“You’d look great in a burqa,”
Melanie Morgan, who suggested that a New York Times editor be killed in a gaschamber for treason for reporting on the US government spying on Americans — to Naomi Wolf, on Chris Matthews Hardball, when Wolf suggested that the Iraq war had nothing to do with terrorism and more to do with the political agenda of the Bush administration and its desire to dismantle the constitution….
Tip to Naomi: In a crude forum, crude people win.
From ABC:
“Don Imus is facing his first lawsuit from a player on the Rutgers Women’s Basketball team for derogatory comments that cost him his job as a radio host in April, ABC News has learned.
Kia Vaughn, star center for the Rutgers Women’s Basketball team, has filed a lawsuit against Imus for libel, slander and defamation — the first civil suit to be filed against the former radio host. Vaughn is asking for monetary damages of an unspecified amount….
Comment:
Obviously her lawyer thinks this suit will fly, but the young woman is a public figure. A tangential one, no doubt, but still, in the public eye.
And today, everyone from front runners for President to fundamentalist preachers gets to be bashed obscenely in public in the free-for all of modern media. It’s coarse, intrusive, and vulgar. No question. But it’s also standard fare. Why suddenly jump on Imus for doing what he’s paid to do? It’s not as if he was courtly to everyone else…
In the BB boo-boo he was trying to be hip and down with street talk…..and tripped up — big time. But no one could seriously have drawn a negative picture of the Rutgers women’s team from what he said. No one could possibly have thought the Rutgers players were “ho’s” from the tone and context of his remarks.
Of course, the public is always free to change its level of tolerance for mud any time it wants to, but if Imus is going to be rounded up and branded, let it be for something he said that really was malicious — his remark about Gwen Ifill being the cleaning lady. That was a truly reprehensible comment – because it came off as contemptious of her professional abilities. And it had to have damaged how she would be seen in her work environment.
But with the Rutger’s team, he was simply horsing around in the dumbest possible way and happened to put his foot in his mouth – not a difficult achievment when you have an aperture that wide and constantly agape….
The guy’s even been sued by his nanny.
So – no to Kia Vaughn. But yes, to a lawsuit…..by Gwen Ifill.
In a recent circular, Front Page Magazine importunes its readers thus:
“Center’s E-newsletter
As you know, the Freedom Center fights the culture war on many fronts at once. I want to make sure that you know what we’re doing and how we’re doing, so you’ll be getting this insider’s report at regular intervals.
Having an Impact on National Security
One strong measurement of the effect we’re having (and the need for what we do) came in the form of request from the head the FBI-California Highway Patrol Joint Counter-terrorism Task Force who called this week to ask if their group could use our flash video “What Every American Needs to Know About Jihad” as a training film. We’ve put this video in over one million e-mail boxes, with a heavy emphasis on those of college students. It has been reproduced on innumerable websites across the web and is now a YouTube video. To view the video and remind yourself of what the FBI-CHP will be teaching to its agents when it tries to get them to know the enemy, go to http://www.terrorismawareness.org/know-about-jihad/.
Jimmy Carter Exposed
Jimmy Carter’s anti Semitic, anti Israel campaign has gone on long enough! The David Horowitz Freedom Center has just published a booklet, “Jimmy Carter’s War against the Jews,” that analyzes with devastating effect the former president’s support for Israel’s enemies, which happen also to be enemies of the United States. Carter’s unreasoning attacks on Israel, growing more shrill with each new pronouncement, have gone beyond national embarrassment. They’re an outrage.
This booklet will be a powerful weapon in our fight against this deceitful, one-sided view of Israel that is being pushed on the American public and especially on college students. The view that sees Israel as the source of all evil in the Middle East is the same view that blames America for everything wrong with the world, including Islamic terrorism.
The author of the booklet, Jacob Laksin, has pulled together the shameful history of Carter’s partisanship in Middle East politics, including the ex-President’s acceptance of Arab oil money to fund his Center. Laskin masterfully exposes the anti-Semitic distortions and outright fabrications in Carter’s latest book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. He shows that Carter’s coddling of tyrants like Fidel Castro is one side of a coin whose other side is embossed with anti Israel and anti American fulminations.
