“The fact of the Matter is…”

Clichés are a prominent part of our use of language. The fact of the matter is they are the overused part of our lexicon. That expression was used six times today on Meet the Press. Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu used that terminology five times. New Orleans Talk Radio host Garland Robinette used it once.

A very nice lady, who might be reading my blog, uses the words “come on” when she is frustrated with the discussion and lacks the language skills. Her, I excuse, because she was born in Egypt and has lived part of her adult life in Brazil and Japan. But, come on Americans. It’s time we learned how to use our language.

This is a good time to give my pitch for Toastmasters. You will improve your speaking skills and most likely receive applause from your boss.

The Power of a Talk Show Host

Hundreds of thousands of people were at a Glenn Beck rally on the National Mall in Washington D.C. His primary guest speaker was Sarah Palin.

Beck asked people to “Help us restore traditional American values.” He is also quoted as saying, “We must restore America and restore her honor.” .

I did not know that America’s values or honor had ended or was reduced. I was happy to learn that there were few political banners or signs at the rally. What does this all mean? What are his intentions?

There is something very eerie about this situation. The Associated Press reporter wrote, “Beck put a heavy religious cast on nearly all his remarks, sounding at times like an evangelical preacher.”

Other than his commentary that “America today begins to turn back to God” I do not know his intentions. Television reporters have been unable to provide any more insight than the vague AP report.

Sarah Palin recognized three soldiers who sacrificed both body and mind in their service to the country. That message was clearer than Beck’s but brought nothing new to the stories of soldier sacrifices. Her speech can be seen at Salon.com.

Election 2010: California Governor

California Governor: Whitman (R) 48%, Brown (D) 40%

The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of Likely Voters in California finds Meg Whitman earning 48% support, while Democrat Jerry Brown picks up 40% of the vote. Six percent (6%) prefer some other candidate in the race, and six percent (6%) are undecided.

It is meaningless information. The reason is that Billionaire Meg Whitman has spent over $104 Million of her own money on the campaign. Jerry Brown obviously doesn’t have that amount of money. He will undoubtedly begin campaigning after the Labor Day weekend.

It really doesn’t matter who wins the election because the state legislature faces a requirement of a 2/3 vote to approve a budget. This requirement is in the state’s constitution.

Arnold Schwarzenegger proved the weakness of the California governor. Most of his ideas were never implemented.

The Subversive Theology of Imam Rauf

This article was posted on the New Republic web site. It is written by Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and sociology and chair of the Ph. D. program in Communications at Columbia. The web site also provides comments that are for the most part intolerant. Gitlin’s next book, The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel.

Still, despite this article re-locating the mosque in lower Manhattan is the right thing to do.

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The fervent mosque-haters have this much right: Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the Sufi leader of the Cordoba Initiative that plans to build an Islamic center on Park Place near the site of the World Trade Center, is subversive. But what he wants to subvert is not the United States of America. What he wants to subvert are dictatorships in Islamic nations.

Imam Rauf’s third book, published in 2005 but unavailable to me last week when I wrote about him and his earlier work, is called What’s Right with Islam is What’s Right with America. In these pages, Rauf proves just as Islamic as his detractors say. He is downright idealistic about Islam and hearty about its prospects. He has been scouting out America for a long time. And what is it that he finds here to gladden his Islamic soul? It’s right there on p. 176:

“…the American Declaration of Independence and Constitution.”

The imam goes on to say that these documents “express the Islamic ideal, which is itself but an expression of the Abrahamic ethic.” Yes, “the American Constitution and system of governance uphold the core principles of Islamic law.” And here’s a way of putting it that never tempted Sarah Palin or Newt Gingrich: “The overarching American religion that all Americans live under is ‘Islamic’ in the sense that it is fully compliant with and expresses the Islamic Shariah.” In Rauf’s understanding, Sharia is predicated on religious pluralism, which is “a fundamental human right under Islamic law.”

