In 2006, I witnessed close-up one of the most shameful events in Canadian journalism. The conservative National Post had received a column by Iranian-born writer Amir Taheri stating that Iran’s parliament had passed a law requiring distinctive clothing (possibly colored badges or stripes) for each of the country’s religious minorities. The Post ran the story, along with its own incendiary commentary, atop Page 1. And illustrated it with photos of Jews wearing stars of David in Nazi death camps.
The story went viral; other right-wing rags and blogs elaborated on it. The next day, the Post retracted and apologized, after receiving a point-by-point rebuttal from Iran’s lone Jewish legislator (the community has been guaranteed one constitutionally for more than a century). No such law had been proposed, much less passed. And it turned out one of the sources Taheri cited didn’t exist. He claimed his words had been taken out of context. They hadn’t. Taheri’s credibility was ruined, or so I assumed.
"It's a prototype; it's not supposed to work. That's why they call it a prototype." - Texas Rangers (2001)
Getting to the DC Auto Show was easy. I drove South on I-95, parked at Greenbelt metro station, then took the green line seven or eight stops to the Mt Vernon Square / Convention Center station. I walked from the station into the convention center just as the show opened. Toyota had a Ride & Drive booth near the ticket area, so I scanned my driver's license and quickly found myself getting into a Prius v - which is called an extended hatchback wagon, but just looks like a longer Prius.
It's commonplace to read here that Obamacare is flawed, could have been better, and we might be better off without it.
What Bernard Avishai says, correctly, is:
“If Obamacare is killed it will....cast doubt on whether Americans will ever be able to hold their fears in check and summon the elementary decency toward the sick that characterizes other democracies.”
By Donal on Sat, 02/04/2012 - 12:35am | Politics, Technology
I stopped by Light Street Cycles today to buy a brighter taillight. The weather's been so unseasonably warm that I'm riding to the light rail, but it's really dark in the morning. The owner showed me all sorts of rechargeable blinkies, and I bought a Knog Boomer. I also signed a petition to complain about building a new street with no bike lanes right next to two college campuses, UMB & MICA. Then I told the owner that I was planning on visiting the Washington Auto Show tomorrow, and being a bike person, she looked puzzled. When I told her I wanted to see the Leaf, she seemed satisfied.
By Michael Wolraich on Fri, 02/03/2012 - 4:06pm | Politics, Humor & Satire, Religion
The Christian Anti-Defamation Commission (CADC) is a not-for-profit 501(c) (3) Education Corporation whose purpose it is to become the first-in-mind champion of Christian religious liberty, domestically and internationally, and a national clearing house and first line of response to anti-Christian defamation, bigotry, and discrimination.
As America slides down the slippery slope into secular abyss, Christianity itself has come under attack. Nowhere is the assault on religious liberty more ruthless than in our schools. Just last month, a malicious little atheist forced a Rhode Island high school to remove its students' inspirational prayer from the wall of the gymnasium.
But one brave man refuses to stand by as the secular state annihilates our childrens' religious liberties. Rev. Gary L. Cass, president of the celebrated Christian Anti-Defamation Commission, has recently launched a new organization called DefendStudents.org, which is dedicated to defending religious liberty in our schools.
The environmental activist Hazel Wolf once wrote that if one wanted to convince an economist, one had to talk to them like an economist. In the contentious atmosphere of socio-political discourse, this is often easier said than done. The principles and fundamental assumptions of the economist are in the grand scheme of things are relatively easy to grasp. The challenge becomes how to translate one's stance through the prism of those principles and assumptions.
When we confront, however, the vast scope of socio-political ideologies the situation gets a whole lot messier.
As you read this, millions of Americans who desperately want to work either cannot find employment at all, or cannot find the quantity and quality of work they need to meet their own needs and the needs of their families. This is real suffering. The unemployed are real flesh-and-blood people, not just fractions of percentage points on Labor Department spreadsheets.
At the same time, we have tremendous unmet social needs. Any well-informed high school student can point to large, daunting national challenges that we sorely need to address, but that we are not addressing with anything approaching the urgency and commitment that the gravity of the challenges would seem to demand of us.
By Michael Wolraich on Thu, 02/02/2012 - 6:51pm | Politics, World Affairs
When will the Israelis attack? That's what the world has wondered ever since 1984, when an anonymous source predicted that Iran would develop a nuclear bomb within two years.