Carter is a symptom of a deeper sickness which blames Israel, and America, first. The Center has the means to do something about his intemperate attacks. For a start, we need to print 250,000 more copies of “Jimmy Carter’s War against the Jews.” Then we need to organize as many events as possible along with an accompanying publicity campaign as we try to get the truth about the source and meaning of Carter’s anti Israel and anti Semitic views into the hands of college students.
To order a copy of the booklet, please contact Stephanie at Stephanie@horowitzfreedomcenter.org.
Islamo Fascism Awareness Week: Is your alma mater on our list??
We are now planning what will be the largest campus demonstrations ever staged by conservative students for October 22-26. We are calling the event Islamo Fascism Awareness Week. We already have student coordinators on 150 campuses and we are hoping that the event will touch close to 200 universities and colleges across the country. We are offering these campuses a full menu of activities including panel discussions on the origins and implications of Islamo Fascism; keynote speakers such as former Sen. Rick Santorum, Christopher Hitchens, Robert Spencer, and Nonie Darwish; and a showing of the uncut version of ABC’s milestone docudrama “The Path to 9/11,” and other documentaries about the threat of radical Islam, including Obsession and Suicide Killers. In addition we are working with our student coordinators to organize protests at women’s studies departments which have been shamefully silent about the violent oppression of women in the Muslim world, and to stage a memorial for the international victims of jihad. Among the campuses already committed to major activities during Islamo Fascism Awareness Week are Columbia, UC Berkeley, Penn State, Temple, Penn, Emory, UC Irvine and Ohio State, This Week has the potential to be a major news event as well as a transforming political experience for our college students.
Details on the event will appear in subsequent Newsletter updates. If you want further information or would like to see your alma mater or a school of special interest added to our list of targets, please call Jeffrey Wienir at jeffrey@horowitzfreedomcenter.org. This is our chance to bring the truth about the war on terrorism to campuses dominated by an unholy alliance between pro jihadists and the hardcore left.
Sold Out Liberty Film Event in Hollywood!!
Not everyone in Hollywood is a trendy leftist. The Freedom Center had a tremendous success this past Tuesday when we premiered a new documentary called “Border” by director/actor Chris Burgard at the Harmony Gold Theater in Hollywood. Talk show host and television personality Larry Elder was the host. Cyrus Nowrasteh, the writer of ABC’s “Path to 9/11,” and other Hollywood celebrities attended. The film, a frightening look at the chaos caused by uncontrolled illegal immigration, filled the house with a paying audience of over 300 people. The showing, first in a series of screenings of conservative films we are developing, took place under the auspices of the Liberty Film Festival, a program of the Freedom Center which has had a growing impact on the entertainment community over the past two years. We will show “Border” again on August 15th in Santa Barbara. Thanks in large part of Mary Belle Snow and Andy Granatelli, the Freedom Center has established a conservative presen ce in that liberal city.
Sign up for Restoration Weekend
The Restoration Weekend will be held this year November 15-18th at the Breakers Resort in Palm Beach, Florida. Called by one newspaper “a blue ribbon gathering of the conservative tribe,” The Weekend provides an occasion for concerned and politically involved conservatives to explore with leading intellectuals the crucial domestic and international developments of the moment. So far, we have confirmed appearances by Dick Morris, former Secretary of Defense Richard Perle, ex-CIA Director Jim Woolsey, Sen. Jim Bunning, Lou Dobbs, Fred Barnes, Michael Barone and many others. For more information please contact Missy Woodward at mwoodward@horowitzfreedomcenter.org
Comment:
Dear reader, were you aware that you have not been sensitized enough to terrorism? No. Even though your face creams and bath gels are regularly thrown away at airport security, even though random strangers get to suss out your bare tootsies, and your underwear is groped by overweight baggage-checkers all in the sacred name of antiterrorism, even though not a solitary TV or radio show can unfold without reference to Osama, terrorists, or the Iraq war…even though every newspaper and magazine and wesbite remotely involved with politics (and most of those that have nothing to do with it), has spent the last 7 years talking about nothing but 9-11 and terrorism; though societies, think-tanks and foundations have sprung to life like dragon’s teeth solely for it; though droves, nay, battalions and armies of analysts have grown rich on the subject…though half the DC population owes its living to it (and the other half lives in mortal fear of being water-boarded on suspicion of abetting it)…though entire nations have been wheedled and threatened to join forces against it — still, dear, dear reader, we just don’t know enough about it….
