Day: September 8, 2010

93-Year-Old Stetson Kennedy Vows to Arrest Qur’an Burner

Trish

stetsonkennedyLocal (in my neck of the woods anyway) legend Stetson Kennedy, best known for his ground-breaking journalism exposing Ku Klux Klan members in the 1940s, is taking on the Qur’an burning church. The 93-year-old Kennedy has vowed to perform a citizen’s arrest of Pastor Terry Jones of Dove World Outreach Center on Sept. 11.

Stetson Kennedy says he’ll be in Gainesville this weekend, and will conduct a citizen’s arrest on Dove World Outreach Center Pastor Terry Jones on the grounds of inciting violence and rioting.

“Any citizen in the presence of a crime in progress may make a citizen’s arrest,” Kennedy said.

“In this case, I would intend to take the Reverend Jones to the nearest U.S. Attorney.”

Kennedy plans to arrest Jones on grounds of sedition, which can be defined as inciting people to disturb the public peace. It’s a bit of a reach, but it makes more sense than Jones’ own plan to paint all of Islam with one brush, based on the attack by Osama bin Laden’s followers nine years ago.

Around the world, others are making a similar error of generalization in mistaking Jones’ idiocy as representative of all America, or all of Florida, or even all of the Missouri-born Jones’ operating base of Gainesville, with some Muslims vowing revenge for Jones’ ignorant actions against Americans, including troops, abroad.

NBC Poll Also Had Results That Bust Media’s Pro-GOP Election Narrative, Including 43% Split on Who Should Run Congress

Jon Ponder

If you listen to cable news and read corporate-media political sites, it’s all over for the Democrats. Why bother waiting for the vote on Nov. 2? Dems should just quietly step aside and let Speaker John Boehner and the Republicans move in, drapes and all, to their new digs at the Capitol.

The NBC poll found that 58 percent falsely believe Boehner and the Republicans have an economic plan that is different from their policies under Bush. What Democrats must show voters is that, simply put, Boehnernomics is just Bushonomics warmed over.

Case in point was, as we noted yesterday, the five days that the media flogged away at a Gallup generic congressional poll that gave the GOP a 10 point advantage — a first for either party in the history of the poll. Today, in the wake of a new edition yesterday of the same poll showing that the GOP’s 10 point lead has vanished — the parties are tied at 46 percent — discussion of the Gallup generic poll has also disappeared. Funny how that works.

At TPMDC, Evan McMorris-Santoro has a piece up on yesterday’s sudden turnaround in the Gallup generic under the headline, “Narrative-Busting New Gallup Poll Excites Dems Briefly”:

[…]

Verbatim

Jon Ponder

Despite his claims that he is “like Oregon,” it’s clear from [Sen.] Ron Wyden’s record that he has simply lost touch with his constituents during his 14 years in Washington … Wyden is a career politician who has championed a reckless economic agenda that has driven our national debt to a staggering $13 trillion and failed to create jobs as the Evergreen State’s unemployment has skyrocketed to 10.6 percent.

– Press release from the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which is clueless about state nicknames. Washington is the evergreen state. Oregon is the beaver state. The NRSCC also fails to omit that the nation’s economic woes are directly attributal to the party’s diastrous economic policies over the 12 years when they controlled one or both houses of Congress and the eight years they held the White House.