Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright

I have to say that I am nonplussed by the commentary on Tiger Woods that has been published and broadcast since Thanksgiving Day of 2009. A man cheated on his wife. Whoa, stop the presses. Hey - I think President's have done that! A man cheated on his wife again and again and again. Whoa - news at eleven! And six and five and seven and ten and repeat ad infinitum. And you know? I think a President has done that too.

So this story is not about a man cheating on his wife. And if Michael Bloomberg can be a divorced father of two kids and still be the three time mayor of NYC, then it's not a story about money either. What is this story about? Why is a golfer - for God's sake, a golfer! - being spoken about in such a manner that leads well meaning idiots like Bret Hume to utter - on air, two nights in a row - that this young Buddhist needs to convert to Christianity; that the very act of saying the blessed name Jesus Christ - out loud - will rectify all of the past misdeeds of a golfer (??!!!!) and wash his sins away.

And no, its not a story about religion, because this is an American story and all American stories are about race - that most fictitious of all elements and yet imbued with such artifice that it has been allowed to enslave father, mother and child for centuries and ensnares their progeny even down to this day; such that some of us - and now, TIger knows he is one of us - pretend they can think of themselves as, "Cablinasian". At times, we allow ourselves to wander through a looking-glass and begin to adopt the rationalizations of the Master; that but for our nature as full-blooded Congo, mulatto, quadroon, octoroon, or whatever the hell a one-sixteenth black is called (besides, nigg- (hey-o! This is a family show), we would be accepted as the full brother of humanity that we are.

Hog.

Wash.

Horse.

Feathers.

I am too old to buy that particular line of cock-and-bull today. You gotta dress that stuff up in evening wear if you think I am going to take that out on the town.

This story - the unfolding drama that is the rise, then fall (and rise again?) of Tiger Woods, is one big, old-fashioned, American party of:"I knew we couldn't trust that negro!" Tiger has been tarred and feathered and run out of town by almost every single one of the corporate sponsors who used to wait on him hand and foot (and some of them probably introduced Tiger to one or two of their female friends, you know - just how the recruiters at USC still do.) So, yes: I'm angry. I'm angry that yet one more Charlie Brown stepped up and tried to kick that football. But I'm even more upset at myself for allowing myself to ever buy into a portion of the hype that was Tiger Woods. He's a man. Men do as we have always done - and if evolution is to be believed, then we are the men women have selected us to be. Do I feel bad for Elin and the children she and Tiger had together? Sure, but this story is not about one man and one woman; it's about one more black man who had to be taught the hard way that he cannot make the same mistakes as other men - other white men.

Not in this country.

Not today.

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Great American Myths, Debunked

I was in Los Angeles on Election Night - 3000 miles from my home in Miami. I did early voting in Florida and then headed out west to spend some time with family, filled with anticipation of what was to come. You see, unlike some, I had fully and completely tossed my hand in with the fates (as documented here for the record). Sure, I felt Obama had a chance to cross over the 400 EV mark, but I was immanently satisfied with the 365-received (I covered my bet with that minimum of 331 EV). So at 8 PM PST, when they declared California for Obama and put him over the demarcation line of 270 EV into the winner's circle as the 44th President of the United States of America; the room, the house and the neighborhood around me erupted into joyous celebration. All around me - and in all communities across the country - Americans were triumphantly passing the torch from the old to the new.

And yet, what began as a whisper on that night ("did you hear? Prop 8 passed. I think it was the black vote that did it"), has since turned into a tsunami of recriminations and remonstrations all with the common theme of - "sigh, well we should have anticipated that black people would bring their prejudices with them to the polls."

Poppycock.

Just what made anyone believe that this particular exit poll was any more accurate than all of the previous pre- and post-election polls across this campaign season? From New Hampshire in January through California in November, polls had consistently misunderestimated how to properly model both the overall wave of voters who were heading to the polls as well as the demographic breakdowns of those voters. But when you live in a country with a media as dedicated to removing daily reports from any historical context, each and every story is reported as though each day begins anew, with no context of what happened yesterday or - God forbid - six months ago.

And so we were treated to a parade of talking heads, each with their own rationale for why black folks behaved so trenchantly, truculently and - okay, I am out of appropriate adjectives that start with the letter "t" - and just what could be done to rectify this terrible, horrible very bad deed? Now, we have two university professors who have conducted a precinct-level statistical analysis of voting data; their results show that - oh, the horror! - black voters were pretty much like everyone else who entered the voting booth.

Here is a little tip, for those of you new to the country: America is a homophobic society. I know, I know, it doesn't say that in the vacation travel logs or the real estate brochures, but its true.

As a country, we put sexual orientation above national security!

So no, black voters don't need special outreach programs, black churches don't need special envoys from the gay community (as if they are not already represented) and we don't need guest spots on "black radio" (as if the commercialized community exploitation devices have any relationship with black radio that was once organically part of the community) offering to tell listeners the way, the truth and the light.

As a country, we need to wake up and let people be people. It is our society - along with many others around the world, to be fair - that has an issue with homosexual behavior. To say it plainly: this is the last area in which discrimination is accepted publicly. One can be the lead pastor of a megachurch, as well as the author of best-selling books and feel free to go on television and say something beyond nonsensical, merely because the object of the sentence is gay people.

Although the press fails to consider history as a component of their responsibilities, we are all swimming together in the same tide. Dr. King used to say that the arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice. I would hope, that in the same year in which we all witnessed the election of the first black president of the United States of America, we could all have just a little faith in the words of Dr. King.

