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POPSParting Ways With The Right Anti-Islamic bigotry that goes far beyond simply criticizing radical Islam, into support for fascism, violence, and genocide (see: Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, etc.) Hatred for President Obama that goes far beyond simply criticizing his policies, into racism, hate speech, and bizarre conspiracy theories (see: witch doctor pictures, tea parties, Birthers, Michelle Malkin, Fox News, World Net Daily, Newsmax, and every other right wing source) And much, much more. The American right wing has gone off the rails, into the bushes, and off the cliff. I won’t be going over the cliff with them.
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POPSMuch Of Traditional Journalism Went Backwards
and were so badly in the tank for one candidate in 2008 that 90 percent of the public can see it. As ABC’s Michael Malone wrote in October of 2008: I also happen to believe that most reporters, whatever their political bias, are human torpedoes . . .and, had they been unleashed, would have raced in and roughed up the Obama campaign as much as they did McCain’s. That’s what reporters do, I was proud to have been one, and I’m still drawn to a good story, any good story, like a shark to blood in the water. So why weren’t those legions of hungry reporters set loose on the Obama campaign? Who are the real villains in this story of mainstream media betrayal? The editors. The men and women you don’t see; the people who not only decide what goes in the paper, but what doesn’t; the managers who give the reporters their assignments and lay-out the editorial pages. They are the real culprits. Picture yourself in your 50s in a job where you’ve spent 30 years
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POPSConservatives to "fast track" Immigration for Hundreds of Afghanis Conservatives to "fast track" immigration for hundreds of Afghanis Thanks to you Canadian Soapbox is now listed in the Top 3 at Canadian Blogosphere. To help this blog climb even higher click on their icon, then hit the green button to vote - limit 1 vote per day per IP - thank you.
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POPSRA's Daily Russian News Blast US to modify or jettison missile defense plans? NATO chief to meet with Russian envoy; Lukaschenko sends out mixed messages. South Ossetia denies book burning; think tank leader says Putin could be heading for Brehznev-style decades in power; Medvedev finds inspiration on blogosphere. Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko has suggested the traditional ally of Russia must 'move away from dependence on just one country, even one that is near and dear to us'. The Moscow Times reports that the authoritarian leader has emphasized ties with Russia, whilst on a rare visit to EU-member state Lithuania. The Russian Foreign Minstry has said that the criminal investigation into charges of forgery against RIA Novosti's Tbilisi bureau chief is politically motivated. South Ossetia has denied bonfire-style burning of Georgian books and other classic works at the state university. An op-ed contributor in the Moscow Times is disturbed by what makes it onto Russian bookshelves.
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POPSPostcard From Canada: Why I Missed Obama's Speech 
I doubled over on the counter, breathing through the pain (those long-ago Bradley childbirth classes are still paying off). Moments later, a nurse appeared to check me in. With a quick swipe of my BC provincial care card, my complete medical files glimmered onto his computer screen. He put a thermometer in my mouth, then confirmed the basic data while a printer spit out my wristband. The whole check-in process took under three minutes. Second: You don't realize how much politics -- in this case, the war on drugs -- has warped medical care until you see how differently non-American doctors and nurses deal with pain management. Since Canada sees drug abuse as a social problem, not a law enforcement one, it's stubbornly resisted several ham-handed attempts by the American government to get it to crack down on doctors who persist in seeing codeine and morphine as useful medications. While Health Canada does keeps tabs on individual doctors' prescribing habits, docs are given vastly more
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POPSObama Makes Moral Case for Health Care Reform Obama did four key things in the speech. * He made the moral case for health care reform, referencing Senator Ted Kennedy many times throughout (read the Kennedy's letter to the president here), saying: "We are the only advanced democracy on Earth – the only wealthy nation – that allows such hardships for millions of its people. There are now more than thirty million American citizens who cannot get coverage. In just a two year period, one in every three Americans goes without health care coverage at some point. And every day, 14,000 Americans lose their coverage. In other words, it can happen to anyone." He made the reasonable case for bipartisanship He demonstrated that he will no longer suffer fools: And he provided the Congressional Progressive Caucus the cover it needs to pass a plan with a strong public option:
