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"My best friends are minority!"

2011-04-04T14:48:00.001-04:00

Believe it or not, Republican State Senator Dan Hall's most stinging criticism of Minnesota public education in the video above is not when he claims

“I watched Minneapolis get destroyed, so I not only didn’t want my kids in the school system. I took them out of Minneapolis because they ruined our neighborhoods with integration and [de]segregation.”

Mr. Hall made his argument for segregation last Thursday (and right in time for April 4!) in support of H.F. No. 934, also known as the K-12 omnibus bill. Later that day, it passed in a party-line vote in the Minnesota State Senate. As reported by the Minnesota Independent, that bill "would take funding from integration and desegregation programs in the Twin Cities and Duluth and shift them to statewide programs for literacy. [It] also repeals the unfunded portions of Minnesota law dealing with desegregation." In short, it aims to address the racial achievement gap in the state's schools by rewarding schools for improving literacy and taking away money for desegregation.

Perhaps Mr. Hall's personal experience led him to believe that literacy is more urgent than desegregation -- that the two are somehow in competition. Perhaps his constituents are asking him to vote this way. However, that's not the argument he makes, nor the people whose support he cites. He cites his "best friends," who Mr. Hall claims are "minority."

“They think integration is foolish. It’s a ploy, it’s to get more money....It’s disrespectful to tell my friends, my minority friends, they can’t make it without extra special help.”

These "minority" best friends are merely the fulcrum of Mr. Hall’s rhetorical argument, one that uses the vocabulary of opposing affirmative action to oppose integration. What's next? Lunch counters? Water fountains?

Still, even that wasn't the strongest shot taken by Mr. Hall at public education in Minnesota. That comes right at the beginning:

“I am a product of the Minneapolis school system, completely, all of my years, many of the different schools. I graduated with a sixth-grade reading ability. I struggled my whole life.”

Even if there are problems with reading levels in Minnesota's public schools stretching back to Mr. Hall's era, even if the funds for the Republican initiative must be taken from integration programs (and they don't have to be), was it necessary to scapegoat integration in this way? Must one be the antagonist of the other?

When this bill reaches Governor Mark Dayton's desk, it will curious to see if he signs it into law, or asks for a new bill that truly strengthens public education without doing so at the expense of racial progress.

The ripple effect.

2011-03-14T12:25:00.002-04:00

Yesterday morning, I visited Mother Bethel A.M.E., my Philadelphia church home -- and the sermon touched on something we at TRMS have also been looking at recently. The title was "The Ripple Effect," and brought front and center Pennsylvania's new governor, Tom Corbett, and the budget cuts he proposed last week. Our pastor, the Rev. Dr. Mark Kelly Tyler:

What bothers me most about the current discourse and conversation in our nation around budgets and finance is that it seems that people continue to forget about the ripple effect...We are connected to one another, and when we create financial distress in one place, you can’t control what happens when the ripples come.

On TRMS, we've covered how Republican governors in states like Wisconsin, Ohio and Michigan would "solve" that problem. We've also examined the rather magical approach that Florida Governor Rick Scott has for his budget issues: reducing public education funding by nearly $2 billion and giving almost all of those reductions away in tax cuts.

In Pennsylvania, Governor Corbett has a twist on Mr. Scott's approach, directing the money saved by harsh cuts in education (and state worker rights) to something else: prisons. Public education? Slashed more than any other area. Funding for the state university system, including Penn State? Literally cut in half. Funding for the state's Department of Corrections? Increased by 11 percent, a total of around $186 million, despite its existing burden on the state's budget.

Judging by the moans and groans that followed that part of the sermon, the church didn't like this at all. Neither did financial reporter Ben Waxman, writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Pennsylvania's prison population has grown by 500 percent since 1980 despite few changes in crime patterns....Throwing the book at minor offenders is a policy choice made by state lawmakers.

If Corbett were serious about cutting all costs, including prisons, he'd identify the problem as our drug-sentencing laws. Instead, he's throwing money at a broken system and claiming it's out of his control.

It's not easy to fill a $4 billion hole, but the first step is correctly identifying the problem.

Governor Corbett was one of the new quote-unquote fiscally conservative Republican governors elected last November, and his rhetoric was party boilerplate: smaller, less expensive government; deficit hawk; no new taxes.

But this is no longer about crowd-pleasing campaign rhetoric. It is about how these brand-new Republican governors are now actually governing. These budget proposals are the stones tossed into the water. Governors like Tom Corbett speak through their budgets, telling students it is more prudent to invest in their future incarceration than in their education. What will be the ripple effect?

New York Times, do better.

2011-03-09T11:38:00.001-05:00

(You know how some people post spoiler alerts for movie reviews? This post is about sexual assualt, so I'd like to warn those for whom stories like this serve as a trigger for past trauma. Still with me? OK, here we go.)

Police in Cleveland, Texas, have determined that an 11-year-old girl was sexually assaulted in late November by a group of 18 men and boys in an abandoned trailer. The New York Times published an article about it today:

The police investigation began shortly after Thanksgiving, when an elementary school student alerted a teacher to a lurid cellphone video that included one of her classmates...
Five suspects are students at Cleveland High School, including two members of the basketball team. Another is the 21-year-old son of a school board member. A few of the others have criminal records, from selling drugs to robbery and, in one case, manslaughter. The suspects range in age from middle schoolers to a 27-year-old.

The shaming of the victim has already begun. The Times cited residents of the community where the girl was raped who claim that the victim "dressed older than her age, wearing makeup and fashions more appropriate to a woman in her 20s."

“It’s just destroyed our community,” said Sheila Harrison, 48, a hospital worker who says she knows several of the defendants. “These boys have to live with this the rest of their lives.”

That same thread appears in an AOL article about the case:

Some are pointing a finger at the victim's parents.
"Where were they when this girl was seen wandering at all hours with no supervision and pretending to be much older?" Cleveland resident Kisha Williams told the Chronicle.

International Women's Day was yesterday, yet the shaming of sexual assault victims rolls on unabated.

I say this as someone who benefits daily, directly or indirectly, from male privilege. Nothing about my appearance will make me more apt to be raped, but yet an 11-year-old girl who may have worn some makeup and "dressed older than her age" is a target for those reasons? There is no gender equality if this idea continues to thrive, especially in the minds of women like those two who were quoted.

Pause and take a step back: if an 11-year-old girl who was raped by more than a dozen guys is being blamed, at what point does it not become the victim's fault? How many perpetrators does it take? How does she need to have been dressed at the time? And how young does she need to be to not only not be blamed, but to get sympathy?

“These boys have to live with this the rest of their lives.”

Those poor guys. They must feel really awful.

Show me, states!

2011-03-02T14:53:00.001-05:00

During the 2008 election season, "11th-dimensional chess" became a convenient, at times lazy phrase useful for making sense of the machinations of Barack Obama's presidential campaign. It was pure exaggeration, of course -- but as a shorthand, it said as much about the few-steps-ahead savvy of Obama's strategy as it did about his opponents being checkmated in ways they'd figure out later.

In last night's TRMS, Rachel took a look at the latest political opponent that the President has put in check. On Monday, he touted the essence of the bipartisan Empowering States to Innovate Act, which would allow states to come up with their own health reform solutions a full three years earlier than the Affordable Care Act. He did so before an audience of America's governors, many of them Republicans who oppose the federal health reforms he fought to make law. If they want to opt out, the President did everything but literally say "go for it":

If your state can create a plan that covers as many people as affordably and comprehensively as the Affordable Care Act does — without increasing the deficit — you can implement that plan. And we’ll work with you to do it. I’ve said before, I don’t believe that any single party has a monopoly on good ideas. And I will go to bat for whatever works, no matter who or where it comes from.

This is like the scene in "The Social Network" in which Mark Zuckerberg tells the three guys claiming he stole the idea for Facebook away from them: "If you guys were the inventors of Facebook...you'd have invented Facebook." The same framework applies here. If Republican governors think they can do better, great. But why didn't they "do better" before now, or before health reform was passed?

As Rachel pointed out with guest Ezra Klein, if any of these Republican governors run for president in 2012, this essentially removes their ability to use health reform as a wedge issue. In the end, they have to offer some policy. If their initial reaction to the President's remarks is any indication, I wouldn't suggest holding your breath.

ONE MORE THING:

The President's challenge wasn't open only to Republican governors. The left is seizing upon this as a chance to advance more progressive health reforms in states like Vermont, where the new governor, Democrat Peter Shumlin, is putting forth an option many liberals favored during the national health care debate:

Vermont’s third option would be a single-payer system with a twist. The state would create an independent public board to oversee the health care system, and the board would contract out the administration of claims. The claims administrator could be either a public or a private entity. Private insurers could compete for this largely clerical work, as they have done for years to administer the Medicare program...
Vermont’s entire Congressional delegation — Sens. Patrick Leahy and Bernie Sanders and Rep. Peter Welch — supports Shumlin’s efforts and they have already begun the process of requesting a waiver.
Considering the President’s willingness to cut states some slack and the hundreds of waivers the government already has granted to insurers and corporations from various provisions of the law, they might just get the waiver they’re seeking.

Less government! More sexism!

2011-02-02T13:19:00.001-05:00

By now you'd expect House Republicans to ignore jobs in favor of demagoguing on a social issue like abortion. It's become a familiar playbook. But what they're doing now is very different, and considerably more dangerous.

Republicans as prominent as Speaker John Boehner and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor are backing a new measure sponsored by vocal anti-abortion Congressman Chris Smith. It is H.R. 3, The No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act.

The bill promises to just what it says it will: make the Hyde Amendment permanent; prevent tax breaks from going to insurance consumers (employers or the self-insured) if the insurance they're buying covers abortion. Anti-abortion legislative goals, in boilerplate language, designed to give the impression that the government pays for abortions willy-nilly (when the facts tell a very different story, particularly for low-income women).

However, in his update yesterday, TPM reporter Evan McMorris-Santoro detailed the bill's effects on rape victims:

...the widest criticism of the bill comes in its exemptions for rape -- provisions that would allow federal money or private insurance to be used to cover an abortion. H.R. 3 says those provisions would kick in only in cases of forcible rape, a distinction from other forms rape of that is largely undefined but seems to suggest that a rape that doesn't include violence wouldn't count. The bill would also limit the incest exemption to women under the age of 18 -- meaning a victim of incest who was legally allowed to vote wouldn't have her abortion covered by Medicaid and would likely have more limited access to private insurance than she does today.

Long story short? Rape, in Republican Newspeak, is only rape if you get hurt. Huh?

Pro-choice activists are relentless and out in force, staging the #DearJohn campaign on Twitter to get Speaker Boehner's attention. So are the many Democrats who don't already support H.R. 3., including Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, who said, "I consider the proposal of this bill a violent act against women." Rep. Diana DeGette of Colorado highlighted the Act's extremism by noting that it goes "far beyond the current law." It also goes far beyond the English language.

Rape is violence. Whether it happens to someone during a home invasion, a woman in a relationship who ends up having sex with her boyfriend after she's made clear she didn't want to, a minor even with her consent, or to an intoxicated woman accosted in a seedy bar, it's rape.

Real talk: a group of mostly male Republicans is using stunt legislation to prioritize the agendas of anti-abortion zealots and health insurance companies. And in doing so, they're making the very definition of rape a topic for debate.

The tweets on #DearJohn are coming from women (and not enough men) who are from this country, who live in this country, and are subject to this latest Republican exhibition of "small government." Will Republicans listen to these Americans, or only the ones who keep them powerful?

What did we expect?

2011-02-01T19:25:00.002-05:00

Past events create expectations, fairly or unfairly. Reading reports, from people on the ground, that today's massive marches throughout Egypt have been peaceful has been admittedly a bit surprising. From what I've been able to gather, there have been no reports of violence from among the protesters today, or from the state against them.

Great news, right? But isn't that something we should expect, especially of an allied government? That sentiment should go right into the "Captain Obvious" file. The Department of Defense apparently disagrees.

Writing for Wired's Danger Room blog, Spencer Ackerman was likewise struck by the lack of violence, but was really taken aback by what he calls an "unalloyed 'attaboy' " to the Egyptian troops from the U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen. First, those props, in a DoD podcast:

"So far, the Egyptian military have handled themselves exceptionally well," he said. "You can see that just from the pictures that have been displayed, in terms of how they have been accepted by their people."

Second, Ackerman touches on the messaging:

Mullen’s big-up for his Egyptian counterparts -- "a stabilizing influence," he said -- is a sharp contrast with four days' worth of rhetoric from senior Obama administration officials. The military is now the only entity in Egypt that the administration has unambiguously praised.

Third, it's been clear, despite earlier reports of protesters being fired upon, that the military was more inclined to hold the center than to get involved either way. Our government giving the Egyptian army dap for not shooting its citizens was a backhanded compliment; it implies America's assumption that there would be violence.

Yes, past events create expectations, but it's disheartening to see that in a time in which Egypt and the Arab world are showing their real potential, we still expect the worst.

Why I'm not mad at Michael Vick.

2010-12-29T14:42:00.009-05:00

There are some stories that just might as well have "It's a slow news cycle" written on their foreheads. Case in point.

I regret that it even matters that President Obama believes that quarterback Michael Vick receiving a second chance in the NFL is a good thing, but when he's asked about people like Snooki, I guess this is a step up. (That the President phoned the NFL owner who signed Vick and expressed said belief probably should be an even smaller deal.) However, as race, privilege and a strangely self-sustaining public anger at a famous convict are tossed into the aforementioned slow news cycle, away we go.

Avoiding cynicism, we actually can glean something important from this episode.

As Laura noted, I was tweeting a little bit about this with Ezra Klein yesterday. The White House's explanation for the call to the Eagles owner may be, as I told Ezra, sauteéd bollocks dipped in weak sauce. Klein's convinced that was the case; I don't think it'd be so unbelievable for a President to call the Eagles about alternative energy use in sports arenas, considering what the team is doing and how much energy these stadiums actually consume. Reading their posts, I disagree with both Ezra and Laura in different respects: Vick is hardly an example to cite when discussing diminished earning power of those who've been incarcerated, and I think those who are still angry with Vick are more concerned with dogs than money. All that is a distraction from the real reason this is still news, so never mind those bollocks.

To revisit: Yes, Vick's crimes were ruthless and nauseating. (I'd stop short of calling them inhuman, since what humans do to animals we don't keep as pets makes his acts quite human.) And yet, the root and true meaning of the word "penitentiary" is obvious in its first eight letters. Why so many of my fellow Americans feel the need to punish him forever is beyond my capacity to explain. Whether Michael Vick is truly reformed, only he can know. He's given every indication of late, both on and off the field, that he's learned his lesson.

Still, there are those like Fox News' Tucker Carlson, who want to kill Michael Vick for what he did. Carlson's is the latest, loudest manifestation of privilege and anger, judging casually with inflammatory rhetoric. (And on the flipside, no, Michael Vick is not being "lynched" in the media, or anywhere else. If he were actually being lynched, Carlson would already be satisfied.)

I have lost family members (for significant time) to jail, and lost one (forever) to people who are now in jail. In that latter experience, I actually know what it's like to want someone to die for their crimes. But I'm no longer interested in judging those who've already been judged, nor belching forth exaggerated anger and enforcing some sort of social imprisonment on them because I found their crimes particularly horrific. Ostracizing those who've done their time can lead only to recidivism, and calling for it is a luxury that we can't afford. If there's anything we can learn from this now much-too-famous phone call, it's that the President clearly understands that.

(Image: Paul Sancya/AP)

'The worse, the better.'

2010-12-21T11:09:00.002-05:00

The comic novel Luthor offers a fresh perspective on an old relationship, one you've likely figured out by now -- that of a hard-working, civic-minded Metropolis industrialist desperate to protect humanity from this so-called "Superman," an all-powerful alien who will not share his power and symbolizes the end of human aspiration. Oh, that's not exactly the narrative you had in mind?

Well, Lex Luthor is the same guy in this book that Superman fans have come to know -- crooked, murderous, and obsessed. But letting us see it from inside his head at least allows Luthor to make his case. And frankly, I can see where some might agree that he has a point.

How we understand someone's deeds depends greatly on our understanding of the motivations involved. But what happens those motivations lead people to adopt the tactics of those they fight against?

During Rachel's interview last night with economist Nouriel "Dr. Doom" Roubini, he used four words to encapsulate what's motivating Republicans in their economic philosophy these days:

"The worse, the better."

Dr. Roubini made note, correctly, that this saying has Leninist origins. It was originally used, apparently by one of Lenin's mentors, to signal that the worse that socio-economic conditions became for the poor, the more inclined those poor would be to stage a Communist revolution. It was a rallying cry for Leninists.

Considering both their rhetoric and their curious mathematics, revolution by the underclass doesn't seem to be the Republicans' goal.

But the idea that Republican policy and rhetoric have, indirectly, appropriated the tools of the same scary Communists they tell us to fear? That is instructive, to say the least. I'm not suggesting that Republicans are emulating Lex Luthor to the letter -- sometimes a metaphor is just a metaphor. That said, Luthor does one thing that Republicans also do: ask us to respect their argument, regardless of its roots. I remain unconvinced, on both counts.

(Image: DC Comics. A special thanks to Joan Hilty for the book.)

Like a mighty stream.

2010-12-20T02:52:00.002-05:00

In the text of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King's historic "I Have a Dream" speech, the word "homosexual" does not appear once. Neither do the more colloquial terms "gay" and "lesbian." Yet words from that speech were what first leapt into my mind Saturday afternoon as I watched the Senate vote to repeal "Don't Ask, Don't Tell".

