This is good. Michelle Pilecki of Huffington Post pointed out an article the Canadians are snickering about (and rightly so) about why Toyota decided to build a plant in Canada instead of Alabama or Mississippi despite the fact that Alabama was offering much better subsidies:
The Huffington Post | The Blog: "But [Gerry] Fedchun [president of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers' Association] said much of that extra money would have been eaten away by higher training costs than are necessary for the Woodstock project. He said Nissan and Honda have encountered difficulties getting new plants up to full production in recent years in Mississippi and Alabama due to an untrained - and often illiterate - workforce. In Alabama, trainers had to use 'pictorials' to teach some illiterate workers how to use high-tech plant equipment.
'The educational level and the skill level of the people down there is so much lower than it is in Ontario,' Fedchun said"
Almost as funny, an Alabama newspaper wrote this article defending the massive brainpower of our southern neighbors entitled
Are Alabama workers dumber than Canadians? To dispute this claim, does the paper compare graduation rates? Aptitude tests? Teeth-per-mouth ratios? Nope. They ask a Toyota executive at the company's Huntsville engine plant, the Alabama Development Office Director and the director of Alabama Industrial Development Training. Oddly enough, none of these people agree with the article.
When our local school district was having a tough time (still is) getting a levy passed for an increase in support, I wrote a letter to the editor of our local newspaper. I wanted to get across the idea that public investment mattered. At the end of the letter I needed an example of a state where public investment was not a high priority and low taxes trumped every other concern. The first state name that jumped out at me was Alabama.
I'd apologize for this post to
SJ, but I'm guessing that she probably enjoyed this post more than any non-Alabamians (or whatever the hell you call yourselves).
Whiskey Bar: Send in the Clowns: "Send in the Clowns
It looks like the Cheney administration is finally getting serious about losing the war in Iraq -- it's sending in the radio talk show hosts:
A contingent of conservatives talk radio hosts is headed to Iraq this month on a mission to report 'the truth' about the war: American troops are winning, despite headlines to the contrary.
The 'Truth Tour' has been pulled together by the conservative Web cast radio group Rightalk.com and Move America Forward, a non-profit conservative group backed by a Republican-linked public relations firm in California.
If the Iraqi insurgents are smart -- and most of them are fucking geniuses compared to your average right-wing talk show host -- they'll spread the word: Leave these particular dumb ass infidels alone. (Not that any of them are likely to poke their porcine snouts outside the green zone without a brigade-strength escort. But you never know where the odd mortar round is going to land.)
Why? Because collectively, these guys are an enormously valuable asset to America's enemies -- both because of their utterly brainless support for Al Qaeda's strategy of turning the war against terrorism into a crusade against Islam, and because they've done such a splendid job of setting up the American people to be demoralized and disillusioned by the truth.
Anthony Cordesman, the conservative but reality-based Iraq analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, provides a good thumbnail description of Al Qaeda's war strategy in his most recent report, Iraq's Evolving Insurgency:
The goal of Bin Laden and those like him is not to persuade the US or the West, it is rather to so alienate them from the Islamic and Arab world that the forces of secularism in the region will be sharply undermined, and Western secular influence can be controlled or eliminated. The goal of most Iraqi insurgents is narrower -- drive the US and its allies out of Iraq -- but involve many of the same methods.
As it happens, the paid propagandists of wing nut radio have the same objective -- to promote a clash of civilizations. They do it by playing up every atrocity committed by the insurgents while ignoring every display of massive overkill (like the flattening of Fallujah) committed by the U.S. military, by glorifying torture and degradation (I Heart Gitmo), by demonizing Islam as a "gutter" religion and the Arabs as a subhuman species, and in general by being the loudest, most obnoxious assholes on the face of the earth. Walking billboards for anti-Americanism, in fact.
And they do these things for much the same reason Bin Ladin rants about Zionists and crusaders: because it gets good ratings. Spewing hatred over the airwaves 24/7 keeps the true believers in a permanent froth, drowning out any doubts about the party line and the party elite. This, in turn, makes it easer to paint dissent as treason and criticism of the Cheney administration as support for terrorism. It's all fairly conventional totalitarian stuff -- which is why I tend to think of wing nut radio as the living embodiment of Ingsoc's slogan: Ignorance is Strength."
Billmon: "I'm not a big fan of patriotism, at least not as most Americans understand the word. Patriotism is just another word for nationalism, and nationalism in my book is the modern equivalent of the black plague -- an incubator of xenophobia at its least, a killer of millions at its absolute worst. And we've seen enough of the absolute worst over the past century to understand where nationalism could ultimately lead: the extinction of the entire human race.
Still, there are emotional attachments to home -- to the familiar, the dear, the remembered -- that go deeper than the intellect and pull harder than reason. Tribal loyalty is a powerful thing. On the morning of 9/11, I was as much a patriot as any man or woman alive, and would have greedily torn Bin Ladin to pieces with my own hands to avenge 'our' dead.
But hatred and revenge are patriotism's curse, not its justification. When Lincoln spoke of 'mystic chords of memory' and urged his countrymen to put their common heritage ahead of their political divisions, he wasn't appealing to their tribal loyalties, but their loyalty to an ideal: democratic government under the law. If American patriotism has any claim to be an exception to the general run of blind national chauvinism, it has to be found in that idea. If America is to be an exceptional nation, one worth glorifying above all others, it has to be because of the quality of her justice and the strength of her democracy -- not because of the language she speaks, or the God she worships or the color of her skin. And not because of her material wealth or military power or imperial ambitions. Least of all those."
