Category: Uncategorized

Navroz Mubarak. Happy New Year. Today, March 21, is the Persian New Year and is also marked by Shi’ah as a religious holiday. Still trying to figure out the history behind it. This year’s resolution is to represent who and what I am faithfully and honestly. Let’s start with “I am a Muslim.” Happy New Year.

It looks like Captain Yee will not be charged with anything. The fifth column brush that was getting ready to paint the entire Muslim community should not be rinsed and ready to be put away. However, if you read the article, you know it’s just poised over the canvas. The choice to not prosecute Yee was not based on the lack of evidence of his guilt, but because it would be a national security risk to reveal the evidence, so they are just going to put him back on active duty. I can’t wait to come back through the looking…

Rep. Henry Waxman helps the Bush administration prove it never lied about Iraq. At least that’s probably how it will get spun. In reality he’s crafted a report on the 237 misleading statements made in 125 public appearances by senior members of the administration. You should download it and read at least the executive summary.

I know that Friedman’s views aren’t universally popular in this forum, but I particularly enjoyed this op-ed from today’s NYTimes.

Who knew we were so popular?

Thankfully Donald Rumsfeld has proven the case for the Iraq war. I’m glad this administration is restoring dignity to the Office of the President of the United States of America.

I found this military intrusion into civilian affairs and subsequent events worthy of note. Especially since this is the type of conference that I might have attended had I been in Austin at the time.

Here’s an interesting thought. During the Islam in America Conference Muqtedar Khan made an interesting observation. Let’s say there are six million Muslims in the US (I think the number is closer to 7 million, but let’s be conservative). The average income of Muslims is $50,000/year. That means the Muslim American economy is $30 billion dollars. Now, I grant you, not all those 6 million are working, or of working age. Let’s say only 1/3 of Muslim Americans are earning, so that’s a $10 billion economy. Not all of that is disposable income. I’m going to say only 1/5 of…

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo has a brief discussion of the recent Spanish elections and the impact the bombings may have had on the results. I have a great deal of respect for his analysis in general, although I do occasionally have reservations about his discourse with respect to Islam. Since I’ve now got a soapbox, I wanted to talk a little about his interpretation of the meaning of events in Iraq from a religious perspective.

I’ve been debating about whether to post something about the whole Janet Jackson breast-baring incident [warning: explicit image]. Then I got lazy, it burned out of import. Then Howard Stern got banned, and it brought up the issue again. I got lazy again (see a pattern?). Now George Carlin has gotten into the act, and while I won’t comment on his remarks on religion, he said something that made me want to write about the issue again. He said: “And yet, they’re very inconsistent — on that Super Bowl broadcast of Janet Jackson’s there was also a commercial about a…