Where's the Outrage?

Now this some good stuff.

Artist: Ella Fitzgerald and Chick Webb
Tune: St. Louis Blues

Tags: Music by ecthompson md
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I’m really not much for burning things. Occasionally, burning firewood is probably okay. I don’t tend to burn trash. I’ve taken care of way too many people who’ve been blown up by “surprises” in the trash. I know that many people like to burn things. Some are fascinated by fire. Others simply like to destroy things. I think the burning of books is kind of futile and stupid. I think that burning religious books, whether the Bible or the Koran or the Torah, is also stupid.

Booman has more:
Burning books is stupid. Getting mad about burned books is stupid. Killing people who had nothing to do with burning any books because you’re mad that a book got burned? That’s World Champion Stupid. It’s especially stupid because the moron preacher from Florida only had something like 30 congregants that he could pull together for his little game with matches. You’re going to kill random people because of what happened in someone’s living room on the other side of the world?I feel badly for everyone who died or sustained injuries, but I feel especially badly for the five Nepalese guards who were killed. They were killed with their own weapons because they refused to use them on unarmed protesters. They went to work for the United Nations and this is their reward. It makes me angry, frankly.

The people who work for the UN in Afghanistan aren’t too happy about it.

Foreigners committed to assisting in the rebuilding of Afghanistan have long accepted the possibility that they might die at the hands of warring parties, but this degree of violence from ordinary citizens is not something most of us factored into our decision to work here……This is not the beginning of the end for the international community in Afghanistan. This is the end. Terry Jones and others will continue to pull anti-Islam stunts and opportunistic extremists here will use those actions to incite attacks against foreigners. Unless we, the internationals, want our guards to fire on unarmed protestors from now on, the day has come for us to leave Afghanistan.

And then there’s this:

The act drew little response worldwide, but provoked angry condemnation in this region, where it was reported in the local media and where anti-American sentiment already runs high. Last week, President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan condemned the burning in an address before Parliament, and President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan on Thursday called on the United States to bring those responsible for the Koran burning to justice.A prominent Afghan cleric, Mullah Qyamudin Kashaf, the acting head of the influential Ulema Council of Afghanistan and a Karzai appointee, also called for American authorities to arrest and try Mr. Jones in the Koran burning.

I’m all for showing some basic respect for other people’s religious faith, but every last one of these jerks can kiss my ass. This is America, and we can burn any damn book we want any damn time we want. No one is going to arrest this fruitcake for burning a book and the fact that you think that we should arrest him means that you don’t understand the first thing about what it means to live in a free society with freedom of conscience. The dumb preacher got a bunch of innocent people killed, but only because a bunch of equally dumb people decided to murder people who had no responsibility or relationship to the man who instigated their ire. And who kills someone for burning a book? I don’t care that the book is sacred. It was probably published in New York before it sat in a Border’s warehouse for months waiting for some religious nutjob to buy it. Just like any other book, it was lit ablaze when the temperature hit 451 degrees fahrenheit. Allah didn’t intervene to prevent the burning, so it must have been something he felt like he had under control. I hope he isn’t the kind of guy who thinks his honor is protected by butchering UN aid workers.

You know what would also be stupid? If I responded to all this by killing the next five short people I see. I’ll just kill them and say I did it because it made as much sense to do it as it did to burn a Koran…or kill people because a Koran was burned. Why not? If you look at it just right, you know they had it coming.

Tags: Afghanistan, Books, Party Politics, Religion by ecthompson md
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A friend of mine pointed me to this video. Nina Simone. Outstanding. Powerful.

Artist: Nina Simone
Tune: I loves you Porgy

Tags: Music by ecthompson md
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First, let me say I told you so. I spent the last two years (here, here and here) I have been talking about our economy and the recession. I talked about some of the causes of our financial collapse. I talked about some of the strategies for getting things turned around. I said that the government must spend money. There’s no other entity within the United States that has the power and size to be able to move our economy. Republicans, on the other hand, have been running around screaming that the government is too big. We have too much regulation and business is being strangled. It’s hard for me to figure out how business is being strangled with record profits rolling in. How can business be dying on the vine when they’re not paying any taxes? House Republicans are insisting on budget tax cuts.

The new jobs numbers are out today. There’s clearly some encouraging news. The economy made over 200,000 jobs last month. The unemployment rate is now 8.8%. Most of these jobs involve the private sector. So, conservatives can’t scream that all of these are government jobs. It is way too early to start doing the happy dance, but it appears that a thoughtful approach to economic policy is actually working.

Long-term unemployment is still a huge problem. There are still 6.1 million Americans who’ve been unemployed for more than six months. 24.5 million Americans are either unemployed or underemployed. In spite of the fact that March was one of the best months we’ve seen in this country in years (source jobs growth) the economy really needs to heat up in order to alleviate some of the pain and suffering that many Americans are feeling. If the economy continues to hire at a rate of 212,000 Americans per month it will be 2018 before the unemployment rate reaches the level that it was before the Great Recession. We’ve got work to do.

Tax cuts and budget cuts are clearly the wrong policy as the economy is beginning to turn around. We need the house Democrats and the Senate Democrats to stand strong against this budget-cutting GOP. The only reason that I can see to enact major budget cuts at this point in our economic recovery would be to stall or kill the economy before it really gets going. The GOP wouldn’t want to sabotage an economic recovery, would they?

Tags: Budget, Economy, Taxes by ecthompson md
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