C-SPAN broadcast an important event today.

The Congressional Muslim Staff Association hosted a panel discussion on the image of Muslims in the U.S. Participants discussed the controversy surrounding the Islamic Center near Ground Zero in New York City, among other topics. Speakers included James Zogby, who heads the Arab American Institute.

Panel members besides James Zogby were Salam El-Marayati of the Muslim Public Affairs Council and Dr. Azizah Y. al-Hibri, Esq. of KARAMAH – Muslim Women Lawyers for Human Rights,

If enough people could only listen to this broadcast and get control of their emotions, then the world would truly be a better place and the Al-Qaeda terrorists will have been defeated, for the moment.

One of the comments by James Zogby reminded me of a famous quote from Mark Twain,

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.

If people could just let go for a moment of what they think they know for sure, then they might be able to learn something that really is so.

After having watched the President’s speech tonight, I can attest to the correct prediction by Ray McGovern in his piece, What Obama Won’t Say Tonight.  The President did not, in fact, say any of what appears in McGovern’s proposal of a speech.

I leave it up to you to see where the following snippet fits into the overall article:

The instructors at Benning insisted that competent commanders never commit large numbers of troops to battle without having established secure LOCs. They then winced when they displayed a relief map of Afghanistan and neighboring countries, showing the deployment of U.S. forces.

I don’t believe for a minute that it would have been productive for President Obama to have said these things tonight.  However, it is very productive for us to consider what Ray McGovern has to say.

Note, I only say consider, because as of yet, I have no independent information as to whether or not McGovern is on the right track.  What he says is quite plausible, but there are a lot of plausible stories and only a few are correct.

You also might be able to hear what the President did say if the link to the C-SPAN video of the speech continues to be valid.

Obama and the Virtues of ‘Politicking’ by E.J. Dionne, Jr. makes exactly the point that I have been trying to make on my Politics Blog since the very beginning.

As applied to the current administration, he says:

But Obama and his party are also in a hole because the president has chosen not to engage the nation in an extended dialogue about what holds all his achievements together, or why his attitude toward government makes more sense than the scattershot conservative attacks on everything Washington might do to improve the nation’s lot.

Later on in the article, Dionne said:

Obama’s mistake is captured by that disdainful reference to ‘politicking.’ In a democracy, separating governing from ‘politicking’ is impossible. ‘Politicking’ is nothing less than the ongoing effort to persuade free citizens of the merits of a set of ideas, policies and decisions. Voters feel better about politicians who put what they are doing in a compelling context. Citizens can endure setbacks as long as they believe the overall direction of the government’s approach is right.

This is a great post.  This is the point I have been trying to make all over the place.  E.J. Dione has a better platform for saying this than I do with my measly blog that only has 16,000 readers.

President Obama seemed to understand this so well during the campaign.  I am somewhat disappointed that he didn’t continue after the campaign.

Democrats think that once they explain something that the world will “note and long remember”.  The Republicans on the other hand seem to know that they have to keep pounding the message relentlessly.

Maybe the Democrats fallaciously think the truth does not have to be repeated.  It has to be repeated at least as often as the lies arrayed against it.

Robert Reich writes on OpEdNews The Two Stories of This Terrible Economy, Yet Obama and the Dems Won’t Tell Theirs.

It’s not that big business and Wall Street are evil. It’s that they’re out to make as much money as possible which is what they’re set up to do. That’s why we need an activist government to stimulate the economy, create jobs, and protect the public from their excesses.

This is the kind of constructive criticism that is useful.

It doesn’t call the President names and attribute evil motives to him. It says what he is doing wrong and suggests a way to fix it.

It would be so nice if more of the authors on OpEdNews took a lesson from this post.

On Augist 26, on The Nightly Business Report, Susie Charib interviewed Mike Holland, director, The China Fund.  This interview was part of the show’s series on the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) countries.

One of Mike Holland’s first responses included the following:

The country’s stimulus program worked really, really well. They instituted theirs at the same time the U.S. instituted its stimulus program. Theirs caused a growth in the economy that up until this most recent quarter was growing about 12 percent a year. As you said, for a country that is now the second largest GDP in the world, this is no longer a tiny emerging country, economically.

For all of the people who say that Keynesian economics does not work, I wonder how they explain the fact that it works just as expected in China. If it works in China, what is so different about the United States that it wouldn’t work here?

