Sunday Scan

No Fireworks In Gualala

A couple weeks back, I wrote about a particularly worrisome matter of the Cal. Coastal Commission issuing a cease and desist order against a 4th of July fireworks show planned in the No. Cal town of Gualala. It is, I think, the foothold the Coastal Commission has been seeking in a larger effort to stop these patriotic displays all along the California Coast.

How crazy is that? This crazy: One of the Gualala Gaeans said in a comment on the post that the damage of a 15 minute fireworks show would be permanent and unmitigatable. My gosh, if the earth were really that fragile, if would have dissolved into dust long ago.

The Gualala Patriots Day Committee (the good guys) appealed the decision and lost, so there will be no fireworks show this year. But the fight goes on; the judge merely failed to overturn the cease and desist; he did not rule on the underlaying matter. Says the Pacific Legal Foundation, which is representing the Patriots Day group:

“The legal fight goes on against this abuse of power by the California Coastal Commission. Although the fireworks won’t happen this year, our lawsuit goes forward. We’ll be litigating to bring the fireworks back in future years – and to have the courts instruct the Coastal Commission on the proper limits of its power.”

For a PLF summary on the case, click here.

The Inevitable In Zimbabwe

The despotic leaders of the multitude of thug-ocracies of the world can breathe a sigh of relief -- the popular uprising against their role model hero, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, has been crushed.

This was a close one, with Morgan Tsvangirai of the Movement for Democratic Change actually winning a popular election. But Mugabe froze the election results and started a campaign of intimidation ... which may be too faint a word. Remember what Mugabe's supporters did to the wife of Patson Chipiro, a MDC regional leader?

They grabbed Mrs Chipiro and chopped off one of her hands and both her feet. Then they threw her into her hut, locked the door and threw a petrol bomb through the window. (BBC)

Preceding the MDC announcement it was not going to participate in the new election was this, also from BBC:

On Sunday, the MDC was due to stage a rally in Harare - the highlight of the campaign.

But supporters of Mr Mugabe's Zanu-PF occupied the stadium venue and roads leading up to it.

Witnesses reported seeing hundreds of youths around the venue wielding sticks, some chanting slogans, and others circling the stadium crammed onto the backs of trucks.

Some set upon opposition activists, leaving a number badly injured, the MDC said.

It said African election monitors were also chased away from the rally site.

Sounds like exactly the sort of election Jimmy Carter would deem to be fair.

Another Reason To Vote For McCain

Buried deep in a WaPo story on hate groups and rising racism that's very short on stats and figures and verrrry loooong on opinion, we find this:

"One person put it this way: Obama for president paves the way for David Duke as president," said Duke, who ran for president in 1988, received less than 1 percent of the vote and has since spent much of his time in Europe. "This is finally going to make whites begin to realize it's a necessity to stick up for their own heritage, and that's going to make them turn to people like me. We're the next logical step."

Keep Duke in Europe! Vote McCain!

Alternative Energy Dreamin'

There's another horse in the alternative energy race ... but this one seems unlikely to generate even one horsepower. But what the heck! Don't stop believin', hold on to that feelin':

Scientists from Europe’s Atomic Energy Commission, in Grenoble, France, have shown that vibrations from raindrops landing on a certain type of plastic can generate enough energy to operate some low-power wireless sensors, like battery-powered outdoor thermometers.

Leonardo diCaprio, take note!

Plenty Magazine offers an "In Depth" feature on the new technology, gushing about how it could be used to power climate sensing devices that now need batteries, so that we get a continuous flow of data to feed into the electricity sucking beasts we call computers.

Of course, rain drop power comes with that bane of all alternative energy: a dearth of economic viability. It takes Penty to the last paragraph to mention this tidbit: The material used to generate raindrop power costs $460 for 1 kilogram, and given the milliwatts produced, a bunch of kilograms will be required. Batteries, on the other hand, cost a buck.

Undaunted, the article ends:

Who knows, April showers may soon bring power.

Of course, not enough power to offset the solar power that's not being generated due to the rain.

Very nice art: Josh Cochran

Extreme Climate Change

NOAA (named, perhaps, for that ark chap, since the oceans are going to flood us all) has released its newest climate change report, Weather and Climate Extremes in a Changing Climate. The resulting bad reporting can perhaps be best summarized by two quick cuts.

First, the pocket liner set got their first impression of the report from this Science Digest intro:

Among the major findings reported in this assessment are that droughts, heavy downpours, excessive heat, and intense hurricanes are likely to become more commonplace as humans continue to increase the atmospheric concentrations of heat-trapping greenhouse gases.

While the mainstream tuned into this Digg summary ...

New report highlights the likely changes in extreme weather and climate conditions under ongoing climate change.

... which in turn generated comments like:

Report: Turning on lamp will light up room.
Report: Pissing into wind will get you wet.
Report: Falling linked to failure to stand upright.

How many of these stories do we need to read before people start seeing this as completely obvious?!

Well, of course, it's just not that obvious. ICECAP gives us this summary by Roger Pielke Jr., who just happens to believe in anthropogenic global warming:

The report contains several remarkable conclusions, that somehow did not seem to make it into the official press release. They include: over the long-term U.S. hurricane landfalls have been declining, nationwide there have been no long-term increases in drought, despite increases in some measures of precipitation, there have not been corresponding increases in peak streamflows, there have been no observed changes in the occurrence of tornadoes or thunderstorms, there have been no long-term increases in strong East Coast winter storms (ECWS), called Nor’easters, there are no long-term trends in either heat waves or cold spells, though there are trends within shorter time periods in the overall record.

Pshaw. What's the fun in reporting boring ol' stuff like that?

Seismic Mitigation As Art

This amazing piece of industrial art is actually the tuned mass damper at the top of Taipei 101, for now the planet's tallest completed skyscraper.

The 728-ton steel ball is so massive it couldn't be lifted into location; rather, it had to be assembled in a cavern carved out of four stories at the top of the tower. Why, you might well ask, put a 728-ton ball at the top of the building?

The simple answer is that Taipei 101 stands just 800 feet from an earthquake fault. More specific: The ball swings counter to motion caused by wind or earth movement, dampening sway.

Deputy Dog, an architecture blog, has a short story on the mass damper, but what really attracts is the video that was shot on May 12, when shocks from China's massive earthquake hit the tower. Tourists in the building actually flocked up to the viewing area for the damper to see it in action.



Don't you just love human ingenuity?

Can You Say "Semper Cheese?"


If you don't understand this, says Blackfive, you've never met a Marine.

Circumscribing The Debate

The NYT has one heck of a hand-wringer this a.m., searching its navel and the navel of other MSM news purveyors for any speck of sexism in their coverage of Hillary Clinton's campaign.

Leading the charge is Katie Couric. Here's the clip:


And what the NYT had to say about it, ignoring her statement that if similar "iron my shirt" issues were tossed Obama's way, it would have been front-page news:

Taking aim from the inside, though, was Ms. Couric, who herself has faced harsh criticism as the first woman to be the solo anchor of an evening news broadcast. Ms. Couric posted a video on the CBS Web site on Wednesday about the coverage of Mrs. Clinton.

“Like her or not, one of the great lessons of that campaign is the continued — and accepted — role of sexism in American life, particularly in the media,” Ms. Couric said.

She went on to lament the silence of those who did not speak up against it.

Odd that the NYT didn't characterize the Couric clip a bit more accurately and dig into it some -- like her reference to a free market entrepreneur's creation of a Hillary nutcracker as somehow being indicative of sexist bias in MSM coverage. Instead, they dredged up these examples of horrific sexism directed at Mrs. Clinton:

• Chris Matthews called her a she-devil.
  