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Let Freedom Ring!

Awesome post - but don't kid yourself. The strain of incredulity that can be found in the modern GOP has roots older than the Republic itself. Remember, we were the first nation founded on the belief of a sub-human species. Pardon me, but I tend to rant and toss things about my home when I watch people - especially Americans - point a finger at the Germans and say silly things like, "we don't want to make their mistakes."

What?

Have you seen our Constitution? Have you heard about this little thing called "the 3/5ths Compromise?" Have you heard of this innocuous Supreme Court decision called "the Dred Scott Case?"

Wake Up! It was not the Germans who made it a capital crime to teach Africans to read!

The very concept of a superior human race was codified in this country, through the creation of a "white race" and a whole host and amalgamations of "lesser races" - embodied most explicitly (and most evilly?) in the "black race." Upon arrival upon these shores (and usually upon making a religious transformation from the Catholic to a Protestant faith), a Frenchman, an Irishman, an Italian and a German suddenly became a Whiteman and entitled to any and all benefits therein. The great thing about going through this transformation - and why so many volunteered to make this crossing, generation after generation - is that at the exact moment of arising from baptism in the stream of Belief in the Eternal Purity of White, one ascended the social ladder to be forever atop the lesser races. You might not have had any more money (although you might!) and you certainly did not have a nicer house (but it could happen!), but the one fact of which you could be certain is that you were forever superior to that darky down the street, you know - the one on the other side of the tracks?

Leave the German people alone. Look to your own history - our own history. Until you - we - wipe away the stain present at the founding of our own Republic, we will never know the fruits of freedom.

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A More Perfect Approach

Why do we act as though we are not sure what a President Obama will do with the ongoing conflict that is the Israel / Palestine issue?

He has said many times that he does not believe in doing the same thing and expecting different results; he will not merely pick up the template laid out by GWB or past Presidents.
He has said many times that people can disagree without being disagreeable; he will find those on both sides who trust in that principle and he will introduce them to the dialogue.
He has said many times that change happens from the ground up; he will seek to win over the hearts and minds of Israelites and Palestinians and mobilize them into a ground force for change.

It is almost as though - since we are still in the era of GWB - that people have forgotten the campaign we all witnessed. More than that, we participated in the election more passionately than many of us ever had before. We expressed that passion as Obama tapped into a groundswell flow of change that was roiling beneath the surface of American politics.

Now, I know what Obama will do less than almost anyone else, but I do recall the speech he gave at Constitution Hall - "A More Perfect Union". As I watched him deliver that speech from my perch at C-SPAN, I saw a man dance across the tightrope that is race in America. I sat in stunned amazement while he recognized the concerns of the descendants of slavery, while at the same time he acknowledged the fears of imminent violence that he has even heard within his own family.

I am not Barack Obama - this should hardly need stating - so please do not accept my short summary of the speech. Watch it for yourselves here - http://www.barackobama.com/tv/ - and then report on how these words affected you.

Can you not already picture Obama weaving together a speech that speaks to the aspirations of the people of both Israel and Palestine? Can you not imagine that just as Pastor Wright cast aside the olive branch created and offered by his own constituent, that there will be those on both sides - Israel and Palestine - who will reject the call to hew towards a spirit of common decency?

And just as it did not matter then, it will not matter for the people of Israel / Palestine.

For it was never about Wright, just as it was never about Obama. It was about us and our dreams.

So to will it be for the people of Israel and Palestine. Just as we were moved by his words to change our dialogue and expand our horizons, so too will the people of Israel / Palestine be changed.

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Here it is . . . BAM!

Back once again here is the rhyme animal, the un-can-able . . .

(un-cannibal?)

Have I mentioned lately that I love me some Chuck D? It is entirely possible that we would never have elected a Black President, without the presence of one Public Enemy. Oh sure, Bill Clinton may have thought he put an end to consciousness with his dis directed toward Sistah Souljah (who has had quite a career as an author), but the reality is that it was the cross-pollination (poly-nation?) accomplished by the vanguards of hip-hop that introduced white folks to black folks in ways that 400-years of living and working side-by-side had never before accomplished.

There are many ways to analyze the events of 4 November 2008 and surely one of those lenses is through the eyes of Gen X, those 45 and under denizens of the "we want no part in your foolishness" crowd. I choose to believe that this generation is going to leave our mark on this society in ways too numerous to count. While Boomers looked back at their parents and proclaimed them, "The Greatest Generation", we have been tasked with cleaning up from the excesses of the Boomers and recreating America once again.

Obama talked about, A New Dawn of American Leadership: as we march into 2009, lets get to work making that dawn one of the brightest ever.

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21st Century Man / 2045

The two defining musical influences of my life are Prince and Public Enemy; that perhaps gives you a framework - a lens - through which to view my thoughts. Most of APAB has drawn from the Chuck D side of my philosophy, but the more hopeful side - the side that sees the issues we face today but believes we can surpass them on the way to a brighter future, just sent the below series of thoughts to the Obama/Biden campaign. Herewith, my attempt to define the future.

I believe Energy & Transportation must be the core focus area for this upcoming Obama/Biden Administration. A focus here would yield benefits in to many other areas, that it announcing plans on a scale even greater than Eisenhower with his interstate highway program, should form the tent pole of your first 100 Days.

