The Temptation of St. Carrie

WTF? a third-rate skank 4 Jesus from the lamer portions of San Diego County utters a barely intelligible defense of what she learned in youth group between fingerbangings in an effing beauty contest and now she’s the hero of the Right? it is as if Joe the Plumber and Miss South Carolina have merged.

does she even realize that nobody of any worth to society except homosexual men (and now hipsters) has ever WATCHED the Miss America Pageant?

WTF do we even care abt this story????? unlike in the days when anita bryant ejaculated messages about the family, today GLBT Americans are relatively safe and have massive public support across the civilized portions of the nation. if HRC gave up this h8 crymez joke and actually campaigned for civil rights (what we pay them for) the issue would be solved and Carrie Prejean and all her friends (the idiots, not the conservatives, though there is a fair amount of overlap) would be deported to a reservation in Nevada.

Concerned that we are too concerned about a stupid whore who’s this week’s head of the crazy Southern (and Fundie/MRMN/TradCath) party.

UPDATE: HRC is wasting no time getting back to doing absolutely nothing this session. glad to see the meaningless Shepard Bill may finally become a law. Meanwhile, my br0 can get evicted cuz he’s ghey.

Filed under: Politics, Carrie Prejean, gay rights, GLBT rights, LGBT Rights, marriage equality

A Latin American leftist with a brain

Ecuador’s Rafael Correa seems to be a pretty chill bro, his contempt for the media notwithstanding. Adbusters has an article which, underneath the layers of pan-leftist Ph.D-speak, makes a point:

Ecuador’s act could be the beginning of a revolution in which leaders of developing countries realize that their obligation is to defend the well-being of citizens and not to submit to Western-imposed neoliberalist policy. Ecuador may not be wealthy, powerful or even politically relevant to most of the developed world, but it is now a beacon of strength for the dozens of countries spending more on loan interest than on health care and education. By choosing people before money and life before debt, Ecuador is beginning to make cracks in the capitalist system.

I believe the problems lie not with capitalism itself, but with the Friedman-Hayek ideological form of capitalism that has infected much of the Western intelligentsia. Liberalism and capitalism are actually the road to social democracy, as Bernstein pointed out. Nonetheless, a pretty good article on a country the papers don’t cover anymore because they have no idea how to run a business.

Speaking of the idiots who run the papers, the New York Times is trying to be hip by printing a quasi-interesting blog meme from several weeks ago. Hopefully some website arises which attempts to do good reporting, or the papers learn how to use the internet, like the rest of us did in 1995, and somehow manages to save itself.

Still, congrats to Adbusters for almost seeing geopolitics as something not controlled by a secretive cabal of the BBC, Israelis, and Americans (especially the Jewish ones).

Filed under: Politics, Ecuador

Green conservatism

Sully weighs in on climate change:

My own preference is to avoid the bureaucracy of cap-and-trade in favour of a serious carbon and petrol tax that would shift the economic balance towards noncarbon energy. If you gave back the tax revenue through a tax refund, you could avoid depressing growth and help cushion the working poor from higher petrol costs. You need no new bureaucracy to do this – and you’d help drive green decision-making away from top-down government towards more bottom-up human-level calculations.

It’s not as satisfying as a massive government regulatory programme. It tries to counter the worst-case scenarios without assuming them. It hopes that a carbon-hostile tax would prompt a technological breakthrough to solve the problem. And it’s easily reversible if needs be. It’s the kind of green policy that is neither in denial nor in hysteria, and it’s a rough balance between the planet’s needs and humanity’s. Think of it as innovation over regulation – a way to manage the contradictions of conservatism and environmentalism after all.

I too favor the straightforward method, which might actually do something and can actually be modified over time. Nonetheless it has no chance of passing. While often pointing the GOP’s tight connections with major industries, environmentalists are less apt to criticize Democratic connections to labor. And on the most important issue of our time, both seem finally united against prudence, justice, and good government.

Filed under: L'Ecologie, Politics

Obama to speak in Utah Irredenta

Obama is going to promote his anti-reality plan today in one the larger burghs of the Mormon Empire:

Obama will announce his Housing Save shortly, from the “where?” suburb of Phoenix called “Mesa, Arizona.” Mesa is one of those places that had 722 residents in the year 1900. Now, it’s got nearly a half-million people, most of them added since 1980. Like the rest of Phoenix and Las Vegas and San Diego and the “Inland Empire” and the entirety of Florida, Mesa has been foreclosed upon, by Fate.

Basically, all the silly towns made up by developers in the ’70s on the ruins of failed 1850s Mormon settlements are probably going to return to desert, like they should; people will go back to living in places where you can survive without air conditioning, vaguely-worded contracts, and Mexican slave-labor. The Church won’t sell the half of Florida it still owns, and Las Vegas will revert to being a Cove Fort-style place for your grandparents to torment you on the way to/from L.A., except controlled by the Mafia. Even if Obama succeeds in saving people who will do anything a realtor tells them to do, concern for the environment and/or actual environmental devastation will halt desert growth, meaning that bands will once again regularly stop in inhabitable Western cities like Salt Lake, Denver, and Missoula instead of imaginary places like Taos, Tempe, or Henderson. Coachella and Burning Man will be relocated to Ketchum and Provo (with “man” replaced by “third-rate cow college”).