  
• MSNBC panelist Mike Barnicle said Clinton was “looking like everyone’s first wife standing outside a probate court.”
  
  
• Also on MSNBC, Carson Tucker said, "When she comes on television, I involuntarily cross my legs.”
  
  
• The NYT was guilty of writing about Hil's "cackle."
  
  
• Ken Rudin of NPR apologized after the fact for comparing Hil to Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction: “She’s going to keep coming back, and they’re not going to stop her."

Awful, awful stuff. Note that all of it came from decidedly left-tilting outlets. Let's take them one by one.

• Perhaps if Matthews had just called her a devil, he would have escaped criticism. You know, like "actresses" are just "actors" today.
  
  
• Barnicle's comment is hardly original; there's polling data that shows Hillary reminds many men of their first wife. Polling data are there to be reported. Ignoring them because it dealt with a candidate's sex would be just as sexist, would it not?
  
  
• Tucker's comment about crossing legs is in accord with Hil's campaign strategy of not running as a woman ... which leaves the alternative of running as a man. And any woman that behaves like a man understandably makes men nervous.
  
  
• And there's been plenty of coverage of Obama's ears and McCain's age, so please, no harpie screeches about Hil's cackle. Oops.
  
  
• Rudin, it turns out, was right. She still has not conceded defeat or left the race.
  

Now, all this bitching and endless nagging about sexism (heh) is all set-up, of course. The real game is not whether Hillary was treated with sexist disregard, but rather, it is a game of using allegations of sexism against Hillary to prime the media to be very, very careful in any criticism of Obama. After all, if sexism is a sin in America, racism is a mortal sin.

You can see Howard Dean hard at work priming this message in his comments about the coverage of Hillary:

“The media took a very sexist approach to Senator Clinton’s campaign,” Mr. Dean said in a recent interview.

“It’s pretty appalling,” he said, adding that the issue resonates because Mrs. Clinton “got treated the way a lot of women got treated their whole lives.”

Mr. Dean and others are now calling for a “national discussion” of sexism.

Obama, in dealing with the Wright blow-up, called for a "national discussion" of racism; Dean did not borrow the term by accident. And if the media's treatment of Hillary is appalling and resonates because it reflects how a lot of women are treated, then any criticism at all of Obama will remind all blacks -- men and women -- of negative ways they've been treated and be even more appalling.

In other words, it's now officially hands off Obama time. This won't make much difference to the average American, as the media has kept its hands pretty well off Obama all along. It will make a profound difference to GOP candidates, speechwriters and campaign chiefs, and to reporters, editorial cartoonists and editorial writers. The former know they are being watched and offenses will be dealt with very, very harshly by the latter.

Missing from this discussion is the Dems' recent sump-diving into ageism with McCain. To twist beyond recognition his comments about the strategic benefits of having an ongoing military presence in Iraq into an attack on McCain's capabilities because he is old must remind many American men and women in their 70s and older of the ways they are discriminated against and belittled ... but where are the calls for a national dialog on that?

Sunday Scan

Triple Crown

Jockey Kent Desormeaux summed up yesterday's Belmont Stakes pretty well, saying of Triple Crown contender Big Brown, "I had no horse." Big Brown finished a distant, distant last, and another year goes by without a Triple Crown winner.

I didn't even watch the race because I've soured on all forms of gambling, but it reminded me of 1977 and Triple Crown winner Seattle Slew, who I saw very up-close at the Kentucky Derby.

The not so incredible ex-wife was a photographer at the Louisville Courier Journal and I was her Derby photo assistant. She buried an auto-drive Nikon so the lens was at dirt level under the rail about 10 yards past the finish line. She focused it on the finish line, and handed me a cable remote.

"Push it when they reach the last pole before the finish and hold it down until the last horse is past you," she said. And that's what I did.

As the pack tore past me, I heard the jockeys yelling and the leather creaking and the whips slapping, I felt a hot rush of air, and was spattered with horse sweat. It was one of the most intense experiences of my life. After they blew past, I let the shutter button go and remembered to start breathing again.

In the process, I took an image of Seattle Slew crossing the finish line, all four feet in the air. It became somewhat famous; in fact, when a commemorative plate company selected one image of Seattle Slew for a series of plates on Triple Crown winners, they selected my Derby picture. Here it is:

I can't claim it as mine; it's credited to my ex-wife. But it's a heck of a lot better than the crummy one of the Belmont at the top of the post, isn't it?

Those Racist Clintons

"Sometimes your opponent just runs a good campaign," lamented Hillary's campaign chief Mark Penn in an NYT op/ed today.

I thought you paid geniuses like Penn millions of dollars, as Hillary did, so that your candidate would run a better campaign.

Penn raises many excuses for Hillary's failure, boiling it down mostly to money -- another responsibility of the campaign chief -- but the most interesting paragraph in the piece is this one:

The Clintons have spent their lives fighting as much as any leaders in their generation for greater equality across racial and gender lines. I believe nothing they said was ever intended to divide the country by race. Any suggestion to the contrary was perhaps the greatest injustice done to them in this campaign.

All in all, I have to agree with him, even though I can't stand it, and even with the famous Bill-ism about the only reason why Obama is running a fairy-tale campaign is because he's black, and the famously misinterpreted Hil-ism about Bobby Kennedy's assassination.

Back in February, I wrote a post titled In A PC Nation, How Will The GOP Run? that raised the issue of hyper-sensitivity on race issues:

Even if there were a line fine enough to appease the keepers of political correctness in the black, feminist and media communities, and there's not, the GOP will be charged with crossing it. There is no way the GOP can get to November without being called every "ist" in the book.

Still true, more true, today. As it turns out, even the Clintons couldn't pass this test in the face of the Obamaniacs who are found in high positions in the media and the DNC. The challenge for that old white guy with his blond cutie-pie of a wife has not gotten any easier.

China, The Nation That Keeps On Giving

Toys with lead paint, tainted dog food, and of course who can forget bird flu? China is such a generous nation! So giving! And since bird flu was such a hit last time around, it's now time for bird flu redux:

HONG KONG (WSJ) -- Hong Kong authorities slaughtered 2,700 birds and banned live poultry imports from mainland China for up to 21 days, after a routine inspection Saturday found chickens in one of the city's poultry markets infected with the dangerous H5N1 bird-flu virus.

While there's little immediate threat to humans from the infected birds, the discovery revives fears that the disease could still be a problem with poultry flocks in southern China -- although it isn't yet clear whether the infected birds came from local or mainland Chinese farms."

And what does the generous, giving People's Republic have to say about all this? Ever the humble gift-giver, they deferred:

An official with the General Administration of Quality, Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine said the agency needed to consider questions about the matter before responding.

Can you say "chicken?"

Those Pesky Thermometers

Yesterday I wrote about NASA cooking the books on its US temperature data, a story Warmie cultists would no doubt reject as tales of denial by Warmie heretics. Well, if they had pipes and if they burned those little bowls of carbon-based plant material, I'd tell them to put this in their pipes and smoke it:

A perfect illustration is found when comparing the USHCN (U.S. Historical Climatology Network) temperature records from Central Park in New York City to those taken a mere 55 miles away at West Point. Readings in Central Park have been regularly measured since 1835 when the city's population had just surpassed 200,000. Today, surrounded by a metropolis of eight million people filled with some of the world's tallest buildings, a massive underground subway system, an extensive sewer system, power generation facilities, and millions of cars, buses, and taxis, the Central Park temperatures have been greatly altered by urbanization. And, as one might expect, the Central Park historical temperature plot illustrates an incredible warming increase of nearly 4øF.

