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Thursday, April 22, 2010
This blog is now located at http://multiculturalperspective.blogspot.com/. You will be automatically redirected in 30 seconds, or you may click here. For feed subscribers, please update your feed subscriptions to http://multiculturalperspective.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default. Republicans for bank failures The answer is that letting banks fail—as opposed to seizing and restructuring them—is a bad idea for the same reason that it’s a bad idea to stand aside while an urban office building burns. In both cases, the damage has a tendency to spread. In 1930, U.S. officials stood aside as banks failed; the result was the Great Depression. In 2008, they stood aside as Lehman Brothers imploded; within days, credit markets had frozen and we were staring into the economic abyss. So it’s crucial to avoid disorderly bank collapses, just as it’s crucial to avoid out-of-control urban fires. Gun fanatics threaten Obama And the Oath Keepers are sponsoring the march. This is a group of right-wingers--many of whom serve in the military or police forces--who pledge to disobey what they regard as "unconstitutional" orders from an increasingly repressive government. Their view of the government is rather dark. They vow not to "obey any order to blockade American cities, thus turning them into giant concentration camps" and not to "obey any order to force American citizens into any form of detention camps." As if the Obama administration is on the verge of declaring martial law and rounding up the citizenry. How the Church became patriarchal St. Paul refers in Romans 16 to a first-century woman named Junia as prominent among the early apostles, and to a woman named Phoebe who served as a deacon. The Apostle Junia became a Christian before St. Paul did (chauvinist translators have sometimes rendered her name masculine, with no scholarly basis). Yet over the ensuing centuries, the church reverted to strong patriarchal attitudes, while also becoming increasingly uncomfortable with sexuality. Tallying Bush's lies Charges and Countercharges: Did Bush Knowingly Mislead the U.S. Into War With Iraq? False Pretenses Following 9/11, President Bush and seven top officials of his administration waged a carefully orchestrated campaign of misinformation about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. ![]() Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Open letter to conservatives Your party--the GOP--and the conservative end of the American political spectrum have become irresponsible and irrational. Worse, it's tolerating, promoting and celebrating prejudice and hatred. Let me provide some examples--by no means an exhaustive list--of where the Right as gotten itself stuck in a swamp of hypocrisy, hyperbole, historical inaccuracy and hatred. When Republicans became zealots It started with minorities: they left the party. Then women; they divorced the GOP and sent it to sleep on the couch. Then, the young folks; they left and are leaving the Republican Party in droves. Then, someone stood up and told my niece and my grandchild that they are not fully Americans—just second class Americans because they are homosexual. They wished hell and damnation upon my loved ones just because they are different. Are we led by priests or are we led by rational politicians? Now, we have became the party of the Old Straight White Folks. We should rename the Republican Party the OSWF rather than the GOP. Republicans follow Nixon's strategy In this analysis, the Republicans believe they can reclaim the lucrative levers of national authority by making the country as ungovernable as possible while a Democrat is in the White House, essentially holding governance hostage until they are restored to power. Then, the Democrats are expected to behave as a docile opposition "for the good of the country" (and usually do). The "destroy Obama" game plan tracks most closely with Newt Gingrich's strategy for undermining Bill Clinton 16 years ago. But today's strategy also traces back to Richard Nixon's sabotage of President Lyndon B. Johnson's Vietnam peace talks in 1968 and Ronald Reagan's October Surprise gambit against President Jimmy Carter's Iran hostage negotiations in 1980. ![]() Monday, April 12, 2010
Why Tea Party extremism is worse Ponder this for a moment. At an event officially sanctioned (and cheered on) by the House Republicans, the assembled were calling the president and the majority of Congress "Nazis." Nothing of this sort occurred during the Bush-Cheney years. This was a low moment in American history--and it marked the GOP's capitulation to the extremism of its Tea Party base. Silence not only implies consent; it can be read as encouragement. And words can lead to action. If someone truly believes Obama and the Democrats are akin to Nazis, what would be the appropriate course of action to take? Brad Pitt's character in "Inglorious Basterds" knows: You kill 'em. To be blunt: If protesters are shouting "Nazis! Nazis!" and GOP leaders are supporting the demonstration, what signal could that send to a possible violent nutcase? ![]() Republicans believe in free lunches The Great Recession and the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan have not been savage enough to reintroduce the G.O.P. to reality. One of the reasons so many conservative Republican absurdities became actual U.S. policy was the intellectual veneer slapped upon them by right-wing think tanks and commentators. The grossest nonsense was made to seem plausible to a lot of people—people who wanted to