Intolerance Nightly

The planned burning of the Qurans to mark the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 terror attack has sparked outrage around the world -- here in Canada, Peter MacKay has stood up and rightly denounced it noting that this may put Canadian troops in Afghanistan in further danger. Terry Jones of the laughably named Dove World Outreach Center has said he doesn't care who's against it and that includes General David Petreus the Commander of the Nato Afghanistan forces who has said it could endanger the troops. Right-wing blogger and CNN (fox-lite) contributor Erick Erickson has said that General Petreus has "folded like a cheap suit" to violent Islamists in being against this hateful act of extremism. And the cowardly leadership of the GOP has remained silent on the issue not wanting to alienate any of their racist voters one guesses. Here's Keith Olbermann on the fiasco:

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This is one of those stories that I've been ignoring on my radio show until today. They're a relatively small group and I always like to explain the craziest of this stuff away by pointing out that these are extremists and out of the mainstream of current American politics... but they're really not that far out there compared to what is regularly broadcast nightly on fox and other MSM news outlets. Have a listen to some of the stuff as chronicled on Rachel Maddow's show:

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Media Demagogues - First In A Series

At the top of the list of modern day media demagogues is self-styled spokesperson for all things Christian is Glenn Beck (even though he is a Mormon). He is getting ready to hold a rally on the anniversary of the "I Have A Dream" speech, and dishonour the name of Martin Luther King. I say self-styled because there is nothing about his behaviour that is remotely Christian. The event which he has claimed will be non-political, will be decidedly political with the NRA as sponsors and Americans for Prosperity, a major conservative political organization backed by right-wing billionaire David A. Koch of the oil giant Koch Industries, providing buses to rally. He will also encourage attendees to join the right-wing group FreedomWorks, which is chaired by former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey.

Listening to Beck discussing NYC Islamic center, he asks, "After you've killed 3,000 people, you're going to now build your mosque?" You have to wonder who the you in the question is. The people who want to build the community center didn't kill 3,000 people on 9/11 -- but it sure is a great way to tar 1.5 billion people and drum up hatred. What major religions would Jesus demagogue?

Glenn Beck even goes so far as to rail and campaign against "social justice" regularly on his program as if such an idea sprang from the devil himself instead of being an idea that runs throughout the Old and New Testaments and includes such virtues as "caring the for the poor and speaking about human rights.

He has helped to normalize this kind of vitriolic speech. Listen to Glenn below talking about rivers of blood:



Keith Olberman takes a look at the the delusions of Glenn Beck:

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Standing Up To Bullies

As we grow up we learn that the only way to deal with bullies is to stand up to them, damn the consequences, because nothing else works. Every other path leads to more fear and more bullying. Keith Olbermann advocates for the President to do just that:

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US Chamber of Horrors!

When I saw the story about the open letter the US Chamber of Commerce sent to the President a couple of days ago I was so horrified I had to flee from the computer console and take refuge in... well, you know, life. I went to a comedy show, hung out with friends, talked, laughed and never mentioned what I had seen.

Sociopathy will suck the fun right out of an evening and that's the only word I can use to describe the contents of the letter the US Chamber of Commerce sent to the President on Wednesday. It's their Christmas wish list and all they want is everything - tax cuts for them tax raises for the middle-class and the poor as well as gutting social Security. To paraphrase, "We want all the nice shiny things the American middle-class has left.

Crooks and Liars does a good job of summarizing what the Chamber's goals are all about. They use the phrase the Chamber no doubt loves and probably coined, "Drill, baby drill!" to great advantage and turn it into other phrases the Chamber probably is secretly in love with: "Loot, baby loot!" and "Starve, baby starve!"

From the huffpo, here's what the Chamber wants: ...deregulation of business, tax cuts for the wealthy, free trade agreements, a reduced corporate income tax, expanded offshore drilling and logging in national forests and the privatization of waterways and roads.

Specifically, the Chamber urges the president to extend Bush-era tax cuts in full and provide tax breaks for companies that move jobs overseas.

The Chamber simultaneously calls for a reduction in the deficit -- a gap caused largely by the tax cuts the Chamber wants extended, which are projected to add $3.4 trillion to the debt between 2009 and 2019.

Now I think this will all work against them and the Republicans in the long and hopefully the short run if word gets out there and people can bear witness to their brazen attempts to ruin once and for all the American middle-class.

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Sunday Links

Never got back yesterday and I even manage to feel a little guilty about it... well not terribly but just enough to remind me I was raised Catholic. So this'll just be links until I'm all caught up here, at the radio station and for tomorrow's show.

