Beautiful Horizons

Happy 420; but what the hell is this guy smoking?

There's a rally planned at Mosque in southeast Michigan.  The knucklehead pastor Terry Jones says he comes in peace - with guns.  Apparently there's local idiots ready to receive the pastor with open arms.  

Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy -- the prosecutor who led the effort to rid Detroit of the hipster criminal Kwame Kilpatrick -- has filed motions to stop Jones from going forward with this rally.  Perhaps good intentions on the part of Ms. Worthy, but Dawud Walid of the Council on American-Islamic Relations says the motion might only further Jones' cause.  I think Mr. Walid is right.  Still, Terry Jones is playing a dangerous game.  He's trying to manufacture a crisis about violent Islam in America that simply doesn't exist.  

UPDATE:  Sheesh.  Accidental discharge.  I just can't compete with this crazy pastor.  

Does the Tea Party Hate Dogs?

    The Humane Society of the United States has evil, ulterior motives at hand in trying to promote an anti-Puppy Mill ballot measure in Missouri.  So says local Tea Party groups and the highly respected canine expert "Joe the Plumber."  Writing on the Alliance for Truth website, Mr. Wurzelbacher chimed in on Proposition B with these nuggets of wisdom,  "This bill forces breeders to limit the number of dogs they can own - regardless of care. Think about this a minute . . . . Should the government have the right to limit the number of houses a realtor can sell? Or the number of cattle a rancher can raise?" Apparently, if the vehicle of government has to be involved in the remedy of some matter, it most be wrong.  The folks over at TPM have a nice summary, here.  

    Full disclosure:  yours truly ran a petition office in St. Louis County during the winter months of 2010.  I personally collected over 700 signatures toward the effort to qualify the measure for the ballot.  It was the easiest petition drive I have ever worked on.  

    Please encourage your friends in Missouri to vote Yes on Measure B this November.  

Annals of Beltway Weirdness

(skip to about 4:40)

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Ewwwww!

This is just creepy:

A MAN walks into a bar. He’s carrying a carpet under his arm. He wraps himself in the carpet, lies on the floor, covers his face and waits for people to step on him. A sign taped to the bar reads: “Step on carpet.”

People step on the carpet — dozens, in fact. The more people who step on the carpet, particularly if they are women in heels, the happier the man is. Some are timid, others are audacious. Some dance on the man. Some step on him while ordering their drinks, completely unaware that a live body is underfoot. Some just stand there, frozen, looking totally freaked out.

Four hours later, the man slips out from beneath his carpet, folds it up, tucks it under his arm and heads home. “It was a nice party,” he says cheerily, as if he were talking about something far more ordinary, like, say, a backyard barbecue.

That man (and none of this is a joke) is Georgio T., a 48-year-old immigrant from Malta, who calls himself the Human Carpet. He has become an occasional sight around New York’s bar and club scene and a fixture at sexual fetish parties.

I'm glad I prefer to drink at home, don't do the club scene nor do I do sexual fetish parties.

GOP Big Tent Racial Sensitivity Marches On...

A Texas state GOP legislator, Betty Brown, asked an unusual question of a representative of the Organization of Chinese Americans during an inquiry into problems of some Texans in establishing voter identification: “Rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese — I understand it’s a rather difficult language — do you think that it would behoove you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more readily here?”

The name of the Chinese-American Rep. Brown directed her question to was Mr. Ko.

(HT: Matt Yglesias)

How to Drive Your Church to the Margins

I am a Roman Catholic and am disturbed by this:

The case of the pregnant 9-year-old was shocking enough. But it was the response of the Catholic Church that infuriated many Brazilians.

Archibishop Jose Cardoso Sobrinho of the coastal city of Recife announced that the Vatican was excommunicating the family of a local girl who had been raped and impregnated with twins by her stepfather, because they had chosen to have the girl undergo an abortion. The Church excommunicated the doctors who performed the procedure as well. "God's laws," said the archbishop, dictate that abortion is a sin and that transgressors are no longer welcome in the Roman Catholic Church. "They took the life of an innocent," Sobrinho told TIME in a telephone interview. "Abortion is much more serious than killing an adult. An adult may or may not be an innocent, but an unborn child is most definitely innocent. Taking that life cannot be ignored."

The girl would have had her life endangered if the baby had been brought to term. Regardless of how one feels on the subject, as Steve Benen notes, "A lot of phrases come to mind when describing all of this, but "pro-life" isn't one of them."

No it isn't. The church is hemorrhaging membership and the dreaded Edir Macedo see an opening:

Evangelicals have not projected a united pro-life platform in Brazil, certainly not one as monolithic as the Catholic Church's. But at least one major sect, the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, has taken a stance that showcases its differences with its Catholic rival. The Universal Church's television channel TV Record recently aired spots featuring a woman declaring, "I decided who to marry. I decided to use the pill. With my vote I decided who'd be elected President. I decided to work so that I won't be discriminated against. Why can't I decide what to do with my own body? Women should be able to decide for themselves what's important."

A church that does not respond to the needs of its membership will continue to lose members. Without members, there is no church. How I wish John XXIII could come back.

There's also this bit of nonsense.

Obama ? Black ?

There is, as one would expect, a wide-ranging discussion of Barack Obama and race.  What's less expected is that the obvious question "Can a black man become President?" seems to have been pushed aside for an even more ominous one: "Is Obama black?"  -  or "Is he black enough?"   

Google "is obama black" and you'll turn up page after page of links to articles that raise doubts about his credentials - not as a President but as a black man.  Debra Dickerson, one of the more prominent national black columnists informed her readers: "Barack Obama would be the great black hope in the next presidential race -- if he were actually black."  Stanley Crouch, the much published essayist and columnist (who true to his contrarian temperment refers to himself as a Negro) puzzled:  "When black people refer to Obama as 'one of us', I don't know what they are talking about."

There are all kinds of arguably complex underlying issues that drive such discussion among these deep thinkers.  Much of it hinges on the fact of Obama's father being an African immigrant more than Barack's being "mixed-race" (as are, obviously,  many people identified as "black".)   For the record, W.E.B. DuBois'  father was of mixed race and an immigrant to the U.S., Stokely Carmichael was himself an immigrant as a 5-year-old with his parents, as was Marcus Garvey . "Were DuBois, Carmichael and Garvey black?"  Crouch, Dickerson, et.al. let Black History Month pass without writing THAT column. Maybe next year...

I don't have much else to add - except that the question "Is Obama black?" strikes me as raising another more fundamental query about the people who ask it.  "What planet do you live on ?" 

Our National Disgrace

I find the Zogby polls to be usually pretty interesting, but they are really scraping bottom here:

As the last–minute holiday crush begins to build and panic grows in the minds of those who are nursing an unfulfilled shopping list, the latest Zogby Interactive poll shows a solution may be just steps away from the easy chair. A wide majority (63%) of American adults said that re–purposing a gift received from someone else in the past is okay – as long as it hasn’t been used and the recipient would be a better fit for the gift.

With the clock ticking ever closer to that annual shopping deadline that procrastinators dread, most adults now agree that a trip to the closet may be just as legitimate – and useful – as a trip to the mall. Yet, while a majority now says re–gifting is okay, not a lot of Americans partake – 9% of U.S. adults plan to “re–gift” a present they received in the past to someone else this holiday season, the Zogby online poll shows. Women are more likely to get in the “re–gifting” spirit this year – 10% say they plan to give an old gift again, compared with 7% of men.

So if you get a set of Ginsu knives or anything with the word Ronco in it, well, you've been advised. Nice to see Zogby covering the tough issues.