Political Bloviation

What he said.  Send the Anti-Defamation League back to Hebrew school:

Adam Serwer Archive | The American Prospect.

Remarkable. An organization whose stated role is to “counteract hatred, prejudice and bigotry” nonetheless opposes people building where they please simply because of the faith they adhere to. Sure “bigotry is unfair and wrong”, the ADL says, but we should give the bigots what they want anyway. It is inconceivable that the ADL would argue such a position if the building in question happened to be a synagogue, and the builders happened to be Jews.

Let’s be clear. This is not about the proposed Islamic Center. There is already a masjid in the neighborhood, and it’s been there for decades. This is about giving political cover to right-wing politicians using anti-Muslim bigotry as a political weapon and a fundraising tool. By doing this, the ADL is increasingly eroding its already weakened credibility as a nonpartisan organization.

I learned a very important lesson in Hebrew School that I have retained my entire life. If they can deny freedom to a single individual because of who they are, they can do it to anyone. Someone at the ADL needs to go back to Hebrew School.

We don’t stand a chance:
Just two Chinese ISPs serve 20% of world broadband users

If you need a reminder of just how big China is—and just how important the Internet has become there—consider this stat: between them, two Chinese ISPs serve 20 percent of all broadband subscribers in the entire world.

Telegeography has updated its world Internet service provider database and finds that the sheer scale of China dwarfs just about everyone else. China Telecom is the largest ISP in the world, with 55 million subscibers. Second is China Unicom, with just over 40 million.

And both companies continue to grow, even as growth slows significantly in more developed markets. Telegeography notes that each Chinese firm added nine million users in the last year—”equivalent to the entire broadband subscriber base

The NY Times has an article on the pending battle over the expiration of the Bush era tax cuts. Clearly we can no longer afford what we’re currently doing. The quandary is how far to go in reinstating parts of the tax cuts. The Republicans insist that it’s foolish to do anything short of 100% reinstatement, because of continuing weakness in the economy. That’s at odds with efforts to reduce the deficit.

As previously noted the GOP is schizophrenic about deficit reduction, insisting that $30 billion in unemployment benefit extensions be paid for with offsetting cuts, but $600 billion in expiring tax cuts should never need to be paid for because the tax fairy magically offsets it.

The Democrats favor leaving the cuts in place for individuals below $200k and families under $250k and allowing rates above that to revert to the 2001 levels. So we’re talking about a 4% increase in the highest bracket (from about 35% to 39%). The GOP casts this as economic apocalypse. I’m thinking the period of time when rates were at that level was a whole helluva a lot better economically than they are now.

Rush Limbaugh said Thursday on his radio show that Fox News and at least one of its anchors “caved” in its coverage of Shirley Sherrod, the former USDA employee who was fired in haste on Monday after an edited clip of her was posted on a conservative website.

“I have to go after it … because even Fox caved on this,” Limbaugh said. “Even Shep Smith. Even poor old Shep Smith went down there and said that everybody’s wrong on this, that [BigGovernment.com founder Andrew] Breitbart is wrong and so forth. There’s only a handful of us that have the guts to put this story straight. If we don’t hammer back nobody will.”

Limbaugh dismissed the story, saying he was bored by it.

via CNN Political Ticker: All politics, all the time Blog Archive – Limbaugh says Fox News ‘caved’ in Sherrod coverage « – Blogs from CNN.com.

“Caved” is a strange way to phrase it. Fox and Breitbart were utterly wrong and got a woman fired for no reason. When confronted with the entire unedited video and a statement from the white farmer the anecdote was about saying she helped them retain their farm and are still friends to this day, Fox was forced to walk back their breathless coverage about white discrimination in the Dept. of Agriculture. The only real story here is that there was successful push back. Usually these smears go unanswered and the injustice remains. They didn’t get away with it for once.

I’m disappointed that the White House and the Dept of Ag asked the woman to resign, without investigation of unsubstantiated allegations. Their appears to be some over sensitivity about racial issue in the Obama administration.

