Month: August 2007
Get Yer Green On — Daily
Although we are loathe to send you, gentle reader, away from Pensito Review, sometimes there’s stuff on the Internets out there that is worth sharing. Like The Daily Green, a daily e-mail newsletter from Hearst that has just started being distributed this week. It is what its name implies — a daily compendium of good stuff for the planet.
From earth-friendly veggie recipes (Trish and Jon will be happy) to biodegradable doggie poop pick-up bags (Spot, Bonnie and Pookey will be thrilled) to profiles of green people (Brad Pitt!!??) and tips on how you can change your lifestyle to be easier on Ma Earth (skip the bleach when washing clothes), The Daily Green is a good, practical resource. And it’s free, too.
In the same vein, check out Grist Magazine (environmental news and commentary) and its consistently entertaining advice column, Ask Umbra. Both are free, too.
Chickenhawk Bush Has the Gall to Lecture Americans on Vietnam
When you hear the sound bites from George W. Bush’s speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars today in which he compares his botched war in Iraq to the Vietnam war, think about what he was doing while thousands of U.S. soldiers were wounded and killed in the jungles of Southeast Asia.
Bush is in effect saying that Vietnam could have been won if only we’d stayed there longer — that winning would have only required a few tens of thousand more lives lost — other than his own, of course.
As is well known, Bush’s elite status entitled him to a cushy berth in a “champagne unit” of the Texas Air National Guard. Associates from that era remember young Bush as being preoccupied with doing drugs, driving drunk and chasing women. There are rumors he seriously damaged a fighter jet while taxiing it on a runway while hungover. And there is strong circumstantial evidence he was discharged less than honorably after failing to show up for a series of Pentagon-mandated drug tests.
With that in mind, here is how Bush today, rewriting and politicizing the war he sat out:
The tragedy of Vietnam is too large to be contained in one speech. So I’m going to limit myself to one argument that has particular significance today. Then as now, people argued the real problem was America’s presence and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would end…
In 1972, one antiwar senator put it this way: “What earthly difference does it make to nomadic tribes or uneducated subsistence farmers in Vietnam or Cambodia or Laos, whether they have a military dictator, a royal prince or a socialist commissar in some distant capital that they’ve never seen and may never heard of?” A columnist for The New York Times wrote in a similar vein in 1975, just as Cambodia and Vietnam were falling to the communists: “It’s difficult to imagine,” he said, “how their lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone.” A headline on that story, date Phnom Penh, summed up the argument: “Indochina without Americans: For Most a Better Life.”
The world would learn just how costly these misimpressions would be. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge began a murderous rule in which hundreds of thousands of Cambodians died by starvation and torture and execution. In Vietnam, former allies of the United States and government workers and intellectuals and businessmen were sent off to prison camps, where tens of thousands perished. Hundreds of thousands more fled the country on rickety boats, many of them going to their graves in the South China Sea.
Quote du Jour
A man’s judgment cannot be better than the information on which he has based it … Give him no news or present him only with distorted and incomplete data, with ignorant, sloppy or biased reporting, with propaganda and deliberate falsehoods, and you destroy his whole reasoning process and make him something less than a man.
— Arthur Hayes Sulzberger (1891-1968), publisher of The New York Times
Poll: 41% of CA Dems Favor GOP’s Electoral College ‘Reform’ Scheme
Republicans know they can never win California on the merits so they are trying a Tom Delay-esque rigging of the vote next year that would give the GOP presidential candidate one electoral college vote for each of the state’s 55 House districts he wins. Had the system been in place in 2004, Bush-Cheney would have gained 22 electoral votes.
When told that it would most likely give Republicans more electoral votes, GOP support jumped to 70 percent, while Democratic support remained the same at 41 percent, though opposition jumped from 42 percent to 53 percent.
That the GOP would make such a naked grab for power is not surprising. What is unsettling is the number of California Democrats who are apparently happy to hand the presidency to the Republicans again. In a new Field Poll, 49 percent of all California voters — and 41 percent of California Democrats — favor the GOP scheme:
In the first survey on the issue since the Presidential Election Reform Act initiative was filed two weeks ago for the June 3 ballot, 49 percent said they’d support changing the current winner-take-all system to a district-by-district method, while 42 percent are opposed.
