Warren for sheriff!

From CNBC of all places, the rap video, Elizabeth Warren for Sheriff of Wall Street:

Sowing The Callous Bigot Wind, Reaping The Crazy Threat-Happy Bigot Whirlwind

Spotty over at The Cucking Stool talks about his neighbor Ben, a local right-wing blogger who apparently has a strange idea of bravery and morality:

Ben is my neighbor, a twenty-something who lives at home; Ben has always been beside himself over my blogging, but it has come to a head in the last year. I’ve never written about Ben. Well, until now, that is.

At a neighborhood party for a high school gradate last spring (well, last last spring, 2009), he came up to me and my wife and started swearing in a spittle-flecked rage, and nearly worked himself up into some kind of a seizure. His mom and dad weren’t there, and some of our neighbors took him in hand and led him away.

Shortly before the Fourth of July parade in 2009, Ben sent me an email and told me not to come around to the parade, because I would get more of the same, and that he intended to clear the neighborhood of the likes of me so it would be a place for “decent folks.” (Ben had, perhaps, been watching too many old Westerns with their “This town ain’t big enough for the both of us” rhetoric.) Here’s the Tea Party impulse to eject the undesirables at work again. Well, for whatever reason, we didn’t run into Ben at the parade.

A few days after the parade, however, Ben sent me an email threatening to put my wife “in my crosshairs.” Ben has commented favorably about guns on Mitch’s site; I viewed — and view, especially considering his earlier behavior and remarks  — that comment as a terroristic threat, made against a family member. I did make a complaint to the Edina Police, and they investigated.

So, that’s it. Well, actually, there is more, but we’ll leave it at that.

No comment needed, because those who actually would most need to read it would rather gargle Drano than read it.

Who Are Al-Qaeda’s Best Friends? Franklin Graham And Pam Geller Are Two Of Them

As is anyone who pushes the anti-Park51 bigotry.

That was made clear today, as David Dayen points out at the other blog where I write, Fire Dog Lake. Jihadist websites are posting up news articles on things like the threatened Koran burning in Florida and the whole right-wing-created Park51 bigotry-fest and using them as tools to radicalize people against the US, and convince them that the people of America cannot peacefully tolerate any Muslims at all.

Sadly, this was all predicted nearly six years ago. From Doug “Pericles” Muder’s seminal Kos diary, Terrorist Strategy 101: A Quiz:

Question 2: In radicalizing your sympathizers, who is your best ally?

No points awarded for “the media” or “sympathetic foreign governments”. In radicalizing your apathetic sympathizers, you have no better ally than the violent extremists on the other side . Only they can convince your people that compromise is impossible. Only they can raise your countrymen’s level of fear and despair to the point that large numbers are willing to take up arms and follow your lead. A few blown up apartment buildings and dead schoolchildren will get you more recruits than the best revolutionary tracts ever written.

Perversely, this means that you are the best ally of the extremists on the other side. That doesn’t mean you love or even talk to each other — they are, after all, vile and despicable demons. But at this stage in the process your interests align. Both of you want to invert the bell curve, to flatten out that big hump in the middle and drive people to the edges. That’s why extremists come in pairs: Caesar and Pompey, the Nazis and the Communists, Sharon and Arafat, Bush and Bin Laden. Each side needs a demonic opposite in order to galvanize its supporters.

Naive observers frequently decry the apparent counter-productivity of extremist attacks. Don’t the leaders of Hamas understand that every suicide bombing makes the Israelis that much more determined not to give the Palestinians a state? Don’t they realize that the Israeli government will strike back even harder, and inflict even more suffering on the Palestinian people? Of course they do; they’re not idiots. The Israeli response is exactly what they’re counting on. More airstrikes, more repression, more poverty — fewer opportunities for normal life to get in the way of the Great Struggle.

The cycle of violence may be vicious, but it is not pointless. Each round of strike-and-counterstrike makes the political center less tenable. The surviving radical leaders on each side energize their respective bases and cement their respective holds on power. The first round of the playoffs is always the two extremes against the center. Only after the center is vanquished will you meet your radical counterparts in the championship round.

[...]

Question 4: What is Bin Laden’s immediate goal?

If you’ve been paying attention, you should get this one right: His immediate goal is to radicalize the hundreds of millions of Muslims who sympathize with the vision of a restored Caliphate, but have better things to do with their lives than join the jihad. A particular problem for Bin Laden are all the Muslims who think that they can find an acceptable place for themselves in a world order dominated by the United States.

I won’t insult your intelligence by asking you who his best allies are in reaching this goal: President Bush, obviously, and all of the neo-conservatives in the Pentagon who push for the most aggressive response to the terrorist threat. Also the Christian leaders like Franklin (son of Billy) Graham, who regularly denounce Islam in terms that look fabulous on Al Qaeda’s equivalent of the locker-room bulletin board. John Ashcroft — and anyone else who mistreats assimilating Arabs and thereby convinces them that they will never really be welcome in America — is also an ally.

It doesn’t matter how much they hate him or denounce his deeds; anyone who radicalizes Muslims is doing Bin Laden’s work for him. President Bush may as well have been reading from an Al Qaeda script when he referred to the War on Terror as a “crusade”. Muslims know their history and know exactly what a crusade is: Christians invade and steal your land. People who didn’t believe this when they heard it from Bin Laden have now heard it from the Crusader-in-Chief.

