Tonight the Washington Post is reporting one of the key founding members of Al Qaeda has been killed. As with all of these reports, we need to wait for further verification and confirmation. I am hopeful that this is a major blow to Al Qaeda. I am also hopeful that we are closing in on Osama bin Laden.
A U.S. official said there is “strong reason” to believe that Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, known as Sheik Saeed al-Masri, was killed, apparently by a CIA drone strike in Pakistan’s tribal belt within the past two weeks.
The official described it as a significant victory against the terrorist group.
“Al-Masri was the group’s chief operating officer, with a hand in everything from finances to operational planning,” the official said. “He was also the organization’s prime conduit to bin Laden and Zawahiri,” he added, referring to al-Qaeda’s No. 2 leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri. “He was key to al-Qaeda’s command and control.” (more…)
Please think of someone who has served and died for our country. When we sit back and enjoy a day off (I worked today) and eat our hot dogs and hamburgers, we should remember the tens of thousands that have died for us.
I’ll try to have something posted tomorrow after I get some sleep. I did find this post interesting on TP:
The latest attempt by BP to shut down its apocalyptic oil gusher — the “top kill” maneuver — has failed, despite BP CEO Tony Hayward’s assurance yesterday that it had a 70 percent chance of success. There’s no question that the federal government, if the president so decides, can take over the challenge of mitigating the damage of BP’s oil to the shores and waters of the Gulf of Mexico. But can President Obama take charge of stopping the wellhead gusher from the foreign oil giant? The administration argues it’s keeping BP in charge of the attempts to shut down the blown out well because government doesn’t have the equipment or expertise to solve this engineering problem without BP:
Adm. Thad Allen, Incident Commander: “To push BP out of the way, it would raise the question, to replace them with what?” [White House briefing, 5/24/10]
David Axelrod, White House adviser: “They’ve got equipment that our government doesn’t have.” [Fox News, 5/24/10]
Ken Salazar, Secretary of the Interior: “This administration has done everything we can possibly do to make sure that we push BP to stop the spill and to contain the impact. We have also been very clear that there are areas where BP and the private sector are the ones who must continue to lead the efforts with government oversight, such as the deployment of private sector technology 5,000 feet below the ocean’s surface to kill the well.” [White House briefing, 5/24/10]
The administration has been keeping an ecological criminal in charge of the crime scene during a national crisis. Seventeen nations have offered assistance — but “the final decision is up to BP” to accept it, according to the State Department — and only Canada, Mexico and Norway have been allowed to help so far. The law — Title 33, Section 1321 — mandates that President Obama “shall direct all Federal, State, and private actions to remove the discharge,” using any means necessary. There are not any resources — people or equipment — that Obama doesn’t have the authority to seize and put into service. [Read more →]
President Barack Obama is in the Gulf. Many progressives want more to be done. My question is what? What more can and should Obama be doing? I can’t think of anything. Neither he nor the federal government have expertise in oil spills (it doesn’t seem that BP has expertise either, but that’s another story). Just think of what’s on Obama’s plate. Granny Doc has more:
Barack Obama has been elected to be President of the United States. Among the issue on his plate, today, are the attack on two mosques in Lahore, Pakistan. The standoff between North and South Korea, a situation so serious that China felt the need to try and calm the situation down. The continuing melt down in the Euro Zone, with terrific potential to bring the economy crashing back to bottom.
The ongoing crisis in Haiti. The intrusion of Brazil and Turkey into the nuclear issues surrounding Iran. The current blockade of 9 large relief ship headed to Gaza, by Israel. Two wars. And, they’re STILL rioting in Africa!
If we profess to live in a Global World, a world in which every issue must be treated as effecting us, compromising our security, or effecting our economic well being, is it reasonable to expect the President to push everything else aside, concentrating only on the Bright Shiny Object that has our immediate attention? (more…)
Reporting from Washington A team of top federal prosecutors and investigators has taken the first steps toward a formal criminal investigation into oil giant BP’s actions before and after the drilling rig disaster off Louisiana.