For more than 10,000 years coal has been a source for fuel and it was the motivating force behind the steam engines that powered the start of Industrial Revolution in the latter stages of the 18th Century. That revolution brought us into the era of economic growth and since that time we have been burning carbon - first from coal, then expanding with oil and natural gas - in ways to generate more and additional forms of power. We use carbon to heat our homes, heat our water, to fuel our cars and to generate electricity.

And that worked so well for us for so long, that most people did not even think to look elsewhere.

But we know what burning carbon - whether from coal or oil or natural gas - has done to our environment. Today, we have rivers - too polluted for us to drink; today we have air - that when we breathe gives us asthma; and that is not the half of it. The "easy" seams of coal to mine have already been brought to the surface; to get what is left, we now do "mountain top removal", which dynamites mountains and shoves the resulting rock down into valleys and the rivers below.

Try hunting near one of those.

The point is this: carbon, as a source of energy, has become to costly to our health, our businesses and our society. Oil at $140 a barrel showed us that.

But we know what we need to do. The shortest path to more energy is to more efficiently use the energy we do have. That means smarter appliances that turn themselves off when not in use and less usage of incandescent light bulbs that generate more heat than light, but even this will not be enough.

We need to ignite the wind and solar power era.

We have enough wind off our Atlantic coast, to power heat and electricity for our homes and businesses and even our transportation up and down the population centers of our Eastern Seaboard. We have enough wind across our great plains to power the megalopolises of the Midwest and we have so many sunny days across our Southwest that our entire Western flank can be powered for heat and electricity with capacity to spare. And we can store solar power now, as thermal energy that we use to run steam turbines. And we can do the same with wind, by using excess electricity over current demand to heat molten salts, that again is used to power turbines when the wind slows. We can connect up these "power generation factories" off the Eastern seaboard with underwater DC cabling so that power generated in one place can be shifted to where it is needed. We can use underground DC cabling to connect our wind farms to our Midwestern cities and our solar farms to our Western cities.

And we can use this network of power to build a national power grid, so that we would have fail-over protection we lack today. And we can also use this network of power to connect our nation with high-speed rail links - all powered by clean, renewable electricity. With high-speed rail links connecting our major cities, air travel can be reduced to transcontinental and intercontinental use. This will take a major source of pollution down to almost a background level of emissions. With a network of national, regional and local rail lines, we can move people from where they are to their destination in an environmentally friendly fashion. And we will have the renewable forms of generating electricity that we can use to power the electric and gas-electric hybrid vehicles produced in our revamped factories.

No Nukes.

No Natural Gas / Oil.

No Coal.

These were the solutions of earlier generations and they served a purpose at the time. Our purpose has changed. We need to use forms of energy that are locally sourced, so that the money circulates within our economy and is not sent offshore to countries that seem to love our money, but us - not so much. We have a chance to lead the world in the generation of clean, renewable energies. Students will once again flock to our colleges; our teachings and our technologies will bring light and power to the world. And with those ties will come the search for common dreams, dreams that lead toward brighter tomorrow's and away from the sorrows of the past.

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A new day is dawning

The US needs to turn its attention to the South. It is the states of Brazil and India where some of the fastest economic growth is now occurring and even an African nation like South Africa too. Strengthening our alliances here - perhaps with a sister organization to NATO - would enable us to build the policy bridges we need to cross the challenges that lay before us. Furthermore, we should wipe away the debt of African nations and Caribbean nations like Haiti. It is unconscionable that the US finds itself as the collector of Haiti's international debt. This debt burden was applied by France initially, more than 200-years ago. Collecting this debt is akin to asking the sons and daughters of slaves to pay reparations to the sons and daughters of their former slave masters - for the loss of those slaves as a "business asset", no less! This is a crime. A crime that should no longer be tolerated. If we as a nation are going to stand forswear against paying reparations to the descendants of slaves, we must also stand forthwith against paying reparations to the descendants of former slave owners. Similarly, the debt of African nations was mostly incurred by dictators - empowered by our CIA - and party to our Cold War games against Russia. To ask the sons and daughters of people slain by dictators we installed to pay debt obligations on money stolen by those dictators, is unreasonable in the extreme. It is time for us to own up to our failures and not look for those whom we victimized to cover our tracks.

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Respect Yourself

If you disrespect everybody that you run into - how in the world do you think anybody gonna respect you?

In this piece from Friday (still returning to normal; long trip back from the DNC in Denver), respected (?) journalist provides his analysis on the convention speeches - with his greatest focus on Obama's acceptance speech and the themes it contained. How does his analysis conclude? Well, like so many in the press, he has some advice for our young hero, so that the good ship Change - as navigated by Obama - does not run aground on the rocky shores of reality. The reality in this case being, attempts to portray this son of a single mom, raised by his grandparents will have a hard time convincing people he is not an elitist - given how thin he is and how "difficult it is to imagine Obama - so disciplined and imperially slim - wolfing down a Big Mac".

This qualifies as political analysis nowadays? One perhaps should not be surprised by this piece from this author and from this journal; after all - it was the National Journal who trumpeted to the world the very liberal status of this Senator from Illinois. Somewhat obviating the fact that his voting record - on which this claim was based - was necessarily impacted by his travel schedule for the 18 months of this presidential campaign. Regardless, let me keep my focus on that "difficult to imagine" line from this "analysis"; apparently - if you are black - you can be too rich and too thin. Sure, Obama is not as rich as John McCain - for all of her charms, Michelle Robinson Obama has never been described as an heiress - but his books have made him wealthy (damn those people who have the temerity to be good writers! John McCain knows that Senators are supposed to have their books ghost-written for them). And his tendency towards frequent exercise and healthy living has led him away from a fast food diet - two tendencies that are most certainly not shared by our increasingly overweight and diabetic society. So of course, it is entirely appropriate for an analysis of four days of convention speeches to zero in on the major problem Obama has: "imperially slimness" and an inability to credibly "[wolf] down a Big Mac".