In fact—don’t tell Sean Hannity—it’s too late to resist. Satan is well ensconced here. “America is substantively an ‘Islamic’ country, by which I mean a country whose systems remarkably embody the principles that Islamic law requires of a government.”

No wonder the Imam is at this moment lecturing in the Gulf States on the State Department’s dime, to discuss “Muslim life in America and religious tolerance,” according to the AP—a trip that Governor Tim Pawlenty, guzzling a lot of tea in a hurry, calls “disgusting.”

No wonder the Bush State Department made similar use of him to win hearts and minds. He’s promoting the American social and political system. He believes that “democracy and liberty, in a peculiarly American way, provide a manifestation of the Abrahamic ethic.” If Muslims outside America “recognize in the American form of governance a genuine substantive workable expression and model of their centuries-old longing for the kingdom of heaven on earth,” he continues, “they can formulate their understanding of an Islamic state along these lines.” In other words, he wants to Americanize the Muslim world in the way that counts—by promoting our political institutions. You can see what Republicans object to, though: He says nothing about promoting the filibuster or repealing the Fourteenth Amendment.

Imam Rauf’s revisionism extends so far as to trash most putatively Islamic states—since 656 C.E., that is, when “the Muslims succumbed to dynastic rule, a paradigm of governance that did not display Islamic religious values.” No wonder it’s been a rough 13+ centuries for Islam ever since. But the moment, he argues, is ripe for American Muslims, for “no contradiction exists between Islam’s theology and the longing of many Muslims for democratic values and equality of opportunity. … Islam’s theology and jurisprudence demand it.” That is, the American system is the answer to an Islamic prayer.

The book closes with an appendix containing a fatwa issued by five Muslim clerics on September 27, 2001, at the request of the most senior Muslim chaplain in the American armed forces. Ending his book with a fatwa! Yes! Cunningly, it’s a “Fatwa Permitting U. S. Muslim Military Personnel to Participate in Afghanistan War Effort.”

What’s Right with Islam, by the way, was published by HarperSanFrancisco, which last I looked is owned by Rupert Murdoch.

Does he know what kind of poison bears his imprimatur?

The Stock Market is Not a Good Bet Now

The stock market has been a disaster this year. Something I predicted at the end of January. My prediction was based upon the theory that as January goes, so goes the entire year. It is an old theory that has been recited annually. This past January brought on another batch of magazines and newspapers that retold that theory. Even Eric Tyson, who writes all those Dummies books on finance, disagrees with the theory.

Perhaps the theory won’t be valid for 2010 but it certainly appears to be following the path that January predicted. The S&P 500 graph supports my prediction. Click the graph for an enlargement.

From Morningstar on August 20, 2010: “U.S. stocks declined Friday on light summer trading volumes, sending the Dow Jones Industrial Average to its second consecutive week of losses as concerns about economic growth weighed on investor sentiment.”

From the New York Times on August 21, 2010: “Investors withdrew a staggering $33.12 billion from domestic stock market mutual funds in the first seven months of this year, according to the Investment Company Institute, the mutual fund industry trade group. Now many are choosing investments they deem safer, like bonds.”

Quotation of the day from the New York Times on their emailed Today’s Headlines dated August 22, 2010: “For a lot of ordinary people, the economic recovery does not feel real.” LOREN FOX, an analyst at a New York research firm, describing investors who are pulling out of the stock market at a striking rate.

320 Pound Woman!

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The question is, What does a 320 pound woman look like?

Are you imagining this woman?

Got it?

Now, before you look at her pictures, get a mental image of what you think a woman who weighs 320 looks like….�
�

�

Ready?

�

Not what you were expecting, was it??!!

The tallest and biggest woman in the world lives in Holland .

She is 7’4″ and weighs 320

What a relief!

Now we ALL know we aren’t overweight, just too short!

