This looks great!  Touring the UK from 14 September.

Nationally acclaimed aod are back on the road this autumn with their unique take on Greek Drama and their first full length, no holds barred, comedy – Lysistrata. (Let nothing stop you from seeing them, The Times). Follow our heroine, Lysistrata and the women of Greece in their bawdy crusade to deny their men sex in order to stop a bloody war. As tensions mount – frustrations erupt…..and phalluses reach bursting point! See who wins and if peace is restored, in this thought provoking, riotous and irreverent re-telling of Aristophanes’ masterpiece.

Directed by Mitch Mitchelson of Circus Space and performed using David Stuttard’s hard hitting and muscular adaptation this promises to be an infectious evening of chaos, naughtiness and absurdity…and more than a little bit of razor sharp satire too!

More on Lysistrata from Wiki.

An MP today announced that he was going to do the job he is paid by taxpayers to do. The MP, who represents a constituency, announced that, after only making one brief appearance in the Commons in the last few months, he was planning to return there to vote (though that may have been because the whips were putting pressure on MPs).

Sarcasm aside, former ministers who carry on enjoying the benefits of being an MP without bothering to undertake their most important responsibility (holding the executive to account) should come in for a lot more criticism, whatever party they are from. In many ways, this is no different from claiming phantom/excessive expenses, since they are not doing the job they are supposed to do. Voting in the Commons isn’t the only thing that matters, but there should be plenty of Commons intervention nonetheless. And if ministers want a break after a long and tiring ministerial career, that is fine, since all they need to do is resign.

My latest article for the Guardian went up yesterday. An excerpt:

In fact, as several (left-liberal) bloggers point out, the picture of Hague with his adviser and veiled insinuations first surfaced at the Mail on Sunday on 21 August. The Telegraph followed.

That was immediately used as a springboard by Paul Staines (aka Guido Fawkes) to stir the pot more viciously and submit an FOI request. In a coincidentally symbiotic relationship, both the Daily Mail and Telegraph quickly jumped on that publicity stunt as a hook to ask the questions they really wanted to.

You might think both episodes were about rightwing bloggers, but you’d be wrong. Blogger Stephen Tall nails it: “This was not a ‘political’ blogger acting in isolation, but in concert with two newspapers which are happy to ape the worst tactics of the Guido Fawkes smear-machine when it suits them.”

It partially looks like I’m letting P Staines off the hook. I’m not. He’s responsible for trying to stir the ‘Gordon Brown is mentally insane’ pot relentlessly without anything substantive to go on. The man is unhealthily obsessed with Brown. But what annoys me more is that the mainstream media are happy to regurgitate these smears without any sort of fact-checking or quality-control that the profession is supposed to be out. They’ve not only abdicated their responsibilities – they’re trying to blame bloggers for doing it too.

Further to my recent articles about Fox News’s bankrolling of the Republican Party and Jon Stewart’s exposé of the connections between Fox News and the “Ground Zero Mosque’s” alleged Saudi financier, some more information is continuing to come to light about the sheer scale of what is actually going on behind the scenes.

Firstly, let’s start with Fox News’s connection with the Republicans. It goes far beyond the $1 million which the channel’s parent company News Corp has now been confirmed to have donated to the Republican Party:

Via ‘Media Matters for America’:

“In recent years, at least twenty Fox News personalities have endorsed, raised money, or campaigned for Republican candidates or causes, or against Democratic candidates or causes, in more than 300 instances and in all 50 states. Republican parties and officials have routinely touted these personalities’ affiliations with Fox News to sell and promote their events.”

The rest of the Media Matters article gives a detailed breakdown of exactly who has been involved, what activities they’ve undertaken, dates & locations etc.

Comprehensive details about the exact amount of money involving people associated with Fox News during the 2010 election cycle alone can be read here. Apparently it comes to nearly $50 million to date, with far more pending.

However, this is just the tip of the iceberg. During the past few days, both the New York Times and the New Yorker have published articles revealing the billionaires who are actually bankrolling the “Tea Party” movement and doing everything they can to destroy Barack Obama’s presidency. The details below expand considerably on Sunny’s recent PP article which also mentioned the matter, although that article focused on environmental issues.

