File that in the “who’d have thought” category. The bigots protesting the construction of a Muslim community center in lower Manhattan start an nasty scene with a bystander.
Apparently their “Mus-dar” is triggered by anyone who happens to have dark skin and wear a skullcap. (Makes you question their ability to sniff out terrorists, huh?)
Bonus points to the prick in the hardhat, who apparently grew up fantasizing about attacking war protesters as part of the Silent Majority.
“What Newt Gingrich is saying is that Islam, like every religion, has to be responsible for its biggest assholes.”
-John Oliver
A great piece from the Daily Show on the controversy surrounding the construction of a Muslim community center in Lower Manhattan. As Jon Stewart points out, all opposition to the project is rooted in attempts to shamefully equate Muslims with terrorists.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
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Edit: The New Yorker also has an excellent take on the issue in their latest Talk of the Town.
Edit Two: Frank Rich knocks it out of the park in the New York Times.
Alexis de Tocqueville, the great French chronicler of early America, was once misquoted as having said: “America is the best country in the world to be poor.” That is no longer the case. Nowadays in America, you have a smaller chance of swapping your lower income bracket for a higher one than in almost any other developed economy – even Britain on some measures. To invert the classic Horatio Alger stories, in today’s America if you are born in rags, you are likelier to stay in rags than in almost any corner of old Europe.
Another good “death of the middle class” piece, this time in the Financial Times. The people profiled don’t seem blameless, but it looks like their biggest mistake was believing that a rising tide lifts all boats.
As the New York Times reports, under Chief Justice John Roberts, “the court not only moved to the right but also became the most conservative one in living memory, based on an analysis of four sets of political science data.”
I disagree with them politically, but I do admire the Republicans for their skill at long-term strategy. The results are disastrous for working people, of course, but corporations will see a new era of unchecked freedom.
In the fall of 1999, the drug giant SmithKline Beecham secretly began a study to find out if its diabetes medicine, Avandia, was safer for the heart than a competing pill, Actos, made by Takeda.
Avandia’s success was crucial to SmithKline, whose labs were otherwise all but barren of new products. But the study’s results, completed that same year, were disastrous. Not only was Avandia no better than Actos, but the study also provided clear signs that it was riskier to the heart.
But instead of publishing the results, the company spent the next 11 years trying to cover them up, according to documents recently obtained by The New York Times. The company did not post the results on its Web site or submit them to federal drug regulators, as is required in most cases by law.
The particulars are obviously different from BP’s compromised safety record, but they highlight a shared trend: corporations disregarding any notion of social responsibility in their grab for short-term profits. They’re also laying waste to the conservative argument that corporations can police themselves. This was happening under arguably the best regulatory body we have, the FDA.
If possible, I think the authorities need to look into distributing some serious jail time as a deterrent to future corner-cutters. Perhaps the government should explore revoking GlaxoSmithKline’s corporate charter as well. Of course, given current feelings about corporate personhood, I would wager the literal death penalty has more support.
But even as he became the toast of Britain’s business world and was made a knight and member of the House of Lords, Mr. Browne was ruthlessly slashing costs. He outsourced many operations and fired tens of thousands of employees, including many engineers.
Tom Kirchmaier, a lecturer in strategy at the Manchester Business School, said that Mr. Browne tried to run BP like a financial company, rotating managers into new jobs with tough profit targets and then moving them before they had to deal with the consequences. The troubled Texas City refinery, for example, had five managers in six years.
This New York Times article on BP’s safety disasters highlights the need for enforceable regulation. Instead, we continue to believe the myth of laissez faire excellence. As we’ve seen with the oil school in the Gulf, it’s disastrous when companies attempt to profit at the margins of recklessness.
Benjamin Kunkel has an interesting article in N+1 examining the influence of employment policy on economic growth. He ends by presenting his vision of full employment.
I’m sure Rush Limbaugh and all the other bottom dwellers who blame poor, minority home-owners for the economic implosion will get right on this one (from the New York Times).
Biggest Defaulters on Mortgages are the Rich
Whether it is their residence, a second home or a house bought as an investment, the rich have stopped paying the mortgage at a rate that greatly exceeds the rest of the population.
Of course, rich people defaulting isn’t what caused the downturn either, but it’s a sweet rebuttal to remoras whose economic platform is to rub the sub-90th percentile’s faces in the dirt.
The New York Times has an informative article on how Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal is trying to claim the federal government’s response to the Gulf oil spill is being undermined by bureaucratic dithering. Problems aside, in reality, the state is responsible for much of the relief planning, and their planning – thanks in part to funding cuts – was incomplete and unready.
As a result of this lack of planning, Jindal et al. want to rush forward with an emergency engineering response that will take months to complete and cost hundreds of millions of dollars…even as experts think it won’t work.
If the White House were proposing this plan, Jindal would ridicule it as undercooked pork, a la volcano monitoring. But apparently asking the experts to weigh in before committing to throwing hundreds of millions of dollars into this crude pit is the height of nanny-state incompetence.
Evan Osnos has a profile in the New Yorker of Chicago’s Mayor Daley, “The Daley Show,” which does a good job of cataloguing the man and all of his frustrating complications. But Ben Joravsky of the Chicago Reader has a compelling comeback, “Taking the New Yorker for a Ride,” charging that the profile falls for the typically myth-making surrounding the mayor.
My favorite line in Joravsky’s piece? The one citing people’s weakness for the argument that Chicago’s success relative to other rust-belt towns is the result of Daley’s strong-man rule.
But I’ll just ask our visiting correspondents to reconsider the pervasive view that Chicago needs a temperamental tyrant who oversees a corrupt and inefficient regime in order to get anything done.
In the same issue of the Reader, reporter Mick Dumke explores why the time might be right for Daley to be replaced in “Time for a Revolution.” I doubt it, but I hope so.