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We had that threat and we survived it. Later we found out we had another threat to our way of life, and that was al Qaeda. We found that out on 9/11.

But I firmly believe this — it's not just, you know, sort of a dramatic statement that a person would make to get press or something, or ink. I believe this with all my heart. The greatest threat to the United States today, the greatest threat to our liberty, the greatest threat to the Constitution of the United States, the greatest threat to our way of life, everything we believe in, the greatest threat to the country that was put together by the Founding Fathers is the guy that is in the White House today.

--Tom Tancredo, Republican Rep. from Colorado from January 3, 1999 to January 3, 2009.

"What Apple really thinks about its customers."

Glenn Greenwald has really done some excellent blogging over at Salon. His post "Octavia Nasr's firing and what The Liberal Media allows" got me to thinking:

CNN yesterday ended the 20-year career of Octavia Nasr, its Atlanta-based Senior Middle East News Editor, because of a now-deleted tweet she wrote on Sunday upon learning of the death of one of the Shiite world's most beloved religious figures: "Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah . . . . One of Hezbollah's giants I respect a lot." That message spawned an intense fit of protest from Far Right outlets, Thought Crime enforcers, and other neocon precincts, and CNN quickly (and characteristically) capitulated to that pressure by firing her. The network -- which has employed a former AIPAC official, Wolf Blitzer, as its primary news anchor for the last 15 years -- justified its actions by claiming that Nasr's "credibility" had been "compromised." Within this episode lies several important lessons about media "objectivity" and how the scope of permissible views is enforced.

Beyond journalism, speech codes concerning the Middle East are painfully biased and one-sided . . . Does anyone ever suffer career-impeding injuries of this type -- the way Nasr and Thomas also just have -- for expressing anti-Muslim or anti-Arab views? No. The speech prohibitions and thought crimes on the Middle East all run in one direction: to enforce "pro-Israel" orthodoxies. Does this long list of examples leave room for doubt about that fact?

In American politics, we had the weird case of Trent Lott taking forever for his racist words and actions to catch up to him. Unless there's a delayed reaction for the anti-Arab sentiment found in the media punditry, Greenwald is spot-on. I don't know whether to find it odd that anti-Arab racism is more acceptable than anti-African American racism or expect that we would be more cognizant of anti-black racism after our long history of slavery, Jim Crow, etc.