Now for something completely different:

Moveon.org says Tell the White House:

If they appoint anyone other than Elizabeth Warren to lead the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, they will be letting down the millions of Americans who joined them in fighting for real Wall Street reform.

Whoever thought that there would be an article like New York Mosque Debate Splits GOP.

Below is a collection of selected paragraphs from the article.  This selection is not entirely representative of the whole thrust of the article.

Norquist, whose wife is Muslim, has emerged as the most outspoken foe of politicizing the mosque issue.

In New Jersey, GOP Gov. Chris Christie warned Tuesday against politicizing the mosque dispute and tarnishing “all of Islam” with fears of terrorism.

“In the long term, there are reputational issues for the Republicans that could make it very tough to compete, particularly at the national level, given the changing demographics of the country,” said Michael Gerson, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush.

Gerson backed Obama’s initial remarks on the topic, saying that a president had no other choice but to take a stand.

“I have spent time in the West Wing and know what it is like for a president who has Muslim citizens, has armed forces at his command and has Muslim soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq who are fighting at our side against Islamic radicalism” to oppose construction of a mosque, Gerson said. “A president cannot say that a holy building serving people of this faith somehow desecrates Manhattan.”

A group of prominent Arab American and Muslim Republicans circulated a letter Tuesday to top party officials, expressing concern over the language Gingrich and other notables were using in the debate.

The signers included Norquist’s wife, Samah, who served as an advisor in the George W. Bush administration; former Bush White House aide Suhail Khan; and Sherine El-Abd, president of the New Jersey Federation of Republican Women.

“While we share the desire of all in our party to be successful in the November elections, we cannot support victory at the expense of the U.S. Constitution or the Arab and Muslim community in America,” they wrote.

I can’t say it any better than what Eugene Robinson reports in his column Jefferson Would be Ashamed of Republican Mosque Panderers.

Most important, organizers have made clear that the whole point of the project is to provide a high-profile platform for mainstream, moderate Islam—and to stridently reject the warped, radical, jihadist worldview that produced the atrocities of Sept. 11, 2001.

“It will have a real community feel, to celebrate the pluralism in the United States, as well as in the Islamic religion,” Daisy Khan, executive director of the American Society for Muslim Advancement, said in May as she argued for permission to build the center. “It will also serve as a major platform for amplifying the silent voice of the majority of Muslims who have nothing to do with extremist ideologies. It will counter the extremist momentum.”

Actually, it will take much more than one community center to stop radical jihad in its tracks. But it’s hard to think of a better way to give extremist ideology a major boost than to demonstrate what far too many of the world’s 1 billion Muslims already believe is true: that the West rejects not just extremism but Islam itself.

“Three hundred of the victims (of the Sept. 11 attacks) were Muslim,” Khan told CNN. “We are Americans too. The 9/11 tragedy hurt everybody, including the Muslim community. We are all in this together, and together we have to fight against extremism and terrorism.”