The investigators, who have been quietly gathering evidence in Louisiana over the last three weeks, are focusing on whether BP skirted federal safety regulations and misled the U.S. government by saying it could quickly clean up an environmental accident.
The team has met with U.S. attorneys and state officials in the Gulf Coast region and has sent letters to executives of BP and Transocean Ltd., the drilling rig owner, warning them against destroying documents or other internal records.
The American Society for Muslim Advancement and the Cordoba Initiative recently presented plans to build a community center two blocks away from Ground Zero in New York City that would include “a mosque, performance art center, gym, swimming pool and other public spaces.” Even though a community advisory board voted in favor of the proposal, conservatives have continued to attack the plan, with Rep. Peter King (R-NY) calling it “offensive.”
On Wednesday, a man named “Tony” called into the KTRH-AM (Houston, TX) radio show of right-wing radio host Michael Berry in support of the Muslim center. First, Berry asked the caller whether “Tony” was his real name, because with his accent, he didn’t “sound like a ‘Tony.’” He repeatedly tried to link to the mosque to terrorists, eventually saying that if the mosque is built, he hopes someone blows it up:
BERRY: No, Tony, you can’t build a mosque at the site of 9/11.
TONY: Why not? Why not?
BERRY: No, you can’t. And I’ll tell you this: If you do build a mosque, I hope somebody blows it up. … I hope the mosque isn’t built, and if it is, I hope it’s blown up. And I mean that. … It’s right-wing radicals like me that are going to keep this country safe for you and everyone else from the people who are flying the planes from the country you fled from. If you want to identify with those people, go live with them.
I originally posted this a couple of months ago. We still need to break up the banks and we are still owed money so, I thought I would re-post.
Last week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the employment report showing that 162,000 jobs were added in the month of March. Republicans look for the bad in the numbers, the Democrats look for the good and the reality was somewhere in the middle. It is nice that the economy has started adding jobs. The economy has added jobs three out of the last four months, yet we’re still in a huge jobs hole. In order to get the unemployment rate of 9.7% back down to the pre-recession rate of 5.0%, we need at least 11 million jobs. At our current rate it will take a 67 months to create 11 million jobs, just over five years. Who is willing to wait for five years?
I’m in the middle of reading Michael Lewis’ book, The Big Short. The whole subprime mortgage market was a big scam. These Wall Street banks would come up with new and exciting ways to entice people who could not afford a house to take out a mortgage on a house. As far as I know, it wasn’t illegal but it was unethical. The system was predicated on rising housing values. As long as the housing values rose, the folks with adjustable mortgages would simply refinance. (Many of us worry about the cost of refinancing, but those costs were waived in many of these subprime mortgages.) I’m still trying to figure out the purpose of derivatives. It seems like the purpose of derivatives is to hide the true risk and value of a particular security or commodity. It is like using Photoshop to morph me into Denzel Washington. That’s just wrong. If you are looking for Denzel and get me, I guarantee that you are going to be pissed!! Probably the only thing more deceptive and deceitful than derivatives would be these CDOs (collateralized debt obligations), which are nothing more than bundled derivatives. So, just in case you were able to figure out what was in a particular derivative, it became nearly impossible to figure out what was in the CDO. The big banks would then get a credit rating agency like Moody’s to put their AAA stamp of approval on these heaps of garbage. Then they would sell these heaps of garbage to your pension fund and my mutual fund. Funds would buy these things because they were AAA rated by S&P or Moody’s.
So, back to my original question, how much do these big banks owe you and me? When Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch began to implode in 2008, you and I came to the rescue. The government, using our money, decided that these guys were too big to fail (except for Lehmans, the government let them fail). Failure would’ve caused a catastrophic collapse of our financial system that’s what we were told. So, we reached deep into our pockets and pulled out hundreds of billions of dollars. Over the last several months, many of these banks have been paying back a large chunks of the billions of dollars we lent them. Once they pay all of the $700 billion back, are we square? My answer is no.. not even close. This guy (Andrew Haldane) over the Bank of England calculated that the irresponsibility of these large financial firms has cost the world approximately $4 trillion. When you think about job layoffs, businesses that had to close because the credit markets all froze up, the loss in value of retirement plans, yup… $4 trillion sounds about right.