Here's some of the things you could have missed if you were busy and had a life and a summer to get to: In the US the Republicans doing everything they can to screw the economy and the unemployed strangely hoping there will be no accountability for their actions and that it will in fact win them seats in November - maybe they hope they can just bury the Dems under an avalanche of corporate money.

Amy Goodman reporting on how the media and scientists are being shut out from examining and covering the ongoing catastrophe in the Gulf and how the lack of transparency may lead to more disasters. From Keith a report on 27,000 abandoned wells in the Gulf of Mexico, 3,500 hundred of which pose a risk of leaking.

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The US courts also refused to grant the Obama administration a stay on the deepwater drilling moritoium.
If you saw the post abut the New Black Panther Party and wondered about the extent of the demagoguery taking place in the American MSM, here from David Neiwert is a collection of those news reports and the ones they don't want you to see. The guy who started the caterwauling about the DOJ's refusal to bring voter intimidation cases against blacks over the New Black Panther case from election day 2008 is J. Christian Adams. He's one of the Bush appointees who was running the DOJ back then who was actively purging career attorneys and replacing them with right-wing activists. Why do these people have any credibility? Well, it's Fox news.

The Washington Post reports that a tax on tanning salons is evidence of reverse racism - someone actually cites this and says, "I now know the pain of racism," seriously! Speaking of MSM wankery - the Huffington Post gets inclusion as a new entrant to the club. Turns out money is more important than accuracy or integrity.

The heat wave has abated somewhat in the east although the long-range forecast for this week includes lots more heat so no putting away those fans yet. A study by Stanford University climate scientists says that exceptionally long heat waves could become the norm in the near future. As the mercury rises outdoors, it's a fitting time to consider the affects of summertime droughts and global warming on ecosystems.

It's also the right time to look at sunscreens and two studies that are creating confusion for Canadians on the subject: one from the Canadian Medical Association Journal and the other from the Canadian Dermatology Association - this CBC report tries to sort it out.

A Roundup of Odds and Ends

There is an entire segment of the population that doesn't want to deal with facts or science or anything they consider to be disagreeable, and they are called conservatives. In essence they have their own set of facts. In another era that would have gotten you institutionalized, today it gets you a job working for Fox News.
Below you can watch Rachel outline how much money BP has spent on spill response research in preparation of the kind of gusher we're witnessing in the Gulf of Mexico (hint: Nothing!).



Some info on BP's police force that are busy keeping the media at bay in Louisiana and what the ACLU is doing about it.  An interview with Mac McClelland, a Mother Jones reporter who has been providing some of the nation's best on-the-scene coverage of the BP oil spill. And an interview with a survivor from the Exxon Valdez spill who discusses the toxic effects of being a part of the clean-up crew. Oh, and the first hurricane of the season is upon the Gulf.

Here's a pair of stories from one of my favourite and clearly one of the best writers in the blogosphere, Glenn Greenwald. Beginning with a story about the intense animosity (jealousy) the recent Michael Hastings' Rolling Stone article about General McChrystal caused. What he calls the "universality of war propaganda," and its' ready acceptance by the MSM.

Debunking the myth about trickle down economics (voodoo), how it hurt 90% of Americans.

Australia's new PM is expected to deal seriously with the issue of climate change. A couple of cautionary articles from Science Daily about trying to geo-engineer our way out of the mess we're creating. It could lead to even more untenable consequences.

Torture

Hello, and sorry I've been unable to look at the intertubes. The surfeit of bad news by the end of a week takes a strange toll on my psyche. Lots to post but don't really know if I'll get to it all. Wanted to start with the subject that began all this for me, torture. Back in 2005 I could all kinds of evidence that torture was happening in Iraq and Afghanistan - but none of it surfaced in the MSM in any  significant way. If you read up on torture you`ll discover that from a practical standpoint it doesn`t really work. From a moral standpoint it`s not only indefensible, it`s self defeating. It creates more enemies than it eliminates.

Last week GWB jr. glibly said that he ordered Khalid Sheik Mohamed water-boarded (183 times) and he`d do it again if it saved lives. Well, it didn`t and it constitutes a war crime. The reaction south of the border was one big collective shrug. Have a listen as Keith Olbermann interviews US Air Force interrogator Mathew Alexander and he explains how Abbu Ghraib recruited terrorists.

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GWB jr. once claimed Jesus Christ was his favorite philosopher - I would like to ask him who would Jesus water-board, and how many times would he repeat this "enhanced interrogation" technique?