Back Towards The Locus

Via Glenn Greenwald:

“The liberal uses crises, real or manufactured, to expand the power of government at the expense of the individual and private property. He has spent, in earnest, 70 years evading the Constitution’s limits on governmental power. If conservatives don’t stand up to this, who will? If they don’t offer serious alternatives that address the current circumstances AND defend the founding principles, who will?”

Thank you, Mark ‘there were connections between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 bad guys‘ Levin. Why not tell us again about how you wish there was more pain involved in waterboarding? Go on, otherwise our irony meters might explode.

The Dayton Daily News:

“Baboucarr Njie was preparing for his prayer session Friday night, Sept. 26, when he heard children in the Islamic Society of Greater Dayton coughing. Soon, Njie himself was overcome with fits of coughing and, like the rest of those in the building, headed for the doors.

“I would stay outside for a minute, then go back in, there were a lot of kids,” Njie said. “My throat is still itchy, I need to get some milk.”

Njie was one of several affected when a suspected chemical irritant was sprayed into the mosque at 26 Josie St., bringing Dayton police, fire and hazardous material personnel to the building at 9:48 p.m.

Someone “sprayed an irritant into the mosque,” Dayton fire District Chief Vince Wiley said, noting that fire investigators believe it was a hand-held spray can.”

Astoundingly the same bloody newspaper that has innocently reported this atrocious crime has been delivering copies of the fearmongering, Islamaphobic documentary ‘Obsession’ to subscribers in the area.

Irony feels a little too warm and fuzzy to cover it.

Woops, Belated Update: The Daily News issued a correction; this incident didn’t take place.

The really rather excellent John Gray in the Guardian:

“How symbolic yesterday that Chinese astronauts take a spacewalk while the US Treasury Secretary is on his knees.“

Representative Michael Burgess (REP):

“I have been thrown out of more meetings in the last twenty-four hours than I ever thought possible as a duly elected representative of 820,000 citizens of North Texas. Mr Speaker, politics is a full contact sport and I understand that, but it is a full contact sport in the light of day, in the public arena. Since we didn’t have hearing, since we didn’t have mark-ups let’s at least put this legislation up on the internet for 24 hours. That’s what Thomas was made for, let’s do that and let people see what we have done in the dark of night. Mr Speaker I understand that we’re under martial law as declared by the Speaker last night.”

Representative Marcy Kaptur (DEM):

“Mr Speaker, my message for the American people: don’t let Congress seal this Wall Street deal. High financial crimes have been committed. Now Congress is being asked to bail out the culprits and to do so at the expense of those who elected us to guard their interests, the people of this country.

The normal legislative process that should accompany review of a monumental proposal to bail out Wall Street have been shelved. Yes, shelved. Only a few insiders are doing the dealing. Sounds like insider trading to me.

These criminals have so much political power they can shut down the legislative process of the highest law-making body in this land. All the committees that should be scanning every word of what is being negotiated are benched, and that means that the American people are benched too.

We are Constitutionally sworn to protect this Republic against all enemies – foreign and domestic – and, my friends, there are enemies. We are told that we will have a bill – a trillion dollar bill to review soon, and we are told that we will have 24 hours with no regular hearings to try and vote on this. The people pushing this deal are the very same one’s who were responsible for the implosion on Wall Street. They were fraudulent then, they are fraudulent now.

We should say no to this deal. I ask my colleagues to join us to meet with some real experts who’ve done financial resolutions without putting the burden on the taxpayer.”

This is a bloody good campaign ad:

A tip of the hat to Dennis Perrin…

Among Labour’s attempts to ‘take the fight to the Tories’, one of the most prominent figures has been the regular commentator and fanatical Blairite Dennis MacShane. His latest column appears to suggest that the British should vote Labour so as to protect themselves from their own hateful xenophobia:

“In Berlin recently, David Cameron promised a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty were he to become prime minister and the Treaty were not to be ratified. That would mean that the first period of any Tory government unleashing, as its main contribution to international politics, a festival of xenophobic hate against Europe.”

So, should we acquiesce to such patronising rhetoric? Is the threat of the Conservatives so urgent that we should throw up the Labourite barricades? Well, let’s look at MacShane’s record and see if he’s any more supportable than a Tory.

