This week has been good for Scott McAdams, the mayor of Sitka, Alaska, and the Democratic nominee for Senate. That's because Republican voters selected a far-right Tea Party candidate, Joe Miller, to run against him. Buoyed by Sarah Palin's endorsement, Miller defeated incumbent Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski in the primary.
Now McAdams has plenty of political playing field to claim, with Miller taking positions against unemployment benefits and Social Security and against abortion even in the case rape or incest. Last night on the show, McAdams sounded struck a populist note. He told us:
You know, so many folks in this country have been off-shored, outsourced, free-traded and deregulated to death. And as Alaska's next United States senator, I will go fight for working people.
We'd love to have Joe Miller on the show as well. Fingers crossed.
Arizona Governor Jan Brewer has yanked all of her campaign advertising from the local CBS affiliate that has been investigating possible conflicts of interest on her staff. Ms. Brewer, a Republican, became a household name this year after signing Arizona's SB1070, the draconian "Paper, please" anti-immigration law.
As CBS station KPHO-TV has revealed, two of Governor Brewers advisers, Paul Senseman and Chuck Coughlin, have extensive ties to a private prison company called the Corrections Corporation of America, CCA. As a prison operator in Arizona, that company stands to benefit from every person detained under SB1070.
Now the Brewer campaign tells us it has stopped advertising on KPHO because of its ongoing investigations into the governor. Coughlin told us that Ms. Brewer herself was personally involved in that decision. "Absolutely," he told us. "It's her campaign."
Reporter Morgan Loew tells us his bosses shield the editorial staff from advertising concerns, as they should. Governor Brewer's attack on journalism notwithstanding, his digging into the forces behind SB1070 seems bound to continue.
We've all been there. After the exhausting process of drinking beer well into the daylight hours, then one must pivot to the equally arduous work of shoving fried food into one's mouth.
If only these two rituals could be combined somehow.
Wish granted!
Now entering the pantheon of great American innovators is Mark Zable, inventor of deep-fried beer. After three years of arduous testing, Zable has devised a method of inserting beer into a ravioli-esque square of pretzel dough and flash frying it for about 20 seconds.
Result? Multiple cravings subdued! And? You can eat these bad boys with your fingers.
Zable will sell his fried beer at a price of five bucks for five squares at the upcoming Texas State Fair, which last year, introduced Fried Butter to the American Eating Public.
First, Focus on the Family comes out against anti-bullying programs in American schools -- because they're gay.
Next, an elementary school in Australia rewrites the words to "Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree," an ode to a bird that includes line "Gay your life must be." The principal tells the Herald Sun, "I just suggested to kids, 'Nowadays that can mean different things, so let's just sing a fun old time.' " He adds that some kids use "gay" to bully each other around, and he wanted to avoid that.
(Crusader Hillis of Australian gay-advocacy group Also Foundation wins the Thick Skin Award for calling the Kookaburra bowdlerizing absurd and saying, "Kids in schoolgrounds say 'That's so gay' and that's all fine. That's just the way that language is.")
Vanity Fair rips into Sarah Palin today for the better part of a jillion pages. It's full-on scorched earth. If you're looking for facts, writer Michael Joseph Gross concludes that the Missouri political action committee Preserving American Liberty paid Palin most of the $126,000 it reported in expenses -- for a single speech in May. Gross also reports that Sarah and Todd Palin throw things like tin cans at each other in epic fights.
But really, who's in this one for the facts-facts? Gross writes of this self-styled politician for ordinary people:
Palin does not always treat those ordinary people well, however--it depends on who is watching. Of the many famous people who have stayed at the Hyatt in Wichita (Cher, Reba McEntire, Neil Young), Sarah Palin ranks as the all-time worst tipper: $5 for seven bags. But the bellhops had it good in Kansas, compared with the bellman at another midwestern hotel who waited up until past midnight for Palin and her entourage to check in--and then got no tip at all for 10 bags. He was stiffed again at checkout time. The same went for the maids who cleaned Palin's rooms in both places--no tip whatsoever. The only time I heard of Palin giving a generous tip was in St. Joseph, Michigan, after the owner of Kilwin's chocolate shop, on State Street, sent a CARE package to Palin's suite, and Palin walked to the store to say thank you. She also wanted to buy more boxes of candy to take home. When the owner would not accept her money, Palin, encircled by the crowd that had jammed the store to get a glimpse of her, pressed a hundred-dollar bill into the woman's hand, saying, "This is for the staff." That Ben Franklin was the talk of State Street the whole rest of the day.
