Often a platform for boozy pictures, racy promotions and profanity-peppered wall posts, Facebook is hardly a model of conservative principles. Nevertheless, the company drew a clear line this week when it announced that ads for Proposition 19, California’s Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act of 2010, would be pulled from the site. The ads, which prominently feature a picture of a cannabis plant, were developed by Just Say Now, a pro-legalization group affiliated with Firedoglake.
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This post originally appeared on Campus Progress.
Last week was a busy one for the Obama administration’s Department of Justice. On Tuesday, following the announcement of a temporary injunction on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, the agency responded by issuing an appeal. “The great potential for significant additional medical breakthroughs is at risk if this research is halted pending the appeals process,” said Justice Department spokesperson Tracy Schmaler in a statement.
When you think of dentists, you probably think of triumphalist ads for Hillary’s Clinton’s implausible 2012 presidential run. The ads usually feature pulsating symphonic music and a creepy, pastel-hued portrait of Clinton. They also run in New Orleans, despite the fact that the person funding them lives in Chicago. Is any of this ringing a bell? No?
Well, fear not. William DeJean, a Chicago dentist, is here to make the fantasies you never had or wanted come true. Here’s his campaign video for Hillary, via Gawker:
According to CNN, DeJean put up the ads because “”I’m a dentist and I don’t think this country is headed in the right direction.”
Sometimes words just fail.
This post originally appeared on Campus Progress.
Facebook raised a few eyebrows last week when it announced it would no longer run advertisements for Proposition 19, California’s pro-marijuana initiative, as long as they featured a picture of a pot leaf. According to one spokesperson, the site doesn’t “allow any images of drugs, drug paraphernalia, or tobacco in ad images … Sometimes our automated and manual processes miss these, but our policy has always been the same.”
This post originally appeared on Campus Progress.
This post originally appeared on Campus Progress.
On Sept. 4, 2003, President George W. Bush signed into law the Prison Rape Elimination Act, which required the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) to perform a variety of duties every year—from “comprehensive statistical reviews of the incidence and effects of prison rape” to the identification of “(A) both victims and perpetrators of prison rape; and (B) prisons and prison systems with a high incidence of prison rape.” The act additionally called on the BJS to draft “a listing of those institutions in the representative sample, separated into each category … and ranked according to the incidence of prison rape in each institution.”
Damned if we do, damned if we don’t.
On Wednesday’s Daily Show, Jon explained just how fraught this whole Muslim community center issue really is. Because terrorists hate us no matter what we say and do, the question of whether or not to build is pretty much moot; our very dialogue is likely to infuriate them.
Indeed, the real challenge is finding a way to treat Muslims in the United States like people instead of faceless radicals. That’s where correspondent Asif Mandvi comes in.
Watch it:
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Tennessee No Evil | ||||
| ||||
In a campaign ad released this past May, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) walks along Arizona’s border fence, grimacing. “Drug and human smuggling,” he says to the sheriff walking alongside him. “Home invasions. Murder.” As the two men trudge up a rocky hill, McCain promises to “complete the danged fence.” The sheriff, in turn, tells McCain, “You’re one of us.”
Results of a new poll from the Pew Research Center show that an alarming amount of conservative Republicans (34 percent) and Independents (18 percent) now believe Obama is a Muslim. The numbers represent a sharp uptick in the misconception since 2009, when conjectures were more modest (18 pecent and 10 percent, respectively). Since the poll was conducted before Obama spoke out on the planned construction of a Muslim community center a few blocks away from Ground Zero, it’s a safe bet that things would look even more ridiculous now, were another study to be conducted.
It’s not surprising that the increasing idiocy about Obama’s religion occurred predominantly among his opponents. What is downright disturbing though is the fact that Democrats are swallowing some of the hot air, too:
There has been little change in the number of Democrats who say Obama is a Muslim, but fewer Democrats today say he is a Christian (down nine points since 2009).
That decrease for Democrats yanks the number down to 46 percent — less than half.
If you’re wondering how everyone suddenly learned about Obama’s Big Secret, look no farther than your television screen: Of the 60 percent of respondents who said “the media” shaped their opinion, 16 percent said TV was the most instrumental vessel. Any guesses on which news channel might have been instrumental in disseminating this info? Anyone?
Another 11 percent said they were able to determine the president’s religion simply from his “words and behavior.”
