Charlie Chaplin's "the Great Dictator" -- Speech to Humanity.

Refugee Crisis - It's Like the Ebola Insanity

Here's an article from Media Matters entitled "Ebola, Syrian Refugees, And Fox News' Annual Hysteria Over Dark, Invading Forces." It's too good to simply link to; here it is in full (under a video clip of Bill O'Reilly; the caption says "THE EBOLA PANIC: American immigration officials should allow no one to enter this country holding a passport from any West African nation." The article itself is worth clicking on, because it's full of links.

"What's going to happen when those Syrian refugees open fire in a Chick-fil-A"? Fox News' Todd Starnes, November 17.

The bile is coming in over the transom so quickly it's getting hard to keep up, as the conservative media signal their latest xenophobic and Islamophobic outburst, this time targeting refugees fleeing war-torn Syria.

Not interested in having a serious debate about how or when to accept mostly Muslim refugees in the wake of the Paris terrorist massacre, Fox News is sponsoring a far-right hate brigade that not only targets refugees, but President Obama, too.

It's a bigoted bank shot for conservative commentators: Accuse Obama of coddling would-be terrorists (including widows and orphans) who are viewed as encroaching on our borders. Or so goes the battle cry, which accuses the president of abdicating America's national security -- and allegedly doing so on purpose.

*Fox's Jesse Watters: Obama is inviting in "the barbarians at the gate."

*Fox's Andrea Tantaros: "Everything that the president is doing seems to benefit what ISIS is doing."

*Ben Stein: Obama's "hatred of America" may be "because he's part black." "He does not wish America well."

In other words, there's a dark, invading force that Obama won't stop. In fact, he seems intent on welcoming it across the border so it can wreak havoc here at home.

Sound familiar?

Indeed, watching the Fox meltdown over refugees you might think, 'This is unique brand of rhetorical manure.' I mean, Obama putting Muslim refugees above the safety of Americans? Opting for a "forced infiltration"? But if you hit the rewind button to October and November 2014, then you remember, 'Oh yeah, they did pretty much the exact same thing twelve months ago with their full-scale meltdown over a domestic Ebola outbreak that never happened.'

Is this now becoming an annual autumn tradition? Some Fox talkers are even connecting the refugee/Ebola dots, although they fail to see it as problematic. "He's imported illegal aliens," said Watters of Obama. "Remember he brought all of the Ebola victims into this country?"

Remember Ebola, indeed.

In terms of sheer fearmongering, Fox News led the wild, right-wing pack. There was Elisabeth Hasselbeck suggesting America be put on lockdown, and her Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy absurdly claiming the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention was lying about Ebola because it's "part of the administration." (Naturally, Fox also promoted a conspiracy theorist who claimed the CDC was lying when it cautioned people not to panic.)

Andrea Tantaros fretted that people who traveled and showed symptoms of Ebola will "seek treatment from a witch doctor" instead of going to the hospital, while Rush Limbaugh implied Obama wanted Ebola to spread in America.

That last point is key to understanding the levels to which Fox talkers and their allies sink in their Obama Derangement Syndrome, both in 2014 and in 2015: The Obama administration didn't supposedly bungle the Ebola scare because it was incompetent. It bungled Ebola because Obama wanted Americans infected.

*Laura Ingraham: Obama's willing to expose the U.S. military to "the Ebola virus to carry out this redistribution of the privileged's wealth."

*Michael Savage: Obama "wants to infect the nation with Ebola" in order "to make things fair and equitable" in the world.

*Fox's Keith Ablow: Obama won't protect America from Ebola because his "affinities, his affiliations are with" Africa and "not us ... He's their leader." Ablow added, "We don't have a president who has the American people as his primary interest."

It's just ugly, rancid stuff; the kind of hate speech that has rarely passed for 'mainstream' conservative rhetoric in modern American politics. (For the record, the Obama administration was "vindicated" for the way it handled the Ebola scare, NBC News recently noted.)

Twelve months later we're witnessing the same kind of toxic sewage (what else should we call it?), as Fox leads the campaign to condemn the president of the United States a terrorist-sympathizer who can't be trusted to deal with Syrian refugees.

