Autoharp virtuoso and all around eccentric guy from Seattle, Bryan Bowers (site) does a tune about expectations. From his LP/CD "Home, Home on the Road".
The goal of any organized terrorist attack is to goad a vastly more powerful enemy into an excessive response. And over the past nine years, the United States has blundered into the 9/11 snare with one overreaction after another. Bin Laden deserves to be the object of our hostility, national anguish and contempt, and he deserves to be taken seriously as a canny tactician. But much of what he has achieved we have done, and continue to do, to ourselves. Bin Laden does not deserve that we, even inadvertently, fulfill so many of his unimagined dreams
If bin Laden did not foresee all this, then he quickly came to understand it. In a 2004 video message, he boasted about leading America on the path to self-destruction. "All we have to do is send two mujaheddin . . . to raise a small piece of cloth on which is written 'al-Qaeda' in order to make the generals race there, to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses."
Through the initial spending of a few hundred thousand dollars, training and then sacrificing 19 of his foot soldiers, bin Laden has watched his relatively tiny and all but anonymous organization of a few hundred zealots turn into the most recognized international franchise since McDonald's. Could any enemy of the United States have achieved more with less?
Could bin Laden, in his wildest imaginings, have hoped to provoke greater chaos? It is past time to reflect on what our enemy sought, and still seeks, to accomplish -- and how we have accommodated him.
Nine years, four national elections, two wars and two presidents since that day, and where are we now as a nation? Broke, deranged and dangerous pretty much sums it up. [...]
Emmylou on the John Fogarty song - from 1992
After Visit from FBI, Loser "Minister" With Checkered Past Decides to Abandon His 15 Minutes of Infamy and Calls Off Quaran Burning. Did the FBI Make Him an Offer He Couldn't Refuse Like Not Charging Him With Some Past Infractions? Hmmm....
The FBI visited Jones at the Dove Center on Thursday, according to Jeffrey Westcott, special agent in charge of the Jacksonville, Florida, bureau. The FBI also visited him a few weeks ago, he said, but would not say what was discussed.
Shane Butcher, who was expelled from the church for disobedience, told the Gainesville Sun he worked for the pastor's TS and Company for up 72 hours a week without pay, and meals were provided from a ''food bank''.
Mr Butcher said punishments for disobedience ranged from cleaning the barnacles off Mr Jones's boat in Tampa, to carrying a life-size wooden cross or writing out all of Psalm 119, the longest chapter in the Bible.
Emma Jones, the pastor's daughter from his first marriage, has described her father's church as a ''cult''.
Pastor Terry Jones runs a used-furniture business out of the church, buying old furniture from around the state, storing it in the church sanctuary and selling it on eBay. Academy students work full-time packaging the furniture; according to the rulebook, lunch breaks are for testing students on their homework.
The center's tax-exempt status was partially revoked because of the apparently for-profit used furniture business.
Conservative blog American Thinker notes that you can't choose your high school classmates either, in response to the "news" that the pastor in Florida threatening to burn a Koran -- presumably at least once -- ate sloppy joes in the same cafeteria with controversial pundit Rush Limbaugh, who is no friend to Muslims or, apparently, cultish book burning fringe figures either.
Now Jones has captured the world’s attention with his book-burning act and finally become “Cape Girardeau’s most prominent export,” at least for this week. He has achieved A-list status, however fleeting. Predictably, Limbaugh responds as though they never walked the same public/socialist school hallways together — calling Jones a “crackpot.” What does it all mean? That Limbaugh has become the envious one, naturally.
I know the conservatives want to cut "entitlements" but literally killing off old people seems extreme even for them. But they seem to think that the elderly are being profligate spenders on health care and so they need to "take responsibility" and pay more so they won't use as much. Anyone who's been around old people and their plethora of health issues knows that's tantamount to killing them.
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US Marines Thursday rescued a German-owned ship seized by pirates in the Gulf of Aden off Somalia after hijackers vainly sought the crew which hid in a secret compartment, the US military and the shipping firm said.
The pirates spent nearly 20 hours searching for the crew and even phoned the shipping company in Germany to ask where they were hidden, a spokesman for the firm said.
"The crew had closed down the engines and locked themselves away in a safe room which the pirates were unable to find," he said.
After searching the ship for three hours the pirates picked up the phone and called the shipping company asking about the crew's whereabouts, the spokesman said.
"They were told the crew was on holiday," he said.
"They then asked how to switch the engines back on, but were told they were broken," he added.
The rescue operation was launched from the USS Dubuque after a Turkish frigate -- part of a multinational force -- responded to a distress signal from the Magellan Star which was sailing from Bilbao in Spain to Singapore.
Obama: Quran burning ‘a recruitment bonanza’ for al Qaeda
Tennessee minister plans to burn Quran, too
“The guy is a nut,” Herbert said. “This is crazy. I am sorry that anyone who names the name of Christ would do this.”
The far Right is making a bid to use the average American's economic frustrations in its campaign against the minorities and immigrants.
Barack Obama's election was a blow to white supremacy. No longer could it be said that the highest reaches of American society were out of bounds to non-whites. It rattled the cages of hardened racists. Protests came fast on the heels of the election. Those who refused to believe that a black man could be President of the U.S. sought fantastic reasons to deny reality: that Obama was not born in the U.S. (a criterion for the office) and that Obama was secretly a Muslim (until now not a disqualification for the office). Having inherited an economic and foreign policy mess, Obama did not articulate a plan that generated confidence among the large section of the American middle class that saw its jobs and its wealth disappear (one indication of the lack of trust in the future is the decline in the birth rate since 2007). The unemployment rate continued to rise, and home foreclosures seemed unstoppable. The general drift in the country was fodder for the growth of small protests, whose presence attracted the attention of Washington's far-Right organisations and the money of the sturdy pillars of the far Right. Former Congressman Dick Armey's FreedomWorks gave its activists to the nascent Tea Party, and rising figures in the Republican Party, such as Sarah Palin, offered themselves as its leaders. They were funded by such figures as David and Charles Koch, owners of Koch Industries, the second largest private firm in the U.S. (after the agro-business behemoth Cargill). The grass-roots protests soon became astroturf events.
