In response to the prank call that pwn36 (owned) Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, a law has been proposed in Wisconsin to criminalize prank calls.
Un dirty-word believable.
Category: Stupid
Big Surprise: Boeing’s 787 Outsourcing Cost Money Instead of Saving It
To the tune of billions of dollars:
The airliner is billions of dollars over budget and about three years late. Much of the blame belongs to the company’s farming out work to suppliers around the nation and in foreign countries.
It should be noted that aircraft manufacturers do not make money off of the sales of aircraft, but rather on spares and support down the road, and in outsourcing, Boeing has thrown that revenue stream to its suppliers, an act that Atrios calls, “obviously insane,” additionally, it makes the entire process of creating an aircraft more riskier, because you have less control over whether tab A fits in slot B, or, as Felix Salmon notes, it’s like, “picking up pennies in front of a steamroller“.
Boeing was told that this was an issue by a senior fellow, L.J. Hart-Smith in 2001, (also here, where the PDF cuts and pastes better) and but chose to ignore it:
The inescapable problem with outsourcing work that could be done in-house is that it necessarily increases the tasks and man-hours to carry out the work way above those needed to perform all assembly, including most subassemblies, at one site. Experience in the electronics industry has shown that out-sourcing work to regions of low labor rate is only a transitory phenomenon. The reason why the rates were low was that there had previously been no work there. Once the work became available, hourly rates increased, so that the primary electronic companies kept moving the work to yet another as-yet-under-developed area, and the cycle was repeated. This may be cost-effective for small items, with production lives of only a few years at most, but it is inappropriate for large aircraft that may need spare parts throughout a service live in excess of 50 years (80 or more for some military aircraft) and for which the manufacturing program itself may last 40 or 50 years. There are so many aircraft components that must be out-sourced, such as engines, avionics, and systems, because today’s prime aircraft manufacturers are no longer equipped to undertake such work themselves, that the retention of a determinable minimum fraction of the structures work is a pre-requisite to developing sufficient cash to develop new products. Without new products, as distinct from derivatives, all companies will go out of business, no matter what their line of business.
The correctness of the author’s position on these matters is easily confirmed by two facts. It was the suppliers who made all the profits on the extensively out-sourced DC-10s, not the so-called systems-integrating prime manufacturer. (The same thing has happened on aircraft assembled by Boeing, in Seattle, too.) Also, when plans were being formulated for the proposed MD-12 very large transport aircraft, almost all potential suppliers indicated a preference for being subcontractors rather than risk-sharing “partners”. Could they have known more about maximizing profits, minimizing risk, etc., than the prime manufacturer who sought their help even though it could borrow money at lower rates of interest than potential suppliers could? The DC-8 was manufactured and assembled almost entirely within the Long Beach plant, with only the nose coming from Santa Monica. That policy was changed after the acquisition of the former Douglas Aircraft Company by the former McDonnell Aircraft Company, but the change did not improve the company’s profitability. It is time for Boeing to reverse this policy.
(emphasis original)
So, McDonnell, a company which was a complete failure in the commercial arena (only 1 project, a failed bizjet), took over what was the number two (and had been the number 1) commercial aircraft manufacturer in the world, and implemented its defense contracting monopsony* driven business model, where it failed, and then Boeing bought McDonnell Douglas, and implemented their failed business model.
Boeing bought MACDAC, but MACDAC took over Boeing, and set the tone for its corporate culture, despite the fact that it was largely a failed company, having lost the JSF competition, and having only 2 major programs that it had initiated, the F-15 and the C-17 over the past 30+ years (the F/A-18 was initiated by Northrop).
One good thing that has come of this is that it will make a fascinating case study for the size of operations for economists, as Paul Krugman rather smugly notes:
In Boeing’s case, they outsourced far too much, only to find that they were getting parts that didn’t do what they were supposed to — and also to find that the subcontractors were seizing a lot of the rents. They discovered, in effect, that there are times when it’s better to rely on central planning than to leave things up to the market.
Obviously this isn’t always true. There’s a tradeoff. But that’s the point — and it’s this tradeoff that determines how big firms should be. Boeing has now provided a clear motivating example. Their loss, the economics profession’s gain.
Heh. Here’s hoping that I’m never a good case study for some academic.
*A monopsony is the flip side of a monopoly. Instead of having only one seller and many buyers, a monopoly, you have only one buyer and many vendors, in McDonnell’s case, the US military.
Why Our Real Enemy is England
First, the royal wedding, and now this!“Lie back and think of England,” that’s what the web site says.