And this man hopes to be taken seriously as a respected journalist.

Now, I know not what is in Ron Brownstein's heart; I only know the man by his actions. And for him to write that Obama cannot seriously be credited with humble beginnings because he is both now successful - usually a good trait in those we seek for our highest office - and disciplined (horror of horrors!) is to enact journalistic malpractice and or malfeasance. One has to wonder what crosses the mind of a man as he commits such words to electronic ink: do they cause his heart to fill with the simple pride of a job well-done? I know that much is made these days of how little esteem the public holds for the press: I say the press must first respect themselves to engender respect from the public.

When you put your name to a piece of analysis that proffers the difficulties a candidate would face in credibly downing a Big Mac, you disrespect yourself and your profession.

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The Greater Fool

This shouldn't bother me; its just a throw-away line mostly ancillary to the larger point the author is attempting to make: 

"Walking through the Olympic Village the other day, here’s what struck me most: the Russian team all looks Russian; the African team all looks African; the Chinese team all looks Chinese; and the American team looks like all of them."

So says New York Times globalism columnist, Tom Friedman.  You see my problem, right?

"The African team all looks African" - just what team is he referring to here?  Teams at the Olympics are by country and my map has not a country called 'Africa'.  It has a very beautiful continent with that name, but try as I might, I cannot see the country to which he refers.

But isn't this was outsiders in general and white people in particular have always done?  It is interesting that the one place they actually concede the invisibility of political borders is when it comes to Africa.  Mention some small Georgian republic and white folks are up and arms about just where South Ossetia belongs, but they day in and day out express a disregard for whether or not Kenya, Ethiopia or Morocco exist as separate nations.

As I said before, this is nothing new - and in the whole scheme of things I should probably ignore this remark.

And yet, I can't.

Because there is a larger context here: what if there was a United Republic of Afrika?  The UAR could be a mighty force amongst the nations of the world and powerful enough to prevent the corporate looting of the natural resources of the first continent.  The UAR could be strong enough to protect its citizens and project a positive image of Afrikan ability across the world.

Perhaps Mr. Friedman has - accidentally, of course - provided us with a road map on how to make the 21st century an Afrikan century.

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Now we are discussing Black Republicans?

Why do black Americans fret about our membership numbers in the Republican Party? They do not fret about it. Did you see McCain's presence at the NAACP and NUL conventions as more than just going through the motions?

The Republicans made an explicit choice after Goldwater lost in 1964, that they would be the party of all interests antithetical to black people. There were black Republicans; Democrats coveted our votes and so they pursued Civil RIghts legislation. We left the Republican Party as for more than a century after the Civil War, their promises to look after our interests were met with sullen statements about how they could not get simple laws passed that required our voices to be heard. Now, you might put the start date with FDR and someone else might put it with Truman, but the fact is by 1960, the Democratic Party was no longer the party of Woodrow Wilson - who hosted the KKK in the White House and that noxious movie, Birth of a Nation - and it was the party of JFK.

There is a reason that man's photo still hangs in the houses of our aging grandparents.

In five years, the coalition JFK and LBJ built did for black Americans what Republicans had failed to do for well more than a century.

(NB: Have you heard about that book - Slavery by Another Name?)

So has the Democratic Party fallen short in areas since the 60s?

Yes.

Has the Democratic Party coasted on the good graces earned by their representatives from the 60s?

Yes.

Perhaps, the problem was not with the Democratic Party. Perhaps - with the candidacy of Barack Obama - we are beginning to see that it was not just the amorphous noun, "the Democratic Party" that was lying stagnate, but it was the black political consciousness - such as it is.

And now that we are experiencing a revival - you want to discuss going back to our former home? The home from which we were thrown and the home in which Rush Limbaugh now lives?

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Can we end this "experience" debate?

First rule for observers of the American political scene is to ignore any media analysis that posits a "horse race" meme. Here are several reasons why:

1. Journalists interpret their commitment to objectivity as requiring them to balance ever positive statement of a candidate with a negative statement. Reporters, anchors and editors fear applying any value metric - that's subjective! - and so they merely present tables of "this helped candidate X; this hurt candidate X.
2. Media outlets need to sell papers and get ratings. Conflict, division, battle - these are the themes that attract attention from viewers and readers. Witness how early polls that showed Obama with a wide lead were immediately discounted as false.
3. Focus on an allegedly tight national poll ignores the fact that we do not elect presidents that way; we elect presidents on a state by state basis. And yet even here - where Obama has held a consistent 20 electoral vote lead by the most conservative estimate since the conclusion of the Democratic primary season - the commentary from journalists tend more toward, "why isn't his lead even larger?" This is the classic case of comparing Obama to a "generic" Democrat and saying that he is not doing as well as that "generic" candidate. This ignores the fact that he was not in a contest against a "generic" Democrat, he was in contest with Clinton, Edwards, Biden, Richardson, et al. Then and now he is performing better than any of those candidates.

But I started all of this with a plea to end this senseless debate on "experience". Journalists create this artificial "horse race" meme and then attempt to fill the space with their analysis. Their faith in how they apply "objectivity" causes them to continually posit pros and cons of each candidate and then they answer their own question as to the state of the "horse race" with opinions as to why candidate X is performing not up to their expectations. They have chosen "experience" as one reason for Obama's reportedly lower performance - again compared to that generic Democrat.