To many, Dr. King is not so much a person as an avatar for American justice and equality, and never more so than in those several minutes of videotape. So perhaps it was a Pavlovian response to the rare experience of seeing, live before my eyes, long-overdue justice finally delivered to targets of discrimination.

"No...no, we are not satisfied," Dr. King said that day, "and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream."

The note pictured above was a handwritten response from President Obama to Sandy Tsao, an Army officer who'd informed her superiors that she was gay and written subsequently to the President to request his help ending "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." She received his response in May. Of 2009.

Justice rolls down like waters. Righteousness like a mighty stream. That sounds pretty fast. And to many, this process seemed anything but. Including, this note shows, the President himself.

Undeniably, the President's "long game" worked in this case, and he'll be within his rights to remind us of that. (Perhaps he'll do so during the 2012 re-election campaign should the failed DREAM Act prove to be his political Obi-Wan Kenobi, a more powerful force in death than in life.)

But for all the anger over the 17 years "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" was allowed to stand, the now-successful struggle for repeal proves that the "long game" is not just a presidential strategy, but a sad reality in an America where such discrimination can be removed from the law and yet continue to thrive -- as if to spite the progress made.

There are not yet any rolling waters, nor any mighty streams. Are you satisfied?

(Image via ThinkProgress.)

Bah humbug!

2010-12-15T12:36:00.004-05:00

Christmas falls on a Saturday this year, but many, many Americans whose jobs require them to work on or around that day will push through. Snow-plow drivers will be be plowing streets and driveways; waiters will attend to families that don't want to cook; retail workers will be there to exchange that Cosby sweater your mom gave you that morning. And that's actually on Christmas Day. As it turns out, a Republican in the United States Senate is ticked that he'll have to work two whole days after Christmas.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is resolute that Democratic priorities such as the DREAM Act, the ratification of the new START treaty and the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" will be dealt with before the end of the 111th Congress on January 4. If that means keeping his fellow Senators in session all the way through until then, so be it. So how did Republican Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona respond to this?

Naturally, by insinuating that Harry Reid and Democrats are insulting Christians. Tumbling down the rhetorical rabbit hole:

"It is impossible to do all of the things that the majority leader laid out without doing -- frankly, without disrespecting the institution and without disrespecting one of the two holiest of holidays for Christians and the families of all of the Senate, not just the senators themselves but all of the staff."

Set aside for a moment the pass-the-buck nature of Kyl's comment, the idea that it's "impossible" to get the same things done that Republicans have made a habit of obstructing (as Rachel and Senator Tom Udall of New Mexico explored in the segment above).

Reid isn't asking them to work on Saturday, the 25th. It's the week after, when quite a lot of us have to go back to work. But Kyl says to request that the Senate do so as well is "disrespecting" Christians, and he's implicitly asking Christians to share in his indignation. (Imagine the scene of a snow-plow driver on Christmas morning, steamed not that he has to work on Saturday, but that Jon Kyl and his Senatorial ilk will have to work on Monday. Heathens, those Democrats!)

Who knew fake outrage was in the holiday spirit?

Who we thought they were.

2010-12-14T12:39:00.005-05:00

The "Tea Party" movement is, by definition, rather without definition. During the recent November elections, likening it to the Republican Party that spawned it seemed like comparing jelly to marble. The structures could not be more different because, for one, there seemed to be virtually no Tea Party structure at all.

Though it was easily disproved, we were told that the force behind the Tea Party movement was organic, furious and, most of all, pure. We were told that there was a purity of political and fiscal philosophy (with a dash of the moral thrown in), but we learned these were just a more attention-grabbing way of articulating what essentially were Republican arguments, with President Obama serving as an avatar for their discontent.

In their post-election incarnation, those claiming the Tea Party label have shown several contradictions in their supposed fiscally conservative and socially libertarian principles. But if what we've been told is to be believed, you'd think this would jar them:

House Republicans on Wednesday promoted Bachus to chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, which has wide jurisdiction over banks, capital markets, housing, consumer credit and the overall health of the American financial system.

No, it's not Congressman Bachus' promotion that should shake those folks. It is what Congressman Spencer Bachus (R-Alabama) said. Seriously, read these two paragraphs (emphasis mine):

Bachus, in an interview Wednesday night, said he brings a "main street" perspective to the committee, as opposed to Wall Street.

"In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated, and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks," he said.

Bachus' quote is notable for its frank admission of what many likely suspected, but I'd guess that a Tea Party movement worth its salt would find this objectionable, since we've been told that they helped put Republicans in charge to avoid exactly this kind of pandering to power.

Or perhaps the only thing that was ever pure about the Tea Party movement was its desire to see Republicans (of varying extremes) elected. And it's not as if Republicans have pretended to be anything but what Congressman Bachus articulated. So actually, Tea Partiers have to be thrilled, right? This is what they asked for. They are who we thought they were.

Barack's new four-letter word.

2010-12-09T11:07:00.005-05:00

Perhaps too often politics lends itself to pop-culture references. It's a lazy tool that we media types love to use in order to make our copy, well, pop. And with all that stipulated, I'll beg your forgiveness as I offer another.

President Obama used the word "fight" or some variation thereof more than a dozen times at his Tuesday presser, mostly in the context of not fighting Republicans now, but promising to do so in the future. Witness this passage from the press conference:

I will be happy to see the Republicans test whether or not I'm itching for a fight on a whole range of issues. I suspect they will find I am.

Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio told Rachel this week that President Obama didn't fight hard enough, that it was presumed that Republicans would cave on unemployment benefits before Christmas. So why was the President was talking about fighting, over and over again? Cedric the Entertainer may hold the answer.

In the concert film "The Original Kings of Comedy," Cedric's set opens with a (somewhat profane) reference to what he calls the "wish" factor: that while some may hope things don't go wrong, some actively WISH for something bad to happen to give us an excuse to fight. Forget about "hope" -- it's now all about "wish." Translated for general audience, Cedric's wish creed goes something like:

"I wish [that nice human being] over there would [do something that give me cause for fisticuffs]."

This tax deal's far from done, so President Obama is asking for a fight that's already here. Will he keep on with his "wish" factor, or will he start scrapping for real this time? A lot of folks wish he would.

(Thanks to Will Femia for the image tweak.)

Do the right thing.

2010-12-06T15:52:00.007-05:00

The English language can be, at once, a wonderful and terrible thing. Our peculiar politics exhibits that dichotomy in double entendres and what an old teacher of mine used to refer to as "simultaneous definition." Take, for instance, a word that has come to mean two very different things in Washington: "compromise."

The Democrats think they're compromising now, specifically concerning unemployment benefits and the extension of the (political and fiscal time bomb that is) the Bush tax cuts. In return for what? A "probably."

What is blackmail to one person becomes compromise to the other. This we've seen played out many times in Washington, and frankly, it is indeed played out. The Obama administration can claim all it wants that they are doing what needs to be done in order to get the unemployment benefits that were blocked to the families that need them, but that ignores, conveniently, the overarching narrative of surrender. When any hint of Democratic fortitude in the face of Republican threat becomes, in and of itself, newsworthy -- something is awry.

Let's just boil this down: Republicans have stated, openly, that their number-one priority is ensuring President Obama is not re-elected. So much so that in the midst of the holiday season, they'll block unemployment benefit and use them as leverage for the benefit of their most ardent constituency, the wealthy. Any victory for the President is unacceptable, the country's benefit be damned. And yet, we get "compromise": one that will cost the country $60 billion over the next two years. (To say nothing of the political price he'll pay in two years when the expiration of this two-year extension becomes an election issue. You can't say he wasn't warned.)

Yes, there is a numbers game at work in Congress, and there will be even more of one once the 112th Congress begins work next month. That said, the issue begins with the President.

We've all heard cries from so many asking, "Where is the man I voted for?" Those cries come largely either from disappointment in the continuation of abhorrent policies, or perceptions that President Obama's being duped or pressured by Republicans to become someone wholly different from the leader he promised to be. However, I think that gets it backward. President Obama is exactly the guy America elected, and at time he is that guy to a fault.

Obama's belief in a Washington that could be free of partisan games has survived two years of unprecedented opposition from the Right. It's not the Right saying, "No, Barack, you're wrong, it can never be like that -- and let us show you why." It's "Barack, you're in our chair."

The President is not naive. He's simply so dedicated to the ideal of compromise that he's not taking the steps needed to achieve it. In the context of double meanings, he's forgetting to do the right thing. Instead, he's doing the Right thing. Alas.

(AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

Why so serious?

2010-11-23T10:55:00.011-05:00

Political differences are funny things. Especially examined by people like Dennis Prager, who treats said differences as a doctor would psychological trauma in his latest for the National Review. Citing a couple polls that he doesn't link and a two-year-old book, Prager presents his new finding: conservatives, quite naturally, are happier than liberals.

Then rather than asking a liberal for a response, he conjures one:

Liberals respond this way: “If we’re unhappier, it’s because we are more upset than conservatives over the plight of those less fortunate than ourselves.”

Pivoting off this invention, the column is fascinating in one particular respect. Prager's gig as a conservative radio host and syndicated columnist has no doubt given him exposure to any number of opinions from any number of Americans, but he tries to employ supposedly data-driven studies (who knows, since he doesn't link them) in the service of rhetoric that isn't based on anything but his own political assumptions and prejudices.

Witness his concern for African-Americans, and our happiness:

It makes perfect sense that a black American who is essentially happy is going to be less attracted to the Left. Anyone who has interacted with black conservatives rarely encounters an angry, unhappy person.

Why?

Because the liberal view on race is that America is a racist society. Therefore, for all intents and purposes, a black American must abandon liberalism in order to be a happy individual. It is very hard, if not impossible, to be a happy person while believing that society is out to hurt you. So, the unhappy black person will gravitate to liberalism and liberalism will in turn make him more unhappy by reinforcing his view that he is a victim.

He could've made his point so much more efficiently by simply writing Black + Liberalism = President Obama = ANGRY! = BOO! Perhaps that would've lacked the sophistication Prager's argument clearly possesses.

There's more, but Prager's argument isn't even original: essentially, this same column was written four years ago by George F. Will in the Washington Post. Maybe I can write this post again in 2014. Wonder if I'll still be this unhappy and angry then.

(Image: Huey Freeman of "The Boondocks".)

Cross-posted on The Maddow Blog.

"...but come on."

2010-08-12T18:08:00.003-04:00

Overt bigotry has made one hell of a comeback in our politics. Witness most of the right in this country buying votes with a down payment of fear and xenophobia, appealing directly and loudly to our basest weakness -- the fear of what is unfamiliar. But what's truly dangerous is that those who pimp racism for political profit threaten to distract American voters from those that continue to use so-called "soft bigotry" and drift it further into the mainstream.

Enter Virginia Congressman and Minority Whip Eric Cantor, deliberately and awkwardly, into the debate about the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque" now set to be built two blocks from the site where the World Trade Center towers once stood. Many political figures, particularly on the Right, have spoken up both for and against the idea that a recreation center -- which would include a mosque -- go up in the shadow of what is, for many, a burial ground.

Cantor arrived in the discussion today with this weak sauce: "Everybody knows America's built on the rights of free expression, the rights to practice your faith, but come on."

"...but come on!" Come on? To where, exactly?

Maybe it was into Eric Cantor's house, where, with this statement, he casually opened the door for Big Bigotry to come in and get comfortable.

Explaining Ben Nelson.

2010-07-16T22:39:00.002-04:00

A friend from Nebraska recently wrote to me in response to my request that she explain Senator Ben Nelson, who has announced that he will be filibustering the climate bill:

Well, to begin with, let's just say that you're right - it is a mix - but the answer is much more complicated than that. This is definitely one of those situations where the details don't fall into a nice soundbite. But then, Rachel's always been good about digging into and trying to explain the details of something.

Where to start......

I don't know if you ever saw it, but during the health care debate, when all the progressive groups and blogs were all out there in full force, Nelson was getting hammered on a regular basis. Markos Moulitsas did a poll (yes, I know they now have Research 2000 problems) and while it showed that some Conservative Dems were not really matching the pulse of their states, Nebraska was different. More voters mirrored his conservative approach than didn't, and Kos even wrote that Nelson appeared to be an exception and was representing the views of the voters of his state. That's just an example for you.

Nelson has always been a more conservative Democrat. We have a history in this state of pretty independent thinking politicians. That is, at least the most liked, most respected ones have been. Nebraska is also the only state with "non-partisan" Unicameral, which encourages finding ways to force politiicans to be more independent in their thinking (but more and more, party politics are having an influence). Recent years have seen the same sorry trend as the nation where rubber stamp Republicans take over, but before them we had people like Jim J Exon, Bob Kerrey, and even Chuck Hagel. You can even go back to the days of William Jennings Bryan and George Norris. There are many more, but these are the names most recognized. They were representatives that didn't toe a party line on a regular basis. Yes, Hagel did side with his party most of the time, but you could always get a straight answer from him, and he'd boldly step up and vote against his party on things that were really important to him. Ben Nelson falls into the mold of the independent trend.

Nelson was actually a pastor in his early years. Not many people know that. He also worked in the insurance industry and has generally had a conservative approach to business issues all his life. But over time, he has become a savvy politician who does understand the diversity of Nebraska.

To understand Nelson, one has to understand Nebraska. During the health care debate, Nelson was in a position I personally don't envy. No matter what he did, he was going to get attacked in Nebraska and be criticized. It's ironic that at times one could read on Nebraska blogs the exact same criticizisms from some of the Nebraska liberals and progressives that were being made by the far right neo-cons in the state. If he supported the more liberal version of HCR, he'd get hit hard by the right. If he went too conservative, he'd get hit by the far left - with the help of a lot of outside progressive groups that a lot of native Nebraskans don't take kindly to. If he stuck to the center more, the right hated him for supported HCR, the left hated him for not giving enough to their side of the argument.

Nebraska voter registration hovers around 48% Republican, 34% Democrat, 18% Indy/Other. As you look at the map, the further left you move on the map, the further right the electorate moves. The 3rd District (in the top ten of most conservative districts in the country) gets high voter turnout fairly consistantly. Even the Democrats in the west tend to be more moderate to conservative than their counterparts in the big cities of Lincoln and Omaha. And Independents, which contain some left-leaning Greens, tend to lean more right than left. Most voters (the ones not as active or not at all active in party politics, but simply vote) you will find are part of the party of the parents before them. Many of the Democrats in the more rural areas are Dems because they or their parents before them became Dems in support of FDR and rural electification. Likewise, you get some Republicans who were more Eisenhower Republicans. A big chunk of the voters will vote for person first, party second, but both sides of the spectrum have those that will only vote party line.

Any politician who is going to suceed in this state as a Democrat has to gain the support of moderate Republicans. If they don't do that, they have no chance of winning. The 3rd District is even harder - there, the voter registration is around 58% Rep, 28% Dem, 14% Indy.

Nelson pays attention to politics in the state. He has a race coming up in 2012. His challenger IS going to be current Governor Dave Heineman. Even though Heiny is running for reelection now, he just lost his Dem Challenger and Dems have to post up a sacrificial lamb for the elections at the state convention in a couple weeks. Heineman was recently challenged by the press (a rarity in this state) to make a pledge to serve his full term his comment? "No comment". And he's going after Nelson and speaking more on national issues, so his 2012 run has begun. This gives you the groundwork for the "Cornhusker Kickback". Heineman made a valid arguement regarding the unfunded mandate on states. Nelson brought it up with Reid. Since they were at the point of passing the bill, they inserted an exemption with Nebraska, but Nelson and Reid did say it was a "placeholder", and something they would work to get for ALL states (which they did). Back here in Nebraska, there was a brief back and forth in the news between Heineman and Nelson. Republicans got the national media to go after Nelson and it backfired on him. If it had stuck to just local media, Nelson was winning the arguement (mainly the hypocrisy of Heineman) in the local news until that happened.

Like I said, the answer on Nelson requires a lot of initial groundwork. To understand Nelson, one has to know Nebraskans. Nelson is losing a lot of support from Democrats and progressive/liberals in the state, but they make up only a small percentage of the voters. What he's losing with them, there's a chance he's gaining more moderate Republican support.

For no reason at all.

2010-02-03T16:54:00.003-05:00

Terence Blanchard, "Sing Soweto".

The accidental poet.

2009-11-06T15:24:00.004-05:00

Famed White House correspondent Helen Thomas waxes poetic on the state of modern journalism to Greg Mitchell:

The changes are immense, no noise of clicking
teletypes and typewriters, obsolete technology,
little real editing unfortunately, instantaneous
communication and more superficiality,

competition based on personality
instead of content in depth, insecurity
about where newspapers are headed,
money a big factor in all things

talk show hosts peddling disinformation,
lack of transparency
by even Obama administration,

blocking torture photos,
calling reporters the night before
presidential news conferences to tell them
they will be called on,

Hope all is not lost
in our great business.

On blogging, again.

2009-10-16T16:38:00.003-04:00

Here we go again. I just can't find my rhythm. Perhaps I'm being too hard on myself for my intermittent sojourns away from this blog. Rather than curse the burdens of my day job, or blame Twitter, I feel like I need to return to the source - pardon the Matrixpun - and recharge. And since I find that the same way I felt over a year ago is how I feel now, this bears repeating:

In the past few weeks, I've (re)discovered that blogging is essentially a rhythmic exercise. It can be likened, I suppose, to something as rudimentary as lifting weights. One can visit a gym and "lift" - but if he or she not lifting the proper weight at the right angle, with the pacing and intensity required, the benefits will be fewer...and if done wrong, a person can actually do harm. In search of a metaphor for why I stepped away from the blog this week - the first sustained break I've taken in four months - didn't come because I was simply breathing heavy after a long workout, basking in an exhaustion borne of fruitful efforts. I've been lifting the wrong weights, with poor form and pacing, for weeks now. And the muscle that I've been seeking to work out has suffered as a result.