As recently discussed on Pickled Politics, last week Jon Stewart and The Daily Show brilliantly exposed the fact that the unnamed person Fox News had been repeatedly claiming was allegedly financing Park51/Cordoba House (aka the “Ground Zero Mosque”) and with implied ties to radical Islamist extremists was actually the Saudi Arabian Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, the second-largest shareholder of Fox News’s parent company News Corp and an individual closely affiliated with News Corp’s primary owner Rupert Murdoch himself. Fox News have subsequently completely dropped their stories about the shadowy “unnamed financier”, and are apparently also refusing to respond to post-Daily Show queries about the matter. Nevertheless, the issue raises the following questions:

· Why is Prince Al-Waheed continuing to work closely with an American news channel which is a) actively involved in pandering to negative stereotypes about Muslims en masse and b) is simultaneously playing an active role in damaging relations between the West (especially the United States) and Muslim populations overseas ?
· Why are Fox News violating the principles of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution and Article 11 of the Treaty of Tripoli, considering that the latter was signed in 1797 directly by the Founding Father & 2nd US president John Adams and ratified & unanimously approved by Congress, and explicitly states that “as the Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion….it has in itself no character of enmity towards the laws, religion, or tranquillity of Musselmen [ie. Muslims]” ?
· Why are Fox News effectively promoting militant Wahhabism as the “default” version of Islam ?
· Why are Fox News persecuting Sufis, the Muslim group which is the most forcefully opposed to Islamist extremism (particularly militant Wahhabism) and whom both Al-Qaeda and the Taliban have a murderous level of hatred for ?
· In summary, why are Fox News effectively doing Al-Qaeda’s dirty work for them ?

Some further facts about Fox News have also subsequently come to light. Despite the channel’s claims of being “fair and balanced” and their repeated denials of any bias towards, or association with, any of the major American political parties, the channel’s parent company, News Corp, has now been confirmed as making a $1 million donation to the Republican Party. This is actually the single largest donation by any corporation, and has a number of ramifications, as summarised in the extracts below:

Does it matter that David Miliband is the ‘heir to Blair‘? Does it matter that David Miliband is thought of as a war criminal?  Does it matter in moral or political terms?

Mr Miliband says his insistence on “due diligence” in high office means his conscience is clear over allegations of a torture “cover-up”, which persist after the last government lost a court battle to prevent the publication of American intelligence reports covering the treatment of Guantanamo Bay detainee Binyam Mohamed by the US in Pakistan in April 2002.

The Liberal Democrats are preparing to use next month’s party conference to embarrass Mr Miliband in a debate claiming Labour “backed” human rights abuses by the Bush administration, including “enforced disappearance, rendition and torture”. Mr Cameron announced a judicial inquiry into Britain’s role in torture and rendition – something Mr Miliband had resisted in his time in office.

As HarpyMarx states:

To supporters of Miliband the elder, ask yourself, how can you back someone whowhinges and whines about the obsession with Iraq, and was complicit in torture who desperately sought through the courts to obstruct and to further cover it up? Do you want this man with blood on his hands to become leader of the Labour Party? Have you  learned nothing from the warmongering and neoliberalism of Blair and Brown? Are you intent on sleepwalking to the election by voting for a man who wants to revamp New Labour, different face same politics (“We don’t need to rewrite Clause IV. We do need a leader who puts it into practice with verve and imagination”…)?

Does it matter whether the next leader of the Labour Party is another war criminal or are there other things that matter more?

If you would like to vote in the leadership election you have until September 8th to join the party.

Hindus worldwide celebrate today as Krishna’s birthday, so “Happy Janmashtami” to PP readers who are marking the occasion.

According to Indian tradition, Krishna was born approximately 5000 years ago, although modern-day historians have estimated that the period of ancient Indian history described in the semi-mythological Mahabharata was more accurately around 3500 years ago. Festivities are held at Hindu temples around the world, including major temples in Britain such as the Swaminarayan temple in Neasden and Bhaktivedanata Manor near Watford. The late George Harrison left the latter building to the associated Hindu sect when he passed away and they usually hold large-scale festivities every year, involving tens of thousands of visitors during the course of several days and including music, free food etc. I’ve been to these annual events many times and they always have a nice, relaxed atmosphere, especially if the summer weather at the time is warm and sunny.

Common Dreams reports:

Last week, an Israeli military court convicted Abdallah Abu Rahmah, whom progressive Zionists have called a “Palestinian Gandhi,” of “incitement” and “organizing and participating in illegal demonstrations” for organizing protests against the confiscation of Palestinian land by the “Apartheid Wall” in the village of Bilin in the West Bank, following an eight month trial, during which he was kept in prison.

The European Union issued a protest. But as far as I am aware, no U.S. official has said anything and no U.S. newspaper columnist has denounced this act of repression; indeed, the U.S. press hasn’t even reported the news.