It's important to note that during the media's Ebola scare last year, lots of mainstream press outlets produced egregiously bad reporting that not only failed to illuminate the public, but it played into the fear the GOP was trying to whip up during the midterm election season. (Sen. Rand Paul: Ebola is "incredibly contagious.")

"Here's What Should Scare You About Ebola" read one overexcited New Republic headline, while CNN's Ashleigh Banfield speculated that "All ISIS would need to do is send a few of its suicide killers into an Ebola-affected zone and then get them on some mass transit, somewhere where they would need to be to affect the most damage."

The Ebola insanity, of course, took place within the couple of weeks immediately preceding the 2012 election, when the Republicans were fearmongering as hard as they could to convince people that the world was simply falling apart, and it was all Obama's fault.

Refugee Wisdom From Fox News

Fox commentator Todd Starnes:

I'm all for welcoming the huddled masses yearning to be free. It's the ones yearning to wage jihad that I'm worried about. What's going to happen when those Syrian refugees open fire at a Chick-Fil-A or launch a chemical attack at Disney World or explode a pressure cooker at Cafe du Monde in the French Quarter?

Unhinged Reaction

This is from an article at Daily Kos by Silly Rabbit entitled "Get the flock out!" (the article itself is packed with links, and it includes a cool graphic saying "Don't forget to hate the refugees when you're setting up your Nativity scene"):

In the week since the (RADICAL ISLAMIC) terrorist attacks in Paris, a disturbingly large number of Republican governors and lawmakers (and way too many Democrats) have been running around like chickens with their heads cut off.

"The refugees are coming! The refugees are coming!" they shout from the rooftops.

Faced with an enemy who hates us for our freedom, some of these thought leaders have suggested taking actions that were "frankly unthinkable" in the aftermath of 9/11, when America itself came under attack—but that's not to say that they're entirely without precedent.

In fact, one proposal—rounding up everyone of a certain religious/ethnic persuasion and locking them away in internment camps—was even the subject of a very famous Supreme Court case.

Other ideas being floated harken back to earlier times, places, and events—such as pre-war (Nazi) Germany and the Spanish Inquisition.

Also, too ... (the) Benghazi!

Now, you might not like any of this, but it's "smart politics" ... or something.

Common Sense On Terrorism

Click here for an article entited "Thirty-five Years of Terrorism," by Mark Sumner at Daily Kos.

There's been an explosion of terrorist events by followers of "radical Islam" -- to use the easily understood shorthand term the Obama administration (for good reason) doesn't like -- since Dubya's disastrous invasions of Afghanistan (which I supported) and Iraq (which I vehemently opposed) utterly destabilized the region.

[Terrorist organizations] are groups that each grew in the face of war. In fact, it’s not hard to associate each of the major terrorist groups with a specific conflict. Islamic Jihad grew from groups involved the Lebanese Civil War during the 1980s, al-Qaida and the Taliban from groups fighting the Soviet invasion (with subsequent U.S. support) in Afghanistan, and of course ISIS ISIL Daesh is an amalgam of groups that resulted from the conflicts in Iraq and Syria. Each group is a specific assembly of militia forces that attracts attention for a period, before the world moves on to being sure that the group resulting from the next conflict is the real problem.

Says Sumner: "None of them is the second coming of the Nazis." Although fearmongering politicians present these rag-tag groups as en existential threat to Western civilization, they are not:

No matter how convenient that analogy is for either war-hawks or fear-peddlers, none of these groups is a threat to the existence or governance of any state, except possibly those destabilized nations in which their main force is located. They are not equipped with massive armies or power air forces.

In fact, the destabilization of the Middle East, which was a goal of both East and West throughout the 20th century, is the reason these groups have a place in which to grow. The Taliban was able to acquire Afghanistan in the dust following the Soviet retreat. Daesh has a handful of towns along a couple of hundred miles of highway only because both Syria and Iraq are so dysfunctional. To a large extent these groups aren’t that different from the people they replaced. Local warlords and regional strongmen. That’s the Middle East as we made it.

