World News Korner

So some of you may have read how how the CEO of the internet browser Mozzila stepped down from his job after it came to light that he had given a $1,000 contribution on support of the 2008 gay marriage ban in California.

In response Andrew Sullivan wrote a rather thoughtful piece on what he saw as the equivalence of pro-gay lynch mob:

He did not understand that in order to be a CEO of a company, you have to renounce your heresy! There is only one permissible opinion at Mozilla, and all dissidents must be purged! Yep, that’s left-liberal tolerance in a nut-shell. No, he wasn’t a victim of government censorship or intimidation. He was a victim of the free market in which people can choose to express their opinions by boycotts, free speech and the like. He still has his full First Amendment rights. But what we’re talking about is the obvious and ugly intolerance of parts of the gay movement, who have reacted to years of being subjected to social obloquy by returning the favor.

This is a repugnantly illiberal sentiment. It is also unbelievably stupid for the gay rights movement. You want to squander the real gains we have made by argument and engagement by becoming just as intolerant of others’ views as the Christianists? You’ve just found a great way to do this. It’s a bad, self-inflicted blow. And all of us will come to regret it.

I have to admit that though I frequently use the Mozilla browser, Firefox, I did not feel compelled to weigh in on this debate one way or the other.

However Greta Van Susteren felt the need to provide her two cents, not so much about what happened to Mozilla CEO and co-founder Brendan Eich, but rather how irritating it was the Sullivan was now being celebrated for his defense of free speech.

Here is her headline:

Andrew Sullivan, is now the Free Speech guy? Free speech should include at least an effort at NO SLANDER yet he felt it was ok, when it advanced his career, to slander a mother by saying obsessively that she should PROVE she is the mother of her special needs child! Yes, a bully! What a world we live in, huh?

Oh yeah, she went there.

And because she went there could the Wasilla Wendigo be far behind?

Aww poor Sarah, bullied by the big bad openly gay blogger, who is now receiving accolades for defending those he feels are being denied their right to free speech.

Oh the humanity.

But exactly what about Sullivan's questioning of the circumstances of Trig's birth would be considered bullying? Here is what he said on June 13, 2011:

It seems to me we have two options. It’s possible that Palin simply made up her drama of labor, or exaggerated it for effect, when in fact it was a routine, if rare, pregnancy, and she had mild warnings that the birth may be premature, and she gussied that up into a tall tale of her pioneer spirit, guided by her doctor, who refused to take the NYT’s calls as soon as Palin hit the big time. I think that’s the likeliest explanation, given the sheer world-historical weirdness of the alternative.

But it’s also possible that she never had that baby at all. I mean, if you read the emails and independent reports above and were asked if this woman were in labor with a special needs child, and that her water had already broken, would you believe it? Just put all the facts in front of you and ask yourself that question.

So she is either a self-serving drama queen who didn’t realize her story would imply she put her child – and many others on the planes – at great risk and then winged it to make her story more plausible; or she is a fantastic hoaxer and liar at a world class meshugana level that, at some point, will make Weinergate look like a damp squib.

To my mind, either option makes her unfit for high office, which is all you need to know really. And the fact that she has never been asked about this by any MSM journalist tells you so so much about what motivates the DC press corps. It’s certainly not curiosity.

That is not bullying, that is simply good reporting. Something that his fellow journalists completely failed to do.

And, as we all know, he was not at all wrong to pursue this story.

Because only one month later we provided the smoking gun that would demonstrate that Sarah Palin lied about her pregnancy in any court in the land.

So yes, Andrew Sullivan is a defender of free speech. And no, he is NOT a bully.

But I know somebody who is.




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Courtesy of TPM:

Republican Senate candidate Jack Kingston has released a new ad featuring a fake call from President Barack Obama telling him to "back off Obamacare."

The 15-second spot, posted on Georgia Rep. Kingston's YouTube page, includes a voicemail from the faux president, with photos of Obama in the background.

"Uh, Kingston. This is the president," says the voice. "You gotta back off Obamacare. You voted 40 times to defund it, you demanded I sign up. Kingston. Let me be clear. I do not want you in the Senate."

Seriously?

Apparently Kingston struggling to win the nomination, and is facing a number of challengers, some of who accused him of not fighting hard enough against Obamacare.

Well this totally fabricated phone call should put those accusations to rest. Don'tcha think?