Is it not the very definition of insanity to do what "experience" has taught you to do and still expect a different result? We know what experience told us to do when it comes to energy supplies: go to war to obtain the energy resources needed. That is what WWII was all about, was it not? Did we not cement our alliance with the House of Saud as a result of that war? So when two oilmen enter the White House and develop an energy plan in secret - can we not assume that the plan was developed from their experience?

Experience is changing our environment, this is a confirmed fact that we can all see every day. We do not know what the new environment will be and we do not know if we can live in that environment; why should we risk finding out? Why would we bet the lives of our children and all of their children in some selfish quest to do what our experience tells us to do?

We have a need; we can call that need "change", but what we need is to do something new. We cannot do what we did before - what our experience has taught us to do - as that way is the path to death. The human - the animal - instinct for survival compels us to veer off the well-trod path of experience.

McCain wants you to think that Obama is risky. Nothing could be more risky than electing a man who is so incapable of learning something new - of doing something different - that he has his staff "bring him interesting information off the internet."

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McCain first played the race card

What follows is my latest attempt to check fools - this time on "John in Carolina". This comment has not made the cut there - yet.

Tarheel Hawkeye: let me be more clear; apparently, I was too diffuse earlier.

Obama has not questioned McCain's status as an American.


McCain has - implicitly - questioned Obama's status as an American ("The American President the American people have been waiting for" - and he did so with a dangling participle)

McCain attacked Obama's status as an American through Obama's African - black - father.

McCain was the first to play the race card in this presidential contest and he did so in the most incorrigible way possible: by insinuating that by the "black blood" Obama carries directly, he cannot be the American President the American people have been awaiting.

This statement was a direct descendant of the thinking that led to the decision in the Dred Scott case of 1854, wherein the Supreme Court of this land stated that no black man had any rights which need be respected by law. The drafters of the Constitution denied citizenship - American-ness - to the African residents of this country; the Supreme Court reinforced that otherness in Dred Scott and nameless other decisions as well. John McCain reincarnated that philosophy with his initial campaign ad of the general election.

I know you have named this blog "John in Carolina", but I hope and pray that it is not beholden to the same old tired rhetoric that claims blacks are not citizens and can never be citizens.

A war was fought over that idea.

Many people died over that question.

Must we repeat that war in the 21st century?

McCain chose to play the race card, because he believes - cynically - that it is his best hope for bypassing the failures of the administration he seeks to succeed.

His act was beneath him.

Defense of that act is beneath you and I alike.

PS - I brought up Helms and Gantt simply for the connection to Carolina and it seemed a nice corollary to the point that bringing up race has long been a component of Republican electoral strategy. A quick read through comments that call Obama an "affirmative action candidate" - firms up that tie-in as affirmative action was the culprit in that Helms ad against Gantt then too.

Black people are not now and have never been the enemy of this country. We have fought for the American ideal in every war this nation has ever waged - even before the fruits of freedom were secured for us and our kin. Anyone who attempts to drive a wedge between Americans of "different" racial backgrounds is seeking to build up their own power base and not to build up our nation.

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Tom Clancy Novel's Are GR8

Delusional. No other word can describe Joe's thesis that the NY Times "outed" Deuce Martinez because, "he not on their side, they don't like what he is doing".

Martinez, gets information from terrorists by talking to them - not by torturing them. Ipso facto, he is not on Joe's side; Joe has been the Morning Joe voice in favor of terror.

One can only conclude that Joe has become delusional on this point, as he seeks an avenue through which to hammer the NY Times over the revelation of a CIA-agent's identity.

But he has a problem here too: there is no motive in the NY Times revelation - other than gettng the best story (and we all know that without the name, opponents of the paper would have cried 'foul' and insisted it was fabricated). Whereas the Plame revelation by the President, clearly had the intent to discredit a critic of his plan to attack Iraq (and isn't it amazing how a 'slam dunk' policy could need such scurrilous defending; almost leads one to the conclusion tha the President didn't believe his policy was so strong).

Furthermore, outing Plame may not have endangered her life, but as any Tom Clancy novel tells us, the CIA often has assets in front companies, whose role it is to recruit covert operatives in foreign lands - in the hopes that they will be better able to blend in with foreign cultures than the average American.

How many of those recruits who were seen with that pretty, blond American woman (nah - who could have remembered her?) found themselves scrambling through streets all around the world in a desperate run out of town and country?

Oh well, its not like we need CIA assets.

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Card Sharks

Senator,  

Please convince your colleagues that this proposal to lift the ban on offshore oil and gas exploration is akin to a shell game; no matter how desperate one is for the prize being offered, one must always remember the first rule of a shell game: the mark doesn't win.  

Oil prices have risen to near $150 a barrel; gasoline prices have risen to near $5 a gallon. No matter how enticing the proposals being made - regardless of the hundreds of billions of potential barrels of oil that are being bandied about - they cannot reduce oil prices and/or gasoline prices one whit.  

What has happened to the Republican Party? Formerly the party of the "rational actor" theory of economics (you remember: the Chicago School and Milton Friedman), they have now become the home for a quasi-behavioral economics and they espouse pop-psychology theories of energy that sound more at home in an infomercial.  

Sad.  