Many of Israel’s ardent supporters keep demanding where peaceful Palestinians protesters are, and yet remain silent when this kind of stuff happens. More at the Guardian.

(via @TenPercent)

Nadeem Badshah in the Guardian has highlighted the case of a taxi driver who picked up and returned fugitive women to their families. The women, many of whom were fleeing forced marriages or other ‘honour’-based violence, were ambushed by Zakir in return for payments of around £5,000:

While most locals in the tightly knit south Asian community thought Zakir was merely picking up and dropping off passengers each day, his work provided perfect cover to exploit his contacts with fellow drivers and shopkeepers to hunt down runaway teenagers. According to Zakir, some bounty hunters would also befriend officials in housing departments and in the Department for Work and Pensions to get National Insurance numbers – a strategy confirmed by campaigners against forced marriages.

The links with the DWP confirms other, earlier investigations, as often even an entry-level worker will have access to details of hundreds of people in the local area, and can get at those details with just a name/date of birth, without being detected. Nor is Zakir unique, as plenty of other bounty hunters operate in this manner; the article points out that some female bounty hunters will infiltrate women’s refuges posing as victims in order to find their targets.

What can be done about this? Heavy prosecutions are the obvious answer, but how can you stop, for example, DWP workers accessing personal data (even if they cannot transfer it to anything, they can write it down manually), and how can this be monitored?

This is meant to be a joke and should be taken in that context. No disrespect intended obviously to victims of terrorists attacks

—-
Muslim suicide bombers in Britain are set to begin a three-day strike on Monday in a dispute over the number of virgins they are entitled to in the afterlife. Emergency talks with Al Qaeda have so far failed to produce an agreement.

The unrest began last Tuesday when Al Qaeda announced that the number of virgins a suicide bomber would receive after his death will be cut by 25% this February from 72 to only 60. The rationale for the cut was the increase in recent years of the number of suicide bombings and a subsequent shortage of virgins in the afterlife.

Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier, was taken hostage by Palestinian militants on 25 June 2006.  To mark Shalit’s 24th birthday, his 5th in captivity, a demonstration was held in Jerusalem near the home of Israel’s PM.

Shalit’s parents Aviva and Noam Shalit have spent the last six weeks camping in a protest tent in Jerusalem following a march asking Netanyahu to facilitate a prisoner exchange.  At a press conference in East Jerusalem on August 4th Noam Shalit called for flexibility:

“If the two sides of the conflict show some flexibility, it will be possible to make an agreement,” Shalit said.

Such an agreement, Shalit said, would benefit thousands of Palestinian families who would have their fathers and sons back to celebrate the festival of Ramadan.

“I would welcome any release of Palestinian prisoners, but I would welcome the release of one Israeli prisoner,” said the emotional Shalit, raising a solitary finger.

At the demonstration yesterday, to which the wives of ministers and members of the Knesset had been invited,  Aviva Shalit spoke to her son:

“Gilad my beloved son, today is your birthday,” said Aviva Shalit. “Once again I did not buy you a present this year, I didn’t bake a cake, you won’t be able to blow out the candles. I miss you more every day. I will make one wish in your name: that your candle not be extinguished, that you remain healthy in your body and soul. Sorry for not freeing you yet.” …

Shalit ended her address by proclaiming that she will not return to her home in Mitzpeh Hila without Gilad. “We will celebrate your next birthday at home,” she concluded.

If Palestinian and Israeli leaders really want peace they will heed the words of Aviva and Noam Shalit.

H/T Women’s Views on News

The Hope Not Hate blog has a summary:

It was frustrating because 800-1,000 EDL came into Bradford acted appallingly and largely got away with it. They chanted disgusting anti-Muslim abuse, threw bottles and other missiles whenever they could, repeatedly attacked the police lines and then, when a group did break out, were able to run around the city without being picked up. The police were soft on the EDL and this only encouraged them to get even more rowdy and obnoxious.

The police failed to push back the EDL at the beginning so they were able to goad locals from across the road. Police dogs and horses were deployed in numbers but every single one of them were pointing at local people, something that only antagonised locals.

The day was however at the same time pleasing in that despite the EDL provocation the day appears to have passed off relatively peacefully. Certainly there was no repeat of the riots that rocked Bradford in 2001. From that point of view the day was a success. Despite provocation and considerable anger the locals didn’t rise to the EDL bait and everyone remain calm, or at least as calm as could have been expected in the circumstances.

