers who listen. When a Republican lawmaker shouts ?baby killer? at Michigan Democrat Bart Stupak, there are violent extremists who see the mission of saving the unborn as a sacred duty. They have little left to lose. We made sure of that. And the violence they inflict is an expression of the violence they endure.

These movements are not yet full-blown fascist movements. They do not openly call for the extermination of ethnic or religious groups. They do not openly advocate violence. But, as I was told by Fritz Stern, a scholar of fascism who has written about the origins of Nazism, ?In Germany there was a yearning for fascism before fascism was invented.? It is the yearning that we now see, and it is dangerous. If we do not immediately reincorporate the unemployed and the poor back into the economy, giving them jobs and relief from crippling debt, then the nascent racism and violence that are leaping up around the edges of American society will become a full-blown conflagration.

Left unchecked, the hatred for radical Islam will transform itself into a hatred for Muslims. The hatred for undocumented workers will become a hatred for Mexicans and Central Americans. The hatred for those not defined by this largely white movement as American patriots will become a hatred for African-Americans. The hatred for liberals will morph into a hatred for all democratic institutions, from universities to government agencies to the press. Our continued impotence and cowardice, our refusal to articulate this anger and stand up in open defiance to the Democrats and the Republicans, will see us swept aside for an age of terror and blood.

Well, okay, I don't think any of us would disagree. The only thing is, Hedges seems to think he's sounding a brand-new alarm, that he's the first to warn that we could be on a path that leads to fascism. Actually, by my count he is . . . um, let's see, carry the one . . . just about the last to warn that we're on a path to fascism. He has helpfully added Fritz Stern's idea of a "yearning for fascism" that precedes the real thing; I think that's something to think about. But I describe his piece as "almost-important" because for all its smug self-assurance it doesn't seem to me really to advance the discussion.

Listen again: "If we do not immediately reincorporate the unemployed and the poor back into the economy, giving them jobs and relief from crippling debt, then the nascent racism and violence that are leaping up around the edges of American society will become a full-blown conflagration." Um, Chris, do you have any, you know, ideas about how that might be done? Perhaps that's so obvious that it didn't need to be explained, unlike all this other stuff that you explain very eloquently but that really many of us kind of worked out for ourselves.

If Hedges had started the piece by saying, "I don't have a damned clue how we might do it, but if we do not immediately reincorporate the unemployed and the poor back into the economy, giving them jobs and relief from crippling debt, then the nascent racism and violence that are leaping up around the edges of American society will become a full-blown conflagration," I would at least feel that we have something to talk about.
The Teabaggers have grievances. Yeah, I get it. By and large, they don't have a clue what has actually happened to them, or what can be done about it. They're mad as hell and they're not going to take it anymore. Not exactly a blueprint for change we can believe in.
Now, however, it appears that the Teabaggers have Zonker. As if they weren't confused enough!
#


Read The Full Article:
http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2010/03/ohmygosh-doonesburys-zonker-harris.ht
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Ohmygosh, Doonesbury's Zonker Harris a Teabagger
Why not Naomi Wolf's signed

DOONESBURY: Monday
[Don't forget to click on all the strips to enlarge]

"[A]s I was told by Fritz Stern, a scholar of fascism who has written about the origins of Nazism, 'In Germany there was a yearning for fascism before fascism was invented.' It is the yearning that we now see, and it is dangerous. If we do not immediately reincorporate the unemployed and the poor back into the economy, giving them jobs and relief from crippling debt, then the nascent racism and violence that are leaping up around the edges of American society will become a full-blown conflagration."
-- Chris Hedges, in an almost-important essay,
"Is America 'Yearning for Fascism'?"

by Ken

So President Obama is now a "Drill, baby, drill" guy. And Zonker's a Teabagger.