When I started this blog, I did so out of pure emotion. Jeremiah Wright had gotten on my last nerve, and the space that I'd set up months previously and had done nothing with suddenly had life. Since I was new to this whole thing, I modeled the blog after other political sites that I'm a fan of, thinking more of fitting in as a way to get myself noticed. I was inconsistent at first, but figured out soon that simply posting smaller items in between longer essays worked as a way to ensure that the blog was always offering something new, something topical to that day's events both in the macro (the world at-large) and the micro (my own life). And that seemed to work.

But it can become a crutch, quoting other posts or articles at length and offering brief rejoinders - and it had lately, resulting largely from a sudden lack of time to devote to longer posts, my weariness at this poll-obsessed, negative-meme-driven campaign for our nation's highest office and a general disinterest in writing for the first time in months. I'd just become sick of it all, and throwing up a blurb about Obama's latest campaign stop, the Olympics or Maureen Dowd's latest column wasn't making it anymore.

Pure emotion driving the majority of my writing here has its pitfalls, and when I lost interest in doing things in the conventional political-blog fashion, it really became pointless to offer my opinion about events that mattered very little to me. If blogging is like going to the gym, throwing stuff up just for the sake of attracting traffic and reminding folks that I'm not dead is like running for 10 minutes, doing five push-ups and then heading to McDonald's for your post-workout meal. No nutrients, nothing earned and growth in all the wrong ways.

I decided that I needn't post again until I really had something to say. Really, isn't that the whole point of writing?

Something else occurred to me during this respite: despite having my privileged education, I'm not nearly as well-versed in the world around me as I need to be in order to have the informed opinion that would inspire both constructive debate and appreciation for my particular worldview. I wasn't proud of the stuff I was putting up. It hit me when I went back to read some of my earlier posts. What had happened?

For one, I'd been listening to all the wrong voices. I haven't read nearly enough books of late, spending much too much time investing myself in the musings of columnists, pundits and other assorted loudmouths whose acerbic take on the world had begun to disillusion me and poison my writing. Part of that has been my now-consistent effort to maintain this page, writing as much as I can when I can, but offering up the musings not just of people whose viewpoints interested me, but also the usual suspects who seemingly everyone had posted on their blogs. Instead of offering a fresh perspective, I was merely following the crowd. That speaks only to laziness on my part.

I listened once again to one of my favorite Stevie Wonder songs, "Feeding Off the Love of the Land" today, in which the master laments how man's narcissism, misuse of prayer and inability to listen to the will of the Lord (much less heed it) robs the true essentials - love, beauty - from the world. It's a song that I think of often when I reflect upon the hazardous political discourse that serves as the mode by which we choose our most important leaders, men and women who truly fit Stevie's description of "fools {who} are even more foolish". But even in that kind of cynicism, I only repeat mistakes that I've been making with this blog. By falling in line with that discourse and bringing nothing unique to offer a more healthy alternative, my presence (however small) in the blogosphere had become more problematic than helpful.

So, as I continue to use this blog as a place to revive a muscle that had been largely dormant for over a decade, I will be more judicious with how I work that muscle out. To paraphrase Jerry Maguire, there'll be fewer posts, less news here at 1,369 lightbulbs. This is not to say I won't post the occasional YouTube that makes me laugh, or the random sports item that doesn't necessarily move forward the great national discourse about a particular pressing item of our time. But I consider the right to voice my opinion and inspire debate a gift from the Creator, and I pray that He grants me to ability to be increasingly disciplined in my use of that voice.

Perhaps I might add something after all.

Race, the final frontier.

2009-09-18T21:30:00.002-04:00

@jsmooth995 tells us how to calm down, breather and tell a motherf..a person that they sound racist. Not that they are racist.

A very important distinction:

Schooled.

2009-09-07T12:41:00.001-04:00

The speech President Obama will give to schoolchildren all over America tomorrow - at least those whose nutty parents haven't pulled them out of school - is now online. Mediaite debunks the crazy:

This is really it. It’s very much a pep talk for kids to do their homework, mixed with some “Chicken Soup For The Soul” and a dash of stump speech rhetoric. Parents who complained about not wanting Obama to impart his political beliefs on their children have nothing to worry about. It’s apolitical and beyond mild.

Of course, this will be an enormous media story all day today and likely for the rest of the week.

Which is an enormous, and continuing, failing of the mainstream media. They're more stenographers and gossip-mongers than reporters these days as it is, but it's there job not to just say, "Oooh, look at the crazy", and to say, "Hey, everyone - these people are crazy. Here's why."

This Week in Race has already taken a stab at explaining it:

Adults talk to our children everyday without our input: teachers, firefighters, police officers, other children's parents on "career days," etc. Presumably there is no opposition to such speakers because those folks are not "strangers" -- they are members of our community. In the past, presidents of the United States were very much considered to be members of our community -- even largely in communities of color.

But this president will never be accepted as "family" or even as legitimate to many Whites. Once that is understood, it is not surprising that parents would not want their children to hear what he has to say unless and until they approve the content ahead of time. If you are not "one of us," you do not get to talk to our children.

Perhaps Obama should get Biden to do the speech. You know, to make these racists more comfortable. Because, at the end of the day, it's clear that that is what's most important to them. Using their kids as political pawns? A means to an end.

On "buying time".

2009-09-04T05:22:00.001-04:00

There's a very thin line, as we all know, between explanations and excuses. They are first cousins; at times looking very much alike, but mostly, easily distinguished by how they look and sound. What I'll say now could look like either. I'll leave it to you to decide what it is.

I haven't written here for over four months. I'd been foundering in this space, trying to assess the real value of my writing. When all it seemed like I was doing was reacting to the latest thing I was supposed to be pissed off about - whatever Glenn Beck said, tea-baggers, the latest GOP lie, it didn't seem inspiring to me, or to anyone else (I thought). I'd had serious internal debates about changing the name of the blog (which I will not do, thanks to inspiration.) Since then, there have been many more incidents, many more things to react to in our changing world, under our new President - Skip Gates, Afghanistan, the health care debate - but I didn't think it would make much of a difference if I spouted off about it in this space. Hell, I didn't know if anyone was even listening.

But what i've discovered is, that concern is secondary.

About nine days ago, on Twitter (yes, I know; more on that later), I crossed paths with a young conservative. We were discussing one of my greatest political worries these days - the nutjobs like Chris Broughton who, inspired by even crazier nutjobs, bring guns and other weapons to events where Obama is appearing and, as we later discovered, openly pray for his death. My attitude was, and is, that I can discuss this with my fellow liberals, my fellow Olbermann/Maddow viewers, ad infinitum. Whatever you want to call them - Republicans, conservatives, #tcot - I'm not reaching that audience, the one that a) really needs to hear it; and b) may actually be able to do something to stop it, since the true wingnuts only listen to their own. (And yes, that goes for both the Right and Left.)

It was a long conversation, but the crux of it was this: when I asked the young man what he was doing, now, to quell the hatred on the Right that is stifling needed dialogue and (let's be real) threatening the life of the President. (All things that would have landed your face on a "Treason!" poster if done a year ago, against Bush 43. But I digress.)

He replied,

idrawrobots @JamilSmith oh believe me, I am just buying time. If and when I can raise my voice loud enough it will help bring true change

To say the least, I was unmoved.

JamilSmith @idrawrobots: "Buying time?" Are you fucking kidding me? When will you speak up against these RWNJs - after one takes a shot at POTUS? #tcot

The highlights of me taking his ass to task can be found here. I was angered not by his politics, but at his casual tone. As in, yeah, I'll get to that. Uninspiring, at the least. How can you see blatant injustice, have the unique power to speak to it, and not act?

Then I remembered this blog.

It's rare that we are given the opportunity to speak loudly, and it's even rarer when we make that opportunity for ourselves. Perhaps you'll interpret that last sentence as me going soft on that 24-year-old conservative for not speaking out. Hardly so. It's just that in reminding him of his responsibilities, I am also reminded of mine.

For the last four months, I've been "buying time". Perhaps for even longer than that. All the rally posts I have made in the past, including that one immediately preceding this one, were flailing grasps at the reason why I started writing here in the first place, like a rope just out of reach. Now, I believe that I've finally taken hold of it.

There are too many problems in the world for me not to use what I've been blessed with to try to solve them. Whether it be the insane paranoia on the Right or the panic and lack of backbone on the Left, I feel that there's a need for many, many voices. Add mine to the coming cacophony. I encourage you to add yours as well, reader, for there can never be enough people trying to make sense of the world we occupy. There really can't.

I hear many debates about the value of this kind of media. I think the real question is not about its value, but its purpose. I spent too much time worrying about the value of every post on this blog, and when I concerned myself too greatly with how my writing looked as opposed to what I was writing about. My purpose for starting this endeavor was much clearer: to provide a strong, educated opinion on issues confronting our world; to examine myself and grow as a writer; and to call the powers that be to account.

How I let worries about being reactionary, or whether people would understand what the hell "1,369 lightbulbs" even meant, break me, I'll always regret. I can't get those four months back. But I can move forward with purpose in my stride, pep in my step. I have work to do.

Internal discussions.

2009-04-15T18:25:00.001-04:00

Lately, I've been taking my old collegiate column handle, "Invisible Man", a bit too literally. As my father would say...it's been a minute since I wrote.

Once or twice, I have pondered what I'm even doing here, in this space. There have been so many different things I've done with my time here, I don't really know if there's a way to fit it all into one category. Maybe I shouldn't be looking to. That's been part of my problem - reconciling that. Blogging is a medium to which I'm still adjusting to, and I still have my issues with its basic tenets. And part of my reticence with writing, admittedly, is due to the lack of any perceived readership, outside of a few dedicated friends. (maybe that shouldn't bother me, but I'm not just talking, per se, to hear the sound of my own voice. I love to inspire debate, and thus far I haven't accomplished that.) But those issues shouldn't keep me from writing, and I apologize for being as absent as I have been.

I owe you an explanation.

To put it short and sweet, I've been in the process of determining what the future of this blog is. I have been writing in this space for nearly a year now, but have been pulled in a number of different directions creatively since the election. Some have limited my time, some have broadened my horizons. The result is a delightful confusion that has sparked ideas for where to take this space, but a lack of focus concerning keeping this page vibrant in the meantime.

That ends today.

I have some things in the works, and I can assure you that major changes are in store for this blog. There will be a new direction, and I'm hopeful that it will lead to my making a more significant contribution.

In the meantime, hang with me. I'm not going anywhere.

O.D.S.

2009-04-14T14:37:00.001-04:00

Glenn Beck's been diagnosed:

The tea-tantrums.

2009-04-10T13:30:00.007-04:00

Sullivan classifies the forthcoming April 15 pity parties:

As a fiscal conservative who actually believed in those principles when the Republicans were in power, I guess I should be happy at this phenomenon. And I would be if it had any intellectual honesty, any positive proposals, and any recognizable point. What it looks like to me is some kind of amorphous, generalized rage on the part of those who were used to running the country and now don't feel part of the culture at all. But the only word for that is: tantrum.

These are not tea-parties. They are tea-tantrums. And the adolescent, unserious hysteria is a function not of a movement regrouping and refinding itself. It's a function of a movement's intellectual collapse and a party's fast-accelerating nervous breakdown.

Rachel Maddow had almost too much fun with this on her show last night. (For those that don't get the joke, this should help.) Although I laughed with her, I did so hesitantly. This isn't purely folly, adolescent in nature and easily dismissed like so many Republican antics these days. I'm taking these much more seriously than either she or Andrew are.

I'll write more on this next week.

Piousness, thy name is Pat.

2009-04-10T10:02:00.006-04:00

This guy is apparently an authority on what's moral and what's not. Who knew?

On the issue of President Obama's invitation to speak at Notre Dame's May 17 commencement, watch the inimitable Lawrence O'Donnell tear Buchanan a new one here. It's really a shame that Mike Barnicle cuts this debate short at the end:

It's not worth going into it in-depth, as O'Donnell remarked correctly that this is largely a made-up controversy engineered by much fewer people than the protesters would have you believe. However, O'Donnell hot fire in this segment lays bare the intellectual dishonesty of the Republican "pro-life" movement. (I prefer its more factual, less pious name: "anti-abortion", but let's use "pro-life" for the ironies it brings out.) In calling out Bush's support of the death penalty during his time as the Governor of Texas, O'Donnell played his trump card right away and completely set the tone for what came afterward. Buchanan was on his heels, relying more on Republican philosophy than actual Catholic dogma. He's like an attorney who wants to convict someone, but hasn't shared evidence through discovery with the defendant. And like most current Republican mores, Buchanan's position is fraught not only with contradiction, but with the celebration of ignorance.

It's one thing to avoid answering a question for 10 minutes because you don't know the answer. Quite another to not only know the answer, but attempt to convince your questioner that he's too knowledgeable for his own good. It's almost as if Buchanan tries to convince O'Donnell that if only used less complicated thinking to arrive at his conclusions, that he'd see the light of day.

Doesn't seem too, well, smart, does it? That's a strategy more likely seen coming from a Bond villain than a political operative. While I've never held high esteem for Buchanan's intelligence, I thought he'd be smarter than this.

The thing that's truly offensive both about the base position of the Catholic Church on abortion and those that twist its interpretation for political gain is that they apply a strangely subjective classification for murder that contradicts the ones understood not only by polite society, but also by the Bible. "Thou shalt not kill" is certainly open to interpretation, but how can people like Buchanan argue that abortion is murder and yet, we're justified in killing anyone who breaks the law in particular ways we find abhorrent?

My faith in the Lord is strong, and I believe killing is wrong, no matter whom. But I also don't believe that (most) abortion is murder, and I guess that's where Buchanan and I part ways. But O'Donnell makes the central point here: to try to bar one President who believes in something the Church opposes despite the knowledge that another President who also believed - and actively practiced - another thing that the Church opposed is nothing but hypocrisy.

Quote of the day.

2009-03-31T15:10:00.002-04:00

"I’m telling you, those Cavs...they’ve only lost one game all year at home. Thirty-five and one."

"And they have home court advantage. That’s pretty impressive," President Barack Obama.

Of mountains and molehills.

2009-03-17T20:18:00.005-04:00

One of TPM's best commenters says we gots to chill:

Well, I'm just shocked. Who could possibly have foreseen that the Republicans would find a way to score major political points after Democrats and liberal bloggers tossed aside all sense of perspective and tore into this thing like a pack of rabid weasels?

By "perspective," I would mean the fact that they're trying to pull us out of a dealth spiral somewhere on the good side of 10% unemployment, a death spiral caused by a multi-trillion dollar hole in the economy, and yet everyone has their dudgeon on over the failure to devote all their attention to making sure a lousy couple of hundred million from flowing into the pockets of the evildoers.

Jesus people, if this is the worst thing or the most important thing that happens in this ongoing economic shitstorm, count yourselves lucky.

It's like being mad at a fireman working inside a burning house because he didn't stop to put out a cigarette left burning in an ashtray because cigarettes are so horrible and reprehensible.

Eyes on the prize. I'm guilty, too. Look at my last post, for goodness' sakes.

AIG stays puffed.

2009-03-17T17:06:00.012-04:00

This is indeed something you don't see every day.

But to paraphrase Egon Spengler, I'm furious beyond the capacity for rational thought. So excuse me if this isn't the most coherent post.

There's a metaphor for this in Mr. Stay-Puft. (Stay with me a sec while I talk it out, in hopes of finding it.) Here we have a huge marshmallow dude, evil to the core. (Ahem, cough, AIG, cough, ahem.) He's been conjured by a well-meaning guy (i.e., Ray). Now Ray knew that things were bad, and knew he was faced with an impossible choice (i.e., which crappy Wall Street firm to trust with his money). So, unable to suppress his dreams, he puts his trust in an image that brought him peace in his childhood, with hopes that this image is so benign that it couldn't possibly destroy us. Next thing you know, AIG, er, Mr. Stay-Puft's crushing everything in its path with abandon, all while wearing the biggest grin you've ever seen.

Only this time it's not a church he steps on. It's your house.

Normally, I don't get too upset when I see rich people being drained by other rich people. It always seemed to me that people like that operated in their own, distinctly separate United States economy - much like the high-end casinos on the Vegas Strip. All the while, a high percentage of us have been stuck at the $5 blackjack tables in A.C. or pulling slot levers in Reno. Most of America wasn't been invited to the party. We just foot the bill for the biggest parlor game in the world.

The question with AIG, for me, doesn't lie in the amount these architects of disaster were paid in bonuses. The how much doesn't bother me. I'm furious because of the why.

"Retention bonuses"? Are you kidding?

Look, I know little about Wall Street, admittedly. But if you're telling me that its firms are thriving to the point where MILLIONS of dollars need to be paid in lump sums to their traders merely to discourage them from leaving? (Even that didn't work, apparently.) To say that "I wish my employer did that for me" would be irrelevant; I wish my boss could "franchise" me in the manner of an NFL player, paying me the average of the top 10 producer salaries in America - ain't happenin'. I realize that it's a different world than where I come from. But I thought that you get rewarded for good work, not incompetence that has your superiors holding out the tin cup under the President's nose, asking "please, sir, I'd like some more".