Royal wedding commemorative condoms.
Between this and reality TV, the Western civilization does not deserve to exist.
Because it Pisses off Democrats. That’s why.
Medicare fraudster, and Florida governor, Rick Scott has decided to cancel a high speed rail project between Orlando and Tampa Florida:
Florida’s congressional delegation, state officials and Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer are pushing back against Gov. Rick Scott’s decision Wednesday to reject $2.4 billion in federal stimulus money to build a high-speed train between Orlando and Tampa.
“This is a century-type decision that needs to be vetted,” Dyer said. “I don’t think it was given a fair hearing.”
U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood intends to meet either in person or by phone Friday with Florida elected officials, likely including Democratic U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson and Reps. John Mica, R-Winter Park, and Corrine Brown, D-Jacksonville, to discuss ways of keeping the project alive even as California, New York and Washington state offered to take some of the money.
And some officials were bitterly critical of Scott for pulling the plug even before bids had gone out to build the 84-mile system. Eight consortia of companies from 11 countries had indicated they would be willing to put up some or all of the state’s $280 million share of the project, while the bid terms would have required them to absorb cost overruns and any operating losses for 20 years.
So, let’s look at this, it would:
- Cost the state little or no money.
- Losses and cost overruns are someone else’s problem.
- Disney wanted it for their Disney World Theme park.
- It would have created 23,000 construction jobs.
So, why did he cancel it? Because in so doing, he’s pissing off Democrats and liberals.
When looking at Republican policy making, one needs to realize that there is an imperative, pissing off Democrats, that frequently subordinates good policy, and sometimes even good politics.
Basically, Republicans are dicks.
No, they aren’t dicks, a dick has a head.
Not Enough Bullets
No, but apparently we look like a bitch
This episode of Sesame Street is brought to you by the letter “B”, as in bullet, and banker …
So, Citi’s CEO, the incomparably incompetent Vikram Pandit, is saying that if if regulators reign in debit card fees, they will have to stick it to poor people:
U.S. banks may cut their services to the poorest Americans as a result of new U.S. financial regulations, including federal caps on debit card processing fees, Citigroup Chief Executive Vikram Pandit said Tuesday.
New U.S. laws, including the Dodd-Frank financial regulation act passed last year, “will change banking,” Pandit said in prepared remarks due to be delivered at an investors’ conference in New York Tuesday.
This makes me want to go all Samuel L. Jackson/Pulp Fiction on his ass …… OK, I want to go all Samuel L. Jackson/Pulp Fiction on his ass dressed in an Elmo suit, but that last bit is just me …… Or at least I think (hope) that the last bit is just me.
Let’s be clear here the debit card fees are a fee levied disproportionately on the poor, and he’s saying that if he can’t f%$# the poor like a bitch, then he won’t serve them?
This guy has a job because he f%$#ed so badly no one wants to take his job, because they would have to fix his mess, and so he, and the whole rotten bank, live off of TARP money, back door Treasury Department subsidies, and the largess of “Helicopter” Ben Bernanke’s Federal Reserve, and he has the nerve to suggest that he is anything but a leech at the public tit.
Un-dirtyword-believable.
No, This is Not The Onion…
Click for full size
Just Because This Needs to Be Shared, So That His Shame Endures for a Very Long Time
But when a married Congressman trolls Craigslist for female companionship and sends a picture of himself topless, it certainly sounds that way:
Representative Christopher Lee of New York abruptly resigned on Wednesday night after a shirtless photo of himself, which he had e-mailed to a woman, was published on the Internet.Mr. Lee, a two-term Republican from western New York, notified the House speaker, John A. Boehner, of his decision in a letter on Wednesday afternoon, after the scandal had erupted, according to senior Congressional officials.Mr. Lee’s office released a statement in which he asked for forgiveness. “I regret the harm that my actions have caused my family, my staff and my constituents,” he wrote. “I deeply and sincerely apologize to them all. I have made profound mistakes and I promise to work as hard as I can to seek their forgiveness.”The resignation came hours after Gawker, a gossip Web site, published an e-mail exchange that Mr. Lee, who is married and has a son, had with a 34-year-old Maryland woman he had met through Craigslist.
In his response to said woman, he described himself as “classy”.
This must be a meaning of the word “classy” I’ve been previously unaware of.