Our economy - and the world economy - is built on growth. Without growth, all of our structures will not merely crumble, they will implode in spectacular fashion. For most of the 20th century, that growth was a US-led growth, as Europe spent several decades either at war, preparing for war or recovering from war; it was only after the fall of Communism and the Berlin Wall that Europe could turn their attention to growth and by then their population was aging. The last decade of the 20th century saw the rise of China and India as economic nations, as they embraced growth in as fierce a fashion as did the early stage capitalists of our own post Civil War Reconstruction. But their populations were/are larger than Europe and they are growing as rapidly as their economies. So, while once the US had the population and the economy to use all of our oil and much of the Arabian oil supplies too, now we have competitor economies and populations for those same oil resources. Were barrels of oil akin to those of Saudi Arabia found off our shores, instead of supporting the economic engines of 300 million people, they would be tossed onto the world market for the 3 billion people of the developed and developing worlds (while we carry along another 3 billion people just as hungry but just out of reach of the bounties of our tables). The economics of supply and demand tell us that not only is there not enough oil to lower the price on a per barrel basis, they also tell us that the longer we wait to transition to a post oil economy the higher the prices will be (and the resultantly higher hardships).  

The only way not to lose a game of Three-Card Monte is not to play a game of Three Card Monte; tell your friends.

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The Cartoon

You know, I was upset when I first saw this cover. Wait.

First I laughed. And then I thought about those who believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim and that Michelle Obama is a Black Nationalist (which I am, there is nothing anti-American about that) and that neither of them respects the American flag and I became upset at the New Yorker.

What right did they have to portray a candidate for national office in such light and what other candidate had they so subjected to such satire?

I jotted down some phrases to describe my feelings and I sent them to the Editors.

And then I sat back and watch a full day's coverage of people denouncing this cover on cable news. And during that long day's worth if inanities, a new day began to dawn and the beauty of this cover was revealed unto me. The conversion point - the point at which I not only felt this was a good cover but that I was glad it was published - was when I saw John McCain going before a television camera and recite the Obama campaign talking points: "this cartoon is offensive and tasteless".

So what was it about seeing McCain's grim intonation of Obama's words (they're just words, after all; what can they do?) that changed my viewpoint?

McCain's latest biography add - created by Karl Rove alum Steve Schmitt - incorporates much of the same messages of this cartoon in the classic, Republican tradition of saying things without directly saying things.

How appropriate it is that we are just ten days into the post Jesse Helms-era, as he - perhaps more than any other Dixiecrat - brought coded messages of racism into our political advertisements and our national media. It was Jesse Helms who used a simple shot of a white man's hands opening and then crumpling a letter to send a message against affirmative action directly and at the same time, reaching back to the origins of the KKK and sending a coded message about the encroachment of that most dangerous "other" into land where he was not welcome.

So what messages does McCain send in his latest biography add?

"It was 1968, the Summer of Love . . . " - intones the baritone, male voice, over images of hippies (Barack Obama is just like those dirty hippies - and you know they we not patriotic)

"But it was another form of love shown by one young POW . . . " - here is that narrator again, now introducing our hero (John McCain is "The American President the American People have been waiting for", as another ad informed us)

I will not brainwash you with the rest of the claptrap contained in this ad from McCain/Rove/Bush, suffice it to say that it indirectly impugns Obama's patriotism (just like the burning flag in the cartoon) ties Obama to the old battles of the Sixties (just like the Black Panther gear on Michelle in the cartoon) and I am sure it has a reference to God and McCain's faith - which would close the loop on the "he's a secret Muslim" trifecta.

All of the tropes of the McCain campaign's latest ad are satirized in the cover cartoon of this week's New Yorker. And here was McCain saying all of it was "offensive and tasteless".

Ladies and Gentlemen: spread the word far and wide that we - the American people - have before us a candidate who shall not fall down before the slimy tactics embraced by the Republican Party in their relentless quest for power and ill-gotten gain. They say it is always darkest before the dawn, but I think I just saw the sun beginning to peak over the horizon.

I think I will go outside and rejoice in this new day.

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One People

This may seem like a strange article to link to for the extended riff below, but this is the vibe I felt after reading this article on Moment.

This article struck me as I see Jews as an excellent model for which to achieve Afrikan Unity - just as the Americans are and the Europeans are and the Indians are and the Chinese are and the Arabs are too. When you are trying to do what others have done - why not model your approach on what they did?

Creating an Afrikan Unity (more than just a political Afrikan Union) does not mean that all peoples of Afrikan descent will hold the same opinion on any one set of issues. Just as that is not a pre-requisite for any of the other "unities" that exist across the societies of the globe. Instead, what an Afrikan Unity means is that we will see ourselves as members of a collective body of people. And this collective will coalesce together to defend itself against those who are perceived to be outsiders.

How many languages are spoken across India? And how many still remember the partition with Pakistan and Bangladesh? And yet there are enough members of this group we call "Indians" who have a common definition of what that means, such that they can all come together and celebrate national achievements like becoming a nuclear nation. And the same is with China: many hundreds of languages are spoken across the mainland of China and yet they can all come together and celebrate events like the Olymipics and mourn events like this last earthquake.

The same goes for Jews:whether Reform or Conservative or Orthodox or convert - they all agree on the right for the state of Israel to exist. And even for those who disagree with that point or believe that the Palestinians have been abused, they still agree that there exists such a people known as Jews.

So I believe that Afrikans should be more like Jews and more like Indians and more like Europeans and more like Americans too. Afrikans need to see ourselves as One People; Afrikans need to realize that their is so much more we can achieve with the larger scale that comes with dropping national borders and even more that can be gained by realizing that tribal differences are merely branches of the same family as opposed to separate families that hold grudges against one another. Today, the peoples of Afrika are divided against each other and we have known for decades what happens to a house divided.