The Telegraph quotes Assam Ali, a 17-year-old A level student from the town, said: “I just hope it doesn’t kick off. That’s not what Bradford needs because it will just lead to more racism and more police on the streets, like it did after 2001. We don’t want this to turn to chaos.”

EDL predicted 5,000 people at the demo – less than a thousand turned up. Even the Daily Mail pictures make them look like “far-right” thugs.

Rallies and events planned in the UK & Ireland are:

London

Time: 14.00-16.00  Place: Trafalgar Square, North Terrace (outside the National Gallery)

Birmingham

Time: 13:30  Place: Central Library

Bournemouth/Wimborne

Place: Collecting signatures in Bournemouth and Wimborne ending up at Kingston Lacy House (by the Obelisk in the garden)

Time: Details of earlier signature collections to follow. Kingston Lacy House, 2pm

Bradford

Time: 11am  Place: Centenary Square

Glasgow

Time: 2pm  Place: George Square

Liverpool

Time: 12.00-16.00  Place: Bold Street Information Site (located adjacent to the Lyceum bank). Bold Street is adjacent to Liverpool Central Station. There is a station exit to Bold Street.

Manchester

Time: 14.00  Place: Piccadilly Gardens

Newcastle-upon-Tyne

Time: 12 noon – 4 p.m.  Place: Grey’s Monument

Dublin

Time: 13.00-14.30  Place: GPO O’Connell St.

Waterford

Time: 13.00 -15.00  Place: outside City Square

More details available from International Committee Against Stoning.

From here:

A singer who performed in front of a “mixed audience” of men and women was lashed 39 times to make him “repent,” after a ruling by a self-described rabbinic court on Wednesday.

Rabbi Amnon Yitzhak, founder of the Shofar organization aimed at bringing Jews “back to religion” (hazara betshuva), has made it his recent mission to fight against musical performances for both men and women.

Yup – it’s from Israel. Religious extremists are a problem everywhere. by @PDberger

Fox News have recently been at the forefront of whipping up hysteria about the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque”. This is actually quite a major turnaround for them, considering that Fox had previously interviewed both Imam Rauf (the head of the Cordoba Initiative) and his wife Daisy Khan, and their attitudes towards these individuals and their efforts were very positive indeed. Park51/Cordoba House was even explicitly discussed with Daisy Khan during an interview in December 2009, and the Fox anchor at the time stated “I can’t find many people who really have a problem with it….I like what you’re trying to do.”

With the exception of the upbeat interview with Daisy Khan on Fox News after the New York Times published a detailed front-page article on 9th December 2009 about the plans for Park51/Corboda House, there was no reaction from the “conservative Right” and no newspaper articles about the subject at all for the next five months…..until Fox News began taking a stridently hostile view towards the building in May 2010.

Someone who has been a particularly vociferous opponent – and an individual who has subsequently been provided with considerable public exposure by Fox News — has been Pamela Geller of “Stop the Islamization of America”, who is allied with racist white supremacists in South Africa and has also openly praised the English Defence League/EDL on a number of occasions, to the extent that she’s repeatedly been in contact with the EDL’s leadership; apparently she also firmly believes that US President Barack Obama is secretly a Muslim.

Fox News’s own promotion of consistently anti-Muslim stories has of course become an established characteristic of the channel. And most recently, Fox News have run multiple news segments making sinister insinuations about a shadowy Saudi Arabian figure with alleged ties to radical Islamist extremists who owns the “Kingdom Foundation” (aka Kingdom Holding Company) and has allegedly been a major financier of Park51/Cordoba House. Fox News have never named this person on-air.

There’s a good article in Time Magazine:

Yes, the stimulus has cut taxes for 95% of working Americans, bailed out every state, hustled record amounts of unemployment benefits and other aid to struggling families and funded more than 100,000 projects to upgrade roads, subways, schools, airports, military bases and much more.

But in the words of Vice President Joe Biden, Obama’s effusive Recovery Act point man, “Now the fun stuff starts!” The “fun stuff,” about one-sixth of the total cost, is an all-out effort to exploit the crisis to make green energy, green building and green transportation real; launch green manufacturing industries; computerize a pen-and-paper health system; promote data-driven school reforms; and ramp up the research of the future. “This is a chance to do something big, man!”

For starters, the Recovery Act is the most ambitious energy legislation in history, converting the Energy Department into the world’s largest venture-capital fund. It’s pouring $90 billion into clean energy, including unprecedented investments in a smart grid; energy efficiency; electric cars; renewable power from the sun, wind and earth; cleaner coal; advanced biofuels; and factories to manufacture green stuff in the U.S. The act will also triple the number of smart electric meters in our homes, quadruple the number of hybrids in the federal auto fleet and finance far-out energy research through a new government incubator modeled after the Pentagon agency that fathered the Internet.