Republican Fail
I’m not sure how it happened, but the Republicans in the house failed to pass an extension of some of the more contemptible parts of the Patriot Act:
Too clever by half, the House GOP leadership allowed only 40 minutes of debate on the extension of the PATRIOT Act today, and brought the bill up for a vote under a rule allowing no amendments and requiring two-thirds of the body to vote YES.
Well, that didn’t happen. Apparently, the Tea Party Congresscritters discovered their love for the constitution, Amendments One and Four inclusive, while taking the opportunity to stand up to their leadership’s lackadaisical attitude toward the Act’s extension.
I believe that the Republican House leadership may have a much deeper appreciation of just the deeper meaning of the exclamation that Dan Castellaneta created as the voice of Homer Simpson.
Heh.
Not Enough Bullets
Here is a guy who is worth more than the GDP of something like 80% of the countries in the world, and he’s bitching because people are not as nice to him as he would like:
What’s eating Jamie Dimon?
At last week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the JPMorgan Chase chief executive once again lambasted the media and politicians for portraying all bankers as greedy evil-doers.
It was at least the 12th time since the start of the financial crisis that Dimon has complained about Wall Street critics painting all bankers as cut from the same cloth. But the timing of his latest outburst seemed odd.
In December, as part of President Barack Obama’s bid to make nice with U.S. business leaders, Dimon was invited to a private Oval Office one-on-one with the president to discuss the economy. Dimon and his wife Judy were also guests at the state dinner the White House arranged for Chinese President Hu Jintao last month. And one of Dimon’s top executives, Bill Daley, was tapped by the president as chief of staff.
BTW, the reason that the media portrays, “all bankers as greedy evil-doers,” and critics of our banking system paint, “all bankers as cut from the same cloth,” is because it’s true.
You are all a bunch of contemptible greed-heads, Mr. “We started shorting Bernie Madoff because we knew he was a fraud, but didn’t bother telling anyone.”
This is why we need to prosecute every one of these rat-bastards to the fullest extent allowed by law.
And in the Annals of Hypocrisy…
We have Ayn “Atlas Shrugged” Rand, who took medicare to pay for her lung cancer surgeries, and Congressman Paul “We will transform our social safety net into a hammock” Ryan, who freely collected social security benefits after his father died.
I don’t generally begrudge people accessing social programs, but when you call people who need them “moochers” and the like, you are a hypocrite and a wanker.
Well, This Explains a Lot About Fox
So Bush Invaded Egypt?Seriously, for how many Millenia has there been a “gift of the Nile” known as Egypt?
I’m beginning to think that their graphics people have just stopped trying, because why bother on a fake news network?
H/t Hedgehog on the by invitation only Stellar Parthenon BBS.
Republicans Are So F%$#ing Classy
Wouldn’t you know it, “Jesse Kelly, the ex-Marine Tea Partyer who challenged Gabrielle Giffords,” is looking into the possibility of gearing up for a special election:
Kelly, if you don’t already know, has been taking heat since Giffords’ shooting for sponsoring a campaign event last year in which supporters joined him in shooting a “fully automatic M-16.” “Get on target for November. Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office,” the event’s announcement read.
It’s true that the M-16 event had no direct connection with Giffords’ shooting, and claims that it indirectly helped create a “climate” conducive to the shooting are dubious at best. Still, to many people, Kelly is now best known as the guy who encouraged supporters to shoot M-16s in the name of defeating a member of Congress who was, several months later, nearly shot to death. Politically, the association is toxic, and Kelly faces a formidable — maybe impossible — task in repairing the damage.
Thus, stories about him quietly looking into whether there might soon be a special election for Giffords’ seat are particularly damaging for him. Sure, the inquiry his campaign apparently made wasn’t actually that unreasonable. There were, after all, reports earlier this week that Arizona state law requires that Giffords’ seat be declared vacant if she’s incapacitated for more than 90 days. All Kelly may have done is make a discreet inquiry about whether this is true. (It isn’t; only the House itself can declare a seat vacant.) But, especially in the wake of the M-16 controversy, it looks terrible for Kelly to be seen making political calculations right now.
Actually, it doesn’t look terrible.
It’s par for the course for the ‘Phants. It took them about 12 hours to politicize 911, after all.
Cindy Gertz, the US Treasury official responsible for trying to prevent foreclosures, just praised the mortgage servicers for their efforts at preventing forecolsures:
An Obama administration housing official on Wednesday defended mortgage servicing companies, just one day after Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said the industry needs an overhaul.
