Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 948

America’s xenophobic rush: Elected official calls for refugee internment camps, majority of Americans now want to slam the door

So much for civil discourse. The national debate on Syrian refugees following last Friday's attacks in Paris only took two days to completely devolve into a fact-free emotional mess of speculation and inflamed rhetoric. On Monday morning, the nation only had two governor's brazen enough to call for an outright ban on all refugees from the war torn nation in the aftermath of the devastating terror attacks, when initial reports indicated that one of the at least seven Paris attackers carried a Syrian passport. So far, officials have reported that the other attackers were Europeans. By day's end on Monday, however, 34 governors had rushed to join their compatriots in declaring America, land of the free, as inhospitable to war refugees. Republican presidential candidate and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie led the pack with his heartless declaration that his state wouldn't even accept “3-year-old orphans.” Rand Paul and Mike Huckabee have since called for a suspension of all visas from Middle Eastern countries. Ted Cruz, the son of a political refugee from Cuba, offered a religious exemption only for Christian Syrians. But every GOP presidential candidate has forcefully turned their backs on Syrian refugees, scapegoating victims of war as ISIS sympathizers and potential terrorists. "Paris should be a wake-up call for the Washington establishment and many in the GOP who support open borders and out-of-control amnesty," Huckabee warned. Today, the Democratic mayor of Roanoke, Virginia, invoked the ugly history of Japanese internment during World War II to defend his callous decision to ban Syrian refugees from resettling in his town. "I'm reminded that President Franklin D. Roosevelt felt compelled to sequester Japanese foreign nationals after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and it appears that the threat of harm to America from Isis [sic] now is just as real and serious as that from our enemies then," David A. Bowers wrote. One GOP lawmaker isn't just invoking past internment camps, he is seemingly calling for a return to such camps in 2015. According to the Kansas City Star, a Missouri lawmaker is in such a panic that he has called for a special legislative session to stop "the potential Islamization of Missouri." "Unless I'm mistaken, a practicing muslim can do whatever is necessary for the 'good' of the faith -- telling 'fibs' is a small part of what they might do," Republican state Rep. Mike Moon wrote to Republican Speaker of the House Todd Richardson. "Our preference, as a nation, should be to place the refugees in camps so that they can be properly cared for and returned safely home when the time is right." Indiana Governor Mike Pence directed his state's social services agency to issue a letter to a Syrian refugee family waiting for three years in Jordan, according to the New York Times, informing them that their relocation should be “suspended or redirected to another state that is willing to accept Syrian placements.” The family was set to arrive in Indianapolis today but has been diverted to Connecticut, where Syrian refugee have not yet been rejected. And it is not just politicians. Now, a new poll shows that the xenophobic fearmongering has worked -- most Americans want the U.S. to stop letting in Syrian refugees. According to a new Bloomberg poll out Wednesday, 53 percent of Americans say the U.S. should not accept any further Syrian refugees, while only 28 percent support the president's plan to resettle 10,000 over the next two years.

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Published on November 18, 2015 14:37

With “Cabs, Camels or ISIS,” Thomas Friedman officially becomes a parody of himself: Can’t a New York Times columnist do better than this?

Scientists toiling deep in a basement laboratory in Denmark have been working for months, and have finally found what they’ve been looking for. They have distilled the essence of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s output into one quintessential paragraph:

So, about 1,000 miles south of the Islamic State start-up in Iraq and Syria — where jihadists are using technology to spawn disruption on a massive scale — another group of Muslims (and non-Muslims) in another Arab country are disrupting the world of camels and cabs.

Okay, I’m kidding a little bit. This is not from a Scandinavian lab but from Friedman’s column today, “Cabs, Camels or ISIS.” Friedman is a smart guy whose heart is in the right place; he really, really wants peace and democracy in the Middle East, the region he’s been writing about for many years. But besides some anecdotal details – “The first calf to come from a cloned camel was born at a research center in Dubai and a local taxi start-up is taking on Uber in the Arab world” – some of the column reads like an Onion parody. If there is an award for consistency, Friedman should win it. If we’re trying to find news ways to think about this complex, changing region that has been back on the front page because of the Paris attacks waged by ISIL last week, this is not it. So what makes this one so yawn-inducing? First is the lazy, un-ironic use of “disruption,” the cheerleading Silicon Valley term that becomes harder and harder to use with a straight face as various “disrupting” influences tear up life in the developed world, putting people out of work and destroying entire industries. (Including, it’s worth noting, Friedman’s.) Friedman really, really likes the term. “Often in the middle of something momentous, we can't see its significance,” he wrote in a column seven years ago. “But for me there is no doubt: 2008 will be the marker — the year when 'The Great Disruption' began.” (The column, incidentally, was called “The Great Disruption.”) Alongside this are two awfully familiar Friedman ideas: That market capitalism can solve our problems -- in the Middle East and, often, everywhere else -- and that middle-class stability (sometimes known as “order”) can keep people in tumultuous places from getting radicalized. Here’s Friedman again:

Given that, I believe U.S. foreign policy out here should progress as follows: Where there is disorder, help create order, because without order nothing good can happen. I will take Sisi over the Muslim Brotherhood. But where there is order, we need to push for it to become more decent and forward-looking... And where there is constitutional order, as in Tunisia, protect it like a rare flower.

Then he endorses Obama’s bombing. “But before we go beyond that, we need to face this fact: To sustainably defeat bad ISIS Sunnis you need good non-ISIS Sunnis to create an island of decency in their place,” he writes. “And right now, alas, finding and strengthening good non-ISIS Sunnis is the second priority of all the neighbors.” That may be a playful riff on the NRA’s “good guy with a gun” line. Either way, it doesn’t really tell us much we didn’t know. Order, moderation, flowers – what’s not to like? But if people haven’t tried these before, they haven’t been reading Friedman’s columns: He comes down this way a lot. (In the months after the September 11 attacks, he was a zealous supporter of George W. Bush’s invasions.) The problem with a column like this isn’t that Friedman is wrong, exactly. It’s that he’s not really moving things forward. A lot of people are looking for intelligence and wisdom on the situation in the Middle East right now. With three Pulitzers and some of the best journalistic real estate in the world, he can’t do better than this?Scientists toiling deep in a basement laboratory in Denmark have been working for months, and have finally found what they’ve been looking for. They have distilled the essence of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s output into one quintessential paragraph:

So, about 1,000 miles south of the Islamic State start-up in Iraq and Syria — where jihadists are using technology to spawn disruption on a massive scale — another group of Muslims (and non-Muslims) in another Arab country are disrupting the world of camels and cabs.

Okay, I’m kidding a little bit. This is not from a Scandinavian lab but from Friedman’s column today, “Cabs, Camels or ISIS.” Friedman is a smart guy whose heart is in the right place; he really, really wants peace and democracy in the Middle East, the region he’s been writing about for many years. But besides some anecdotal details – “The first calf to come from a cloned camel was born at a research center in Dubai and a local taxi start-up is taking on Uber in the Arab world” – some of the column reads like an Onion parody. If there is an award for consistency, Friedman should win it. If we’re trying to find news ways to think about this complex, changing region that has been back on the front page because of the Paris attacks waged by ISIL last week, this is not it. So what makes this one so yawn-inducing? First is the lazy, un-ironic use of “disruption,” the cheerleading Silicon Valley term that becomes harder and harder to use with a straight face as various “disrupting” influences tear up life in the developed world, putting people out of work and destroying entire industries. (Including, it’s worth noting, Friedman’s.) Friedman really, really likes the term. “Often in the middle of something momentous, we can't see its significance,” he wrote in a column seven years ago. “But for me there is no doubt: 2008 will be the marker — the year when 'The Great Disruption' began.” (The column, incidentally, was called “The Great Disruption.”) Alongside this are two awfully familiar Friedman ideas: That market capitalism can solve our problems -- in the Middle East and, often, everywhere else -- and that middle-class stability (sometimes known as “order”) can keep people in tumultuous places from getting radicalized. Here’s Friedman again:

Given that, I believe U.S. foreign policy out here should progress as follows: Where there is disorder, help create order, because without order nothing good can happen. I will take Sisi over the Muslim Brotherhood. But where there is order, we need to push for it to become more decent and forward-looking... And where there is constitutional order, as in Tunisia, protect it like a rare flower.