We must be such slow learners…
Heard on Chris Matthew, Hard Ball, this evening:
(Paraphrasing) “We went to Iraq not because of WMD, not because Saddam was a bad guy, but essentially because we needed to take over a country to have a base from which to pursue our global policies….”
I wasn’t really paying attention to the show until I heard that. Now I wait all agog to find out who the wet-behind-the-ears pundit was who let an entire tribe of mountain cats out of this particular bag…a body bag, I should add.
What’s even more amazing is that after registering a small intellectual double take, Matthews just babbled on as usual.
If anyone ever wanted proof that the respectable, non-Fox, “liberal” media long ago took leave of its senses — here it is. They don’t think there’s a need to keep up even the faintest pretence in the eyes of the rest of the world….let alone do their job.
On July 31, 2007 Republican rep from Colorado, and presidential hopeful, Tom Tancredo, whose position on Mexican immigrants has made him the darling of nativists, urged the bombing of Mecca and Medina as a deterrent to future terrorist attacks.
Actually, his statement was not anywhere as clear as that. In the second half, the CNN report said Tancredo would bomb in retaliation for a terrorist attack on the homeland (Bushspeak for America); in the first half, that it would preemptively bomb to deter such an attack.
Then again, linguistic precision hasn’t been a noted attribute of this administration, which for the last half a decade has pretended that preemption is no more than deterrence and prevention.
Take President Bush himself:
“If necessary, however, under long-standing principles of self defense, we do not rule out use of force before attacks occur, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack, when the consequences of an attack with WMD are potentially so devastating, we cannot afford to stand idly by as grave dangers materialize.”
In this piece, even before attacks materialize – whose time and place are uncertain – Bush urges self—defense, by which, naturally, he means attack.
And what would we be attack-er-defending against? Oh, that would be potential. As in, defending against potential terrorism.
Attack in self-defense to deter the potential of an uncertain terrorist attack. You get it.
Or perhaps the point is you don’t.
Of course, “potential” also remains in the eye of the beholder.
Tancredo doesn’t see much potential for terrorism, for instance, in repressive, nuke-wielding crony-capitalist gambling den, China. Oh no. The Chinese only sit on a large chunk of US treasuries and their every financial flutter turns Ben Bernanke at the Federal Reserve a sicklier shade of yellow as the global credit binge turns into a global hangover. But not to worry.
No, as a social conservative and Christian Right activist from a district largely constituted of middle-class and affluent Caucasian voters, Tancredo’s position on immigration and the Middle East is lit by the eerie flames of civilizational war, a la Samuel Huntington. So, naturally, he finds terrorist potential solely in Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia, which (whatever we might think of the objects of its financial patronage) at last count was still an ally.
Perhaps Tancredo, recognizing the potential for Allies to turn into Axis (Of Evil), is only deterring that potential. Or preventing it. Or pre-empting it. Or perhaps he recognizes the potential a run on the Bank of Mecca would have to destroy the last shred of credit America has and turn the Iraq war into an outright Crusade against a billion Muslims.
Of course, some people think that’s already what’s going on.
Bay (Pat, without the winsome charm) Buchanan, chief Tancredo Wazir, reassures us, nonetheless, that the man is “open-minded and willing to embrace other options.”
Could that mean he will be content to take out only the Ka’aba in a surgical strike and leave the rest of Mecca alone, thus reassuring Muslims the world over about the precise precision both of US weaponry and US language? Or does it mean he will just content himself with a border war with Mexican immigrants in the south?
At this point, it’s hard to figure out.
Just as hard as figuring out why the State Department is throwing a hissy fit over this anyway. [Tom Casey, a deputy spokesman for the State Department, told CNN’s Elise Labott that the congressman’s comments were “reprehensible” and “absolutely crazy” etc. etc.]
After all, Tancredo said about the same thing in 2005.
“If this [a nuclear attack] happens in the United States, and we determine that it is the result of extremist, fundamentalist Muslims, you know, you could take out their holy sites,” he said on July 15, 2005.
And he had plenty of company among people who aren’t conservative Christians.
One right-wing journal claimed that the “nuke Mecca” threat was the only reason America had remained free of terrorist attack post 9-11 (“Intelligence expert says nuke option is reason bin Laden has been quiet,” WorldNet, January 1 2005).
