Your one stop pundit shop.
Eugene Robinson on the wolves in sheep clothing:
... according to The Post, that an entity called Americans for Job Security has made nearly $7.5 million in "independent" campaign expenditures this year, with 88 percent going to support Republican candidates. Who's putting up all that money? You'll never know, because Americans for Job Security -- which calls itself a "business association" -- doesn't have to disclose the source of its funding.
Likewise, the American Future Fund has spent $6.8 million on campaigns this year, with every penny of that money benefiting Republicans. The patriotically named group -- and, really, who doesn't want America to have a future? -- is based in Iowa and has never before been a big player in the Great Game of campaign finance. Now, suddenly, it has a king's ransom to throw around.
Whose money is it? The American Future Fund won't tell you.
The Supreme Court made all this possible with its ruling early this year, in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ... It's bad enough that public offices can be purchased. It's unconscionable that we can't even know who the buyers are.
Richard Cohen:
... it is the language of our time. It is the language of Glenn Beck, who fetishizes about liberals and calls Barack Obama a racist. It is the language of rage that fuels too much of the Tea Party and is the sum total of gubernatorial hopeful Carl Paladino's campaign message in New York. It is all this talk about "taking back America" (from whom?) and this inchoate fury at immigrants and, of course, this raw anger at Muslims, stoked by politicians such as Newt Gingrich and Rick Lazio, the latter having lost the GOP primary to Paladino for, among other things, not being sufficiently angry. "I'm going to take them out," Paladino vowed at a Tea Party rally in Ithaca, N.Y.
Back in the Vietnam War era, the left also used ugly language and resorted to violence. But the right, as is its wont, stripped the antiwar movement of its citizenship. It turned dissent into treason, which, in a way, was the worst treason of all. It made dissidents into the storied "other" who had nothing in common with the rest of us. They were not opponents; they were the enemy: Fire!
On my bike, I recalled those days and wondered if they have not returned.
Michael Gerson explains how President Obama drove away white Evangelicals -- 73% of whom supported John McCain -- because they're not sure what religion he is (hint: he's not a Muslim), they really like Glenn Beck, Obama didn't embrace faith-based initiatives, and he supported health care reform (which apparently should be made available via a wing and a prayer).
Bob Herbert isn't a big John Boehner fan:
I’ve always thought of Mr. Boehner as one of the especially sleazy figures in a capital seething with sleaze ...
Mr. Boehner is the minority leader in the House and would most likely become speaker if the Republicans win control in next month’s elections. He has stopped funneling corporate money to his colleagues on the House floor. (It is now illegal.) But nothing else has changed, except that his already outsized influence-peddling has grown. The amount of democracy-destroying money that manages to make its way into the sleazy environs of what is now known as Boehner Land has increased to a staggering degree.
Derrick Z. Jackson:
The Tyler Clementi tragedy showed how America has come a long way but still has a long way to go. The suicide of the Rutgers University freshman, after his intimate encounter with a male friend was streamed live on the Internet by his roommate and a classmate, resulted in a campus outpouring far beyond gay and straight boundaries. [...]
But as this suicide so profoundly demonstrated, the Internet is a vehicle for which we yet have no agreed value system, no clear rules of civility. It was disturbing to read in the New York Times coverage, “students debated whether the surreptitious broadcast was a thoughtless prank or crime.’’ It was unsettling to see USA Today ask out loud, “Was what happened to Clementi a hate crime, bullying, a prank or all three?’’
We need to speed to a place where the question need not be asked. The digital age is no place for thoughtless pranks, when humiliations streamed around the world can haunt victims forever.
H.D.S. Greenway:
... Americans should be alarmed at the rising anti-Islamic tide that threatens so much of what this country stands for. The shameful concept that a building legally bought and paid for in Manhattan can’t be used as an Islamic center because it stands some blocks from the site of a terrorist act; the silly claims by some members of the Texas Board of Education that textbooks are biased toward Islam; the outrageous antics of a cleric who threatened to burn the Koran; and the flap over whether some Wellesley school children on a field trip to a mosque kneeled during prayer, are all examples of a truly upsetting trend.
Ted Nugent continues to litter the pages of The Washington Times, which granted, amounts to a speck in a landfill. I'll save you some time: government, bad, Democrats, worse, people, angry, Tea Party, good.
The increasingly insane Washington Times editorial board has jumped on the Sharia-law-is-coming bandwagon ... and then some:
Many Americans believe this conquest is well underway, if not already secretly completed. President Obama was concerned enough about perceptions of his faith to address the question at one of his recent "backyard discussions" in New Mexico. Mr. Obama said he is "a Christian by choice," which may or may not assuage the concerns of those who believe he is a Muslim by birth.
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