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Top Stories Thursday 05 Dec

William Burton on skybox politics:

You get the point. The Democrats can make a list of every industry that favors Republicans over Democrats, then go down that list getting rid of every policy they ever instituted to favor those bastards. They once opposed price controls fro prescription drugs; they should now favor them. Not only is it good politics in that millions of voters would benefit from Democratic policies, but sticking it to your enemies is also good politics. It gives the big donors a reason to fear you, and may convince some of them to stay the hell out of politics completely. The same is true for sticking to the oil companies, the insurance companies, the big polluters, etc.

Body and Soul on the tension between women’s rights, respect for (minority) cultures and conservative commentators with time for neither:

And should I read anything into the fact that both Rushdie and Sullivan aim a good measure of their anger about the Miss World riots at feminists, who seem to be culpable because they failed to appreciate how important a part of Western liberal values beauty pageants are? (And will the gentlemen be disappointed to learn that Isioma Daniel apparently doesn’t share their anti-feminism, since her next writing will appear in the feminist publication conservatives most love to mock — writing not about Miss World, but about a topic neither one of them has considered worthy of notice: the radical women of the Niger Delta. I’ve been combing the press for months digging up stories on those women, and I wouldn’t miss that article. Somehow I don’t think Andrew Sullivan will be reading it. Isioma Daniel served her purpose for him as a means of attacking Muslims; what she has to say about women fighting the oil companies will probably be less compelling.

And in Sullivan’s bizarre attempt to blame “puritanical, anti-capitalist feminists” who “hate free societies,” do I hear a message to Western women: You’d better be grateful for the oppression we have here, because obviously our form of patriarchy is better than their form of patriarchy?

Thank you, I guess.

Eschaton on hating America:

Being, roughly speaking, on “the left,” I have of course been accused many times, one way or another, of “hating America.” You know, me and my good buddy Chomsky who I apparently worship though I’ve never really read. I’ve never quite known what this meant, actually. It’s easy to dismiss it simply as rhetorical bludgeoning by one’s political opponents, I suppose – a pee-wee league version of a Hitchens polemic. It is more than that, of course. I’ve posted before about the underlying source of this belief – roughly, conservatives believe they have a unique claim on the “true America” which has been tainted economically by that liberal FDR, politically by activist judges and states’ rights violating Civil Rights and Voting Acts, and socially by homosexuality. Or something. If only one could remove the stain of the liberal legacy, we could truly return to the glory days of our untainted past.

Thursday is Cartoon Day!

Top Stories Tuesday 03 Dec

Aron’s Israel Peace weblog on the logic of occupation, Yom Kippur and the religious meaning of Israel:

One of the things we are always taught on Yom Kippur is that we are only pardoned for sins against God. To be forgiven for sins one commits against a fellow human being, one has to seek out the wronged person and ask their forgiveness personally. As I sat in synagogue this Yom Kippur, I thought about all my sins of commission and omission. The families whose houses we entered without permission. The parents whose hearts were filled with panic as we took their sons away blindfolded and bound. The children who cried as we banged on the doors of their houses in the middle of the night, shouting “Jaish, Jaish(army, army).” And most of all, I thought of that teenage boy, suspended in terror from a pole on a minaret. Where could I find them all? How can I ask their forgiveness. In fact, for me, there is no atonement.

That evening, as the service closed, the whole congregation stood up and began to sing Hatikvah, the Israeli national anthem. It got me angry. Why were they singing this political song in a religious sanctuary? Now I left the service totally depressed. Not only did I no longer believe in the old god. I no longer believed in the new god, either. For me, there is no redemption.

Top Stories Monday 02 Dec

Nathan Newman on who the “new Right” really are:

Unlike the stone racists of the American Renaissance, the “new Right” has learned a hypocritical cadence to dress their racism in the language of tolerance. But nothing symbolizes the bogus nature of the rhetoric than newly elected governor Sonny Perdue of Georgia, having campaigned on reviving the confederate flag, declaring “Free at Last, Free at Last, Thank God Almighty We are Free at Last” as his victory speech.

The Right today can quote Martin Luther King, but it’s all in the cause of Wallace and Bull Connor.

The Pontificator on the two questions that should be central to US foreign policy:

1) In ten years, will it be easier, or harder, to obtain weapons of mass destruction?

2) In ten years, will people outside the U.S.A. hate the U.S.A. more, or less, than they do today?

Bertram Online on responsibilities:

So, commentators of the ?Right?, you who ? in your own, warped self-understanding ? have been fighting a fight against Communism and so smoothly converted that fight into a fight against Muslims: do you feel the slightest little tingling of responsibility for what goes on? In the suburbs of Copenhagen and in Sweden?