A Season of Fear

Howard Fineman is a regular contributor to Newsweek. This is an interesting read. It is a bit sarcastic.

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The GOP’s shortsighted immigration play.

If we had any sense, the fall elections would be about just one thing: the economy. But we do not have any sense. We are facing what Wall Street would call the triple witching hour. Republicans have their finger on three social-demographic hot buttons. The first is illegal immigration (in proposing a review of the 14th Amendment), and the second is Islam in America (in objecting to the mosque at ground zero). They won’t be able to avoid pushing the third, race, even if they wanted to, given that the two leading congressional Democrats facing ethics charges are African-American. The Democrats, in response, label the GOP xenophobic and intolerant and those are the nice words. If Barack Obama’s inauguration could it have been only 19 months ago was a moment of proud, blessed calm, we are now looking at a nasty, community-shredding season of fear.

Given where Republicans and come November, maybe the country are headed, I wanted to interview a well-known Republican of color. Rep. John Boehner was out of town, so I called former representative J. C. Watts of Oklahoma. He’d risen from rural poverty to the starring role on the Sooners football team and served in Congress from 1995 to 2003. He supported Sen. John McCain, but he was a proud witness at Obama’s swearing in. Unlike me, he had no illusions about what it meant. I’d lived too much history, and had seen too much discrimination, to see that day as a new world, he says. Events have validated his skepticism. We have a political and media culture, based in Washington, in which no one wants to study things peel the onion before they speak. Instead, they just play to the base to get them worked up. That’s what’s happening on all these issues.

The foremost example is immigration. No longer content merely to advocate for the arrest and deportation of illeglas(see: Arizona), conservative cooks in the constitutional meth lab have concocted a much stronger intoxicant: rewriting the 14th Amendment to get rid of birthright citizenship (never mind that enacting the 14th Amendment during Reconstruction is something the GOP brags about on its Web site). The plan feeds straight into the cortex of Tea Party constituents: amending the amendment would end a supposed wave of anchor babies born to mothers who fly to the U.S. like malevolent storks to inject aliens into our bloodstream.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell wants to have hearings. He regards himself as a cautious constitutionalist, but he can’t resist a red-hot hot button when he sees one, especially if it might help protect the Senate candidate in his home state of Kentucky, Tea Partier Rand Paul. Republicans focus on Chinese anchor-baby cases, but the larger message isn’t lost on tens of millions of Hispanic voters. So whatever gains this issue helps the GOP make today and they might not be insignificant could cost the party tomorrow, Watts says. I was just with some Republican Hispanic leaders in many ways, the future of our party and they told me they were heartbroken. They think we’re taking the legs right out from under them.

Fears of the other not to mention media concentration in New York City provide staying power to the GOP’s focus on the Islamic community center planned for a site near ground zero. Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich continue to push the issue; most Democrats continue to avoid it. And while Republicans are careful to avoid any hint of racial language about the ethics cases, the GOP machinery churns out compendiums of coverage of Reps. Charlie Rangel and Maxine Waters, whose congressional trials, inconveniently for the Democrats, are scheduled for this fall. Rush Limbaugh taunts Rangel by noting that the president has wished aloud that the congressman would retire. Limbaugh also said that Maxine Waters is just Charlie Rangel in a skirt, meaning well, who knows, but it wasn’t supposed to be nice.

Will all of this work for the Republicans? In spite of the sound and fury or, perhaps, because of it maybe not. With the economy sliding into a potential double-dip recession, the GOP would be better off focusing on the administration’s economic track record, or lack thereof. Republicans also risk backing themselves into a demographic corner. They can’t afford to be the party of white people who fear everyone else (nor can the Democrats be the party who calls everyone who disagrees with it racist). We’ve all got to take our time and think clearly before we speak on these matters, says Watts. Now that would make sense.

Howard Fineman is also the author of The Thirteen American Arguments: Enduring Debates That Define and Inspire Our Country.