The far right's 'sword'Robinson: There is a good reason to worry about right-wing extremism. Read Article    

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ASSOCIATED PRESS

Stewart Cairns for The New York TimesRoger Meyer, behind a town's language ordinance Small New York Town Makes English the LawBy PETER APPLEBOMEJACKSON, N.Y. It’s about 2,500 miles from this green, rural town in the rolling hills near Vermont to the Mexican border at Nogales, but that hasn’t stopped Jackson from making a bid to be New York’s small version of Arizona in the immigration wars. Or that’s how it is beginning to feel two months after Jackson — which has 1,700 people, no village, no grocery store or place to buy gasoline, no church, no school, two restaurants and maybe a few Spanish-speaking farm workers — decided it needed a law requiring that all town business be conducted in English. One nearby town, Argyle, has since passed a similar resolution. A third, Easton, is likely to consider one at its Town Board meeting in June. The law has already put Jackson at odds with the New York Civil Liberties Union, which says it violates state and federal law. But in the great American echo chamber, every mouse gets to roar, so Roger Meyer, who proposed the law, feels he is making progress toward protecting the English language from threats near and far. “For too long, the federal government has shirked its duty by not passing English as the official language of the United States,” said Mr. Meyer, 76, a Town Council member and retiree who runs Chains Unlimited, a sawmill and chain saw and logging supply company. “So seeing as this law couldn’t be passed from the top down, I felt I’d start a grass-roots movement to try to get it passed from the bottom up.” The law designates English as the town’s official written and spoken language, “to be used in all official meetings and business conducted by the elected officials and their appointees.” The civil liberties union has asked the board to rescind the ordinance. “The English language is not under attack in Jackson or anywhere else in the state or country,” said Melanie Trimble, director of the civil liberties union’s capital region chapter. The group said the law prohibited constitutionally protected speech and discriminated against anyone with limited English skills who tried to conduct business with the town, whether they wished to report a crime or to testify in local court or to obtain a building permit. It contains no exceptions for medical emergencies and police investigations, in which public health and safety are at stake, the group said. Asked if, for instance, he felt the law would prohibit a flier in Spanish about a rabies epidemic, Mr. Meyer said he believed it would not. Alan Brown, the town supervisor and the only board member to vote against the law (it passed 3 to 1, with one member absent), said he thought it would. Mr. Brown…

 How Facebook can make your career click
May 4, 2009

 Barack Obama is in denial By Toby Harnden Barack Obama is in trouble. His signature health care reform has been doomed by the Democrats losing their Senate super-majority. He needs to reconnect with ordinary Americans, his advisers tell him. So what does he do? He does a long interview with Diane Sawyer, the new ABC News anchor, in which he states that his big mistake was “we started worrying more about getting the policy right than getting the process right”.Then the White House pushes out the disastrous Valerie Jarrett – who recently and hilariously described the Obama administration as “speaking truth to power” by bashing Fox News – to tell Politico that “there’s no one more frustrated than President Obama” and that the Scott Brown Massachusetts massacre was, er, nothing to do with Obama. “I don’t think it was directed at Barack Obama,” she said. “In fact, Senator Brown said himself he didn’t run against the President.”This comes after Representative Marion Berry of Arkansas, announcing he would not fight an election he would almost certainly lose in November, revealed that Obama had told Blue Dog conservative Democrats that the difference between 1994 and 2010 was that “You got me.”So which is it? It’s nothing to do with Obama but then again it’s all about him? Good luck with that message in November.Democrats who (unlike Obama) face re-election in November are noting that the President campaigned for candidates in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts – all of which he won comfortably in 2008 – but they still bombed.The Obama line that Massachusetts is about disgust with “process” not policy and the Jarrett line that it is about some vague unfocused frustration lead to the inevitable conclusion that this White House just doesn’t get it.As William McGurn in the WSJ points out, the central problem is that Americans – only 20 per cent of whom view themselves as liberal – view the Obama agenda as too far Left. “There’s no sign that Obama buys any of this,” writes McGurn. “His team argues, apparnetly oblivious to the inherent condescension, that no intelligent American could possibly oppose his health-care agenda on substance.”Yep, the mindset is one of: sooner or later these dumb Americans will realise that we know what’s best for them.Obama also gave the game away during the Sawyer interview when he yet again compared governing the US to the election campaign.“I’ve gone through this before,” he said. “I went through this through the campaign. When your poll numbers drop, you’re an idiot. When your poll numbers are high, you’re a genius. If my poll numbers are low, then I’m cool and cerebral and cold and detached. If my poll numbers are high, well, he’s calm and reasoned.”So in the parallel universe that Obamaland has become, this is just like the summer of 2007 when the poll numbers of the man who Oprah Winfrey would call “the One” were slumping and Hillary Clinton was riding high –…