Eliot Spitzer knows dirt when he sees it (natch), and is as pissed as I am:

Everybody is rushing to condemn AIG's bonuses, but this simple scandal is obscuring the real disgrace at the insurance giant: Why are AIG's counterparties getting paid back in full, to the tune of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars?

It all appears, once again, to be the same insiders protecting themselves against sharing the pain and risk of their own bad adventure. The payments to AIG's counterparties are justified with an appeal to the sanctity of contract. If AIG's contracts turned out to be shaky, the theory goes, then the whole edifice of the financial system would collapse.

The appearance that this was all an inside job is overwhelming. AIG was nothing more than a conduit for huge capital flows to the same old suspects, with no reason or explanation.

This is exactly the kind of shit Jon Stewart was talking about.

I'll turn it over to people who are much calmer, and are dealing with this from a real-world perspective. Megan McArdle:

The employees of AIG know which traders are good, and which ones are idiots who made a bad mess worse. But they're not going to tell us--or rather, they'll tell us, and the idiot traders will point the finger at someone else. From what I understand, you can't even just ask which traders lost money--some of the traders will be able to argue, with justice, that they lost money because they were helping the company cut its risk exposure rather than taking bets they might win. Others made good trades that were Overtaken By Events.

Why not just say "no bonuses for anyone at AIG"? To hell with the bums! Well, we now own the company. If we hasten the flight of quality employees out of the company, that will cost us money. The answer might be some kind of performance bond. But as in other financial firms, traders often take as bonus what should be salary, which means that they need at least part of their bonuses to maintain their lifestyle. If they're faced with bankruptcy, the traders who are talented will go elsewhere--the financial market is shrinking, but the top traders still have other opportunities. AIG has a lot of positions to unwind. Do we want to leave the job to the dregs of the organization?

The New York Times' Andrew Ross Sorkin (who upon first glance this past Sunday on the "Chris Matthews Show", appeared to be a huge douche) actually makes a good point, whether we like it or not:

Here is the second, perhaps more sobering thought: A.I.G. built this bomb, and it may be the only outfit that really knows how to defuse it.

A.I.G. employees concocted complex derivatives that then wormed their way through the global financial system. If they leave — the buzz on Wall Street is that some have, and more are ready to — they might simply turn around and trade against A.I.G.’s book. Why not? They know how bad it is. They built it.

So as unpalatable as it seems, taxpayers need to keep some of these brainiacs in their seats, if only to prevent them from turning against the company. In the end, we may actually be better off if they can figure out how to unwind these tricky investments.

Great. March on, Mr. Stay-Puft.

Catfight.

2009-03-17T16:35:00.002-04:00

Dahlia Lithwick on Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham slinging mud back and forth with Meghan McCain, and what kind of, um, image that presents:

You. Have. Got. To. Be. Kidding. This is the female version of the Rush Limbaugh-Michael Steele-David Frum smackdown for the soul of the GOP? One skinny blonde attacking another skinny blonde who is angrily defended by a third skinny blonde, after which everyone retires in a huff to their favorite health blogs to angrily discuss the importance of a positive body image and the need to support a healthy body mass index?

Ever wonder why some men think women are less than serious political thinkers? It certainly helps explain why so many men continue to believe that when it comes to "political discourse," women are all long, sprawling legs and silky blond hair in a tangle on the dessert cart. It's one thing to air your dirty laundry. But are we really stupid enough to be having a front-page battle over a plus-size thong?

One would think not. More from Dahlia:

If you're going to fight about politics, fight about politics. Here's a useful litmus test: As long as the media continue to cover women's political differences in their "Health" sections, we are probably doing something wrong. Just as Michelle Obama has been reduced to a perpetual fashion story, the fight for the future of young women in the GOP has now become a body-image story. Well done, ladies! Way to get your thoughts and preferences taken seriously!

The end of "enemy combatant".

2009-03-14T14:42:00.003-04:00

Yesterday, President Obama and his Department of Justice struck down another pillar holding up Bush's house of horrors, removing the "enemy combatant" classification from further use:

In a filing with the DC District Court, the DoJ said that it would no longer use the term and asserted a new standard for the government’s authority to hold detainees at Gitmo. The Obama administration is still claiming that it has the authority to hold prisoners there, but it will now be based on authority from Congress and the international laws of war. The Bush administration claimed that the president could unilaterally hold prisoners without charge.

Though it is at one level merely semantic - tripping up some of the more reactionary critics of the policy, on both the right and left - Saturn Smith notes why this is an important change:

This doesn't change immediately the situation of any of the detainees. They're still being held in Guantanamo the same as they were yesterday, and their prospects moving through the justice system -- or lack thereof -- are the same.

What it does change is the source of the president's authority for holding them there. No longer, this statement says, are they being held there at the whim -- on the executive authority -- of the president. Instead, the filing rests on both international law and a specific Congressional act. While I (and many) disagree with some of the provisions of that Authorization for the Use of Military Force, what's not arguable is that it's a law that came to being in the regular, old-fashioned way that we make laws here.

We're moving back to the order of law. Flawed law made by flawed people, sure, but still -- law. Instead of decree.

Big step. And about time.

Flawless victory.

2009-03-13T16:20:00.009-04:00

I've actually dealt with Jim Cramer on a professional level before, so I was not at all shocked to see him show up, guns blazing, and...take his beating like a good little boy.

Cramer's a nice guy. He has an uncharted hyperactivity quotient and the volume of a colicky infant, but he's able to tone it down for the rest of us mortals when he's not on his stage. He knew whose house he was in last night. Look at how he approaches the table when he's introduced. He almost bows to Stewart. Like a young man knowing he's gonna get it when he gets home, Cramer knew he was wrong, and the only decision he had left was how he was going to face the music.

What was interesting was how Stewart chose to play the song. He could've just squashed the whole thing. But in a bizarro world in which cable news becomes more theatrical, reactionary and ridiculous by the day, Stewart has to know his "Daily Show" is becoming more a news program than the news itself. And in a world in which guys like Olbermann and O'Reilly are known more and more for their histrionics than their ability to report the news, it's up to the comedian to be the journalist.

Still, some weren't impressed. Megan McArdle disagrees with me and other that think Jon Stewart was practicing journalism (at some level):

I'm very sympathetic to Stewart's deep critique of financial shows, but I don't think the way to go about it was to string together a bunch of very misleading clips. Nor to imply that Santelli, who has been vocally against all bailouts from the beginning, was merely frothing on the forclosure program because ordinary taxpayers were finally getting a taste of federal largesse. But Stewart carefully claims he's just an entertainer, so he has no obligation to hew to journalistic standards on things like quoting out of context.

Financial journalism isn't, as Stewart argues to Cramer over and over, entertainment. So how come Stewart acted as if it was?

Ta-Nehisi Coates:

In all of this, I find myself unsatisfied by the critique. For me, the investigation always begins at home--Who are we? Why is there a market for foolishness? I don't know much about the financial world. I come to this equipped solely with the weaponry I was deeded by the streets of Baltimore, and in the home of Cheryl Waters and Paul Coates. The shield in that arsenal, is the intuitive sense that no one gives you a house for nothing, that you don't base your future on advice from the dude who cameos on Arrested Development. Nothing special there. I think we all have access to the shield of Street Knowledge, and yet in these times, we seem to have put our faith, not in our innate sense, but in the worst sort of clownery.

I like Jon Stewart. I thought he did a good thing yesterday. But I left that interview unsatisfied. I left it wondering about the animal in us I know who Jim Cramer is. I know what wracks him. But what about us? Who are we in all this? Why are CNBC ratings still soaring? What madness has led us to hand off our shields and put our future in the hands of shaman and faith-healers?

I agree, but that said, we can still appreciate the interview for what it was: both a Howard Beale cry to placate the masses and a Schadenfreude-heavy spectacle of entertainment. That's at minimum. Andrew Sullivan believes this was a seminal moment:

It's not enough any more, guys, to make fantastic errors and then to carry on authoritatively as if nothing just happened. You will be called on it. In some ways, the blogosphere is to MSM punditry what Stewart is to Cramer: an insistent and vulgar demand for some responsibility, some moral and ethical accountabilty for previous decisions and pronouncements.
Braver, please. And louder.

Shortcut to success.

2009-03-10T08:27:00.005-04:00

So much for Michael Steele's 12-point plan:

(Source: Salon.)

Off the rails, actually.

2009-03-09T17:53:00.005-04:00

Michael Steele's misadventures continue:

Michael Steele has already said that he's going to implement communications strategies at the RNC that are "off the hook" and "beyond cutting edge." But is he now taking things to a whole new level?

Check out this RNC Request-for-Proposal that's been circulating on the internet, soliciting bids for redesigning the group's website.

It begins with a general (very general) statement of principles:

Chairman Steele made his tech priorities clear at the [RNC Tech Summit]: "...bottom line is if we haven't done it - let's do it. If we haven't thought of it - think about it. If it hasn't been tried - why not? If it's going to be 'outside the box' - then not only keep it outside the box, but take it to someplace the box hasn't even reached yet."

And it doesn't get a whole lot more specific after that. In fact, the two-page document is so light on the kind of details you might expect an RFP of this sort to have, that it's already being slammed on conservative blogs.

A pro tells us why this is so bad:

"It's really hard to write a proposal for that vague of a request," Jennifer Kyrnin, who has been designing web sites since 1995, and teaching web design since 1997, and who frequently responds to RFP's for web design work, told TPMmuckraker.

Kyrnin allowed that she had received RFP's as vague as this one, but never from a company or organization as prominent as the GOP. "Most are from new small businesses who've never put up a site before," she said.

Kyrnin flagged several obvious weak spots in the RFP.

Citing the RNC's view that "an aesthetically pleasing site that is intuitive and fun to use should be the overall goal," she said: "Well, yeah. I mean, that's what everybody wants."

As for the RNC's advice that it want someone with "experience in building social networks," Kyrnin said: "That, I look at and I go, 'what the heck do you mean?' If I were writing a proposal that would make me nervous."

The first TPM page I linked has a decent criticism, even it is from a nut like Erick Erickson. I don't really care if Michael Steele lives up to his promises given to a party populated by many who likely consider him an affirmative-action baby. Those are the folks he's decided to lay down with. But even this seems to stretch the bounds of credulity.

I care more about this country than I do about Democrats beating Republicans. But the Republican Party as it now stands is an impediment to progress. I mean, a spending freeze in the middle of a recession? Paging Herbert Hoover:

In today's economic climate, I find the Republicans' clown act less funny and more troubling by the day. And for that reason, I hope Michael Steele stops making brothers look worse by the day, steps away from the mic and resigns his post.

Beaver, damn.

2009-03-09T17:41:00.004-04:00

John McCain's on his earmark warpath again, mostly because he thinks his charm works on us as well as it works on the media.

While focusing on less than 1% of the budget and making it sound as if that spending's putting us in the poorhouse is quaint, it's not funny to the people who, you know, need the money he's making fun of:

“How does one manage a beaver?” U.S. Sen. John McCain asked his followers from the Senate floor this week.

McCain's derisive comments – “$650,000 for beaver management in North Carolina and Mississippi,” he typed on his Twitter mini-blog – came as part of his continuing campaign against directed spending, or earmarks, in the federal government.

But he angered workers in North Carolina who say they know full well how to manage beavers: Trap the critters, blow up their dams and let the water flow.

State and federal wildlife officials claim to have saved nearly $5 million last year in potential flood damage to farms, timber lands, roadways and other infrastructure through its Beaver Management Assistance Program – the same one McCain was making fun of in Washington.

“Maybe you should ask him how much he knows about this and why he picked it out for ridicule,” said U.S. Rep. David Price, a Chapel Hill Democrat. “We know why he chose this – because it sounds funny.”

The Republicans have turned into a bunch of frat boys.

The devil doesn't take his own.

2009-03-09T17:38:00.001-04:00

"Before it's all over, it'll be called the Ted Kennedy memorial health care bill," Rush Limbaugh.

On Watchmen.

2009-03-06T19:16:00.007-05:00

As anyone who's been to the movies with me can attest, I don't like to miss the previews. Perhaps I get it from my mother, who refuses to enter a movie theater if the film has started. But I can't recall an instance where the previews, good as they may be, got me to see a film I otherwise wasn't planning to see. Much less got me to read a book that I may not have read in order to prepare for a film I wasn't planning to see.

I'd heard of "Watchmen" a few years back, and since I loved comic book heroes - but not comic books - as a kid, I wasn't particularly inclined to read it. I'd devoured a few graphic novels: "Kingdom Come" and "The Dark Knight Returns", to name a few. But I was enough of a nerd to know the names Rorschach, Comedian, Ozymandias and Doctor Manhattan.

Oh, and I'd seen this:

It's a hell of an image.

The idea that something meant purely to evoke good feelings being stained with blood (and by implication, violence) sets you up well for what happens in "Watchmen", and the meditation it provides on the very notion of heroism. (Some good guides for the uninitiated can be found here and here. Or you could just read the thing.)

In fact, that's what the trailer actually made me do. I checked it out because I saw that same smiley face again, and I had one of those "oh-I've-always-been-meaning-to-read-that" moments that makes me at once excited and regretful. Add that to the fact that I hadn't read a book in an absurdly long time, and I really had no excuses left.

I thoroughly enjoyed the novel. But it's not my opinion that is interesting - it's why certain people have decided that they won’t see the film, and why I think that is.

It's not as simple as "old guys get it, young people do". Roger Ebert gave it four stars:

In a cosmic sense it doesn’t really matter who pushed the Comedian through the window. In a cosmic sense, nothing really matters, but best not meditate on that too much. The Watchmen and their special gifts are all the better able to see how powerless they really are, and although all but Dr. Manhattan are human and back the home team, their powers are not limitless. Dr. Manhattan, existing outside time and space, is understandably remote from the fate of our tiny planet, although perhaps he still harbors some old emotions...

“Watchmen” focuses on the contradiction shared by most superheroes: They cannot live ordinary lives but are fated to help mankind. That they do this with trademarked names and appliances goes back to their origins in Greece, where Zeus had his thunderbolts, Hades his three-headed dog, and Hermes his winged feet. Could Zeus run fast? Did Hermes have a dog? No.

That level of symbolism is coiling away beneath all superheroes. What appeals with Batman is his humanity; despite his skills, he is not supernormal. “Watchmen” brings surprising conviction to these characters as flawed and minor gods, with Dr. Manhattan possessing access to godhead on a plane that detaches him from our daily concerns — indeed, from days themselves.

Indeed, heroism itself can be a burden. It’s rarely shown to be a physical one – with the exception of Kryptonite, rarely do we see our superheroes injured or even limited. But Ebert, upon a second viewing of Watchmen, came out with more revelations:

The next detail is not important to the plot of "Watchmen," but I found it fascinating: Manhattan thinks he might leave this planet altogether, travel to a distant galaxy, and there, he suggests, might try his hand at creating some life himself. He would then, would he not, be the Intelligent Designer of life in that place?

Left unanswered is the question of how life was created here on this planet, and indeed the question of whether Manhattan as he now exists constitutes life. Always remaining is the much larger question, Why is there something instead of nothing? These are questions Manhattan might fruitfully meditate upon, although if you exist on a quantum level, as he himself observes, life and non-life are all the same thing, just nanoscale bits of not much more than nothing, all busily humming about for reasons we cannot comprehend. As he puts it, "A live body and a dead body contain the same number of particles. Structurally, there's no discernible difference. Life and death are unquantifiable abstracts. Why should I be concerned?"

Whoa.

I’m not ruining anything by revealing that the danger that the world faces when Manhattan says these things is cataclysmic. Nuclear war is at hand; the Doomsday clock is at five minutes to midnight. And he chooses to regard us as simple matter, and not something to be concerned about? In what story can you think of did the superman refuse to save us?

But strangely, a similar disconnection from material that those devoted to it see as essential to life as water - a quasi-religious marriage of cultural artifact and acolyte - serves me well when I analyze what I just watched today. I'm glad I'm not a full-fledged, Vulcan-ear, lightsaber-wielding fanboy, even if I have elements of one within me. (A better way of explaining it would be: I get many of their jokes, but I'd be hesitant to try to make them laugh.) The fact that I'm not a fanboy enables me to say that I arrived at the theater to see Watchmen today knowing that I was not about to see the Bible depicted on-screen. (I've already seen that, and to say I was much more emotional about that film than this would be an understatement.) To some, though, it was. I mean, this is the book that spawned the Frank Millers of the world, and without "Watchmen", there is no Dark Knight.

But some folks couldn't care less about any of that. My conversations with many who aren't as captivated as I was by the novel or advertisements for the film fall into two camps: those that have absolutely a) no interest in seeing the film and/or b) have no earthly idea what the story is about, since it doesn't feature a superhero that they've heard of. Can I understand why one wouldn't be into Watchmen? Of course. It's extremely violent; the language is consistently authentic, er, bad; and there's a big, blue, naked dude with his junk hanging out, clearly visible throughout the film. (On the other hand, that might actually help the box office.)

I understand where they're coming from. But they are making a mistake.

The key to approaching something as complex as Watchmen, novel or film, is that you have be willing to give yourself a little more credit. Americans have become engrossed with the very simple psychology of our favorite heroes, but how well do we really know them? Superman, with his alienation complex, daddy issues and mocking imitation of human behavior; Batman, the orphaned trust-fund kid who is driven by psychosis and a sick need for what he perceives as justice; Iron Man, a weapons mogul whose guilt over the destruction he's wrought drives him more than any sense of heroism; Spider-Man, a cocky kid who only stood to profit from his powers until he's spurred into maturity by the murder of the man that raised him; Hulk, a green mass of pure rage spurred from the innards of an innocent scientist, a being that hardly even knows what he's doing.