All this is very encouraging and I hope it works and reaches somewhere. But there’s also a technological and economic incentive here – the US is trying to stay level with China, which is pouring billions into the same technology. The government there sees developing green tech and renewable energy as the technology of the future – allowing China to leapfrog the west in vital technology.

Obama knows this, and he wants to make sure the US doesn’t get left behind. This government? It’s cutting £1bn from science and research technology funding. And our investment into renewable energy is pitiful. You can never blame the Tories for long-term thinking.

SBS – the iconic west London based women’s group – has launched a fund raising appeal to support two women from India who were the victim of a horrific acid attack. I can’t publish the pictures here because they are that horrific.

Below is a letter they sent out to supporters, and wanted us to publish here:

* * * * * * * * * *
Dear Friends,

I am writing to you in the hope that you will be able to donate generously to finance the medical costs and rehabilitation of Samar (31) and Juwariya (25) Atique whose young lives and hopes were brutally crushed in October 2009 by two men who threw a jug of acid on their faces as the women were returning home from a day’s work in a rickshaw.

Their crime – Juwariya had turned down a marriage proposal from one of the men!

They sustained severe burns and injuries to their faces, their eyes and their upper bodies. In acid attack cases, the victims should be hosed down gently with a continuous stream of water immediately to stop the acid continuing to burn into their flesh. But they did not get treatment for five hours after the incident because the woman doctor was threatened with a similar attack by these men and their families.

Got this from the Network of Sikh Organisations today, thought it was worth sharing:

Yesterday, Brenden Gormley, Head of the Disasters Emergency Committee commented that generous donations by the British public to flood relief in Pakistan were shaming politicians across the world. His words remind us how political concerns, like those over terrorism or corruption, can all too easily trump basic humanitarian considerations.

The suffering evokes poignant memories for many Sikhs The floods are in the land of the birth of Guru Nanak, the founder of the Sikh faith; a land that saw the forceful expulsion of their grandparents during the partition of the sub-continent 63 years ago this month, in a frenzy of religious hate. Despite this, most Sikhs see it as their basic religious duty to help. Many Sikhs like others have contributed generously to the aid effort, while others are helping in Pakistan. But for some, the hurt of the past remains. So how do we break the chains of history to look to the needs of the present?

For Sikhs, the answer lies in two incidents. The first occurred a little over 300 years ago, when the infant Sikh community was defending itself from attack by the Mughal rulers. . In a particularly fierce battle, a Sikh water carrier called Kanyia was seen supplying water to the enemy wounded Angry Sikh soldiers dragged him before Guru Gobind Singh. The Guru asked if the charge was true. The bewildered Kanyia replied that it was, and said that he was simply doing what the teachings of Sikhism required him to do: look to those suffering whoever they might be. The delighted Guru embraced him, calling him ‘bhai’ or brother and gave him medicines and bandages to continue his good work.

The second incident lies in the experience of the war between India and Pakistan in 1971 when Punjabi Pakistani prisoners of war and their Punjabi Sikh captors embraced each other and swapped stories like long lost brothers. The incident showed the utter absurdity of man made borders drawn on maps to divide communities on the basis of politically induced communal fear and hate. Yet this has been done over and over again, and is still being done around the world today.

Helping those in need is not only a basic human duty, but here it can also play a small part in boosting confidence, trade and prosperity. More importantly, it can give a lie to the myth that people of different faiths cannot live together.

DEC donate page

This is an excellent article in the New Yorker: An excerpt:

The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests.

In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. And Greenpeace issued a report identifying the company as a “kingpin of climate science denial.” The report showed that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups.

Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies—from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program—that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus.
….
” The Kochs have given millions of dollars to nonprofit groups that criticize environmental regulation and support lower taxes for industry. Gus diZerega, the former friend, suggested that the Kochs’ youthful idealism about libertarianism had largely devolved into a rationale for corporate self-interest. He said of Charles, “Perhaps he has confused making money with freedom.”

These are also the guys who founded the US libertarian think-tank Cato Institute. When President Obama, in a 2008 speech, described the science on global warming as “beyond dispute,” the Cato Institute took out a full-page ad in the Times to contradict him.