Local (in my neck of the woods anyway) legend Stetson Kennedy, best known for his ground-breaking journalism exposing Ku Klux Klan members in the 1940s, is taking on the Qur’an burning church. The 93-year-old Kennedy has vowed to perform a citizen’s arrest of Pastor Terry Jones of Dove World Outreach Center on Sept. 11.
Sounds like Blair can't run away from his own history. First he was pelted with eggs and shoes in Dublin then he canceled an book signing event in London. Now that protesters discovered he was preparing for a party at the posh Tate Modern in London, he canceled his showing there as well.
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By my count, that is thirty men and only three women, and I’m being generous about the “women” part since I’m not sure Phyllis Schlafly even counts as human anymore, much less as a woman. On the other hand, it would probably be worth the price of admission just to listen to Schlafly order Ramesh Ponnuru around all week (“Boy! Cabin boy! Bring mama a mai tai and I’ll give you a shiny new dime.”) while Rich Lowry cruises the piano bars with his new wingmen: Greg “The Gut” Gutfeld and Jonah ” The Much Bigger Gut” Goldberg.
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They said that we just needed to pass this so we could get something better down the road. Perhaps that's true. But for the foreseeable future it's going to a fight just to keep the fairly crappy plan as it is, and I frankly have very little faith that' they'll be able to do it. I certainly hope they do.
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The First Amendment of the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution allows one, nay, encourages one to be a total fucking douchebag asshole in support of whatever fucktarded cause one and one's yahoo posse want to hoot and holler over. It's that simple. It's that cut and dried. And the reason it encourages such behavior is that judging who is a total fucking douchebag asshole and whose cause is fucktarded is in the eye and ear of the beholder. For, indeed, one could have argued that blacks in the Jim Crow south who were peaceably assembling at lunch counters were the assholes. And one could argue the opposite. Many people considered the Chicago Eight a bunch of unAmerican hippie cocksuckers who deserved only imprisonment, if not exile. One could argue that Gregory Lee Johnson was a complete cunt for burning an American flag outside the Dallas City Hall during the Republican National Convention in 1984. But the Supreme Court said in 1989 that his level of cuntishness didn't matter. What mattered was that it was speech (with even Scalia agreeing). And that as such, go fuck yourself with your precious little hurt feelings.
That's the deal. That's why you say rights are rights. As New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who has emerged as this passionate advocate for free speech, said, "The First Amendment protects everybody, and you can't say that we're going to apply the First Amendment to only those cases where we are in agreement." Bloomberg was commenting on Pastor Yosemite Sam's plan to burn a pile of Korans outside his shitty little church in Gainesville, Florida.
And you know who else is right? Fucking Pastor Yosemite Sam himself. Yeah, he's a hateful redneck son of a donkey ass-fucker (more or less). But read what he says on the church's website about why he's burning a Koran:
Republicans are usually eager to trumpet their support for the troops and the war against terror. So why aren't they condemning the Florida pastor who plans to lead his congregation in a Quran-burning bonfire on Sept. 11?
In September 2007, the Senate voted 72-25 to condemn the anti-war group MoveOn.org for running a full-page newspaper ad that denounced Gen. Petraeus, then the U.S. commander in Iraq, as "General Betray Us."
If the senators want to show their genuine support for Petraeus (and not just indulge in an easy political stunt), they should denounce Terry Jones for endangering the troops and providing aid and comfort to the enemy—and, better still, send federal marshals to Gainesville, Fla., to help the local fire chief (who has ordered Jones not to burn the books) maintain public safety.
Comedic horrors thrive, moronism seems to inbreed and fester, and most of it manifests under the banner of a mutant Christian God, or extreme conservatism, or some form of fundamentalist moral outrage that can't exactly be explained but which often makes its most devout adherents appear to be nothing more than frenetic fleas sucking blood from the Great Hound of life. The beast merely scratches and sighs, and keeps right on gnawing the bone of eternity.
Oh, the hardcore lefty fringe has its violent cretins, to be sure, natty Earth Firsters to slavering PETA blood hurlers, eco-terrorists and freako off-grid cults, but those groups never claim to be a vital part of the Democratic Party. Liberalism does not depend on terrible education rates to survive.
The GOP, on the other hand, sucks hard from the teat of ignorant extremism, splashes gleefully in the shallow mud puddles of Sarah Palin's battered grammar, draws much of its power from the worst the human spectacle has to offer. Simply put, the modern Republican Party would not exist without its army of high school dropouts drunk on Rush Limbaugh and sexual dread. It's not difficult to imagine "Burn a Quran Day" becoming a new Texas state holiday.
What to make of it? After all, the world has always been speckled with rabid clowns, an endless parade of spittle-flecked sociopaths that make us shudder and sigh, many with "Reverend" before their names or "Show" just after it. American culture is rife with worldviews so narrow and poorly educated, you can be quickly convinced we are but an inch from permanent insanity.
After all, the Fred Phelps, the Glenn Becks, the Terry Jones of the world are but our basest natures made manifest, the bleakest, most paranoid, lazily ignorant parts of each and every one of us. Deny it at your peril. As Joseph Conrad once wrote, "the bitterest contradictions and the deadliest conflicts of the world are carried on in every individual breast capable of feeling and passion." He should know.