Meanwhile, Robert Spencer, scholar of Islamic history, theology, and law and the director of the Jihad Watch thought it was a bad idea only because it might not have worked out:
“It is likely that a destruction of the Ka’aba or the Al-Aqsa Mosque would have the same effect: it would become [a] source of spirit, not of dispirit. The jihadists would have yet another injury to add to their litany of grievances,” he wrote in FrontPage Magazine on July 28, 2005, almost wistfully.
In fact, nuking Mecca is as popular a meme in Washington as a Paris Hilton video on YouTube.
On February 6, 2007, Don Imus said on MSNBC’s Imus in the Morning – “It might be [a] good start with somebody who’s willing to take three big ones and drop one on Mecca, one on Jeddah, and one on Saudi — one on Riyadh.”
On March 2002, The National Review’s senior editor, Rich Lowry, suggested in an online forum that there was “…lots of sentiment for nuking Mecca… Mecca seems extreme, of course, but then again few people would die and it would send a signal.”
[In 2004 the city had 1,294,167 residents, according to wiki, so it’s hard to figure out what Mr. Lowry could have been thinking when he referred to “few people”. On the other hand, in the context of the ground swell of hype from the nuclear industry in recent years about “resource wars” supposedly driven by burgeoning populations east of the Suez, a million may indeed be few].
Such are the cultural and racial anxieties that Tancredo’s rhetoric plays on. Whatever the merits of his position on immigration in other respects. And it does have some.
Those resource wars were probably what the Pentagon had in mind, when three years after Lowry made his remark, it revised its 1995 nuclear strike doctrine to include enemies who were using “or intending to use WMD” against the U.S. or its allies, their forces and their civilian populations. Imminent intentions at Mecca or elsewhere would thus be preemptively deterred or defended by nuclear attack.
But besides metaphysical provocation from the swarthy and fecund, another potential provocation for a nuclear preemptive strike by the Pentagon was laid out decades earlier, in January 1975 in Commentary magazine. That was just after the Saudis had embargoed oil and sent prices soaring in the west. In response, Robert Tucker promoted the radical notion of invading Arab oil fields in a piece with the snappy title, “Oil: The Issue of American Intervention.”
Fast forward a quarter of a century, post 9-11, and get to Rand Corp. analyst Laurent Murawiec’s notorious power point presentation on July 10, 2002, to the Defense Policy Board, an influential committee of ex and current defense officials chaired by Richard Perle, Iraq-war hawk nonpareil.
After accusing the Saudis of “supporting our enemies and attacking our allies,” Murawiecz advised US officials to target Saudi Arabia’s economic assets should their rulers disobey US ultimatums that included a ban on Islamic charities and “anti-Israeli” writings.
Love us or we’ll bomb you.
Murawiecz, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and Rand, adviser to the French Ministry of Defense, some -time writer for Lyndon LaRouche, and founder and managing director of the obscure and dubious consulting firm, GeoPol Corp. in Geneva, (with close ties to questionable arms dealers) laces his work with references to Saudi reproduction and fecundity (see the November 17, 2005 discussion at the Hudson Institute of his book “Princes of Darkness: The Saudi Assault on the West”).
In his sensational 2002 presentation, he urged the confiscation of both oil fields in Arabia as well as Saudi assets in the US, as a first step. And as a second step, he urged that the Saudis be informed that their holy places were targets and that “alternatives are being canvassed”. His recommendation was that Muslim pilgrims just take their Hajj elsewhere and stop ruining all that oil for the civilized world, i.e. us.
A year later, Congress released its 9-11 report, with its heavily censored pages under the impressively sinister title, “Certain Sensitive National Security Matters.” Naturally, that was leaked. Naturally it became unofficially known (but never officially charged) that Saudi nationals with known contacts to two of the 9-11 hijackers also received money and had contact with Saudi officials, and that the Saudis have willfully provided al-Qaeda with assistance through Muslim charities. What didn’t become unofficially known was the official view by “a host of senior intelligence and law enforcement officials” (“Saudis on the Defensive,” Gary Leupp, Counterpunch, August 8, 2003) that “there is a lot of information in there that’s inflammatory but not accurate, or inferential or open to interpretation. Some of it is based on information that is partial, fragmentary and wrong. It is certainly not conclusive.”
