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.

-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.

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.

“He said we’re a commodity like soybeans and oil, and the price of commodities go up and down,” Mr. Budd recalled. “He said there are thousands of people in this area out of jobs, and they could hire any one of them for $14 an hour. It made me sick to have someone sit across the table and say I’m not worth the money I make.”

With their article, “In Mott’s Strike, More Than Pay at Stake,” the New York Times details the efforts of Dr Pepper Snapple Group to squeeze its workers to increase already-rising corporate profits.

The workers are doing the right thing in organizing for their own self-interest. I think it’s crucial for consumers to pressure manufacturers and stores to favor workers. I’m not sure what the best path for action is, though. I try to patronize local businesses, but maybe they just apply the same squeeze, with a friendly face.

Most importantly, the article is a strong prompt to consider and share your own end-of-life plans. Toward that end, I publicly plead: please don’t have me stuffed or place my brain in a monkey.

But as the heterosexual possessor of a working penis, I have to tell you, I really, really hate it when guys cite the supposedly Darwinian inevitability that men can’t control their libidos and their dicks as a reason to fuck over women and gays. I hated it during the great “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” circle jerk of the early ’90s, when a conga line of military hacks took the position that, if gay men were allowed to serve alongside “regular” men, every barracks would turn into a bar scene from Cruising. And I didn’t like it any better a few years later, when there were a string of scandals related to women in the military being harassed and worse by some of those clean straight male servicemen, and the conga line started up again, this time with the hacks insisting that this is what just happens when men are forced to be in the same vicinity as women–it’s not as if their superiors could ever get them to control themselves.

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.

Bobby is the author of the short-story collection, The Exciting Life and Death of the Amazing Henry and Other stories (which I reviewed here). He was also a longtime FLYMF contributor, with a number of stories in FLYMF’s Greatest Hits. Bobby’s FLYMF work includes When The Camera Stopped Rolling, Mike Tyson Movie Reviews, O’Neill ‘Scopes’ An Early Career, Monkey Dance, Outrageous Claims, In Memorium, Adventures In Time Travel, The Worst Story Ever, Batman Begins By Superman, The Coreys, Tonto’s Shocking Discovery, Vegas Wedding, The Solution To America’s Problems, Superman Returns, The Pirates Of Swenxof, and “Sly” Nostalgia.

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.