These are some seriously screwed-up people. But we know them by their fancy costumes and Saturday-morning cartoons, and we didn't even realize that we were watching a bunch of nuts.

I grew up on those cartoons, preferring them to the comics that spawned them. So many of my generation did, as did their kids. If the highly-processed, easily digested version of "Watchmen" that the studio wanted had come to pass, we might have seen something akin to this nightmare:

A comic like "Watchmen" was before its time, but it also, in ways, came too late. Not enough of us were reading comic books, even in 1986. I think Watchmen will have trouble reaching those of us who approached the whole notion of the superhero in a casual fashion, thinking that all we needed to know about Superman was that he had heat vision and could fly. We can't afford to get wrapped up in the fact that Watchmen's alternate 1985 may appear quaint. This is not a time in our history in which we can opt for the dumbed-down version. We have to know ourselves, and we have to know our heroes.

There's a lot more to why these people - in comics or in real life - choose to be the heroes that they are, and that is worth exploring. Watchmen shows you why some of those people put on the costume, and you may not like the answer.

Twitter quitter.

2009-03-06T12:09:00.003-05:00

A few weeks back, I started a Twitter account. Then the Republicans just killed it, with all the flair of a middle-aged dad embarrassing his teenage kids by trying to rap along to Soulja Boy.

I have more to say about that, but ESPN's Bill Simmons captures why I have issues not just with Twitter, but how it and other things are affecting writing on the Web:

The more interesting angle for me is how Twitter and Facebook reflect where our writing is going thanks to the Internet. In 15 years, writing went from "reflecting on what happened and putting together some coherent thoughts" to "reflecting on what happened as quickly as possible" to "reflecting on what's happening as it's happening" to "here are my half-baked thoughts about absolutely anything and I'm not even going to attempt to entertain you," or as I like to call it, Twitter/Facebook Syndrome. Do my friends REALLY CARE if I send out an update, "Bill is flying on an airplane finishing a mailbag right now?" (Which is true, by the way.) I just don't think they would. I certainly wouldn't. That's why I refuse to use Twitter.

I'm done with Twitter before I even started. (Facebook's OK, though.)

Made for you and me.

2009-03-04T15:56:00.003-05:00

Two years ago, I met an angel. In church, no less.

Here's to big time love - happy anniversary, sweetheart.

Overjoyed.

2009-03-04T15:50:00.003-05:00

That's my feeling upon the discovery of a visionary new artist, one who can not only can sing, but plays a mean bass. To say that Esperanza Spalding gives me hope is admittedly a bit corny, but no less true. And that's not only because at the White House concert honoring the great Stevie Wonder, she nailed my favorite Stevie song in a way I didn't think was possible:

On Ash Wednesday.

2009-02-25T23:39:00.004-05:00

I was prepared, when I sat here, to write about the short shrift that Ash Wednesday gets from Christians in this country, especially when compared to the end of Lent, Easter. I just got back from my church's service, and I joked with my lady that it had about a tenth of the people in attendance as would be dressed in their finest on Easter Sunday, packing the pews to capacity. I found it interesting that the end of a period of sacrifice is so much more celebrated, is so much more joyous than the beginning. But in a religion in which suffering became the pathway to our forgiveness, Ash Wednesday serves as a reminder that the pain's the thing, as Shakespeare might say.

But there's something about this day that rings much truer for me. For in reflection, I find that Ash Wednesday wasn't the beginning of a trial for me. It signaled the beginning of the end.

I remember learning, when I was a child, that the ashes used on Ash Wednesday to smear the foreheads of millions at the beginning of Lent were the burned remnants of the dried, dead palms from the previous year's Palm Sunday, mixed with sacred oils. Whether or not that's true for every church, I don't know. But faith is in part a choice, and as I have faith in God and His Son, I choose to believe it.

For me, faith has been a struggle. I have had doubts about the Almighty, stemming mostly from the scientific, pragmatic way I approach problem-solving and investigation. I first found the Bible approachable as a literary text, making some of its flights of fancy (A burning bush? Really?) easier for me to accept when I was younger. I kept my doubts secret, mostly out of cowardice. But my academic nature (similar to many other situations) was won over by passion in fits and starts. It was hard to see that good fortune that befell me as I grew up, to see the faith in works done by so many close to me, to hear the preachings of my beloved pastor and not think that somehow, God was at work.

Then Andre died.

My cousin had been missing for months. Ironically, I learned of his murder when I came home from a church service. The closest thing I've had to a brother was murdered by someone he'd trusted, so in my 15-year-old wisdom, I made the leap that since the prayers for Andre's protection had been cruelly refused, I'd refuse to pray. What's the point of trusting God when the man Andre had trusted had (literally) stabbed him in the back?

My first experience with death had scarred me deeply. After I left for college, I went churchless for over a decade. With one notable exception. See, I worked in midtown NYC, blocks away from the famous St. Patrick's Cathedral. I wasn't a Catholic, but I made a point on every Ash Wednesday to get in the Yankee Stadium-on-Opening Day-length line to receive the mark on my forehead. I hadn't grown up doing so, and there was a part of me that did it merely out of the appreciation of custom. But it was always clear to me that ashes are meant for the faithful, and it seems now that I waited in that line and knelt before the priest because it made me feel that, on one day at least, I was a man of faith again. I could believe.

I could expand on this at greater length, but my point is clear. The ashes didn't put me back on the path, but they gave me a reminder, in a time of my life in which I could have very easily fallen victim to self-indulgence and vanity (in other words, my twenties), that there was a path at all. After all, it was staring me right in the face, every time I looked in the mirror.

My vanity still gets the best of me at times, and I'm far from perfect. But I'm been on the path for a while now, and as I trudge along (with increasing speed) to a faithful life, I'm reminded tonight about how that journey back to Christ began.

Ash Wednesday may get the short shrift. But never from me.

"Fella".

2009-02-20T17:02:00.003-05:00

Michael Eric Dyson really gets Pat Buchanan to remove the hood (or put it on, as it were) and expose what he really thinks about African-Americans:

MC Steele.

2009-02-19T20:03:00.005-05:00

This truly had me speechless:

Newly elected Republican National Committee Chairman Michael S. Steele plans an “off the hook” public relations offensive to attract younger voters, especially blacks and Hispanics, by applying the party's principles to “urban-suburban hip-hop settings.”

Um...good luck?

“We need messengers to really capture that region - young, Hispanic, black, a cross section ... We want to convey that the modern-day GOP looks like the conservative party that stands on principles. But we want to apply them to urban-suburban hip-hop settings.”

Um...wha...huh?

But, he elaborated with a laugh, “we need to uptick our image with everyone, including one-armed midgets.”

He might have better luck starting with them.

Term of endearment.

2009-02-19T20:00:00.001-05:00

"Nigga" has been replaced in Harlem:

Note how even the fighting students refer to each other. Good humor...

A-Roid.

2009-02-18T11:51:00.006-05:00

Even my hatred of the Yankees borders on clinical, I can't get into this story, even though it seems that he blew it at yesterday's presser, raising more questions than he answered:

"The bottom line is this -- I have no idea," said one official in Major League Baseball. "Only Alex probably knows for sure. I hope to God he's telling the truth."

If it turns out he hasn't told the truth -- despite having his chances to come clean, despite knowing all the risks, despite knowing what a lightning rod he is -- this will become baseball's version of Watergate, in which the cover-up turns out to be worse than the crime.

I'm not sure it's that deep. But even still, I don't care that much.

The most interesting thing I've heard about it - and that's not saying a lot - is that Rodriguez is so narcissistic that his choice of 'roid, "boli", was chosen supposedly because it makes leaner muscle and doesn't turn you into the Incredible Hulk. He had to remain lean to maintain that "A-Rod" image (and no doubt, to deflect suspicion of being a 'roider).

Problem is, he doesn't really have an image to speak of. When you think about Hank Aaron, you think about his character and strength. When you think about Rickey Henderson, you think about his speed and flamboyance. When you think about Derek Jeter, you think, immediately, he's a winner. (In every way.) Think about it: when you thought about Alex Rodriguez before this revelation, what really came to mind? I mean, he's a great player, but is there anything about him that comes to mind?

Paul Lukas at Uni Watch captures it perfectly:

Aside from the obvious (i.e., he’s not a very good liar, which we already knew), the main thing that kept going through my head was, “What a thoroughly boring person.” Now, most pro athletes are boring — that’s what happens when you spend so much of your time on airplanes, in hotels, and in gyms. It’s not exactly a stimulating environment. But even by the relatively low socio-dynamic standards of people who get paid to hit a ball of twine with a stick, A-Rod strikes me as a particularly uncompelling character.

I don’t mean he’s stupid — I mean he’s dull. Can you imagine talking with him about books, movies, design, or any other creative enterprise? Can you imagine him trying to tell a good joke? A good story? Yes, he’s a gifted athlete, duh, but take him off the field and there’s no there there. He’s got zero charisma, zero spark, zero curiosity, zero anything. And I’m baffled by the frequent references to him being handsome, good-looking, and so on — to my mind, he doesn’t even have that going for him (I don’t mean that as a potshot; I’m just using it as another measure of how uncharismatic I find him). All he has is some money. Okay, a lot of money, but that’s boring too, because it’s too big for us to wrap our heads around, so it becomes cartoon money. He’s a cipher at best, a construct at worst. I’m rooting for his story to go away, and fast, mainly because I’m tired of devoting time and thought to such an uninteresting person.

And you can say what you want about Barry Bonds, but there’s no denying that most of what I’ve just written here wouldn’t apply to him.

All the while, he still hasn't apologized in public for slandering SI's Selena Roberts in that interview. Until he does that, none of this means much to me.

If you thought racism was dead...

2009-02-18T10:48:00.003-05:00

...because we have an African-American president, there's always someone out there, you know, comparing him to crazed killer chimps...

It came in today's New York Post.

Why should we even be surprised anymore?

Say anything.

2009-02-06T19:12:00.005-05:00

Perhaps the best explanation for why I have not written this week is that I am left simply drained by the week just past. And while I have, as I said earlier, plenty to say, I'm not sure any of it would help. If there is a word for how I feel about the environment our new President finds himself in (and, through concessions to people who are only out for themselves, is helping to perpetuate)...it is despair.

While I have plenty to say, I haven't been willing to just say anything. Maybe I should have. But I didn't. Much of that has to do with my unease at times with this medium, the instantaneous smattering of thoughts that one might later regret. I am a person that usually measures my words carefully, particular when speaking on matters of importance. That never dulls my intensity, but it does sometimes hold me back.

Apparently, many of our elected officials do not have that problem, and we are (literally) poorer for it. So much sound and fury in Washington this week, signifying absolutely nothing for the American people that their mismanagement put into crisis. Combined with my current reality - facing the possibility of being laid off (along with several colleagues) at the end of the month - I've become rather disillusioned. At times like these, so many of us just want to crouch in a corner and put our hands over our ears, hoping to drown out the fools that might seek to ignore facts in the pursuit of their own truth.

I'm not so naive as to believe that the change President Obama seeks to bring can happen this quickly. But...damn. The Republicans act like November never happened.

One wishes that President Obama could put the song below on a tape, go to the Capitol Hill steps and pull a Lloyd Dobler.

Mr. Stevland Morris is truly a prophet:

Perhaps these verses would resonate with the powers that be:

Seems the wisdom of man hasn't got much wiser
Than the very beginning of our time
Agree or war has been our way of compromising
Let live and love has become our biggest lie

Seems to me that fools are even more foolish
Thinking of themselves and nobody else
But then if asked for poor will riches be replenished
They say boot straps must be pulled up by themselves

Feeding off the love of the land
Leaving much to be desired

Living off the love of the Lord
While the price for life is higher

Righteous.

2009-02-06T19:05:00.001-05:00

Sometimes you come across posts on other blogs that are so right on that you have just post the whole thing and tip your hat. Will Wilkinson, consider my hat tipped:

In case you forgot, here’s what objective political news analysis looks like. Shockingly straightforward! I think the problem with the American media is that it’s full of Americans who overestimate the importance of American micro-politics, and so, consciously or subconsciously, undertake every damn story as a public-opinion-shaping framing our counter-framing exercise and eventually forget how to report the obvious interpretation of events.

This isn’t willful. The obvious interpretation of events has simply become invisible to their team-spirited minds. This is not to say that there isn’t, at the the same time, a very strong sense of the professional obligation to be “objective,” but that tends to manifest itself as pretending to take the other team’s talking points seriously, which is really not at all what objectivity requires.

This is the kind of thing that I am seeking to avoid. Hence why you've seen me offer no interpretation of the proposals the Republicans have offered regarding the stimulus. More later.

Busy week.

2009-02-06T15:22:00.002-05:00

My day job has kept me occupied this week - those who know me understand why. Apologies for not writing as much as I would normally. I'll be back on track either later today or tomorrow.

Believe me, I have a lot to say about what's happened in the world this week. I'll likely post-date my posts, so be sure to check the past week's dates for new material.

The right team won.

2009-02-02T17:47:00.001-05:00

So says Rick Reilly:

As a Browns fan, I say "bah humbug".

As a good son...I say, congrats, Mom.

No jacket required.

2009-01-31T22:24:00.006-05:00

Former Bush Chief of Staff Andrew Card is all bunched up over Obama's new Oval Office dress code:

"...I found that Ronald Reagan and both President Bushes treated the Oval Office with tremendous respect. They treated the Office of the Presidency with tremendous respect. And some of that respect was reflected in how they expected people to behave, how they expected them to dress when they walked into the symbol of freedom for the world, the Oval Office. And yes, I'm disappointed to see the casual, laissez faire, short sleeves, no shirt and tie, no jacket, kind of locker room experience that seems to be taking place in this White House and the Oval Office."

You wouldn't believe it at first glance, perhaps, but this is truly deep.

At first, you may be wondering why the nitpicking has stooped to this level, but Steve Benen of Washington Monthly nails it:

Traditionalists may not approve of Obama's easy-going style, but we're a long way from a "laissez faire locker-room experience." A frat house it isn't.

The other thing to consider here is exactly how one "respects" the presidency. For Card and others who served with Bush, it's about choice of clothing. For those who serve with Obama, it's about honoring institutional limits and the rule of law.

Or, put another way, where exactly does a loyal Bushie get off talking about "respecting" the presidency? Did George W. Bush always wear a coat and tie? Sure. Good for him. But while he was wearing nice clothes and demanding that his staff do the same, he also oversaw a scandal-plagued White House that trashed constitutional norms and routinely ignored the laws that the president twice swore to faithfully execute.

One respects the office by honoring its place in a constitutional system, not by wearing a suit.

Isn't it sad that something like this actually needs to be elucidated?

It's business time.

2009-01-28T18:06:00.007-05:00

Joan Walsh makes an astute point, comparing President Obama's approach to the stimulus bill to that of the juvenile GOP. So much for leaving behind "childish things":

But Obama doesn't look like he's trying for 80 votes in the Senate anymore, as one of his aides once foolishly said earlier this month; he looks like he's wielding his electoral mandate for change, and he should. And he and his staff are mostly ignoring John Boehner's House Republicans, who seem determined to make their party irrelevant with their sloganeering and obstruction while the economy falls apart.

There was a little too much pandering to the CEOs for my taste, of course. I wasn't thrilled when Obama blamed the economy's troubles on "a sense of irresponsibility that prevailed from Wall Street to Washington" and then said the burden for recovery will fall on "executives and factory floor workers, educators and engineers, healthcare professionals and elected officials."

I'd like the burden to fall heaviest on those responsible for this mess, some of them probably in Obama's audience this morning. But that's not realistic politics.

After the speech, MSNBC's Pat Buchanan asked, "Was that Barack Obama or Ronald Reagan?" Buchanan tried to make the case that Obama's speech was "very conservative," because he also promised to root out government waste -- as though waste were a liberal value. But what Buchanan was really praising was Obama's Reaganesque grasp of politics and pageantry. He's trying to make Democrats the party of business and prosperity, and he looks like he's succeeding. It's going to be fun to watch the House Republicans now.

Yeah, that's all well and good. Frankly, I don't give a hot damn what Pat Buchanan thinks about anything. This post was simply an excuse to allude to the notion of this being...

..."business time". It is Wednesday, after all:

Jessica Alba 1, Bill O'Reilly 0.

2009-01-28T18:00:00.003-05:00

Naturally, with the name of my blog paying homage to this masterpiece, I can't pass up a chance to praise Jessica Alba. (How do they relate, you ask? She played the Invisible Woman in the Fantastic Four flicks, of course.)

Anyway, as in the film, it's evident that pissing off Ms. Alba is a bad idea:

I want to clear some things up that have been bothering me lately. I find it depressing that in the midst of perhaps the most salient time in our country's history, individuals are taking it upon themselves to encourage negativity and stupidity. Last week, Mr. Bill O'Reilly and some really classy sites (i.e.TMZ) insinuated I was dumb by claiming Sweden was a neutral country. I appreciate the fact that he is a news anchor and that gossip sites are inundated with intelligent reporting, but seriously people...it's so sad to me that you think the only neutral country during WWII was Switzerland. Check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden_during_World_War_II if you want to see what I was referring to. I appreciate the name calling and the accurate reporting. Keep it up!!

