corporatists masquerading as conservatives

Jonathan Chait in TNR points out that conservatives' rhetoric and the GOP policies (with control of Executive and Legislative branches of government) are worlds apart:

What [Republicans] hated about the Medicare bill was the part about helping senior citizens buy medicine. When the government gives money to sick people, you see, that's incipient socialism. When it gives money to drug companies, doctors, and employers, that's the free market in action.

All this is in keeping with the recent pattern of Republican governance. Last year, the Associated Press conducted a remarkable study showing how federal spending patterns had changed since the GOP took over Congress in 1995. Republicans did not shrink federal spending, it found, they merely transferred it, from poorer Democratic districts to wealthier Republican ones. This, the A.P. reported, "translates into more business loans and farm subsidies, and fewer public housing grants and food stamps." In 1995, Democratic districts received an average of $35 million more in federal largesse than Republican districts, which seems roughly fair given that Democratic districts have more people in need of government aid. By 2001, the gap had not only reversed, it had increased nearly twentyfold, with GOP districts receiving an average of $612 million more than Democratic ones. Justifying this shift, then- Majority Leader Dick Armey said, "To the victor goes the spoils." It would be a worthy slogan for Bush's reelection campaign.

trickle down

Dismantling FDR's legacy is an ideological goal of conservatives. Since it will never happen (the New Deal was the foundation upon which our middle class was built and remains essential to the fabric of our society), they are trying for symbolic victories instead - like replacing FDR with Reagan on the dime. Somehow I think that Nancy Reagan's objections will be irrelevant:

Nancy Reagan voiced her opposition Friday to an attempt by Republican lawmakers to put Ronald Reagan's likeness on the dime in place of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

"While I can understand the intentions of those seeking to place my husband's face on the dime, I do not support this proposal and I am certain Ronnie would not," the former first lady said in a statement released Friday.

"When our country chooses to honor a great President such as Franklin Roosevelt by placing his likeness on our currency, it would be wrong to remove him and replace him with another," she said. "It is my hope that the proposed legislation will be withdrawn."

Watch for similar attempts in a few decades to replace Clinton's legacy of achievement, peace, and prosperity with equally symbolic victories of the Bush mythos. Here's a clue as to the form this might take:

CSS update

fixed a lot of the problems that bugged me before. The site looks gorgeous in Mozilla or Firebird, it looks ok in IE v6, and I haven't tried it in any other browser, your mileage may vary.

Are you still using IE? Just TRY Firebird. Here's a whole list of reasons why. Trust me, you'll be hooked.

well-progressed

fellow Muslim "TheBit" runs a very rigorous group blog devoted to examining Islamic theology from within, ie the perspective of a practicing believer (as opposed to a secular or a self-hating viewpoint). It is with some pleasure that I note the addition of Harun Moghul, whose name will be familiar to any regular readers of alt.muslim.

Harun's latest entry is a great example of the detailed self-examination that so characterizes the blog. Excerpt:

By questioning Islamic law as a project, however, do not believe I advocate a "salad-bowl" religion or the creation of a religion intent only on blind imitation (commonly referred to as "taqleed"). I do believe that, even from the perspective of the Qur'an alone (ignoring for the time being Hadith literature), certain behaviors are licit and certain others are illicit. Yet the more I search for a firm basis upon which to ground these injunctions, the more elusive it seems. What I find instead is that there is another aspect to the very idea of Islam -- submission -- itself, an idea of inevitability, lacking in the fierce optimism that characterizes some presentations of Islam, especially in the West.

We often view Islam as a religion preaching free will (How often do we hear: "La ikraha fi al-deen," there is no compulsion in religion? [2 256]). Yet I am coming to the view that what we ignore is that the religion of Islam offers free choice in only the most fleeting manner. Faith is a mystery, when we look into it. Law is rationalization of the supra-rational, when we consider it. Reality, from the Islamic point of view, really exists at many levels of comprehension, the more thorough of which must (in my view) admit to the possibility that there is no meaningful choice. At least, none that Islam can (or perhaps even should) provide.

From the Islamic point of view, practicing submission is the only reasonable choice before a person. We are able to accept the divinity of the Qur'an through various investigative techniques, but upon accepting its divinity, we are made to understand that divinity itself is incomprehensible. Not to say that it borders nothingness, as is often the Jewish conception, but that though it is a very real presence in our lives, for improving us or punishing us, the Divine is nonetheless beyond human logic. Once making the choice to live Islam, we can use our intellects to advance understandings of Islam, of its injunctions, but we cannot apply our intellects upon Islam itself, as a faith from God, nor can we apply our intellects to see whether or not we have made a free choice.