And that’s after voters are told that scrapping the current winner-take-all system would give Republicans an advantage in the presidential race, with a potential 22 of California’s 55 electoral votes going to the Republican nominee. The GOP currently holds 19 congressional districts…
In the Field Poll, voters were first asked if they would support dividing votes by district. Voters favored it, 47 percent to 35 percent, with 57 percent of Republicans favoring it and 28 percent opposing it. Among Democrats, 41 percent supported it and 42 percent were opposed.
When told that it would most likely give Republicans more electoral votes, GOP support jumped to 70 percent, while Democratic support remained the same at 41 percent, though opposition jumped from 42 percent to 53 percent.
A glimmer of good news. Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, both of whom are popular with California Democrats, are leading the opposition to the measure.
Quote du Jour
What is a communist? One who has yearnings
For equal division of unequal earnings.
Idler or bungler, or both, he is willing
To fork out his copper and pocket a shilling.
— Ebenezer Elliot (1781-1849), English Chartist poet
Press One for English? Not in Central Florida!
Poor Adam Putnam. The third highest-ranking Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives has a constituency that is inflamed.
What are the residents of Lakeland and Central Florida so upset about? Is it the grinding violence in the occupation of Iraq? The lack of access to health care, causing middle class families to lose their savings? The impending housing market and mortgage lending collapse, which threatens the entire economy?
No, it’s much bigger than any of those things.
Their most frequent complaint is dialing a business and getting “Press one for English and two for Spanish,” he said.
That’s right. They are sick and tired of having a foreign language offered them by automated phone systems. Enough already! Someone needs to pass a law! Hey Adam Putnam!
“It is hotter than Iraq, hotter than abortion. I have never had an issue that so overwhelmingly overshadows everything else,” the Bartow Republican said. “I would say it is ahead of every other issue by 4 to 1.”
…The almost absolute opposition to immigration has a lot to do with a cultural concern as well as other issues of border security and a feeling of fairness to those who immigrated legally.
“What I am hearing from them is that we are losing our cultural identity. Instead of being the traditional melting pot, we are becoming factions,” he said. “Now all of these things are not necessarily government’s responsibility, but there is a growing concern that there is no assimilation anymore as there has been throughout our history.”
Something’s wrong here. Either Putman’s staff is throwing away the emails and letters from residents concerned about real — as opposed to Rovian manufactured — issues, or Central Florida is in big trouble. I tend to believe that Putnam, who continued to peddle the “Nancy Pelosi wants a bigger plane” story even after it was exposed as false, is ignoring the real issues in favor of the ones that appeal to the base.
Putnam is chair of the House Republican conference committee, which coordinates the party messages and manages media relations for House Republicans. It’s his job to make the Democratic House leadership look as bad as possible. If automated phone systems are the best he can do, like I said, poor Adam Putnam.
Mark Foley Doing Pretty Good in Fake Election
A poll being conducted by the Stuart (FL) News has some participants seeking career opportunities with the paper, since it is obvious employees are encouraged to drink on the job.
The question asked is, if an election were held today, would you vote for former Rep. Mark Foley (R-Ephebophile) or Rep. Tim Mahoney (D-Palm Beach)? Although at one time disgraced page molester Foley led, the results are currently:
Mark Foley — 30% (83 votes)
Tim Mahoney — 69% (185 votes)
268 total votes
Who is that 30 percent? No doubt it’s the same 30 percent who would support George Bush, no matter what, even if he too were caught instant messaging teenage boys about what turns them on. And it’s that same 30 percent who think Bush is doing a helluva job, no matter how bad things are.
Some of the comments reflect this conclusion.
“Amazingly, the vote is split. This has to be either a haven for pedophiles or die-hard Republicans or both!”
“Is the 44% up there now for Foley voted by peodphiles? Do we have that many in our area?”
“No, they’re not pedophiles, they’re just dyed-in-the-wool Republicans. These are the same people who will vote for Rudy Giuliani. They’ll swallow their objections to his stands on abortion, gay rights etc. just because they think he is the only Republican who can beat Hillary Clinton. Hypocrites! All of them!”
There’s more. Take a moment and vote yourself, or just read the comments.
