I want to live up to her expectations. (Applause.) I want our democracy to be as good as Christina imagined it. I want America to be as good as she imagined it. (Applause.) All of us -– we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children’s expectations. (Applause.)
Read the speech. It’s worth it.
(Via The White House.)
Ta-Nehisi Coates on Fear Is the Path to the Dark Side: “
It’s no surprise that the former Navy pilot sees himself as a champion of the military, and he chides Obama for inexperience in pushing to lift the ban on openly gay service members. But McCain is indulging in semantics when it comes to Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.
In 2006, he said on MSNBC that ‘the day that the leadership of the military comes to me and says, ‘Senator, we ought to change the policy,’ then I think we ought to consider seriously changing it.’ Now that Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, supports the Pentagon’s move toward junking DADT–and even McCain’s wife, Cindy, has appeared in a gay rights group’s video opposing the policy–the senator is blocking Obama’s plan.
‘I understand that’s his commitment to the gay and lesbian community,’ McCain says. But while a Pentagon study released Tuesday found more than two-thirds support for the change among service members and said disruptions would be minimal, McCain wants a broader study that would focus on combat readiness.
Hate leads to suffering…
His explanation: ‘The Marine commandant is opposed to [dropping] Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. I know for a fact the other three service chiefs have serious reservations.’
As for their superiors, McCain casually mentions the commander in chief and defense secretary, ‘neither of which I view as a military leader.’
H/T to Andrew.
Ta-Nehisi Coates writes:
He Reported the FBI’s Own Informant to the FBI: “Here’s an incredible piece of reporting in the Washington Post about Craig Monteilh, a convicted criminal turned FBI informant-provocateur, and former foot-solider in our War on Terror:
Before the sun rose, the informant donned a white Islamic robe. A tiny camera was sewn into a button, and a microphone was buried in a device attached to his keys.
‘This is Farouk al-Aziz, code name Oracle,’ he said into the keys as he sat in his parked car in this quiet community south of Los Angeles. ‘It’s November 13th, 4:30 a.m. And we’re hot.’
The undercover FBI informant – a convicted forger named Craig Monteilh – then drove off for 5 a.m. prayers at the Islamic Center of Irvine, where he says he spied on dozens of worshipers in a quest for potential terrorists.
Since the 2001 terrorist attacks, the FBI has used informants successfully as one of many tactics to prevent another strike in the United States. Agency officials say they are careful not to violate civil liberties and do not target Muslims.
Monteilh said he was instructed to infiltrate mosques throughout Orange and two neighboring counties in Southern California, where the Muslim population of nearly 500,000 is the nation’s largest. He was told to target the Islamic Center of Irvine, he said, because it was near his home.
FBI tactics were already a sensitive issue at the Irvine mosque, a stucco, two-story building that draws as many as 2,000 people for Friday prayers.
With tensions rising between law enforcement and Muslims over allegations of FBI surveillance, J. Stephen Tidwell, then head of the FBI’s Los Angeles office, spoke at the mosque in June 2006.
‘If we’re going to mosques to come to services, we will tell you,’ he said, according to a video of his speech. ‘. . . The FBI will tell you we’re coming for the very reason that we don’t want you to think you’re being monitored. We would come only to learn.’
Two months later, in August 2006, Monteilh arrived at the same mosque. He had called earlier and met with the imam. That Friday, he took shahada, the Muslim declaration of faith, before hundreds of worshipers.
(Via Ta-Nehisi Coates :: The Atlantic.)
Here we go again.
TSA Agents Harass and Threaten Mother, Force Her to Miss Flight:
Stacey Armato:
TSA rules allow for alternate screening (no x-ray) for breast milk and I almost never had a problem… until the week before this screening. I was held for 30 minutes that week while the TSA manager called to find out the rules. I was told to ‘pump and dump,’ and asked why the milk wasn’t clear, also asked where my baby was and if it was really milk (uh traveling, working mom pumping doesn’t usually have the baby with her).
After begging him to figure it out, they finally let me through. I called and complained to TSA and was instructed to travel with the TSA breast milk rules printed out and present them whenever there is a problem.
A week later, she traveled through the same airport and this time, the TSA agents recognized her and retaliated, detaining her in a special screening area for an hour, purposefully making her miss her flight unless she relented and allowed her milk to be X-rayed. She showed them the printed TSA regulations allowing alternative screening for breast milk and they told her those rules don’t apply.
And she got the security tape to prove her story. Minus, curiously, 20 minutes of footage.
(Via Daring Fireball.)
I wonder how conservatives live with themselves when justifying this at the same time going ballistic over 3 percentage points on taxes or access to healthcare. That kind of hypocrisy simply escapes me.
Schneier on Security: Close the Washington Monument:
“Terrorism isn’t a crime against people or property. It’s a crime against our minds, using the death of innocents and destruction of property to make us fearful. Terrorists use the media to magnify their actions and further spread fear. And when we react out of fear, when we change our policy to make our country less open, the terrorists succeed — even if their attacks fail. But when we refuse to be terrorized, when we’re indomitable in the face of terror, the terrorists fail — even if their attacks succeed.”
(Via Schneier on Security.)
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. We have been dancing to Osama’s tune for too damn long. We need to stop taking cues from insane men in caves. Refuse to be terrorized.
[Fallows post] ‘When we can’t talk about what we’re really doing, and when we penalize politicians for speaking the truth, we’re asking for trouble. Of the sort many people will encounter at the airport tomorrow — and in months ahead. ‘
The question I’m always left with after reading this is this: How do you get to a place where, as a society, we cultivate a mature approach to risks facing us?
(Via Ta-Nehisi Coates :: The Atlantic.)
Indeed I’ve been asking that for some time now.
Three Steps Toward a Balanced Budget:
“Our personal and national relationship to debt is indeed a moral issue. Leaving our children to pay the bills for excessive spending cannot be justified. But, if a budget really is a moral document, how we reduce the deficit is also a moral issue. Our budget should not be balanced on the backs of the poor. Cuts should not come from the services and programs that people rely on now more than ever. The reality is that we have a lot of wasteful spending in our federal budget, but most of it does not come from things that help the most vulnerable people in our society.”
(Via God’s Politics Blog.)
In short, he suggests cuts to:
We’d save billions upon billions and we’d have a more moral budget to boot.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| MSNBC Suspends Keith Olbermann | ||||
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The rename of the fake rally is genius.
UPDATE: Here he is on Rachel Maddow of MSNBC.
Jon Stewart’s Closing Rally Speech: “If We Amplify Everything, We Hear Nothing”: “Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear wrapped up this afternoon with one of its only serious moments—Jon Stewart’s 12-minute closing address—that was also its most important/poignant one.”
(Via Gawker.tv.)
I often wonder whether or not education is fulfilling its purpose. A great majority of the so-called education people do not think logically and scientifically. Even the press, the classroom, the platform, and the pulpit in many instances do not give us objective and unbiased truths. To save men from the morass of propaganda, in my opinion, is one of the chief aims of education. Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from fiction.
The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason but no morals.
We must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character–that is the goal of true education. The complete education gives one not only the power of concentration but worthy objectives upon which to concentrate. The broad education will, therefore, transmit to one not only the accumulated knowledge of the race but also the accumulated experience of social living.
I mourn for the current state of affairs in our education system and in our politics.