(By the way - do you know how hard it is to find an image of this woman to put on this blog that wouldn't have my lady looking at me sideways? Put some clothes on, girl.)

No go, Blago.

2009-01-28T17:39:00.008-05:00

There's a reason why I haven't addressed this crook or the egoistic buffoon he hired to replace Obama in the Senate.

Quite simply, the guy was caught on tape doing the deed, then "outsmarted" Harry Reid, which is no major accomplishment in my book, by appointing a doofus to the Senate. (A quick aside: it's nice to get to the point where I can actively dislike the only Black U.S. Senator. Paging Chris Rock!)

On his way to inevitable impeachment, he quotes random poems and compares himself to every admirable human being or tragic event in the last century - and in the process of trying to pimp the media in his effort to stain potential juries, may have gotten himself in even deeper shit:

The guy is a joke, and a dull one at that. What is there to discuss, really?

The presider.

2009-01-28T17:33:00.005-05:00

I knew I could count on Brother Sullivan to get it:

What the critics misread in his Inaugural was its classical structure. He was not running any more. He was presiding. His job was not to rally vast crowds, but to set the scene for the broader constitutional tableau to come to life. Hence the obvious shock of some Republican Congressman at debating with a president who seemed interested in actual conversation, aas opposed to pure politics. Last Tuesday, there were none of the bold declarative predictions of the Second Bush Inaugural - and none of the slightly creepy Decider idolatry. Yes, Obama set some very clear directional goals, but the key difference is what came next: a window of invitation. The invitation is to the other co-equal branches of government to play their part; and for the citizenry to play its. This is an understanding of the president as one node in a constitutional order - not a near-dictator outside and superior to other branches of government. It is a return to traditional constitutional order. And it is rooted in a traditional, small-c conservative understanding of the presidency.

If Bush was about the presidency as power, Obama is about the presidency as authority. It's fascinating to watch this deep difference in understanding slowly but unmistakably realize itself in public actions. Somewhere the Founders are smiling. The system is correcting itself after one of the most unbalanced periods in American history. But it took the self-restraint of one man to do it.

And this is only after a week.

First day out.

2009-01-28T17:17:00.005-05:00

Prison can truly make you forget people, and that was the case with me and John Forte. The Phillips Exeter grad was convicted for drug trafficking (read more about the case here), and lost seven years of his life in a cage. (Though, judging by the comments on this page, some believe those Exeter connections helped him get out, courtesy of a commutation by Andover grad George W. Bush. I'm glad the brother's out, but I don't disagree with that theory.)

The video below is not just a video for his new song, "Life Has Just Begun," but also details the first day of freedom for the musician most remembered for playing with and writing songs for the Fugees back in the day:

He also provided a written account to The Daily Beast:

A little more than an hour and a half elapsed before my package of clothes was brought over by a couple of corrections officers. They were kind, made a couple of jokes at which I did not laugh; my nerves were still frazzled. I brought the bag of clothes into an adjacent bathroom and breathed a sigh of relief upon realizing that they did, indeed, fit me. The two officers who delivered my clothes were also the officers who escorted me to the SUV that awaited me in the parking lot.

“Good luck,” they said, almost in unison.

Did they practice that? I wondered.

“Thanks.”

My manager jumped out of the vehicle and gave me an enormous bear hug.

“We were worried,” she said, teary-eyed, motioning for me to enter the truck. “We’ve been here for more than two hours. Waiting.”

“Ah,” I reminded her, “’tis the nature of a bureaucracy. Everything is a process.”

Indeed.

They hugged?

2009-01-28T16:35:00.005-05:00

I really think we need to come up with a different classification for people that would do something like this in the name of the same Christ I also serve. I mean, how is this at all Christian?

After a Lutheran school expelled two 16-year-old girls for having "a bond of intimacy" that was "characteristic of a lesbian relationship," the girls sued, contending the school had violated a state anti-discrimination law.

The girls were expelled in their junior year for "conducting themselves in a manner consistent with being lesbians," said McKay, who added that the girls never disclosed their sexual orientation during the litigation. Hanson said the girls had been "best friends" and, citing their privacy, declined to discuss their sexual orientation. They are now in college, he said.

The dispute started when a student at the school told a teacher in 2005 that one of the girls had said she loved the other. The student advised the teacher to look at the girls' MySpace pages. One of the girls was identified as bisexual on her MySpace page, the other's page said she was "not sure" of her sexual orientation.

McKay said the website also contained a photograph of the girls hugging.

According to the principal, who called each girl out of class separately, both admitted they had hugged and kissed each other and told other students they were lesbians. The girls said they admitted only that they loved each other as friends.

One of the attorneys arguing for the girls said that the court has essentially given these schools license to discriminate, and I have to agree. But that's only the superficial part of this, to me. This school did this because not because these girls vandalized the property, got into a fight or cut a class. They did it because they felt these girls were sinners and they wanted them cast from their midst. (Sorry for the biblical language, but apparently these people think that God loves all of His children - except the gay ones.)

Sarah Hepola from Broadsheet (look out for the pun in that title) expounds:

So, OK: It's a private school that wants to uphold a certain religious ethos. (The school is associated with the same religious denomination as Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann.) Should they be allowed to discriminate based on their shame-based ethos? I'll leave that for the courts to decide. (A lawyer for the girls hopes to take the case to the California Supreme Court.) But at a time when our school system is so embattled -- fingers crossed, economic stimulus plan -- and at an age when kids are discovering themselves and in the very place you might hope adults would be trying to sheperd them into an adult world, it's just a damn shame that a school would spend its valuable resources on this kind of witch hunt.

Many often cite Matthew 7:1, often paraphrased as "Judge not, lest ye be judged".

But you have to look deeper. Read on:

1 "Do not judge, or you too will be judged. 2 For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.

3 "Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? 4 How can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? 5 You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye.

Considering that the church has had so many specks in its eyes, nose and mouth with regard to repressed homosexuality over the years, I have always found it sickly ironic how fervently they seek to judge those courageous enough to be whom...

...well, whom God made them to be.

Company town.

2009-01-27T16:14:00.004-05:00

Wilmington, Ohio is closer to Cincinnati than to my hometown of Cleveland, and though it's only 300-some miles down I-71, it apparently might as well be a different world.

I have no idea what it's like to grow up in a "company town", but the 60 Minutes report you see above. Judging from what these people are going through, the effects of the current economic crisis will not be unlike the fallout from a war.

I'll add more to this post later when I can.

Stokely in a dress?

2009-01-27T15:59:00.006-05:00

The man you see above is Stokely Carmichael. Don't know who he is?

Neither, apparently, does Juan Williams:

During the January 26 edition of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor, NPR news analyst and Fox News political contributor Juan Williams again baselessly attacked first lady Michelle Obama, claiming that "her instinct is to start with this 'blame America' ... stuff." Williams asserted that "[i]f you think about liabilities for President [Barack] Obama that are close to him -- [Vice President] Joe Biden's up there -- but Michelle Obama's right there." Williams continued: "[S]he's got this Stokely Carmichael-in-a-designer-dress thing going. If she starts talking,...her instinct is to start with this 'blame America,' you know, 'I'm the victim.' If that stuff starts to come out, people will go bananas, and she'll go from being the new Jackie O to being something of an albatross."

Williams provided no evidence for the claims that Michelle Obama's "instinct" is to "blame America" or be "the victim," nor did he provide examples of her having "this Stokely Carmichael-in-a-designer-dress thing going." Additionally, Williams did not provide any evidence that she could be a "liabilit[y]" or an "albatross" for Obama.

Of course he didn't.

Ta-Nehisi Coates puts this idiot on blast.

Surely you jest.

2009-01-27T14:33:00.004-05:00

Slate's Charles Peters and Timothy Noah scoff at Obama's goal of creating four million new jobs in two years, reminding us how FDR did it in two months:

The only serious obstacle the CWA encountered is the same one that President Obama would face today: politics.

Let's hope that the current economic crisis won't worsen to the point that the U.S. needs a government program on that scale. But if it does, please don't say the job can't be done. In his inaugural address, President Obama said, "The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small but whether it works." That may presage a departure from Republican orthodoxy ("government is the problem") and Democratic surrender to it ("the era of big government is over"). If government can do the job best, let it.

Poison Eele.

2009-01-27T14:07:00.003-05:00

Just when you thought that becoming the first African-American First Lady would have been enough:

...the Black Artists Association is taking her to task for not wearing anything by an African American designer. Cofounder Amnau Eele said Wednesday she will make a formal appeal to the First Lady’s office on behalf of the BAA. “It’s fine and good if you want to be all ‘Kumbaya’ and ‘We Are the World’ by representing all different countries. But if you are going to have Isabel Toledo do the inauguration dress, and Jason Wu do the evening gown, why not have Kevan Hall, B Michael, Stephen Burrows or any of the other black designers do something too?” Eele said.

This is the kind of self-destructive stuff that we Black folks engage in way too often. What makes it even sadder is that Ms. Eele thinks she's helping. By speaking out on behalf of the designers - which the Black Artists Association doesn't even represent formally - she really seemed to believe that this rather sarcastic protest would actually reflect well on her and the people she name-dropped.

One of them didn't seem to appreciate it:

B. Michael said the statement made on behalf of the Black Artists Association (and first published in WWD Jan. 22) does not represent his point of view. “I understand their sensitivity and respect their right to express it,” he said. “I personally believe it is an unfair expectation to place on the First Lady. Fashion is subjective and a matter of personal choice.

It's obvious that Michelle Obama can wear whatever she pleases and should be able to do so without having it inferred by people like Ms. Eele that she's somehow not down with the cause.

That said, she doesn't deserve this:

According to WWD, Black Artists Association co-founder Amnau Eele has received death threats in response to her public criticism of Michelle Obama for not wearing an African-American designer to the inauguration.

Everybody chill. It's a dress.

Obama's slogan for 2012?

2009-01-22T13:38:00.002-05:00

"Keep the Change."

You heard it here first.

This land is my land.

2009-01-21T13:47:00.004-05:00

An event such as yesterday's is hard to encapsulate fully, for there are so many contexts in which its uniqueness, import and power can be examined. Let me start, then, with the obvious one - the fact that the hand that you see above on Lincoln's Bible is that of an African-American.

Admittedly, I struggled to find a voice to express whatever I was feeling after November 4. It felt like a dream, and as in dreams, articulation and detail aren't always in great supply. I couldn't - or felt that I couldn't - find apt words to encapsulate the moment. But Obama found some in his inaugural address yesterday that led me in the right direction:

Our challenges may be new, the instruments with which we meet them may be new, but those values upon which our success depends, honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism -- these things are old.

These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history.

What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility -- a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character than giving our all to a difficult task.

This is the price and the promise of citizenship.

But what of the many Americans - people of color, women, differing sexual orientation and religion - who feel that, despite having paid that price of citizenship in so many ways find themselves at times denied that privilege? This land may be your land, they say, but it is not my land. If I am the most responsible and dutiful American imaginable, how is it that I can still be called "nigger" by my countryman for the slightest slight? When I am made to feel like a foreigner in my own country, how is it that I can taste that which is America?

Perhaps the election of President Barack Obama is, as he put it in his victory speech in Grant Park, the answer to such a question.

The week after the election, my father's co-worker told him that Obama's victory meant that she could finally "unpack her suitcase". She finally felt that America was home, and that we were not merely Africans in America, strangers to the unencumbered promises of freedom and opportunity that are supposedly endemic to the land in which we were born.

The fact remains that Dr. King's dream, contrary to many of the hastily manufactured t-shirts and posters on sale all over D.C. yesterday, remains unfulfilled. The rise of one man to the highest office in our nation is not, in and of itself, absolution for those who continue to make their fellow Americans feel like they're somehow less than American. This corrosive behavior did not die off with the departure of George W. Bush from the White House and ostensibly, from public life.

Elizabeth Alexander's inaugural poem expressed an important sentiment:

Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle; praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand-lettered sign; The figuring it out at kitchen tables.

Some live by "Love thy neighbor as thy self."

Others by first do no harm, or take no more than you need.

What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.

In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.

On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp -- praise song for walking forward in that light.

We may indeed be on the cusp of a new world. We can, and should, take Barack Obama's election as a sign of things beginning and not ending. But the obstacles remain plentiful, and often we can get in our own way.

Whether or not yesterday's inauguration helps you unpack your suitcase, know that everyone in America, by virtue of their birth, should do so as soon as possible - and make themselves at home.

At last.

2009-01-20T23:59:00.000-05:00

Home from history.

2009-01-20T23:20:00.005-05:00

Just got back to Philly from attending the inauguration, and I'm wiped out. I'll write more tomorrow on this. I'm spent beyond words, but I don't know even know what to say now. Except for, perhaps, "hallelujah."

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

"I may not get there with you."

2009-01-19T12:27:00.008-05:00

On his day, notes from the mountaintop:

Monique Fields reminds us of the original appeal for a holiday:

My earliest memory of celebrating King was in 1981. A group of us 10- and 11-year-olds were sitting in music class, where we sang or played instruments. When the music lesson was over, our teacher wheeled out the record player for a little history. If we behaved, she told us, we could listen to some music.

She pulled an album from behind her desk, the one with Stevie Wonder on the front wearing beads on his braids. She pulled the disc from its sleeve and carefully put the needle on the album. Stevie began to sing:

You know it doesn't make much sense

There ought to be a law against

Anyone who takes offense

At a day in your celebration

Amen. Happy birthday to ya, Dr. King.

"I just couldn't take it anymore."

2009-01-16T15:17:00.004-05:00

They're still not free. Mychal Bell explains why he tried to take his life:

"I just wanted to show everybody that I really wasn't the type of kid that everybody was making me out to be," said Bell, who worked out with his school's team even though he couldn't play in games. "Nobody will ever be perfect, but it's like that's where my mind was. You need to be perfect."

There's more I have to say about this. Another time when I have more time.

On Panetta, and accountability.

2009-01-07T14:46:00.004-05:00

I was all prepared to write all about my thoughts concerning Leon Panetta, Diane Feinstein's whining and the message Obama was clearly sending with the pick. Then I saw Rachel Maddow already had it nailed:

A big clue as to why Panetta may have been chosen can be found here.

Headline of the day.

2009-01-07T14:42:00.001-05:00

"Joe the Plumber to become war correspondent."

Is a punchline even necessary?

Senator Franken?

2009-01-05T16:51:00.003-05:00

The guy I wanted to win almost as much as Obama appears to be maybe, kinda, sorta, perhaps officially in, finally:

The state Canvassing Board certified the results of the U.S. Senate recount this afternoon, showing Democrat Al Franken with a 225-vote advantage over incumbent Republican Norm Coleman.

Coleman is going down swinging (and flailing):

But while the canvassing board's ruing marked a cap to a long and wild election, it did not secure Franken's spot in the United States Senate. Even as state officials were finalizing ballot numbers, Norm Coleman's campaign was making preparations to legally challenge the results.

Aides to the Minnesota Republican insist that part of the recount process was unfairly tilted towards districts more favorable to Democrats, and, in particular, called for the inclusion of 650 more rejected absentee ballots. On Monday, the State Supreme Court ruled against the latter complaint. By then, however, Coleman's lawyers were already hinting at bringing the case to the federal level -- under the argument that it constituted an equal protection issue. The senator will have only seven days to challenge the results: Gov. Tim Pawlenty and Secretary of State Mark Ritchie must co-sign the certification within the week.

Coleman seems likely to pursue this avenue. But it may be too little too late. Aides to Franken note that with today's canvassing board decision the vote tallies are final.

"The canvassing board has officially accepted the election numbers as official," an aide told the Huffington Post. "The margin is not going to change anymore."

That means a Coleman victory will have to come via a court willing to wade into the partisan waters.

That's never worked for a Republican before, so...wait, what's that?

Secret agent man.

2009-01-05T16:17:00.007-05:00

Obama's selection to run the Central Intelligence Agency is Leon Panetta, former congressman and White House Chief of Staff. Sullivan points us to a very informative piece that gives me hope that the CIA's torture-happy days may be over:

Our Constitution defines the rules that guide our nation. It was drafted by those who looked around the world of the eighteenth century and saw persecution, torture, and other crimes against humanity and believed that America could be better than that. This new nation would recognize that every individual has an inherent right to personal dignity, to justice, to freedom from cruel and unusual punishment.

We have preached these values to the world. We have made clear that there are certain lines Americans will not cross because we respect the dignity of every human being. That pledge was written into the oath of office given to every president, "to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution." It's what is supposed to make our leaders different from every tyrant, dictator, or despot. We are sworn to govern by the rule of law, not by brute force.

We cannot simply suspend these beliefs in the name of national security. Those who support torture may believe that we can abuse captives in certain select circumstances and still be true to our values. But that is a false compromise. We either believe in the dignity of the individual, the rule of law, and the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, or we don't. There is no middle ground.

We cannot and we must not use torture under any circumstances. We are better than that.

Not everyone on the Left is psyched about Obama's latest pick, though, attributing the pick to political CYA:

Let's be honest with ourselves; the only reason Leon Panetta is the choice for director of Central Intelligence Agency is because he is completely clean regarding wire-taps and torture. He's completely clean in regards to those controversial programs because he never worked intelligence. Beyond the Iraq Study Group, Leon Panetta never worked intelligence. Even regarding foreign policy, his credentials are limited to his time in the House of Representatives; by the way, he never once served on a committee in Congress that is involved with foreign policy. Leon Panetta will not have the respect of the career-staff within the Central Intelligence Agency. Why would they respect him?

