The painting in question, a student project completed in 2003, adorns a wall in the corridor leading to the Bastrop High School gym. It depicts the sometimes unpleasant history of the town, showing scenes of a Mexican and Comanche raid and slaves working in a cotton field, as well as unifying visions of children of different ethnicities reaching out to one another. [...] Patty Green, the art teacher who coordinated the project, said she doesn't understand why the issue is coming up now. Austin muralist Raul Valdez organized a group of Bastrop students to paint the mural using a $10,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bastrop Association for the Arts.
"It sat up there for five years, and nobody had a problem with it," said Green, the head of the Bastrop association.
Bastrop resident Lauren Hansell, who made the original complaint, homeschools her children but visits the school on Fridays to pray with students at the flagpole.
A Christian, Hansell said she wants the mural removed because of the war and slavery scenes and depictions of Buddha and ancient gods. [...] Among the images on the mural are an Aztec sun, ancient Egypt's King Tutankhamen, Buddha and Shiva, a Hindu deity, dancing on a demon of ignorance.
Hansell, who at first interpreted Shiva's dance as a message in favor of abortion, said laws that bar Christian symbols from public schools should apply to the mural.
The First Amendment, which bans government-sponsored religious activities even as it protects religious expression from government interference, allows students to pray during school in informal settings, according to U.S. Department of Education guidelines.
So after 5 years of the mural being displayed a woman who has nothing to do with the school except for proselytizing every week on school grounds complains and engenders a controversy.
WASHINGTON - The White House on Tuesday denied a published report in Israel that said President Bush intends to attack Iran before the end of his term in January. A story in the Jerusalem Post quoted a "senior official" there as saying that Bush plans to attack Iran in the coming months. The story says the unidentified official claimed that a "senior member" of Bush's traveling entourage made the statement about attacking Iran in a closed meeting. Bush was in Israel last week.
The article also says the unnamed Bush official said that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney "were of the opinion that military action were called for."
[snip]
Perino said the "president of the United States should never take options off the table, but our preference and our actions for dealing with this matter remain through peaceful diplomatic means. Nothing has changed in that regard."
Diplomacy? Isn't that appeasement to Georgie? I think this means we're going to attack Iran before the year is out.
And McBush apparently doesn't give a fuck who is actually in charge in Iran:
Yesterday, the Wonk Room’s Matt Duss noted that Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) often incorrectly portrays Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as if Ahmadinejad has a significant role in formulating Iranian foreign policy. He doesn’t. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and Iran’s National Security Council set Iran’s foreign policy.
Yesterday, Time’s Joe Klein pressed McCain on the issue, but McCain refused to concede he was wrong, saying he disagreed that Khamenei runs Iranian policy behind the scenes. McCain added that because the “average American” thinks Ahmadinejad is Iran’s leader, that’s good enough for him:
MCCAIN: I mean, the fact is [Ahmadinejad’s] the acknowledged leader of that country and you may disagree, but that’s a uh, that’s your right to do so, but I think if you asked any average American who the leader of Iran is, I think they’d know.
Ahmadinejad? Khamenei? What does it matter if we're going to nuke the place anyway?
OK, now that I have your attention, let's talk about race ... and sex.
In a kinda sorta follow up to SteveAudio's post about the racist Curious George T-shirt and in light of the comments on that post, I'd just like to say: Misogyny is terrible, racism is worse.
Let me re-phrase: Misogynists are terrible, racists are worse. I suggest you read the post and read the comments, and read the links to the comments on other sites. I'll wait ...
... ... ...
Yep, those were awful, sexist, misogynist comments about Hillary.
And that's really bad, but racism is about both men and women. Men and women that were kidnapped and stolen from Africa and auctioned off as chattel in our country. Men and women that were considered as property, and even enshrined in the Constitution as 3/5ths of a person so that Southern states were equally represented in Congress.
There aren't groups in our country that want to kill women just for being women but there are groups in our country that want to kill black people, just for being black.
And if I were to put on my cynical hat I would say that Hillary should take the VP job, if offered, because Obama being assassinated, (and if he's elected I put the odds of that at 50/50), is the best chance she has of being President.
And that's why misogyny is terrible, racism is worse.
There are some folks we call dead-enders. They will follow The Party no matter what. If they saw GWBush, John W. McCain, Dick Cheney, and Grover Norquist gang-raping their child on TV, they would still vote for anyone with an "R" after their name, including the aforementioned McCain.