Despite seeing through the Bush line on immigration, Christian cultural warrior Tancredo is still a big fan of the Bush global war on terror, and especially of its Middle Eastern front on the Tigris. An ardent supporter of the defense industry in general, Tancredo, it seems, is also a convert to the Tucker-Murawiec vision of a de-Saudified Middle East.
He is also given to that favorite leisure sport of under worked DC lawmakers– regime change in Iran. There, Tancredo, a conservative Christian, supports the ultra left-wing People’s Freedom Fighters (MEK), which has been identified as a terrorist organization by the State Department and is led by the charismatic Marxist feminist, Miriam Rajavi.
Tancredo, a co-chair of the House Iran caucus, offered support to a pro-MEK rally in Washington on January 19, 2006 and wrote to the organizers, the Council for Democratic Change in Iran, “We believe a possible alternative to the current government can be achieved through supporting the people of Iran and the Iranian resistance.”
That means that Tancredo, the conservative, is allied with the most radical faction in the ongoing debate about how the U.S. effects Iranian regime change. (Note: No party to that debate suggests that perhaps Iranian regime change might not be the business of the US government).
On the surface, that’s an odd place for a self-described cultural conservative.
Since it is coincidentally also the vision of neo-conservative theorist, democratic revolutionary, connoisseur of fascist belles-lettres, and Iran Contra go-between, Michael Ledeen..
You remember him.
He’s the guy who was selling weapons to the mullahs he’s busy denouncing now. And he’s the guy who was promoting the Afghan mujahadeen — including Osama Bin Laden — back then as our chief allies against communist totalitarianism.
He was also involved with the neo-fascist Masonic lodge P2 (Propaganda Due) and a network of Italian secret service agents associated with the CIA-coordinated “stay-behind” strategy. As part of its Cold War vision, “stay-behind” members attempted to “destabilize” the Italian government in the 1980s through terrorist attacks and false flag operations blamed on socialists.
Ledeen, an avid admirer of Machiavelli, has argued that the US must be “imperious, ruthless, and relentless” against the Muslim world until there has been “total surrender.”
And more:
“We will not be sated until we have had the blood of every miserable little tyrant in the Middle East, until every leader of every cell of the terror network is dead or locked securely away, and every last drooling anti-Semitic and anti-American mullah, imam, sheikh, and ayatollah is either singing the praises of the United States of America, or pumping gasoline, for a dime a gallon, on an American military base near the Arctic Circle.” [National Review, 12/7/2001, republished in the Jewish World Review, 12/11/2001]
Iraq just isn’t enough for Ledeen.
“We do not want stability in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and even Saudi Arabia; we want things to change. The real issue is not whether, but how to destabilize.” [Wall Street Journal, 9/4/2002.
Ledeen, probably unlike Tancredo in this respect, is not a useful tool.
Keep those points in mind and consider that just yesterday, August 5, only a week after the Tancredo eruption, U.S. troops claim to have killed the al-Qaida mastermind (al Badri) behind the bombing of the golden dome of al Askariya shrine in Samarra, one of the most sacred of Shiite holy places. It was the act that set off waves of sectarian killing last year.
Actually, the mosque itself was then guarded by local police, presumably under US authority. Some describe Shia having taunted the police with slogans prior to the bombing which might have provoked the Sunni response. Or not. There’s no way of knowing now, except that now, Tancredo gets a lucky break.
The take out of al-Badri should set Muslim hearts at rest, if they don’t actually flutter for Uncle Sam again. Tancredo can stop explaining himself to CAIR and go back to his work — for regime change in Iran and Saudi Arabia.
And Laurent Murawiec, polyglot scholar of cultural identity, who has analyzed how pigs affect Muslims differently from Christians and proclaimed publicly that the global war on terror is not a war on terror really, but “a war on jihad and an Islam that has, for all practical purposes, throw its lot with the jihadis,” can get back to his.
And what is Murawiec’s work? Closely connected to the RMA (Revolution in Military Affairs), it turns out.
In case you didn’t know, the RMA is Donald Rumsfeld’s pet project and makes Information War (IW), including netcentric war, its center piece. Imagery is its language.
Murawiec even has a book on the subject (“Greek Rhetoric Meets Cyberspace: Toward a Theory of Information Warfare”).
