Month: October 2010

Fox News has its own Rick Sanchez problem. We’ll see if Fox responds the way CNN did.

There does seem to me to be a valid point about extreme Islam’s recent terror record – and its pseudo-religious justification. But religious identities can always be used and abused for extremist violence, as we have seen from Northern Ireland to the West Bank. Moreover, the statement as made is untrue and can only be explained by rank bigotry. There have been Basque terrorists, American terrorists (Timothy McVeigh), Irish terrorists, Basque terrorists, leftist terrorists, Christian terrorists, and on and on.

I think CNN was right to fire Sanchez. I think Fox should fire Brian Kilmeade for exactly the same reason. Will they? Over to Roger Ailes …

Ackerman previews the WikiLeaks Iraq document dump. He writes that the release could come as early as next week and that up to "400,000 reports from 2004 to 2009 could be revealed this time — five times the size of the Afghan document dump." Questions he's hoping to find answers to:

A reader writes:

We don’t even have to come up with a hypothetical situation as a counter-example: anyone who says, “Jews killed Jesus,” is pretty much labeled as an anti-Semite, right?

Except some Romans actually did it. But point taken. Another writes:

I’m trying to imagine O’Reilly protesting the construction of a VFW hall in Oklahoma City because the people who blew up the Murrah Building were veterans.

Keep trying. I think my pro-life terrorist hypothetical works the best. And I can remember a time in Britain when some assumed all terrorists were Irish and Catholic.

A reader writes:

I've had an enormous number of hassles with absentee voting this year – hassles that have really shaken my faith in the basic durability of our electoral system. I e-mailed my registrar for an absentee ballot request form, a form which never arrived.  I e-mailed again, and was told that a form had been mailed on the day after my original e-mail had been sent, and was asked if I wanted to request a second form.  This time the form arrived – a week after I had been told it had mailed – and I filled it out.

I am still waiting for my absentee ballot.

I don't know what to think.  Is someone intercepting my ballot?  Is the county elections commissioner overworked and understaffed, or is he slowing down ballots of those whose names are recorded as voters in certain party primaries?  I live in Chicago; is the vaunted "machine" doing something sneaky at the post office?  I have no way of knowing.

What I do know, though, is that I mailed a Netflix DVD on the same day, and since that day I have received a new Netflix DVD, watched the movie, sent it back, and received ANOTHER Netflix DVD.  So while something seems to be the problem, it is apparently not the mail carriers.

Another:

What I dislike most about absentee voting is the loss of community.  I love lining up at a school or church with my neighbors, most of whom I don't know, and feeling a certain sense of shared purpose and identity.  I'm not a very social person, but voting is one occasion that I want to be around my neighbors.  It's one time when we aren't consumers, but citizens, exercising a fundamental right and responsibility.  I've missed voting twice in 33 years, both minor elections, and I still kick myself about those misses.

More pragmatically, I would hate to vote for a candidate a month before the election and then learn something that would have changed my vote!

Another:

As a Washington state resident, let me tell you that your concern about the effective abandonment of the secret ballot in mail-only voting states is well-merited. My younger brother attends an expensive private college, which my father generously pays for. As a condition of the tuition subsidy, however, my father demands that my brother surrender his signed ballot to him for him to fill out as he chooses. Unsurprisingly, my brother and my father have pretty different political leanings. But my brother has effectively forfeited his right to vote in exchange for $35,000 a year of college tuition.

Serwer's case against the Chamber of Commerce :

I'm not on the SCARY FOREIGN MONEY train, but like Antonin frickin' Scalia, I think democracy works best when people are publicly accountable for their political speech, that anonymity under these circumstances undermines civic responsibility, and that the First Amendment protects your freedom to speak and doesn't confer a freedom not to be criticized, particularly if you're an individual with the means to spend millions to swing the outcome of a political contest. Who is saying something, and who is paying them to say it, matters. 

Steinglass pushes back against Wilkinson's defense of foreign money:

While I think it a moral imperative that foreign individuals be allowed to say what they think about American politics, I think congress should be able to regulate whether, say, the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company could pour unlimited amounts of money into a non-profit called, say, Seattleites Against Pork that runs television advertisements seeking to unseat congressman Norm Dicks. Purely out of opposition to Mr Dicks's rampant earmarks, of course, and not because he tried to torpedo EADS's bid for a Pentagon aerial refueling tanker in favour of Boeing's. That's the way I generally see corporate funding of independent political communication working on the domestic side, and I don't see why it would be any more salubrious with foreign corporations.

Thoreau agrees that impeachment proceedings are unlikely if Republicans retake the House of Representatives, but has some fun speculating on most likely scenarios. Kevin Drum plays along:

Since we're going for style points here, I'm putting my money on a scenario in which South Carolina decides to nullify the healthcare reform law and prohibit its enforcement. Obama nevertheless directs the IRS office in Charleston to dispatch tax delinquency notices to uninsured residents. Governor Nikki Haley instructs the state police to barricade the IRS in order to prevent it from delivering outgoing mail, at which point Obama sends in Army troops to reopen the office. This is taken as a tyrannical abuse of federal power, and Rep. Joe Wilson files immediate impeachment charges. The impeachment bill passes with 220 votes — 201 from the Tea Party, 18 from the rump Republican Party, plus Bobby Bright — and is sent to the Senate. Chief Justice John Roberts presides, wearing robes decorated with the scales of justice stitched in gold lame, but Tea Partiers and Republicans eventually rally only eight Democratic supporters and the charges fail by a single vote. Mary Landrieu, who spends the entire trial vacillating loudly and publicly about the weight of history, eventually provides the one-vote margin of victory and immediately commissions a book about her experience, Keeping Faith: How One Woman Made a Difference in Trying Times.

 

A reader writes:

Pete Wehner draws a terrible analogy to the Bill O'Reilly claim about Muslims. The claim "Catholics are child molesters" undeniably implies that all Catholics, or at least most, are child molesters. The people who claim that saying "Muslims killed us on 9/11" implies that all or most Muslims killed us on 9/11 are dishonest. It would not be physically possible for a group of hundreds of millions of people to have killed us on 9/11.

So what, if anything, do you, Pete Wehner, and Joy Behar pretend to think that this statement means, if not the obvious, which is "The people who killed us on 9/11 were Muslim"?

My reader has a logical point on the analogy as such. But by referring to the Park51 project, O'Reilly was clearly saying that American Muslims are part of the same community, faith and mindset of al Qaeda. That is unfair and it is untrue.

A better analogy would be opposing the construction of a Catholic church on the same bloc as an abortion clinic which had been bombed by some pro-life Catholic fanatics. If asked why he opposed the building of a Catholic church in such a place, someone had said, "Because the people who bombed the same block were Catholics!" we'd say he was a bigot, right?

Scott Morgan thinks Jerry Brown is shooting himself in the foot by opposing Prop 19:

If Brown genuinely has a problem with legalizing marijuana, that's one thing, but if he thinks he's scoring any political points with this position, he's out of his mind. As the above video shows, Whitman is accusing him of being "soft on crime" regardless of his anti-legalization stance. What more could she even say? Getting attacked by Whitman for supporting Prop 19 would actually help him. After all, marijuana legalization is doing better in the polls than either of these fools.