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Courtesy of MIT Technology Review:

Back in 1990, about 8 percent of the U.S. population had no religious preference. By 2010, this percentage had more than doubled to 18 percent. That’s a difference of about 25 million people, all of whom have somehow lost their religion.

That raises an obvious question: how come? Why are Americans losing their faith?

Today, we get a possible answer thanks to the work of Allen Downey, a computer scientist at the Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts, who has analyzed the data in detail. He says that the demise is the result of several factors but the most controversial of these is the rise of the Internet. He concludes that the increase in Internet use in the last two decades has caused a significant drop in religious affiliation.

Of course there are other factors in the study as well, including fewer parents introducing religion to their children, and a slight increase in college enrollments.

However the correlation between increased internet access and decreased religious affiliation is dramatic and compelling.

When I first started The Immoral Minority it was to provide a space to talk openly about politics and religion, the two things my former wife used to tell me "should not be discussed in polite society."

At the time there only seemed to be a handful of places where religion was discussed with any regularity, but in the almost ten years of this blog's existence that has dramatically increased.

Today you can get into a spirited debate, and access reams of information about religion, mythologies, and the history of various beliefs, on numerous sites, such as the Huffington Post, Reddit, Salon, Daily Beast, you name it.

This allows people, even small towns and isolated areas of the country, to have their eyes opened to things that their parents or the leaders in their communities simply do not want them to know.

Of course I see this as wonderful and it gives me great hope for the future. It is safe to say that others do not see it this way.

In places like Saudi Arabia and Iran they dramatically limit access to the internet in hopes of controlling access to information that would undermine religious faith and promote ideas about equality and human rights.

I would not be at all surprised to see similar attempts to control information in this country, since access to information threatens those who thrive on the ignorance of their parishioners, constituents, or party members.

Personally I would be pleased to think that IM had any impact on a visitor's religious outlook and inspired them to do their own research and question the foundation of their faith.

In my opinion knowing more, thinking more, and discussing more can only lead to greater understanding and a better country.



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Courtesy of Crooks and Liars:

Jacobs: Arming everybody on posts seems to be a very foolish stance..(Lott tries to cut in) No, be quiet. A very foolish response (The colonel) to a problem that needs a solution, (You make hyperbole here) but this is not the solution. Please, don't be rude..

Lott: No, earlier you were talking about...

Jacobs: Please. Don't Be Rude.

Savanna: let him finish his statement.

Jacobs: Be quiet. Arming everybody on posts and the intended danger in doing that is not a solution to protect the lives of people who serve and sacrifice for us. Now you can say what you want to say.

The portion of the conversation not contained in the above clip, and to which the pro-gun "researcher" is referring, is also worth noting:

Jacobs: Well there are several issues here, the first is whom do you arm, Do you arm wives, dependents? It's absolutely a ludicrous suggestion. The situation at Fort Hood the other day in the circumstance in which everyone had weapons could very easily result and probably would have resulted in enormous mass fratricide and you would have this all the time.

Second problem revolves around the notion that civilian life, or military life on a civilian post is just like combat.

The third point revolves around the notion that the shooter values his own life more than he does carrying out what he's going to carry out and therefore he's not going to do it if everybody else is armed. Complete nonsense.

Well said, and completely correct in my opinion.

Many of these mass shooters are on a suicide mission. It does not concern them one bit that they will be shot, in fact they expect it. And if it does not happen, as we have seen time and time again, they are perfectly happy to kill themselves.

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Courtesy of Reality Check:

President Obama recently announced an initiative to curb rape on campuses across the United States. It is a well-known problem that rapes and sexual assaults that happen on campus are often handled in-house, without police interference. Often, there is little to no punishment for the rapists, and their victims are made to feel shame and guilt for reporting at all.

Fundamentalist and evangelical Christians often hold up these kinds of stories as examples of how “the world” is corrupt. Christian colleges bank on the idea that they are safer because they are a faith-based environment—the sexual sins of rape supposedly don’t happen on their campuses.

A number of recent revelations have proven this assertion wrong. From Bob Jones University to Pensacola to Cedarville to Patrick Henry to Hyles-Anderson College, Christian colleges are plagued by accusations at once familiar and strange: College counselors asking rape victims leading questions about their potential guilt, a lack of reporting to authorities, and failure to punish the rapist are all problems known to those who study incidences of rape at colleges and universities.

But in the Christian environment, the fundamentalist theology surrounding sexual activity and purity creates another layer of shame and guilt. A theology that positions the colleges as better and safer than their secular counterparts also creates an environment in which a person coming forward about rape risks being seen as “impure” and “broken.”

