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Politics

Obama Speaks Out On Mosque Controversy: ‘Our Commitment To Religious Freedom Must Be Unshakeable’

By Faiz Shakir on Aug 13, 2010 at 10:05 pm

Tonight, President Obama hosted an iftaar dinner at the White House — a feast marking the culmination of a day of fasting for practicing Muslims during the current Islamic calendar month of Ramadan. At remarks delivered at the dinner, Obama spoke out on the controversy surrounding the construction of a new Islamic center near the Ground Zero site, firmly siding in favor of the project:

OBAMA: Let me be clear: as a citizen, and as President, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country. That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances. This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakeable. The principle that people of all faiths are welcome in this country, and will not be treated differently by their government, is essential to who we are. The writ of our Founders must endure.

Watch it:

From the moment he entered office, Obama has made a commitment to engaging in a more positive relationship with the Muslim world. During his inaugural address, Obama said, “To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect.” And later, in a speech in Cairo, Egypt, Obama added, “I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.” But the right-wing antics against the construction of mosques, the disturbing instances of hate crimes against Muslims, and the rising tide of Islamophobia has served to frustrate the administration’s commitment to engage with the Muslim world.

So, Obama’s strenuous defense of the “Ground Zero mosque” tonight is significant not just in bolstering the credibility of his message to the Muslim world, but it also engages him directly in the political fight against far right extremists here at home who wish to erode the American values at stake in the fight over the mosque. Obama emphasized tonight that “our capacity to show not merely tolerance, but respect to those who are different from us” is an important marker of the distinction between us and the “nihilism” of terrorists. In other words, using language that perhaps Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, and their fellow xenophobic cynics might be more comfortable with — the question is simple: Are you with us or against us?

Update

Rep. Peter King (R-NY), an ardent opponent of the mosque, issued a statement essentially arguing that bigotry should respected and tolerated. “President Obama is wrong,” King said. “It is insensitive and uncaring for the Muslim community to build a mosque in the shadow of ground zero. While the Muslim community has the right to build the mosque they are abusing that right by needlessly offending so many people who have suffered so much.”


Update

,New York’s Conservative Party is planning to air TV ads to ask a private company to use its power to halt construction of the Islamic center.


Update

,The leaders behind the Islamic center project were excited to hear Obama’s remarks. “We are so blessed to be Americans! This is the greatest country in the world,” Sharif El-Gamal, the project’s developer, said in an email to the New York Daily News.


Update

,Glenn Greenwald heralds the speech as “one of the most impressive and commendable things Obama has done since being inaugurated.”

Politics

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen: ‘I’m disappointed and was blindsided’ by McCollum’s immigration bill.

By Andrea Nill Sanchez on Aug 13, 2010 at 8:00 pm

ap_ros-lehtinen_080623Earlier this week, Florida Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate Bill McCollum (R) unveiled a proposed immigration bill which many argue is “even tougher” than Arizona’s controversial immigration law, SB-1070. While McCollum likely believes his support of the bill will win him some votes, he has also sparked a backlash amongst several notable Latino members of the Florida Republican Party. Most notably, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL). The Cuban-American U.S. congresswoman and co-chair of McCollum’s Statewide Hispanic Leadership Team was in disbelief and doesn’t think the anti-immigrant legislation will solve the state’s problems. The Miami Herald reports:

U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Miami, a co-chair of the team, said Thursday afternoon that she last spoke to the state attorney general on Tuesday — one day before he called a news conference in Orlando to unveil the bill with Republican legislators.

“I’m disappointed and was blindsided by Bill’s decision to promote this, and I encourage the candidates to focus on plans that will improve Florida’s economy, bring jobs to our state and jump-start our tourism,” Ros-Lehtinen said. “I fail to see how promotion of this issue will accomplish that, and I was taken aback.”

The Cuban-American congresswoman added: “Bill McCollum doesn’t owe me an explanation…but I would have liked to have known beforehand because I would have cautioned him to focus on other issues. Obsessing about this issue in the gubernatorial campaign means other issues are getting short shrift.”

When asked about McCollum’s latest move, a spokesperson for Senate candidate Marco Rubio (R-FL) simply stated, “He believes the best approach is for the federal government to deal with border security and immigration, and he hopes state efforts like Arizona are a wake-up call for Congress to get its act together.” Former Gov. Jeb Bush (R-FL) similarly distanced himself from McCollum’s proposal, stating that though he still supports McCollum, he “personally disagree[s] with him having to go that far.” The Wonk Room has more fallout from McCollum’s bill.

Yglesias

Endgame

By Matthew Yglesias on Aug 13, 2010 at 6:14 pm

A 747 just left with you:

— 19th century controversies over whether to permit synagogues.