Cindy Gertz, director of operations at the Treasury Department’s Homeownership Preservation Office, said mortgage servicers–firms which collect loan payments–have hired tens of thousands of extra staff to work with a crush of struggling borrowers who are trying to renegotiate the terms of their mortgages.
“I think tremendous progress has been made,” Gertz told a group of bankers at a conference organized by the Mortgage Bankers Association. Gertz, a former executive at mortgage finance giant Freddie Mac, did acknowledge that the process is not complete.
This is kind of like saying that IV drug users who share needles have been helpful in the fights against AIDS.
The only explanation for the fact that a Google News search of the name does not reveal the phrase, “Spending more time with her family,” is that this is what her boss, Tim “Eddie Haskell” Geithner, and his boss, Barack Obama, actually believe that loan servicers acting in bad faith are a necessary to protect our banking system.
Remember Always that the Cossacks Work for the Czar
Go to the very gifted cartoonist’s website for a full size image, and buy some of his stuff
So when a political appointee of Barack Obama’s decides to use the King holiday to say that Martin Luther King, Jr. would have supported the never-ending war in Afghanistan, because it is somehow or other a “just war”:
Jeh C. Johnson, the Defense Department’s general counsel, posed that question at today’s Pentagon commemoration of King’s legacy.
In the final year of his life, King became an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War, Johnson told a packed auditorium. However, he added, today’s wars are not out of line with the iconic Nobel Peace Prize winner’s teachings.
“I believe that if Dr. King were alive today, he would recognize that we live in a complicated world, and that our nation’s military should not and cannot lay down its arms and leave the American people vulnerable to terrorist attack,” he said.
I understand that Mr. Johnson knew Dr. King, and went to school with his son, but seriously, using Dr. King to pimp the war in Afghanistan is so deeply appalling that it buggers the mind.
It is absolutely ludicrous when juxtaposed with the before and after pictures of Tarok Kolache.
Winning Hearts and Minds…
This is your village
This is your village after the US military “saves it”
This is your village after the US military “saves it”
Any questions?
Because of activities by the Taliban in Tarok Kolache in Afghanistan, they basically occupied it, the US obliterated it with over 25 tons of munitions, but that’s OK, because it’s not like the Afghans are people deserving of consideration:
As [Petraeus Hagiographer and all-around toady Paula] Broadwell tells it, the villagers understood that the United States needed to destroy their homes — except when they don’t. One villager “in a fit of theatrics had accused Flynn of ruining his life after the demolition.”
An adviser to Hamid Karzai said that the 1-320th “caused unreasonable damage to homes and orchards and displaced a number of people.” Flynn has held “reconstruction shuras” with the villagers and begun compensating villagers for their property losses, but so far the reconstruction has barely begun, three months after the destruction.“Sure they are pissed about the loss of their mud huts,” Broadwell wrote on Facebook, “but that is why the BUILD story is important here.”
Seriously, they live in mud huts, why should we care what the f%$# they think?
More seriously, this is the endgame of a failed colonial adventure, and I think that anyone with half a brain, including David “I want that 5th Star, Bitches” Petraeus, and Barack Obama, but the general is too interested in his career, and the President is too afraid of the Republicans calling him names, so the insanity continues.
Un-Dirty-Word-Believable
The roof is on fire…
Have you heard the one about the guy who passed the bar exam in Ohio, but was denied his law license on moral grounds because he had accumulated too much debt going to law school?
Yeah, well, it ain’t funny:
Wow. Guy goes to law school, guy racks up a huge amount of debt, guy has no idea how he’ll pay off his debts. Sound familiar? Okay, here’s the twist: the guy failed the “character and fitness” component of the Ohio bar because he has no plan to pay off his loans.
What the hell kind of legal education system are we running where we charge people more than they can afford to get a legal education, and then prevent them from being lawyers because they can’t pay off their debts?
Because it’s not like Hassan Jonathan Griffin was in a particularly unique situation when he went before the Ohio bar. A year and a half ago, we wrote about a man who was dinged on his character and fitness review because he was $400,000 in debt. That’s an extraordinary case. Hassan Jonathan Griffin owes around $170,000. He has a part-time job as a public defender. He used to be a stockbroker. He’s got as much a chance of figuring out a way to pay off his loans as most people from the Lost Generation.
The more that we make getting out of a hole impossible for ordinary Americans, the more we make a hollow country that will one day implode.
If this is what America is, then we need to examine what we are, because this is the sort of sh%$ makes me want to play Nero, and fiddle while the whole corrupt place burns.
