(This diary hits at a theme I've hit on recently, but it can't be hit on ofen enough. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
The floods in Pakistan are now believed to have affected twenty million people, fully 11% of the population. The case can be made that Islamic extremism hot spots Afghanistan and Somalia, both under pressure of drought in the years before their implosion, were actually the first to tumble. Pakistan appears to be the next climate domino set to fall.
Already our Pentagon, driven by profiteering defense contractors, has begun to apply the rhetorical devices of the Cold War to describe the consequences of climate change. See my clever title? Yes, indeed, we need to expand defense spending to be ready for the War On Climate Change(tm).
Or we can extract our heads from our hindquarters and come up with a rational response.
There have been plenty of tremendous and troubling leaps made when trying to express outrage over the Islamic Center proposed near Ground Zero (this weekend with Sarah Palin, who called it the "9/11 mosque" on Twitter, for example), but Newt Gingrich may win the award for most offensive analogy.
Building the mosque near Ground Zero, says the former Speaker, is like putting a Nazi sign near the Holocaust Museum.
Gingrich has made this comparison for a couple days now, including this morning on Fox & Friends, when he said:
The folks who want to build this mosque, who are really radical Islamists, who want to triumphfully (sic) prove they can build a mosque next to a place where 3,000 Americans were killed by radical Islamists. Those folks don't have any interest in reaching out to the community. They're trying to make a case about supremacy... This happens all the time in America. Nazis don't have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust Museum in Washington. We would never accept the Japanese putting up a site next to Pearl Harbor.
Of course the folks behind the Cordoba House Cultural Center aren't radical Islamists. They're exactly the opposite. As Wikipedia notes about Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the spiritual leader and driving force:
Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, (born in 1948, in Kuwait) is an Arab-American Muslim imam, author, and activist whose stated goal is to improve relations between the Muslim World and the West.He has been Imam of Masjid al-Farah, a New York City mosque, since 1983.
He has written three books on Islam and its place in contemporary Western society, including What's Right with Islam is What's Right with America, and founded two non-profit organizations whose stated missions are to enhance the discourse on Islam in society. He has condemned the 9/11 attacks as un-Islamic and called on the U.S. government to reduce the threat of terrorism by altering its Middle Eastern foreign policy. Author Karen Armstrong, among others, has praised him for his attempts to build bridges between the West and the Muslim world.
His congregation is Sufi, the mystical branch of Islam, about as far away from fundamentalists as its possible to be.
But in Gingrich's bigoted mind, all Moslems are radical Islamists. That is the very essence of his bigotry: "They" are all the same: evil. For no reason. Just because they are. And he's not just some guy. He's the former Speaker of the House, and a serious potential candidate for President in 2012. In the GOP world, he's as heavyweight as it gets.
Newt is a bigot and he is the face of the GOP.
And not just the clown face of Sarah Palin, but the "serious intellectual" face, as has been for nearly 20 years now.
What's more, at the same time that Newt's spouting his bigoted hatred, other conservatives are busy trying to whitewash themselves and their movment, in a continuing effort to deny their racist past, as well their present. For example, the pseudo-intellectual James Taranto at the WSJ:
Very few (honest) people will say with a straight face that Fox News is not an appendage of the national Republican Party. But for those few who will make that claim, this story should shut them up for good:
News Corp., which owns Fox News and the New York Post, gave $1 million to Haley Barbour's Republican Governors Association this year, according to the RGA's most recent filing.
The company's media outlets play politics more openly than most, but the huge contribution to a party committee is a new step toward an open identification between Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. and the GOP...
News Corp. Spokesman Jack Horner emails, "News Corporation believes in the power of free markets, and the RGA's pro-business agenda supports our priorities at this most critical time for our economy."
The $1 million is a statement unto itself, but what really seals the deal here is the statement from the News Corp. spokeshole - the statement explicitly endorsing the Republican political ideology.
Again, Fox News's image as a genuinely "fair and balanced" news organization, or even as a right-of-center but nonpartisan news organization, has been long since destroyed. But this story about Fox becoming one of the GOP's chief benefactors and underwriters proves that Fox is an appendage of a party, not anything that can be credibly labeled a media outlet.
Remember how your mom used to tell you to go outside and play so you could get some fresh air and sunshine? That's kind of how I feel today. This old insider, who has had one foot outside for a while now, is going to play with the kids outside for a while.
When Matt Stoller and Chris Bowers and I decided to start OpenLeft a little over 3 years ago, we thought it would be worthwhile to have a site where there was some dialogue and interplay between an old DC insider like me and some of the really smart and strategic voices from the blogosphere. We've had more than our share of fascinating discussions, entertaining debates, and innovative activist projects, and I am very proud of the role OpenLeft has played in the blogosphere.
When Markos approached Chris and I to work with DailyKos and help turn it into, in Markos' words, "an activist powerhouse", we were excited to sign up. The potential for working with the DailyKos community to build a platform for citizen activism is enormous, and we are both looking forward to being a part of helping it blossom and grow. In addition to that, I am excited to help Markos continue to build a truly dynamic media platform. The opportunity to work with him, Chris, and the entire DailyKos community is extraordinary.
