“It’s disgusting,” said Dawud Walid, director of the Michigan branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, who has lead the charge against what he sees as an irresponsible and dangerous book.

Every mention or depiction of Muslims or Islam in the book titled “We shall never forget 9/11″, is accompanied by the word “terrorist” or “extremist” and there are no counterbalancing images or references to the Muslims who were killed in the attacks or were among the first responders searching for survivors, Walid said Tuesday.
AFPBy Mira Oberman |
Nor does the book mention that the vast majority of Muslims in the United States and around the world condemn terrorism, he added.

“It’s silly to think that a young person who colors that book who has no contact with Muslims would come away with anything but fear of Muslims and thinking that Muslims are bad people,” Walid told AFP.

Really Big Coloring Books publisher Wayne Bell insists that the book is an honest portrayal of events.

“We tell this truth and tell it in black in white,” Bell said in a telephone interview from his St. Louis, Missouri office.

“This book is about 19 evil terrorists who murdered 3,000 people,” he said. “It just so happens that the people who flew those planes into the buildings were radical Muslim jihadists.”

The book was released earlier this month ahead of the 10th anniversary of the attacks and comes after the specialized publishing house had seen customers search repeatedly on its websites for coloring books about the attacks.

“We did a lot of research, talked to a lot of parents and the recurring theme we heard was do not make a book that’s politically correct and is going to whitewash this event,” Bell said.

People also wanted a book that would be patriot and focused on a theme that became the book’s title: “We shall never forget 9/11.”

Subtitled “The Kids’ Book of Freedom,” the book teaches children that “freedom-hating radical Islamic Muslim Extremists” attacked America because they “hate the American way of life because we are FREE.”

Walid said this overly simplistic and populist interpretation of events is simply not true.

He pointed to statements made by Osama bin Laden and the conclusions of the US congressional 9/11 commission which found the attacks were rooted in a belief that American foreign policy and its ‘immoral’ culture are at war with Islam and Muslim countries.

The cartoon of bin Laden hiding behind his wife as he is shot by a Navy SEAL is also not a true depiction of events, Walid noted.

Bell dismissed the criticism as an attempt to exploit an “innocent book” to promote a political agenda.

The controversy has had a positive impact: all the headlines have spurred sales.

By Mira Oberman |

Leininger is not widely known outside of Texas, but inside the state he is seen as a pioneer of political donations to conservative politicians and causes. The conservative activist made his millions selling hospital beds, and since the 1980s he has pushed a mix of religious right fervor and pro-business activism, which is now reflected in the politics of all major Texas Republican figures, particularly Perry. Since 1989, Leininger, who is worth more than $300 million, and his wife have donated at least $6.9 million to political parties, political action committees and state and federal candidates, according to data obtained by TransparencyData.com, a site run by the Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit that aims to increase government transparency. He has also created a host of nonprofits, most prominently the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), to advance his conservative political agenda.

“James Leininger has been the sugar daddy of the far right in Texas,” said Kathy Miller, the president of the Texas Freedom Network, a nonprofit supporting religious freedom and individual liberties in Texas. “He is probably one of the biggest donors to the Republican Party of Texas’ move to far-right extremism.”

Leininger has been particularly helpful to Perry over the years. In 1998, Perry was in a close contest for Texas lieutenant governor with Democrat John Sharp. In the waning weeks of the campaign, Perry and Sharp were neck-and-neck, and Perry was running low on funds. Leininger stepped forward with a $1.1 million loan to the campaign, enabling Perry to increase advertising when many voters were just beginning paying attention. Perry won that race by a hair. Since then, Leininger has donated more than $250,000 to Perry’s gubernatorial campaigns. A request put into Leininger’s office for comment was not returned by Saturday morning.

A report released on Wednesday by Texans for Public Justice documented the many ties between Perry and Leininger. Of particular note, Perry and Leininger have participated together in a number of financial transactions, including investments by Perry in one of Leininger’s companies.

Andrew Wheat, research director for Texans for Public Justice, told The Huffington Post, “What puts the relationship between Perry and Leininger apart is these personal financial deals.”

According to the report, Perry made a quick $4,500 from a stock purchase and sale in Leininger’s Kinetic Concepts, Inc., the hospital bed manufacturer that made Leininger a millionaire. Perry’s stock purchase came after meeting with Leininger and immediately before an investment group started buying up Kinetic Concepts shares, driving up the price of the stock. In total, Perry would wind up making $38,000 off of Kinetic stock investments.

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The state Department of Health says it has received 27 requests for information about Obama’s birth certificate this month, compared with 16 in November. There were 16 requests alone in the first half of this week, although most came from a single person.