This is how he describes IW in an article for the Hudson Institute (“Military Action in Cyberspace,” December 15, 2003):
“For instance, a pig may mean something different to a Muslim and a Christian. A Muslim might see an impure and accursed animal, whereas a Christian might see ham on legs or one of Walt Disney’s Three Little Pigs. Effective use of visual images across cultures requires great knowledge and sophistication……..
In all these cases, IW involves creating phantom cyber-images, which can include phantasms of nonexistent trains, airplanes, stock market orders, and bank transfers; false impressions of the enemy’s troop strength and one’s own, of supplies and movements, of fake attacks and all-too-real defenses; and phantom images of the enemy’s leaders doing evil things on screen because one has video-morphed images of them doing them so.
Information warfare is not about machines or even electrons. It is about people’s minds, society’s functions, and armies’ strategies. Cyberspace endows us—and our enemies—with new and extraordinary means with which to achieve our respective aims. “We have only begun to cyber-fight.”
Indeed.
Tancredo: Threaten to bomb Muslim holy sites in retaliation
Republican presidential hopeful Tom Tancredo
WASHINGTON (CNN) — Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo’s campaign stood by his assertion that bombing holy Muslim sites would serve as a good “deterrent” to prevent Islamic fundamentalists from attacking the United States, his spokeswoman said Friday.
“This shows that we mean business,” said Bay Buchanan, a senior Tancredo adviser. “There’s no more effective deterrent than that. But he is open-minded and willing to embrace other options. This is just a means to deter them from attacking us.”
On Tuesday, Tancredo warned a group of Iowans that another terrorist attack would “cause a worldwide economic collapse.” IowaPolitics.com recorded his comments.
“If it is up to me, we are going to explain that an attack on this homeland of that nature would be followed by an attack on the holy sites in Mecca and Medina,” Tancredo said. “That is the only thing I can think of that might deter somebody from doing what they would otherwise do. If I am wrong, fine, tell me, and I would be happy to do something else. But you had better find a deterrent, or you will find an attack.”
Tom Casey, a deputy spokesman for the State Department, told CNN’s Elise Labott that the congressman’s comments were “reprehensible” and “absolutely crazy.” Tancredo was widely criticized in 2005 for making a similar suggestion…”
Comment: OK, Tancredo is being called on it. Irresponsible, crazy….
But guess what? He isn’t the first person to say it. Here’s Michael Ledeen, neocon guru and noted mullah-baiter:
In 2000: “[T]he defense of the country is one of those extreme situation in which a leader is justified in committing evil.”(‘Michael Ledeen, Machiavelli on Modern Leadership: Why Machiavelli’s Iron Rules Are As Timely and Important Today As Five Centuries Ago (New York, NY: Random House, 2000))”
“Stability is an unworthy American mission, and a misleading concept to boot. We do not want stability in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and even Saudi Arabia; we want things to change. The real issue is not whether, but how to destabilize.” (‘Michael Ledeen, “The War on Terror Won’t End in Baghdad,” Wall Street Journal, 4 September 2002.’)” Wall Street Journal, 9/4/2002]
So, why is Tancredo so crazy for articulating what one of the leading theorists of this government has been saying for the last 7 years in every major news outlet in this country without censure?
“Women and children were spotted screaming for help from treetops in Uttar Pradesh. In parts of the state, river levels rose so quickly that villagers had no time to save any belongings.
“The gush of water was so sudden we did not get the time to react,” Vinod Kumar, a resident of a flooded village in Basti district, told Enadu TV.
One woman in Uttar Pradesh who identified herself only as Savitra said she had not “eaten anything for the last two days.”
Health workers were fanning out across parts of Bangladesh and India to try to prevent the spread of waterborne diseases like diarrhea, typhoid and cholera.
In northwestern Bangladesh, farmer Rahmat Sheikh and his family were among 2,000 people who fled their flooded village for higher ground in the Sirajganj district.
“The floods have taken away all I had,” said the 40-year-old Sheikh. “Rice paddies in the field, two cows and my house all are gone. I don’t know how we will now survive.”
Some 14 million people in India and 5 million in Bangladesh have been displaced or marooned by flooding, according to government figures. At least 144 people have died in India and 54 more in Bangladesh.