The West Point readings have also been meticulously maintained since 1835, but the environment surrounding the thermometer shelter has experienced significantly less manmade interference then the one in Central Park. The West Point readings illustrate a significantly lower warming increase of only about 0.6øF over the same 170-year period. This is remarkable given that the year 1835 is considered to be the last gasp of the Little Ice Age -- a significant period of global cooling that stretched back several hundred years.

Cries of out of control global warming become more dubious when one looks at the hottest decade in modern history, the 1930s. The summer of 1930 marked the beginning of the longest drought of the 20th Century. From June 1 to August 3, Washington, D.C. experienced twenty-one days of high temperatures of at least 100ø. During that record-shattering heat wave, there were maximum temperatures set on nine different days that remain unbroken more than three-quarters-of-a-century later. (emphasis added; source)

How long can the global warming myth stand up to the temperature facts? It's an unanswerable question because global warming is the science of hysterics and hypnotism, and is therefore outside the realm of rational deduction.

hat-tip: Greenie Watch

Forever Reuters

No one can slip subjectivity into journalistic objectivity like Reuters. Here they are again, reporting on the meeting of G8 energy chiefs in Japan:

Japan, the United States, China, India and South Korea -- who together guzzle nearly half the world's oil -- said that they had agreed on the need for greater transparency in energy markets and more investment by consumers and producers both, while stopping short of calling on OPEC to pump more crude today. (source)

"Guzzle" is defined as "to drink especially liquor greedily, continually, or habitually." The U.S. and Japan should not be included with the guzzlers; we are more and more merely consumers. Greed simply isn't a part of our oil consumption; efficient output is. We consume ever more efficiently, investing billions in ways to make our automotive fleet, our homes and our industrial operations more efficient.

An objective Reuters (oxymoron) would have used the word consume. If it wants to look for oil-guzzling whipping boys, it should have stopped the list at China and Inda, which have put economic growth far ahead of environmental protection, and have put the acquisition of oil ahead of the efficient consumption of oil. In fact, both countries still subsidize the price of fuel to their populations, and refused reasoned calls to stop the practice in the name of greater fuel conservation.

Excitable Electrons

Confession time: I never understood this Mohamed ElBardei guy, and could no see the top UN nuke monitoring guy as a Nobel Prize winner than ... say ... Al Gore.

His mini-interview in Spiegel (the full interview publishes on Tuesday) gives me no further insights.

On Iran:

"The readiness on Iran's side to cooperate leaves a lot to be desired," he said. "We have pressing questions." Iran's leadership, he said, is sending "a message to the entire world: We can build a bomb in relatively short time."

On Syria:

But the general director of the International Atomic Energy Agency also said he expected "absolute transparency" from Syria.

On stopping proliferation by military action:

"With unilateral military actions, countries are undermining international agreements, and we are at a historic turning point."

What's difference between Iran and Syria might explain why ElBardei expects complete transparency from Syria, but not Iran? The only thing that comes to my mind is that there's been military action against Syria's nukes but not Iran's.

Hyper-Hysteria

Fear is rising with a bullet on the list of global motivators. Plastic baby bottles, genetically engineered food, cell phones ... all feed the hysteria machine, ultimately producing stories like this:

South Korean politics are on the brink of meltdown after spiralling public hysteria over “mad cow” disease in American beef unleashed a weekend of mass protests and pitched battles between demonstrators and riot police.

Police vehicles were today attacked by angry mobs armed with sticks and police lines were reportedly charged after the 40,000-strong crowd of peaceful protesters thinned-out to leave a smaller group of activists.

With the violence threatening to continue for another week, and the calls for his resignation being screamed by students on the streets of Seoul, President Lee Myung Bak now faces a series of potentially crippling departures from his immediate circle of allies. (Times of London)

How many recent cases of BSE have there been in the US? One.

How many recent cases of BSE in the US were discovered before the cow was slaughtered for beef? One.

How many humans have been infected from BSE in US beef? None.

Frankly, being in that crowd of angry Koreans looks far more dangerous to one's health than eating U.S. beef.

Pfleger: "America Is The Greatest Sin Against God"

According to ABC's Jake Tapper, the congregants at Obama's now-dumped under the bus United Trinity weren't too vociferous when Padre Michael Phlegm Pfleger said this:

"Racism is still America's greatest addiction. I also believe that America is the greatest sin against God.

"If the greatest command is to love, than the sin against love must be the greatest sin against God who IS love and who calls us to love one another. So that this greatest sin against God, racism, it's as natural as the air we breath."

How can people be so wrong? I'm not a Pollyanna; racism still exists in America, whether it is blacks calling us honkies or whiteys and thinking the worst of us, or us to them, or any other race doing the same to any other. But it's clear that there is no institutional racism in America any more. Rather, minorities get preferences not offered whites.

But is racism America's greatest sin? Obviously not, because for a sin to be truly great, it has to be unaddressed, running rampant, destroying people. That is not a definition of racism in America. By that definition American's greatest sin is probably indulgence (and its identical twin materialism), arrogance ... or let's face the obvious one, the one Pfleger supports (and Obama supports to the max), abortion.

Whatever America's greatest sin, could a reasonable person really find America to be the greatest sin against God? All of us who believe in God believe he cares about each individual, so wouldn't a state like North Korea, which so viciously attacks the individual in the name of the power and wealth of the very few, be more sinful in His eyes? Or Mugabe's Zimbabwe? Or Somalia, where tribal warfare in the name of Allah has destroyed one generation, going on two? Or Sudan, where a Muslim government sits passively by while Sudanese Christians and animists are systematically destroyed?

Certainly, America is not without sin, particularly since "to whom much is given, much is expected." But it is a twisted mindset that can warp reality into creating an America which is the world's greatest sin against God. And as it happens, this warper of reality, Pflegar, has been very close to Barack Obama for decades. You know this stuff, but Tapper gives a pretty good summary of the recent relationship along with a juicy link:

In September, the Obama campaign brought Pfleger to Iowa to host one of several interfaith forums for the campaign. Pfleger has given money to Obama's campaigns and Obama as a state legislator directed at least $225,000 towards social programs at St. Sabina's, according to the Chicago Tribune. Pfleger appears to have been scrubbed from the Obama campaign's page that features the testimony of faith leaders, but you can see the cached version HERE.

There are not many churches in America that would invite Pfleger to speak. Obama has had a 20-year very supportive relationship with one of the only ones that would.

Quote Of The Day: Racism Ploy Edition

"Because of the fact I am Mexican, they think I have to sleep under a cactus and eat from taco stands."
-- Former CA Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez

Forgive me for not putting all the little accent squiggles over Nunez' last name; I do it at the risk of being called racist.

Nunez has rightfully earned quite a reputation as a big-time spender while heading up the state assembly -- not just the usual tax-gouging we've come to expect from Dems, but also the illegal spending of his campaign funds on lavish trips, nice hotels and fine food and drink. He's been catching a heap of criticism for that, so when asked about it on a Spanish TV station, he unloaded, as quoted in the SacBee:

"Everyone's done it like this," Núñez said of previous legislative leaders. "The difference is there are some in politics who want to judge me in a certain manner. Because of the fact I am Mexican, they think I have to sleep under a cactus and eat from taco stands.

