Tanks For The Shame

(Cartoon by Jack Ohman published 8/19/14 in the Sacramento Bee and featured at McClatchy DC.)

(Cartoon by Kevin Siers published 8/15/14 in the Charlotte Observer and featured at McClatchy DC.)

I've slipped back into that bad habit of watching the news on television and reading the news on line.  Unfortunately, the news has been more than a little distressing.  The big stories right now are the crazy Islamic terrorists who are into beheading folks who aren't sufficiently Islamic for them and (closer to home) the news out of Ferguson, Missouri of a police shooting of a young black man who turned out to be unarmed.  It was another case of "Walking While Black."

The latter story really depressed me.  Here we are in the 21st Century and this nation just can't get past its racism.  What makes it even worse is that the police are armed to the teeth with military grade weapons.  The excuse is that the "bad guys" have them, so the police should too.  Or something.  The victim in Missouri was shot six times by the automatic weapon the officer was carrying.

Why do police departments have to have tanks, or armed drones, or even the kind of automatic weapons that can fire off six rounds in quick succession.  Wouldn't one shot by a trained officer be enough to bring "the bad guy" down?  Are our police lousy marksmen?  What?

Wouldn't wearing protective body armor be a better choice if a military arsenal is involved?

I know: too many questions from a loony old broad.  It's just that I'd hoped to see some good kind of changes before I died.  I guess I'm asking for too much.

Juan Go Bye-Bye

Atrios beat me to the punch on the story of NPR's canning Juan Williams for some comments he made on Bill O'Reilly's television show on the Fox network. I guess I should stay up later than I do.

While Atrios cited the New York Times article, I first read the news this morning in the Los Angeles Times. The quotes will be coming from that article.

Here's some of what Mr. Williams had to say on O'Reilly's show:

"I mean, look, Bill, I'm not a bigot," said Williams, who is African American and has written extensively on the civil rights movement and race in America. "You know the kind of books I've written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on a plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous." [Emphasis added]

What an odd thing to say.

I mean, does Mr. Williams get all nervous when an observant Jew boards the plane wearing a yarmulke? Or a Catholic priest with a clerical collar? Does jewelry in the shape of a cross worry him? All of those accessories signal a religious orientation, one that the wearer is openly displaying and presumably identifies with.

Surely Mr. Williams decries racial profiling. Why, then, does he engage in religious profiling? Yes, the terrorist criminals of 9/11 were all Muslim, but they weren't wearing "Muslim garb." In fact, they were all wearing "Western garb," suits, button-down collars, shiny shoes.

Now, the irony of all of this is that Mr. Williams comments came in the context of "political correctness," a favorite topic of Bill O'Reilly. Mr. Williams, presumably to continue making his bones with O'Reilly and Fox (for whom Mr. Williams also works)made it clear that he had no use for that kind of verbal politeness. He feared that it could "lead to some kind of paralysis, where you don't address reality." Of course the reality which Mr. Williams was actually addressing in his comments seems to be his own lack of courage when it comes to boarding airplanes.

I'm sure Mr. Williams will have no problem moving into full-time employment with Fox now that he's lost his gig at National Public Radio. I'm also sure that he and his new colleagues will have a field day over the firing. The viewers will be treated to long discourses on the First Amendment (even though Williams wasn't arrested, detained, or fined for his comments). And during those discourses Shirley Sherrod's name will never come up.

But there is this: Juan Williams won't be on NPR any more.

Those Librul Points of View

Congratulations are due to WaPo today, it has presented the ultimate argument. It's librul. Seriously, that's it.

In his breathtakingly eloquent victory speech Thursday, Mr. Obama said Iowa would be remembered as "the moment when we tore down barriers that have divided us for too long, when we rallied people of all parties and ages to a common cause."

But what cause, precisely? There's virtually nothing in Mr. Obama's platform that diverges from the standard, left-wing Democratic fare. He promised again Thursday not to "just tell you what you want to hear, but what you need to know." But virtually nothing he says is dissonant to liberal ears; in foreign policy, trade policy, education policy, fiscal policy, there is nothing with a nod to the possibility of good ideas in the red-state playbook.

Guess there's nothing else to say for WaPo editors, no good ideas to cite.

Thanks, fellas, that's as close as you've yet come to admitting that the left has all along been the correct point of view. The right is continuing to leave a legacy of disasters, and WaPo has only contributed to ruining the country.

Unemployment up, stoking recession fears

...how the Federal Government will probably make the sub-prime mess even worse than it already is likely to become and waste your tax money in the process.

End Iraq war, or support it with bonds, draft

Who's watching your pay stub?

Now here's one I really can be at one with;
Impeach both

There's just a few of those librul viewpoints that are totally right, and unarguable. Yeh, WaPo is right, Obama just spouts all those ideas that are right, he doesn't talk about those right wing wrong ones. Killer.