— Large illuminated signs are mandatory in Times Square.

— The journalism job market is healthier than the overall labor market.

— Birth order affects children’s intelligence and personality.

— Virginia congressmen think spending money on Virginia-based defense contractors is crucial to national security.

— John Judis was right the first time.

— Recovery summer!

New Pornographers, “A Bite Out of My Bed”

Politics

After Supporting Hearings On The 14th Amendment, McCain Backtracks: ‘I Certainly Don’t’ Support Repeal

By Alex Seitz-Wald on Aug 13, 2010 at 5:40 pm

mccain3 Last week, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) joined the growing movement within the GOP to reassess the 14th Amendment and its mandate that anyone born in the U.S. automatically be granted citizenship. “I support the concept of holding hearings” on the issue, McCain told reporters last Wednesday.

But just over a week later, McCain changed his tune, telling the AP, “I’m not requesting hearings,” and that he “certainly” doesn’t support changing the 14th Amendment:

“When I was asked … I said ‘Look, if senators want to have hearings then senators have hearings, that’s how the Senate works, but I’m not requesting hearings,’” McCain said in an interview Thursday. “I’m devoting all my efforts to getting the borders secure, and if you get the border secure than the difficulties and challenges with this issue of people coming across our border illegally to have children is dramatically reduced.” [...]

When asked directly if would support such an amendment, McCain said: “No. I mean, first of all we’d have to have hearings, we’d have to find out what the argument would be, but I certainly don’t at this time.”

As his record would have predicted, McCain is flipping on his position from last week, but he is actually heading back towards the more reasonable stance he used to hold. McCain used to be a leading advocate of a path to citizenship and comprehensive immigration reform, and expressed serious reservations about mass deportations.

Meanwhile, California’s GOP nominees for governor and Senate, Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina, respectively, bucked the trend within their party and both came out against changing the 14th Amendment, Politico reported today. “I don’t support changing the 14th Amendment,” Fiorina said, explaining it’s just “an emotional distraction.”

Yglesias

End of McNeelyblogging

By ThinkProgress on Aug 13, 2010 at 5:20 pm

By Ryan McNeely

Today is my last day as an intern with the Center for American Progress and my last day working with Matt on his blog.

Given my limited experience, Matt’s decision to take me on as his first-ever intern was truly a leap of faith. Matt treated me as a peer, allowing me to write for his blog — which I’ve read and learned from for years — and for this I owe him a debt of gratitude. And everyone at CAP, including ThinkProgress Editor Faiz Shakir, Deputy Editor Amanda Terkel, and the rest of the team has treated me with kindness and respect, always willing to share their limitless blogging wisdom.

I’m still undecided as to what exactly I will be doing next (before returning to school in September), but for now, you can follow me on Twitter at @RTMcNeely. Or, you can say hello in the comment section, where I can return to my natural state of participant rather than moderator.

Thanks, everyone!

Climate Progress

If Doctors Were Climate Scientists, We’d Be Dead

By Brad Johnson on Aug 13, 2010 at 4:54 pm

In a case of climate malpractice, too many journalists and scientists are now overemphasizing the difficulty of understanding anthropogenic warming’s influence on weather. Right now, this is how many climate scientists and the journalists who cover climate are talking about the unprecedented weather phenomena during the hottest year in recorded history:

“it is impossible to blame mankind for single severe weather events”

“language—which suggests that we can, in fact, attribute specific weather events to global warming—should be strictly avoided”

“the usual caveat that no current weather event can be said to be ’caused’ by climate change”

“As we continually stress, one extreme weather event, or even a series of weather events, is not caused by global warming or climate change”

“you cannot say a single event or a single summer is unequivocally due to climate change — by definition it’s weather, and not climate”

“a single weather event cannot be blamed on climate change”

“climate change cannot be said to cause an individual event”

“You can’t attribute any single weather-related event to a hotter planet”

If this is how our doctors worked, then sick patients would hear nonsense like this:

Sure, you’ve been diagnosed with AIDS. Sure, you have a rare, malignant cancer that is only seen in 1 out of 500,000 healthy people and is common in AIDS patients. But one cannot conclude 100 percent that this is caused by your full-blown AIDS. One must observe your life-threatening symptoms over many years to draw conclusions in terms of AIDS. You cannot say unequivocally a single outbreak or a single cancer is unequivocally due to HIV — by definition it’s a disease, and not an immune deficiency syndrome.

Many journalists and climate scientists repeat the maxim “no single weather event can be attributed to global warming” as if it is an absolute verity, not a useful but overly simplistic rule of thumb. Fortunately, other scientists like Michael Tobis and journalists like the Associated Press’s Charles Hanley understand how to properly express the catastrophic influence of fossil fuel pollution on our climate.