FOX News and the other Cons like to paint themselves as super-smart hyper-patriots. If they really were, they wouldn’t be pushing people’s bigotry buttons on this issue just to score political points.

Johann Hari On The Management-Consultancy Scam

Hari tells you pretty much what you either suspected or already knew from bitter experience:

He [David Craig, former management consultant and author of the industry exposé Rip Off!] worked to a simple model, which is common in the industry. He had to watch how a workforce behaved for a week – and then tell the company’s bosses, every time, that they had 30 percent too many staff and only his consultancy could figure out who should be culled. If he calculated they actually had the right amount of staff, he was told by his bosses not to be so ridiculous and do his sums again: where was the money for them in a properly-staffed company? The company had to be POPed – People Off Payroll.

Of course, this advice was often disastrous. His company was sent into a chain of 500 menswear shops. They advised them to cut staff by (surprise!) 30 per cent, and to replace most full-time staff with part-timers. The result? The full-time employees had been highly motivated, because they wanted a career in the company; the part-timers only wanted a little extra cash. So motivation levels in the company collapsed, and with it the standard of service. The company was bankrupt within a few years.

Yes, you might say, but surely he was just a bad management consultant. The rest must get results. The evidence suggests not. The Cranfield School of Management studied 170 companies who had used management consultants, and it discovered just 36 per cent of them were happy with the outcome – while two thirds judged them to be useless or harmful. A medicine with that failure-rate would be taken off the shelves.

Sounds awfully familiar, doesn’t it?

Sunday Afternoon News Roundup

– Feminists! Don’t be a Dumb Cluck like Sarah Palin — Get your Cackle of Rads membership card today!

– Why do obvious smears and lies such as those directed against the Park51 development get so much media play? Could it be because our corporate-run, Republican-worshiping press keeps giving prime media space and respect to contemptible bigots like CNN’s Erick Erickson?

– In other news, Randy Demmer is still a twit and Tim Walz’s congressional seat is Mr. Walz’ for as long as he wants it.

– And now a not-so-recent item that is timely once more: Legalized booze, not the FBI, is what finally broke Al Capone.

Smear machine targets Wikileak founder

At least, that’s the way it looks.

Via David Derbes, commenter at Eschatonblog, John Burns and Eric Schmitt, NYT

Julian Assange, founder of the whistle-blower Web site WikiLeaks who has been embroiled in a fight with the Pentagon over the recent release of classified documents, briefly became the focus of new attention on Saturday when Swedish prosecutors sought him for questioning on rape allegations — then quickly said the accusations were unfounded.

Mr. Assange, a 39-year-old Australian, had quickly posted a denial of the Swedish allegations on Twitter, saying that the charges were “without basis.” After the accusations had been initially reported in a Swedish newspaper, he wrote: “We were warned to expect ‘dirty tricks.’ Now we have the first one.”

Now, who exactly was the source for this false story, and how did it get through the entire world media without being vetted?

Democrats Beating Republicans In The Cash Race

This is kind of interesting: Namely, that Democrats are still beating Republicans in the cash race, as they did in 2008.

Of course, now is the time when the big GOP cash dump is likely to happen. Then again, the Target/Best Buy/MN Forward debacle is causing many businesses to think twice about throwing huge sums at the Republicans and their allies.

Our liberal media

Peter Hart, FAIR says:

Meanwhile, on Public TV…
08/19/2010 by Peter Hart
Two PBS-related items of interest.

-Last year when PBS announced the retirement of Bill Moyers and the inexplicable cancellation of the excellent Now program, word came that some public TV stations would be airing a program produced by (yes, this is a real thing) the George W. Bush Institute. The show, Ideas in Action, is host by James Glassman; as FAIR noted, he is

a longtime fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, is perhaps best known for his remarkably optimistic–and wrong–book Dow 36,000. He also regularly penned op-eds for major U.S. newspapers that pushed views and policies that would directly benefit sponsors of his online news site, TechCentralStation.com (Extra!, 3-4/05).

According to a report at the Politico (8/18/10), Glassman’s show will air Sunday mornings on WHUT and on Maryland Public Television (MPT).

–The PBS program Nightly Business Report, produced by a public station in Miami, has been sold to “a private company headed by Mykalai Kontilai, a former manager of mixed martial artists,” according to a report in the New York Times. The Times notes that the show “has struggled recently to find enough corporate underwriting sponsors,” so presumably the new owners think they can do that. The show will continue to be produced at the Miami public station WPBT.

The arrangement is somewhat puzzling: a private company now takes ownership of a public TV program, and will apparently solicit private corporate sponsors for an important “public television” show. Then again, the PBS flagship NewsHour newscast is a project of MacNeil/Lehrer Productions, and the majority owner is Liberty Media, the company run by conservative media mogul John Malone.

(emphases added)

This is why I no longer contribute to PBS and, as far as I am concerned, the NewsHour–even though some of their correspondents are straight journalists– amounts to propaganda.

The last word on the mosque “controversy”

Bartcop gets all the good cartoons:

Somehow This Doesn’t Surprise Me

From Media Matters (via TBogg), we find out that conservative commentators just can’t resist the urge to racially demagogue the Blagojevich trial and verdicts.

But of course, conservatives and Republicans really aren’t racists. Joe Scarborough says so!