It always cracks me up when a supposed 'thoughtful' Right-wing pundit criticizes a Democratic candidate, thoughtfully, as if they would ever vote for said candidate, or even consider him anything but a traitor willing to sell us all down the river into Islamofascist slavery:
The fact that everyone knows who Bush was referring to and the fact that the substance contained in the remark reflects the widely held belief of a very large percentage of voters should have given Obama an opening to retract the remark and share his thoughts on engaging Iran, Syria, and other terrorist supporting nations in a useful dialogue.
Instead, Obama and the Democrats hit the ceiling, calling Bush every name in the book and whining about their hurt feelings. Their reaction reminded me of a line from the movie All The Presidents Men where the Washington Post has published an article accusing the White House of wrongdoing and the reaction to that article from the Nixonites. Ben Bradleee observes “They doubt our ancestry, but they don’t say the story isn’t accurate.”
Obama called Bush’s words “an appalling attack,” “dishonest,” divisive, “fear-peddling,” fear-mongering,” but for some reason, never got around to responding to the substance of Bush’s charge; that Obama and the Democrats cannot be trusted with running American foreign policy because their outlook on the world is is based on false assumptions about, our friends, our allies, our role in the world, and most of all our deadly enemies.
Bush actually did Obama a favor. He gave him a golden opportunity to lay out his “realistic” ideas on American foreign policy so that it would get the widest possible hearing. The problem, as Obama and the Democrats well know, is one of perception – a perception they try their best to finesse rather than tackling head on. It’s not about talking tough and making threats. It is about calling our enemies, well, enemies . They could try that for starters.
Right. Problem is, any idea Obama lays out as realistic will be ridiculed by this guy and his crowd. Yet he seems so reasonable. But often so do most sycophants and supporters of totalitarian regimes.
What could possibly be wrong with 75,000 people attending a political rally?
Admittedly, not much on the surface. And perhaps if the times weren’t so perilous and the candidate who was the beneficiary of that huge crowd wasn’t so problematic, we could really celebrate such an outpouring of support, free from the nagging doubts that plague many of us about Barack Obama and his past associations and present ideological beliefs.
Except my republican soul (note the small “r”) is a little frightened at this mob scene. Politicians should be plebeian in their appeal – being one of us and not standing above us, Caesar-like in their beguilement of the masses. Truman and Eisenhower were plebes; modest in their habits and with no illusions regarding their own failings. There is something to be said for such solid republican values in a presidential candidate and when someone such as a Kennedy or Obama rises above the masses, presenting themselves as perhaps something more than a servant of the people, we are bound to look in askance at such a phenomenon.
The anti-populist elitism, the sniff of "dirty masses" from an ivory tower conservative psuedo-intellectual is almost enough to make the spirit of Bill Buckley smile up from Hell. The fear of the people revolting, trying to further their own best interests, has been a touchstone in conservative politics since long before the Cold War.
And in case he forgot, there's never been a more anti-plebian President than GWBush, with the possible exception of Poppy Bush, who really took his elitism as a life style, and didn't try to hid it with a phony rancho in Texas.
Moran finishes his anti-Obama whine thusly:
But dangerous he is – for his beliefs, not for his personality or the character of this mass movement he has inspired. So when I see 75,000 people screaming his name with the kind of abandon reserved for rock stars or religious figures, I worry more that the candidate won’t be able to live up to the lofty expectations he has engendered in his legions than he would use such a movement for nefarious purposes.
And given his incredible lack of experience and zero track record in getting anything done, I would guess that if he is elected he would generate more disappointment among his followers than any other president in memory.
Dude, that's rich in unintended irony. He worries, poor concern troll he is, that Obama won't live up to the Left's expectations, that he has an "incredible lack of experience and zero track record in getting anything done", and will "generate more disappointment" blah blah blah.
Like, you know, George W. "28%" Bush has done.
The real reason for all this pearl-clutching and hand-wringing is in the video at the top, and rests on the heads of the Republican collective, the "dirty unwashed masses" who voted for McCain, once a pariah in Republican top circles, now their candidate. Weak as Wally Cox with the flu, ethically challenged as Ferdinand Marcos, anti-intellectual as GWBush, and flip-flopping more than a trout in the bottom of a boat, McCain's star is the one they have hitched their wagons to. So Moran instead carps and whines about Obama's mis-perceived problems, and pronounces him a bad candidate.