I don't see these essays as making a specific point, but rather making a series of observations that, upon reflection, become the basis for further self-examination. They are a starting point for questions, not an end point of answers. As such though it is well-representative of and rightful heir to the 14 centuries of Islamic philosophy and analysis of the faith from within - a rich tradition that today's critics of the faith are blissfully ignorant of, and which I consider TheBut, Asim, and Harun to be today's representatives of.

CSS problems

I'm working on the formatting problem - seems to be traced back to a bug in how IE 6 renders CSS. It looks fantastic in Firebird :) It's probably about time I made the site validate, anyway. Look here for a great inspiration.

UPDATE: ok, we now have a table-free pure CSS layout. Still looks best in Firebird or Moz, but if you insist on using IE, it should still be readable :) But - I highly encourage you to try Firebird. Trust me.

Still some layout issues to fix, including the wierd whitespace above and below blockquotes, the refusal of the border between the sidebar and main to display, and the way the text in the main column still wont render the margins I put in. Feel free to suggest CSS tweaks ...

and Jesus was black, too

Meryl Yourish might be disappointed, but I actually found the column on 1920's Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig's polemics against Islam to be intriguing. The specific attacks on Islam are unoriginal, but the historical context is interesting. Most of the polemical attacks against Islam that I was aware of were from Christian sources stemming from ongoing political dispute over the holy lands (Saladin's memory was still fresh), whereas Judaism at the time was centered in Christian Europe.

I do think that Rosenweig's prophecy that "The coming millennium will go down in world history as a struggle between Orient and Occident, between the church and Islam, between the Germanic peoples and the Arabs," was more of a self-fulfilling one, and that his energies might have been better focused on European/Germanic anti-Semitism rather than the Islamic bogeyman.

As Yourish points out, the same columnist has an essay whimsically titled "Mahathir is right: Jews do rule the world"^[1] which goes on to credit Judaism with the invention of democracy, the philosophical framework that made Protestantism possible, and the messianic inspiration of America's founding. Ok, sure, why not? Though the rest of the essay is devoted to specific faults of Arab cultures (because they have no volunteer fire departments or school boards) and the concept of God in Islam (as explained by Jewish polemicist Franz Rosenzweig! quelle surprise), and doesn't really address how the asserted Jewish foundation of the edifice of Western civlization translates into direct rule over the globe by the Elders of Zion. I am sure this will be a topic of a future column.

^[1]I'm glad the columnist isn't Muslim, he would have had to contend with accusations of blood libel (since, by trying to justify Mathahir's claim, he is encouraging violence against Jews by giving Muslims convenient rationalizations with which to pursue their murderous intent. Without which no doubt they would have gone peaceably home to volunteer on their local fire departments and school boards).

marketing desperation

As I have argued earlier, Bush's trip to Iraq was good for the troops. It was an action that stood on its own merits and drew universal praise, even from his political opponents (including Howard Dean and Hillary Clinton).

Of course, not content to let something worthwhile stand on its own, the White House saw the need to (once again) try to spin the trip as part of the Bush Mythos, by emphasising the secrecy and mystery of the trip - by lying through their teeth:

On the flight over [to Iraq], Air Force One had come within sight of a British Airways plane, Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, told reporters on the trip, according to the transcript.

The British Airways pilot radioed over and asked, Mr. Bartlett said, "Did I just see Air Force One?" There was silence from the Air Force One pilot, who then replied, "Gulfstream 5."

There was a longer silence from the British Airways pilot, Mr. Bartlett said, who, seeming to get that he was in on a secret, then said, "Oh."

That's the supposedly liberal New York Times that regurgitated Bartlett's bald lie without scrutiny, by the way. And yes, it IS a lie:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - British Airways said on Monday that none of its pilots made contact with President Bush (news - web sites)'s plane during its secret flight to Baghdad, contradicting White House reports of a mid-air exchange that nearly prompted Bush to call off his trip.

Honor Verrier, a spokeswoman for British Airways in North America, said two BA aircraft were in the area at the time and neither radioed the president's plane to ask if it was Air Force One.

"We have spoken to the British Airways captains who were in the area at the time and neither made comments to Air Force One nor did they hear any other aircraft make the statement over the radio," Verrier said in response to a question from Reuters.

The White House had no immediate comment on the discrepancy.

Bush aides recounted with excitement last week the moment during the flight to Baghdad when they said a BA pilot thought he spotted the president's blue and white Boeing 747 from his cockpit.

This kind of transparent attempt at playing up the drama of Bush's every action is so institutionalized that the Wite House actually thinks it can just lie with abandon and that no one will fact-check them. But it's so trivially easy to do so that the failure of the NYT to even bother is the real surprise here.

The Bush Halo doesn't exist, but the apologists take its existence on faith.

UPDATE: more examples.