Box Turtles commenters for teh blog title win: Merry KKKristmas!!!

Via: Balloon Juice and AmericaBlog and Box turtle:

Mississippi-based American Family Association wants you to light up your front yard for Christ this Christmas.

Light up your front yard, porch, patio, driveway, business, organization or church this holiday season with a stunning Christmas cross.

Stunning indeed!MORE

Balloon Juice continues:

Yes, thanks to the AFA, Christians everywhere can have their very own burning cross in their front yard for a mere $81.85, plus shipping and handling. Oddly enough, this does not seem to be a big seller in African American communities

May I suggest an intensive overhaul of American education, with a special emphasis on AMERICAN HISTORY????

EDIT: Here's teh American Family Store Page it is on. Take a look at the advertising pitch...

Decorate this holiday season with the Original Christmas Cross to remind your friends, family, neighbors, and all who drive by your home, office, or church of the real meaning of Christmas. You won't find the Original Christmas Cross in stores, so order online today!

Now I wasn't aware that a burning cross had anything to do with the Original Meaning of Christmas tm, in fact, I thought the cross on a whole was a symbol of Easter, but what do I know...

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How Does it Feel to be a Problem? Young and Arab in America

The post 9/11 era has been a troubled one for American society and its treatment of Arab and Muslim Americans. They have been marginalized, maligned, and in some cases attacked. Even the presidential campaign was not immune from anti-Muslim bigotry. In fact, it became one of the contest's recurring themes. Barack Obama was said to be Muslim, a rumor that has circulated for nearly two years—a whisper campaign that took off through email and the Internet. At a McCain-Palin Rally in Columbus, Ohio, a woman told John McCain: "I don't trust Obama. I have read about him. He's an Arab." McCain shook his head and responded, "No, ma'am. He's a decent, family man," but left it at that. No one in a position of power, with the exception of Colin Powell, has defended Arab Americans and criticized the scapegoating of an entire people.
Brooklyn has the largest Arab American population in the United States and Moustafa Bayoumi, a professor of English at Brooklyn College, has followed the lives of seven young men and women. He tells their stories in his new book, How Does it Feel to be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America.

“When you’re invisible, you want to be visible.”

Just as Americans are told that there's only one kind of sexuality that's "normal" so too LGBTQ people in other countries are are told their sexuality's a function of colonialism. Presenting a global view of the culture wars and the fight for equality, Fadzai Muparutza of Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe (GALZ) and Rauda Morcos, of Aswat Palestinian Gay Women. One Palestinian, One Zimbabwean, they're here on a fundraising tour co-sponsored by ASTRAEA's Lesbian Fund for Justice. Rauda started as a lesbian activist because "When you're invisible, you want to be visible. The reality - political reality - for me, as a Palestinian living in Israel, makes you, forces you, to be who you are."
Homosexuality is a crime in Zimbabwe. GALZ can't register as an organization, and must wait for people to find them -- sometimes because they've heard the homophobic speeches of state leaders! With a supportive family, Fadzai runs the Gender Program of GALZ, and lives as an Out lesbian. And points out that her president and our president in the USA share similar views on homosexuality.

(no subject)

Wanda Sykes comes out at Prop 8 protest

There is someone on my friendslist who cannot STAND Thomas Friedman

How about a little schadenfreude?


This rest of the news, unfortunately, is not so easy to hear:

The Biggest Landmine of them all

...I predict that the consuming crisis will be the detention and torture program that we continue to operate at Guantanamo Bay and around the world. The following points are not opinions but simple widely-reported facts.

(1) America holds thousands, if not tens of thousands, of muslims or suspected muslims at various sites around the world. The list includes Bagram air base in Afghanistan, prisons in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay and the ‘black site’ prisons that have almost certainly not all been dismantled.

(2) Most of our detainees are innocent; some minority is genuinely dangerous. This was true for Abu Ghraib, it remains true in Guantanamo.

(3) Torture produces lies – innocent people confess and many of those with with secrets to hide will spill the secret along with any other plausible lie that might please the torturers. In 2004, while John Kerry fruitlessly tried to unseat president Bush, homeland security kept Americans awake at night chasing equally fruitless threats around New York City and elsewhere. The threats seemed like a capricious gimmick to keep the president in office, and there was some of that, but the alerts had a basis in actual prisoner accounts. These revelations came from the same origin as the supposedly solid ‘confessions’ on which most of our military commissions are based – they are the desperate words of a person trying to make the abuse stop.

(4) Given (3), we have no way of knowing which of our prisoners were ever dangerous, other than a small number of detainees whose name were on a confirmed list when we arrested them.ANd it gets worse

More on the Detainee Landmine

Some pundits think that we should wait and see what Obama does with the Bush-era torture regime; in my opinion that attitude is dangerously wrong. America’s credibility hangs by a rapidly fraying thread. Saving it will depend on relentless pressure from prominent pundits, preferably voices much more prominent than Glenn Greenwald, to pull up the rocks and expose the entire regime to disinfecting sunlight.
...
We cannot justify holding on to virtually any of our detainees without charging them in a legitimate court. However, as the Hamdi case illustrates, fairly charging tortured and illegally kept detainees is essentially the same as freeing them. Then the liberated detainees can file lawsuits. If the new government shows a few scruples about using the State Secrets card more honorably then, like the pending suit by Maher Arar, an innocent Canadian tortured for a year in Syria, the civil suits alone could be catastrophic.

We already know that discovery will uncover prosecutable crimes in practically every case. Ergo, prepare for the greatest fletchering ever seen by man. If levied honestly, damages could collectively rank in legal history with the tobacco settlement. I do not have the training to guess how much one year of a life is worth, or five years. If those five years included relentless abuse that left you physically scarred and psychologically damaged, how much would you ask for?MORE

The End of American Exceptionalism - what no President will acknowledge

The operative questions becomes this: if neither the CIA nor the Joint Chiefs of Staff had existed when Osama bin Laden launched his attack, if Congress had not created the Department of Defense or the National Security Council back in 1947, would the United States find itself in any worse shape than it is? That is, if President Bush had had to rely upon the institutions that existed through World War II - a modest State Department for diplomacy and two small cabinet agencies to manage military affairs - would he have bollixed up Iraq any more than he has? To frame the question more broadly: When considering the national security state as it has evolved and grown over the past six decades, what exactly has been the value added. And if the answer is none - if, indeed, the return on investment has been essentially negative - then perhaps the time has come to consider dismantling an apparatus that demonstrably serves no useful purpose.

Those words appear on P. 101 of The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism by Andrew J. Bacevich, West Point Grad, professor of history and international relations at Boston University, and one of the most cogent critics of the nation in which we live.

...

Crediting the United States with a "great liberating tradition" distorts the past and obscures the actual motive force behind American politics and U. S. foreign policy. It transforms history into a morality tale, thereby providing a rationale for dodging serious moral analysis. To insist that the liberation of others has never been more than an ancillary motive of U.S. policy is not cynicism, it is a prerequisite to self-understanding.

MORE

Thanks a lot, Senor Bush.

I think I want to see this....

PRAY THE DEVIL BACK TO HELL - trailer

Pray the Devil Back to Hell is the extraordinary story of a small band of Liberian women who -- armed only with white T-shirts and the courage of their convictions - came together in the midst of a bloody civil war, took on the warlords, and brought peace to their shattered country.

Pray the Devil Back to Hell reconstructs the moment through interviews, archival footage and striking images of contemporary Liberia. It is compelling testimony to the potential of women worldwide to alter the history of nations.

Interview with the film director,