I keep hearing from official sources that we’re getting Afghanistan under control, but I don’t believe it. If we are, how is this happening?
The Taliban in Afghanistan has publicly stoned to death a man and a woman over an alleged love affair, government officials said.
I guess a mass of soldiers sitting in your country really doesn’t do much to change your quaint ancestral folkways.
Quite the little hissyfit is brewing on the far right. One one side is Joseph Farah, lunatic publisher of the online teabagging journal, World Net Daily, better known as Wing Nut Daily to rational people. Farah organizes something called the “Taking America Back National Conference”, in which the not-very-bright half of America gets together to piously discuss how they can complete the total trashing of the country.
On the other side is crazy flaming psycho goon Ann Coulter, who would have been a headliner at the WND conference — she’s exactly the kind of nut WND loves. Unfortunately, Coulter also accepted an offer to speak at another crazy place, Homocon,, organized and attended by far right gay Republicans who seem to love everything the Tea Party movement stands for, except that bit about hating gay people.
I guess Farah was upset that Coulter would talk to gay people rather than stoning them, so he rescinded his invitation to speak at the WND conference.
“Ultimately, as a matter of principle, it would not make sense for us to have Ann speak to a conference about ‘taking America back’ when she clearly does not recognize that the ideals to be espoused there simply do not include the radical and very ‘unconservative’ agenda represented by GOProud,” said Farah. “The drift of the conservative movement to a brand of materialistic libertarianism is one of the main reasons we planned this conference from the beginning.”
Aww, poor Joe. Now he’s left with no one to talk at his conference…oh, wait. There’s no shortage of raving loonies on the right. He’s still got Michele Bachmann and Alan Keyes. But Coulter is furious with him.
“[T]his was an email exchange [between] friends and even though I didn’t expressly say ‘OFF THE RECORD’ and I believe everything I said, he’s a swine for using my private emails politely answering him,” Coulter wrote to the Daily Caller. “[W]hy would he do such a despicable thing? … for PUBLICITY.”
She continued: “I will say that [Farah] could give less than two sh–s about the conservative movement – as demonstrated by his promotion of the birther nonsense (long ago disproved by my newspaper, human events, also sweetness & light, american spectator and national review etc, etc etc). He’s the only allegedly serious conservative pushing the birther thing. for ONE reason: to get hits on his website.”
You know you’re in trouble when you’re in a dialogue and Ann Coulter is the sane one. And Farah isn’t helping the perception of his judgment.
Farah responded to Coulter’s remarks, saying, “Ann is angry. I hope she calms down and there can be some restoration, repentance and forgiveness. She said some mean things about me, but I can sleep at night knowing I did the right thing in God’s economy.”
God’s economy? What does that mean? I’d love to know exactly how his god is carrying out his economic plans.
Does this mean god is an atheist, because he seems to be shipping our economy overseas to China?
The Australians are having an election, and one of the parties is the Family First Party — a Christianist group — and another is the Australian Sex Party, which would have my vote just for the name, if I were Australian. And after watching this debate between the two, I am confirmed in my bias.
I’m a bit disillusioned with Julia Gillard, who’s a bit too quick to throw away principles to pander for votes (which probably means she’ll get elected). Fiona Patten, though, seems quite nice and forthright. And I like their ads.
Now if only the US had a party like that…
Australia is not a particularly religious nation, and they’ve got the same problems we all do—a sagging economy, and essential demands for social programs that ought to be met…but compromises have to be made. Here, though, is a compromise I can’t understand: the Labor government has decided to throw away huge sums of money on something ridiculous.
That something else is school chaplaincy. Last week the Gillard government pre-empted its own review and increased the program’s funding by more than a third. The total cost to the taxpayer now stands at $437 million.
What are these chaplains supposed to do? It seems to be a sinecure for god-wallopers, who get a privileged position in a school, and $20,000 per year for…it’s not clear.
The Government knows chaplains are evangelical Christians, not mental health experts. This is why departmental guidelines prohibit chaplains from counseling students. They also ban chaplains from providing educational and medical services, as well as from proselytising. All of which begs the question: what exactly are we paying chaplains $20,000 each to do?
I’m not the only one wondering. As a report on the program reveals, many chaplains are unclear about their role. A majority admits they do deal with student mental health and depression issues, student alcohol and drug use, physical/emotional abuse and neglect, and suicide and self-harming behaviours. What most don’t do is refer to appropriate professionals when out of their depth.
If you’ve got problems in the schools like the ones listed above, it seems to me that hiring someone incompetent and untrained will not solve them.