"What's a luxury hotel? A stay at a Sheraton? … I am, you could say, like a head of state. I'm the leader of the Assembly of the state of California. Where am I supposed to sleep?"

The "everyone's done it" defense is one that really rings true, isn't it? "I confess ... but ..." It hardly addresses the $47,000 he spent on plane fares, or the the more than $5,000 at a wine cellar in France, and certainly not the more than $2,500 in campaign funds he dropped for "office expenses" at Vuitton.

Another prominent California Hispanic, Hector Barajas, communications director of the California Republican Party, called out Nunez:

"Questioning someone's expenses, especially when they're in public office, is something the public should do."

And trying to hide under a brown cover is simply despicable.

The Divisive Rev. Wright

How savvy of the NCCP to invite Rev. Wright to give the keynote address at its 53rd annual "Fight for Freedom Fund Dinner." No speaker, not even Barack Obama -- or as Wright referred to him, "Barack HUSSEIN Obama, Barack HUSSEIN Obama, Barack HUSSEIN Obama" -- could have garnered more attention.

And fundraising is always about getting attention.

You can see Rev. Wright's speech here; I've only had a chance to view about a third of it, so I'm going to focus on just one passage, in which he was rebuking an Oakland official who called him divisive:

"I am not one of the most 'divisive.' Tell him the word is 'descriptive.' I describe the conditions in this country -- conditions divide, not my description."

This is the sort of wordplay most pastors like. Give them an alliteration and they can build an entire sermon series around it. Most, fortunately, do a better job at it than Wright.

Does Wright spend any time accurately describing conditions in America? Forget the sound bites we all know -- AIDS, chickens coming home to roost -- and think of the stuff of his week in, week out sermons as they've been described to us by his church itself:

We are a congregation which is Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian... Our roots in the Black religious experience and tradition are deep, lasting and permanent. We are an African people, and remain "true to our native land," the mother continent, the cradle of civilization. God has superintended our pilgrimage through the days of slavery, the days of segregation, and the long night of racism. It is God who gives us the strength and courage to continuously address injustice as a people, and as a congregation. We constantly affirm our trust in God through cultural expression of a Black worship service and ministries which address the Black Community.

This is a church that describes itself as not being of America. It describes America as having a long night of racism without hinting that dawn came a long time ago. (In fact, he says in the speech he believes "a change is going to come.") It describes an America of continuous injustice, not one continuous opportunity. It describes a church with no desire to join the rest of America, but to maintain itself apart, divisively.

That's Wright's description of America: A country in which every black is oppressed and every white is an oppressor, a country in which blacks who do succeed are derided with derogatory name-plays (with the exception of Obama).

These are not accurate descriptions of America. Opportunity abounds, and even if black racism remains robust, white America is more than willing to accept and promote ambitious, hard working blacks, just as we are with the ambitious and hard working of any race. All you have to do is look around; count the numbers, track the income, check the admissions, name the senior executives and partners.

Nor are Wright's descriptions of America helpful. They seek to continue the divide, to promote victimization, to make differentness a divide. Black liberation theology can only continue if the need to liberate continues, so the advances in civil rights, not white racism, are the greatest threat the church faces. Wright does not want it put out of business, so his is not a language of description; it is a language of division.

Descriptions are not necessarily divisive, if they are accurate. No one ever went to war over agreements. But Wright doesn't describe America correctly, and it is those descriptions themselves that are so divisive. America is moving far beyond the America Wright describes, and his continued description of where we were instead of where we are going is, in a word, divisive.

Caution: White Guy Blogging

So I've been scrutinized, and that's who I am!

I hate blacks and I hate women. I've got all the power. I cannot be relied on. I have a terrible temper, and I'm fine with having it.

Funny, that's not what I feel, act or think like, but Nora Ephron writing at Huffpo sums up white men in so many words, so it must be so.

No one will call Ephron anything derogatory and overused to the point of meaninglessness -- racist, sexist -- for denigrating me and my white male brothers as terribly as she has, but that's OK; we expect it. It just comes with having all the power, you know.

Since the Dems have been running icons this election season, they've ended up where they deserve to end up, even if Ephron isn't crazy about it:

Here's another thing I don't like about this primary: now that there are only two Democratic candidates, it's suddenly horribly absolutely crystal-clear that this is an election about gender and race.

You could say it's an election about the economy and the war, but what fun would that be? Why focus on vital things when it's much more fun to call people names -- or accuse others of calling people names, or accuse their spouses of calling people names?

But when you run a race like the Dems have run, which as a Dem you have to do because identity politics is what you are, you end up with results like this; you end up running a race that means nothing because the only difference between the candidates is sex, race and age.

And for some reason, they've left age out of it. Until after the primaries, when they face that old white guy.

I might just be an insensitive, out of touch white guy, but it seems to me that it doesn't matter if the president is a man, a woman, a black or a white or anything else. What matters is policy and position -- not about race and gender, but about things that actually matter.

You'd think it would be the Dems that are saying that, but it's not. It's me, the GOP white guy, because they're fixated on the genetic matter of two individuals instead of where their policies will take us.

That leaves us white men, and all the intelligent people who join us in this effort, to think not of race or gender, but of the future, and to vote from our brains, not our hearts, skin or our sex organs. It's unfortunate, really, that all the power still resides in my white male brothers in Pennsylvania and Indiana, but that's the card they've been dealt by the Dems.

America's great talk on race never happened. Blacks will vote overwhelmingly for Obama. Older white women will vote overwhelmingly for Clinton. What a shame that is. I think what Ephron meant to say was this: White Dem men in Pennsylvania and Indiana will actually be voting about what matters, while most of the blacks and women will be voting about symbols that really don't matter at all.

OK, they matter. But only if you're a sexist or a racist.

Update: For a much more intelligent article on the issue, read this one at the other CSM.

Is Obama Ready For A Dialog On Race?

The wonders of the Internet! It lets me go to memeorandum to see a compilation of news from around the world and bloggers' comments on it, and launching from there, I go from my breakfast nook in South Orange County to Pittsburgh and the student newspaper from Carnegie Mellon U., a paper I would never have read were it not for the Internet.

And there, in coverage of an off-off-mainline political event featuring Michelle Obama and a smallish crowd of supporters, I find that the Obamas are not ready for a truthful dialog on race in this country, no matter what Barack Obama said in his flag-saturated speech on race. Truth, it seems, is no where to be found.

While the crowd was indeed diverse, some students at the event questioned the practices of Mrs. Obama’s event coordinators, who handpicked the crowd sitting behind Mrs. Obama. The Tartan’s correspondents observed one event coordinator say to another, “Get me more white people, we need more white people.” To an Asian girl sitting in the back row, one coordinator said, “We’re moving you, sorry. It’s going to look so pretty, though.”

“I didn’t know they would say, ‘We need a white person here,’ ” said attendee and senior psychology major Shayna Watson, who sat in the crowd behind Mrs. Obama. “I understood they would want a show of diversity, but to pick up people and to reseat them, I didn’t know it would be so outright.”

Of course, this is standard political showmanship, the carefully constructed crowd. No one ugly in the front row. And not too many blacks in front -- they might scare away white voters. (Unless it's a white candidate, then it's not too many whites in front.)

If Obama were indeed a change-engine instead of just an ultra-liberal hack in change clothing, he would let the people who cared the most be the people framing the shot. Instead, each stop is carefully orchestrated to create a sense of comfort, trust and normalcy, while in fact it is staged, false and contrived.

So this is our great new dialog on race made possible by Obama? I thought so. It's the kind of dialog unsubstantial candidates really like: One between carefully selected, like-minded people.