I’m certain el Rushbo finds the truth boring. It’s not what he’s accustomed to dealing with.

The GOP really saying what they think is always a bad idea for their electoral chances. As they say “hubris comes before the fall’”.

Republicans are feeling good about the midterms — so good that they’ve started saying what they really think. This week the party’s Senate leadership stopped pretending that it cares about deficits, stating explicitly that while we can’t afford to aid the unemployed or prevent mass layoffs of schoolteachers, cost is literally no object when it comes to tax cuts for the affluent…

…this past Monday Jon Kyl of Arizona, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate, was asked the obvious question: if deficits are so worrisome, what about the budgetary cost of extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, which the Obama administration wants to let expire but Republicans want to make permanent? What should replace $650 billion or more in lost revenue over the next decade?

His answer was breathtaking: “You do need to offset the cost of increased spending. And that’s what Republicans object to. But you should never have to offset the cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans.” So $30 billion in aid to the unemployed is unaffordable, but 20 times that much in tax cuts for the rich doesn’t count.

via Op-Ed Columnist – Redo That Voodoo – NYTimes.com.

Not so much in Ireland:

Despite its strenuous efforts, Ireland has been thrust into the same ignominious category as Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain. It now pays a hefty three percentage points more than Germany on its benchmark bonds, in part because investors fear that the austerity program, by retarding growth and so far failing to reduce borrowing, will make it harder for Dublin to pay its bills rather than easier.

via In Ireland, a Picture of the Cost of Austerity – NYTimes.com.

Compare that to Iceland:

Unlike other disaster economies around the European periphery – economies that are trying to rehabilitate themselves through austerity and deflation — Iceland built up so much debt and found itself in such dire straits that orthodoxy was out of the question. Instead, Iceland devalued its currency massively and imposed capital controls. And a strange thing has happened: although Iceland is generally considered to have experienced the worst financial crisis in history, its punishment has actually been substantially less than that of other nations.’

via The Icelandic Post-crisis Miracle

We paid 100% to investors who would have (and probably should have) been wiped out. Iceland paid 0% and devalued its currency. The difference now is that Iceland is covering much more quickly than Ireland and pays lower interest on bonds. Cui Bono? Investors. Who suffers? The working poor and the unemployed. Sort of a win-win for the conservative chattering classes. Don’t listen to them.

Andrew is, sadly, depressingly,but almost certainly correct. We’re hostage to an evermore expensive, bloody and doomed effort in Afghanistan.

Those of us who hoped for some kind of winding down of the longest war in US history will almost certainly be disappointed now. David Petraeus is the real Pope of counter-insurgency and if he decides that he needs more troops and more time and more resources in Afghanistan next year, who is going to be able to gainsay him? That’s Thomas P. Barnett’s shrewd assessment. Obama’s pledge to start withdrawing troops in 2011 is now kaput. It won’t happen. I doubt it will happen in a second term either. Once Washington has decided to occupy a country, it will occupy it for ever. We are still, remember, in Germany! But Afghanistan?…

…So now we have the real kool-aid drinker, Petraeus, who will refuse to concede the impossibility of success in Afghanistan just as he still retains the absurd notion that the surge in Iraq somehow worked in reconciling the sectarian divides that still prevent Iraq from having a working government. I find this doubling down in Afghanistan as Iraq itself threatens to spiral out of control the kind of reasoning that only Washington can approve of…

…This much we also know: Obama will run for re-election with far more troops in Afghanistan than Bush ever had – and a war and occupation stretching for ever into the future, with no realistic chance of success. Make no mistake: this is an imperialism of self-defense, a commitment to civilize even the least tractable culture on earth because Americans are too afraid of the consequences of withdrawal. And its deepest irony is that continuing this struggle will actually increase and multiply the terror threats we face – as it becomes once again a recruitment tool for Jihadists the world over.

via Obama: Hostage To Petraeus – The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan.