The NYC Ground Zero Mosque Issue!

Ok, so I have had it up to my eyeballs over the whole Ground Zero Mosque issue.  First of all, let’s get something straight, the Islamic Cultural Center and Mosque will be two NYC blocks from Ground Zero.  I’m not sure on the orientation but that backs the distance somewhere between a half and two miles from the site.  So let’s stop the whole they are building a mosque on ground zero bullshit, not to mention that there is another mosque I believe four blocks from Ground Zero and that Muslims as well as Christians, Jews, Atheists and probably a Zoroastrian or two died on 9/11.  All of the dead from that horrible day have a claim to be memorialized, not just the ones that look like, or worship like the average American and before you criticize this project, do you know if any Muslim fireman or police died that day?

Honestly given the distance involved I’d like to set up a criterion as to who can actually complain about the mosque, if you can’t sprint the distance from Ground Zero to the mosque without needing oxygen afterword or a rest break during the run, you can’t criticize this project.  Good luck Rush, Hannity, I actually think Palin might have a shot, personally I think it would be a hoot to see all the talking radio/TV heads and republican congressmen running this together, I’d bet we could even boost MSNBC’s ratings for that.

The second and most important point of all in this discussion is geography.  I believe that New York City is located in the United States of America.  Which squarely puts this discussion within the laws of the United States of America.  Please tell me, especially all of you freedom loving conservatives, under what law could we possibly deny this project?  What law will be broken by Americans, acting like good little Capitalists, who have legally purchased property, have cleared the project through the NYC Landmark Preservation Committee, and will have a legal building permit to complete this project?

If the reason we want to deny this project is that we don’t like it, or we don’t agree with it, than tough shit.  In America, as I have often heard conservative talking heads say, we operate under capitalistic principles and under the rule of law supported by the Constitution of the United States of America.  So there it is, ok Beck, Hannity, Limbaugh or any of the other talking heads on Fox News, tell me what law these folks have broken, or is it innocent until proven guilty unless you’re a Muslim or a Hispanic living Arizona?

If you’ve been asleep for the last few weeks here’ s alink to an article about the project:

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2010/06/06/a_mosque_at_ground_zero/

Why I’ve lost all respect for Senator John McCain.

First of all let’s be clear, I’m not that big a fan of any politician, my general opinion being that the majority of them are interested in only one thing, staying in office.  Because if you stay in office you have political power to make things happen and while some I’m sure are just addicted to the power, that power has to have benefits, hmmmm wonder what those are?

However Senator McCain for a long time had the most respect I could muster for a politician.  First you take a look at his background, the man withstood 6 years in the Hanoi Hilton, a prisoner of the North Vietnamese, he was tortured and abused and took it all.  Did he crack, sure he did, but there is no such thing as a man who doesn’t crack under those circumstances and McCain himself has admitted that fact.  Then as a senator McCain was in fact a maverick, most politicians upon hearing an idea or reading a bill first check to see what party it came from?  If it came from their party it’s a good idea, if not, then it is something to be defeated and demonized.  This was not McCain’s stance, sure he took the party line most of the time, but that fit his ideology.  However he was not blindly committed to only doing what the party wanted and at times crossed the aisle when he thought appropriate.  For this he was branded as a “liberal” Republican and at times his party loyalty was questioned.

I was even lucky enough to meet him once at a hotel in Reno.  It was when he was running for the nomination of the Republican Party and I happened to be staying at the same hotel.  I met him coming out out of the elevator, I had noticed the security standing outside of the door of the room next to mine and I put two and two together.  We shook hands and he introduced himself and I joked he better keep the noise down and he replied with a smirk, “I think you better, I have the guys with the guns.”  I ran into him getting back on the elevator a couple of hours later and although security had stopped them, McCain waived an elderly couple and then me on to the elevator with him.  It was a brief encounter with him but he seemd like a genuinely nice man.