MacShane is notable as an enthusiastic internationalist. After the Venezuala coup, he wrote that Hugo Chavez had often been a “ranting populist demagogue” and appealed for a “swift return to a legitimate, democratic government in Venezuela“. Two days later, Chavez was reinstated.

In 2003, at a Commons debate, he declared that he was “proud to be a member of a Government who have vanquished tyranny“. Three years later, he could only blame the “catalogue of errors the Americans made” for the failure of the invasion, as well as his “anti-American and anti-western” colleagues. If he was proud of the vanquishing, didn’t he have a part to play in the resultant catastrophe?

Nevertheless, he’s still standing on a soapbox and sounding in the apocalypse. Recently, he has been beating the drum for a confrontation with Russia:

“Alas, [the South Ossetia conflict] is only the beginning, and Britain cannot betray Poland and its fellow EU and Nato allies as Chamberlain did in the 1930s.”

It surely isn’t coincidence that four days before that article was published, the Henry Jackson Society – of which MacShane is a member – released a report entitled “Czechoslovakia 1938 – Georgia 2008?”.

MacShane has also been prominent in his opposition to ‘radical Islam‘. In the wake of the Istanbul bombings, he saw fit to tell Constituents that it was…

“…time for the elected and community leaders of British Muslims to make a choice: the British way, based on political dialogue and non-violent protests, or the way of the terrorists against which the whole democratic world is uniting.”

That isn’t only Islamaphobic, it’s rather more Little England than your average eurosceptic.

So, if MacShane has been so wrong, and is still wrong, why should we entertain his warnings of a grim Conservative future (psst: the answer is that we shouldn’t)?

Thus spake Gordon Brown, an idiot and an arse…

“…we contemplated on the financial issues that are being raised in every country of the world by what’s happening because of financial turbulence on the markets.

America and Britain have always stood together as one in times of difficulty and challenge. And I said to President Bush this afternoon that facing this global turbulence, Britain supports the financial plan. And whatever the details of it, it’s the right thing to do to take us through these difficult circumstances.”

According to Gordon, then, the deal is right regardless of what it states, and sod the economists, politicians and commentators that disagree.

Could it be he accepts the broad aim of the proposals and believes that, possibly due to the perceived urgency of the situation, all else is irrelevant? Well, that would be absurdly naive:

“Neither the mission of the new agency nor its oversight are clear. If taxpayers are to buy illiquid and opaque assets from troubled sellers, the terms, occasions, and methods of such purchases must be crystal clear ahead of time and carefully monitored afterwards.”

I suspect that he doesn’t even believe that, but accepts the plan because it’s a plan. That’s dribble-inducingly stupid, of course. If one needed to buy a car then one wouldn’t accept the first deal simply because it offered a car.

Lurid sycophancy is the most generous inference that one can draw from such a statement.

The National Review reflects on the Presidential debate…

“I think Obama supporters are happy enough tonight. But I suspect they wanted McCain to show up tired and cranky and he didn’t he appeared a leader whose dont some of that leading. I have my quibbles with some of what McCain said and didn’t said, but the choices are clear in this election and I think you saw a bit of why tonight.”

Psst! As a follow up, see them exploiting 9/11 to the hilt and straight down the hand:

“If al-Qaeda and militant Islamism did not exist, I would be much more comfortable with Barack Obama,” explains Debra Burlingame. Burlingame, a former attorney, is the sister of Charles F. “Chic” Burlingame III, who was murdered on September 11, 2001, when the plane he was piloting, American Airlines flight 77, was crashed into the Pentagon.”

America’s Shittiest Website indeed…

A rather inspiring talk from Dan Hind, the author of The Threat To Reason…

“Compared with state-corporate assaults on the public’s ability to understand matters of deep importance, the chosen targets of the Folk Enlightenment pale into insignificance. While the folksy defenders of the Enlightenment are quick to denounce fantasy and paranoia, they give us precious few grounds to believe that they are not themselves lost in a sort of intellectual fugue.

Why on earth should one limit one’s concerns to enemies of the Enlightenment who sportingly identify themselves as such?”

Why Labour supporters really should be thinking again…