The article also goes on to say that though the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently issued a report concluding the evidence for global warming is unequivocal, more Americans are convinced than at any time since 1997 that scientists have exaggerated the seriousness of global warming. “The Kochs promote this statistic on their company’s Web site but do not mention the role that their funding has played in fostering such doubt.”

In a 2002 memo, the Republican political consultant Frank Luntz wrote that so long as “voters believe there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community” the status quo would prevail.

It is perhaps the biggest myth that “libertarians” buy into – that the people they look up to are free-wheeling intellectuals who have no ties to the corporatist world that libertarians actually claim to hate. The Cato institute, the climate change denial industry – everything is funded by these mad-men. They don’t care for rationality, evidence or the planet – only their own bottom line.

The other point I wanted to make was… once you read the article you understand the kind of entrenched money and vested interests he is up against. Shifting the system is neither easy nor quick.

This is a nice bit of news.

The generosity of the British public in helping Pakistan’s flood victims is “shaming politicians around the world”, the head of the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) has said. Brendan Gormley, chief executive of the DEC, said the UK public was leading the way in donations, but that further funds were urgently needed.

The DEC’s Pakistan Floods Appeal has now raised more than £30m.

I’m going to a fund-raiser this Friday, do attend if you can. All money goes to the DEC appeal.

This is a follow-up to the previous PP article discussing the Pakistani Sufi rock group Junoon and its founder/current lead singer Salman Ahmad (recently also interviewed by Rolling Stone magazine). As discussed previously, Junoon have been heavily involved in opposing Islamist extremism along with promoting pluralistic interfaith understanding & friendship; Salman himself is also a UN Goodwill Ambassador for HIV/AIDS, and has worked in conjunction with both the Clinton Global Initiative and Dr Tahir ul-Qadri’s Sufi organisation Minhaj ul-Quran, along with giving a concert at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in 2007.

Salman Ahmad, who is currently based primarily in New York, recently visited the UK and was interviewed at length by Stephen Sackur on BBC 24’s HARDtalk programme. They discussed a range of topics, including Islamist extremism, terrorism, Sufism, the West, and American Muslims, and you can see the full interview in three parts via Youtube below:

There’s an excellent article in Foreign Policy mag (hat tip @HabibaHamid)

Muslim Americans are, by and large, both socially and economically conservative. Sixty-one percent of them would ban abortion except to save the life of the mother; 84 percent support school choice. Muslims overwhelmingly support traditional marriage. More than a quarter — over twice the national average — are self-employed small-business owners, and most support reducing taxes and the abolition of the estate tax. By all rights they should be Republicans — and not long ago they were. American Muslims voted two to one for George H.W. Bush in 1992. While they went for Bill Clinton by the same margin in 1996, they were brought back into the Republican fold in 2000 by George W. Bush.

If Clinton was, as the author Toni Morrison once quipped, America’s first black president, Bush was, at least momentarily, the country’s first Muslim president. As early as 1999, he hosted a series of meetings between Muslim and Republican leaders, and paid a visit himself to an Islamic center in Michigan — the first and only major presidential candidate to do so. The 2000 Republican convention in Philadelphia was the first in either national party’s history to include a Muslim prayer. On the campaign trail, Bush celebrated the faith of Americans who regularly attended a “church, synagogue, or mosque.” After Muslim community leaders told him of their civil liberties concerns over a piece of 1996 immigration enforcement legislation signed into law by Clinton, Bush criticized it himself in one of his presidential debates against Vice President Al Gore.

The work paid off. By election day, Bush had been endorsed by eight major Muslim American organizations. He won more than 70 percent of the Muslim vote, including 46,200 ballots in Florida alone, prompting longtime conservative activist Grover Norquist — one of the few prominent movement figures to caution against the current wave of mosque demagoguery — to proclaim in the American Spectator that “Bush was elected President of the United States of America because of the Muslim vote.“

The problem for Republicans is that while fear-mongering is always good at getting the base fired up – ultimately it comes down to the demographic numbers and the votes. The party has turned psychotic – not just over the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ but even going far as saying that children born in the US of foreign parents should not be allowed to become citizens (that one aimed clearly at Hispanics).

The numbers of Latinos in the US matters more obviously and several pollsters have pointed out (see Huffington Post) that Republicans simply can’t win several states in the south (New Mexico, Colorado, Florida, California, parts of Texas) without the Hispanic vote. Get abandoned by these voters for a generation and the Republicans will stay out of power for the same time.

Also worth noting: New York Times gives context to ‘GZM’ imam’s quotes / The Wall Street Journal points out that Jihadists are loving the hate that Americans are churning out at Muslims.