Chris Hedges posted the above-noted piece on TruthDig Monday, by coincidence the very same day that Zonker Harris made initial contact with the Teabaggers. (For the benefit of non-Doonesbury folk, the two-time Grand National Tanning Champion's website bio begins: "Few young Americans have so thoroughly savored the joys of college -- which he once referred to as 'the best nine years of my life' -- as Californian-American Zonker Harris.") I think Hedges is a serious writer, with a lot of on-the-ground journalistic observation (and he was a good journalist, for the record) to back up his theorizing. This piece begins:

The language of violence always presages violence. I watched it in war after war from Latin America to the Balkans. The impoverishment of a working class and the snuffing out of hope and opportunity always produce angry mobs ready to kill and be killed. A bankrupt, liberal elite, which proves ineffectual against the rich and the criminal, always gets swept aside, in times of economic collapse, before thugs and demagogues emerge to play to the passions of the crowd. I have seen this drama. I know each act. I know how it ends. I have heard it in other tongues in other lands. I recognize the same stock characters, the buffoons, charlatans and fools, the same confused crowds and the same impotent and despised liberal class that deserves the hatred it engenders.

?We are ruled not by two parties but one party,? Cynthia McKinney, who ran for president on the Green Party ticket, told me. ?It is the party of money and war. Our country has been hijacked. And we have to take the country away from those who have hijacked it. The only question now is whose revolution gets funded.?

The Democrats and their liberal apologists are so oblivious to the profound personal and economic despair sweeping through this country that they think offering unemployed people the right to keep their unemployed children on their nonexistent health care policies is a step forward. They think that passing a jobs bill that will give tax credits to corporations is a rational response to an unemployment rate that is, in real terms, close to 20 percent. They think that making ordinary Americans, one in eight of whom depends on food stamps to eat, fork over trillions in taxpayer dollars to pay for the crimes of Wall Street and war is acceptable. They think that the refusal to save the estimated 2.4 million people who will be forced out of their homes by foreclosure this year is justified by the bloodless language of fiscal austerity. The message is clear. Laws do not apply to the power elite. Our government does not work. And the longer we stand by and do nothing, the longer we refuse to embrace and recognize the legitimate rage of the working class, the faster we will see our anemic democracy die.

Hedges offers as an example Yugoslavia, arguing: "The Balkan war was not caused by ancient ethnic hatreds. It was caused by the economic collapse of Yugoslavia. The petty criminals and goons who took power harnessed the anger and despair of the unemployed and the desperate."

Good stuff, no? I'm glad the piece has also been posted on AlterNet, which is actually where I saw it. It's also on AlterNet that Justine Sharrock posted a provocative interview with trendy left-wing sage Naomi Wolf: "Naomi Wolf Thinks the Tea Parties Help Fight Fascism -- Is She Onto Something or in Fantasy Land?" Sharrock posted her interview on Tuesday, which again by coincidence is the day that Zonker ran into a slight glitch establishing his against-the-man credentials with the Teabaggers:

DOONESBURY: Tuesday

Naomi Wolf is best known in political circles for her 2007 book The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot,in which she argued that the Bush regime had made great progress in advancing the U.S. along the "ten steps" to fascism.
She followed it up in 2008 with Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries,a manifesto on the loss of our liberties.

Sharrock notes in the introduction to her interview:

Now, under President Obama, Wolf's book is providing ammunition for the Tea Partiers, Patriots, Ron Paul supporters and Oath Keepers, who also warn of impending tyrannical government. Even when the book first came out pre-Obama, Alex Jones, Michael Savage and Fox News invited her on their shows, and agreed with her.

It?s not just her message. She speaks their language, referring to the Founding Fathers and American Revolution as models, admitting to a profound sense of fear, warning of tyranny, fascism, Nazism and martial law. When Glenn Beck warns of these things we laugh. When Wolf draws those same connections, we listen.

Sharrock asks if Wolf realized that her book "is being lauded within the Tea Party and patriot movements.