Stories time and again claim that it is “impossible” to link anthropogenic climate change with an individual extreme event. While attribution, strictly defined, may be very challenging, it is not necessarily an impossibility. Many kinds of events, in particular ones that have a historical precedent, could have occurred in an alternate reality that doesn’t include manmade greenhouse gases. “It can still be problematic to blame a specific individual extreme weather event on climate change,” Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring and attribution at the UK Met Office, properly explains, “because there have always been extremes of weather around the world.”

However, there can also be individual events which would be either extremely unlikely or physically implausible without greenhouse forcing. Scientists have the capacity to determine influence and attribution for weather phenomena from global forcing for which the physical processes are well understood. When we’re talking about unprecedented mesoscale phenomena — like a season-long Eurasian heatwave during a solar minimum — or phenomena with multi-annual latency — like the record temperatures of the Lake Superior or decline of Greenland ice mass, then natural variability is not a plausible explanation.

More importantly, this is a frustratingly moot question. We have exactly one planet to live on, and it’s one whose climate system is now being driven by manmade pollution. The coming changes which are known with absolute certainty — sea level rise, glacial decline, ocean acidification — presage suffering on an apocalyptic scale. There is no alternate planet with everything the same except with pre-industrial levels of carbon dioxide to compare against. Weather phenomena are determined through physical processes by the state of the ocean-atmosphere system, making greenhouse pollution one of the causative agents of today’s weather. And yet energy is expended on semantic knots over the words “cause,” “attribute,” and “influence” — as if that matters. The simple reality is, as Wally Broecker once said:

The climate is an angry beast, and we’re poking it with sticks.

Related Posts

Alyssa

Next Time, Can Ramona Flowers and Scott Pilgrim Defeat Exes Together?

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Aug 13, 2010 at 4:45 pm

As reviews of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World come in, inevitable hating has begun. Paste magazine called it like a video game adaptation in that it was “more akin to watching a videogame than actually playing one.” So far, though, the film is ranking around 80 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and having read the first in the comic book series, I’m feeling cautiously optimistic about the film. It promises to be an over-the-top, not-too-deep late summer blockbuster.

But the premise of the film: that Scott (Michael Cera) must defeat Ramona Flowers’ seven evil ex-boyfriends before he can date her. Greg Rozan on Facebook ponders the premise:

From book one alone, he is a hapless, lovable loser whose primary interest in life is… get the girl. So what, right? What else in life could possibly be worth pursuing? I mean if you think about it, it’s a miracle we’ve been able to construct all this technology and social artifice when us guys are so consumed with the desire to f*ck and be f*cked. Why do we even bother with education and literacy and all that garbage? We have all the tools we need to propagate the species by the time we hit puberty! Scott Pilgrim is just another manifestation of an apparently ubiquitous male obsession.

To be honest, when I first heard about the Scott Pilgrim series, I resisted reading it for a long time precisely for that reason. Even expanding on the male obsession theme, Scott’s quest to defeat evil exes sounded a little too close to chivalry (something feminists have often decried as sexist). Furthermore, the plot suggests that Ramona has baggage that must be dealt with and Scott does not.

Why should Scott have to defeat Ramona’s evil exes but not have to fight his own? Ultimately in relationships we’re each fighting our own demons and our own pasts even if our current partners must also deal with that baggage along the way. If anything I would have loved to see Ramona and Scott take on the exes together.

Yglesias

Who Picks Regional Fed Presidents?

By Matthew Yglesias on Aug 13, 2010 at 4:44 pm

thumb_219838-thomas-hoenig

As you read about Kansas City Fed President Thomas Hoenig’s plan to increase the unemployment rate by pushing inflation even further down below target, it’s worth asking yourself “How does a person get to be President of the Kansas City Fed?” Well, you get picked by the Board of Directors. And who picks the Board? Local bankers, mostly:

Each Federal Reserve Bank has a nine-member board of directors: The member banks elect the three Class A and three Class B directors, and the Board of Governors appoints the three directors in Class C. Directors are chosen without discrimination as to race, creed, color, or national origin. The directors in each class serve staggered three-year terms.

Class A directors of each Reserve Bank represent the stockholding member banks of the Federal Reserve District. Class B and Class C directors represent the public and are chosen with due, but not exclusive, consideration to the interests of agriculture, commerce, industry, services, labor, and consumers; Class B and Class C directors may not be officers, directors, or employees of any bank. In addition, Class C directors may not be stockholders of any bank. The Board of Governors annually designates one Class C director at each District Bank as chair of the board of directors and another Class C director as deputy chair.