Twenty-eight years later, Israeli may have finally set a date for its long-awaited assault according to United States Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.
Panetta reportedly told David Ignatius of the Washington Post that Israel is likely to strike Iran sometime in April, May, or June of this year.
According to Panetta, the Israelis believe that Iran will soon enter what they call the "zone of immunity," which sounds like either a science fiction episode or a game of tag. Soon after the Post reported Panetta's remarks, the Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak confirmed that the Israelis were very concerned about Iran's imminent arrival in the Immunity Zone.
But the report raises an intriguing question:
Why did Leon Panetta announce the schedule for Israeli's surprise attack?
There's been a lot of punditty chatter about what the Romney vs. Gingrich struggles means: insiders vs. outsiders, establishment vs. Tea Party, elite vs. non-elite, whatever. But listening to that clip of Gingrich attacking John King, listening the open, undiluted pleasure that Gingrich takes in his own rage, made it clear to me what this is really about. The Republican primary voters are electing their political family a new Drunk Dad. And they want to be sure they get the right kind.
Main Stream Media just reported (6:30 AM CT) that the Groundhog saw his shadow today and that means that there will be at least five more weeks of winter (it used to be six weeks, but with global warming and all!) and billionaires will continue to fund people like Newton Gingrich.
So the more things do not change, the more things stay the same (what?).
The Susan G. Komen foundation hours ago pulled the money they grant to Planned Parenthood to provide mammograms citing a congressional investigation of Planned Parenthood. I predict this is going to turn into an epic failure on the part of the Foundation.
What do you think will happen? Deciding to pull funding for a program that helps low income women receive mammograms, seems like you might be penalizing the people who most need these services . Women are going to be completely outraged at your actions, as once again our health care needs are subject to politicization, and now an organization that once helped is assisting those who would hold our needs hostage. I am dumbfounded at your reprehensible decision that jeopardizes the health of poor women. You know you going to have to reverse this horrendous decision, right, you have to know this, because the announcement has caused what now appears to be a mini-firestorm, but by tomorrow will be totally out of control. The longer this goes on the worse your publicity, and the more money the Foundation loses. But it isn't just money that the Foundation is set to lose here, it has also suddenly lost the air of non-partisanship, and the appearance of a willingness to participate in the politicization of reproductive health, and in doing so, you were willing to sacrifice those who can't fight back.
I was nine years old in April 1974 when the images of Patty Hearst -- newspaper heiress and Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) kidnapping victim -- wielding an M1 carbine while robbing a San Francisco bank with the SLA splashed over the news. Because I was nine, I wasn't aware of the whole back story or who the SLA or Randolph Hearst were. I knew Ms. Hearst was some kind of an "important person" who normally doesn't go around robbing banks. I was aware of the debate as to whether she had voluntarily joined in the SLA or whether she had been somehow brainwashed into doing so. And somewhere along the line, I became aware that Ms. Hearst's apparent new revolutionary tangent was purported by some to be a consequence of the Stockholm Syndrome.
The promoters of the Australian Open should be awfully pleased. Often—too often—the women's final in a major is a dud. Usually the semis are better matches, and one player freezes up to play a bad match in the final. But even though the 2012 women's final was a 6-3, 6-0 rout, a new Number One was crowned, and the match wasn't completely awful. Maria Sharapova wasn't dumping serves into the net, was returning well, and hit a few winners—she was simply led into a boatload of errors. The NY Times' Straight Sets blog offered the theory that Victoria Azarenka won mostly because she hit with more topspin than Sharapova. Even though she obviously does hit with topspin, Sharapova is considered a flat hitter in the modern game. My feeling was that Azarenka covered the court a lot better than Sharapova, while hitting the ball just as powerfully (and shrieking just as loudly).
The men's semifinals were excellent, and the final may be one for the ages. The Atlantic speculates that this final may portend the new look of men's tennis: as an endurance sport. Even given that both Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal took a lot of time between points, the match took almost six hours, and many of the points involved over twenty shots, even thirty shots. A popular tennis coach once noted that, statistically speaking, for the average player the point will end on the next shot. For these guys, it seems that no matter how well they hit the ball, the point will go on at least another six shots. Part of that is because the tennis authorities have slowed down the courts, and part of that is because these guys are very fast and very fit, and part is because they are hitting with extremely exaggerated topspin.