The big question is how do we collect? It is clear that they owe us. I don’t think that we will ever get paid. I don’t think that we will ever get back the money that we lost because of their incompetence, arrogance and stupidity. The one thing that we can do is to make sure that this never happens again. We have to break up the banks. I don’t think that breaking them up into large chunks is a good idea. We need to break them up in such a way that they can fail without jeopardizing our economy. According to Robert Reich, $100 billion should be the upper limit. Okay, I can agree with this number. It is arbitrary. The loss of $100 billion is not going to bring down our economy. I like the number. (I also want to get rid of credit default swaps and derivatives need to be regulated, as do these huge pools of money called hedge funds.) So, it’s time to push Congress, and especially the Senate, towards better regulation and breaking up these huge banks and financial institutions.
One of the reasons that I really like Rachel Maddow is because she is so thoughtful. She did her homework. She found an oil spill in 1979 in the Gulf of Mexico. The similarities are remarkable. The main question that I have is if we’re going to drill these wells should we have more than a theory on how to fix the problem when problems arise?
Here on Mexico’s Gulf Coast, the Deepwater Horizon disaster has revived memories of the world’s worst accidental oil spill, a 1979 blowout that spewed oil for nine months, devastated marine life and covered the Texas and Mexican coasts with gobs of crude.
Now, people here are worried they may be in for a repeat of that disaster as ocean currents begin to catch oil from the Deepwater Horizon well and the Atlantic hurricane season gets underway June 1.
There are strong parallels between the two spills. Like the Deepwater Horizon spill, the Ixtoc 1 spill on June 3, 1979, involved the failure of a blowout preventer device, a kind of emergency shutoff valve. In both cases, metal domes put over the well failed to stop the leaks.
And in both cases, crews turned to something called relief wells dug horizontally through the seafloor to stop the spills, a technique that can take months. (more…)
It is sad when you are so old that it takes you several days to recover from a very busy day in the hospital. Anyway, I would like to throw a couple things to you on a Wednesday evening.
Microsoft vs Apple
The US government has ordered British Petroleum to use a less toxic disbursement. I was just wondering, when they use the disbursement where does the oil go? If we’re just spreading it around, how is that helpful?
BP may be intentionally underestimating the amount of oil that’s being released into the Gulf in order to save the company millions of dollars.
Former Detroit mayor gets 18 months in jail for being a moron. I’m not sure how he figured he would be able to lie in court and get away with it.
James O’Keefe pleaded guilty to tampering with Senator Mary Landrieu’s phone. I’m not sure how he only got a $1500 fine and 100 hours of community service. That seems a little light to me. If I tried to tap a senator’s phone, I wonder how much I would be looking at. Just a fine for me. It would never happen.
As the president works to end the stupid policy of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, conservatives are pulling out all the stops. Conservative talker Bryan Fischer has stated that Hitler used gay soldiers. (Notice that anything that conservatives don’t like must be associated with Hitler.) The Family Research Council has stated that ending the discriminatory policy will mean more gay rape in the military. Their logic is crazy and convoluted.
New study suggests the best time to act on climate change and the energy bill is right now.
I spoke with a friend of mine today, a friend I haven’t talked to in a long time. After the pleasantries, the Right Wing nonsense started. Obama is spending too much. Okay, I asked, how much is too much when you have an economy that is capable of generating massive amounts of money? There was no answer. So, for my friends who are budget hawks, I would like to re-post this from several months ago. Enjoy.
The harping of conservatives has become louder and louder over the last couple of weeks over the budget deficit. They have wrongly stated that Barack Obama spending us into poverty. There are many analogies that could be used, but the one that I’ll use right now is that our house is on fire. First, we need to put out the fire. Secondly, we rebuild the house.
