Dan on The IRP
ArchPundit
He continues the Apostasy. It’s quite amusing.
March 2007
Today’s Tosser
John Ruskin offering up another chestnut from the right wing noise machine:
The Tennessee Center for Policy Research reported today (see here) that Al Gore, who won an Academy Award Sunday night for his film about global warming and the importance of energy conservation, uses 20 times the national average to power his Nashville mansion. What’s more, his use has increased since the release of “An Inconvenient Truth”.
TCPR, of course, didn’t really understand what it was talking about.
What seems to escape people criticizing Gore is that the Gore has challenged the assumption that Green power has to be more expensive in the long term and that generically power consumption isn’t the problem. The problem is power consumption from carbon based fuels.
The scare tactic used by the denial industry is that it will cost tremendous amounts to change the way we produce power or to reduce power consumption. This isn’t true largely because green power is likely to become far cheaper as it is more widely used.
But as with many things in wingnut land, facts aren’t real important.
Daily Dolt: Jill Stanek
Fritchey works toward his Teen Genocide Promotion award
It’s really hard to improve upon that.
Just What is AntiSemitic?
Fran Eaton is trying to tar Obama’s pastor with antisemitism after her attempts to paint the church as black supremacist were met with the appropriate, “What the hell are you talking about?”
The Israelis have illegally occupied Palestinian territories for almost 40 years now. It took a divestment campaign to wake the business community up concerning the South Africa issue. Divestment has now hit the table again as a strategy to wake the business community up and to wake Americans up concerning the injustice and the racism under which the Palestinians have lived because of Zionism.
The Divestment issue will hit the floor during this month’s General Synod. Divesting dollars from businesses and banks that do business with Israel is the new strategy being proposed to wake the world up concerning the racism of Zionism. That Divestment issue won’t make the press either, however.
What’s unclear is what is antisemitic. It’s not antisemitic to criticize the Israeli state. Antisemitism is when someone is bigoted against Jews in general–like saying Jews are cheap or Jews are conniving. Not that the state of Israel is illegally occupying territory.
I happen to think Wright is oversimplifying the situation in Israel as the Palestineans have had pretty clear paths to peace, but rejected them. That said, Israel’s treatment of Palestine has been far from perfect. Calling for political action to reverse Israel’s actions in Palestine is hardly bigoted, however. Essentially, he is calling for Israel to live up to the partition in 1948. George Bush has too. They just get there in different ways.
Of course, one can guess that the real problem she has with Wright is that he thinks George Bush is a jackass.
Eaton is a bit clueless when throwing words around like Black Supremacist or Antisemitic apparently because it doesn’t matter to her whether the charges are true. In the case of the Black Supremacy charge, the documents on the church’s website provide an important context for the discussion of race in the Black Values System right here. If one actually reads the context of the 12 precepts it boils down to the fact that Christians in the church have a special responsibility to their community and to viewing those around them as equal before the eyes of God. It’s kind of like pulling yourself up by your bootstraps as a community. That’s not Black Supremacy, it’s Christianity in the context of a particular community which faces a number of challenges specific to that community.
All from a site that labels a State Senator a slut, says a State Rep is backing genocide, and continues to have authors lie about the madrassa story.
There is nothing wingnuts can say that marginalizes them.
I Got Your Message Right Here Mr. Mayor
Daley talks a little trash about the unions success on Tuesday:
“Where’s the message? Hello? I mean — come on. What message? I’ve been more [pro-] labor than they have. Every crane down here is labor,” said Daley, whose big-box veto cost him support from all but one major union.
As I’ve said before, the point of the union effort and especially SEIU wasn’t to have a big one-shot victory, though the results were pretty damn good for them. It was to create a political operation that functioned in the City and in a particular time when the Machine is dying. It’s certainly true that the Machine has been dying for years, but the Obama win and Sorich case have accelerated that process and left an opening for a new player. That player is organized labor and SEIU in particular.
Before anyone jumps on me over the Big Box ordinance being bad and such, this isn’t an endorsement of that bill as I tend to think it would be best handled at the state level. However, it spurred SEIU and the Chicago Federation of Labor into a serious effort to elect union friendly aldermen and build that organization up. This was the first real test and while they didn’t clear the table, the unions were 2-3-6 in the 11 races they targeted including 3, 7, 12, 15, 16, 21, 25, 37, 42, 43, and 50 winning outright in 7 and 42. Losing outright in 12, 25, and 37. Going to a run-off in 3, 15, 16, 21, 43, and 50.
Of those races they targeted, four SEIU made no endorsement: 25, 37 43, and 50. In two of those the incumbent won outright and in two the runoffs only happened barely with both incumbents taking just under 50 percent of the vote. It’s somewhat likely that candidate selection was a problem in these cases, but also that the incumbents will win in April.
That said, it looks like two of the runoffs are likely to go to the union backed challengers in 15 (actually open seat) and 16. In the final two runoffs, I’d probably call the outcome a tossup with 3 and 21. If the unions can deliver the votes with the superior organization in what is likely to be very low turnout, those two are potential pickups as well.
Of the incumbents SEIU endorsed (they made endorsements in 37 of 50 wards and four of the non-endorsements are above) only three are headed to a run-off and none lost. 24, 35, and 50 are all incumbents endorsed by SEIU and in runoffs, but only Chandler in 24 appears to be in any real trouble having garnered only 36 percent of the vote to 20 percent for his nearest challenger. In 50 (Moore) and 35 (Colon) the incumbents received 49 and 46 percent of the vote respectively. Moore’s is the most notable race since he had business interests pumping money into the race attacking him.
SEIU and CFL had a good election cycle given what I believe their objectives are in terms of long term movement building. Daley might not care much because he probably thinks this is his last term. Those who follow Daley will have to contend with the operation put together for this years’ race.
Statewide this is also a big win for Democrats. Getting out the vote is tough in the City often times, but with the machine dying off, it was getting harder. This sort of operation will generally benefit Democrats and continue to provide large majorities coming out of Chicago for those Democratic candidates.
It’s All Over for McCain According to Tom Roeser
After all, McCain said that American soldiers’ lives had been wasted:
Dismissing the lost lives of American troops during wartime as having been wasted ranks is just about the all-time most catastrophic statement a presidential candidate can make. Saying the dead have died in vain is not only opposite to Abraham Lincoln (with whom Obama wants to be compared), it is a lethal dose of strychnine from which no ordinary candidate could be expected to recover. If Obama can make use of his blackness to overcome his slur, he would be seen as a true political wonder-worker. Chicago’s David Axelrod, his media guru, should be promptly elevated to the canonical status of the all-time great cosmeticians, the Democrats’ Jim Farley who sold the patrician FDR as a regular guy and the Republicans’ Mark Hanna who packaged William McKinley, the pal of the Wall Street plutocrats as the workingman’s friend. .
It’s even the same context. I have no problem with what either of them said, but I’m not part of the outrage machine.