During a speech to the Israeli parliament yesterday morning, President Bush attacked Barack Obama, comparing him to Nazi appeasers for the Illinois senator's willingness to hold discussions with Iran.
One problem: Bush's speech came just hours after The Washington Postreported that Bush's defense secretary, Robert Gates, said that the United States needs to "sit down and talk with" Iran. Not only that, Gates added, "We can't go to a discussion and be completely the demander."
Oops.
Naturally, then, a media firestorm erupted, with the Bush administration and its political allies questioned all day about whether Bush has any idea what he is talking about, whether he has lost control over the Pentagon, whether Gates will be fired, what Gates thinks about Bush's comparison of those (like Gates) who advocate dialogue between the United States and Iran to appeasers of Adolf Hitler, and whether the fiasco will remind voters that the Bush administration's foreign policy has been marked by incompetence and dishonesty, thus doing irreparable electoral damage to John McCain and other Republican candidates.
Sorry -- what was I thinking? That didn't happen.
Instead, much of the news media got busy pretending the Post article didn't exist and that Gates had not undermined Bush's political attack on Obama. Instead, many news outlets simply rushed to repeat Bush's assault over and over again, as though it had merit.
Just like this guy... who had no clue what Neville Chamberlain had done and what appeasement actually means:
to yield or concede to the belligerent demands of (a nation, group, person, etc.) in a conciliatory effort, sometimes at the expense of justice or other principles.
One apocryphal bit of business surrounding the 'Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler...' quote, used 'liberally' without attribution by various conservative writers and attributed to Senator William Borah, the 'lion of Idaho', bears mentioning.
Borah was linked quite often in the papers of the times as a compatriot to his fellow Republican Senator, Gerald P. Nye (R-North Dakota), who during his time in office was the chairman of a special Senate committee tasked with investigating the munitions industry’s connections with World War I.
Essentially, the committee found some rather striking degrees of conviviality between the American government of the time under Woodrow Wilson, and various arms manufacturers and sellers, including Samuel P. Bush, who at the time was tasked by Bernard Baruch to head the Ordnance, Small Arms, and Ammunition Section of the War Industries Board, a post for which as a 'railroad man' he showed scant previous experience, save for his very amicable relations with such social luminaries as Percy Rockefeller, owner of Remington Arms, and Averill Harriman, later Senior Partner of Brown Brothers Harriman & Co.
Both captains of industry later took it kindly upon themselves to recommend young Prescott Bush to Yale's Skull and Bones fraternity in 1916, along with Averill's brother 'Bunny' Harriman.
It should be noted that Remington Arms became preeminent in small arms and ammunition contracts for American and Allied powers during this time, supplying by one estimate '...machine guns and Colt automatic pistols; millions of rifles to Czarist Russia; over half of the small-arms ammunition used by the Anglo-American allies in World War I; and 69 percent of the rifles used by the United States in that conflict' ...No doubt, merely incidental to the close personal relationships being formed by these elite members of American society.
Although the final findings of the committee were somewhat ambiguous, in a similar fashion to the determinations of the McCormack-Dickstein Congressional Committee (tasked to examine the 'businessman's putsch' of 1933), numerous Neutrality acts were reactively authored and passed as an indirect result of the investigation.
It would be illuminating to reflect upon the larger role that Samuel P. Bush might have played in facilitating such amicable relationships in the Great Game of the time, but unfortunately most of the records detailing his activities in this matter were burned by the National Archives at an unspecified date, purportedly in order to 'save space'.
Sgt. Matthis Chiroux, who served in the Army until being honorably discharged last summer after over four years of service in Afghanistan, Japan, Europe and the Phillipines, today publicly announced his intention to refuse orders to deploy to Iraq.
Resisting the backdoor draft or as I see it, involuntary servitude.
IVAW's post finishes with a request for donations:
To donate to IVAW’s Legal Fund to support Matthis and other servicemembers who are refusing to support the occupation of Iraq, use our online donation form and select “Legal Fund” under special projects.