I’ll avoid mentioning the obvious, that these deficit hawks were silent in 2001, 2003 and again in 2004 as President Bush passed massive tax cuts that were not offset by massive spending cuts. So, these hawks are somewhat hypocritical. Many of these hawks have looked at some promising economic numbers, and the unemployment rate from last month, and point to an improving economy. I’m not sure that the unemployment numbers are quite as rosy as we think. It appears that there is evidence that many of these Americans that are unemployed are now running out of unemployment benefits. Therefore they cannot seek further jobless benefits.
By the way, where are these jobs coming from? For the past 20 years industry has been cutting jobs and streamlining. As business returns, why wouldn’t they simply work with a streamlined workforce? Why wouldn’t they outsource the job, if possible, to somebody in Singapore or Dubai? With the auto industry shrinking and the economy not expanding, where are these jobs going to come from? Well, some of the jobs should come from infrastructure rebuilding that we funded through the stimulus package. Other jobs have to come from this legislation that President Obama spoke about today (See Video). Green Energy. Congress needs to move on this legislation. This is critical. We need this industry to produce millions of new jobs.
I also want to mention that Americans made the same mistake that many conservatives are making now back in 1935-1937. This was right in the middle of the New Deal. GDP was increasing. Unemployment was decreasing. Deficit hawks began to worry about budget woes. A poll at the time revealed that a majority of Americans wanted the administration to balance the budget. Therefore, Roosevelt began to balance the budget. Predictably, as taxes were increased and government spending decreased, GDP fell and unemployment rose. It was the exact opposite that budget hawks wanted to happen. President Barack Obama needs to walk the fine line. He needs to get the economy going but, as the economy begins to heat up, he does need to slow spending. He does need to balance the budget — after the economy began showing solid signs of recovery. Our economy has shown an incredible capacity to make money. We can pay off his debt, but first we need to put out the fire.
Hey, really bad day today. Hopefully, tomorrow will be better.
A few progressives are calling for the White House to really get involved with the Gulf Oil Spill. Kick BP out of the way and figure out how to stop this thing!
Anti-government dude, well, he appears to be anti-everything, was arrested in Ark. Very strange.
With tensions escalating quickly, South Korea is ending nearly all trade with North Korea, and blocking North Korean merchant ships access to South Korean shipping lanes. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton described U.S. support of South Korea as “unequivocal,” and announced that the American military and South Korean forces would initiate joint military exercises.
Yemen: “Yemeni tribesmen kidnapped two American tourists, a man and a woman, Monday morning outside the capital city of Sana, the American Embassy in Yemen confirmed on Monday.” The kidnappers are reportedly seeking the release of an imprisoned ally. (Ed note: Yemen is so dangerous that we have stopped letting our military ships re-fuel there. Why would American tourists be in Yemen. Seriously? Why?)
Texas gubernatorial hopeful, Houston Mayor Bill White (D), will, if elected, try to undo the damage done to the state curriculum by the Texas Board of Education.
Bagram: “A federal appeals court ruled Friday that three men who had been detained by the United States military for years without trial in Afghanistan had no recourse to American courts. The decision was a broad victory for the Obama administration in its efforts to hold terrorism suspects overseas for indefinite periods without judicial oversight.” (Ed note: This is very disturbing.
Fox News’ on-air news team probably shouldn’t use the word “we” when talking about Republicans, at least if the network intends to keep up appearances.
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s wife apparently calls him “Mr. Clueless.” She’s referring to his familiarity with technology, but I kind of like the broader applicability of the label.
A mashup is when you mash several tunes together. I have no idea who is the best at this. I do know that this guy DJ Earworm is da man. He is incredible.