This system has never made any real sense. The Fed’s Open Market Committee is an important maker of public policy. There’s no reason private firms should have such a large role in its governance. But many aspects of Fed governance have escaped scrutiny in recent decades thanks to the perception that the Volcker, Greenspan, and Bernanke era Feds were doing a good job. Increasingly, however, it’s clear that the Fed is not doing a good job—it seems incapable of hitting its inflation target, for example— which should spark increased discussion of the matter.

Media

Fox News Ignores Laura Schlessinger’s Racist ‘N-Word’ Tirade

By Ben Armbruster on Aug 13, 2010 at 4:40 pm

Yesterday, Media Matters posted audio and transcript of Dr. Laura Schlessinger’s racially-charged rant in which she, in her own words, “articulated the ‘n’ word all the way out — more than one time.” (11 times in five minutes, according to the Huffington Post.) Schlessinger’s tirade occurred earlier this week during a segment with an African-American caller, whom she said “had a chip on [her] shoulder.” She has since apologized for her remarks.

CNN’s Rick Sanchez was the first cable news host to pick up on the story, and the network has run four segments on it since. MSNBC reported on Schlessinger’s remarks twice already today. But how many segments has Fox News run? According to a ThinkProgress review of the network’s coverage, zero.

schlessinger_coverage2

Why has Fox News ignored the story? Perhaps because Schlessinger is a regular guest on the network. Just last year, Sean Hannity hosted the right wing radio host to promote her new book.

Update

The American Prospect’s Jamelle Bouie comments that Schlessinger’s use of the “n-word” was “the least racist thing” about her rant:

The caller — a black woman — is in an interracial marriage with a white man, and is increasingly frustrated with the racist jokes and comments made by her husband’s friends and family. [...]

To recap: Dr. Laura immediately dismisses her caller’s problems, uses a racist joke to prove her non-racism, insists that black people voted for Obama over nothing but racial solidarity (as if pre-Obama, African Americans never voted for Democrats), strongly resents the fact that “black guys” can use the N-word but she can’t, and declares that “if you’re that hypersensitive about color and don’t have a sense of humor, don’t marry outside of your race.” Dr. Laura isn’t known for her sensitivity, but this is an impressive display of raw racial resentment.

Economy

New Housing Policy Brief Shows GOP Is More Interested In Scoring Political Points Than Helping Homeowners

By Pat Garofalo on Aug 13, 2010 at 4:00 pm

Next week, the Obama administration is hosting a meeting focused on finding ways to begin addressing the country’s broken housing finance system. For the last year or so, the Treasury Department has been saying that the next big effort following financial regulatory reform would be figuring out what to do with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two government sponsored enterprises, and this meeting is the first step in that process.

Republicans, of course, consistently go on and on about Fannie and Freddie, concocting an alternate reality where they were the main culprits in the housing bubble (despite the fact that by the time the bubble really started raging, the GSE’s had largely departed from the scene). And they have made no end of hay about GSE reform not being included in the financial regulatory reform effort.

But now that the administration is starting to turn its attention to GSE reform, the GOP is going to have to put its money where its mouth is. But much like the economic “solutions” pamphlet it released last week was short on actual solutions, the housing Policy Brief it released this week — authored by Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) — is a bit short on actual policy.

It’s not until the very bottom of the document that the GOP’s “solutions” for what to do with Fannie and Freddie are detailed, and though there are three points there, they all come to the same conclusion, which is: “end the current GSE conservatorship by a date certain.”

Now, nobody thinks that the current situation regarding the GSE’s is tenable, and we have to dramatically rethink the way in which we do housing finance in this country. But the Republicans have no vision for what would replace Fannie and Freddie which — like it or not — back more than 90 percent of the mortgages in the country. And setting a date certain for kicking their legs out would not only harm the housing market, but could upset far wider swathes of the global economy:

GSEs are currently essential tools of federal policy, providing an enormous amount of liquidity in support of the federal government’s efforts to stabilize the housing markets. Investor appetite for the MBS issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac helps to finance the significant borrowing of overseas’ capital by the U.S. government, providing an outlet for foreign investors to invest the excess dollars accrued by our significant current account deficit. Any abrupt disruptions could affect the balance of payments and global macroeconomic stability.

The GOP’s brief includes some hand-waving about competition and innovation replacing all of this mortgage financing, but the fact remains that the GOP simply has no idea what it wants the mortgage finance system to look like, and spends the vast majority of its policy statement on the issue trying to score political points off the false notion that government-backed loans to poor people brought the global economy to its knees. I’d say the GOP are a bunch of empty suits on this issue, but that would give them too much credit for getting dressed in the morning.

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