12 September will be Burn the Confederate Flag Day.
Burn the Confederate Flag Day is a protest against the right’s exploitation of racial prejudice for political gain. We urge you to burn the Confederate flag, a long-time symbol of racial hatred, on Sept 12, the date when the racially-divisive Tea Party holds its annual hate fest.
Now I just have to figure out where to get a cheap traitor’s flag in Minnesota. Hmm…it sounds like the kind of thing a truck stop might sell.
How dare radicals insert their civil rights provisions into the sacred Constitution — a federal judge has just declared that California’s Proposition 8 is in violation of the 14th Amendment. Now it’s probably going to the Supreme Court, and who knows what will happen in wacky Roberts-Scalia land, packed with Catholics.
I guess the only surefire strategy for the conservatives is to go back to whining about that awful 14th amendment. Meanwhile, California should plan on having a gay old time.
Writing about the role of the NAACP in swatting down the endemic racism in the Republican party, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes something beautiful.
I have, in my writing, a tendency to become theoretically cute, and overly enamored with my own fair-mindedness. Such vanity has lately been manifested in the form of phrases like “it’s worth saying” and “it strikes me that…” or “respectfully…”
When engaging your adversaries, that approach has its place. But it’s worth saying that there are other approaches and other places. Among them–respectfully administering the occasional reminder as to the precise nature of the motherfuckers you are dealing with.
It’s worth saying, respectfully, that I have never been overly enamored with my fair-mindedness, so it’s the second paragraph that resonates most strongly with me.
(via Mike the Mad Biologist)
The cover of the latest issue of Time is going to shake a few people up. Aisha is a woman who fled the tyranny and abuse of her in-laws, and as a punishment, the Taliban had her husband cut off her ears and nose.
Here’s where pro-war propaganda steps in: the cover is titled, “What happens if we leave Afghanistan”. It’s set up as if this kind of horror would be a consequence of our military leaving the country. However, the story undermines that message.
This didn’t happen 10 years ago, when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan. It happened last year. Now hidden in a secret women’s shelter in Kabul, Aisha listens obsessively to the news. Talk that the Afghan government is considering some kind of political accommodation with the Taliban frightens her. “They are the people that did this to me,” she says, touching her damaged face. “How can we reconcile with them?”
If we want good news from Afghanistan, it’s not going to be measured in body counts or enclaves raided or bombs dropped. It’s going to be when we actually hear about the progressive people of the country rising up and shaming the men and mullahs and misogynists. There could be a role for military aid in protecting a fragile political and social movement, but there’d be an even stronger role for education. I don’t see much sign of that happening.
It’s amazing: WikiLeaks has just dumped over 91,000 classified documents from the Afghanistan war on the web. Just like that, we get an actual look at what’s been going on over there, unfiltered by the traditional media, and definitely not given a rosy patina by Fox News. Fox New is, of course, treating this as a serious blow to their worldview — which isn’t surprising, since reality does great damage to Fox. US Government sources also condemn the release, since it exposes the failures of militarism, and militarism is what the government and its profitable contractors have committed themselves to.
I think it’s wonderful. Truth is an essential part of accurately assessing the war.
And the war isn’t going well. There are tales of atrocities on both sides, civilians being murdered by both sides, backhanded deals by Pakistan with both the US and the Afghan insurgents, and an increasing number of attacks — we aren’t winning at all.
The other shocking bit about this revelation is that it wasn’t done by any of the established media organizations — it took a stateless, independent organization to actually break the barriers to information that other media companies respect. Now, of course, Spiegel, the Guardian, and the NY Times are doing a fine job of analyzing the deluge of information…but once upon a time, we might have expected investigative journalists to do that work. I guess it’s cheaper to hire a Judith Miller to massage government propaganda than to actually dig into the facts.
This sad fact about the news disappointed me.
Ask yourself: Why didn’t Wikileaks just publish the Afghanistan war logs and let journalists ’round the world have at them? Why hand them over to The New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel first? Because as Julien Assange, founder of Wikileaks, explained last October, if a big story is available to everyone equally, journalists will pass on it.
“It’s counterintuitive,” he said then. “You’d think the bigger and more important the document is, the more likely it will be reported on but that’s absolutely not true. It’s about supply and demand. Zero supply equals high demand, it has value. As soon as we release the material, the supply goes to infinity, so the perceived value goes to zero.”
I have a very low opinion of most journalists — it’s a career in disrepute, given the sad state of media affairs, especially with the pathetic state of television news. I glanced at some of the programming going on now, and most of what I saw were mannequins arguing over whether it was right to release these documents, rather than any substantive discussion of the horrors contained within them.
But I will say this: Julien Assange is a hero who is doing a great service to both rescue and revolutionize honest journalism.