GOP leaders sought yesterday to "re-brand" the party with a new slogan and renewed pledges of fiscal rectitude and limited government. But the slogan -- "The Change You Deserve" -- came under mocking fire, because it parallels Democratic presidential front-runner Barack Obama's "Change We Can Believe In" motto and it mirrors the advertising slogan for the antidepressant Effexor. [ED: Take for depression, social anxiety disorder, and panic disorder. Common side effects include apathy, irritable bowel syndrome and sexual dysfunction. Take only if you are a republican.]
In a speech to Israel's Knesset, Bush said: "Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along."
"We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history."
Of course, his loyal minions claim he wasn't trying to smear Obama:
The White House said Bush's comment wasn't a reference to Obama.
"It is not," press secretary Dana Perino told reporters in Israel. "I would think that all of you who cover these issues and have for a long time have known that there are many who have suggested these types of negotiations with people that the president, President Bush, thinks that we should not talk to. I understand when you're running for office you sometimes think the world revolves around you. That is not always true. And it is not true in this case."
Sure. That's why it was done in the Knesset; Bush can claim that Republicans are better defenderers of Israel. And it's bullshit on so many levels. And who was the genius speechwriter that came up with this? We can't blame Frum for this, I don't think he's that stupid.
Harry Reid has a pretty good take on it:
“Not surprisingly, the engineer of the worst foreign policy in our nation’s history has fired yet another reckless and reprehensible round. More than seven years into his Presidency and in the sixth year of the directionless Iraq war, President Bush has yet to learn that his brand of divisive partisan rhetoric is precisely what has made America and our allies less secure. And for the President to make this statement before the government of our closest ally as it celebrates a remarkable milestone demeans this historic moment with partisan politics.
“President Bush’s own actions demonstrate that he believes negotiations – at the right moment, under the right conditions and with the right leaders – can both show strength and produce results. He has relied on negotiations with North Korea and Libya, two state sponsors of terror. And by conducting discussions with Russia, China, Libya, North Korea and Iran in recent years, President Bush has demonstrated his belief that negotiations can be a tool to advance America and Israel’s national security interests. I call on the President to explain the inconsistency between his Administration’s actions and his words today.”
Over in Israel today, George Bush got right down to business and compared Democrats to the Hitler appeasers who sold out Czechoslovakia just before World War II. Barack Obama shot back that this was a "false political attack" and that Bush was a liar.
. . . I still think I would have preferred something like a Reaganesque shake of his head followed by "It's always Munich with these guys, isn't it?" There are times when mockery is the best policy.
And as proof that GWBush's statement is sheer partisan hackery, here's his SecDef just yesterday in the WaPo:
The United States should construct a combination of incentives and pressure to engage Iran, and may have missed earlier opportunities to begin a useful dialogue with Tehran, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said yesterday.
Does this mean he will be reprimanded by Bush? McCain, of course, fellatessupports Bush:
Senator John McCain, who has been critical of President Bush on the environment and other policies this week, on Thursday morning wholeheartedly endorsed Mr. Bush’s veiled rebuke in the Israeli Knesset of Senator Barack Obama that talking to “terrorists and radicals'’ was no different than appeasing Hitler and the Nazis.
“Yes, there have been appeasers in the past, and the president is exactly right, and one of them is Neville Chamberlain,'’ Mr. McCain told reporters on his campaign bus after a speech in Columbus, Ohio. “I believe that it’s not an accident that our hostages came home from Iran when President Reagan was president of the United States. He didn’t sit down in a negotiation with the religious extremists in Iran, he made it very clear that those hostages were coming home.'’
Note the obligatory Reagan idolatry. But oft-sensible conservative Andrew Sullivan thinks:
This is manna for the Obama campaign, sent straight from Heaven. Who wouldn't want to run against this president this November? By conflating Bush and McCain on this, the White House has done the Democrats a massive favor.
Part of the Soviet failure in Afghanistan was due to the fact that the Reagan administration was feeding billions of dollars in arms to Afghanistan's Islamic resistance. Reagan and, even more, his intensely ideological CIA director, William Casey, saw the battle for Afghanistan as a titanic struggle in the war between Eastern tyranny and Western freedom.
. . . After the last Soviet troops departed, Afghanistan fell off the American radar screen. Over the next few years, Shevardnadze's worst nightmares came true. The Taliban rose to power and in 1996 gave refuge to the—by then—much-hunted Bin Laden.
Oh yeah, those were our terrorists. So Reagan was doing his presidential duty by talking with those terrorists, as well as creating Iran-Contra, but now Bush and McSame won't talk to anybody?