Since I wrote Give Me Liberty, I have had a new audience that looks different than the average Smith girl. There is a giant libertarian component. I have had a lot of dialogue with the Ron Paul community. There are [Tea Partiers] writing to me on my Facebook page, but I figured they were self-selective libertarians and not arch conservatives. I am utterly stunned that I have a following in the patriot movement and I wasn?t aware that specific Tea Partiers were reading it. They haven?t invited me to speak. They invited Sarah Palin.

Wolf was invited to speak to a Ron Paul rally last summer,

and I loved it. I met a lot of people I respected, a lot of ?ordinary? people, as in not privileged. They were stepping up to the plate, when my own liberal privileged fellow demographic habituates were lying around whining. It was a wake-up call to the libertarians that there?s a progressive who cares so much about the same issues. Their views of liberals are just as distorted as ours are of conservatives.

And thank goodness she set them straight about that! She also knows why "the sides don't understand each other":

Frankly, liberals are out of the habit of communicating with anyone outside their own in cohort. We have a cultural problem with self-righteousness and elitism. Liberals roll their eyes about going on "Oprah" to reach a mass audience by using language that anyone can understand even if you majored in semiotics at Yale. We look down on people we don?t agree with. It doesn?t serve us well.

Wolf has written that some of the Teabagger ideas are "ahead of their time." She provides for-instances:

I used to think ?End the Fed people? were crackpots. The media paints them as deranged. But it turned out we had good reason to have more oversight. Or take their platform about states? rights. Demographically, I?m a hippie from San Francisco and I?m not culturally inclined to be sympathetic to states' rights. My cultural heritage is FDR and Medicare and federal government solutions. But if you think through the analysis, strengthening state rights is a good corrective of the aggregation of an over-reaching federal power. Take California?s challenge of the Patriot Act or states like Vermont leading the way with addressing the corruption of the voting system. It?s a good example of the Tea Party thinking out of the box on how to address a problem.

Are you ready to scream yet? Is this apparently intelligent person really so deluded as to imagine that the right-wing (or Libertarian) hostility to the Fed or passion for states' rights has anything in common with what the vision of America she claims to believe in? Sharrock, an excellent interviewer, pursues this issue, asking, "How do you feel about your books bolstering a fight for policies you don?t agree with?"

If people are taking my book seriously and organizing, getting into office, caring about the constitution, and not waiting for someone else to lead them, I think, God bless them. All of us should be doing that. The left should be doing that. There is always the risk in advocating for democracy that the first people to wake up might not be your team, but that is a risk worth taking. I would rather have citizens I don?t agree with organized and active than an oligarchy of people that I agree with.

DOONESBURY: today

Which bring us back to Chris Hedges. As you'll recall, he's really concerned with the threat of imminent violence. Late in his piece, he writes:

When someone like [Sarah] Palin posts a map with cross hairs on the districts of Democrats, when she says ?Don?t Retreat, Instead -- RELOAD!? there are desperate people cleaning their weapons who listen. When Christian fascists stand in the pulpits of megachurches and denounce Barack Obama as the Antichrist, there are messianic believers who listen. When a Republican lawmaker shouts ?baby killer? at Michigan Democrat Bart Stupak, there are violent extremists who see the mission of saving the unborn as a sacred duty. They have little left to lose. We made sure of that. And the violence they inflict is an expression of the violence they endure.

These movements are not yet full-blown fascist movements. They do not openly call for the extermination of ethnic or religious groups. They do not openly advocate violence. But, as I was told by Fritz Stern, a scholar of fascism who has written about the origins of Nazism, ?In Germany there was a yearning for fascism before fascism was invented.? It is the yearning that we now see, and it is dangerous. If we do not immediately reincorporate the unemployed and the poor back into the economy, giving them jobs and relief from crippling debt, then the nascent racism and violence that are leaping up around the edges of American society will become a full-blown conflagration.

Left unchecked, the hatred for radical Islam will transform itself into a hatred for Muslims. The hatred for undocumented workers will become a hatred for Mexicans and Central Americans. The hatred for those not defined by this largely white movement as American patriots will become a hatred for African-Americans. The hatred for liberals will morph into a hatred for all democratic institutions, from universities to government agencies to the press. Our continued impotence and cowardice, our refusal to articulate this anger and stand up in open defiance to the Democrats and the Republicans, will see us swept aside for an age of terror and blood.