The qualities that set a great athlete apart from the rest of us lie not just in the muscles and the lungs but also between the ears. That’s because athletes need to make complicated decisions in a flash. One of the most spectacular examples of the athletic brain operating at top speed came in 2001, when the Yankees were in an American League playoff game with the Oakland Athletics. Shortstop Derek Jeter managed to grab an errant throw coming in from right field and then gently tossed the ball to catcher Jorge Posada, who tagged the base runner at home plate. Jeter’s quick decision saved the game—and the series—for the Yankees. To make the play, Jeter had to master both conscious decisions, such as whether to intercept the throw, and unconscious ones. These are the kinds of unthinking thoughts he must make in every second of every game: how much weight to put on a foot, how fast to rotate his wrist as he releases a ball, and so on.
In recent years neuroscientists have begun to catalog some fascinating differences between average brains and the brains of great athletes. By understanding what goes on in athletic heads, researchers hope to understand more about the workings of all brains—those of sports legends and couch potatoes alike.
As Jeter’s example shows, an athlete’s actions are much more than a set of automatic responses; they are part of a dynamic strategy to deal with an ever-changing mix of intricate challenges. Even a sport as seemingly straightforward as pistol shooting is surprisingly complex. A marksman just points his weapon and fires, and yet each shot calls for many rapid decisions, such as how much to bend the elbow and how tightly to contract the shoulder muscles. Since the shooter doesn’t have perfect control over his body, a slight wobble in one part of the arm may require many quick adjustments in other parts. Each time he raises his gun, he has to make a new calculation of what movements are required for an accurate shot, combining previous experience with whatever variations he is experiencing at the moment. (more…)
To be honest, I have no problem with a prayer to start a Board of Education meeting. I think that’s fine. But listen to the partisan and misguided prayer that whe delivers. Cynthia Dunbar, who delivers the invocation, ends her prayer with a very partisan statement that we are a “Christian land governed by Christian principles.” The whole thing is so disappointing.
I have no idea who Cynthia Dunbar is or what she does for a living. I don’t know if she’s an ordained minister or simply a well-connected zealot. If you’re just a little bit thoughtful about what you say before you say it, you would do little bit of research. Within the first two paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence there is a reference to God.
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Well, this must be evidence that our forefathers thought we should be a Christian nation. Well, I’m not sure that is direct evidence. The Declaration of Independence is really a letter from the colonists to the King of England. So this letter is basically telling King George that we’re not going to live under his rule anymore.
Our first governing structure was the Articles of Confederation, constructed in 1776. Although the Articles of Confederation did not mention God, it did mention “the Great Governor of the World.” Even early drafts of the Constitution refer to God and to Christianity. I’m not sure if Ms. Cynthia Dunbar has actually read our Constitution. I have. And when you read the Constitution you notice that there is no mention of God, the Creator, the Great Governor or anything like that in its final version. Why? Again, if you study American history and not just the blatherings of Newt Gingrich and Focus on the Family (“…the Constitution was designed to perpetuate a Christian order..”) you recognize that this was not an oversight. Instead, it was a deliberate attempt by our forefathers to remove God and religion from the document. This is why Article VI declares that there be “no religious test” to hold office in the United States government. This language was inserted not by Thomas Jefferson or John Adams, but by Charles Pinckney, governor of South Carolina. The measure was adopted without much discussion and, according to a Maryland delegate, it passed by an overwhelming majority. Again, if Ms. Dunbar had truly studied her history she would’ve noticed that in several of the states there was a heated debate over this clause. Reverend David Cantwell, a Protestant minister from North Carolina, was fearful that “Jews and pagans” would be able to govern. There were similar arguments in multiple states. There was a general worry that a Quaker might get into the White House and his pacifism cause us to be overrun by anyone or some foreign power. Virginia went so far as to suggest changes in language in Article VI so that it read “no other religious test shall ever be required then I believe in the one and only true God, who is the rewarder of the good and the punisher of the evil.” James Madison defended the idea that there be no religious test to hold public office in the Federalist Papers number 51 and 56.
We really and truly do have a remarkable document in the US Constitution. Many states, including Massachusetts and Virginia, had language in their state constitutions which included actual religious tests for office holders. They had to be Christians. Over the years this language was dropped. This shows us how remarkable it was that we were able to get a Constitution that was as liberal as it was.