Then he endorses Obama’s bombing. “But before we go beyond that, we need to face this fact: To sustainably defeat bad ISIS Sunnis you need good non-ISIS Sunnis to create an island of decency in their place,” he writes. “And right now, alas, finding and strengthening good non-ISIS Sunnis is the second priority of all the neighbors.” That may be a playful riff on the NRA’s “good guy with a gun” line. Either way, it doesn’t really tell us much we didn’t know. Order, moderation, flowers – what’s not to like? But if people haven’t tried these before, they haven’t been reading Friedman’s columns: He comes down this way a lot. (In the months after the September 11 attacks, he was a zealous supporter of George W. Bush’s invasions.) The problem with a column like this isn’t that Friedman is wrong, exactly. It’s that he’s not really moving things forward. A lot of people are looking for intelligence and wisdom on the situation in the Middle East right now. With three Pulitzers and some of the best journalistic real estate in the world, he can’t do better than this?Scientists toiling deep in a basement laboratory in Denmark have been working for months, and have finally found what they’ve been looking for. They have distilled the essence of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s output into one quintessential paragraph:

So, about 1,000 miles south of the Islamic State start-up in Iraq and Syria — where jihadists are using technology to spawn disruption on a massive scale — another group of Muslims (and non-Muslims) in another Arab country are disrupting the world of camels and cabs.

Okay, I’m kidding a little bit. This is not from a Scandinavian lab but from Friedman’s column today, “Cabs, Camels or ISIS.” Friedman is a smart guy whose heart is in the right place; he really, really wants peace and democracy in the Middle East, the region he’s been writing about for many years. But besides some anecdotal details – “The first calf to come from a cloned camel was born at a research center in Dubai and a local taxi start-up is taking on Uber in the Arab world” – some of the column reads like an Onion parody. If there is an award for consistency, Friedman should win it. If we’re trying to find news ways to think about this complex, changing region that has been back on the front page because of the Paris attacks waged by ISIL last week, this is not it. So what makes this one so yawn-inducing? First is the lazy, un-ironic use of “disruption,” the cheerleading Silicon Valley term that becomes harder and harder to use with a straight face as various “disrupting” influences tear up life in the developed world, putting people out of work and destroying entire industries. (Including, it’s worth noting, Friedman’s.) Friedman really, really likes the term. “Often in the middle of something momentous, we can't see its significance,” he wrote in a column seven years ago. “But for me there is no doubt: 2008 will be the marker — the year when 'The Great Disruption' began.” (The column, incidentally, was called “The Great Disruption.”) Alongside this are two awfully familiar Friedman ideas: That market capitalism can solve our problems -- in the Middle East and, often, everywhere else -- and that middle-class stability (sometimes known as “order”) can keep people in tumultuous places from getting radicalized. Here’s Friedman again:

Given that, I believe U.S. foreign policy out here should progress as follows: Where there is disorder, help create order, because without order nothing good can happen. I will take Sisi over the Muslim Brotherhood. But where there is order, we need to push for it to become more decent and forward-looking... And where there is constitutional order, as in Tunisia, protect it like a rare flower.

Then he endorses Obama’s bombing. “But before we go beyond that, we need to face this fact: To sustainably defeat bad ISIS Sunnis you need good non-ISIS Sunnis to create an island of decency in their place,” he writes. “And right now, alas, finding and strengthening good non-ISIS Sunnis is the second priority of all the neighbors.” That may be a playful riff on the NRA’s “good guy with a gun” line. Either way, it doesn’t really tell us much we didn’t know. Order, moderation, flowers – what’s not to like? But if people haven’t tried these before, they haven’t been reading Friedman’s columns: He comes down this way a lot. (In the months after the September 11 attacks, he was a zealous supporter of George W. Bush’s invasions.) The problem with a column like this isn’t that Friedman is wrong, exactly. It’s that he’s not really moving things forward. A lot of people are looking for intelligence and wisdom on the situation in the Middle East right now. With three Pulitzers and some of the best journalistic real estate in the world, he can’t do better than this?