Since 2008, “birthers,” who believe Obama was born in Kenya and thus ineligible to be president, have been requesting information from the state about his birth. The requests continued despite Obama’s camp releasing a copy of his certificate of live birth and reports of Obama’s birth announcements published in 1961 in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and The Honolulu Advertiser.

Three weeks into his term, newly elected Gov. Neil Abercrombie told The New York Times that with regard to the birthers, he is “going to take care of that.”

Read More @ The Honolulu Star Advertiser

Former Gov. Mitt Romney (R-Mass.), whose own successful dalliance with health care reform in Massachusetts is cited as an intellectual model for Obamacare, stands to gain little from this specific policy topic being at the center of political discourse.

At least that’s how the conventional wisdom goes. And in the wake of Judge Henry E. Hudson’s decision, there was, as expected, another wave of debate over Romney’s own role in championing the individual mandate for insurance coverage — the provision that was ruled unconstitutional.

Whether this pattern persists through the 2012 elections (should Romney run) depends on the whims of legal processes and the vindictiveness of the rest of the Republican presidential field. Romney, after all, was not the first conservative to champion an individual mandate. The Heritage Foundation did so as well. But the former governor tends to get the preponderance of attention when the conversation turns in that direction.

As the scrutiny mounts, Romney has begun to fine-tune his pitch for why his own plan made for sound policy, but Obama’s amounted to an “unconstitutional power grab by Washington,” as aide Eric Fehrnstrom put it.

For starters, team Romney has begun arguing that the better indication of his policy preference would be the 2008 campaign’s white paper, not the Massachusetts model. The former, as Fehrnstrom noted in a pre-Christmas exchange with the Huffington Post, is a reflection of what Romney would do nationally — a “federalist approach to health care reform.” It doesn’t have an individual mandate but, rather, encourages states to deregulate their insurance markets.

“Mitt said repeatedly in the 2008 campaign that his plan was not designed for the nation as a whole,” said Fehrnstrom. “He said states may want to copy parts of it, and perhaps improve on its features, but he was very explicit in saying the federal government should not impose a one-size-fits-all plan on the entire nation.”

The number of banks on the brink of collapse rose from 86 to 98 during the summer months, according to analysis of federal data from the Wall Street Journal. The banks in question have received $4.2 billion dollars in aid through the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). Most of the troubled institutions are relatively small.

The latest sign of distress in the financial system suggests the bailout may have simply been a stopgap solution for a sector still contending with the aftershocks of the greatest banking crisis in 80 years.

The continued weakness of some banks now threatens to impede a tentative economic recovery, say experts. With many banks still troubled, lending remains tight, depriving businesses of capital to expand and hire. With expansion and hiring rare, the economy remains weak, depriving the banks of healthy customers–in short, a feedback loop of trouble.

The Wall Street Journal defined “troubled banks” as those with less than 6 percent of their primary assets both reliable and liquid.

Through TARP, the government has purchased hundreds of billions of troubled assets from banks in danger. Though the program was purportedly meant to benefit healthy institutions with a good chance of survival, these latest failures suggest that many banks were in tenuous shape to begin with. Seven TARP recipients have already failed, at a loss of $2.7 billion.

But some analysts pointed to the fact that most of the failing institutions are relatively small in dismissing concerns.

From the Huffington Post

But FLOTUS wasn’t the only one who boogie-woogied! The President got in on the action, too, celebrating Diwali. Then the First Couple headed off to New Delhi, with Michelle wearing a coat to match her frock and the President putting on his jacket while walking to Air Force One.

Check out a video and scroll down to see photos from their morning in Mumbai.

On ABC’s “This Week,” Christiane Amanpour repeatedly pressed Paul to move beyond “slogans and platitudes” to “direct information” on how the Republican Party will balance the budget and cut the deficit.

Paul immediately reiterated that he was going to push for a balanced budget amendment and said that cuts needed to come from across the board — including defense spending. Whenever Amanpour asked whether a specific program — such as Medicare, Social Security and health care — would be cut, Paul simply kept reiterating that he was going to be looking “across the board.” He was unable, however, to actually name anything significant that would be on the chopping block:

AMANPOUR: Give me one specific cut, Senator-elect.

PAUL: All across the board.

AMANPOUR: One significant one. No, but you can’t just keep saying all across the board.

PAUL: Well, no, I can, because I’m going to look at every program, every program. But I would freeze federal hiring. I would maybe reduce federal employees by 10 percent. I’d probably reduce their wages by 10 percent. The average federal employee makes $120,000 a year. The average private employee makes $60,000 a year. Let’s get them more in line, and let’s find savings. Let’s hire no new federal workers.

AMANPOUR: Pay for soldiers? Would you cut that?

PAUL: I think that’s something that you can’t do. I don’t think –

AMANPOUR: You cannot do? [...]

AMANPOUR: So, again, to talk about the debt and to talk about taxes, there seems to be, again, just so much sort of generalities, for want of a better word. [...]

