Thursday, June 10, 2010

Various Current Events

Tea Party demonstrator punched by Bush critic (411 Mania)
Supreme Court shifts on Miranda and confession (FindLaw)
Israel without clichés (NYT)
A king/queen for America? (NYT)
Parenting suffers from technology use (NYT)
Taliban bombs Afghan wedding (NYT)
Prop 14 reconfigures CA primaries (NYT)
CA voters approve open primary (LA Times)
Microsoft follows Apple, banning porn on phones (LifeSite)
Coptic Pope rejects Egyptian remarriage ruling (C Post)
90% of Evangelical leaders OK with contraception (C Post)
Saudi man gets 90 lashes for kissing girl in a mall (CNS News)
SB 1070 backlash Hispanics register Democrat (AZR)
Lawmakers want IDs for prepaid cell phones (Fox News)
Sen Burris to allow overseas military abortions (Wash Times)
Health law could uninsured 1 million (Politico)
US 85th in peacefulness in world (Wash Times)
How the Global Peace Index is calculated (Wikipedia)
Publisher puts warning label on Constitution (Fox News)
Sen. candidate wants to cut end-of-life care (Miami Herald)
Bachelor’s degrees for preschool teachers? (Boston Globe)
NJSC limits defendant family rights at sentencing (NJ.com)
400 DC DUI based on flawed test (Wash Post)
FF restaurants: 1 year reprieve on calorie posts (Boston Globe)
Chevrolet memo: “Don’t call it ‘Chevy’ anymore.” (USA Today)
Hispanics fleeing Arizona (USA Today)
Claremont seminary to train Imams and Rabbis, too (LA Times)
Weapons a common catch, say fishermen (Boston Globe)
Reuters photos of Israeli raid edited, denies bias (Fox News)
The 25 hardest working lawmakers (The Hill)
Mortgage interest deduction may go (The Hill)

4 comments:

Naum said...

Regarding Helen Thomas

Why Helen Thomas and not Rush Limbaugh?I have to ask -- why does Helen have to "resign" but others who have done similar things get to keep their jobs?… …Like, say, Rush Limbaugh?… …Or Sean Hannity?… …Or Glenn Beck?… …Or Bill O' Reilly?

Helen ThomasWhere was their indignation when Rush Limbaugh was making disgraceful and insulting comments about African Americans, gays, Muslims, and women and then was hosted and toasted at the White House? And did they speak out when Pat Robertson was making bizarre pronouncements connecting the devastation of Katrina or Ariel Sharon's stroke with God's justice?…

Our hard-core adversarial press corps…the central issue -- as both my Salon colleague Gabriel Winant and The American Prospect's Adam Serwer adeptly document -- is not the perception that she's guilty of bigotry, but the wrong kind of bigotry. Anyone who doubts that should compare the cheap, easy and self-righteous outrage orgy against the powerless, 89-year-old columnist to the total non-reaction in the face of the incessant and ongoing anti-Arab bigotry of The New Republic's Marty Peretz, or to the demands of then-House Majority Leader Dick Armey that the Palestinians leave the West Bank and go back to where they came from, and similar statements from Mike Huckabee (still gainfully employed at Fox News).

Naum said...

Arizona's 'Papers Please' Law (factcheck.org)
Arizona Senate Bill 1070: A Preliminary Report (U. of Arizona College of Law)
How do they get to be that way? (Roger Ebert)
Racist roots of Russell Pearce's regressive anti-immigrant laws

Naum said...

I find it odd that you and callers eager to denounce Helen Thomas (rightfully so, her remarks were inexcusable), but champion folks like Russell Pearce and the architects of SB1070 (who have been labeled racist, "hate group" by SLPC and human rights organizations) , who have displayed bigotry and a history of acts of racism

----

…Republican State Senator Russell Pearce. Mr. Pearce is famous in Arizona for having sent an email to his supporters that included a white nationalist screed, accusing the media of pushing the view, quote, “a world in which every voice proclaims the equality of the races, the inerrant nature of the Jewish, quote, ‘Holocaust‘ tale, the wickedness of attempting to halt the flood of nonwhite aliens pouring across the borders.” Mr. Pearce sent that around to all of his supporters in which he later apologized for.