The Grauniad* Lambastes Wikileaks for What the Grauniad* Published
Glenn Greenwald details just how ridiculous the ongoing feud between The Guardian and Julian Assange has become, with the paper the paper accusing Assange of endangering lives because of cables that were released by The Guardian itself:
Last week, on January 3, The Guardian published a scathing Op-Ed by James Richardson blaming WikiLeaks for endangering the life of Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of the democratic opposition in Zimbabwe. Richardson — a GOP operative, contributor to RedState.com, and a for-hire corporate spokesman — pointed to a cable published by WikiLeaks in which American diplomats revealed that Tsvangirai, while publicly opposing American sanctions on his country, had privately urged their continuation as a means of weakening the Mugabe regime: an act likely to be deemed to be treasonous in that country, for obvious reasons. By publishing this cable, “WikiLeaks may have committed its own collateral murder,” Richardson wrote. He added: “WikiLeaks ought to leave international relations to those who understand it – at least to those who understand the value of a life.”
This accusation against WikiLeaks was repeated far and wide. In The Wall Street Journal, Jamie Kirchick — the long-time assistant of The New Republic‘s Marty Peretz — wrote under this headline: “Julian Assange’s reckless behavior could cost Zimbabwe’s leading democrat his life.” Kirchick explained that “the crusading ‘anti-secrecy’ website released a diplomatic cable from the U.S. Embassy in Harare” which exposed Tsvangirai’s support for sanctions. As “a result of the WikiLeaks revelations,” Kirchick wrote, the reform leader would likely be charged with treason, and “Mr. Tsvangirai will have someone additional to blame: Julian Assange of WikiLeaks.” The Atlantic‘s Chris Albon, in his piece entitled “How WikiLeaks Just Set Back Democracy in Zimbabwe,” echoed the same accusation, claiming “WikiLeaks released [this cable] to the world” and that Assange has thus “provided a tyrant with the ammunition to wound, and perhaps kill, any chance for multiparty democracy.” Numerous other outlets predictably mimicked these claims.
There was just one small problem with all of this: it was totally false. It wasn’t WikiLeaks which chose that cable to be placed into the public domain, nor was it WikiLeaks which first published it. It was The Guardian that did that. In early December, that newspaper — not WikiLeaks — selected and then published the cable in question. This fact led The Guardian — more than a full week after they published Richardson’s accusatory column — to sheepishly add this obscured though extremely embarrassing “clarification” at the end of his column:
• This article was amended on 11 January 2011 to clarify the fact that the 2009 cable referred to in this article was placed in the public domain by the Guardian, and not as originally implied by WikiLeaks. The photo caption was also amended to reflect this fact.
(emphasis original)
While I find The Guardian to be a top flight paper, this is inexcusable.
I get the impression that Assange is a bit of a jerk, and hard to deal with, but that does not excuse this crap.
*According to the Wiki, The Guardian, formerly the Manchester Guardian in the UK. It’s nicknamed the Grauniad because of its penchant for typographical errors, “The nickname The Grauniad for the paper originated with the satirical magazine Private Eye. It came about because of its reputation for frequent and sometimes unintentionally amusing typographical errors, hence the popular myth that the paper once misspelled its own name on the page one masthead as The Gaurdian, though many recall the more inventive The Grauniad.”
Vos? Sarah Palin iz a Yid*
When juxtaposed with the phrase, “Don’t retreat, reload,” this is an unfortunate turn of phraseSo Sarah Palin is now claiming that criticism of her “target map” and her shooting inspired rhetoric is blood libel:
“Vigorous and spirited public debates during elections are among our most cherished traditions,” Palin wrote in an early morning post on her Facebook account on Wednesday. “But, especially within hours of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible.”
(emphasis mine)
<Facepalm>
For those of you unfamiliar with Jewish history, the blood libel is the accusation that Jews use Christian baby’s blood to bake their matzohs for Passover.
This fraud was the cause of the deaths of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of Jews over the past 200 years.
Needless to say, the idea that anyone who isn’t Jewish would use the term for something as meaningless as criticism over their rhetoric is offensive, ahistorical, narcissistic, and just plain wrong, particularly for someone who is not Jewish.
The level of venality for a non-Jew to use this to condemn people for saying mean things about her simply boggles the mind. I cannot imagine anyone being so self-centered and inconsiderate to do this, so Sarah Palin must be Jewish.†
The response to this has been actually been fairly universal.
Months ago, Elizabeth Hasselbeck, The View‘s resident right winger, called the map despicable months ago.