PAUL: Well, the thing is that you can call it a generality, but what if — what if I were president and I said to you, Tomorrow, we’re going to have a 5 percent cut across the board in everything? That’s not a generality, but there are thousands of programs. If you say, Well, what are all the specifics? There are books written on all the specifics. There’s a book by Christopher Edwards, downsizing government, goes through every program. That’s what it will take. It’s a very detailed analysis.

DeMint had a similar experience on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” When asked by host David Gregory where the American people should be prepared to sacrifice in order to cut the deficit, DeMint said, “I don’t think the American people are going to have to sacrifice as much as the government bureaucrats who get paid about twice what the American worker does. First of all, we just need to return to pre-Obama levels of spending in 2008. We need to cut earmarks so people can stop taking home the bacon, we need to defund Obamacare and then we need to look at the entitlement programs, such as the way Paul Ryan has done in the House with his Road to America’s Future.”

When Gregory pointed out that going back to 2008 spending levels won’t get anywhere close to balancing the budget, he asked whether everything would be on the table. DeMint said he opposed cutting Social Security. “If we can just cut the administrative waste, we can cut hundreds of billions of dollars a year at the federal level. We need to keep our promises to seniors, David, and cutting benefits to seniors is not on the table.” DeMint also said that cutting benefits for veterans is out.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) is facing fire from Republicans in his home state for making critical comments about the Tea Party movement. If you think that’s big..check this out.

At 52, the life-long bachelor has been fodder for such rumors for years, but with the resignation of Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho — the anti-gay politician who pled guilty to disorderly conduct after allegedly soliciting sex in an airport men’s room — the internet is abuzz over who’s next, and they’re dying to know what’s going on in Graham’s bedroom. Is it the latest grasp for the light switch in South Carolina’s powerful political closet? Or the inevitable labeling of “closet-clinging self-hater” that befalls any content bachelor?

Mainstream media often avoids asking older, single politicians what they do in their free time. While there were rumors dating back 25 years, it wasn’t until blog reports about Craig trolling cruisy D.C. restrooms that The Idaho Statesmen put a reporter on the story. And even though they held the story until after Craig’s arrest was made public, some still accused the paper of orchestrating a witch hunt.

When GQ asked last year, Graham wasn’t mean, just dismissive. He said he’s not gay, just a loner. But that denial isn’t stalling renewed interest in the question. In a post on who’s next out of the closet following Craig’s arrest, blogger Michael Signorile (www.signorile.com) first points a questioning finger at Graham.

“Let’s have a real investigation of the rumors about South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who … has been rumored to be gay for years,” Signorile says. “Like Larry Craig, Graham has voted antigay — including for the federal marriage amendment — while people in South Carolina and Washington have discussed what some say is an open secret for a long, long time.”

Graham isn’t the first South Carolina politician to face such questions. While other names are omitted from this story because they aren’t at the center of national speculation (thank your lucky chinos, boys) they’ve reached some of the most influential seats in state politics.

Charlie Smith, a West Ashley realtor who ran for the Statehouse twice as an openly gay man, says that he finds it laughable when activists suggest that gay South Carolinians should show political leaders that they’re no different from straight people. “They know exactly what it means to be gay,” he says. “They just don’t have integrity.”

Fortunately for them, what they do have is a gay community content with leaving the rumors for cocktail hour chatter and not front page scandal. “I’m not a believer in outing,” Smith says. “People have a right to deal with this in their own time.”

He has also let opportunities go by when he could have challenged these officials about their sexuality. “It can be very detrimental in politics to back people into a corner,” Smith says. “Even when they’re acting against their own self interests and mine.”

That said, he warns that the tightrope these closeted politicians are walking is thin and that positions harmful to the gay community could prompt activists to address the hypocrisy, much like they have in the Craig case. “They know we’ll fight back,” Smith says.

The comments about Graham are not new, but they haven’t seen this kind of prominence since Graham’s 2002 election to the U.S. Senate. Early in the campaign, state Democratic Party Chair Dick Harpootlian said Graham was “a little too light in the loafers to fill Strom Thurmond’s shoes.” He later said he didn’t know what “too light in the loafers” meant. Apparently he didn’t know what too thick in the head meant either.

During a debate, Democratic candidate Alex Sanders also seemed to frame a question about Rudy Giuliani’s endorsement as an indictment on Graham’s personal life. “(Giuliani’s) wife kicked him out, and he moved in with two gay men and a Shih Tzu. Is that South Carolina values? I don’t think so.”

The renewed movement to question Graham’s sexuality won’t chink his armor in front of South Carolina voters, says Jack Bass, a political science professor at the College of Charleston and co-author of Strom: The Complicated Personal and Political Life of Strom Thurmond.

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