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Extremism
To block the construction of any mosque is to glorify Al-Qeda
Michael Daly nails it with today's op/ed piece. From It's an emotional issue, but blocking the Ground Zero mosque is just what the terrorists want:
Even now, after all our mistakes, after we let Bin Laden slip away in Afghanistan and lost our focus going into Iraq, Al Qaeda is still more a gang than an army.
It is still so small that its new operations chief, Adnan Shukrijumah, met personally with the knuckleheads who planned to bomb the subway last September.
When the previous operations chief, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was captured, he was not surrounded by a host of terrorists. He had nary a bodyguard when he was rousted from bed in his underwear at the house where he was hiding out like what he was, a murderer on the run.
We have since built him into a figure of such awesome evil that we are afraid to try him in downtown Manhattan like what he is, a murderer who has been caught.
We have glorified Al Qaeda in the same way, but to reach its ultimate goal, it still needs us to convince the majority of Muslims that the war on terror is really a war on Islam.
We are only helping the bad guys if we declare that the religious freedom at the core of our democracy does not apply to a mosque too close to Ground Zero. read more »
Repost: Protest today at the Mormon Temple
As we asked some days ago, please come out today to protest the hateful and bigoted policies of the Mormon "church".
In the wake of the passage in California of the bigoted Proposition Eight, which took away the right of same-sex couples to marry, an effort bankrolled by the Mormon "church", protests are taking place nationwide.
In New York City, please join our friends and allies outside the Mormon temple on the Upper West Side.
Wednesday, Nov 12, 125 Columbus Ave at 65th Street
6:30pm to 8pm
The Mormon "church", apparently oblivious of its own rather checkered sexual past, has been at the forefront of hateful, ignorant anti-gay bigotry for the last decade. It's time to fight back.
And while you're at it, sign the petition to remove the "church's" tax exempt status here.
Update: It gets better: Mormons are resigning from their church en masse. Join them.
Why republicans lost (and will continue to lose)
A week after the triumph of America over republicanism, it would appear that the vanquished and humiliated other side isn't taking their crushing defeat all that well. Witness this gem offered by a republican in one of our comment threads.
As for our right-wing ideology being discredited, it has not been. The masses are selfish and want money for nothing and and chicks for free and lots of cheap gas and the left has promised to deliver all that. That is why Obama has been elected. For that reason and because he is Black. He will fail to deliver like all the other Black lefties who have gone before him.
Shorter him (they're always him): we didn't lose because of anything we did wrong. We lost because the American people are stupid and greedy.
Lest you think that this is an isolated opinion, it's not.
Predictably taking the hardest line were the braying tribunes of the right-wing plebs, Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter. The McCain-detesting Coulter wrote, "The only good thing about McCain is that he gave us a genuine conservative, Sarah Palin. He's like one of those insects that lives just long enough to reproduce so that the species can survive. That's why a lot of us are referring to Sarah as 'The One' these days. Like Sarah Connor in 'The Terminator,' Sarah Palin is destined to give birth to a new movement."
Limbaugh managed to refrain from comparing McCain to an insect, but he joined Coulter in anointing Palin the future queen of the Republican Party. Noting that a Rasmussen poll showed that 69 percent of GOP voters love Palin, Limbaugh sneered, "So all of you wizards of smart on our side, all of you intellectualoids who think that Palin was a drag, the party loves Sarah Palin. The vast majority of conservative Republicans love Sarah Palin. Twenty percent of Republicans who say she hurt the ticket, you are probably the ones that need to go and walk and join across the aisle with the others that you find so much more palatable because they are able to communicate and they are writers and they are intellectual ... The party loves her."
These are the roots of enduring defeat. Continue doing all those things you've been doing, the things that voters overwhelmingly rejected, and then go and insult those voters.
I'm sure that will work. Please, republicans, continue down this path.
Finally somebody in the national netroots who gets Rudy Giuliani
And that guy is Ezra Klein, You don't need to make anything up, invent any scandals, concoct any problems. You just have to honestly evaluate the words coming out of Giuliani's mouth, the rhetoric coming out of his campaign, and the advisers circling the candidate. It's all there. There's no blowjob, I know, but there's a real threat, and the media should, in its role as guardian of some minimal level of competency within the political process, be pointing out that this man is dangerous, his statements scary, his campaign unsettling, and his advisers insane. His is not a normal candidacy, and so long as the reporters continue treating it as the equivalent of Hillary Clinton's campaign rather than Pat Buchanan's, we're in trouble.