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) has come out in support of the planned Islamic community center in lower Manhattan, Park51, the supposed Ground Zero mosque. Mr. Hatch told the Fox affiliate in Salt Lake City that it's clear many people object to the project. "But as far as their right to build that mosque, they have that right," he said, demonstrating himself to be one of the grownups in the Republican Party on this issue.
Mr. Hatch, a Mormon, has been a major supporter of the rights of religious groups to set up camp without discrimination by government. He sponsored the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000, or RLUIPA, which explicitly protects religious groups from discrimination in community zoning.
Over the past decade, RLUIPA has become a key plank in the platform of right-wing groups like the American Center for Law and Justice. That group, in particular, devotes a chunk of its website to Mr. Hatch's law, though it seems to want it to apply only to Christian churches. Freedom-loving ACLJ has actually gone to court against Park51. Yesterday, nonstop chief counsel Jay Sekulow sent out a fundraising pitch that's in direct contradiction to the beliefs of his hero, Sen. Hatch, and has a much less direct connection to the facts.
Today is the first day since March 2003 that the U.S. has not been actively at war in Iraq. On Tuesday, President Barack Obama marked the end of combat in Iraq with an Oval Office speech thanking troops for their sacrifice.
It was never clear why we were there in the first place -- President Bush's rationale for the war shifted from links to 9-11, to weapons of mass destruction, to creating a new democracy, to Saddam Hussein being a bad man. But there were no links to 9-11 or weapons of mass destruction. Yes, Saddam Hussein was a bad man, but as Richard Engel told us last night, there is still no real democracy in Iraq and the country has become a "basket case."
On the occasion of President Obama's speech, the Republican leadership decided they and President Bush should get more credit, especially for the surge in troops that was supposed to lead to an Iraqi government and hasn't.
In the opening segment of last night's show, Rachel Maddow made this assessment of the war in Iraq:
Two American things have been accomplished in Iraq. Tens of thousands, more than a million Americans served their country in a horrible war for seven and a half years under horrible circumstances and under political leadership that was not honest about why they had been sent there. Those Americans are to be honored for what they did and what they gave and they are to be taken care of as veterans now that they're home.
The other accomplishment in Iraq is that we have finally found a way to leave, to get combat troops out, now.
Those two accomplishments belong to this president, who's overseeing the withdrawal from Iraq, and to the people who served -- the people who served honorably for these seven and a half long years.
Credit for all the rest of it, for the made-up reasons for going in, for going in in the first place, for letting Afghanistan spill out of control in favor of this war, for the constant revisions for the justifications for war to obfuscate the craven petty radicalism that really started -- Republicans, you guys can go right ahead and take that credit. Go right ahead. Credit where credit is due.
Republicans, this one's yours. It's got your name on it.
Special Immigrant Visas for Iraqi and Afghan Translators/Interpreters "Anyone who, on or after October 1, 2008, files a Form I-360 petition for special immigrant status with block "k" checked in Part 2, claiming status as "Special Immigrant Afghanistan or Iraq National who worked with the U.S. Armed Forces as a translator" will be subject to the FY 2009 annual fiscal year limitation of 50 special immigrant visas. Please note that demand for visas in this category exceeds annual limits and you may wish to consider one of the following categories."
Ok, this got a little long. The contest is explained at the end. The short version is that an Amazonian tribe uses verb suffixes as a means of indicating the source of their information. Your challenge is to come up with verb suffixes for English to make it easier to know where a person is coming from with what they're talking about (and whether they're worth listening to).
The piece is interesting enough, pointing out properties of a language will be reflected in a native speaker's thinking. If you speak a language that assigns genders to nouns, then you're likely to think of those nouns in the context of the gender your language assigns them.
That's simple enough, but the real gem comes in an example toward the end about the Matses people in Amazonian Peru:
For instance, some languages, like Matses in Peru, oblige their speakers, like the finickiest of lawyers, to specify exactly how they came to know about the facts they are reporting. You cannot simply say, as in English, "An animal passed here." You have to specify, using a different verbal form, whether this was directly experienced (you saw the animal passing), inferred (you saw footprints), conjectured (animals generally pass there that time of day), hearsay or such. If a statement is reported with the incorrect "evidentiality," it is considered a lie. So if, for instance, you ask a Matses man how many wives he has, unless he can actually see his wives at that very moment, he would have to answer in the past tense and would say something like "There were two last time I checked." After all, given that the wives are not present, he cannot be absolutely certain that one of them hasn't died or run off with another man since he last saw them, even if this was only five minutes ago. So he cannot report it as a certain fact in the present tense. Does the need to think constantly about epistemology in such a careful and sophisticated manner inform the speakers' outlook on life or their sense of truth and causation?