Those of us who think differently -- who think race is not of great consequence, who think huge government solves nothing, who know we'll never tax our way to paradise -- well, we'll fare worse than the Asian gal above. We won't just be moved from the back row; we won't be let into the room.

Two Black Americas, Two White Americas

For one heck of a heart-stopping look at America today, look no further than today's op/ed page of WaPo and the columns by Charles Krauthammer and Eugene Robinson.

Krauthammer's piece, The Fabulist vs. The Saint, shows us a white America paralyzed by fear of black America. No, not fear that we'll be mugged or our wimmin will be violated, but fear that we may say something that displeases our black co-citizens. After showing the media's glee to jump on Hillary's well deserved fate ("her Waterloo at Tuzla"), Krauthammer turns to the flag-bedecked Obama race speech:

This invitation to move on, as it were, has been widely accepted. After the speech it became an article of faith that even referring to Wright's comments was somehow illegitimate, the new "Swift-boating."

It is not just that Obama surrogate Rep. George Miller denounced the Clinton campaign for bringing up Wright when talking to superdelegates as trying to "work the low road." You expect that from a campaign. Or that Andrew Sullivan called Hillary's commenting on Wright "a new low." You expect that from Andrew Sullivan.

But from the mainstream media? As National Review's Byron York has pointed out, when Clinton supporter Lanny Davis said on CNN that it is "legitimate" for her to have remarked "that she personally would not put up with somebody who says that 9/11 are chickens who come home to roost" or the kind of "generic comments [Wright] made about white America," Anderson Cooper, the show's host and alleged moderator, interjected that since "we all know what the [Wright] comments were," he found it "amazing" and "funny" that Davis should "feel the need to repeat them over and over again."

Davis protested, "It's appropriate." Time magazine's Joe Klein promptly smacked Davis down with "Lanny, Lanny, you're spreading the -- you're spreading the poison right now," and then suggested that an "honorable person" would "stay away from this stuff."

Honorable people don't criticize hate-spewing black pastors and black presidential candidates who sat their families in front of the spew for 20 years. Why? Because honorable whites don't diss anything about blacks, apparently. In public anyway.

Of course, Hillary's campaign has every right to bring the matter up because it goes to the question of Obama's ability to reason, act and live in a manner we have come to expect of the men who have put on George Washington's mantle. But the discussion is off limits not just because Obama is black, but more so because the white liberal elite think Rev. Wright is right.

But he's wrong. Robinson doesn't say as much in his op/ed, Two Black Americas, but the black America that he paints says it loud and clear. While he talks about successful blacks and blacks in poverty today, that's not the two black Americas he's talking about. Rather, it is the black America of Martin Luther King and the black America of today.

Forty years after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, we sometimes talk about race in America as if nothing has changed. The truth is that everything has changed -- mostly for the better -- and that if we're ever going to see King's dream fulfilled, first we have to acknowledge that this is not an America he would have recognized.

On April 4, 1968, it was possible to make the generalization that being black in this country meant being poor; fully 40 percent of black Americans lived below the poverty line, according to census data, with another 20 percent barely keeping their heads above water. African Americans were heavily concentrated in the inner cities and the rural South. We were far less likely than whites to go to college, and our presence in the corporate world was minimal.

Robinson acknowledges that 25% of blacks today are mired in poverty, and because the better-off blacks don't have generations of money and success behind them, they're a bit more nervous about their success, but:

• African Americans control $800 billion in purchasing power, which, if translated into gross domestic product, would make a sovereign "Black America" the 15th- or 16th-richest nation on earth.
  
  
• Not even 2% of black households 40 years ago earned the equivalent of $100,000 a year in today's dollars. Now, about 10% of black households do.
  
  
• In many cities, more African Americans now live in the suburbs than within the city limits.
  
  
• The grandson of a slave was chairman of Merrill-Lynch until he resigned in the wake of the mortgage meltdown, "and floated back to earth with the help of one of the loveliest golden parachutes Wall Street has seen."

These probably aren't the people who make up most of Rev. Wright's congregation, which I've heard it referred to as an "inner city black" congregation. If that is indeed the case, it may be like this group described by Robinson:

For those who haven't made it into the middle class, however, things are different. Inner-city communities were hollowed out -- a process accelerated by the riots that followed King's death -- and left fallow for decades. Middle-class professionals fled, businesses closed, schools disintegrated, family structures fell apart. Drugs and crime were symptoms of the general rot ...

Such people could well respond positively to Wright's hate speech about white America, but they would be better served by a pastor who encourages them to join the middle class. Wright, however, preaches that the middle class is a cop out and counter to black liberation.

Obama stuck with a church that, as near as we can tell from Wright's sermons, demonized the 75% of blacks who were successful. As a man who wanted to be the president of America, he should have been doing all he could to see other blacks achieve the financial security he and Michelle enjoyed. That's what we expect as Americans.

Obama's judgment went haywire, or the whole sitting in the pew thing was just a sham that didn't require much thought -- yet the media wants to be done with the whole affair, leading me to the conclusion that there are two white Americas: The one that is comfortable with race, and the one that is so uncomfortable with it, they would rather not talk about it -- proving my long-held theory that Obama is benefiting from racial Teflon, to the detriment of every candidate he faces.

Obama's Race Speech And The Racial Divide

Let's see if I'm tracking this Wright right.

Obama goes to church for 20 years with a guy who says America got what it deserved on 9/11, forces drugs on blacks and should be damned by God.

Eyebrows go up and support for Mr. Change softens.

Obama gives a big speech, for once surrounded by flags he has shunned to date, sort of as if Rev. Wright had resigned as his policy chief on stage sets.

Pres. Clinton says, in light of all this, "I think it would be a great thing if we had an election year where you had two people who loved this country and were devoted to the interest of this country."

And for even raising the question that a guy who won't wear a flag, sometimes doesn't put his hand over his heart, and refuses to leave an unpatriotic church may be something less than the American patriotic ideal, Clinton gets called a McCarthyite by a retired general who serves on Obama's staff.

If it weren't the Dem party, I wouldn't think it could be true, but true it is -- as true as the story that Fox News anchor Brian Killmeade walked of the set, complaining of too much Obama-bashing. That's Fox, the whipping boy of the Left.

(As for that last point, Fox News has been on in the background for hours a day here at our in-laws home, and I am Wright-wrung; I don't care to see another clip of him, ever. I haven't seen what's on the other networks, but I told Incredible Wife last night that Fox is driving people back to Obama by overplaying this story.)

So it's a wild story, one that can get out of focus quickly. As a public service, C-SM provides this refocusing moment: The story is about how race relations might influence the 2008 election.

The story has provided a finely tuned measure of the depth of the racial divide that remains in America four decades after the Civil Rights movement's victory. Just look at these stats, courtesy of Rassmussen:

• 84% of those polled said they had heard at least part of the speech. Whoa. Do you think race is an important topic in America? Do you doubt that Obama has generated high levels of interest in politics?
• Of those, 51% ranked the speech good or excellent, 26% said it was fair, and 21% said it stunk.
• Yes, there was the traditional party split in the results: 67% of the Dems who heard it liked it, along with 53% of the Independents and 31% of the Republicans.
• And here's the kicker: Rassmussen found that 86% of the black voters thought it was good or excellent, but only 45% of the white voters. That's nearly two-to-one.