Additionally, former Bush speech writer turned conservative apostate David Frum, has called her out for unleashing her attack dogs, while National Review nepotism hire Jonah Goldberg, calls the use of the phrase stupid in so many words., and trust me, Jonah Goldberg knows stupid like few others.
Additionally, Jewish Groups, including the ADL, which normally spends it time sucking up to ignorant bigots have condemned the use of the phrase.
Pat Buchanan, though, was true to form, saying that he, “thought it was an excellent statement“.
For what it’s worth, Joan Walsh’s assessment of the statement, that Palin has fatally wounded her Presidential chances, is, I think, completely wrong.
Her analysis misses a basic Republican imperative, to piss off liberals and Democrats any chance they get. Really, when you look at GOP frat boy behavior, it’s clear that much of what they do is driven by this petty need.
By pissing off liberals with the “blood libel” comment, she cements her relationship with the movement conservatives and teabaggers, and pissing off Jews, who constitute a minuscule part of the party, is just gravy, because it shows the Talibaptist wing of the Republican party that she is one of them.
That being said, I would still argue that the simplest hypothesis is the one most likely the correct one, and that would be that she is a person suffering from Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
*My best effort at translating “What? Sarah Palin is a Jew?” into transliterated English.
†I’m not asking for evidence of Todd’s circumcision, thankyouverymuch!
I am a Bad Person
Natalie has an audition for a magnet program this morning, and I suggested that she keep the bling to a minimum, so that she does not distract from her performance.
Then I qualified my statement, saying, “Then again, I am an engineer giving fashion advice, which is a lot like Jared Loughner giving gun safety advice.”
I am not a good person.
Jenny McCarthy Can Kiss My Shiny Metal Ass*
Steven Wakefield’s now discredited paper in Lancet claiming a tie between autism and vaccines is now more than just a zealot doing bad science.
Brian Deer of the British Medical Journal reveals that it was outright fraud:
In the first part of a special BMJ series, Brian Deer exposes the bogus data behind claims that launched a worldwide scare over the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine, and reveals how the appearance of a link with autism was manufactured at a London medical school.
………
Unknown to Mr 11, Wakefield was working on a lawsuit, for which he sought a bowel-brain “syndrome” as its centrepiece. Claiming an undisclosed £150 (€180, $230) an hour through a Norfolk solicitor named Richard Barr, he had been confidentially 8 put on the payroll two years before the paper was published, eventually grossing him £435 643, plus expenses.
(emphasis original)
Now the question is when he goes to jail for fraud, though if I were the prosecutor, I would add felony murder to the bill of indictment as well.
Have you heard the latest thing that conservatives are seizing on to accuse Barack Obama of being a godless secret-Muslim socialist Negro?
Well it appears that Barack Obama’s speaking positively of the Latin phrase E Pluribus Unum, on the seal of the United States since 1792, has given them a new reason to be shrill:
The culture wars have a new battlefield, thanks to a letter this week from the Congressional Prayer Caucus to President Obama. To the religious right, the motto “E Pluribus Unum,” which has been part of the fabric of American democracy since it was emblazened on the national seal in 1782, has become a controversial, anti-God statement. See the Congressional Prayer Caucus letter:
http://forbes.house.gov/UploadedFiles/National_Motto_Letter_to_President.pdf
Obama referred, innocently enough, to the motto “E Pluribus Unum” in a recent speech, pointing out that the Latin phrase, first adopted by the Founders, means “out of many, one.” This beautiful motto perfectly captures the spirit of pluralistic America, where one country is formed out of many states, and where one people – the American people – are formed from a melting pot of immigrants from all around the world.
Out of many, one. Indeed, the wisdom of the Founders, in enscribing “E Pluribus Unum” on the Great Seal of the United States, can’t be questioned.
Or maybe it can. As the above letter shows, to Rep. Michele Bachmann and others on the Congressional Prayer Caucus, Obama’s reference to “E Pluribus Unum” borders on unpatriotic. They say he should instead be promoting the motto “In God We Trust,” which was adopted as the official national motto at the urging of religious conservatives in 1956, during the McCarthy era and at the height of the Cold War Red Scare.
Well, I get why they object to the phrase E Pluribus Unum. First, it’s another hammer to use against a figure that they clearly see as an uppity (*insert epithet here*), and second, the basic idea of E Pluribus Unum is the acceptance is that people who are different from them, either in philosophy, theology, or pigmentation, are legitimate Americans, which fulfills them with horror.
They are really deeply repulsive human beings.