To answer that question with the thesis of the article, a person who speaks a language that requires constant mindfulness of how he knows what he knows would have to be not just mindful of source but sensitive to the avoidance of sourcing. Can you imagine if our language required us to be so much as aware of the source of what we say?
"On the occasion of American Bird Conservancy's "Friends with Benefit," Erin McKeown wrote a song inspired by and with the support of Rachel Maddow. This video documents that song and the story behind it (despite being of crappy video quality)."
Big thanks to @erinmckeown for doing the legwork on finding this (and performing the song).
Also thanks to @Aliya for having the presence of mind to record it.
After President Obama's speech on the Iraq War tonight, Rachel Maddow will take a look at how we got to this point. We'll see you for that at 9 Eastern. For now, pictures from Rachel's trip to Baghdad this month.
September 1st marks the 25th anniversary of deep-sea explorer Robert Ballard's discovery of the Titanic, the notoriously "unsinkable" and massive ocean liner sent to dizzying depths at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean by a rogue iceberg in the early hours of April 15, 1912. The Titanic took with it the lives of 1,500 passengers, countless artifacts, and too many questions. The story, and the rusty, haunting evidence left behind, is mystifying and discomfiting, the stuff of legends. The Titanic's eerie presence at the bottom of Atlantic remains a constant, silent reminder of the consequences of excessive pride and human error.
RMS Titanic Inc. and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, have formed the new Expedition Titanic , which has begun its trek about 2.5 miles below the water surface off the shore of Newfoundland, using imaging technologies and sonar tools to create a complete map of the ship. And they have created a website to allow fans to "explore" the scene, complete with an opening animation that brings you to the depths of the wreck! Total geek-out.
Despite Hurricane Danielle's interference with plans as of late, scientists have been able to map out a 2-by-3 mile area around the ship (the bow and stern are split in two, and rest almost 2,000 feet apart). In addition to providing historical contexts for different parts of the ship, Expedition Titanic has begun to post videos of the rust-covered ship, clearer and sharper than ever before.
The mogul behind the great salmonella egg recall has piled up health and safety violations dating back to the mid-1990s, and his problems stretch back much further. Austin "Jack" DeCoster is the principal owner of Wright County Egg, which has recalled 380 million eggs this month. A second farm connected to DeCoster, Hillandale, has recalled 170 million eggs.
Conditions at DeCoster's operations in Turner, Maine, were so bad that in the 1970s he almost single-handedly inspired a state law banning kids from working around dangerous machines, reports the Portland Press-Herald. The paper notes that DeCoster paid $2 million to settle Department of Labor violations in 1997. Two years later, DeCoster paid $5 million to settle a class-action suit by underpaid workers, some of whom logged 80-hour weeks without overtime. And in 2002, DeCoster paid $3.2 million to settle a suit by Mexican workers who said they were given worse housing and working conditions than their white American colleagues. DeCoster has been accused of running an "agricultural sweatshop" and called a "habitual violator" of environmental laws by the Iowa Supreme Court.
To encourage recruitment to the White House prepares facilities to businesses and asking Congress to reduce the tax burden on middle class. The President: "Republicans stop with the filibuster"
Ok, Google Translator wasn't exactly at peak performance with that one but "Stop with the filibuster" would have been a great (English) line.
The story goes to their coverage of Obama's Rose Garden speech yesterday, which barely registered a blip in the media here and definitely not with such powerful expression as in Italian via Google.
ADDING: Just for interest's sake, here are some of the U.S. headlines on that story:
(iCasualties chart of troop injuries by state. Click to enlarge.)
In his address on the close of combat in the Iraq War tonight, President Obama is expected to "celebrate" the "tremendous sacrifice" -- press secretary Robert Gibbs' words -- made by American troops. Today at Fort Bliss, in Texas, the president told them:
The country appreciates you. I appreciate you. The most pride i take in my job is being your commander-in-chief. It also means that as we transition in Iraq, that the one thing I will insist upon for however long I remain president of the United States is that we serve you and your families as well as you serve us.