The black/white split is the biggest of all, saying that a racial divide still exists in America, and that a "patriotic" black is different from a "patriotic white." Just listen to the scathing condescention in Rev. Wright's voice -- and the boisterous affirmations from the congregation -- when he mentions Condeleeza Rice, Colin Powell or Clarence Thomas. Success in the white world is no success for Rev. Wright's audience; it is fighting the other man's fight, sleeping with the enemy.

If you revile Rice, Powell and Thomas for their success, then you must view Obama's success as a success of a different stripe: A success in beating the white man's world. And you are not electing Obama as a person of unity, but a person who will accentuate the difference and refuse to be the sort of bridge at least Rice and Powell have been, and Thomas should have been.

It's as if there were two primaries going on in the Democratic party -- one of whites choosing between two options in the politics of identity, and one of blacks, voting overwhelmingly for a man who resonates for them this message: We are not a part of you, white America, and we don't really want to be.

If you say that's not exactly patriotism, then you're condemned (poor, poor Bill!), and you shake your head, whether it happens to be dark-skinned or fair, and realize that you're a part of a party that's not yet ready for racial harmony.

And you might think, maybe the GOP, which isn't so much about identity politics, might be the better place for me.

hat-tip: memeorandum

Sorry, Peggy, You So Missed The Point

Peggy Noonan wrote some beautiful speeches for Ronald Reagan, so while I've downgraded her punditry considerably over the last few years, I've still respected her as a critic of what makes a speech great or less than great.

No more.

In today's WSJ, she declares of Obama's race in America speech:

I thought Barack Obama's speech was strong, thoughtful and important. Rather beautifully, it was a speech to think to, not clap to. It was clear that's what he wanted, and this is rare.

It seemed to me as honest a speech as one in his position could give within the limits imposed by politics.

Honest? Obama lost any claim to honesty when he -- he who refuses to wear a flag lapel pin -- suddenly appeared flanked by not one, not two, but eight flags. Symbols matter too, and anyone who can't see the phony symbolism of Obama's stage setting is forever forbidden from criticizing the "Mission Accomplished" banner that has plagued Bush for years now.

Noonan zeroed in on what she thinks is the crux of the speech:

Most significantly, Mr. Obama asserted that race in America has become a generational story. The original sin of slavery is a fact, but the progress we have lived through the past 50 years means each generation experiences race differently. Older blacks, like Mr. Wright, remember Jim Crow and were left misshapen by it. Some rose anyway, some did not; of the latter, a "legacy of defeat" went on to misshape another generation.

Does she not see that by allying and aligning himself with a pastor who wishes to spread the "legacy of defeat" to another generation, he is willingly, happily thrusting his two daughters into that world of suspicion and resentment, instead of the new world he professes to seek? Isn't what one teaches one's children the truest test of one's beliefs? By teaching his children that Rev. Jeremiah Wright's teachings are the teachings he wants to listen to on Sunday, he is saying it's his choice to keep the shackles of resentment and unforgiveness firmly in place for future generations.

Noonan suffered a sytlistic swoon during the speech:

Here I point out an aspect of the speech that may have a beneficial impact on current rhetoric. It is assumed now that a candidate must say a silly, boring line -- "And families in Michigan matter!" or "What I stand for is affordable quality health care!" -- and the audience will clap. The line and the applause make, together, the eight-second soundbite that will be used tonight on the news, and seen by the people. This has been standard politico-journalistic procedure for 20 years.

Mr. Obama subverted this [soundbite speaking style] in his speech. He didn't have applause lines. He didn't give you eight seconds of a line followed by clapping. He spoke in full and longish paragraphs that didn't summon applause. This left TV producers having to use longer-than-usual soundbites in order to capture his meaning. And so the cuts of the speech you heard on the news were more substantial and interesting than usual, which made the coverage of the speech better. People who didn't hear it but only saw parts on the news got a real sense of what he'd said.

This from Reagan's speechwriter -- Reagan who mastered applause lines. Tear down the wall of your miconceptions, Noonan. The speech may move writers who yearn for more complex sentences and political policy wonks who yearn for substance over soundbite, but if the speech is dishonest at its core, if it shows the candidate to be a hypocrite who can't explain his way out of his corner but tries, nonetheless, by attempting to drag everyone into the cesspool, then what care we about how long a soundbite producers have to air?

The speech was about saving his campaign, not altering the speaking style of politicians. So the ulitimate measure of the speech is whether or not it save his campaign. In that regard I'll give Noonan one. She said at the outset of the piece, "We'll see if it's a success." There is certainly no evidence to date that it was.

Seething

In between all the talk and helping Joyce clean out the coffee pot, I've been reading Obama's speech (text here; video here), and by the time I was at the end of it, I was seething.

Before I get to that, I have to say the Obama team has some outstanding speech-writers and a client who is particularly gifted in delivering their work. Given the hurdle Obama had to jump with this speech ... well, it's a good thing that black guys can jump, and jump he did, making a valient attempt at damage control.

But in the end, the speech was nothing more than a clumsy effort to tie black racism to white racism, saying that we're all as bad as Rev. Jeremiah Wright, so why don't we all just get together and be racist together for the greater good? And it was the end of the speech that just made my skin crawl: The story of Ashley, the white Obama volunteer who came to work for him because of the "injustice" of having her mom lose her health insurance and suffer through cancer and financial hardship.

Now Ashley might have made a different choice. Perhaps somebody told her along
the way that the source of her mother’s problems were blacks who were on welfare
and too lazy to work, or Hispanics who were coming into the country illegally.
But she didn’t. She sought out allies in her fight against injustice.

Is that how he thinks whites think? That we would blame blacks or Mexicans for this particular set of circumstances? That it's "injustice" to have to be self-reliant? Holy cow! I thought Obama was supposed to be a guy who transcended the old stupidity, but here he is wallowing in it.

We are told that Ashley's problem isn't racism but corporate greed, and therefore that the answer to Ashley's problem is ubiquitous government. And this socialist message is supposed to reassure us that Obama hasn't drunk deeply of Rev. Wright's Kool-Aid?

Uneven Fields

Geraldine Ferraro:

"If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position."

Rev. Jeremiah White:

"The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, God damn America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people."

White is talking about a white government, not a black government. This is clearly a statement about race.

Ferraro:

"Any time anybody does anything that in any way pulls this campaign down and says let's address reality and the problems we're facing in this world, you're accused of being racist, so you have to shut up."

White:

"We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye.

"We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost."

Hillary Clinton immediately distanced herself from Ferraro ...

"I certainly do repudiate it and I regret deeply that it was said. Obviously she doesn't speak for the campaign, she doesn't speak for any of my positions, and she has resigned from being a member of my very large finance committee."

... and before the end of the first day of full-blown media frenzy, she was sacked from her position in the Clinton campaign.

I've just scanned the Brietbart U.S. politics headlines, and there's no big news story about Obama apologizing for his pastor, quitting the church, and urging us all to have a big group hug. That could come tomorrow, or Obama may try to say it's not fair to have a "religious test" for him, any more than it was for Mitt Romney. But Romney's church is a church, not an ongoing racist political rally under the guise of weekly sermons.

Granted, the same quick fate that met Ferraro met Obama foreign policy advisor Samantha Power after she called Hillary a monster, she was canned, and Obama issued a statement distancing himself from her. But Power didn't ist-speak -- nothing racist, nothing sexist -- just something in crushingly bad taste.

Now, if Ferraro had used rhetoric in the style of Rev. Wright, her comments would have been more along the line that because Obama is black, he sells crack, has a long rap sheet with prison time, and is a sexual threat to decent white women everywhere.