Could it be that once the Republican’s get their hands on a stimulus plan and manage to shape it to their liking that it no longer works as well as it could? Why don’t Republicans want our economy to succeed? Why is it that certain facts about economics are just unacceptable to Republicans? Why do they reject reality?

Come November, should we replace some of the current realists in Congress with a few more Republicans from fantasy land?

I just caught the 1957 movie A Face In The Crowd on Turner Classic Movies the other day.

A female radio reporter turns a folk-singing drifter into a powerful media star.

Was it amazing foresight that Budd Schulberg used to write this story that could be about Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, or others of their ilk?

Perhaps extrapolating from Father Charles Edward Coughlin or Arthur Godfrey was enough to get this close to the modern day demagogues.

The article Windows DLL Load Hijacking Exploits Go Wild starts off with:

Less than 24 hours after Microsoft said it couldn’t patch Windows to fix a systemic problem, attack code appeared Tuesday to exploit the company’s software.

Ever since I have used Linux/Unix starting in the early 1980s, I have been aware that it is possible to create a similar hazard by setting your search path variable to search the current director.  There were always warnings that though convenient to do this, it was a security hazard.

Of course, back in the 80s there was not the widespread use of the internet.  In the more closed environments back then, one wasn’t hearing about attacks using this vulnerability. (That doesn’t mean it wasn’t happening.) Back then I didn’t pay much attention to the warning.

Since I have had the Unix emulator Cygwin installed on my PC, I have avoided setting my search path in Cygwin to have this vulnerability.  I have been avoiding this on the Cygwin part of my PC for at least 10 years or more.

Little did I think that Microsoft had built this security hole into Windows in a way that was not even optional.  I don’t know why I shouldn’t have considered it, since Microsoft seems to have had just about every security hole that is imaginable, even the ones that were well advertised before Microsoft adopted them. Don’t get me wrong, this is not a vulnerability that Microsoft just introduced.  It has been in Windows ever since there have been DLLs (dynamic link libraries).  The need for backward compatibility is one of the reasons Microsoft won’t fix the problem.

The op-ed piece Why We Need a Second Stimulus by Laura Tyson spells out in very simple terms what the government’s fiscal plan should be.

Laura Tyson, a professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, was chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers and the National Economic Council in the Clinton administration. She is a member of President Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board.

SPOILER ALERT: Here is the summary of her prescription:

Faced with these risks, as long as the economy is operating far below potential, policy makers should do two seemingly contradictory things. First, they should provide additional fiscal support for job creation and growth. And, second, they should enact a credible multiyear plan now to stabilize the ratio of federal debt to gross domestic product gradually as the economy recovers.

By easing capital market concerns about the government’s future borrowing needs, such a plan would permit larger deficits and slower debt reduction while unemployment is still high. The long-run debt problem — the result of imprudent fiscal decisions before the recession, escalating health care costs and an aging population — must be addressed once the economy has recovered. But for now the priorities of fiscal policy should be jobs and investment.

Please take careful notice of the proviso that she states, as long as the economy is operating far below potential. In case I still have not conveyed the point strongly enough, the implication is that when the economy starts operating at its potential, then the prescription changes.

The article Building a Nation of Know-Nothings by Timothy Egan is a partial explanation of what my political blog is trying to fight.

SPOILER ALERT: The quotes below give away the punchline to the article.

It would be nice to dismiss the stupid things that Americans believe as harmless, the price of having such a large, messy democracy. Plenty of hate-filled partisans swore that Abraham Lincoln was a Catholic and Franklin Roosevelt was a Jew. So what if one-in-five believe the sun revolves around the earth, or aren’t sure from which country the United States gained its independence?

But false belief in weapons of mass-destruction led the United States to a trillion-dollar war. And trust in rising home value as a truism as reliable as a sunrise was a major contributor to the catastrophic collapse of the economy. At its worst extreme, a culture of misinformation can produce something like Iran, which is run by a Holocaust denier.

It’s one thing to forget the past, with predictable consequences, as the favorite aphorism goes. But what about those who refuse to comprehend the present?

Yes, I know this is a Democratic Party video and it is not fair and balanced. However, when you think about all the Republican blathering that has gone unanswered, it is about time the Democrats said something.

We also have to remember that we need many messages about the positive program of the Democrats and why it is the right program at the right time. If the positive message just happens to refute the talking points of the Republicans, so much the better.