believe in a free lunch. When Mr. Reagan told the country that “government is the problem,” the intellectual handmaidens of the corporate and financial elite were right there to explain in exhaustive detail why that was so. Greenspan = captain of Titanic Greenspan was testifying to the commission trying to pry loose the still incomplete story of how the American economy was driven at full speed into its iceberg. He was eager to portray himself as an innocent bystander to forces beyond his control. In his rewriting of history, his clout in Washington was so slight that he was ineffectual at “influencing the Congress.” The “roots” of the crisis, he lectured, dated back to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In other words: Wherever the buck stops, you had better believe it’s not within several thousand miles of the Oracle. As he has previously said in defending his inability to spot the colossal bubble, “Everybody missed it—academia, the Federal Reserve, all regulators.” That, of course, is not true. In last Sunday’s Times, one of those who predicted the bubble’s burst—Michael Burry, an investor chronicled in “The Big Short” by Michael Lewis—told in detail of how Greenspan and others in power “either willfully or ignorantly aided and abetted” the reckless boom and the ensuing bust. Islamic and Christian women stay subordinate I was puzzling over that one when it hit me: As a Catholic woman, I was doing the same thing. I, too, belonged to an inbred and wealthy men’s club cloistered behind walls and disdaining modernity. I, too, remained part of an autocratic society that repressed women and ignored their progress in the secular world. I, too, rationalized as men in dresses allowed our religious kingdom to decay and to cling to outdated misogynistic rituals, blind to the benefits of welcoming women’s brains, talents and hearts into their ancient fraternity. To circumscribe women, Saudi Arabia took Islam’s moral codes and orthodoxy to extremes not outlined by Muhammad; the Catholic Church took its moral codes and orthodoxy to extremes not outlined by Jesus. Beck admits Fox isn't news ![]() Sunday, April 11, 2010
Video: US troops kill Iraqi civilians A major reason there are hundreds of thousands of dead innocent civilians in Iraq, and thousands more in Afghanistan, is because this is what we do. This is why so many of those civilians are dead. What one sees on that video is how we conduct our wars. That's why it's repulsive to watch people--including some "liberals"--attack WikiLeaks for slandering The Troops, or complain that objections to these actions unfairly disparage the military because "our guys are the good guys" and they act differently "99.99999999% of the time." That is blatantly false. Just as was true of the deceitful attempt to depict the Abu Ghraib abusers as rogue "bad apples" once their conduct was exposed with photographs (when the reality was they were acting in complete consistency with authorized government policy), the claim that what was shown on that video is some sort of outrageous departure from U.S. policy is demonstrably false. In a perverse way, the typical morally depraved neocons who are justifying these killings are actually being more honest than those trying to pretend this is some sort of rare and unusual event: those who support having the U.S. invade and wage war on other countries are endorsing precisely this behavior. ![]() Tuesday, April 06, 2010
Teabaggers are like Klansmen It's this multi-directional loathing that animates the charges that the Tea Party movement is, by its basic nature, racist. (That plus, you know, all the really obvious racism.) In their evocations of a lost, "simpler" past and a "real America," this is what the Tea Party folks are talking about: themselves in the center, and the looters, thieves and degenerates all around them. It’s pretty close to the outlook that characterized 19th-century southern populism. That movement was both an uprising against a capitalist system that the populists saw as rigged from above and also, eventually, virulently racist. Tea Party ideology also closely echoes the belief system of the revived Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s. This second iteration of the Klan was a movement of small businesspeople, skilled workers, clerks and the like, who were convinced that the government and high finance had formed a conspiracy against them with the poor, Jews, Catholic immigrants and African-Americans. Beck perverted Jesus's message Wallis says Beck compared those churches to Communists and Nazis. Wallis says at least 20,000 people have already responded to his call to boycott Beck. He says Beck is confusing his personal philosophy with the Bible. "He wants us to leave our churches, but we should leave him," Wallis says of Beck. "When your political philosophy is to consistently favor the rich over the poor, you don't want to hear about economic justice." Bush's campaign of misrepresentation Or let's put it this way: Can Wehner, Rove and Douthat state that Bush carefully reviewed the intelligence in order to present to the public an accurate depiction of what was known and not known about the WMD threat possibly posed by Saddam? Bush and his aides were looking for ammo. They wanted this war--and they made unsubstantiated claims to get it. The truth was not a priority. ![]() Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Americans for healthcare reform: 50-47% Think about it this way: if we were talking about Social Security or Medicare, how do you think "repeal and replace" would poll? It would poll terribly, because it sounds like