And even though we all know what Powers said is a pretty accurate characterization of the junior senator from New York, it was far short of what she would have said if mimicking Rev. Wright's style. After all, he said the 9/11 victims got what they deserved.

Obama had to know this was coming. He's sat in the church and has heard the sermons. He knows that the preaching there pushes blacks away from America, as Victor Davis Hansen said in delightful understatement:

Most who could sit through those diatribes and venom each week might find it difficult to have a balanced view of so-called “white” people or the country at large.

Yet Obama, knowing America's double standard when it comes to race speak, didn't bother to distance himself from Wright, other than saying the Rev. sometimes gets wound up and is a bit of a crazy uncle. Well, you can't leave a crazy uncle; he's family. But you can leave a church, and should if the teachings are inflammatory and make you uncomfortable.

If this blows over without doing serious damage to Obama, without changing the media's go-light coverage of him, we know that what I've been worrying about is true: The GOP will not be able to challenge Obama without cries of "Racist! Racist!" from every corner.

Or "Sexist! Sexist!" if Hillary wins the nomination.

Obama Plays The Race Card ... GOP, Beware!

How quickly political time flies. It seems like only yesterday the rap on Barack Obama was that he isn't black enough to get the black vote. Maybe it was dancing with white chicks that solved this problem, maybe not, but now he's suddenly black enough to play the race card against Clinton -- a preview of what he'll do (pardon the expression) in spades against the GOP if he gets the nomination.

HuffPo was among the outlets this a.m. spilling the contents of an Obama race card memo:

Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign has prepared a detailed memo listing various instances in which it perceived Sen. Hillary Clinton's campaign to have deliberately played the race card in the Democratic primary.

The memo, which was obtained by the Huffington Post and has been made public elsewhere, is believed to have been given to an activist and contains mostly excerpts from different media reports. It lists the contact info and name of Obama's South Carolina press secretary, Amaya Smith, and is broken down into five incidents in which either Clinton, her husband Bill, or campaign surrogates made comments that could be interpreted as racially insensitive.

The document provides an indication that, in private, the Obama campaign is seeking to capitalize on the view - and push the narrative - that the Clintons are using race-related issues for political leverage. In public, the Obama campaign has denied that they are trying to propagate such a perception, noting that the document never was sent to the press.

But irrespective of the memo, the image of the Clinton campaign sowing racial discord did bubble to the surface following a series of comments made this past week. On Friday, Bill Clinton called into multiple African American radio shows, including one hosted by Al Sharpton, to tamp down backlash against him for calling Obama's candidacy a "fairy tale."

All of a sudden "America's first black president" is just a race-baiter because he used the words "fairy tale" in a sentence about Obama! (Shouldn't he be a gay-baiter, really?) If Bill Clinton can get painted with this nasty brush, imagine what the powers of black victimization would do to Romney, McCain or Huckabee!

Am I overstating the case? Well, read Clinton's remarks in context and see:

"It is wrong that Senator Obama got to go through 15 debates trumpeting his superior judgment and how he had been against the war in every year," said Clinton, "and never got asked one time, not once, 'Well, how could you say, that when you said in 2004 you didn't know how you would have voted on the resolution? You said in 2004 there was no difference between you and George Bush on the war and you took that speech you're now running on off your website in 2004 and there's no difference in your voting record and Hillary's ever since?' Give me a break.

"This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen..."

Anyone who sees a racial comment in that is the true racist, because he (and I'll use "he" because this is coming out of Obama's camp) sees race everywhere.

Hillary also got nailed by a black man for saying that it took Lyndon Johnson to get the Civil Rights Act passed -- which is, politically speaking, the truth. Johnson knew how to work Congress, particularly the old Southern Dem racist members, to get it done. But she committed the sin of not doing the mandatory genuflect to Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, even though they had nothing to do with the political gamesmanship Hillary was referring to.

Whatever the Clintons' motivations in their cozying up to black voters, they don't deserve what they're getting from the Obama campaign. As the primaries in the Southern States are upon us, it's obvious that Obama's people are pulling out all the stops to push black voters away from the Clinton machine and into the now black enough arms of Obama.

If the strategy works, we'll know it soon enough ... and we'll know what's in store when Obama begins campaigning against the party of the Great Emancipator.

hat-tip: memeorandum and a hat-tip to Incredible Daughter #3 for suggesting the Ellen photo

Racist Ron's Excuse Is Pathetic

clipped from youtube.com

Even for 24-hour-news-cycle outlets like CNN, a 10 minute, 36 second story is exceptionally long, but that's what CNN gave to this report on Ron Paul's racist newsletters, as originally reported in The New Republic's piece Angry White Man.

On the clip, Paul says:

Yeah, it is [shocking], and of course it's been rehashed a long time and it's coming up now for political reasons, but everyone knows in my district that I didn't write them and I don't speak like that.

Staffers have reaffirmed this, saying Paul did not write the pieces.

It doesn't take having a career in messaging, as I do, to realize that the professional term for this is "poppycock." Paul's newsletters carried his message to constituents, fundraisers, contributors and hangers-on for over a decade. Paul's office produced them, his name was on top, and it presented his views, sometimes in a very personal way, like this 1992 piece, which says of carjacking:

I frankly don't know what to make of such advice [about how to prevent carjacking], but even in my little town of Lake Jackson, Texas, I've urged everyone in my family to know how to use a gun in self-defense. For the animals [black, hip-hop youth, from an earlier reference] are coming.

I all for firearms for self-defense, but any fool can see that this is written in the first person and includes references to Paul's town and Paul's family. If it's not written by him, it was written by a ghostwriter close to him to appear to be by him.

When I'm writing for a client, I personalize it in similar ways so it sincerely reflects the client; not only his views, but his life. Whoever wrote this, and Ron says utterly unconvincingly that he doesn't know who did, knew Paul and was comfortable writing in his place.

The writing absolutely reflects Paul's views; that's how ghost-writing works. Similar stuff is sprinkled through ten years of Paul's newsletters, and it's inconceivable that he never reviewed a word of it, and never demanded a rewrite. It's also inconceivable that a small-time congressman with a shoestring staff of fellow travelers doesn't know who wrote the piece.

So we're left with only two possible conclusions:

1. Ron Paul is a lying racist, or
2. Ron Paul doesn't know how to manage a staff.

Either option does not a good president make.

America, The Racist?

If it's true what they say about Iowa -- that there are more pigs there than people -- then it's not too much of a stretch to figure that there are more two-headed pigs there than blacks. (Assuming two-headed pigs make up about 2.5 percent of the state's pig population.)

So, can Rev. Al Sharpton please explain to me why you call America a racist country when:

Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) has won the Iowa caucuses while Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) seemed headed for a third-place finish, a stunning affirmation of his message of hope and a stinging rebuke of the long-time national frontrunner. (WaPo)

Somebody call Rev. Alice Sharpton -- we need someone to comment on how sexist America is!

"The Horrors Of Negro Rule"

There's a famous newspaper, a leader, really, in forming the opinion of the nation by articulating the reasoning and policies of the Left. Do you know which one I'm talking about?

Hint: It's the one that published this passage in an editorial:

It has of late become the custom of the men of the South to speak with entire candor of the settled and deliberate policy of suppressing the negro vote. They have been forced to choose between a policy of manifest injustice toward the blacks and the horrors of negro rule. They chose to disfranchise the negroes. That was manifestly the lesser of two evils. . . . The Republican Party committed a great public crime when it gave the right of suffrage to the blacks. . . . So long as the Fifteenth Amendment stands, the menace of the rule of the blacks will impend, and the safeguards against it must be maintained.

