An airline is investigating the removal of two imams from a flight headed to North Carolina, ostensibly because passengers felt uncomfortable with their presence of the pair — both clad in Islamic attire.
The incident occurred Friday on an Atlantic Southeast Airlines flight from Tennessee to North Carolina and it involved Masudur Rahman and Mohamed Zaghloul were wearing traditional Muslim dress, CNN affiliate WCNC reported.
The two — who hold high religious positions in the Muslim community — were headed to North Carolina for a conference on prejudice against Muslims, or Islamaphobia.
Dear Islamic clerics:
Maybe next time you should have one of your wives drive you to the Islamaphobia conference. Just sayin’ . . .
You’re probably thinking to yourself: “Wow! They showed her blog URL on TV! That must have been worth a gazillion hits!” Alas, you’re wrong:
So it’s not like getting re-Tweeted by Alyssa Milano or something. But don’t worry, Sarah: We’re talking to Greg Gutfeld and Andy Levy about getting you into the Red Eye “leg chair.” It’s just a matter of time.
“You know how we were always screaming ‘Death to the infidel American imperialists’ before you killed bin Laden? Well, now we’re going to scream it even louder. So there. Nyah nyah nyah.”
Question: If it weren’t for the fact that it plays 24/7 in airport waiting areas, would anyone ever watch CNN? Not me. Sometimes I switch over to MSNBC for kicks, but I never watch CNN.
So anyway, Piers Morgan had Michael Moore on Thursday night, so that he could give the rest of America (or at least the part of America stuck watching CNN in airports) a lecture about what it really means to be a Good American:
I was raised in an Irish Catholic home. I believe in those principles that I was raised with. I hear a lot of people in this country often say, what would Jesus do? I don’t think Jesus would go down to Ground Zero like a lot of people did on that — on Sunday night with champagne bottles and pop corks and have a party. . . .
And I think — I think, look, like I said, I’m glad he’s gone. But I just feel something has — we’ve lost something of our soul here in this country. And maybe I’m just an old school American who believes in our American judicial system. Something that separates us from other parts, other countries where we say everybody has their day in court no matter how bad of a person, no matter what piece of scum they are, they have a right to a trial. . . .
We are at a point now where we don’t — ‘what do we need a trial for, just get rid of him.’ The second you say that, you’re saying that you hate being an American. You hate what we stand for, you hate what our constitution stands for.We stand for something different than that and we’re better than them. We don’t just operate in an uncivilized way the way they did on 9/11. We operate in a moral way. . . .
You know we should be standing up and saying, ‘listen, damn it, we’re Americans. This is the way we do it. You commit a crime, we put you on trial. That’s the way it works here.’ . . .
It’s amazing, isn’t it? He tries to play the Jesus card, then he tries to play the patriotism card, and he can’t seem to get it through his thick head: This is war.
Al-Qaeda is a foreign enemy making war on America. They are not Americans, entitled as such to the legal protections — habeas corpus, etc. — guaranteed under the Constitution. It would be more apt to compare them to pirates, deserving nothing better than a noose on a rope slung over a yardarm.
But I give Michael Moore credit at least for being consistent and non-partisan. His willingness to take the side of America’s terrorist enemies has apparently not been diminished by the fact that there is a Democrat in the White House.
Herman Cain meets with reporters Thursday following the Republican presidential debate in Greenville, S.C. His communications director, Ellen Carmichael (in green blouse) checks her messages.
And some of the expected voices like Jim Hoft and Stacy McCain immediately went into full blow, ALL CAPS DRUDGE MODE yelling CAIN WINS! CAIN WINS! But let’s face it… Cain has a lot more work to do than Pawlenty. One good appearance which was, at times, rather short on substance is not, I think, going to be nearly enough to launch his electoral ship boldly out into the public eye as a serious contender.
Go read the whole thing, and then watch the video of Frank Luntz’s focus group (or watch it again, if you’ve seen it already):
Luntz asks for a show of hands of Cain supporters and then says, “Well, we can stop right there!” More than half the people raised their hands, and when Luntz asks how many of them began the evening as Herman Cain supporters, only one hand goes up. “This is unprecedented — he was not a real candidate before tonight.” Notice also at the 1:20 mark where a guy says of Cain, “He’s likeable.”
Luntz was surprised by the result — I was not. I had predicted a Cain victory (as had my friend Steve Foley at Citizens for Cain). In fact, in a conversation with Cain’s communication director Ellen Carmichael a few hours before the debate, I’d said that Mitt Romney skipping the debate was perfect, because it would highlight the contrast between Cain and the charisma-deficient Tim Pawlenty.
Yet Jazz Shaw, who didn’t see it coming, sneers at the result that vindicates my judgment, and then sneers at my excitement — and also sneers at Jim Hoft — because being excited is uncool. Continue reading ‘Smart’ Pundits Sneer at Herman Cain →
Herman Cain was not someone I gave high marks to during the debate but he “won” the Frank Luntz focus group that came on immediately after the debate. Cain would consistently answer his question giving a bullet-point response, arguing that you need to “identify the problem” before solving “the problem.” For whatever reason, this seemed to appeal to the focus group.
Yeah: Pragmatism is so . . . impractical.
Kristula-Green’s “conventional wisdom” about the Greenville debate was expressed by Ben Smith of Politico, who dismissed the other participants as “second- and third-tier candidates” and said Pawlenty was “widely viewed as the only candidate in Thursday night’s Fox News debate with any real chance of becoming the nominee of his party or President of the United States.”
“Widely viewed” is one of those phrases like “many observers” by which reporters embed conventional-wisdom opinions into their stories as if they were talking about established facts. In campaign coverage, this is a way of privileging the punditry over actual voters.
Tim Pawlenty is widely viewed as lame and boring, which is why many observers believe that Obama would mop the floor with him if the Minnesota governor actually got the Republican nomination.
Don’t piss down my back and tell me it’s raining, sources say.
CBS News was also stunned by Cain’s focus-group win. I don’t know why this seems so shocking to some people. As Cain’s spokeswoman Ellen Carmichael has been saying for weeks, “When people meet Herman, they like Herman.”
This is something the pundits might notice if they actually paid attention. I remember last year in New Orleans at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference, when Cain’s speech was over, he had the darnedest time getting out of the ballroom because so many well-wishers wanted a chance to shake his hand and talk to him. And that happens at every gathering of Republicans he attends. He’s a likeable guy, very down-to-earth and approachable, and people relate to that.