Finally, Ms. Dunbar has proven that she does not belong on the Board of Education of any state. Before giving her prayer, she did not do her homework. She instead resorted to the common wisdom of people like Jerry Falwell and Newt Gingrich. If you want to teach your children common wisdom just remember that’s not the same thing as teaching them facts. The fact is we have a Godless Constitution, which was written by Christian men who feared tyranny of all kinds. Our forefathers purposely omitted God so that we could truly have freedom of religion or the freedom not to have any religion if we wanted. That’s the beauty of our Constitution.
Sections of this post were taken from the fabulous book, The Godless Constitution by Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore.
Are we living in the year of 2010 or 1960? I’m sorry, but this sounds like an episode of It Takes a Thief (a short-lived TV series starring Robert Wagner as a suave and sophisticated thief who began stealing for the American government.) Several extremely expensive works of art were stolen from a Paris museum. From press accounts, there are no solid leads.
Mr Girard put the value of the stolen paintings at just under 100m euros (£86m; $123m). They had earlier been estimated to be worth some 500m euros (£431m; $618m).
The five missing paintings are Dove with Green Peas by Pablo Picasso (painted in 1911), Pastoral by Henri Matisse (1906), Olive Tree near l’Estaque by Georges Braque (1906), Woman with Fan by Amedeo Modigliani (1919) and Still Life with Candlestick by Fernand Leger (1922).
Museum officials discovered the theft early on Thursday, when they found a smashed window and a broken padlock which had been cut to gain access to the five paintings.
It is the biggest heist since the 1990 theft at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston of a Vermeer, several Rembrandts, Degas and other masterpiece.
None of these works has yet been recovered. (more…)
I don’t think that the tea party is going to be able to take America back to the 50′s, too much as changed. A friend of mine sent me an e-mail which really illustrates this point. He wrote:
Amid all the clamor in public debate —every now and then a snapshot speaks volumes about our culture –as does people’s reaction to the photo.
Look at the next photo in the attached photo gallery. For some reason it touched my heart about America —and I couldn’t stop gazing at it. Black and Brown Presidents walking in front of an incredibly diverse crowd of school children and a few adults. Compare it w White House lawn photos of 50’s , 60s and even 70′s.
Click on photo for larger image
The wide eyed joy and wonderment on the kids faces. A few other adults who are more sanguine either due to maturity or detachment. The seriousness of the task that Secret Service agents bring to their jobs at all times.
How America has and is changing.
What’s more—this is the type of photo that probably elicits very different reactions—particularly on the eve of an anticipated divisive immigration reform debate—based on the viewer’s life perspective. It touched me very deeply.
It reminds me of 2 other photos that offer similar commentary on different world views.
The famous 1965 photo of Cassius Clay standing triumphantly over a fallen Sonny Liston (click on photo to see enlarged image) while the background was full of “objective “ journalists and photographers with looks of disgust and amazement on their faces.
The 1974 photo of Ali’s knockout of George Foreman in Zaire with a background picture of unanimous unadulterated ectasy amongst the Black Africans.
This one is similarly etched in my mind as an updated snapshot of where we are in history.
One of my commenters reminded me of the shenanigans that were going on at the Department of the Interior. Most of that was going on in the division of Minerals Management Service. These guys have been under scrutiny lately because of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. For a while, this was Corruption Central. Lucrative contracts were steered to former employees. Employees were accepting gifts, including golf, ski and paintball outings, along with tickets to football and baseball games. Alcohol, cocaine and marijuana were shared with oil and gas company representatives. Sexual relationships between industry representatives and members of the Minerals management service were also found. It’s kind of surprising we haven’t had more problems than we have. We need to fix this.