Daesh, which so many are trying to build into a horrible threat, has not even managed to topple Bashar al-Assad even though he was half-toppled before they made themselves known. Their threat to the government of the United States, or to any stable nation, is essentially nil. Their control is a lot less than total. Their funding wouldn’t pay the bills in Davenport, IA. Even if you take the higher estimates, the number of fighters they can field is about one tenth the size of the Iraqi Army (a real army, with real tanks, etc) in 2003. It’s about 1/40th the size of the Iraqi Army when it was crushed in the first Gulf War.

What Deash does itself is not a threat. What we do… that’s a different story.

They cannot cause us serious harm. We, however, can indeed cause serious harm to ourselves and our societies if we lash out violently out of irrational fear.

Sumner points out that in looking at the last 35 years of terrorism, 9/11 stands alone: "Of everything that happened over this period, this is the one act that defined how we think of terrorism … but at the same time, it’s utterly unique. Unique in the extent of it’s planning, the true international funding, and certainly unique in the scale of the destruction it brought."

He points out that since 1981, and including 9/11, just under 16,000 deaths have been caused by Islamic terrorists. Now, while 16,000 is, sadly, a large number,"if every death from terrorism that occurred worldwide over the last 35 years had actually taken place in the United States, you would still have a better chance of being shot accidentally by a friend or relative than you would of being killed in a terrorist attack. You’d also stand a much better chance of being killed by the police over that period."

The real measure of a terrorist act isn’t in the damage it does to individuals, but in the reaction it generates from groups, from nations, from the whole world.

Which is exactly why terrorists do it. Terrorism works. It generates terror. It provokes a level of response hugely disproportional to the effort it requires (especially when you can count on a good percentage of politicians to run on a platform of fear, fear, fear). It elevates the status of those at its center from unknown thugs into household names. And when it happens somewhere that has deep meaning to many people—like Paris—that anger is magnified.

Which leads to the real threat from terrorism.

Sumner points out other, far more serious occurrences in terms of loss of life: a million people killed in Rwanda in 1994 over a few weeks; civil wars killing millions more; 110,000 deaths documented in Iraq, but best estimates of the actual total range upward from 650,000 (not to mention 4,279 combat deaths of U.S. military personnel; Mexican drug dealers have killed nearly 50,000 people in only their worst three years.

There are a lot of pundits claiming that Daesh is different from—and greater than—the threat from al-Qaida or previous groups for one big reason: Daesh has territory. They have that “Islamic state” where people can visit, learn to be evil, then be sent forth to spread disaster.

Only … we’ve seen that film before. It was called the Taliban. The Taliban not only held territory, they held much more territory, with many times the population of the towns held by Daesh. They did it openly, as the more-or-less recognized government of Afghanistan for five years. They were the caliphate before the caliphate was cool.

ISIS/ISIL/Daesh nominally controls these areas, but they have to remain in the shadows; the moment they emerge into daylight, they will be destroyed. But the conflict and hatred will remain. The only long-term solution is to bring stable government to these troubled areas, government supported by the people, government that can enforce the rule of law. That's a solution that can only be postponed and delayed by rash, violent behavior on our part today as a result of irrational fear.

They are not supermen; hey are common thugs. They are not defenders of the Muslim faith! They practice a terrible perversion of a legitimate faith held by 1.5 billion people across the planet.

Screening Process For Refugees

This is excerpted from an article by Heather on Crooks & Liars, entitled "Fox's Bolling Wants Americans Wetting Their Beds Over Syrian 'Refu-Jihadis," which links to an article at Time Magazine entitled "This is How the Syrian Refugee Screening Process Works." Here's the portion Crooks & Liars excerpts:

How are Syrian refugees referred to the U.S.?

The process begins with a referral from UNHCR. The U.N.’s refugee agency is responsible for registering some 15 million asylum seekers around the world, and providing aid and assistance until they are resettled abroad or (more likely) returned home once conditions ease. The registration process includes in-depth refugee interviews, home country reference checks and biological screening such as iris scans. Military combatants are weeded out.

Among those who pass background checks, a small percentage are referred for overseas resettlement based on criteria designed to determine the most vulnerable cases. This group may include survivors of torture, victims of sexual violence, targets of political persecution, the medically needy, families with multiple children and a female head of household.

What happens once a refugee is referred to the U.S.?