For example, (Samantha) Field recently reported that in 2003 another Pensacola Christian College student was attacked by her then-boyfriend, bound and gagged, and left in a construction site on campus after being raped. The student sought the help of a school counselor, but instead of receiving needed help and victim services, she was expelled for being a “fornicator.” She left campus while her injuries from the rape—a bruised face and a broken arm—were still healing. (The school’s president said in a recent statement that the school “has upheld the law, will continue to uphold the law, reports criminal acts when we are made knowledgeable of them, and fully cooperates with any investigation.” In response, Field wrote that she had heard directly from “a PCC staffer who was expressly forbidden—by three people in the administration—from reporting a child sexual assault to the police and [was] informed [by those three individuals] … that they would not make a report.” She says this “was confirmed by other staffers.” She acknowledges that it was not illegal, in 2011, for the school not to report the assault.)

The student’s expulsion and treatment by the college is directly tied to the perceived sin of having sex outside of marriage. It was apparently considered worse that she was now “impure” than that she had been raped. To her knowledge, her rapist was never confronted or punished, and went on to graduate.

Rape is nothing new on college campuses and in fact that was what first inspired me to teach a women's self defense class while attending college in Hawaii back in the early 80's.

However in this day and age one would think that rape would be handled with much more delicacy, and that women (or men) who had been victimized could expect their school to seek to bring their assailant to justice and take great pains to make sure there would be no more sexual assaults.

Of course for that to happen they would first have to understand the nature of rape, and recognize that it was not a sexual act, but rather a criminal act based on power, not desire.

And of course for Christian schools, they need to stop thinking of their female students as the sinful descendants of Eve, and think of them instead as actual human beings deserving of at least as much respect and protection as their male counterparts.

Or perhaps more.

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Yesterday on Facebook Palin endorsed Pete Ricketts and had her ghostwriter write up a post just chock full of cookie cutter conservative jargon and anti-liberal vitriol.

Here is a taste:

While Pete’s opponents in this race have made a career for themselves as politicians, bureaucrats, or lobbyists, Pete spent his career in the private sector helping grow his family’s successful business from the bottom up. I believe in teaching kids to never fear success and in fact to look to those who’ve ethically earned their success and emulate their work ethic!

Yeah I have no idea what all of that blabber meant, but it is interesting to note that Ricketts actually TRIED to be one of those career politicians that Palin vilified up above back in 2006, when he ran against Democrat Ben Nelson for his Senate seat.

He failed in that endeavor, after spending over eleven million dollars of his own money, and so he is back and newly reborn as a Tea Party conservative.

While giving Ricketts his political reach around Palin also decided to go on the attack against the evil liberals.

The alternative is woeful dependency on an inevitable sinking ship I call “Liberal Lunacy.”

Yes of course, WE are the lunatics.

The rest of the post is overflowing with the usual hackneyed Palin-aprops. Such as "common sense conservative," "fearless patriot," and of course, "servant's heart."

Palin also warns about the "recycled old discredited attacks" which I believe refers to this one about his position on amnesty leveled at him by Charlie Janssen, who is running for the same nomination.

Palin goes onto say this:

Pete has the business acumen, the moral integrity, and the conservative common sense to lead Nebraska into a prosperous future.

The problem is that she is describing the wrong Ricketts family member. In fact it is his father who seems to have the business acumen, as evidenced by the fact that it he who owns TDAmeritrade, the company for whom his son Pete serves as the CEO.

In fact it appears that the father, Joe Ricketts, is the REAL political heavyweight.

It was the senior Ricketts who started the super PAC "Taxpayers Against Earmarks," now known as "Ending Spending," and who spent 10 million dollars of his own money attempting to prove that President Obama was a leftist radical who was heavily influenced by the Reverend Wright.

This from May 2012, in the New York Times:

“The world is about to see Jeremiah Wright and understand his influence on Barack Obama for the first time in a big, attention-arresting way,” says the proposal, which was overseen by Fred Davis and commissioned by Joe Ricketts, the founder of the brokerage firm TD Ameritrade. Mr. Ricketts is increasingly putting his fortune to work in conservative politics.

Oh yeah, this explains why Palin is so enthusiastic about the son.

Palin at Friday morning Ricketts fundraiser.

These are her kind of people. Completely out of their fucking minds!

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