Adam’s post below is very informative, and you should all go and read it. Go ahead, I’ll wait.
And now for something completely predictablePost + Comments (48)
An interesting coincidence
A young boy from Irving, TX loves to tinker and invent things. He brings a homemade clock to school to show his engineering teacher. Another teacher sees it, calls the police and naturally the school and the authorities act like hamfisted tools about the whole situation, apparently on the theory that another teacher’s mistaken impression (the kid never said it was anything but a homemade clock) constitutes a terroristic threat. It should surprise nobody that his last name is Mohammed.
Now for the interesting part. Irvine’s mayor is a notorious islamophobe. You would not go too wrong thinking of Frank Gaffney.
Mayor Beth Van Duyne has accused mosque leaders of creating separate laws for Muslims and the City Council voted Thursday to endorse a state bill that Muslims say targets their faith.
[…] The mayor stands by her statements, including an interview with former Fox News host Glenn Beck last month, when she said Sheikh and other imams were “bypassing American courts” by offering to mediate disputes among their worshippers according to an Islamic code called Shariah.The mediation is advertised as voluntary, nonbinding and in harmony with the law.
But it has led Van Duyne to back a bill by state Rep. Jeff Leach, R-Plano, that would forbid judges from using foreign law in their rulings.
While the bill does not mention religion, Leach has singled out the Islamic mediation panel as a “problem” it will solve. The wording is largely identical to that in a previous bill pitched by another lawmaker as a way to stop the influence of “large populations of Middle Easterners.”
The kid was also not some random ninth grader. From the story linked on top, bolding mine:
“He just wants to invent good things for mankind,” said Ahmed’s father, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, who immigrated from Sudan and occasionally returns there to run for president. “But because his name is Mohamed and because of Sept. 11, I think my son got mistreated.”
Mohamed is familiar with anti-Islamic politics. He once made national headlines for debating a Florida pastor who burned a Quran.
So you have rabid islamophobes running the city and a nationally known Muslim spokesman living here. I will close with this odd detail from the top story.
They led Ahmed into a room where four other police officers waited. He said an officer he’d never seen before leaned back in his chair and remarked: “Yup. That’s who I thought it was.”
Feel free to make your own conclusions.
‘Til the One Day the Lady Met This Fellow
Since the teaturd rump running the Republican Party has never fully accepted the 14th amendment, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Trump and the other pureblood US Americans running for the nomination (like Carson) are coming out against birthright citizenship. This puts Cruz, Jindal, Rubio and even Santorum in a tough spot, because their purity of essence is shadowed by some doubt or other: Cruz’ no doubt painful and prolonged birth occurred in Canada to a US mom and foreign dad, Jindal’s first incoherent burbles were in the US when this anchor baby secured his Indian parents’ place in the fatherland, Marco Rubio’s first soft, seductive mews’ were the cries of an anchor baby for his Cuban parents, and icky Ricky uttered his first of many annoying mouth noises on US soil at a time when his pop was not a 100% Prime USDA Grade A citizen.
Aside from the obvious irony, what’s laughable is the horseshit standards by which the birthers judge these guys, because of course they have to explain away the possibility that any of them aren’t eligible for the Presidency. Here’s a taste of the justification for Jindal:
So the question comes up about Bobby Jindal’s parents. Both of them were in the United States on student visas. To me the real question is does the candidate have any divided allegiance. So if Jindal’s parents remained steadfastly identifying as Indians and he steadfastly identified as an Indian, even though he was born in the United States and was a citizen, he would not be eligible. Legitimately, he would not be eligible to be President. But given the fact that he changed his name after a character in “The Brady Bunch” — as American as it gets — I don’t think there’s any question in any of those candidates that there’s any dual allegiance.
If only Obama had changed his name to “Greg”, “Peter” or “Bobby”, we’d have avoided years of turmoil over his citizenship.
Update: Piyush just chucked out a stone from his glass house:
We need to end birthright citizenship for illegal immigrants.
— Gov. Bobby Jindal (@BobbyJindal) August 17, 2015
‘Til the One Day the Lady Met This FellowPost + Comments (141)
They were careless people, Tom and Daisy
This will never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever happen, but it’s a good thought (via):
I have a fantasy. It’s that every politician and pundit who goes on TV to discuss the Iran deal is asked this question first: “Did you support the Iraq War, and how has that experience informed your position?”
They were careless people, Tom and DaisyPost + Comments (90)
No One Could Have Predicted
That an anti-Muslim flame-thrower would try to turn his followers’ fear into cash:
KPNX television reporter Brahm Resnik tweeted on Sunday that Ritzheimer had set up a GoFundMe page to raise $10 million to “protect his family or run against” Sen. John McCain (R-AZ).
It is, of course, not impossible that Ritzheimer might be at risk. See Hebdo, Charlie and Theo Van Gogh, e.g. Obviously, none here wish Ritzheimer more than regular ridicule, and it is my devout hope that the Muslim community in this country continues to act as they have so far: emphasizing that sheer dicktitude on display, and demonstrating the virtues of another path:
The contentious nature of Ritzheimer’s protest on Friday didn’t prevent some productive interaction between the two sides. From the Washington Post:
Jason Leger, a Phoenix resident wearing one of the profanity-laced shirts, accepted an invitation to join the evening prayer inside the mosque, and said the experience changed him.