Before the process of deconstructing Willard Romney began in earnest a month ago it was difficult to objectify that special world of Finance which exists as a form of supra-capitalism I choose to call Financiocracy---a Confederation of institutions and individuals who in a multi-national context make money with money.
The Confederation exists in an ethos which is literally not anchored to our traditional form of locale-specific capitalism. One of the most vivid examples of such un-connectedness is when, in the invention of Mortgage Backed Securities, sold and traded world wide, home mortgages in the U.S.were severed from the established grounding of actual paperwork and signatures, and the physical recording of mortgages in the municipalities where the asset resides, a centuries-old practice, was violated.
Romneyville crystalizes one aspect of this brave new world of finance so discreetly and clearly that it is likely to remain as Exhibit A of a practice known as Private Equity for a generation to come. Romneyville rests on several important privileges extracted from the government and populace of the U.S (see below).
I just read a snippet from an old article in Essence Magazine indicating that researchers have uncovered new information suggesting that Cleopatra may not have been Black. The article brought back to mind a piece I read by Earl Ofari Hutchinson many years ago entitled, Whose Black History To Believe? In that very insightful article Hutchinson points out that black history tends to be given either short shrift by traditional historians, or is exaggerated beyond all recognition by historians of a more Afrocentric persuasion. His premise is that both approaches do a disservice to Africa American history. His analysis shows that African Americans would be better served by a more balanced interweaving of African American history into the fabric of American history as a whole.
By Donal on Sun, 01/29/2012 - 10:32pm | Food & Drink, Health
While watching various matches of the Australian Open, we were bombarded by those videos from the Corn Refiner's Association claiming that your body can't tell the difference between cane sugar and high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) - so they must be the same. But consider that your body can't tell the difference between air and carbon monoxide, either, and low concentrations of CO will kill you.
We need to let President Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, (audience boos) and my dear friend the chairman of the Democrat National Committee, we need to let them know that Florida ain't on the table," West said. "Take your message of equality of achievement, take your message of economic dependency, take your message of enslaving the entrepreneurial will and spirit of the American people somewhere else. You can take it to Europe, you can take it to the bottom of the sea, you can take it to the North Pole, but get the hell out of the United States of America...
Following cheers, West added, "Yeah I said 'hell.'"
Moments after the quote was mentioned on Twitter, former Reid spokesman Jim Manley responded via his own Twitter feed: "Me to allen west. You first asshole.
How did we reach such a level of discussion that there is no agreement as to the starting point of discussion between the red and the white, the conservative and the liberal, the republican and the democrat?
In any wars of words in an election season, truth is often an early casualty. The war of words between Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich is no exception. The two Republican front-runners are currently telling each other carefully fabricated stories about their own pasts that cover tracks and reinvent reputations.[1] But in the end that is less damaging to the entire democratic process than the accidental and less contrived stories that, in passing, they are also telling us. Right now, as they attack each other with increasing venom, the four remaining Republican presidential candidates are collectively rewriting a critical part of our immediate past – and in the process are seriously misleading us as they battle with each other.
Yesterday, the New York Times' Straight Sets blog raved about the intensity of the Nadal-Federer semifinal, but this morning's match between Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray was a dogfight. I woke up at 4:30AM to a score of Djokovic leading 6-3, 3-5, but Novak fell behind on serve and was broken to lose the second set. All even.
The third set was very tight. The first game, Djokovic serving, took over ten minutes. Murray was serving crisply and controlling the baseline rallies with tightly-angled forehands. Reportedly suffering from a "stuffy nose," Djokovic looked tired and far less confident than usual. He wasn't serving that well, and repeatedly had to fight back to hold his own service games. Nole did well to reach a tiebreak, but couldn't hold off Murray. Andy only needed to keep going and take the fourth set. Crikey, even Ivan Lendl cracked a smile.
The promoters of the Australian Open should be awfully pleased. Often—too often—the women's final in a major is a dud. Usually the semis are better matches, and one player freezes up to play a bad match in the final. But even though the 2012 women's final was a 6-3, 6-0 rout, a new Number One was crowned, and the match wasn't completely awful. Maria Sharapova wasn't dumping serves into the net, was returning well, and hit a few winners—she was simply led into a boatload of errors. The NY Times' 