All of this nonsense points to a couple of agonizingly clear conclusions:
1. Cognitive dissonance — that is, the practice of shaping one’s reality to fit one’s pre-existing conclusions, rather than allowing conclusions to correspond to reality — is raging with a sort of rabid force among Republicans. The very fact that perceptions about Obama’s religion can change (without Obama doing anything at all) indicates that the Right will create beliefs, then go from there; the facts don’t matter.
2. There’s a hazard to jumping to the president’s defense on this one. If progressives eagerly dispel claims that Obama is a Muslim, it could seem like a sort of de facto distancing tactic from Muslims in general — a very bad move in the midst of this whole Cordoba House controversy. In other words, to argue “Of course he’s not one of those people” implies that there is something unsavory about those people (i.e. Muslims) in the first place.
On the other hand, to keep silent on the issue is to be complicit in its falseness; it is to allow an incendiary misconception to dominate discourse. There’s really no easy way out of this one.
Pat Buchanan has never been known for his subtlety. He has said integration of blacks and whites is a bad thing because “the incapable are placed … side by side with the capable.” He has called AIDS “nature’s retribution for violating the laws of nature.” Most recently (like, as recently as just one week ago), he claimed Judge Vaughn Walker’s Proposition 8 ruling was an example of “judicial tyranny.”
So yeah, the man’s words are about as benign as a hollow point bullet. Which is why this little nugget — a response to Newt Gingrich’s comparison of Cordoba House supporters to Nazis — is totally unexpected (via TPM):
Pat Buchanan, the MSNBC commentator who’s no stranger to controversial statements, said today that he thinks Newt Gingrich went “too far” when he compared the developers behind the Cordoba House Muslim community center to Nazis. It’s “absurd,” said Buchanan. “There is no valid comparison there.”
Buchanan also called Gingrich a “political opportunist” who’s trying to be “more controversial than Sarah Palin,” who would be his potential primary challenger in the 2012 presidential election.
This is not to say that Buchanan has anything pertinent to say about Islam. In fact, most of his opinions on the subject are pretty misguided, incendiary, and even steeped in the same bankrupt Nazi rhetoric he’s now critiquing. What it does point to is the explosive nature of this Cordoba House debate — a debate loaded enough to tangle party allegiances that were once taken for granted.
Editor’s note: In an effort to update AlterNet readers on goings-on between our two fine coasts (and to stave off desert-induced insanity), AlterNet’s Byard Duncan will be filing dispatches from his trip across the United States. What follows is the second installment.
If you’ve ever seen Santa Fe, you know it hosts a lot of amazing scenery: Smooth adobe angles, poking and folding out of the red mountains. A sky so huge and blue it’s like an existential conundrum. Those sunsets.
What you might not know is that the city also has a prairie dog problem – an infestation bad enough that local authorities have started using poisonous gas to kill the creatures en masse.
In one cemetery near the city’s center, prairie dogs have created a network of tunnels so complex it’s ruining irrigation systems. The little guys are also exhuming human remains: femurs, ribs, pieces of spine, etc. From the local NBC affiliate:
A grave stone marker for Brewster Bloom who died in 1922 has been tunneled under. The grave of Rosa Ulibarri, who died in 1984 is also home to prairie dogs; and even former Governor Arthur Seligman, who served New Mexico in the 1930’s, has prairie dogs expanding their colony near his tomb.
According to a 1987 city ordinance on the humane relocation of prairie dogs (yes, this actually does exist), authorities must “protect the diminishing populations of Gunnison’s Prairie Dogs by ensuring their safe and humane relocation prior to the development of property within the city of Santa Fe to appropriate and protected habitat areas as designated by the city.” Prairie dog advocates — there’s The Prairie Dog Coalition in Santa Fe, and something called Prairie Dog Pals in Albuquerque — say that gassing the animals is a brutal solution to the problem.
“They’ve tried relocation once, once, and they didn’t have any follow-up done, so they’re spending money doing the inhumane thing instead of something more 21st century,” Yvonne Boudreaux, president of Prairie Dog Pals, recently told a local news station.
The cemetery owners have a markedly different take.
“The cost is about $100 per prairie dog to remove and relocate versus $1.80 for a gas canister,” Fairview Cemetery Association President Erik Mason said.