India’s Meteorological Department said unusual monsoon patterns this year have led to heavier than normal rains….”
What do 19 million refugees look like?
I wonder if the media would consider this worth covering extensively – not only because of the number of people in distres — but even from sheer intellectual curiosity:
How do crowds move? How do they survive?
Amazingly, they will…
From Reason:
Why some libertarians don’t want to join the Ron Paul revolution.
“But some Ron Paul Revolutionaries insist that the mainstream media are putrid corpses in brackish water, and conventional polls are for losers who still answer their landlines. Paul’s support—by more postmodern measures—continues to grow. He’s still the king of meetup.com, which does generate real-world crowds, and even real-world food drives. He’s also the political king of YouTube (22,157 subscribers). We won’t find out for months if these netroots measures mean anything in electoral terms. And that’s just fine for a thrifty message-oriented candidate, who psychically benefits from running (and builds up more fundraising resources for any future effort) even if he fails utterly with vote totals.
This past Sunday he hit a political respectability jackpot, with a long, thorough, serious, and critical-but-respectful profile in the New York Times Magazine. Most of the Ron Paul press tells, however questioningly, of a politician dedicated to severely limited government that doesn’t want to interfere in our personal lives, doesn’t want to investigate us and control us, wants to abolish the income tax, and wants to bring troops home and dedicate our military only to actual national defense—a politician against the federal drug war, against the Patriot Act, against regulating the Internet, and for habeas corpus.
One prominent version of Libertarian Ron Paul Anxiety comes via noted and respected anarcho-legal theorist Randy Barnett in The Wall Street Journal. Barnett has decades of hardcore libertarian movement credentials behind him and is one of Lysander Spooner‘s biggest fans. (Spooner, the 19th century individualist anarchist, famously declared the state to be of inherently lower moral merit than a highway bandit.) But the mild obstetrician, family man, and experienced legislator Ron Paul is too radical for Barnett in one respect—the respect that is key to most of Paul’s traction to begin with: hisconsistent, no-compromise, get-out-now stance against the war in Iraq.
Barnett is eager to dissociate libertarianism writ large from Paul’s anti-Iraq War stance, claiming that many libertarians are concerned that Americans may get the misleading impression that all libertarians oppose the Iraq war—as Ron Paul does—and even that libertarianism itself dictates opposition to this war. It would be a shame, he suggests, if this misinterpretation inhibited a wider acceptance of the libertarian principles that would promote the general welfare of the American people.
This is doubly curious. First, because opposition to non-defensive war traditionally is a core libertarian principle (to begin with, since it inherently involves mass murder and property destruction aimed at people who have not harmed the people imposing the harm) and is, in fact, the position of the vast majority of self-identified libertarians. Second, why would one worry that libertarianism can be damaged by an association with an idea that is in fact immensely popular? And, to boot, a popular position in which Paul has unique credibility for being right, and right from the beginning, unlike pretty much every other candidate…….
…..Libertarians leery of Paul should ask themselves (while bearing in mind that of course no one, certainly no libertarian, is under any obligation to support or advocate or vote for any politician ever): Have we ever seen a national political figure better in libertarian terms—better on taxes, on drugs, on spending, on federalism, on foreign policy, on civil liberties? And for the pragmatic, cosmopolitan, mainstream libertarian: Why is Ron Paul the place where making the non-existent best the enemy of the good becomes the right thing to do?
Senior Editor Brian Doherty is author of This is Burning Man and Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement.
Comment:
And a bit more here on the truly a-pauling reason:
Says Norman Solomon (hat tip to Dandelionsalad):
“On Iraq policy, in Washington, the differences between Republicans and Democrats — and between the media’s war boosters and opponents — are often significant. Yet they’re apt to mask the emergence of a general formula that could gain wide support from the political and media establishment.
The formula’s details and timelines are up for grabs. But there’s not a single “major” candidate for president willing to call for withdrawal of all U.S. forces — not just “combat” troops — from Iraq, or willing to call for a complete halt to U.S. bombing of that country.
Those candidates know that powerful elites in this country just don’t want to give up the leverage of an ongoing U.S. military presence in Iraq, with its enormous reserves of oil and geopolitical value. It’s a good bet that American media and political powerhouses would fix the wagon of any presidential campaign that truly advocated an end to the U.S. war in — and on — Iraq.