Once we realize that Afrikans are members of one family - One People - we will be able to provide the assistance to one another that is within us today, but that we are blinded from seeing by the filters of nation and "tribe". Removing these blinders will enable the Afrikan People to throw away the yoke of the IMF, the World Bank and the welfare state. We need this sort of "assistance" from those who would control us and our resources not.

One People. One Family. Many Tribes. That is our source of strength and it should never be used to divide us and set us one against another.

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Okay, here is my POV on FISA

To all of those hyperventilating over the new Obama position on FISA I say, "take a deep breath, my brother".

Hold it.

Hold it.

Now exhale, slowly.

Let me make a proposition: we all care so deeply about fighting against telecom immunity as it seemed like that was our last chance to get some justice in what is perhaps the biggest crime in our nation's history. And that is not an overstatement: when the one individual who has been granted executive authority in our nation and is tasked with upholding and defending our Constitution willfully chooses to abridge said Constitution well, there can be no greater crime.

I am with you.

But seriously, isn't a civil suit against AT&T rather weak compared to a criminal prosecution? That's like arresting the hooker and letting the pimp walk (oh, wait - that is what we do). That's like arresting the drug user and letting the dealer walk (oh, wait - that is what we do). Forget metaphors, what I mean to say is: don't you really want to see these perps shackled and frog-marched to the penitentiary?

I do, but it could be just me.

In the end though, I still have hope. I have hope that a Constitutional Law Professor (and no, not that John Yoo mofo; how in the H-E-double hockey-sticks does Stanford University justify placing that nincompoop on their staff? In a teaching position, no less!) will at a minimum constitute a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to give these citizens (making a huge assumption on my part that they still see themselves as citizens and not as members of some sort of Star Chamber empaneled to rule over the rest of us) one last chance to come clean, confess their actions and come back to the fold. I am not asking them to be Democrats or liberals; I am asking them to commit themselves to the Constitution and to renounce attempts to "save" the Constitution by subverting it.

Should they reject an offer of this sort (which I see as a benign gesture of national healing), then I would expect President Obama to immediately sign the treaty for the International Criminal Court and instruct ever other signatory to that treaty to issue a warrant for the arrest of GWB et al, should they ever leave US territory.

Perhaps the humiliation of being internally exiled as though they were members of a banana republic dictatorship will inspire them to come in from the cold.

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R. Kelly and what it means to be a man / Juneteenth 2008 / 'Bout Damn Time

Statement of Black Men Against the Exploitation of Black Women

Six years have gone by since we first heard the allegations that R. Kelly had filmed himself having sex with an underage girl. During that time we have seen the videotape being hawked on street corners in Black communities, as if the dehumanization of one of our own was not at stake. We have seen entertainers rally around him and watched his career reach new heights despite the grave possibility that he had molested and urinated on a 13-year old girl. We saw African Americans purchase millions of his records despite the long history of such charges swirling around the singer. Worst of all, we have witnessed the sad vision of Black people cheering his acquittal with a fervor usually reserved for community heroes and shaken our heads at the stunning lack of outrage over the verdict in the broader Black community.

Over these years, justice has been delayed and it has been denied. Perhaps a jury can accept R. Kelly's absurd defense and find "reasonable doubt" despite the fact that the film was shot in his home and featured a man who was identical to him. Perhaps they doubted that the young woman in the courtroom was, in fact, the same person featured in the ten year old video. But there is no doubt about this: some young Black woman was filmed being degraded and exploited by a much older Black man, some daughter of our community was left unprotected, and somewhere another Black woman is being molested, abused or raped and our callous handling of this case will make it that much more difficult for her to come forward and be believed. And each of us is responsible for it.

We have proudly seen the community take to the streets in defense of Black men who have been the victims of police violence or racist attacks, but that righteous outrage only highlights the silence surrounding this verdict.

We believe that our judgment has been clouded by celebrity-worship; we believe that we are a community in crisis and that our addiction to sexism has reached such an extreme that many of us cannot even recognize child molestation when we see it. 
We recognize the absolute necessity for Black men to speak in a single, unified voice and state something that should be absolutely obvious: that the women of our community are full human beings, that we cannot and will not tolerate the poisonous hatred of women that has already damaged our families, relationships and culture.

We believe that our daughters are precious and they deserve our protection. We believe that Black men must take responsibility for our contributions to this terrible state of affairs and make an effort to change our lives and our communities.

This is about more than R. Kelly's claims to innocence. It is about our survival as a community. Until we believe that our daughters, sisters, mothers, wives and friends are worthy of justice, until we believe that rape, domestic violence and the casual sexism that permeates our culture are absolutely unacceptable, until we recognize that the first priority of any community is the protection of its young, we will remain in this tragic dead-end.

We ask that you:

o    Sign your name if you are a Black male who supports this statement:

     

http://www.petitiononline.com/rkelly/petition.html

o    Forward this statement to your entire network and ask other Black males to sign as well

o    Make a personal pledge to never support R. Kelly again in any form or fashion, unless he publicly apologizes for his behavior and gets help for his long-standing sexual conduct, in his private life and in his music

o    Make a commitment in your own life to never to hit, beat, molest, rape, or exploit Black females in any way   and, if you have, to take ownership for your behavior, seek emotional and spiritual help, and, over time, become a voice against all forms of Black female exploitation

o    Challenge other Black males, no matter their age, class or educational background, or status in life, if they engage in behavior and language that is exploitative and or disrespectful to Black females in any way. If you say nothing, you become just as guilty.

o    Learn to listen to the voices, concerns, needs, criticisms, and challenges of Black females, because they are our equals, and because in listening we will learn a new and different kind of Black manhood

We support the work of scholars, activists and organizations that are helping to redefine Black manhood in healthy ways. Additional resources are listed below.