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POPSWhy Israeli Jew Uri Davis joined Fatah to save Palestine So what does Davis believe, and why? His father was a British Jew who met his mother, a Czech, in British Mandatory Palestine in the mid-1930s, where they married in 1939, four years before his birth. While his mother escaped the transports to the gas chambers at Auschwitz, many in her family did not. It is a familiar story in Israel. But the lesson that Davis learnt from it was different from the vast majority of Jews who concluded that never again could Jews depend on others to guarantee their security from persecution. "An important part of the education that I received from my parents," Davis recalled last week, "was never to generalise. To beware of every sentence that begins with 'all'. It was not 'all' Germans who killed my mother's family. It was some Nazis." Another distinction was emphasised by his mother. "If she heard the suggestion of vengeance, she would be horrified. She sought justice. One of the biggest problems addressing a Zionist audience is that the distinction
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POPS Obama File 82 Exclusive! Obama, The Communist Van Jones and the Demos Connection Obama file 81 here http://newzeal.blogspot.com/2009/08/obama-file-81-former-weathermen.html Incidentally in the mid 1990s, Collins was one of several IPS people who helped organise the New Party-which Obama joined in 1995 in Chicago. Van Jones serves om the Demos Board of Trustees. So where does Obama fit in? According to the Demos website; Demos began as a vision of Charles Halpern--then the president of the Nathan Cummings Foundation and a veteran non-profit entrepreneur. He was troubled by the narrow conversation about America's future. On the eve of the 21st century, it seemed that America no longer had the imagination to tackle its largest problems and build a more just society . In 1979 Don Rose, a mentor to Obama's right hand man David Axelrod served in the leadership of the IPS spinoff Conference on Alternative State and Local Policies, with Miles Rapoport.
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POPSNow They Want Our Feelings, Our Emotions They are breaking us, tearing us down so they can rebuild us the way they want. It's what the military did to the draftees before they sent them to Viet Nam. They've already started to tell us that we're happy. Are we happy?
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POPSPublic Option Dropped, Lefty Blog Hilarity Ensues! So, in this difficult time for Democrats, a visit to the left side of the blogosphere was warranted. Equipping myself with a Haz-Mat suit (suitable for Biosafety Level 4 Hot Zones) and a laptop, I've returned from that mission horrified and shocked at what I've seen. The overwhelming public mistrust of socialized medicine be damned! We've got socialist principles to install, so get the hell out of the way! • jimfromthefoothills firmly states, "Remember, we are going to rebuild every school, bridge and road in the country. We will fix healthcare. We will restore the constitution, end illegal wars reduce emissions of greenhouse gasses." ......... • sandra adroitly observes, "Obama has succeeded in showing us that the corrupt corporations hold the power, the crazy screamers have succeeded, and democracy has failed us, big time." ......... If by "corrupt corporations", you mean the companies that pay billions in taxes and employ millions of American taxpayers
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POPSPelosi's Swastika Carrying Plants Are Sprouting Don't believe me. Ask this guy who made a living posing as an ashamed Republican. The media couldn't stop falling for his shtick... Update: First, I was wrong, the sign in question is in the batch of 133, it's easy to overlook, but visible here. Second, our lefty friends want to claim that this is somehow proof that I had it all wrong. I didn't have anything wrong. At the time of Pelosi's statement that picture was unknown to everyone, me, the Huffington Post, everyone at Daily Kos, and even to Pelosi herself. It was only revealed after I proved that Pelosi's information wasn't coming from it's natural sources, the netroots and all its denisons. The sign itself (lame as it may be) generated zero notice, and wasn't noted in press accounts or netroot accounts. More importantly the photo in question wasn't from a townhall meeting, it was from a street demonstration - there was no townhall meeting that day. In that regard it rates a FAIL as proof that Pelosi was right.
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POPSMore Red-Baiting of Obama: The "Socialist" Joker Here we have yet another demonstration of lablelling substituting itself for critical thought. Obama gets red-baited once more. It's a pity that Tyler Nixon at Delaware Libertarian isn't an artist because if he were he could do an image of Obama as a fascist, something he labeled the President in a recent post: http://tinyurl.com/nq7bjn Thoughtful criticism must be difficult for these people.
