Category Archives: Rants

American Muslims Still Victims of 9-11

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Media Matter for America reports:

On what is rapidly becoming a regular feature, Fox & Friends this morning continued their incessant attack on Islam. Co-host Alisyn Camerota this morning hosted anti-Islam blogger and founder of the ironically named Americans Against Hate organization Joe Kaufman to attack Muslim Family Day at Six Flags Great Adventure. Camerota called it “insensitive” that they would host the event on September 12, “just hours after the anniversary of the September 11th attacks,” and added “but what’s even more controversial are the allegations that the Muslim group organizing the event could have been involved in financing the September 11 terror attacks.” Kaufman went further, employing what is becoming a familiar phrase among anti-Muslim bloggers: “The fact that they’re having it on September 12th, I believe they are actually spitting in the face of Americans.”

This kind of criticism is disgusting!  The event is being held on September 12 because that is the first weekend after Ramadan ends.  The event celebrates the Eid el-Fitr or festival of the end of Ramadan, the most holy month in the Islamic calendar.  The Muslim group organizing the even is the Islamic Circle of North America, established in 1968,

as a response to the growing need for a supportive Muslim community in North America. The organization initially focused on educating its growing membership about Islam, the goal being to adhere to Islamic values amongst a religiously diverse community.

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Watch the Numbers Turn on the Student Debt Clock

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The counter at the time of posting. Click to go to the site for the current total.

$848,193,864,069 at 2:52. $848,194,027,574 at 2:53. It’s frightening how fast the figures change on the student debt clock.

Total student loan debt outstanding exceeded total credit card debt outstanding for the first time in June 2010. The seasonally adjusted figure for revolving credit in the Federal Reserve’s G.19 report (current report, historical data) was $826.5 billion in June 2010. (Credit card debt represents as much as 98% of revolving credit.)

It’s a big problem and a growing one. Graduates are not making enough when they leave college to make the payments on their student loans, yet it is nearly impossible to discharge such loans, even through bankruptcy. College students are clearly borrowing to much and you may be tempted to say let them suffer the consequences.

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Academic Freedom Media Review, August 14-20

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Speak, by R. Baxter © All Rights Reserved

“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
— from the Friends of Voltaire

When Laura Schlessinger quit her job this week, she made claims about violations of free speech and her first amendment rights. This is absurd. Her show is on commercial radio network. The First Amendment applies to the government infringing on free speech; a commercial network needs to think about the listeners or viewers, as well as the advertisers. Laura Schlessinger is free to use the “N-word” as much as she wants in the privacy of her own home, and speeches for organizations that share her views, or just out on the street if she’s prepared to deal with the consequences.

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Argentina Legalizes Same-Sex Marriage

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People protest same-sex marriage bill outside Argentina's Congress in Buenos Aires on Tuesday. (Natacha Pisarenko/Associated Press) Read more: http://tinyurl.com/argentine-marriage

Argentina has just joined the club of nations that has legalized same-sex marriage. Yes, the nation that many stereotypically associate with overwrought machismo, and in which the Catholic Church still exerts considerable influence, has taken this radical move. It seems clear that the tide is turning, at least in the “West.” It’s turning here in the United States too, the setbacks like last year’s referendum in Maine and Prop 8 in California, or the large number of amendments to the constitutions of various states passed to protect the “sanctity of marriage” during the past 5-6 years.

I want to use this post to make a detached, rational argument why this is a good trend, based on fundamental American values about the nature of our government in relation to individual rights. It’s odd that someone with my political beliefs might make the argument on these terms, but ultimately it is a libertarian, perhaps even conservative argument. I’ll make no appeal to emotion, putting forth touching stories of nontraditional families or the devastation wrought by deeply held emotional ties are denied.

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Using the BP Crisis for Political Gain

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The Daily Show holds them accountable again.  Did you catch this segment last night? Say something one day, contradict yourself another and, in general, the media lets them get away with it. Not the Daily Show. Yay Jon!

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Day 62 – The Strife Aquatic
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

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So politicians flip-flop according to the political breeze from one day to another. No big surprise. But Joe Barton’s assertion that the administration should apologize for “shaking down” BP was only the most shocking moment in a charade during this completely absurd hearing.
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Dear Birthers…

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I doubt any documentation would satisfy them.

Dear “birthers”,
Mercifully, you are less present in the news these days, but every once in a while some item passes before my eyes and penetrates my psyche to annoy me again. The fact that Hawaii is still so overwhelmed with requests for the President’s already published birth certificate that the legislature has passed a law authorizing “any Hawai’i department to ignore repeated requests for information from the same person if the department already has responded within a year,” is one example. (HonoluluAdvertiser.com)

Ordinarily I would applaud your sense of civic involvement. If a citizen suspects something is afoul, it’s noble to root it out. But there’s also a time to give up and accept that all the evidence should not only lay your suspicions to rest, but also tuck them in and sing a lullaby. In this case that time was about 15 months ago immediately after the President took the Oath of Office. But you can’t give up and I’m now starting to take your wacko claims personally, an implicit insult to my intelligence.
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Monday, Monday!

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Concert Ticketing Fees

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Can someone tell me what “ticketing fees” cover? Or “processing fees”? What, precisely, are the costs involved involved in each and every ticket purchased online that warrant them? Why do we pay “convenience fees” at all? It’s not as if you have a choice between that and a less convenient option for many events. Perhaps you can purchase by phone, but there are charges for that, too.

It used to be the case that music stores and other retailers were outlets for concert ticket vendors, but I wouldn’t even know where to find one now. The only place I’m sure you can always buy tickets in person is the actual venue.

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Ambivalence re: A Petition to stop a Controversial Super Bowl Ad

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Liberal groups are petitioning CBS regarding a spot set to run during the SuperBowl.

The broadcast networks that air the Super Bowl have historically rejected advocacy ads. Yet CBS, which is airing the Super Bowl this year, has accepted an anti-choice ad by the ultra-conservative group Focus on the Family.

Focus on the Family’s “celebrate life” (read: anti-choice) ad features Heisman Trophy-winning college football star Tim Tebow. And CBS approved this anti-choice ad, even though the network has repeatedly rejected advocacy ads in past years including a 2004 MoveOn.org ad that went after then-President Bush’s fiscal irresponsibility and an ad the same year from the United Church of Christ showing them welcoming a gay couple who had been turned away from another church.

— via Credo Action

I have mixed feelings about this type of action.  I am uncomfortable with asking a network not to air an ad because I don’t like the message.  But what bothers me here is that CBS is airing this, but in 2004 it refused to air an ad from the United Church of Christ showing them welcoming a gay couple who had been turned away from another church because it was network policy not to accept “advocacy” advertisements.  CBS says it has revised its policy.  It’s a shame that the United Church of Christ, Planned Parenthood, or some other organization can’t try to buy time for a comparable spot putting forward a progressive viewpoint on some social issue.  That would test the network’s claim.

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Economists on the Budget Freeze

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Here’s how one economist responded to President Obama’s idea of a spending freeze, which is likely to be a major topic of his State of the Union speech.

A spending freeze? That’s the brilliant response of the Obama team to their first serious political setback?

It’s appalling on every level.

It’s bad economics, depressing demand when the economy is still suffering from mass unemployment. Jonathan Zasloff writes that Obama seems to have decided to fire Tim Geithner and replace him with “the rotting corpse of Andrew Mellon” (Mellon was Herbert Hoover’s Treasury Secretary, who according to Hoover told him to “liquidate the workers, liquidate the farmers, purge the rottenness”.)

That economist is Princeton professor Paul Krugman, winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Economics.
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