Well, okay, I don't think any of us would disagree. The only thing is, Hedges seems to think he's sounding a brand-new alarm, that he's the first to warn that we could be on a path that leads to fascism. Actually, by my count he is . . . um, let's see, carry the one . . . just about the last to warn that we're on a path to fascism. He has helpfully added Fritz Stern's idea of a "yearning for fascism" that precedes the real thing; I think that's something to think about. But I describe his piece as "almost-important" because for all its smug self-assurance it doesn't seem to me really to advance the discussion.

Listen again: "If we do not immediately reincorporate the unemployed and the poor back into the economy, giving them jobs and relief from crippling debt, then the nascent racism and violence that are leaping up around the edges of American society will become a full-blown conflagration." Um, Chris, do you have any, you know, ideas about how that might be done? Perhaps that's so obvious that it didn't need to be explained, unlike all this other stuff that you explain very eloquently but that really many of us kind of worked out for ourselves.

If Hedges had started the piece by saying, "I don't have a damned clue how we might do it, but if we do not immediately reincorporate the unemployed and the poor back into the economy, giving them jobs and relief from crippling debt, then the nascent racism and violence that are leaping up around the edges of American society will become a full-blown conflagration," I would at least feel that we have something to talk about.
The Teabaggers have grievances. Yeah, I get it. By and large, they don't have a clue what has actually happened to them, or what can be done about it. They're mad as hell and they're not going to take it anymore. Not exactly a blueprint for change we can believe in.
Now, however, it appears that the Teabaggers have Zonker. As if they weren't confused enough!
#


Read The Full Article:
http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2010/03/ohmygosh-doonesburys-zonker-harris.ht
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A Primer On New "Progressive" "Non-Triangulation"

Courtesy of Steve Benen:

If the president has already effectively given Republicans what they wanted on energy, what will he get in return? A Hill staffer I know emails with an alternative look at the same dynamic, suggesting President Obama is playing a game we've seen before.:

Obama preempts the other side's most resonant arguments, which forces them to come up with more and more extreme claims in order to differentiate themselves. In the end, he occupies the reasonable middle ground and his opponents are Palinized. [. . . T]he policy is a tailored, measured version of what the Republicans have urged [. . .] Republicans are sort of forced to twist and parse, and even to oppose things they have long supported, just because the Administration hasn't gone far enough.

[MORE . . .]

[B]y announcing the drilling policy without seeking to extract concessions, the Administration makes clear that it is their policy and they are the centrist/flexible/pragmatic ones -- making it harder for Republicans to argue that they accomplished this or that they forced Obama to do it. [...]

(Emphasis supplied.) All kidding aside, you can agree or disagree with the policy or the politics on this, but you can not honestly say that this is not, to a freaking T, the triangulation Third Way approach long derided by progressives when Bill Clinton did it. It is a carbon copy -- change "off shore drilling" for "welfare reform" and it is 1995 all over again.

Speaking for me only

Read The Full Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TalkleftThePoliticsOfCrime/~3/6ay3o-6wkbk/542

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Never mind

Don't you just hate it when you inadvertently blame gays for the brutal massacre of more than 7,000 people?

Recall that earlier this month, Ret. General John Sheehan testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee in opposition to repealing "don't ask, don't tell" and did just that, but now:

A retired U.S. general has apologized for comments this month linking the defeat of Dutch troops by Serb forces at Srebrenica in July 1995 to the presence of openly gay soldiers in the Dutch military.  [...]

Sheehan said he had been told by a Dutch military commander that the Dutch felt the presence of gay soldiers was one of the reasons the peacekeepers were so easily defeated.

But in a letter on Monday to that commander, retired general Henk van den Bremmen, Sheehan acknowledged that Van den Bremmen had said no such thing at the time.