Books:
Who's Gonna Take the Weight, Kevin Powell
New Black Man, Mark Anthony Neal
Deals with the Devil and Other Reasons to Riot, Pearl Cleage
Traps: African American Men on Gender and Sexuality, Rudolph Byrd and Beverly Guy-Sheftall

Films:
I Am A Man: Black Masculinity in America, by Byron Hurt
Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes, by Byron Hurt
NO! The Rape Documentary, by Aishah Simmons

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Democracy Ain't Easy

It may just be me, but when I hear people say - "Americans are not happy with the progress in Iraq, but we still want to win" - I have to resist the urge to shout: "You are confusing the question!"

Of course Americans want to win, winning is imprinted onto our DNA.  It is part of who we are, it is what we mean when we say we strive for "a more perfect union".  What Americans need to know is not whether we want to win or not - that goes without saying.  What Americans need to know is how can we win in Iraq?  Can we win with the same strategy George W. Bush was put in place - instead under the guidance of John McCain - or do we need a new strategy altogether?  Do we need something that places us on a completely different vector to reach our stated goal?

Aside: this debate is not about how one side wants to win and the other side wants to lose; no - this debate is about how one side believes we can win by doing what we have been doing and how our side believes that to win we need to "think outside the box."

Pardon my descent into consultant-ese; sometimes these cliches are useful.

By attempting to create a democratic state in the heart of the Muslim world, this administration has embarked upon the grandest of nation-building efforts the world has ever known and at the same time they have professed to be able to do so without the involvement, counsel or assistance of respected subject-matter experts.  Interesting.

This approach - experts, who needs 'em - has never been the recipe for success on any of the countless consulting engagements on which I have either worked or studied and the results to-date confirm the wrongheadedness of this strategy (or lack thereof).  Experts are called experts for a reason and it is not because they always know what works, but because they always know what are the proper indicators of success.  They know what to look for to see if your actions are proceeding in your desired direction.  This is helpful so that you do not wander so far off course and waste so many millions of dollars, before someone shouts: "Stop!"

It seems like it would be so easy to find experts on creating democratic nations - especially in a country that has its history as being the first democratic republic in the modern world.  We should be able to receive an answer just by shouting to the heavens: "what worked for us?"

First, we also needed the assistance of a major power - the French - to defeat those who saw our Declaration of Independence as the bleating of a minor ewe.  So if we accept the framework that claims the citizens of Iraq longed to be free of the oppressive regime of Saddam Hussein, then we know from jump that the catalyst for freedom is indeed present.

Second, how did the French help us in our fight and how can we model our actions on theirs?  The French augmented our ground forces; they had a battle-tested army with a professional officers core.  We had a ragtag bunch of volunteers with heart and little else.  Additionally, the French had a rather useful Navy - which was useful as our embryonic republic had not one.  Our modern Air Force is providing much the same type of service for both our ground troops as well as those of the incipient Iraqi Army.

Finally - and this is perhaps most important - once the British were defeated, the French withdrew.  They did not establish enduring or permanent or 'choose-the-adjective-which-best-suits-your-mood' bases amidst our hinterlands.  Of course there were many concerns on the potential for trouble to befall our fledgeling confederation (please open your texts to War, French and Indian).  It was well understood by all of the actors on the world stage that this new nation was going to face troubles both large and small and it was by no means certain that we would survive and prosper.  France still laid claim to vast swaths of territories to our West and Northwest; deadly skirmishes were still being waged with indigent Amerindian populations; and the Spanish Empire was just to our South as well as occupying territory sweeping so far across our western flank as to reach the Pacific Ocean.  And yet, with all of the perils in which they were ensconced, the founders of our republic knew that they must prevail or perish of their own accord.

So must this new nation of Iraq.

None of us know what the future holds in store for either us or them; they may survive as a republic, evolve into an independent confederation of states, return to the tyranny of a dictatorship or be swallowed up in parts by their neighbors.  Whatever their future calls for, only the people of Iraq can call it into being.

That is what democracy means.  

This is the essence of self-determination.

If we truly believe in the power of free peoples and free states to determine their own path, then we must leave the Iraqi people to seek theirs.

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Is there a "Dear Abby" for delusional pols?

I am in need of counseling. Well, really it is for a close friend of mine, a pundit.

All pundits actually.

Yesterday, McCain goes on the Today show and says that having an estimate on when our troops will return from Iraq is not important.

Wow, methinks.

And yet my friend - pundit - tells me that Americans will always trust McCain on "national security" issues more than they will Obama, because he has "a lifetime of service" and that his family has "four generations of military service", which means that no matter the size of the dichotomy between McCain's words and the wishes of the American public - that American public will still choose McCain over Obama.

Now - I just picked up my copy of "Why We're Liberals" yesterday, so I have not made it through all of the conclusions, but I do have this question:

How can the American public be both liberal in nature and at the same time seemingly enthralled to a Republican Party divorced from the reality of the ramifications of the "authorization to use military force" in Iraq (oh - and is an AUMF the same as a declaration of war and if so how and why is it different and if not is it even legal?)

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