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Published on November 18, 2015 13:31

19 cops descend upon black woman suspected of breaking into her own apartment

Fay Wells, a vice president of a strategy company in Santa Monica, California recounted, in her own words, what it's like to have one's neighbor summon the police because he suspects you're breaking in to what's actually your own apartment. Included in the piece is the 911 call of her white neighbor, in which he identifies her as one of two Hispanic women who are accompanied by a Hispanic male with a bag full of "tools." The magnitude of his misreading of the basic situation is responsible, in part, for the Santa Monica Police Department's overreaction -- the man with the bag of "tools" is the locksmith, and Wells is one of the women, though it's unclear who the other one identified by the caller is. "It...didn’t matter that I didn’t match the description of the person they were looking for -- my neighbor described me as Hispanic when he called 911," Wells wrote. "What mattered was that I was a woman of color trying to get into her apartment -- in an almost entirely white apartment complex in a mostly white city -- and a white man who lived in another building called the cops because he’d never seen me before." Wells also points out that not only was the SMPD's response inept in and of itself, but the manner in which it internally accounted for it apparently is too. She acquired the cards of two officers at the scene, but when a list of responding officers she'd requested arrived, neither of their names were on it. When the Washington Post requested that same list, it was told that 16 officers responded, but received a list with 17 names on it. Nor did that list match the one provided to Wells. But Wells is more concerned with the basic incompetence demonstrated on the scene. "The SMPD sent 19 armed police officers who refused to answer my questions while violating my rights, privacy and sense of well-being," she wrote. "A wrong move, and I could have been shot." Read her entire account at the Washington Post... [image error]Fay Wells, a vice president of a strategy company in Santa Monica, California recounted, in her own words, what it's like to have one's neighbor summon the police because he suspects you're breaking in to what's actually your own apartment. Included in the piece is the 911 call of her white neighbor, in which he identifies her as one of two Hispanic women who are accompanied by a Hispanic male with a bag full of "tools." The magnitude of his misreading of the basic situation is responsible, in part, for the Santa Monica Police Department's overreaction -- the man with the bag of "tools" is the locksmith, and Wells is one of the women, though it's unclear who the other one identified by the caller is. "It...didn’t matter that I didn’t match the description of the person they were looking for -- my neighbor described me as Hispanic when he called 911," Wells wrote. "What mattered was that I was a woman of color trying to get into her apartment -- in an almost entirely white apartment complex in a mostly white city -- and a white man who lived in another building called the cops because he’d never seen me before." Wells also points out that not only was the SMPD's response inept in and of itself, but the manner in which it internally accounted for it apparently is too. She acquired the cards of two officers at the scene, but when a list of responding officers she'd requested arrived, neither of their names were on it. When the Washington Post requested that same list, it was told that 16 officers responded, but received a list with 17 names on it. Nor did that list match the one provided to Wells. But Wells is more concerned with the basic incompetence demonstrated on the scene. "The SMPD sent 19 armed police officers who refused to answer my questions while violating my rights, privacy and sense of well-being," she wrote. "A wrong move, and I could have been shot." Read her entire account at the Washington Post... [image error]

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Published on November 18, 2015 13:30

#JeSuisChien, the latest sign racist westerners care more about dead dogs than dead humans

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Published on November 18, 2015 13:28

Bernie Sanders puts Wall Street on notice: “On day one, I am appointing a special committee to investigate the crimes on Wall Street”

Bernie Sanders has long described himself as a democratic socialist and has found himself fending off mischaracterizations of his political ideology quite often on the campaign trail, so much so that he plans to hold a major address on Thursday explicitly detailing what it means to be a democratic socialist. Ahead of Sanders' big speech, Rolling Stone is out with its new cover feature on his political revolution and as an interview with the candidate while he was on the campaign trail back in May reveals, the populist seems just as committed to major reform as ever -- starting with Wall Street. The Vermont senator told Rolling Stone's Tim Dickinson that his first course of action upon entering the White House would be to go after the Wall Street executives responsible for the 2008 global financial collapse. Not one Wall Street executive has ever been held criminally liable for the rampant financial malfeasance that dove the world markets into a tailspin. Sanders described to Rolling Stone exactly how such inaction came about and why he thinks President Obama "blew it" on holding Wall Street executives accountable:

About a half-dozen of us went to visit the president, I'm guessing six months into his [first] term. And we went into the White House, and Larry Summers was there and [Tim] Geithner was there. We had all their money people, all their financial people. That was the issue. I like the president very much, and I have supported him. We've worked together. But these are some of the disagreements we have. The American people were crushed by the greed and illegal behavior on Wall Street, right? And the American people wanted justice. And we said to the president – I wasn't alone on this – we said, "Mr. President, you gotta do something. You gotta be tough on this issue." The end result was seven years have come and gone and there are still no high-ranking CEOs who are in jail. There are kids who smoke marijuana who have criminal records, but not CEOs of large corporations. No matter what kind of crimes and illegal activity, these guys [Wall Street CEOs] are too big to jail? That is one of the reasons why people become alienated from the political process. They just don't see justice. From a public-policy point of view, in terms of holding people accountable for serious crimes, the Obama administration blew it. From a political point of view, in giving people confidence that we have a criminal-justice system that works for all, regardless of their wealth or power, it blew it.