Our government performs its own intensive screening, a process that includes consultation from nine different government agencies. They meet weekly to review a refugee’s case file and, if appropriate, determine where in the U.S. the individual should be placed. When choosing where to place a refugee, officials consider factors such as existing family in the U.S., employment possibilities and special factors like access to needed medical treatment.

How do we know the refugees aren’t terrorists?

Every refugee goes through an intensive vetting process, but the precautions are increased for Syrians. Multiple law enforcement, intelligence and security agencies perform “the most rigorous screening of any traveler to the U.S.,” says a senior administration official. Among the agencies involved are the State Department, the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center, the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security. A DHS officer conducts in-person interviews with every applicant. Biometric information such as fingerprints are collected and matched against criminal databases. Biographical information such as past visa applications are scrutinized to ensure the applicant’s story coheres.

What percentage of applicants “pass” the screening process?

Just over 50%.

How long does the whole process take?

Eighteen to 24 months on average.

How many have been resettled here?

About 1,800 over the past year. They’ve been placed in dozens of states across the country, but most are in big states with large immigrant populations, such as California, Texas, Illinois and Michigan.

Who are they?

According to a senior administration official, roughly half the refugees admitted have been children. Around 25% are adults over 60. Only 2% of those admitted, the senior administration official said, have been single males of “combat age.”

Follow the Time link for more.

Mexican Immigration To The U.S. - A Net Minus

Greenwald Compares Paris To 9/11

That's not the most accurate headline; I can't find a way to summarize it in a few words. Anyway, here's Greenwald on the similarities between the war drums banging in the fall of 2001 and today:

GLENN GREENWALD:I mean, Afghanistan is the perfect example, Amy, which is, you know, if you go back and listen to what American political leaders, in both parties, and journalists and pretty much the entire country—I mean, 90 percent of the American population supported the war in Afghanistan. I mean, there were a good number of people who didn’t, but overwhelmingly people did.

What everybody was saying at that time was—they were speaking out of rage and anger and hatred and disgust for the Taliban for their involvement, or perceived involvement, or responsibility for the 9/11 attacks. And the idea was, we’re going to go to Afghanistan, and we’re going to obliterate the Taliban. We’re going to basically just bomb them out of existence. And the Bush administration has a completely free hand, cheered on by the media and the overwhelming majority of the American population to do exactly that. And they tried. And yet, as you just said, 13 years later, the Taliban is stronger than ever, because you cannot do that. All you end up doing is turning the people of Afghanistan against you, and therefore driving them into the arms of the Taliban. We just won’t learn that lesson.

And the reason we won’t learn that lesson is twofold. Number one is, a lot of what is being stoked are really potent instincts in human nature—our tribalistic instinct, our desire for vengeance, our desire to otherize people and then destroy them. And so, when you see carnage in Paris—I’m sure it’s true for you, I know it’s true for me—all of us have that impulse to say, "The people who did this are monsters, and we want to destroy them." But we, as human beings, have not only impulse, we also have reason. And the purpose of our reason is to control our instincts and impulses. We don’t just act by instinct and impulse. If we did, we’d be the lowest-level animals. But the media is trying to stoke that id part of our brain, and so is the government, to just focus on vengeance and focus on the desire to obliterate, even when it’s not in our interest to do so.

And then the second reason is, you know, the American media benefits immensely from war. A huge number of people watch CNN and MSNBC when there are wars. They get to go to war zones and dress up as soldiers, you know, with camouflage flaks, and they embed with the American media. It’s exciting for them. They win awards as part of their career. They feel nationalistic. They feel like they have purpose. Telling people that they’re part of a civilization war and fighting for freedom and democracy, that makes people feel really good, especially journalists. And so, journalists are hungry for war.

You could basically see them drooling in that press conference they did with Obama a few days ago where they tried to badger him into sending ground troops into Syria. So, all of these emotions and all of these instincts and all of these really ignominious impulses are combining into this really toxic brew, that we’ve seen many times in the U.S. over the last several—you know, since 9/11, but I don’t think we have seen it quite as potently since 2002 or 2003. And it’s amazing to watch everything just repeat itself.

Best Article I've Ever Seen About A First Skydive

Click here.

164-Person Head-Down Formation

164 jumpers, 7 planes, 175mph, and a new world record! A hand-picked group of pro and amateur sky divers jumped over Chicago in attempt to pull off a world-first: 164 people hand-in-hand in a group.