The president said his administration will devote special services for mental health needs and for traumatic brain injuries, wounds that have become hallmarks of the war in Iraq. The chart by iCasualities, above, shows the totals for troops wounded by state. iCasualties counts 4,416 deaths among U.S. service members. The worst year for American troops was 2007, with 961 Americans lost. Considering that President Bush bulled his way into seven years of war on the basis of false intelligence, theirs has been a tremendous sacrifice indeed.
We'll bring you President Obama's speech at 8 p.m. Eastern, followed by special coverage from Rachel Maddow at 9 p.m. Eastern.
(Matt Stoner's the kid in the middle, circa 1980 in northern Arizona.)
Matt Stoner, a third-generation Arizonan, sends this story about an illegal immigrant in Arizona who left his wife and baby daughter to go back to Mexico and fill out the paperwork required to become a citizen. The Arizona State graduate got through the system in 361 days, not because that's the way it usually works, but because Sen. Dick Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois and sponsor of the Dream Act, intervened.
Stoner writes that the political climate has changed in his home state:
So many people have moved to Arizona over the last 50 years, it's common that people joke about not knowing native-born Arizonans. Now the term "native" in the immigration debate has a whole different meaning and one that frankly I find disturbing. So to be clear, I am not a nativist. I researched Russell Pearce and his website claims he is a fifth-generation Arizonian, but he is definitely a nativist. I was actually surprised he tracks his family history that far back.
My central thesis is that "legal" migration of people from the Northeast, South and Midwest has dramatically impacted the current political climate in Arizona. These Americans don't have an appreciation for Arizona's history and heritage of not only Hispanics but also Native Americans. My other main point is people like Sarah Palin, the Minuteman militia, other outsiders, etc., who are commenting on Arizona don't have a clue about the state or the border. I feel they are hijacking the critical issue for their own political advantage. They are riding the populist anti-immigration wave that is so common to American history during bad economic times. Xenophobia is so in vogue, it sickens me.
The Arizona I know and love, is not the one you hear much about and sometimes I fear that I'll never again see that Arizona. Instead you hear about the border, drug mules, etc. I have to tell you living in Tucson for the last 12 years, I have not seen an increase in crime or anything like the rhetoric of the "number 2 kidnapping capital of the world" in Phoenix, where my parents live.
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is the great conservative hope of the Republican Party in this era. This is the man whom Fox News host Glenn Beck says he wants to vote for for president in 2012.
Since last week, Governor Christie has been trying to explain why an error on an application cost his state $400 million in federal Race to the Top funding for education. Staffers were supposed to answer a question with data from the '08-'09 fiscal year, and instead gave data from the 2011 year.
Christie started by blaming President Obama, saying the Commander-in-Chief would have to come to New Jersey and explain why administrators weren't given a second chance. Then video surfaced of Obama administration officials in fact giving New Jersey a second chance and the state education commissioner still not having the right answer.
Governor Christie then fired Bret Schundler, in what Schundler describes as the governor hitting a "groove," a rafters-rattling tantrum. Schundler says he'd told Christie how the mistake happened before the governor ever started blaming President Obama. And Schundler, a longtime Republican loyalist, is releasing e-mail that supports his side of the story.
"It's not every time that the guy thrown under the bus is still yelling from underneath the bus," Rachel Maddow said on the show last night. This one may not be on the national radar yet, as reporter Charles Stile of the Record of Bergen told us. But you can bet Schundler's cries have reached Republican national headquarters.
This is the most sensible thing I've read about the repeated poll results showing a disturbing number of Republicans are unable to understand that Barack Obama is not a Muslim:
People in fact may voice an attitude not as an affirmed belief – a statement of perceived factual reality – but rather as what my colleagues and I have taken to calling "expressed belief" – a statement intended to send a message, not claim a known fact.
It's human nature. Some people who strongly oppose a person or proposition will take virtually any opportunity to express that antipathy. Offer a negative attribute, they'll grab it – not to express their "belief," in its conventional meaning, but rather to throw verbal stones at that which they so thoroughly dislike.
In short, people who don't like who or what you're polling about will answer the poll in a way that reflects that negativity regardless of the literal meaning of the answers.
You're welcome to disagree, of course, but I find this much more reassuring than dismissing the percentage of respondents with incorrect beliefs as idiots. (But yes, I've also seen the videos of actual, confirmable idiots, so I know they're out there.)
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