--- On Mon, 12/29/08, Ismail Lagardien <ilagardien at yahoo.com> wrote: From: Ismail Lagardien <ilagardien at yahoo.com> Subject: [lbo-talk] US CIVIL WAR in 2010? To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Date: Monday, December 29, 2008, 9:47 AM
MOSCOW -- For a decade, Russian academic Igor Panarin has been predicting the U.S. will fall apart in 2010. For most of that time, he admits, few took his argument -- that an economic and moral collapse will trigger a civil war and the eventual breakup of the U.S. -- very seriously. Now he's found an eager audience: Russian state media. In recent weeks, he's been interviewed as much as twice a day about his predictions. "It's a record," says Prof. Panarin. "But I think the attention is going to grow even stronger.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123051100709638419.html
Aluta Continua!
________________________________ From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> To: lbo-talk <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Sent: Monday, 22 December, 2008 12:19:37 Subject: [lbo-talk] excellent rant
<http://gawker.com/5115636/barney-frank-unsurprisingly-doesnt-care-for-rick-warren>
Barney Frank, Unsurprisingly, Doesn't Care for Rick Warren By Pareene, 10:56 AM on Mon Dec 22 2008, 1,191 views
Guess who is not happy with the Rick Warren invocation? Barney Frank, one of the country's three openly gay congresspeople.
“Giving that kind of mark of approval and honor to someone who has frankly spoken in ways I and many others have found personally very offensive, I thought that was a mistake for the president-elect to do,” said Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat, today on CNN’s “Late Edition.”
Of course no one needs to please Barney Frank and his constituency, because you can pretty much take them for granted (liberal Massachusetts residents, not all the gays). Hooray for politics! Of course it's only symbolic and we can all have disagreements as proud loyal Americans but still get along, right? Whatever, fuck that.
In "symbolically" "reaching out" to someone you "don't necessarily agree with on everything" you are actually legitimizing his bigotry as acceptable. Which it isn't. Furthermore however "purely symbolic" this little invocation is, Warren has done tangible, actual, real-life non-symbolic work fighting against gay rights, and this sort of shit just increases his political capital and ability to do more actual non-symbolic work fighting against gay rights. It sucks. It's also not too surprising, because Obama doesn't support gay marriage, which is a stupid and wrong position, but he's an incrementalist, so it's understandable, even if we all wish he was a big hippie utopian radical free-love socialist. But the Warren pick is an incremental step back, when there are a thousand gay-friendly pastors and ministers out there who could use the publicity more.
If "no red or blue America" post-partisanship means the explicit endorsement of a bigot pastor, a useless pork-happy Republican heading the DoT as we embark on the biggest infrastructure program of a generation, and an economic team full of the guys who found common ground with the Reaganites back in the day only to then scorch and salt that common ground, the ground we were all trying to grow money in, then we'll take the divisive and damaging politics of bitter partisanship, Mr. President-elect! ___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
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