I see the point that Obama may have made the pick (quite late, for him) to avoid the appearance of hypocrisy when it comes to torture, but I really don't see what's wrong with a candidate's involvement with torture being a deal-breaker. Isn't that what we've been complaining about with regard to Bush-Cheney-Abu Ghraib-Gitmo for years? You can't get what you asked for and then bitch.

But my real problem with this post is that this person seems to care what CIA career-staff will think about their new boss. Career-staff who, presumably, have carried out the Bush-Cheney strategy of torture. So if they don't do their jobs because they're in a snit, Obama and Panetta will get rid of them. Who gives a damn what these people think?

I haven't written much about torture here, largely because many others are all over it already and I consider an egregiously obvious point: you can't claim you're the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave if you torture people to get information - much of which is likely faulty as a result of said torture. I agree with Panetta that we must embody the ideals that we claim to export. We wonder why "they hate us"? Please.

That said, I feel like I do after the Browns have a good draft. We have some good prospects, but they have to execute when the game starts.

Start all over.

2009-01-01T20:59:00.007-05:00

When my mother left home to pursue her doctorate, I knew nothing would ever be the same. One might think that my world should've been rocked the previous year, when I started college. I'd also left home for extended periods before (including the previous two semesters and a summer in England), but I always knew I was coming home. So as she pulled out of my father's driveway, I came to a very stark realization that physically shook me: Mom wasn't coming home.

I was so overwhelmed by sadness that I collapsed into my father's arms, unable to fully rationalize what was happening to my world. I'd become so comfortable in my reality, despite it not being the American Idyll(TM), that I couldn't conceive of things changing - despite the fact that I was quite aware of my mother's dream and the steps she'd been taking to follow it.

My sheltered, suburban childhood was over. Whatever vain hope I had of my parents reuniting was dead. Since I was too young and didn't remember their divorce, this was the first time that I felt my routine reality would sent back to square one.

Everything would change.

I went a long time before I felt again precisely that strange mix of emotions: so disorienting and shocking, yet interesting enough in its pure uniqueness that my intellectual curiosity is piqued. See, I've always been very conscious of my emotions and capable of evaluating them objectively. I can fly off the handle and later, fully realize I've been an ass and why I was an ass. In an instant, I can know precisely why I'm happy, but my analytical side never takes away from my enjoyment. And I never cry without provocation. There's always a reason.

The tears that shook out of my eyes that day dried long ago, and truth be told, I haven't cried much since. Little occasion to, I guess.

But when, ironically, my mother - now a tenured professor and the agent of change in my world - called me from Florida to celebrate well after the 11:00pm confirmation of Barack Obama's election to our nation's highest office, I was too overwhelmed to speak. This, after I'd spent the first few moments of victory holding my lady close as tears shook out of her. I felt as if my team had won three Super Bowls in one night. Emotional in a way that was dizzying, and decidedly not alone. Thousands more were like me (see above), arriving all at once at the intersection of Joyous and Overwhelmed. As they were that day in my father's driveway, tears were inevitable.

Here was a nation that, for the first time in my adult life, now stood ready to make the world I'd been dreaming about in my little liberal head for so long. As my homegirl Tracy Chapman sang in one of my favorite songs:

The whole world's broke and it ain't worth fixing
It's time to start all over, make a new beginning
There's too much pain, too much suffering
Let's resolve to start all over make a new beginning

Now don't get me wrong I love life and living
But when you wake up and look around at everything that's going down
All wrong
You see we need to change it now, this world with too few happy endings
We can resolve to start all over make a new beginning

Start all over
Start all over
Start all over
Start all over

Everything will change. Everything has changed.

Power's back on.

2008-12-11T17:00:00.009-05:00

I've written this post so many times now, in my head and on the page. Perhaps that's the problem.

Make no mistake - my day job has been the primary reason I haven't been writing since Thanksgiving. But I also stopped writing here for a time because, frankly, I didn't see anything to write about. No, that's the wrong way to put it. I didn't see any subject to which my writing would add clarification, purpose or perspective. I subscribed to the mantra I'd put forth in my August 24 post, "On blogging", a post put up after the first sustained break I took from this space:

So, as I continue to use this blog as a place to revive a muscle that had been largely dormant for over a decade, I will be more judicious with how I work that muscle out. To paraphrase Jerry Maguire, there'll be fewer posts, less news here at 1,369 lightbulbs. This is not to say I won't post the occasional YouTube that makes me laugh, or the random sports item that doesn't necessarily move forward the great national discourse about a particular pressing item of our time. But I consider the right to voice my opinion and inspire debate a gift from the Creator, and I pray that He grants me to ability to be increasingly disciplined in my use of that voice.

Perhaps I might add something after all.

Perhaps I might. Maybe I just needed a little extra time after the election to recharge the lightbulbs, so to speak. Time to pay my electric bill.

Bill's paid, switch is flipped, all dead bulbs replaced. On to 2009.

Casual fan.

2008-11-24T19:33:00.010-05:00

I had a frightening realization today, and it had nothing to do with the economy. Well, it did, kinda. Let me just talk it through.

I'm a passionate sports fan and also a professional in the field. No matter which capacity I'm in, there are, inevitably, fans that will get under your skin. Sometimes it's the media whores who'd do absolutely anything to get on television (yes, you too, Big Dawg); or the really drunk guy who, despite your team losing 34-7, needs to remind you of the score every 12.6 seconds. Maybe it's the Super Know-It-Alls (Who-Often-Really-Don't-Know-Shit), or the "What's a Touchdown?" (WHAT?, for short) fans who pick teams in the office pool based on color or proximity to said fan's hometown.

That said, all that animosity's out the door. That prissy, wine-drinking "fan" who scored tickets from his company's CEO (or is the CEO), the one who's telling me to sit down as I lose my voice yelling expletives at players on the field that can't hear me? I might be able to school him on the Tampa 2, but dude's likely running circles around me from Monday to Friday.

I've been so lost in the maelstrom of the nation's economic woes, I've hardly had time to form an opinion. Maybe it's because I really don't have a right to one just yet. I'm fairly knowledgeable about a number of things, but money is not one of them. I don't read the Wall Street Journal or Financial Times. I don't watch CNBC, Fox Business or Suze Orman (I've been warned off the latter). I'd never heard of Timothy Geithner until shortly after the election, nor most of the people President-elect Obama has appointed to keep the RMS Titanic from sinking (I know enough to see that we've already hit the iceberg).

So, let me refrain from comment until I, frankly, learn more about this.

The Obamas, on 60 Minutes.

2008-11-17T18:45:00.002-05:00

The full show:

Watch CBS Videos Online

Sending it up.

2008-11-16T19:39:00.002-05:00

In thanks for Mother Bethel's new pastor, Mark Kelly Tyler (who has a blog, for goodness' sakes), I offer Ephesians 4: 10-16 -

10 He who descended is the very one who ascended higher than all the heavens, in order to fill the whole universe.) 11 It was he who gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists, and some to be pastors and teachers, 12 to prepare God's people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up 13 until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.

14 Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of men in their deceitful scheming. 15 Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is, Christ. 16From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.

On my father, the veteran.

2008-11-11T22:27:00.007-05:00

I recall her class, and the conversation, but not her name. Whatever my seventh-grade English teacher's name was, she taught me one hell of a lesson.

Shortly after class, she and I were talking. Thinking back, I'm surprised that I had time to chat. I remember that the walls were blue, and that I was holding my copy of Cry, the Beloved Country - but the particulars of how we got on the topic of our fathers and war remains fuzzy, as this occurred over twenty years ago. How the chat ended stands out like it happened yesterday.

When I remarked that my Dad and I could talk about anything, she sounded a note of caution. "Don't ask him too much about war", she said. Why not, I asked. I then wondered aloud if my father had killed anyone in 'Nam. "I asked my father that question," she said. She told me that she'd done so when she was a pre-teen, like me, wide-eyed and curious. Her father sighed, and replied solemnly,

"Yes."

"And then he said not another word", she recalled. Neither did I, for that matter.

Largely because of that conversation, my father and I haven't talked much about his "time in the service", as he termed it. He was an Air Force radar operator in Vietnam, but I never found out really what that meant. He would talk about his time stationed in places ranging from New Orleans to Laos, but I never asked for dates or details. He'd let me walk around the house in his old fatigues, but never talk about the sweat he surely put into them. He'd show me the faded burn scars on his right forearm, caused by fresh M-16 shells - but I never dared asked him the when and where.

In fact, the only detail I ever really learned was that his rank and classification (which I've since forgotten), when I applied for a Child of a Vietnam Veteran scholarship to a summer college program at Oxford University. I would go to Oxford at 16, while around my age, my dad would be preparing himself for war.

My father graduated from high school in 1964, so he knew damn well what was awaiting him if he enlisted. His older brother joined him, and eventually became a paratrooper. I knew them as completely different people, and still am left longing to know the men they were. But even if I only know what my father did in an abstract sense, I know that his service opened the door to his becoming the great, imperfect man he is today. I really wouldn't have it any other way, and I guess that today, that is what I'm most thankful for.

The man pictured above is not my father, but it might as well have been. He has the same clean-shaven face filled with possibility, a face that I'd never seen before. (My father has had virtually the same beard all my life.) That's a young man I'd like to know. But I'm thrilled to know the old man I know today.

Yes, part of me would like to ask my father about his service, get to know the details. But I'd much rather talk to him about the election, the newest Bond flick and LeBron James. Surely, you'd be correct to assume that I've made assumptions about what my father had to do, and what now has to live with. However, if I can spare my father the pain of remembrance, I have done him a service.

There's no need to ask our veterans about every detail. If you're in doubt, and as conflicted as I was twenty years ago...just do as I did today, in a phone call to my father.

Just say thanks, and leave the rest alone.

Sending it up.

2008-11-09T06:19:00.001-05:00

Only one verse, for a historic week. Job 5:16:

16 So the poor have hope,
and injustice shuts its mouth.

Normally, there's a gospel tune here. But only one song, by one man, fit:

If only Ray could have been here for Tuesday. If only.

1,000 words.

2008-11-08T21:08:00.001-05:00

New York City.

I'll keep posting these as long as they keep popping up.

Maddow hearts Palin.

2008-11-08T18:28:00.000-05:00

Rachel has to just cherish moments like this:

The man at the door.

2008-11-07T20:15:00.002-05:00

Do yourself a favor and read about Eugene Allen.

President-elect Barack Obama.

2008-11-07T20:04:00.007-05:00

Man, that has a nice ring to it. His first presser, live from Chicago:

Nate Silver and Sean Quinn at 538 live-blogged the event. Silver's conclusion:

That was pretty impressive. Obama was charming and assertive, and the campaign has a real knack for ceremony and staging (e.g. the phalanx of economic advisers standing behind Obama). The press corps is going to love him, at least for the first several months.

Greg Sargent:

Obama balanced gravity and a sense of appropriate seriousness with an occasional effort to lighten the mood with some easy banter, striking a tone that will probably turn out to be a hallmark of his presidency. He asked Chicago reporter Lynn Sweet why she had her arm in a cast. And he referred to himself as a "mutt" at one point with some self-deprecating humor that, given that he's just been elected president, risked sounding insincere, but somehow didn't.

The low point of the presser came when a reporter asked Obama to respond to the fact that Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad has written him an unusual letter congratulating him for his victory -- a frivolous waste of time given the big issues Obama is confronting.

Joe Klein:

Unlike his immediate predecessor, he seemed completely in control.

Blaming us for Prop 8.

2008-11-07T19:54:00.002-05:00

Shanikka at My Left Wing counters Coates, saying blaming Black folks for Prop 8's failure is racist:

I am working too hard. I have no time to write diaries. Yet between yesterday afternoon, when I'd finally read one hateful racist fingerpoint from a white gay person too many here and elsewhere on the internet, I'd had enough. I therefore blew off work that needed to get done and still needs to get done to try and put to rest, once and for all, this virulently racist idea that Black people are to blame for the passage of Proposition 8 here in California. It is an idea grounded in utter myth, a complete lack of knowledge about anything related to Black people's presence in California, and just plain old scapegoating.

Hoepfully, this diary will help put all that to rest, and we can get back to work trying to beat back the hateful results of Tuesday's vote.

She really breaks it down. Read the whole post. I think she and Ta-Nehisi both have valid points: while there may not have been enough Black folks in California, among other things (I'm going to fact-check that), that doesn't excuse even one California voter from voting for this bigotry.

Black folks (and non-Black folks) need to move past homophobia. Wake up.

(H/T: Jack Turner.)

Bowtie to a barfight.

2008-11-07T18:40:00.005-05:00

Now, I just said that I like to run up the score. I wanted the Dems to get the 60 Senate seats, the filibuster-proof majority. What I didn't want was for them to get to a point where they hung by the thread of 60 votes, with Traitor Joe's finger at the kill-switch.

Lieberman's status in the Democratic caucus hangs by a thread - a thread attached to Harry Reid's finger. Yesterday, the two met, and it seemed Reid would put Lieberman over his knee at that point. It's known that Reid holds Lieberman in high personal regard, despite the shiv he put into Barack Obama's side in the form of a disgusting speech at the Republican National Convention. Lieberman also went well beyond the personal conviction of supporting his friend John McCain: he campaigned for Republicans in other races. His behavior demanded more than Reid's milquetoast statement today:

"Joe Lieberman has done something that I think was improper, wrong, and I'd like if we weren't on television, I'd use a stronger word of describing what he did," Reid told CNN's John King. "But Joe Lieberman votes with me a lot more than a lot of my senators. He didn't support us on military stuff and he didn't support us on Iraq stuff. You look at his record, it's pretty good."

Greg Sargent may consider that "ratcheting up the rhetoric", but I only see it as another shadow punch by one of the sorriest leaders the Democrats have ever had.

That said, Lieberman has outdone him. The Connecticut "independent" actually threw down an ultimatum:

"Senator Lieberman's preference is to stay in the caucus, but he's going to keep all his options open," a Lieberman aide said. "McConnell has reached out to him and at this stage his position is he wants to remain in the caucus but losing the chairmanship is unacceptable."

"Unacceptable"? Let him keep his chairmanship of his committee, or else?

Need I remind this dude that he has no leverage? His guy lost! He turned his back on Obama, who'd campaigned for him against Ned Lamont in 2006, when Lieberman was fighting for his political life. What possible motivation should the Democrats have for not only keeping this guy in the fold, but caving to his demands in order to do so?

I never thought I'd say this, but the Democrats need to get in Joe Lieberman's face, if they can stoop that low, and...quote Dick Cheney.

By this, I don't mean take away his chairmanship and let him take his ball and go home. Kick his ass out of the caucus.

Josh Marshall spells it out:

...the simple fact is the Democrats don't need Joe Lieberman. He's not in a position to call anything 'unacceptable'. The Democrats didn't get to 60 votes or at least it now seems highly unlikely -- which was his only hope to have any continued relevance or position to bargain from. And the truth is that filibuster-busting votes are often made on an ad-hoc basis rather than on a party line. In any case, there'd be no more reason to trust he'd be there as a 60th vote as a Democrat than as a Republican.

If he pulls a Zell Miller, fine. His credibility is shot, and he cannot be trusted. Why would you want to depend upon someone like that? Let him accept the Republican invitation, sit on the other side of the aisle (with no chairmanship, by the way) and defeat him along with the rest of them. And there's no way Connecticut re-elects this cat. Why play yourself in the meantime?

As Marshall says, Reid and the Dems need to make it absolutely clear to Lieberman that this is not a negotiation. They should go Michael Corleone on him:

[Geary is demanding a large bribe for a gaming license]
Senator Pat Geary: I want your answer and the money by noon tomorrow. And one more thing. Don't you contact me again, ever. From now on, you deal with Turnbull.

Michael Corleone: Senator? You can have my answer now, if you like. My final offer is this: nothing.

Run up the score.

2008-11-07T18:07:00.002-05:00

In the aftermath of the Browns' second consecutive crushing loss (but good job, Brady!), I have to say this offered some relief.

Personally, I love it when my team runs up the score. I know that may not seem terribly mature, but when you grow up rooting for the teams that I love, it's such a rare occurrence that I don't believe it qualifies as unsportsmanlike.

So perhaps that's why I love that not only did Obama turn North Carolina blue for the first time since 1976 and Indiana for the first time since Lyndon Johnson did it 44 years ago. Just to pile on, he also won Omaha's electoral vote, making it the first time in four decades that a Democrat captured any of Nebraska's electoral votes. That puts him at 365 electoral votes.

Get Missouri, too, while you're at it. (Unlikely, I know.)

Last throes.

2008-11-07T17:48:00.005-05:00

It seems the Army has a new hustle.

Brandon Friedman, an Iraq war veteran, on VetVoice:

Well that didn't take long. Polls across America had been closed for less than 24 hours and Army Career Counselors were already exploiting Barack Obama's victory in an effort to recruit former soldiers back into units. This email was forwarded to me by an Iraq veteran and former Army captain who received it on Wednesday:

Did you catch the sales pitch?

By that time our new President will have gotten us out of these other countries.

Friedman continues:

But larger questions become immediately apparent: Was this career counselor told to use this tactic by his chain of command or not? Is this going to be a shift in recruiting Army-wide? Is the Army going to use President Obama as a recruiting tool? If so, this would symbolize a stunning--if not totally rational--renunciation of the Bush administration and its handling of the military. If this becomes an Army policy, it represents a true "ding-dong the witch is dead" moment for the service.