August 13, 2015

Some Viewpoints on Syrian Refugees

Click here for a Charlie Pierce article at Esquire entitled "France's President Shows Us All How to Treat Syrian Refugees." According to French President Hollande:

"Life should resume fully," Hollande told a gathering of the country's mayors, who gave him a standing ovation. "What would France be without its museums, without its terraces, its concerts, its sports competitions? France should remain as it is. Our duty is to carry on our lives." In the same spirit, he added, "30,000 refugees will be welcomed over the next two years. Our country has the duty to respect this commitment," explaining that they will undergo vigorous security checks. Hollande noted that "some people say the tragic events of the last few days have sown doubts in their minds," but called it a "humanitarian duty" to help those people … but one that will go hand in hand with "our duty to protect our people." "We have to reinforce our borders while remaining true to our values," he said.

And here's Senator Elizabeth Warren:

"[Syrians are] terrified that the world will turn its back on them and their children. Some politicians have already moved in that direction, proposing to close our country to people fleeing the massacre in Syria," Warren said. "That is not a real plan to keep us safe." She added that the United States has "a choice either to lead the world by example or to turn our backs to the threats and the suffering around us." Warren's comments come as a growing number of her Republican colleagues, and some Democrats, are calling for a temporary halt to President Obama's push to increase the number of refugees, including Syrian refugees, accepted into the country. She also took a veiled shot at the Republican presidential field, where Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush have suggested refugee resettlement should focus on Christians. Warren said that the United States isn't a country that sends "children back into the hands of ISIS murderers because some politician doesn't like their religion, and we are not a nation that backs down out of fear."

Here's President Obama addressing the Republican presidential candidates:

"Apparently, they are scared of widows and orphans coming into the United States of America," Obama said. "At first they were too scared of the press being too tough on them in the debates. Now they are scared of three-year-old orphans. That doesn't seem so tough to me."

Another Obama quote:

"When I hear political leaders suggesting that there would be a religious test for which a person who’s fleeing from a war-torn country is admitted … that’s shameful…. That’s not American. That’s not who we are. We don’t have religious tests to our compassion."

Reaction To The Paris Terror Attacks

Click here for an xcellent editorial in the Baltimore Sun: "Paris stands strong; so should we."

If the point of terrorism is to inflame, divide and frighten, surely the best response is to do just the opposite — to not give in to rage and anger and blindly lash out, to unite and not fan the flames of fear. After the awful attacks on Paris by ISIS last Friday, the French people found their voice in a few simple words, "Je suis Paris" or "I am Paris," a showing of solidarity and support. Meanwhile, nine U.S. governors, at last count, demonstrated how not to respond to terrorism, announcing that they oppose allowing Syrian refugees to settle in their states.

Death Penalty For Homosexuals?

I wasn't able to embed this video, so you'll have to paste the following into your address bar:

https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7983491075086324714#allposts

This is an 18-minute clip from the Rachel Maddow Show. It starts with Rachel's wrap-up of the forum she had moderated the night before, where she interviewed the three Democratic nominees (Clinton, Sanders, and O'Malley).

But at about 6 minutes in, she turns to a discussion of the forum attended by Republican candidates Ted Cruz, Bobby Jindal, and Mike Huckabee, the National Religious Liberties Conference, held in Des Moines, Iowa, on November 6 and 7, hosted by a lunatic fire-and-brimstone pastor named Kevin Swanson. The topic: should homosexuals be executed (yes, that's right, killed) by the government? Lovely stuff.

The reverend man of God says that if his son or daughter invited him to their gay wedding, he would dress in sackcloth and ashes at the entrance to the church and sit surrounded by cow manure, which he would smear all over his body.

"It's not a gay time. These are the people with the sores, the gaping sores, the sores that are pussy and gross, and people are coming in and carving happy faces on the sores. That's not a nice thing to do. Don't you dare carve happy faces on open, pussy sores. Don't you ever do that. Don't you ever do that. I tell you don't do it."

Well, all right, then.

"America needs to hear the message: We are messed up."

Maddow responds, "Oh, yeah, we are." (She's gay, of course.)