My loss of admiration for McCain started during his run for the nomination and subsequent run for President.  First, during the nomination run he was the McCain I knew and respected, and subsequently in a system that does not reward honesty and integrity he was trailing.  At this point I would have expected McCain to stand his ground, behind his principles and lose the nomination.  But alas, the drive to win, to be the big man was too much for him to ignore and so he started moving to the right and dropping the type of rhetoric John McCain had never used.  He even began to court the religious right, a group that he was notoriously at odds with over the last few years.  The tactic was as we all know successful and he became the Republican Party nominee.

Once he became the nominee he went even further to the right in hopes of winning and as we all know thrust Sarah Palin upon us all.  From everything I’ve read McCain may regret that decision as badly as the rest of us do but now we are subjected to throngs of Tea Party wanna be Sarah Palin’s yelling, drill baby drill.  Needless to say I’d lost a lot of respect for McCain by time the election but thought maybe, now that he’d lost, he might return to being the senator I respected, it was not to be.

McCain is right now embroiled in an election battle with J.D. Hayworth a former representative and now a radio talkshow host.  Given Hayworth’s right-wing attitudes and his success with the voters McCain has turned drastically to the right particularly on immigration where he once cosponsored a bill with Ted Kennedy.  He’s gone from a reasonable man on this issue to a right-wing parrot for the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Pailin and the Tea Party.  John McCain has even produced an ad where he says, finish this fence, in reference to the border fence in Arizona.  He’s backing Jan Brewer and her idiocy and has taken a brutal hard line on immigration.  Were these his beliefs and policies all along I could respectively disagree, but when your beliefs and policy recommendations are based on the political expediency of the moment, well at that point Senator McCain, you’re just another politician and I hope you lose.

Jan Brewer, Sarah Palin, Joe Barton or Rush Limbaugh who’s the winner?

Today a quick little post to see who the biggest idiot was in the month of June:

Was it Jan Brewer for her utterly unsubstantiated comment that the majority of all illegal immigrants are drug mules?

http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/06/25/arizona.immigrants.drugs/index.html

Was it Sarah Palin for her emphatic declaration that her breasts are real?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/12/sarah-palins-boob-gate-re_n_610136.html

Perhaps it was Senator Joe Barton for apologizing to BP.

http://zdeaconblue.wordpress.com/2010/06/18/rep-joe-barton-apologizes-to-bp-nice-job/

Or was it Rush Limbaugh for standing by his earlier remarks that Obama used the Haiti earthquake disaster to “burnish his credentials with minorities?”

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-6100434-503544.html

You decide, you can vote for the winner in the comments section.

Why conservatives will win!

Once in a martial arts class a fellow student asked my instructor what type of fighter was the most dangerous.  He talked through the obvious skill advantages of karate, kung fu and even classical boxers but in the end he arrived at the conclusion that a street fighter was the most dangerous, simply because he was the most unpredictable.  As a kid who grew up in a tough neighborhood and spent a decent amount of time on the street, I can tell you that the toughest guy was not the biggest guy, it was the crazy guy.  Lots of times this was a skinny little guy but what made him so tough was that he was willing to do anything, for a minor infraction he’d hit you in the head with a brick.  This my friends is why the conservatives will win, because they are the crazy little skinny guy you met on the street.  They believe what they believe and will act disproportionately to the offense they have deemed committed. 

What will they win?  They’ll win power and influence in this country, the ability to control the flow and course of the discussion of information which will allow them to influence the majority of Americans.  The reason they’ll have this influence is because the majority of Americans take what they hear on TV, cable or some half-assed blog to be gospel.  They don’t question why or how a conclusion is reached just that they heard it from a source they’ve deemed credible.   Once they have given that credibility to a source they believe it completely which is why idiots like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh can gain traction saying the most outrageously stupid things, but don’t worry Sarah Palin can see Russia and Jan Brewer, Governor of Arizona can pick out an illegal alien just by looking at one!

