Monday, November 22nd, 2010
DAVID GIBSON, Religious Reporter - AOL Politics Daily
Stephan: This is how distorted the parallel world of the Religious Far Right has become. With Michelle Bachman, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Rand Paul, and the Fox explicitly agitprop channel blasting away it can not be sustained that this is just a few loonies. If we don't understand the shadow nature of this energy in our culture we will never know how to deal with it.
While a divided nation last Tuesday finally rallied around one bright shining moment of patriotic glory — President Obama’s awarding of the Medal of Honor to Afghan hero Army Sgt. Salvatore Giunta — a popular right-wing Christian commentator sharply split opinions even within his own camp. He blasted the award as ‘feminized’ because it honors Giunta for saving his comrades rather than killing the enemy.
The Army’s official citation details how Giunta ‘exposed himself to withering enemy fire’ during a daring effort to engage the enemy and extract his wounded comrades from an ambush. But Bryan Fischer, a columnist for the American Family Association who has often provoked headlines and consternation with his commentaries, read the narrative as hardly the sort of thing American soldiers were once known for.
President Obama awards Medal of Honor to Army Sgt. Salvatore Giunta’When we think of heroism in battle, we used the think of our boys storming the beaches of Normandy under withering fire, climbing the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc while enemy soldiers fired straight down on them, and tossing grenades into pill boxes to take out gun emplacements,’ wrote Fischer, director of issue analysis for the AFA, a longtime lobby on the Christian […]
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Monday, November 22nd, 2010
Stephan: I include this story because you have probably heard about Glenn Beck's attack on philanthropist George Soros. I consider Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh to be personifications of America's shadow. They articulate the fear, hate, and rage about the changes in our culture, the movement to a majority non-white population; the push back of formerly subjugated groups such as women, and gays; and, the rising multi-polar nature of the world. The fact that they have millions who hang on their every word, I think, is one of the most disturbing trends in America today -- a neon lit example of where willful ignorance takes one.
In the interest of full disclosure I should say that I met George Soros twice back in the 1980s, when I was involved with citizen diplomacy and the Esalen Soviet-American Project. I was struck at the time with his incredible integrity and commitment to democracy. When no one else would help he put millions of dollars on the line to help Russia and the Republics find their way out of the Soviet labyrinth peacefully, so that no threat to world peace came from that quarter, as it quite easily might have done. Few knew about this, and fewer yet understood how important it was. In the subsequent years I have had occasional contacts with Soros' staff and, each time, my sense of their integrity and purpose was renewed.
On Wednesday, Glenn Beck and the leadership of Fox News made a mockery of their commitment to me and two rabbis.
Let me take a few steps back to tell you why what happened scares me.
On Tuesday night, many in our community were gathered together, in Brooklyn, in Dayton, in Santa Barbara. Seventy-two years ago, the homes, shops and synagogues of many of our parents, grandparents or great-grandparents were ransacked, broken and burned as Nazi stormtroopers destroyed towns and villages across Germany and Austria. Many historians view Kristallnacht as the beginning of the Final Solution and the Holocaust.
Washington Post journalist Dana Milbank has observed that Fox News host Glenn Beck has a bit of a Nazi fetish. From Obama’s inauguration through June 2010, Beck had ‘202 mentions of Nazis or Nazism, according to transcripts, 147 mentions of Hitler, 193 mentions of fascism or fascist, and another 24 bonus mentions of Joseph Goebbels.’ This week he spoke again about the Holocaust. But it was not to commemorate Kristallnacht. It was to engage in an insidious form of Holocaust revisionism. His motivation? To score political points against George Soros, a prominent Jewish philanthropist and Holocaust survivor.
As some may know, I was the subject […]
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Monday, November 22nd, 2010
RICHARD BLACK, Environment Correspondent, - BBC News (U.K.)
Stephan: If you had any doubt that human activity was a factor in climate this should settle it for you.
Carbon emissions fell in 2009 due to the recession – but not by as much as predicted, suggesting the fast upward trend will soon be resumed.
Those are the key findings from an analysis of 2009 emissions data issued in the journal Nature Geoscience a week before the UN climate summit opens.
Industrialised nations saw big falls in emissions – but major developing countries saw a continued rise.
The report suggests emissions will begin rising by 3% per year again.
‘What we find is a drop in emissions from fossil fuels in 2009 of 1.3%, which is not dramatic,’ said lead researcher Pierre Friedlingstein from the UK’s University of Exeter.
‘Based on GDP projections last year, we were expecting much more.
‘If you think about it, it’s like four days’ worth of emissions; it’s peanuts,’ he told BBC News.
The headline figure masked big differences between trends in different groups of countries.
Broadly, developed nations saw emissions fall – Japan fell by 11.8%, the UK by 8.6%, and Germany by 7% – whereas they continued to rise in developing countries with significant industrial output.
China’s emissions grew by 8%, and India’s by 6.2% – connected to the fact that during the recession, it was the industrialised world that really […]
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Sunday, November 21st, 2010
PAUL SULLIVAN, - International Herald Tribune
Stephan: This is why the trickle down economics argument about extending tax breaks for the rich is garbage. Put money in the hands of the poor and the middle class, and they spend it. Put money in the hands of the rich, and they invest it in the most advantageous manner -- to them -- possible. Buying stock in a corporation in Australia is not really very helpful in putting a plumber in Toledo to work.
There are two reasons why the wealthy are investing abroad. The financial crisis and the slow recovery showed them that the United States was not immune to devastating crashes of the kind that wealthy people in emerging markets have tried to hedge against by investing abroad. And second, American investors are worried that their portfolios are going to suffer for the foreseeable future, given the size of the United States’ budget deficit, the weakness of the dollar and the uncertainty over the stock market.
‘I’ve never seen a period in which clients have expressed such an interest in nondollar investments,
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Sunday, November 21st, 2010
T.W. FARNAM, Staff Writer - The Washington Post
Stephan: Thanks to David Nichols, JD.
Results from November’s midterm elections have exposed a deepening political divide between cities on the coasts and the less-dense areas in the middle of the country.
The Republican Party’s big gains in the House came largely from districts that were older, less diverse and less educated than the nation as a whole. Democrats kept their big majorities in the cities.
That’s a contrast to the last GOP wave in 1994, when Republicans’ share of the vote was consistent inside and outside metropolitan areas, according to a Washington Post analysis. That year, Republicans captured seats in a broader array of places.
The analysis, based on a review of the House vote in counties across the country in both years, has good and bad news for both parties.
The Obama coalition remained intact. Democrats remained strong in areas with the party’s core of minorities and higher-educated whites. But movement of white working-class voters away from the party is a concern for Democrats, especially because of President Obama’s traditional weakness with those voters.
Republicans’ success with the blue-collar vote and the high enthusiasm of the tea party gives it a fired-up base headed into 2012. But in a presidential election with higher turnout, the party might have trouble […]
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