As for OpenLeft, we are exploring what will happen next. Chris needs to dive full-time into working at DailyKos, and he was our editor and heart and soul, so him being gone causes us to re-evaluate everything. I will continue to write some for OpenLeft, as will Adam Bink and some of our other talented writers, but I have never been even close to a full-time presence, and since I will be increasingly working with DailyKos, I will have less time at OpenLeft than before.
One final note about my work going forward: I have also begun work this summer with MoveOn.org on their exciting project to clean up the corporate corruption in DC. While this project is currently focused on shaping the 2010 electoral dialogue, it will be a campaign we will need to keep on for years to come. To be working with both DailyKos and MoveOn.org, two of the leading institutions in the world of the progressive netroots, is an honor and a privilege.
No matter what happens, I will however remain an insider. Once they inject you with the insider virus, it does change your DNA a bit. I know some folks think that makes me intrinsically evil (one of my all time favorite comments on a blog post came the other day when someone said that because I knew Rahm Emanuel, that automatically made me a bad guy). But I hope I can work with the DailyKos community, as well as with OpenLeft and MoveOn, to use my insider knowledge to help the entire movement get better at shaking up what happens inside, and to be a bridge between the other progressive insiders that are involved in national politics and the progressive netroots community. For all my insider-y status, my roots are in the deep and wonderful tradition of progressive movement politics- Alinsky-style community organizing, the labor movement, the movements of the 1960s. Building on that history and tradition, I look forward to working with all of you to create a stronger progressive movement in the future.
Yesterday, in the discussion thread of my diary, "Obama, man of anti-principle, strikes again--gives assist to mosque-haters and al Qaeda ", there was a vigorous debate about whether Obama had done the right thing in making his second statement about the Manhattan mosque. There was even a vigorous debate about whether he had said anything different in the second statement. There were very articulate arguments on both sides.
But then, at the end of the day came Harry Reid's announcement that he was joining Sharon Angle on the side of the haters, and Obama's leadership failure immediately became clear. Now, via wobbly's quick hit, we read that the mosque's proponents may be about to withdraw, in a vain attempt to appease the haters.
Newt Gingrich, Osama bin Laden and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are jumping for joy.
Obama's leadership failure has empowered them above all others.
One could argue endlessly about the rightness of Obama's position as a lecturer in constitutional law. He certainly would have made a perfectly adequate guest for a segment on an MSNBC program. But leadership is not just about what you do or say in an abstract, classroom-correct sort of way. It's about what you communicate to inspire the soul. Or to dispirit it.
Somehow, in the abstract, Obama realized perfectly well that this was all about us as Americans. But he utterly failed to get that very same message in his own gut.
At Media Matters, Joe Strupp reported on how two top former military men--one also Colin Powell's former top aid when he was Secretary of State--saw this as a disaster for us:
A retired general and a former Bush Administration official harshly criticized efforts to block the building of a mosque in lower Manhattan, contending such a position is unconstitutional and could harm U.S. relations overseas.
Major General Paul Eaton, a retired Army commander who oversaw the training of Iraqi troops following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel and former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, both slammed right-wing opposition to the Mosque.
"What we are seeing out of the Republican Party here is just appalling," Eaton told me Monday. "From a constitutional perspective, from a common sense perspective and from a military perspective."
...
Both men also pointed to a detrimental impact such opposition can have on U.S. relations overseas with Islamic countries, and even put U.S. military men and women at risk.
"It is like offering your opponent two or three whips with which to beat you," said Wilkerson. "The impact on our military people would be injurious if we say 'no.' It would put another instrument in the hands of those who want to exploit the fear that Americans are at war with Islam and not the radical elements within it."
Eaton echoed that view, noting: "It is a slap in the face to a great many people we wish to have as allies. We are trying to make allies of our colleagues in Iraq and Afghanistan and this is not helpful."
He also added, "This is unhelpful to the American fighting men and women and counter to the image we wish to portray in Afghanistan and Iraq."
It's now clear that we're looking at a failed presidency. Regardless of whatever else happens, even if he wins re-relection, Obama has utterly squandered the promise he held out for us all. He empowers the haters and evildoers of the world by only opposing them academically, while giving way to them in every practical sense.
And the longer we refuse to see this obvious fact, the more complicit we are in betraying his promise as well.
Yesterday, Matt Yglesias posted a strongly worded rebuttal to a portion of my Left Ed diary this Sunday. Rather than continuing with the harsh push-back I posted on the QuickHit from Mark Matson, I'm going to try to see if there is some common ground that Matt and I can agree on so that there can be some concerted effort among the progressive community to do right by the nation's school kids.