It very well may be policy soon enough, if I read New York Times piece correctly. We all knew Obama's victory likely meant that (pardon the expression) our imperial Iraqi adventure is in its last throes, but it appears to already be impacting our policy in the region:

Iraqi Shiite politicians are indicating that they will move faster toward a new security agreement about American troops, and a Bush administration official said he believed that Iraqis could ratify the agreement as early as the middle of this month.

“Before, the Iraqis were thinking that if they sign the pact, there will be no respect for the schedule of troop withdrawal by Dec. 31, 2011,” said Hadi al-Ameri, a powerful member of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, a major Shiite party. “If Republicans were still there, there would be no respect for this timetable. This is a positive step to have the same theory about the timetable as Mr. Obama.”

I in Iverson.

2008-11-07T14:29:00.002-05:00

In her latest ESPN column, Jemele has a very good argument for why Detroit will be good for Allen Iverson:

Rasheed Wallace sounded a lot like Iverson when he came to Detroit four years ago. Sheed was consumed with a hunger that was identical to Iverson's. He also was considered a selfish cancer who didn't know how to win. Sheed turned out to be the reason the Pistons won a championship in 2004 and why they've been at the upper echelon of the Eastern Conference for much of the millennium.

Sometimes an organization rubs off on a player, not the other way around.

I disagree with her assessment for two reasons (and none of them are the fact that I'm a Cavaliers fan): a) the guy Detroit just traded, Chauncey Billups, was a distributor who can score. Iverson is a pure scorer who has to be reminded to distribute.

But mostly because b) Jemele's theory about why Detroit could be good for Iverson and vice versa is based wholly on conjecture, and not in the history of Iverson's career and behavior. It's based on hope, not evidence. Now, as anyone who reads this blog regularly know, I have asked folks to believe in hope, and in the future. But this is basketball, and it is wholly different. I find it difficult to believe that he'll be in any way different on the court than he has been in the past just because he's in a different (and admittedly, smarter) organization.

As much as Jemele lauds the Pistons' discipline and team-first attitude, they are getting older, and quickly. Iverson doesn't help them get any younger. Also, in the trade, they lost their best big man off the bench, Antonio McDyess.

As a writer, I am willing to stand corrected, but as a fan, I hope I'm right. Change may have been good for Iverson as far as his overall championship prospects, but it's not necessarily what the Pistons needed to get them over the top.

Changes I can believe in.

2008-11-06T20:09:00.001-05:00

Read my mind:

(AP Photo/Mark Duncan)

On Prop 8.

2008-11-06T10:01:00.001-05:00

Ta-Nehisi Coates on Prop 8's unfortunate passage:

Still on a gut, emotional level, this makes me sick. If someone wants to give me a reason why gay people shouldn't be able to marry that doesn't, at its root, boil down to "yuck," I guess I'd love to hear it. But really that isn't the point. I've always maintained that you don't have to like black people to do the right thing. Same thing here. I'm not very interested in folks's homophobia. I'm interested in why they think they should be in the business of dictating terms of love to two consenting adults. It's disgusting. And we need to let this shit go. There may be great, sound reasons beyond--the blacks are pathological!!--to explain this. But there are no great, sound reasons that excuse it. Cut this shit out. We know better. Even if other people didn't.

Nader's nadir.

2008-11-06T04:05:00.009-05:00

I thought I'd lost every ounce of respect for Ralph Nader. The 2000 nonsense cost him most of his capital with me, and in 2004, he lost even more for running so plainly not for the people he claims to represent, but for his own glorification.

But now, it's all gone.

Jimi Izrael:

Holy Jesus on The John. There's context, yes, but that was the best literary allusion he cold muster?

Already, it starts.

I understand that Nader has an almost pathological need to discuss issues related to poverty. However, that would require us to somehow ignore the fact that this has really, now, become all about him. For all of Nader's self-aggrandizing runs of the presidency haven't made one fucking dent in the causes he supposedly believes in. The undeniable proof of his lack of effectiveness lies in this interview. If you're reduced to pulling stunts to garner attention from a media that learned long ago to ignore you, racist stunts that shock even Fox News, what is left for you?

And keep in mind that this isn't even the first time he's pulled this shit.

Perhaps the saddest part of all this is that Nader himself is an assimilated minority - son of Lebanese immigrants - that has more or less "passed" as White for years. He has some nerve accusing others of "talking White" and being an Uncle Tom. Some real damned nerve.

Ralph Nader can go to hell, as far as I'm concerned. But perhaps I'm just taking his bait. The better place for us to send him might very well be off of our news pages, and out of our national consciousness. That would really piss him off.

OH, HE DID DO SOMETHING CONSTRUCTIVE?

A commenter in Matthew Yglesias' thread sums up Nader's career well, with my links:

Taking republican money and accepting republican assistance to further republican electoral victories.

But hey, he did something or other to GM fifty years ago. And he started the PIRGs! Those are awesome. Awesome guy. High fives all around.

Mister President.

2008-11-05T20:49:00.015-05:00

I remember the first time I ever saw Barack Obama's name. I remember laughing.

I was riding in a friend's car in Chicago five years ago when I spotted a navy billboard alongside the freeway, well-lit and well-juxtaposed in front of the Second City skyline, topped with small white type over huge block letters spelling out a name I'd never seen before.

O-B-A-M-A
I'm no etymologist or anthropologist, so I didn't know what the origin of the name was. Truth be told, I thought it was Japanese (and I guess I had good reason). I asked my friend, with an immature scoff in my voice, "Who's that?" I was told that Barack Obama was an exciting local politician who was "someone to watch".

I learned more about him, and began to follow his race for the U.S. Senate from afar. It was a contest missing any sense of drama (as long as you don't count Alan Keyes). I recall a growing admiration for him, rooted in a perceived commonality with his life experience. But while every home I grew up in was within a five-mile radius of the other, this Obama was a citizen of the world.

Still, as he marched to victory in that 2004 Senate race, I had the feeling I was witnessing a preview of a bright future. Best way to sum it up? Without waxing too poetic, I can best compare it to this: a sailor lost at sea suddenly spots a lighthouse, a safe haven that though far away, offers promise of salvation to come.

Even in 2004, we were a country that needed saving.

At the Democratic National Convention, we saw the future for the first time:

As a Christian with an Arabic name, my ears perked up when Barack Hussein Obama spoke of his name, and how his parents believed that in America, one's name would not be a barrier to success. I shot out of my seat when he spoke of the United States of America, and the prayer that we all had a place in that America. And after he was done, I sent up thanks, sharing a thought and dream with so many: that this 43-year-old Illinois state senator would someday be the first African-American President.

Even as we wallowed in silent disbelief after John Kerry's loss, there was the promise of salvation to come. Barack Obama's victory in his Senate race served notice that a day like November 4, 2008 could come. Only I thought that it would come in 2016, at the earliest. No way could we elect a Black president. Not this soon, at least. Not when this "skinny kid with a funny name" still looked, well, like a kid. If Barack Obama was to move into the White House, he'd have to wait.

Besides, Hillary Clinton was next in line. John Edwards was still out there, and not found out. There were other contenders for barrier-breaking: Clinton, Bill Richardson. (The latter was actually my bet; if there was any chance for a person of color, it was a Hispanic guy with an Anglo-Saxon last name that didn't look particularly "ethnic".)

No way could we elect a Black president. Not this soon, at least.

Fast-forward to February, 2007. Despite the catcalls he knew he'd hear - "he's too young!"; "he's too inexperienced!"; "he's too...uh, presumptuous!" - the junior senator for Illinois had announced his candidacy boldly and without any hint of wavering. Obama wasn't in this to be a symbol, or to make a stand on a particular issue of interest. He was in to win.

But he knew that his oratory would not carry the day. If so, 2004 would have been more than his moment of anointing. Kerry likely would have won. His loss proved to the Democratic Party and to Obama that there'd better be more meat on them bones. He couldn't just be the beacon off in the distance.

And then, last night arrived. I could wax on about how I wished my great-grandfather, who fled Mississippi lynch mobs at 15 and came north, were here to not only to see this day, but have had the chance to press one of the fingers on his leathered, massive hand to a button inside a voting booth. But to me, after writing incessantly about this man and his message, I finally got it.

As the announcement came through my series of tubes at 11:00pm Eastern, my girlfriend leaped up and started shouting.

"OH MY GOD!"
Over and over, the lady I pray one day will be my wife was screaming and crying with happiness, and I held her tightly as I heard the Grant Park crowd matching her pitch. This was happening. Now. Past was suddenly prologue to a future that I looked forward to with a new fervor, a future with a wife and kids who, from the day they enter this world, officially have no restrictions on their dreams.

I have Obama to thank for that. While America's obsession with Obama's racial first further proves that there's nothing "post-racial" about his victory, the greatness of the moment was encapsulated in the man's face as he emerged to speak.

Obama approached the microphone with a sobriety and focus that proved once and for all the source of his victory - his temperament and wisdom. Surely the lessons of our horrible American record on race informed that countenance, perhaps even weighing his smile down. He knew that his speeches were the beacon, the light that shined so brightly in our eyes that we had no idea how close salvation could be.

His election does not guarantee that we will be saved from the maladies of the Bush years, and I will take a cue from Obama's own measured nature and others that warn against the romance of politics, criticizing him when deserved. But as I finally collect myself and wipe away the last tear, I find myself finally grasping what Obama's been trying to say all along.

Past is prologue. This is about the future. And the only hope I have for Barack Obama is that he seizes the moment, and helps guide our lost America back to shore.

(Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images.)

American history.

2008-11-05T19:50:00.000-05:00

44.

2008-11-05T14:20:00.001-05:00

A change gonna come.

2008-11-04T22:59:00.001-05:00

How I voted.

2008-11-04T12:36:00.005-05:00

I sent the following to Andrew Sullivan this morning. I know this is long, but I wanted this documented for perpetuity:

I live in Germantown, a Philadelphia neighborhood northwest of the city, about 15 minutes from the Art Museum and its famous steps. It’s a neighborhood that’s largely working-class African Americans. Lucky for me, I was a mere 500 feet from my polling place, the church on the corner.

The first thing I noticed was the box of magazines. I’ve never seen things like that at a polling location before – only at places where you expect the wait to be interminable (dentist’s offices, etc.) But the location was even more telling – it was outside, about 50 feet from the entrance. The line at 8:10am was coming out of the doors and just about reached the box of magazines.

I prepped myself for a long wait and was about to reach for a magazine when I was approached by one of two polling supervisors (not sure if that’s the proper term, I can’t recall). Wearing a tag indicating that she was associated with the Obama campaign, she asked me which precinct I was in, then directed me inside to where there was a completely separate area for my line (I was in the 22nd, the line outside was for the 21st.) Saved me a bunch of time.

Getting inside, I got into a line that was about 50 folks long. There was a TV there with fuzzy reception, broadcasting CBS. (During my time in the line, I noticed the recent 527 ad about Obama and Wright – “Too Radical…Too Risky” – and wondered how people could be harassed for wearing an Obama t-shirt or button while that kind of filth could very easily have influenced a vote in a less reliably liberal area. Careless on the election workers’ part.)

That aside, the place was running like clockwork. All of the election workers were very good at expediting folks into their proper lines (A-L, M-Z) and getting them into one of the two booths allotted for each of the two precincts voting in the church. I felt there was something somehow poetic that I’d be casting a vote for an African American for president in a church, thereby answering so many prayers of those on whose shoulders I’ve stood.

Slightly behind me in line was an elderly African American woman who’d anticipated a longer wait: she had a Philadelphia Tribune and a walking stick that could collapse into a chair. I first struck up conversation with her after I heard her discussing dirty campaign tactics with a young brother in line and referring to a “her” all the while – I wasn’t sure if they were referring to Hillary or Palin. They did get on to the Palin-Sarkozy prank call, and to say that she was horrified would be an understatement. It wasn’t going to sway her vote, which was already Obama’s. But it did give me a strange sense of relief that after today, all the bollocks would come to a close.

I’m a devout Christian, but for whatever reason, prayer has never come naturally to me. But before my finger pressed the button next to Obama’s name, my hands came together firmly. I imagined later that the ghosts of the trailblazers held them together, knowing that my heart would know what to do next. I sent thanks up to my forebears, the Black (and White) freedom fighters without whom there would have been no opportunity for me to vote at all, let alone for a man that looks like me. Then I pressed the button.

After finishing the ballot, I said “thank you!”so loudly that I’m sure everyone in line heard me. Never has the phrase in Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise” been more salient:

“I am the hope and dream of the slave.”

I was done at 8:42am.

See below.

2008-11-04T07:00:00.001-05:00

Doctor's note.

2008-11-04T02:03:00.004-05:00

Give Sarah Palin credit - she's a non-conformist.

When every candidate on a national ticket has seen clear to release their medical information to the media, and through them, the public - even if you count John McCain's double-secret probationary period that docs had to review his (no copies!) - Palin gave America a distinct and unmistakable with the distinct possibility of a second to follow.

In what can only be termed as an Election Day dump (pardon the scatological pun), Palin and her advisors submitted a letter from her now somewhat infamous physician, Dr. Cathy Baldwin-Johnson, saying:

"Governor Palin is in excellent health and has no known health problems that would interfere with her ability to carry out the duties and obligation of Vice President of the United States of America."

Yeah, America! What the hell was the big deal, anyway? Sheesh.

Sullivan has an idea:

Releasing this letter one hour before polling day begins and refusing to provide any actual documentation is not an answer. We need documentation to verify the last pregnancy: the amniocentesis results with Sarah Palin's name on them, for example, would be readily available and easy to disseminate, and would help raise awareness of Down Syndrome. So why not give us something? All we have in this literally last minute letter is Baldwin-Johnson's name. We had that already.

A song for November 4.

2008-11-03T22:07:00.009-05:00

From TPM's Genghis:

Contrary to President Bush's assurance, he is not the Decider. We the People are the Deciders. Mr. Bush is a temporary employee to whom we have granted provisional authority to govern on our behalf. We the People make such Decisions infrequently but regularly--every four years. And now it is again time for us to Decide.

Sometimes the Decision may seem inconsequential, a choice between equals, but the consequences of our Decisions inevitably prove that the differences were starker than we imagined. The authority that we grant to these individuals is of such magnitude that even the small choices that they make--the words they choose, the people they hire, the favors they grant, the priorities that they pursue--have great consequences. However much Mr. Bush seemed like Mr. Gore eight years ago, he has led the nation down a very different path than Mr. Gore would have done. The difference cannot be measured by any single policy or historical event. It consists in the accumulation of policies, priorities, appointments, speeches, favors, initiatives, and other actions that Mr. Bush has executed under the authority that we have twice granted him.

The Decision is always a gamble. We can never know how a person will exercise the authority we grant to him or her. The best candidate may be the worst president. Like poker players, we can only make educated choices based on the hands we've been dealt. A low pair will sometimes win; four aces will sometimes lose. But we can play the odds, and we can maximize our chances. What we must not do, if we value the welfare our nation, is to Decide for the wrong reasons. We are not choosing a policy, a friend, a hero, a judge, or an entertainer. We are choosing to hire someone who will make innumerable decisions on our behalf, someone who will affect the lives of billions of people in our country and around the world.

This year, we must do better. We cannot know for certain whether Mr. Obama will be a more capable leader than Mr. McCain, but we have many reasons to believe so. Over the course of his career and in this campaign, Mr. Obama has demonstrated solid temperament, sound judgment, a deep and nuanced intelligence, strong leadership, and broad appeal. He aims to right the errors produced by Mr. Bush's incompetence: the imprudent war that killed millions, cost trillions, and produced little; the tax cuts for the richest among us that have exploded our deficit and amplified the economic inequalities that divide us; the politicization of our government; and the secrecy meant to hide choices we abhor.

In contrast to Mr. Obama, Mr. McCain has been erratic, often confused, prone to anger, and out of touch. The policies that he has favored committed us to the terrible war, bankrupt our government, and undermined the "fundamentals" of our economy. The people that he has hired, most notably Ms. Palin, have exhibited notable incompetence. He has belied a reputation for integrity and substance with a campaign that has exploited our worst instincts and sought to distract us from matters of importance.

It is time to Decide. We can be guided by our fears and prejudices and bet the weak hand. Or we can place our bet on the man who has given us so many reasons to believe that he will work effectively on our behalf to improve our lives and make our nation greater. We the People are responsible for our future. We are the Deciders.

Nailin' Palin.

2008-11-03T21:03:00.001-05:00

The second Troopergate report will be released tonight. Hoo-boy:

Timothy Petumenos, an independent investigator hired by the Alaska Personnel Board, says he will release the report during a news conference 7:30 p.m. EST Monday.

A separate legislative panel earlier found that Palin, the Republican vice presidential nominee, abused her office by allowing her husband and other staffers to pressure the public safety commissioner to fire a state trooper who went through a nasty divorce from Palin's sister. She fired the commissioner, but denies it had anything to do with the trooper.

AND WHAT A SHOCK.

The probe that Palin initiated to probe herself exonerates...herself:

"There is no probable cause to believe that the governor, or any other state official, violated the Alaska Executive Ethics Act in connection with these matters," Timothy Petumenos, the Anchorage lawyer hired to conduct the probe, wrote in his final report.

Zachary Roth at TPM takes this apart.

The mighty Quinn.

2008-11-03T19:19:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, many sounded the clarion call. Today, it was actually answered:

The Browns have confirmed that Brady Quinn will make his first NFL start Thursday night when the Browns host the Broncos.

Quinn, the second of the team's two first-round picks in 2007, will replace Derek Anderson.

'bout damn time.