What’s In a Name? The Islamification of Europe
Back in 1992 a fellow traveler and I were on assignment for a travel magazine in Cairo, Egypt. We concocted a goofy experiment. We would stand back to back on a busy street, and one of us would holler, “Mohamed!” Then we’d count the number of men who turned to look. There were usually no fewer than a half-dozen. Pretty funny, huh?
Well, today you could conduct the same experiment in London or Amsterdam or Paris with similar results, say some pundits. They point to the rapid encroachment of Islam into Europe and the creation of a mysterious place fraught with danger called “Eurabia”:
Muhammad is the second most popular name for newborn boys in Britain, if you add together the various spellings. In the Seine-St-Denis suburb of Paris, Mohamed is number one. In the four biggest Dutch cities in 2005, either Mohamed or Mohammed came top.
Facts like these have led some pundits to forecast the Islamicisation of Europe – a future “Eurabiaâ€. Bernard Lewis, a scholar of Islam, cited the immigration from Muslim countries and relatively high birth-rates of immigrants as trends that mean “Europe will have Muslim majorities in the population by the end of the twenty-first century at the latest.â€
Not so, say others who study the issue. They argue that these are emotional assessments made based on biases and assumptions, not statistics:
‘Nobody knows how many Muslims there are in Europe.’
— Jytte Klausen of Brandeis University
— Jytte Klausen of Brandeis University
Nominal Muslims — whether religious or not — account for 3 to 4 percent of the European Union’s total population of 493 million. Their percentage should rise, but far more modestly than the extreme predictions. That is chiefly because Muslims, both in Europe and the main “emigrating countries†of Turkey and north Africa, are having fewer babies.
“Nobody knows how many Muslims there are in Europe,†says Jytte Klausen, a professor of politics at Brandeis University who studies European Muslims. Few European states ask citizens about religious beliefs. Estimates based on national origins suggest that 16 million nominal Muslims live in the EU. There are about 5 million in France, 3.3 million in Germany and 1.5 million to 2 million in the U.K.
But isn’t it in the best interest of organizations whose job it is to convince us that there is a threat among us to exaggerate the numbers? If there’s a growing percentage of Muslims in the general population, it goes without saying that there’s a percentage of them who are bad eggs, who want to blow up our buses and subways, poison our water supplies, murder our women and children because Allah tells them to.
But actually:
The U.S. National Intelligence Council predicts there will be between 23 million and 38 million Muslims in the EU in 2025 — 5 to 8 percent of the population. But after 2025 the Muslim population should stop growing so quickly, given its falling birth-rate. In short, Islamicisation — let alone sharia law — is not a demographic prospect for Europe.
Too bad. I was kind of intrigued by the idea of vacationing in exotic Eurabia.
Calling all Mohameds!
Karen Thurman, Please Return from Lunch
Update: One reader was evidently confused about the letter in question so we drug it out of the trash, brushed off the coffee grounds, and posted it for his or her edification. On the back of the part you tear off and fill out with McCain-Feingold required disclosure info about yourself is the phrase, “Paid for the by the Democratic State Parties and the DNC as a joint fundraising program, www.democrats.org/victory fund. This communication is not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.”
We were just standing around the virtual Pensito Review water cooler, chewing over one of our favorite subjects: How stupid is Florida Democratic Party Chair Karen Thurman?
I think she’s regular stupid, hovering somewhere between feather head and judgement-challenged. Buck thinks she’s too stupid to live, brush her teeth unassisted, or wipe her own backside. Jon, a California resident, agrees with both of us.
Well moments ago, from whom should I get a letter in the mail? It’s our very own K.T., and she’s got great news for me!
The response to our 2007 Annual Fund Drive has been so overwhelming that we have decided to extend the deadline for gifts to September 14, 2007.
There are so many things wrong with that opener that I hardly know where to begin. For starters, was she really going to cut off donations because they didn’t come in by some arbitrary deadline? “Sorry, your check arrived too late. We don’t want it now.”
And where do you go, in requesting urgent financial assistance, after you’ve just described the response so far as “overwhelming?” It doesn’t exactly make me look over my finances and decide I can pay the electric bill next week but right now I must help Karen! She needs me!
I’m beginning to see it Buck’s way. This woman really does need to find additional new employment, besides her job as a lobbyist in an agency headed by the former chair of the Florida Republican party. I hope the response by Democrats to extending Karen’s deadline at the helm of the party is not overwhelming.