Russell Pearce is also famous for having been caught on tape hugging a neo-Nazi. No, like a real neo-Nazi. Not some sort of metaphorical Godwin‘s law-invoking neo-Nazi guy, but an actual neo-Nazi guy. See, with the swastikas?

Russell Pearce is the guy who introduced this radical immigration bill in Arizona… …meet the guy who‘s taking credit for writing the new law, that would be the gentleman named Kris Kobach.

Kris Kobach is a birther. He‘s running for a secretary of state in Kansas right now. His campaign Web site today brags, quote, “Kobach wins one in Arizona.”

The guy that helped Arizona‘s new immigration bill is also an attorney for the Immigration Reform Law Institute. That‘s the legal arm of an immigration group that‘s called FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform. FAIR was founded in 1979 by a man named John Tanton. Mr. Tanton is still listed as a member of FAIR‘s board of directors.

…Mr. Tanton wrote this, quote, “To govern is to populate. Will the present majority peaceably hand over its political power to a group that is simply more fertile? As whites see their power and control over their lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night or will there be an explosion?” That‘s FAIR, who helped write Arizona‘s anti-immigrant law.

After John Tanton got FAIR off the ground, for nine of the first years of the group‘s existence, the group reportedly received more than $1 million in funding from something called the Pioneer Fund. The Pioneer Fund describes itself as a group formed, quote, “in the Darwinian-Galtonian evolutionary tradition and eugenics movement.”

…the Pioneer Fund has funded controversial research about race and intelligence, essentially aimed at proving the racial superiority of white people.… …original mandate was to promote the genes of those, quote, “deemed to be descended predominantly from white persons who settled in the original 13 states prior to the adoption of the Constitution.”

…FAIR, which, again, claims credit for writing Arizona‘s new immigrant law, John Tanton‘s FAIR was long bankrolled by the Pioneer Fund—which actually makes sense after you read some more of Mr. Tanton‘s writings. Quote, “I‘ve come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority and a clear one at that.”

…John Tanton told the “Detroit Free Press” that America will soon be overrun by illegal immigrants, quote, “defecating and creating garbage and looking for jobs.”…



In drafting that language, FAIR may have slipped a little something special in there for themselves. FAIR makes a living off of suing local and state governments over immigration laws. Tucked inside Article VIII of Arizona‘s new law is a provision that if groups like them win their cases, quote, a judge—sorry—a judge may order that the entity, quote, “who brought the action recover court costs and attorney fees”—which could create a nice financial boon for the formerly eugenics movement…

Naum said...

The new Arizona state immigration bill (SB-1070) signed into law on April 23 will seriously obstruct, if not undermine, the practice of medicine in the state of Arizona. It specifies that those who “conceal, harbor or shield or attempt to conceal, harbor or shield” a foreign person who came to the United States illicitly “are guilty of a class 1 misdemeanor” punishable by a fine of at least $1,000 (Sec. 5, Section 13-2929).1 It can be argued that health care providers who neglect to report illegal immigrants under their care will violate the law and be considered criminals. The bill provides physicians with no guidance as to what constitutes “reasonable grounds” to suspect that somebody is in the country illegally, leaving the particulars of such scrutiny to anyone’s imagination (although the fact that Arizona shares a border with Mexico rather than a European country suggests that whites will not be “reasonable” suspects). One interpretation is that health care providers in Arizona will need to ask for a passport before seeing certain patients (and providers themselves will need to carry their own passports at all times, depending on their physical appearance or accent). Arizona practitioners, hospitals, and medical associations need to ponder the extent of their liability under the new law and draft clear institutional policies to defend their patients and employees from potential harassment. Asking patients to produce immigration documents violates the trust that physicians, nurses, and other health care workers endeavor to earn from them. This bill threatens one of the oldest traditions of medicine: physicians shall protect patients regardless of nationality or race.2 This legislation, if unchallenged, will force health care providers to choose between the dignity of their profession and the indignity of violating the law. — Lucas Restrepo, M.D. Barrow Neurological Institute, Phoenix, AZ, in the New England Journal of Medicine