Michael Burry is the hedge fund manager mentioned in Michael Lewis’s book, The Big Short. He figured out the housing bubble and invested in credit default swaps. Basically, the credit default swaps acted as insurance against mortgage-backed securities defaulting. If the securities defaulted, Michael Burry got paid. (He made over $1 billion with the crash.) Somehow, I missed an op-ed that he wrote in the New York Times over a month ago. Burry challenged Alan Greenspan to explain why he, Greenspan, did not see economic collapse coming. The article is unusually lengthy but clearly worth a read. I believe that all of Michael Burry’s points are extremely valid. If he was able to put together all the pieces using publicly available information, why wasn’t the Fed able to put together those same pieces? I think that this is a valid question. The Fed failed us, the American people.
There are several contentious issues with financial reform. The one that I’ve been pushing and trying to hammer on is making the banks smaller. Another issue is fixing these derivatives. Derivatives are currently unregulated. Blanche Lincoln, Senator from Arkansas, introduced legislation to regulate these derivatives. It’s somewhat surprising that she would introduce such a legislation, as she is associated with the free market crowd. The chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, Christopher Dodd, opposed this regulation and was trying to scale it back. He met with stiff opposition and has dropped his objections. (I’m hoping that some time in the near future someone will write a book about Christopher Dodd, Barney Frank and other members of the House and Senate banking committees. I think their loyalties are somewhat divided.) There’s an interesting conspiracy theory that is floating around. Senator Lincoln, up for reelection and being challenged from her left, never intended for this legislation to be passed. Instead, once she was able to squash her primary opponents she would withdraw her amendment. At least that’s how the conspiracy theory goes. Currently, she is in a runoff.
Finally, over the last several days the NBA has shown us that the Orlando Magic and the Phoenix Suns are not strong enough to pull off an upset. If the Lakers and Celtics stay healthy, they should cruise to victory and meet in the finals. This would be a GREAT final.
CNN has painted this exercise as one about race, but maybe it’s not. If what the mother has said is true (not really been exposed to other races) then the child knows that she is good and she is white. The only figure that looks like her must also be good. The figures that don’t look like her but be bad. Now, if the mother had a Black friend that came over with her daughter then this exercise could be about race. As far as I can tell this is about being different.
My mother, a woman who grew up in the Baltimore projects, told me over and over again, “if you don’t have something nice to say, maybe you should keep it to yourself.” I think that this applies to Mark Williams. Religion is always a difficult subject to talk about. People have irrational responses to reasonable questions. Therefore, it is important to tread lightly.
Sometimes, when you open your mouth, you reveal more about yourself than you do about those that you are condemning. Mark Williams revealed his ignorance when he called Muslims “the animals of Allah” and he referred to the God of Islam as a “monkey God.” I will assume, for the moment, the Mark Williams is a Christian (I don’t know this but I’m assuming). Therefore, in studying Christianity he should understand that Islam is a spinoff of Christianity. The God of Islam is the God of Christ and the God of Moses. So, in condemning the God of Muslims he is condemning his own God, my own God.
Mr. Williams has revealed that he has learned nothing by reading the Bible. The Bible isn’t about hating your fellow man. The Bible isn’t about spewing as much hate filled rhetoric as you possibly can. The Bible is about loving your fellow man and loving God. Mark Williams appears to be doing neither. My job is not to judge Mark Williams. He will be judged when the time comes. This gentleman supposed to be some type of conservative talkshow host. If he is spewing this kind of venom on the air, he should be removed. Talking in front of a microphone, broadcasting, is a privilege. He does not deserve this privilege. If he has just written this rhetoric on his blog than his blog should be boycotted by all.
Finally, I’m sorry I don’t get why building a Mosque near ground-zero is so upsetting. It wasn’t the Muslim faith that attacked us on 9/11. It was 19 men who were practicing some twisted form of that religion. I would think that there would no clearer sign that we, Americans don’t hate Islam and embrace all who come here (legally) than a Mosque near ground-zero.
Errington C. Thompson, MD, is a surgeon, scholar, full-time sports fan and part-time political activist. He is active in a number of community projects and initiatives. Through medicine, he strives to improve the physical health of all he treats...
The latest attempt by BP to shut down its apocalyptic oil gusher — the “top kill” maneuver — has 