First off Matt, can you and I agree on the impact that poverty and socioeconomic conditions have on children? When you say that "it's difficult to obtain unimpeachable statistical data on how to improve life outcomes for children," I hope you would at least understand that there's nothing difficult at all about concluding that poverty has a huge impact on the outcomes of children. I would hope that you understand that the most far-reaching study of influences on student achievement, the Coleman Report, concluded that out-of-school factors - such as poverty, health, and homelife - had far and away the most influence on the "life outcomes of children" and that statistically schools had only a small influence on the trajectory of children's lives.
Second, I would hope that you agree that the next most influential set of factors affecting student achievement have to do with school level factors such as having a safe place to learn and having a guaranteed and viable curriculum. And I would hope that you would agree that a "teach to the test" approach where students are drilled in a direct instruction mode to do well on reading and math high-stakes tests is anything but a viable curriculum, because that approach ignores so many other aspects of a well-rounded education - like history and the arts.
Third, I would hope that you agree that the best instructional methods should be available to all children, regardless of their socioeconomic and cultural background. I would hope that you understand that a "one size fits all" approach to teaching simply doesn't work for every child. That instruction needs to be differentiated because we all learn in the different ways. And that children from poverty deserve the same access to instructional approaches that you and I want for our children. Since children of poverty are not inherently different from our kids, are they?
Next, I would hope that you understand that the opportunity costs (a business term I'm sure you value) of pursuing false approaches to improving our nation's schools - like the charter school movement, which produces in your words "about the same" as what we are currently achieving - are something to be avoided? Especially when we know that the results of charter schools are not just "about the same" as public schools, as you maintain, but actually worse for some kids. And especially when you know that results of KIPP charter schools in particular are grossly distorted by those schools selectively and attrition rates.
Instead of hurtling down these roads to nowhere, don't you think it would be better to talk about how we should address the root causes of low achievement with universal early childhood education and better health care for kids, which we know can work? True, these are long-term solutions, but isn't every year that we spend nitpicking around the edges of real progress with proposals such as "more charter schools" yet another year lost in the work of rescuing low-achieving kids?
Finally, I would hope that you understand the true dynamics of racism. I learned a long time ago from a public school teacher in Iowa that whenever you hear about what's best for "those kids" and how "they" should be treated differently from your children that what you're hearing in actuality is the language of racism. I grew up in Texas on the tattered edge of suburban Dallas during a time when there was something called "desegregation" going on. I went to a small, all-white elementary school perched high on a caliche knob where the September winds shocked our morning flag raising into immediate furl. After we recited the Pledge of Allegiance we were informed about the "new students" that were going to be bussed from the other side of town to "our school" and how they were "different" from us. Our political leaders back then told us that it would be better if those black and brown kids kept to their own schools because those schools were what "those kids needed." Back then, in the South, those politicians were all Democrats.
Today, as Linda Darling Hammond points out, "the achievement gap between minority and white students in reading and math is larger than it was in 1988," and a "growing share of African-American and Hispanic students" now find themselves in "highly segregated apartheid schools that lack qualified teachers; up-to-date textbooks and materials; libraries, science labs and computers; and safe, adequate facilities." And once again, as I saw on the blackland praries of my childhood, we have Democratic leaders telling us to support a charter school movement, which tends to foster highly segregated schools, as numerous studies have shown.
So my last question to you Matt is what kind of Democrat are you?
I don't oppose all wars. And I know that in this crowd today, there is no shortage of patriots, or of patriotism. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war.
Why do I have the feeling that ignoring this is a huge practical and moral mistake?
United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon met Sunday with Pakistan's president, and both men urged the international community to step up efforts to help the millions affected by flooding in Pakistan...
He said he has visited scenes of natural disasters worldwide, but has seen "nothing like this. The scale of the disaster is so large -- so many people and in so many places, in so much need."
"Thousands of towns and villages have simply been washed away," Ban said. "Roads, buildings, bridges, crops -- millions of livelihoods have been lost. People are marooned on tiny islands with the floodwaters all around them. They are drinking dirty water. They are living in the mud and ruins of their lives. Many have lost family and friends. Many more are afraid their children and loved ones will not survive in these conditions."
When you read about the effects of climate change, you see these moving maps where large parts of the land mass become submerged and you think, "boy that's really something." But what this shows is the depth of human misery that mass flooding causes. And the probability that this will be happening with frequency and sometimes simultaneously going forward is quite high. What that translates into, aside from the aforementioned human misery, is political instability, mass migration and social upheaval. This is a peek at our future, and it's happening in one of the most dangerous places on earth.
Gosh, ya think?
At the same time, General Patreas is putting on a grand show to convince all the serious people (who laugh at global warming 'cause it snowed last winter) that we really can and should "win the war" in Afghanistan where less than 100 al Qaeda operatives may still be.
And "winning" that war will... do what exactly? Because I do have a much, much clearer sense of what it would mean to win the war on global warming. Another war in which we're very, very clearly fighting on the wrong side.
Of coure, global warming doesn't "cause" these sorts of things directly. It "merely" loads the dice more and more heavily in the direction of a different climate regime, and what we're experiencing now are the transitional effects as what were once highly unusual conditions become increasingly frequent.
