The LA Times has a three-pager up about the plight of Muslims* in the US. For the last half-decade, there’ve been … problems, of course, but the Times rather elegantly skirts the real source of trouble with lines such as this:
“The terrorists are just everyday Muslims following their satanic cult,” read a recent e-mail to the Muslim Public Affairs Council in Los Angeles.
That’s the only indirect allusion to the elephant; here’s the Hitchcockian McGuffin, a quote from a Muslim man at the tail of the piece:
“I have a few deferred dreams of my own, like learning to fly, or buying a rifle to go deer hunting with friends. But I can’t do either of those things without worrying about being reported to authorities. Non-Muslims can do those things. We can’t.”
It’s obvious what we’re supposed to think is the problem; but can you spot the source?
Note, by the way, that Qatar, a Muslim nation, is now offering to help the Boys and Girls Clubs in the Gulf Coast area rebuild after Katrina. Another thing the “pro-family” right-wing loonies in the Fed can’t seem to manage: Caring for America’s youth.
I guess they really, really believe in this outsourcing thing, huh?
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I’m not often caught completely unawares by the depths of cretinism to which my fellow primates descend, but this story (another via MSNBC) managed to do it.
Apparently there is a small trend among some parents to ask for “ADHD” meds for kids who don’t need them — so the kids will do better in school. And we’re not talking about lifting Fs here; we’re talking about raising Bs into A level.
Now let me be clear about something. I’m not certain “ADHD” even exists, and I’m not alone in that. There are a lot of mental health experts who doubt it as well. There are no clear diagnostic criteria for it; there is no medical or pharmacological test that can be administered to determine if it’s present or absent in a given child.
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I first caught sight of this one on MSNBC last night. An “investigative” “journalist” from LA got the shit beaten out of him by a woman and her husband after dogging them a little too relentlessly.
Evidently John Mattes was “investigating” the couple for suspected real estate scams when he got too close to Rosa Barraza, who began by confronting him and throwing water at the videographer. When Mattes persisted, she slapped him, whereupon Mattes told her that her behavior wasn’t “appropriate”. Barraza used invective to explain her feelings on that, and things deteriorated rapidly.
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There are a couple things that fall pretty neatly into this category. For starters, the military is retooling its manual on torture interrogation of prisoners detainees enemy combatants them thar bad people what hates our way of life n such. The LA Times reports that there was initial resistance to even mentioning the Geneva convention in the manual, since apparently them thar bad people might use it to, oh I don’t know, insist on minimal human rights, but
[I]n June, the Supreme Court ruled in Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld that the provisions of the Geneva Convention could be applied to an unconventional conflict, like the war on terrorism. The court said that Common Article 3 covered all individuals caught up in a conflict, whether part of a regular military force or not.
There they go again, those damned activist judges, screwing it up for everyone.* Far too late to prevent a public debacle, of course — but then, Abu Ghraib was just one of many, many wrong steps in this particular act of this particularly stupid administration. (Why, oh why, can’t we just “move on”?)
Though I have to say a court case named [anyone at all] vs. Rumsfeld has a damned nice ring to it.
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Or not. I’ve been asked by a few about the “veggie chili” recipe that’s been adopted by the hospital cafeteria, so I figured I’d share it with the rest of the world too.
This is a flexible recipe that can be adapted for meatish use as well. However, it’s meant to carry a meal more or less by itself; the chili turns out hearty and substantial just as it is, sans dead animal of any kind.
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Chicago’s not the only city that has overcrowded schools; it’s just the latest to hit the news. Recently an administrator there lost his job in the name of improving education conditions (Washington Post):
CHICAGO — Fed up with overcrowding at a Chicago public high school with too many problems and too little space, Principal Martin McGreal indulged a fantasy of overwhelmed school leaders everywhere: He declared enrollment closed.
“No Child Left Behind”, huh, George? Well, that’s technically right; these are children, not child.
Between unfunded mandates, “school choice” and general school overpopulation, it seems clear the GOP is at war with public education. I guess home schooling is the only way they’ll get things like “Intelligent Design” taken seriously. That, and of course a radical right-wing outlook.
The “big on security” GOP seems to have developed a case of Reagan’s Syndrome* of late, just plain forgetting vastly important things, and once again my perennial question to right-wing warmongers goes unanswered.**
Here’s only a fraction of what the NY Times has to say about our favorite forgotten first target in the “war on terror”:
Today, [Lashkar Gah, Afghanistan] is the epicenter of a Taliban resurgence and an explosion in drug cultivation that has claimed the lives of 106 American and NATO soldiers this year and doubled American casualty rates countrywide. Across Afghanistan, roadside bomb attacks are up by 30 percent; suicide bombings have doubled. Statistically it is now nearly as dangerous to serve as an American soldier in Afghanistan as it is in Iraq.
The Afghani government was asking for assistance in peacekeeping as early as 2002 — before that Texan idiot in Washington decided to wipe daddy’s ass for him.
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In happier news, CNN has found that Americans are annoyed. Deeply annoyed. We are feeling, as Douglas Adams might have put it, a “bright, searing flame of annoyance.”
A majority of Americans surveyed — and a higher percentage than recorded during the same time last year — said things in the United States are going “badly.” Among this year’s respondents, 29 percent said “pretty badly” and 25 percent — up from 15 percent a month ago — answered “very badly.”
Only one in five was “content” — so I guess we know how many rich, white right-wingers there actually are in the US now: About 60 million.
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I’m not going to mock Steve Irwin’s death, but I have to say it’s not all that surprising. The man made a career out of chasing down animals — some of them quite dangerous — and getting as close to them as he possibly could. He had a way of insisting he wasn’t harming them, but he was putting them under stress. (As Cartman had it, it really pissed them off.)
Apparently he was doing some promos for another upcoming kids’ program during downtime at the Great Barrier Reef when he swam too close to a submerged stingray. It seems there was videotape captured of Irwin pulling the barb out of his chest, which is more than a little creepy.
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From the NY Times:
LONDON, Sept. 1 — The time is October 2007, and America is in anguish, rent by the war in Iraq and by a combustive restiveness at home. Leaving a hotel in Chicago after making a speech while a huge antiwar protest rages nearby, President Bush is suddenly struck down, killed by a sniper’s bullet.
This is describing a British TV program to be broadcast in the UK in October. Why does the prospect of Bush being assassinated make me unhappy?
Because then we’d be stuck with Cheney. (Or, if you want to be particular, unfiltered Cheney.)
Pat Buchanan really pisses me off.
Not because of his frankly 1950s outlook or his frequent backslides into outrageous bigotry — but because there are times, not many but a few, when he’s able to make a lucid, valid and relevant point, and I find myself, against all my best judgment, agreeing with him.
He rails pretty regularly against Bush and the Iraq invasion, and comes up with little gems such as this:
Iraq today appears as an exposed salient, a bridge too far, a war against a dispossessed Sunni minority, that we can neither win nor walk away from without its becoming the haven for terrorists it never was before we invaded. Half our army is now either in Iraq, has been through Iraq or is on the way. U.S. Reserve and Guard units, which have provided 40 percent of the troops for the war, are no longer meeting recruitment goals.
This is a very nice piece of articlate, clear polemic, and it makes me feel respectful. But then he comes up with stuff like this, and it makes my skin crawl:
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