Here is an article (lightly edited, grammar and punctuation corrections) entitled "4 Unbelievable Things Said at the National Religious Liberties Conference," by Robin Marty, at a site entitled Care2:

What would our nation be like if there was no more separation of church and state? If we replaced the Constitution with the Ten Commandments? These are the sort of questions that get asked at the National Religious Liberties Conference, a gathering of far right, theocratic political voters and operatives, all of whom want a government where we are actually one nation under God, and God is the Old Testament, vengeful type.

For a number of current GOP candidates for president, this isn’t an idea that fills them with terror. Instead, it’s the perfect pool to try to gain more support for their own presidential bids. Former Governor Mike Huckabee, current Governor Bobby Jindal, and Sen. Ted Cruz all came to Iowa to court the theocratic vote, hoping their backing might push their campaign further in the quest to rule the White House.

So what do theocrats talk about when they meet? Here are four jaw-dropping statements made at the National Religious Liberties Conference, and one idea that shockingly makes a lot of sense.

1) Gays should be put to death. Are there still people in the United States who honestly believe being homosexual should be a death sentence? So it seems, based on some of the literature being passed out at the event. “At the conference, where [Phillip Kayser] is giving two speeches on how local officials and others can defy the Supreme Court’s marriage equality decision, Kayser distributed the very pamphlet calling for the death penalty for gay people that caused a stir back when he endorsed Paul,” reports Right Wing Watch, who did extensive coverage of the weekend. “In the pamphlet, ‘Is The Death Penalty Just?,’ Kayser unsurprisingly concludes that the death penalty is in fact just, and lists homosexuality among the offenses deserving of capital punishment. Ironically for a ‘religious liberties’ summit, he also claims that the government should treat ‘breaking the Sabbath,’ ‘blasphemy and cursing God publicly,’ ‘publicly sacrificing to other gods’ and ‘apostasy’ as death penalty crimes as well.”

2) Anyone who doesn’t pray every morning is unfit for the presidency. For the far right theocratic wing, there really is a religious litmus test, and Sen. Ted Cruz is ready to prove his chops. “[A]ny president who doesn’t begin every day on his knees isn’t fit to be commander-in-chief of this nation,” Cruz told his audience. If there was any doubt that Cruz is a true believer who really, really wants this group of voters’ support, the fact that he not only showed up himself, but sent his father there to speak as well, should make his agenda clear. His father, who is a pastor, called his son the senator "the man of the hour.”

3) God trumps the constitution. Or at least, so say the potential presidents. According to Gov. Bobby Jindal, as long as a belief is a religious one, no one in the government should be able to place any sort of limit on what that religious person chooses to do. “No earthly court can change the definition of marriage, no federal government, no ACLU should be able to take away our religious liberty rights,” Jindal said to applause, according to Radio Iowa. “We were given those by God almighty.”

4) Vampires. They are a thing. If the rest of this seems pretty extreme, well, take a look at the pastor putting on the event. Kevin Swanson, the weekend host, gave a riveting speech that bemoaned the legal victories of equality for gay people, trans people and all of “secular” America, and said that the continuing trend would lead to even more evil entities. “The culture is becoming more and more radical,” Swanson said, according to Jezebel, and this radicalization is leading to “total chaos. Witchcraft is more and more popular, especially with the youth. It’s an adventure. Drunkenness is a disease. Homosexuality is an orientation. Cannibalism, vampirism is increasingly acceptable.”

Despite all of this fear-mongering, however, the GOP candidates did make one point that was actually quite rational. Regardless of what you think of the state of the country, and whether you believe a president needs to do God’s work or not, putting someone with no political experience into the highest political position available is asking for disaster.

“I’ve never had a job in Washington, so don’t blame me for the failures of Washington,” said Mike Huckabee, according to the Washington Post. “But I do believe that it’s important to have somebody who can articulate our vision and message, somebody who has had the experience of working a political climate that is extraordinarily hostile.” He later told reporters, “Is the presidency an entry-level job? If it is, then elect whoever you want. I realize a lot of people say, ‘We don’t want experience!’ OK, fine. But you won’t even hire someone to mow your lawn that’s never started a lawnmower.”

Even the theocratic wing of the party can be right occasionally.