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POPSWall Street on Speed
As debates in the blogosphere in the last couple of days have made clear, there are a couple of possibilities of what is at work here. One is that Goldman and others are literally using privileged information to make trades ahead of markets, in which case they are committing a felony. Specifically, the abuse is known as "front-running," or trading ahead of customers, and it is an explicitly illegal form of market manipulation. Front running is epidemic on Wall Street--the whole point of an investment bank trading for its own account is to take advantage of its specialized knowledge of markets--and the SEC or the Justice Department shuts down front-running when it becomes too blatant to ignore. The other possibility is that the Goldmans of the world have found themselves a nice loophole. Tapping into the Stock Exchange's own computers and other sources of trading activity is something that anyone in theory could do, but only a few privileged insiders have the sophistication to exploi
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POPSMurdoch CEO Labels Bloggers “Political Extremists” The source of the establishment’s move to claim that bloggers and alternative media outlets are “extremists” or at worst “terrorists,” as we first reported in September 2006, was a White House strategy document that the government had been following since 9/11. In a September 5, 2006 speech President George W. Bush referred to the document as “an unclassified version of the strategy we’ve been pursuing since September the 11th, 2001,” that takes into account, “the changing nature of this enemy.” The strategy paper on how to ‘win the war on terror’ cites “conspiracies” as one of the wellsprings of terrorism and threatens to “address” and “diminish” the problems they are causing the government in fulfilling their agenda.
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POPSThe Jig Is Up Mousavi wasn’t about to give up Iran’s nuclear program either. But the fact that engagement is now so patently absurd even to the left blogosphere should give the Obama team pause. What are they going to do now? So perhaps it was not George Bush’s “fault” that we couldn’t “get along” with Iran. Any American president who declines to countenance the regime’s thuggish behavior becomes the object of their scorn. There is no “engagement” without forfeiting our conscience. And the notion that Ahmadinejad and his mullah patrons would give up their nuclear program in response to some charm offensive from the president is now revealed to be utter drivel. If Obama can’t rally world opinion now — when the nature and intentions of the regime are so clear — it is hard to see when he will ever be able to do so. After all, who now thinks we can do “business” with the mullahs and/or learn to live with a nuclear-armed despotic regime?
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POPSI Demand Respect, General, "Could you say 'senator'?" "Why do some liberals apparently despise our military?" DeVore asks in a statement on his campaign's Web site. He says the use of "ma'am" is "a perfectly acceptable sign of military respect to both a U.S. senator or a senior female officer." Republican critics in the blogosphere and elsewhere are excoriating Boxer. Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., called Boxer "a loose cannon" and an embarrassment to her party. "I just can't put up with that kind of thing when people think too much of themselves, and we see a lot of that in Washington," DeMint told Fox News Channel. Boxer is scum. California's beleaguered taxpayers would do well to throw her out on her kiester at the next available opportunity.
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POPSHow the Internet Works in Iran " But if the destination is not on the forbidden list, it's allowed to go through. Outside Iran, the proxy servers are like transit points. Activists set up proxy servers on their own computers, using Internet Protocol numbers that don't appear on the forbidden list. Traffic from Iran can go through to those addresses with no problem. The data traffic is then forwarded to wherever it's destined to go, even if that destination is supposedly forbidden. During the post-election crisis, proxy servers have been popping up like thousands of computerized "Casablanca" cafes around the world. The Pirate Bay, a popular file-sharing site based in Sweden, launched an anonymous Net-surfing forum to help Iran's opposition - but most of the proxy providers are amateurs."
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POPSAbout Compassionate Conservatism I know Bush was crazy with the spending, but that’s not really an excuse for Obama to airdrop gasoline on a wildfire. The conservative blogosphere really should start a fundraiser to buy everyone at Daily Kos helmets to keep them from hurting themselves. That’s compassionate conservatism right there. In Africa, newborn sons are named after George W. Bush. Yet his legacy to this country is the election of a black man — whose father was a true son of Africa. Bush saved over a million lives in Africa from HIV related illnesses. If that kind of compassion is "a contradiction in terms," or troubling, perhaps the bar is set too high.
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POPS A New Consensus? Michael J. Totten I know it's slightly less convenient for you read my work over there, but this means I don't have to rattle my tip jar over here. I'm mostly finished with my next dispatch from Iraq, but I'm finding it difficult to concentrate on it right now. It's a bit "off topic" anyway, so I'm thinking of holding onto it for a bit. Maybe Iran will settle down soon.
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POPSAre Republican car dealers getting picked on? Well, no, despite what you may have read in the right-wing blogs. The % of shuttered dealers who are Republicans is the same as the % of still-open dealers who are Republicans. Fact is, a lot of car dealers are Republicans.
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