From the department of really good thoughts;
orrg1 wrote:
Karl Rove had a specific "51%" strategy to exacerbate the "Red/Blue" partisan split in the country purely for political gain at a time when we are fighting wars in two countries. Several government agencies, including vital ones such as the Justice Department, have had their credibility destroyed by appointment of political hacks to key positions. Just bringing an end to this sorry era would go a long way towards uniting the country. Just what alternate, clueless universe are you from?

As usual, comments contain the wisdom the WaPo editorial board completely lacks.

When Citizenship Isn't Enough

This administration swears it's not profiling Arabs and Middle Easterners who cross American borders, but at least one Arab American finds that hard to believe. From today's NY Times:

Abe Dabdoub calls the day he was sworn in as an American citizen last year the proudest moment of his life, little suspecting that his new identity would set off a bureaucratic nightmare at the hands of the Department of Homeland Security.

Most of his family members live in Canada, and on each of Mr. Dabdoub’s 14 trips to visit them since last August, on his way back across the Ambassador Bridge into Michigan, the Customs and Border Patrol agents have sent him through a security gantlet, he says.

He has been fingerprinted 14 times, his body searched 9 times, been handcuffed 4 times and isolated in a separate detention room 13 times. On the fourth trip, the border patrol agents started subjecting his wife to similar scrutiny.

...the problem continues unabated and, typical of such cases, no one in the federal government nor his elected representatives will tell him why he is being singled out. [Emphasis added]

Mr. Dabdoub was born in Saudi Arabia of Palestinian parents and moved to Canada at age five. His work took him to Michigan where he currently lives. He's an American citizen now, yet he has gotten stopped at the border each and every time since he's gotten his citizenship, and no one will tell him why, presumably because that is some kind of state secret.

This fellow citizen has made it onto one of the many government "lists" and the chances are he won't be able to get off that list.

A Government Accountability Office report issued last September said that just 31 individuals whose names were mistakenly on the watch list had them taken off in 2005. Thousands of such redress queries have been submitted, most of them from people who are misidentified. But their names cannot be removed because they are not the person on the list, the report said. [Emphasis added]

How's that for a Catch-22?

September 11 should be remembered, but only as the date our civil liberties were stripped from us.

More On the Grounded Imams

On Saturday, I posted on the six Muslim religious leaders who were removed from a U.S. Airways flight because they had made the other passengers "nervous" by their activities. On Monday, several of them, along with other imams, a Jewish rabbi, and several Christian ministers struck back in a wonderfully American fashion: they held a protest. From an AP report in the Minneapolis Star Tribune:

Imams, ministers and a rabbi staged a "pray-in" demonstration Monday at Reagan Washington National Airport and demanded an apology from US Airways for barring six Muslims from a Minneapolis to Phoenix flight last week.

The religious leaders called for an end to racial profiling, saying it was unacceptable in America.

...On Monday, Shahin and a handful of other Muslims bowed down on rugs and prayed in Terminal A near the US Airways ticket counter. Jewish and Christian clergy also said prayers.

After the prayer session, Shahin and other religious leaders boarded a US Airways flight to demonstrate their determination to continue praying and flying. [Emphasis added]

Bravo!

Here, by the way, is a description of one of the things that unnerved the other passengers:

The imams, who were returning from a religious conference, had prayed on their prayer rugs in the airport before the flight. After they boarded the flight, a passenger, who was alarmed by their activity, passed a note to a flight attendant. The men were taken off the airplane, handcuffed and questioned.

Now, does anyone believe that if a white Christian group had prayed aloud before boarding the flight that they would have been prevented from flying? Even if those prayers involved speaking in tongues, the most that would have elicited would be eye-rolls from the jaded business class flyers. But these were Muslims, and apparently of Middle Eastern background, and when they kept getting up from their seats before take-off, some passengers freaked. Does anyone believe that excited white Christians not seated together burbling over their conference, would have gotten that kind of attention?

Here's the thing. Most Americans haven't a clue about the religion of Islam. All they know is that a bunch of people professing that faith flew planes into buildings and killed about 3,000 Americans. They also know, because they've been told so damned many times, that we are at war with Islamofascists who want to destroy America and eat our puppies. That certainly doesn't excuse their ignorance, but given the American propensity for intentional ignorance when it comes to anything not white-bread American, it does kind of explain the response of the passengers on that flight.

What is doesn't explain is the airline's response. If there were passengers who were nervous about the prayers and the color of the imams, why didn't the airline offer the nervous passengers another flight? Why were the imams removed from the flight and handcuffed? It seems to me that what we have here is an extension of the crime of Driving While Black. Now we have Praying While Muslim.

U.S. Airways is "looking into" the situation, and we're already hearing calls for some clarification from the federal government on guidelines, but those guidelines haven't caught up to the reality on the ground. I suspect that the racial profiling will continue, but maybe the outrageousness of this incident will provoke a more reasonable approach. In that regard, there is a slightly hopeful note mentioned in the story:

The Homeland Security Department's Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties said last week that it was investigating the US Airways incident.

Well, now there's an idea.