“It was something I’ve never seen before. I took my shoes off. I kneeled. I saw a bunch of peaceful people. We all got along,” Leger said. “They made me feel welcome, you know. I just think everybody’s points are getting misconstrued, saying things out of emotion, saying things they don’t believe.”
Paul Griffin, who had earlier said he didn’t care if his t-shirt was offensive, assured a small crowd of Muslims at the end of the rally that he wouldn’t wear it again.
“I promise, the next time you see me, I won’t be wearing this shirt,” he told one man while shaking his hand and smiling. “I won’t wear it again.”
But to return to the defining thread of this kind of nonsense: whether or not Ritzheimer may indeed face anything more than scorn, you have to be impressed — not in a good way — at hiseffortless pivot to the trough. Rage and bigotry as a profit maximizing strategy.
Poltroon!
ETA: Seems the campaign has been pulled. Ah, well. It’s the thought that counts.
Image: Gustave Courbet, The Man Made Mad with Fear, c 1843-44.
The Great White Fright
Apparently, even discussing the notion of white privilege on America’s college campuses in 2015 is causing a massive fit among your local white nationalist groups, to the point where they’re concern trolling everyone in sight about how awful it is being a white guy.
The National Youth Front’s leader, Angelo John Gage, told TPM in a phone interview Thursday that he believes the bulletin board amounted to discrimination. He repeatedly took issue with the portrayal of white people and Christians as having “privilege.”
“State and federal law says you must keep the school discrimination-free. They’re not doing that,” Gage said. “The Civil Rights Act says you can’t have discrimination based on race, sex, gender — all that stuff. Here comes a board that discriminates against people for their race, sex, gender, religion. It’s the complete opposite.”
He defined privilege instead as something “handed to you.”
“‘Oh you’re black, here you go, here’s a scholarship.’ That’s a privilege,” Gage explained. “Or here’s a racial quota. ‘You’re not qualified but you’re black, so here’s the job’ — otherwise it’s racism.”
Exciting new quantum technology will need to be developed in order to successfully play a violin small enough for Mr. Gage here, so I’m really jazzed about those coming scientific advances that will benefit all of humanity. Perhaps these nano-scale breakthroughs can also be applied to locating all the lost fucks I give about “reverse racism” in a country that was founded on the wholesale slaughter of the people living here and then built with the blood of the enslaved dragged here from an entirely different continent.
And yeah, being a straight cisgender male roughly the size and shape of a refrigerator, the internet reminds me almost daily that there are things I don’t have to worry about as much in my life (even though I’m black.) I’ve learned a lot (mostly when to shut up and listen to others) about basic awareness, which is all this “anti-White” bulletin board seems to involve.
As a side note, aren’t these the same people complaining that making “safe spaces” in colleges and universities is “coddling” students and making them weak, because in college you’re supposed to be constantly challenged by new ideas?
Anyway, it doesn’t shock me that we’re still dealing with stuff like this in 2015, not at all, but at this point the changing demographics of America is just something that certain people are never going to be able to handle, no matter how much you try and educate them.
Obama on the Ferguson Report
PBO addressed the findings of the DOJ’s Ferguson report in a radio interview. Here’s an excerpt of an AP story (published on the local rag’s website):
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama said the type of racial discrimination found in Ferguson, Missouri, is not unique to that police department, and he cast law enforcement reform as a chief struggle for today’s civil rights movement.
Obama said improving civil rights and civil liberties with police is one of the areas that “requires collective action and mobilization” 50 years after pivotal civil rights marches brought change to the country. The president made his first remarks about this week’s Justice Department report of racial bias in Ferguson, which found officers routinely discriminating against blacks by using excessive force.
“I don’t think that is typical of what happens across the country, but it’s not an isolated incident,” Obama told The Joe Madison Radio Show on Sirius XM radio’s Urban View channel. “I think that there are circumstances in which trust between communities and law enforcement have broken down, and individuals or entire departments may not have the training or the accountability to make sure that they’re protecting and serving all people and not just some.”
President Obama will be a relatively young man when he leaves office in a couple of years, and he’ll have a high profile the rest of his life, as all former presidents do. He could do a lot worse than to use that spotlight to promote law enforcement reform as a civil rights issue.
Comments sections of local newspaper sites are generally cesspits of stupidity, and the one under the above article is no exception. Here’s a piece of one turd that bobbed to the surface:
Obama, undoing all Dr Martin Luther King’s progress in less than 8 years. Dr King wanted people to be judged by the content of their character, while all we ever hear from Obama and Holder is white police are violating black people’s rights.
Yeah, that’s the problem — an entire administration focused on oppressing white cops. The comment above would qualify as nut-picking if the sentiment expressed wasn’t so widespread.
The yawning gap between verifiable reality and morons’ perceptions is crazy-making sometimes — not just on this issue but, well, pretty much everything. Obama’s the REAL racist. It snowed so there’s no climate change. Tax cuts for rich people will improve the economy, etc., etc., etc.
No bombardment of lived experience, real-world outcomes or data can penetrate the concrete-and-steel reinforcements encasing these moronic beliefs. There’s no bunker buster of truth.
Oh well. At least it’s Friday. Any big plans for the weekend?