So I have suggested the conservative right is the skinny crazy kid on the block and to substantiate this I have to prove that first they are crazy, and then that they are willing to go over the edge to make their point.  On to the first issue, how nutty are they?  In a recent Harris Interactive online poll, 24% of the respondents who identified themselves as Republicans believe that President Barack Obama is the Antichrist.  Ok, do I really need to go any further on the nutty front!  Additionally, as pointed out by Steve Mirsky in Scientific American, 22% of Republicans in the survey think that President Obama wants the terrorists to win, so that means 2% presumably think he is the Antichrist yet somehow he still wants the terrorists to lose, maybe it’s bad guy envy?  Ok, so we can be fairly confident the conservative right is nuts.

Now, on to the second point do they act disproportionately to the circumstances?  Personally, I would consider the deaths of 8 abortion doctors and multiple clinic bombings over the last couple of decades to qualify as an over reaction to legalized abortion.  This does not even get into discussing how the same people who feared the Teletubbies would turn their children gay, are ok with their children and everyone else’s children seeing horrid giant posters of aborted fetuses that they display for the general public.  A serious and disproportionate over reaction to disagreeing with a law.  It would be the equivalent of anti-logging activists on the left assassinating loggers.

Finally, I think the right in general to be just as hypocritical as the left and politicians in general, when Ronald Reagan or any Bush was in office the slogan was, “America love it or leave it.”  But now with Barack Obama in office you can suddenly hate America and hang out, my how things have changed, or have they?

To Jan Brewer, Governor of Arizona, kiss my shiny white Irish A@#!

Hello Governor Brewer let’s get something straight, you signed a bill that makes it a misdemeanor to be an illegal immigrant in Arizona so that local and state authorities can deal with the immigration issues your state is facing.  I understand the difficulties that southern Arizona in particular faces in regard to illegal immigration. You’ve taken a lot of static for that decision and your most recent response, a ripoff Kermit the Frog puppet singing reading is fun, is not only ridiculous but hypocritical.  Particularly in light of the fact that you say this action will not inspire racial profiling, of course you must be talking about the amended bill you signed removing the racial profiling language, so I wonder, Governor Brewer, did YOU read the first version of the bill you signed? Remember, reading is fun!

 If you go to this link: http://immigration.change.org/blog/view/frog_puppet_thinks_reading_and_arizona_sb_1070_is_fun you can see the stupid singing frog video and read a quick little snippet by Alex DiBranco where she quotes Arizona State Rep. Russell Pearce, the sponsor of SB 1070 who goes ahead and admits racial profiling was exactly what he had in mind: “Ninety percent of the illegal aliens in Arizona come from south of the border, so it [appearance] certainly may be a factor.”  At least he’s honest, Governor Brewer doesn’t have the same integrity.

I’m sick and tired of politicians on the right, so-called ”conservatives”, using bullshit reasons to be sexist, racist assholes.  I’m not racist, I’m just against illegal immigration they say, taking a break from telling their beaner and wet back jokes to face a camera.   Rush Limbaugh isn’t sexist as he refers to this or that woman as the news chick, or government chick, he’s just joking around, I mean hey. the term femonazi is a term of endearment, please.  Conservatives don’t understand how students wearing US Flag shirts to school on Cinco de Mayo could possibly be construed as anything other than patriotic.  Surely they are not trying to incite Mexican-American students.

Cut the shit, all of you, just stop, THIS IS AMERICA!  You want to be a patriot, aspire to the actual ideals this country was founded on, a nation where those who cannot find freedom or prosperity in their homeland can come and find it here.  That plaque on the statue of liberty is not just for decoration, nor was it ever intended to be conditional.  In this country we take the poor and the displaced as long as we are able, that’s patriotic.  My great-grandfather immigrated to this country from Ireland, you may have heard of a little something called the potato famine, if not, look it up!  When the Irish came to the US they were spit upon, maligned, beaten, killed and discriminated against.  But my people had an edge, we looked a hell of a lot like the people who were already here.  Mexicans and Latinos immigrating here legally or illegally have a much bigger hill to climb based on nothing more than the color of their skin.  These people are just as hard-working as my ancestors were, they come here and they work here to make a better life for their children, just like my great-grandfather and so many other Irish men and women did.  So Governor Brewer on behalf of myself and all of my Irish ancestors, kiss my shiny, white, Irish ass and get off the Mexican’s back!