"Now what do you think a president should have done," Sanders offered, "on day one, I am appointing a special committee to investigate the crimes on Wall Street." "We're gonna move this quickly," Sanders promised. "And if these people are found guilty, they will be in jail. Nobody in America is above the law," Sanders declared, arguing that many Wall Street executives had "committed some very serious crimes." "Is that what Barack Obama said?" the candidate asked. Read Bernie's full interview with Rolling Stone here.

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Published on November 18, 2015 13:22

“What’s next? Hotties of the Holocaust?”: Even Daily Caller’s own readers agree the “Syria-sly hot” refugee list is disgusting

For those of us who spend a probably unhealthy amount of time consuming news and social media, the time prior to an election, the days during a congressional hearing and aftermath of an act of mass violence are always fraught with awful, awful commentary. And some days, you'd like to just get the facts of a developing situation without the wading through the inevitable "worst possible reaction" angle. But it's there anyway. So on Wednesday, just as quickly a brief spark of humanity dignity flickered across social media with the news that French President Francois Hollande reiterated his nation's commitment to accept 30,000 refugees over the next two years, citing "humanitarian duty," elsewhere, the Daily Caller was finding new depths to sink. In the Tucker Carlson-led site's ongoing bid not to just be a repugnant parody of a news site but a gross parody of Maxim, the Caller somehow decided it'd be a good idea to run a slideshow of "13 Syrian Refugees We’d Take Immediately." And the rest of us all have to live in a world where crap like this exists. "Written" by entertainment editor Kaitlan Collins and hot on the heels of her big "Emily Ratajkowski’s Underwear Doesn’t Match [PHOTOS]" scoop and "These 8 Celebrities Had Sex Romps With Their Nannies [SLIDESHOW]," Collins noted that "While a growing list of governors are claiming they won’t allow Syrian refugees to enter their states, we think these women might make them change their minds." She even managed to throw in a pun, saying, "They are Syria-sly hot." Way to go, there, pulling one- and two year-old images from a "Syrian Girls Got Beauty" Instagram account intended "to show the rest of world the beauty of our queens" and turning it into a bizarre commentary on the refugee crisis. How ill-conceived was this apparent NO FAT CHICKS plea for a U.S. response to the crisis of Syria's people? I could tell you what I think, but hey, I'm just a shrill, pro-abortion feminist who believes that a vast number of people living in America today got here because they or their ancestors were trying to get away from someplace else. What do I know? I could cite Ana Marie Cox's astute observation that "Haha: female refugees are at high risk of sexual assault! Funny because it’s true!" But she's just a lady too. Instead, why don't I tell you what some of the commenters — that's right, Internet commenters, on the Daily Caller, no less — thought. "What's next? Hotties of the Holocaust?" asked one reader, while another wondered, "HOLY **** - are there no editors at the Daily Caller? Who thought this was a good idea???" Another wrote, "Congratulations on turning world turmoil and suffering in to a punchline. Maybe you can dig back to genocidal moments throughout modern history and find archived pictures of hot people we wouldn't have kicked out of bed for eating crackers. Or better yet, maybe we can replace the poem on the Statue of Liberty to simply read, 'If you're ugly...Don't bother.'" Let's put it this way, a user who goes by the nickname StampOutLiberals opined, "Not really a joking matter. I am getting less and less enthused with The Daily Caller." Thanks, StampOutLiberals. Naturally there was plenty of racist commentary as well, but I've got to say, way to alienate even Daily Caller readers, there. It's so pathetic that I'm going to perform a public service and make this easy, so easy even someone who covers the Emily Ratajkowski underwear beat can understand. First, just because a woman is Syrian does not mean she is need of asylum. You don't get to call these women "refugees" when all you know about them is their heritage. Second, turning a crisis of global proportions into a lesson in objectification is not just offensive it's actually dumb. And finally, the Daily Caller is a bottomless toilet full of flaming garbage that makes the world a worse place merely by existing. I think that about covers it. Srsly.