"I am sorry that my recent public recollection of those discussions of 15 years ago inaccurately reflected your thinking on some specific social issues in the military," Sheehan said in the letter. "To be clear, the failure on the ground in Srebrenica was in no way the fault of the individual soldiers."

A shorter apology could have gone something like, I lied.

Read The Full Article:
http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/9bSu0wFOONw/-Never-mind

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Today Is Al Gore's Birthday

Today is Al Gore's birthday. In July of 2008, this appeared at the Wall Street Journal:Appearing before a packed crowd at DAR Constitution Hall in Washington, the former vice president and Nobel laureate urged lawmakers to resist the temptation to[...]

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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Docudharma/~3/2ZCITGoUCdc/today-is-al-gores-birthd
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Explaining why he's a Reagan conservative,
Hannity regurgitates Reagan falsehoods

Sean Hannity, purporting to explain what a "Reagan conservative" is, claimed that President Reagan created 21 million new jobs and doubled federal revenues. Neither of those claims are true.

Hannity pushes falsehoods about federal revenues, job creation under Reagan

From the March 30 edition of On The Record with Greta Van Susteren:

SEANHANNITY: You know, Conservative Victory, I identify myself as a Reaganconservative...

GRETA VAN SUSTERN: What is that?

HANNITY: Reagan conservative? It's simple. You know, Reagan was magical interms of... He inherited... Wanna talk about the worst economy since the GreatDepression? You know, interest rates were twenty-one and a half percent,double-digit unemployment, inflation was out of control, and Reagan came intooffice and he said "we can reverse this."And all the Democrats at the time said "you know what, it's not going towork, Reaganomics is going to fail." Hedrops the top marginal rates from seventy to twenty-eight percent... Lo andbehold revenues in eight years doubled to the federal government... Twenty-onemillion new jobs are created and it ends up, at that point in time, being thelongest period of peacetime economic growth in American history. It worked.

Revenues to the federal government did not "double" under Reagan

OMB: Revenue in inflation-adjusted dollars increased by less than 15percent. According to theOffice of Management and Budget (OMB), when adjusted for inflation to constantfiscal year 2000 dollars, receipts (revenues) increased from $1.077 trillion to$1.236 trillion during Reagan's tenure in office. In current dollars, receiptswent from $599 billion to $909 billion, an increase of roughly 50 percent.

From the OMB:

FISCAL YEAR

REVENUE IN CURRENT DOLLARS (billions)

REVENUE IN CONSTANT FY2000 DOLLARS (billions)

1981

599.3

1,077.4

1982

617.8

1,036.9

1983

600.6

961.7

1984

666.5

1,016.8

1985

734.1

1,082.6

1986

769.2

1,107.3

1987

854.4

1,196.1

1988

909.3

1,235.6

Hannity overstates job creation underReagan

Hannity credits Reaganwith 5 million additional jobs created. The Bureau of Labor Statistics database shows that betweenReagan's inauguration (January 1981) and the time he left office (January1989), nonfarm payroll jobs (seasonally adjusted) wentfrom 91,031,000 to 107,133,000, an increase of about 16.1 million, 5million less than Hannity's claim.

Using a measurement thatincludes farm jobs, there were 99,955,000 total civilian employment jobs(seasonally adjusted) in January 1981, according to the BLS statisticaldatabase. In January 1989, there were 116,708,000 total civilianemployment jobs (seasonally adjusted), a difference of roughly 16.75 millionjobs.

Hannity modifies language on economic expansion to correct prior falsehood

In previous discussions (see here, here, here, and here), Hannity has falsely claimed thatReagan oversaw the longest peacetime economic expansion in history. In fact,the longest such expansion was from March 1991 - March 2001, fallingmostly within President Clinton's tenure. Hannity now accurately indicates thatthe expansion under Reagan was "at that time" the longest period of peacetimeeconomic expansion.

Read The Full Article:
http://feeds.mediamatters.org/~r/mediamatters/latest/~3/UEbDJsBlrY0/201003310029

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