a bunch of nonsense. That's the same challenge Republicans will begin to face. They are starting out from behind with a strategy that is destined to fail. It's not an enviable position to be in. Pope ignores pedophilia The sin-crazed “Rottweiler” was so consumed with sexual mores—issuing constant instructions on chastity, contraception, abortion—that he didn’t make time for curbing sexual abuse by priests who were supposed to pray with, not prey on, their young charges. American bishops have gotten politically militant in recent years, opposing the health care bill because its language on abortion wasn’t vehement enough, and punishing Catholic politicians who favor abortion rights and stem cell research. They should spend as much time guarding the kids already under their care as they do championing the rights of those who aren’t yet born. ![]() Columnist proves Bush's lies Can Wehner, Rove and Douthat state that Bush carefully reviewed the intelligence in order to present to the public an accurate depiction of what was known and not known about the WMD threat possibly posed by Saddam? It's telling that Wehner does not attempt to concoct a response to that query. The bottom line is undeniable: Bush and Cheney repeatedly issued false statements to guide the nation to war, and they made no concerted efforts to guarantee that they were providing the public with the most realistic depiction of the threat. They were not interested in an honest debate; they wanted war. Christians infected with prosperity gospel It's a disease that's rampant in the culture and in the church. People are inundated with messages from powerbrokers, media, entertainment, TV evangelists and bestselling authors that say joy is inextricably bound up in material prosperity, physical health, relational success and all the comforts and conveniences Western society provides. For most people, joy and suffering are incompatible, Storms noted. Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Sowell goes off deep end With politicians now having not only access to our most confidential records, and having the power of granting or withholding medical care needed to sustain ourselves or our loved ones, how many people will be bold enough to criticize our public servants, who will in fact have become our public masters? This is Sowell's nightmare: Nancy Pelosi poring over your individual medical records--especially if you've written something critical about her in your blog. Worse, if you need an operation, she'll be able to issue an order: no treatment for you! Consequently, the entire population will turn into a mass of meek and sniveling sycophants who dare not utter a negative peep about the people in Washington, lest they receive a death warrant from those they criticize. So we're not talking merely about turning the United States into a European-type state--the fear expressed by so many conservative opponents of the health care reform law. Sowell is predicting the complete enslavement of the American public. Beck to Christians: Get out! I'm begging you, your right to religion and freedom to exercise religion and read all of the passages of the Bible as you want to read them and as your church wants to preach them . . . are going to come under the ropes in the next year. If it lasts that long it will be the next year. I beg you, look for the words 'social justice' or 'economic justice' on your church Web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words. Now, am I advising people to leave their church? Yes. But Glenn Beck is saying something else: "Leave Christianity." Again and again in the Gospels, Jesus mentions our responsibility to care for the poor, to work on their behalf, to stand with them. In fact, when asked how his followers would be judged he doesn't say that it will be based on where you worship, or how you pray, or how often you go to church, or even what political party you believe in. He says something quite different: It depends on how you treat the poor. ![]() More healthcare = longer lifespans Most of American history has seen a steady increase in access to first-rate health care. But we’re now seeing a reversal of this long trend. A new report has found that one-quarter of Californians are now uninsured. The reason for the declining access? Our politicians’ ignominious failure over the last half-century to provide universal health care, despite the efforts of Democratic and Republican presidents alike to pass it. It’s astonishing that Republicans today are lined up overwhelmingly against a health care package that is more modest and moderate than one that Richard Nixon proposed in the early ’70s. Big brother in blue The stops themselves are an outrage and a continuing affront to black and Hispanic New Yorkers, who are the ones most frequently singled-out by the police for this public humiliation. But Speaker Christine Quinn and Council Member Peter Vallone Jr., the committee’s chairman, are focusing on the computerized files that the Police Department is keeping on people who are stopped but found to have done nothing at all wrong. This is not a small problem. The cops are making more than a half-million of these stops every year. A vast majority of the people targeted—close to 90 percent—are completely innocent. They are not arrested. They are not given a summons. After enduring a mortifying public encounter with the police—which frequently requires the targets to sprawl face down on the sidewalk or spread themselves against a wall or over the hood of a car to be searched—they are sent on their way. |
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