The disconnect between public opinion and elite opinion has led to reverse perceptions of a crisis of democracy. As war continues, some are appalled at the absence of democracy while others are frightened by the potential of it. From the grassroots, the scarcity of democracy is transparent and outrageous. For elites, unleashed democracy could jeopardize the priorities of the military-industrial-media complex.”
Now what would those priorities be and what crisis could the M-I-M complex be staving off?
Via the Daily Paul, here is Robert Prechter (in Elliot Wave Theorist) explaining why he is “Beyond Bearish“:
“But there is a much more important event for believers in perpetual inflation to explain: the trend of yields from bonds and utility stocks. In the 1970s, prices of bonds and utility stocks were falling, and yields on bonds and utility stocks were rising, because of the onslaught of inflation. But in the past 25 years bond and utility stock prices have gone up, and yields on bonds and utility stocks (see Figures 2 [not shown] and 3) have gone down. Once again, this situation is contrary to claims that we are experiencing a replay of the inflationary 19?teens or 1970s. Those investing on an inflation theme cannot explain these graphs. But there is a precedent for this time. It is 1928?1929, when bond and utility yields bottomed and prices topped (see Figure 4) in an environment of expanding credit and a stock market boom. The Dow Jones Utility Average was the last of the Dow averages to peak in 1929, and today it is deeply into wave (5) and therefore near the end of its entire bull market. All these juxtaposed market behaviors make sense only in our context of a terminating credit bubble. This one is just a whole lot bigger than any other in history.
Some economic historians blame rising interest rates into 1929 for the crash that ensued. Those who do must acknowledge that the Fed’s interest rate today is at almost exactly the same level it was then, having risen steadily?and in fact way more in percentage terms?since 2003. So even on this score the setup is the same as it was 1929. Remember also that in 1926 the Florida land boom collapsed. In the current cycle, house prices nationwide topped out in 2005, two years ago. So maybe it’s 1928 now instead of 1929. But that’s a small quibble compared to the erroneous idea that we are enjoying a perpetually inflationary goldilocks economy with perpetually rising investment prices….”
King of Spin decoding, Norman Solomon, author of War Made Easy in a piece at Counterpunch.
“Former readers of Mad Magazine can remember a regular feature called “Scenes We’d Like to See.” It showed what might happen if candor replaced customary euphemisms and evasions. These days, what media scenes would we like to see?
One aspect of news media that needs a different paradigm is the correction ritual. Newspapers are sometimes willing to acknowledge faulty reporting, but the “correction box” is routinely inadequate — the journalistic equivalent of self-flagellation for jaywalking in the course of serving as an accessory to deadly crimes….
Explaining the intricacies of humanitarian intervention, a post by Lenin’s Tomb from March of this year that still holds good.
“Since 2003, according to UN estimates, some 200,000 have been killed in the Darfur region of Sudan in a brutal ethnic-cleansing campaign and another 2 million have been turned into refugees.
How would you know this? Well, if you lived in New York City, at least, you could hardly take a subway ride without seeing an ad that reads: “400,000 dead. Millions uniting to save Darfur.” The New York Times has also regularly featured full-page ads describing the “genocide” in Darfur and calling for intervention there under “a chain of command allowing necessary and timely military action without approval from distant political or civilian personnel.”
In those same years, according to the best estimate available, the British medical journal The Lancet’s door-to-door study of Iraqi deaths, approximately 655,000 Iraqis had died in war, occupation, and civil strife between March 2003 and June 2006. (The study offers a low-end possible figure on deaths of 392,000 and a high-end figure of 943,000.) But you could travel coast to coast without seeing the equivalents of the billboards, subway placards, full-page newspaper ads, or the like for the Iraqi dead. And you certainly won’t see, as in the case of Darfur, celebrities on Good Morning America talking about their commitment to stopping “genocide” in Iraq.
Why is it that we are counting and thinking about the Sudanese dead as part of a high-profile, celebrity-driven campaign to “Save Darfur,” yet Iraqi deaths still go effectively uncounted, and rarely seem to provoke moral outrage, let alone public campaigns to end the killing? And why are the numbers of killed in Darfur cited without any question, while the numbers of Iraqi dead, unless pitifully low-ball figures, are instantly challenged — or dismissed?”