[Wonkette]

Filed under: Politics, Utah Politics

Denmark sells out

Remember the Danes, how they saved the vast majority of Danish Jews during the Holocaust, whose number one export was once moral courage? Well, not anymore:

A number of school administrators have come forth in recent days to confirm that they recommend Jewish children should not enrol at their schools….

On Monday, headmaster Olav Nielsen of Humlehave School in Odense publicly admitted he would refuse Jewish parents’ wish to place their child at his school….

Other headmasters have now come forth to support Nielsen’s position, adding that they are putting the child’s safety first.

Well there goes centuries of rigorous liberal thought!! But remember, kids, this is anti-Zionism, so it’s okay, as it only assumes 45% of Jewry is responsible for everything bad that has ever happened.

Filed under: Politics, antisemitism

Haha Iran makes same mistake twice

Juan Cole explains why Khatami’s second time around will also accomplish nothing:

Khatami has many flaws. He is at base a Khomeinist and so supports a regime that has a poor record on human rights. He may have high principles himself, but so far he has been relatively ineffectual in getting them implemented. His unwillingness to risk a crisis by pushing hard liners too far may contribute to social peace, but it also gives the hard liners a veto on reform.

All this election will do is give some legitimacy to the regime, which has suffered from very low voter turnout recently. By voting for a proven incompetent quasi-liberals, all Iranian liberals will do is put themselves backward. If you are reading this and can vote in Iran, don’t. Then read this guy.

Filed under: Politics, Iran

Big Labor

Tula Connell of the AFL-CIO explains:

What do Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have in common? They both oppose provisions in the economic recovery package that would ensure that taxpayer dollars are spent on products that are made in America-to the maximum extent possible.

This bizarre brand of left-revanchism continues to undermine my hopes that Obama and the Hill Dems can actually make progress on the most important issue of our time, Climate Change. If this kind of meaningless crap can get the great unwashed of the Midwest to start fighting against the Green movement, the Democrats won’t have the spine to stand up to them.

While I was volunteering with an enviromnental organization last year, the union-industry reps came in and gave us all oxymoronic hats and t-shirts. Interestingly, these “Clean Coal” products were all made in China.

[UPDATE: It appears America’s Power is actually just industry science-deniers, no labor involved. But I still am worried that labor will be more AFL, less CIO.]

Filed under: L'Ecologie, Politics

Congress source of all problems in ME, too!

Remember how moderate (i.e. non-Southern Republican and AFL-CIO-bankrolled rustbelt Democratic) senators are taking everything that might actually stimulate the economy and fight climate change out of the stimulus package and stuffing its fallen corpse with pork and tax cuts for Rockefellers, then putting Gingrich on the teevee to explain that the inverse is somehow true? Well, as M.J. Rosenberg explains, Congress is also responsible for the fact that Jews and Arabs are still killing each other, instead of creating amazing fusion dishes.

But a President cannot do the job alone. He needs the American people behind him, and he needs Congress. Unfortunately, Congress tends to view the Israeli-Palestinian conflict not so much as a problem but rather as a cash cow for fundraising. Democrats, Republicans, liberals and conservatives tend to come together as one when it comes to telling the pro-Israel community what it thinks we want to hear (and will reward).

He basically analyzes the Israeli election very thoroughly from an American perspective, highly recommended reading.

Filed under: Politics, Israel

Christianism

Sully distills contemporary conservatism:

Even evangelicals like Joe Carter would support this, right? And Christianists insist they are not anti-gay and do not want to hurt anyone. So why not? And, on cue, a Christianist Republican who once supported the exact same legislation when he was opposing marriage equality now opposes it. Why? It’s a threat to marriage!

The Church’s silence is just getting more and more grating to the soul.

Filed under: Politics

The woes of Western journalism

Iason Athanasiadis comments on the problems Western journalists in the Middle East face:

But there are few more challenging or rewarding occupations than covering the Middle East as a freelance journalist. That the world’s premier news-producing region is also among the most misunderstood and misrepresented is not so much a Western conspiracy, as public opinion would have it in the Arab or Persian street, but rather reflects its seemingly infinite layers of complexity. In an area whose cultural norms often appear diametrically opposed to the West and where the barriers of language and culture are almost insurmountable, I often found that simple images told the story more effectively than sentences encumbered by qualifications, complicated by parentheses, and clogged by background. My outsider’s eye saw distinguishing details that local familiarity overlooked, while living in the region enabled me to recognize the images that count and capture them.

He sees his identity as a Greek as one of an intermediary between East and West, citing precedents from the Achaemenids to the Ottomans to the Taliban. It’s a pretty interesting articles

Filed under: Politics, Journalism, Middle East