If you guessed the New York Times, you would be dead-on right.

The quote is one of about 40 presented in a WSJ Opinion Journal Extra, Whitewashed, The Racist History the Democratic Party Wants You to Forget, by Bruce Bartlett. The quotes start with Thomas Jefferson, and on their run-up to Joe Biden, they cover the pre-Civil War years, the Jim Crow years, and the years of the civil rights movement (with a special visit from the Kennedys).

It's not just blacks that get disparaged, either. The Dems, including FDR, were every bit as racist in their dealings with Mongoloids ... oops, that's not exactly PC today; Asians.

Yes, parties can change, and it's beyond refute that the dregs of the old racist Southern Democrats now are likely to vote GOP if they're not voting independent. But it is also indisputable that the Dems hang onto their racism under thick covers of cloying concern (i.e., opiating minorities through welfare and victimism to forestall "the Horrors of Negro Rule"), and that the GOP is not today anything approaching the old racist Democratic party of yesterday.

Only the Dems could come up with quotes like these. We Republicans might be able to pen something this ripe about the ACLU, al Qaeda or the cut and run Dems, but against blacks? No, that was the domain of one party and one party only: The party of Hillary, Obama and Edwards.

Oh, and the party of Chris Dodd, too, who in 2004 said:

"I do not think it is an exaggeration at all to say to my friend from West Virginia [Sen. Robert C. Byrd, a former Ku Klux Klan recruiter] that he would have been a great senator at any moment. . . . He would have been right during the great conflict of civil war in this nation."

hat-tip: memeorandum

Quote Of The Day: Paint It Black Edition

"I believe that black artists have the right to interpret ourselves first. If nobody steps up to the plate to do that, then certainly pass it along to someone else."
-- Black artist Gilbert Young

Gilbert Young is so angry that he's started a protest Web site (King Is Ours) where he attacks another man because of his race, and attacks his brothers for making a decision that was not made on racial grounds.

Granted, it's a humdinger of an eyebrow-arching decision: The artist selected by the MLK Memorial Foundation to sculpt the Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial in Washington DC is not black, not even American -- he's Chinese.

The foundation defends its selection:

The memorial foundation directing the project seems surprised at the criticism. Ten of the 12 people on the committee that chose the sculptor, Lei Yixin, are black. Lei is working closely on the design with two black sculptors in the U.S., organizers said, and the overall project is being directed by a black-owned architecture firm. (USAToday)

Lei Yixin apparently won the competition fair and square; he is after all, one of only nine artists in all of China who are considered "masters" by the government. As such, his commissions have included hero-statues for very unheroic men, men who have oppressed in the name of Communism.

I understand where Young is coming from because it would have been an uncontroversial decision to pick a black artist for the job, and we would have been treated to a great symbolic gesture as one of our most hallowed pieces of real estate -- between the Lincoln and Jefferson monuments -- was entrusted to the hand of a black artist.

Certainly, Young (see here for more samples of his work like the one above) has an easy point to argue and he argues it very well:

Is it that Alpha Phi Alpha, one of the country’s oldest African American fraternities, and the executive staff of the King Memorial project—also all black, and the Memorial Foundation Leadership, could not find one African American sculptor good enough to create a likeness of King? That’s crazy. You best believe, there is not ONE national memorial, not ONE monument to a leader or historical event in China, Russia, France, Italy, India, Germany—go ahead and name them all—that has the name of an African American artist engraved in its base. It’s probably not that they don’t like us or appreciate our abilities. It’s that a commission of such importance is a legacy for a country and its countrymen. Why should the King Monument be any different?

But his position ultimately is untenable against the teachings of Dr. King, who preached that America should be race-blind (among other less laudable positions).

More resonate than Young's are the complaints of Ann Lau and her comrades who push for human rights in China. Pointing to Yixin's statues of Mao and the fact that the MLK granite will be cut from a mine where worker's rights and safety are likely not high priorities, she said,

The whole thing is wrong. We are going to be permanently connecting Dr. King with someone whose ideology is totally opposed to Dr. King's ideology.

And that's where I settle on this: I would have preferred if the foundation had accepted a black artist, but given Dr. King's teachings, I can't fault them; and I understand that many blacks won't care one bit what one pampered white man has to say about it; and I think their judgment wouldn't score too high on Dr King's scale, and I believe in my heart that it is very wrong to do anything to glorify the current regime in China.

It would have moved Dr. King greatly if somehow the Communist functionaries were moved to change their ways when they first see Yixin's statue, but that most certainly is not going to happen, so the MLK Memorial Foundation ultimately has wasted a very important opportunity for positive symbolism.

Black Forget Our History Month

Emmett Till, the Chicago teenager who, when visiting in Mississippi, allegedly whistled at a white woman and was subsequently killed by angry whites, is apparently not someone enlighted black teachers want upwardly mobile young blacks to learn about.

Nevermind that his death is widely regarded as one of the sparks that lit the fire of the civil rights movement, making their upward mobility more possible. Nevermind that he's part of black American history, whether we like it or not.

At a charter school in LA, two teachers were fired after they planned to have their 7th grade students recite a poem about Till during a Black Hisory Month assembly, then participated in protesting the school administration's action when the administration forbade the reading of the poem.

The administration gave three reasons. First, and believe it or not, the more plausible of the two reasons, the poem was deemed unsuitable for young school audiences, says the LA Times. Granted, there's plenty of stuff in Till's story that you wouldn't want a kindergartener to hear:

Till's mother had an open casket funeral to let everyone see how her son had been brutally killed. He had been shot and beaten; he was then thrown into the Tallahatchie River with a seventy-five pound cotton gin fan tied to his neck with barbed wire to work as a weight. His body remained in the river for three days until it was discovered and retrieved by two fishermen. (source)

The LAT did not share the poem with its readers, so we don't know how rough it was. Certainly, there would have been room for the administration and the teachers to work out a reading that would have pleased both.

Second, believe it or not, the administration nixed the poem because Emmett whistled at a girl, an act the female principal of the school regards as sexual harrassment.

What is she doing leading a charter school if she can't apply historical context to events? A whistle in the 50s is not the same thing as a whistle in the 00s. And besides, would she justify Till's death because he whistled? Is sexual harassment now a capital offense?

The third reason is the most interesting of the three:

School officials refused to discuss the particulars of the teachers' firings but said the issue highlights the difficulty of providing positive images for students who are often bombarded by negative cultural stereotypes.

"Our whole goal is how do we get these kids to not look at all of the bad things that could happen to them and instead focus on the process of how do we become the next surgeon or the next politician," said Celerity co-founder and Executive Director Vielka McFarlane. "We don't want to focus on how the history of the country has been checkered but on how do we dress for success, walk proud and celebrate all the accomplishments we've made."

I wonder if McFarlane has ever heard anything about running the risk of re-living history if you don't know history. Even though the school's position is a refreshing turn away from the victimization that seems to be the dominant curricula at many black schools, it is very frightening to think of history not being taught merely because it's painful.

Emmett Till's death, the civil rights movement and more than 40 years of laws and court decisions have transformed McFarlane's "bad things that could happen to them" into "bad things that are very, very unlikely to ever happen to them." In that light, Till's death could be a positive lesson about how far America has come in so short a time.

The matter raises a final question: Who's poems do the children at Celerity get to hear? Is Angela Davis a positive role model they'd be introduced to? Maxine Waters?

I'd rather they learn about the black boy who whistled at the white woman.