“When do we start a serious dialogue about the Birther movement being a proxy for racism that is unacceptable to articulate in more direct terms?”
So asks Glen Thrush at Politico about a new poll on whether President Barack Obama is a U.S. citizen. The poll shows 58 percent of Republicans believe Obama isn’t a citizen or aren’t sure. By a wide margin this sentiment is strongest in the South. In fact, among Southerners of all political stripes, 53 percent are in the no or unsure he-isn’t-a-citizen camps.
Forget that Hawaii’s Republican governor has verified the authenticity of Obama’s birth certificate and that journalists and others have inspected it. Forget that two Hawaiian newspapers printed birth announcements when Obama was born in 1961. What’s worth remembering is that hatred in politics kills rational thinking. It creates a false reality where wrongs feel righted and vindication can be summoned at a whim.
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I don’t agree with everything President Obama does or doesn’t do. But too many people miss his essential, rare quality: he is a real leader, a leader unafraid to take on difficult and complex problems by confronting them with blunt yet uplifting language, language that holds up a mirror, a mirror reflecting truth. From his speech in Cairo today about the Middle East, religion, and much more:
All of us share this world for but a brief moment in time. The question is whether we spend that time focused on what pushes us apart, or whether we commit ourselves to an effort – a sustained effort – to find common ground, to focus on the future we seek for our children, and to respect the dignity of all human beings.
A sometimes irrationally exuberant supporter of Barack Obama, I’m puzzled and dismayed at his administration’s failure to address the torture scandal. Repudiating torture isn’t enough. Finding the truth and punishing lawbreakers are only way to right terrible wrongs.
The most lucid assessment of the administration’s failure comes via the always-trenchant Scott Horton. He accuses the CIA and Justice Department of engaging in a de facto cover-up of Bush administration illegalities and warns of the consequences: Read More
The most provocative, over the top, and disturbing take on what has befallen us appears in the latest Rolling Stone. Sometimes the truth is so close we can’t recognize it, and a writer like Matt Taibbi comes along to piece everything together into sharp focus:
The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d’état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations. Read More
I usually wield no club in the intensifying mainstream media bashathon. But Todd Gitlin, whose journalism bona fides make his views worth a read, rightly hammers Big-Time Reporters’ coverage of President Obama’s press conference last night.
Petulance born of arrogance is especially repugnant when it leads to stories focusing on style at the expense of substance. We need hard-nosed reporting combined with clear explanations and analyses of what’s really happening around us. Now more than ever.
Long before The Sopranos, I learned about real-life Mafia from Gay Talese in his stunning 1971 book Honor Thy Father. So his recent byline in the New York Times‘ City Room blog caught my eye.
Talese recounts helping panhandlers improve their income by composing better-worded signs that invoke President Obama’s name.
Word gets around. Tonight, a man and woman camped on the sidewalk outside my neighborhood Safeway grocery brandished a sign with this spiel: “Obama Wants To Make A Lot Of Change! We Only Need A Little.”
It works, the woman said between bites of meatloaf.
This is akin to shooting fish in a barrel, I suppose. But if you treasure words and how they’re put together, you’ll enjoy Mark Nickolas’ simple but clever idea: use Microsoft Word’s readability tool to compare the language Barack Obama used Monday answering questions at his first presidential press conference versus that of George W. Bush eight years ago. Read More
A story of redemption and grace starts my morning: 48 years after beating a prominent member of the Civil Rights Movement, a former Ku Klux Klan member apologizes in person with a handshake and hug.
“I tried to block it out of my mind. It kept coming back,” says Elwin Wilson, who attacked John Lewis, now a congressman from Georgia, in the “whites only” area of a Greyhound bus station in Rock Hill, South Carolina.
Wilson, now 72, has been haunted with guilt for years. What sparked him to apologize, not just to Lewis but black residents in Rock Hill? Barack Obama’s election.
How many people are paying attention to President Obama now that the hoopla over his election and inauguration has died down? Not enough. Listen to this video clip (requires a scroll down) of what he said today about our stricken economy. Better yet, read the transcript of his speech after the clip. He understands what needs to be done as painful and distasteful as it is.
Republicans apparently find taxes so detestable they’d rather see millions suffer and the country grind to a halt to get their way. Such is their boundless ideological arrogance. But as the president said today: Read More
This homemade Obama sign in a yard not far from my house seems more appropriate now than during the campaign. Without the new president’s leadership, the economy would indeed end up busted.
Like anyone, I don’t like the prospect of Himalaya-like deficits. But nearly every economist whom I’ve seen quoted says the only way to jump start the economy is through extraordinary government spending. Otherwise, the deficits will seem mild compared to the fiscal ruin we’d face. Read More
My day began with champagne and two friends, Benjamin Alexander Clarke and Kelley Burke, at an elbow-to-elbow cafe, Krakow Koffeehouse, where we watched President Obama sworn in. It ended with a neighborhood potluck dinner and never-to-forget, flag-waving march with 40 other people through the streets of Portland. Read More
An email promoted tonight’s showing of vintage film footage from the civil rights movement. The location: a pizza place on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in Northeast Portland.
It seemed a fitting way to spend the evening with wife and little boy. So we sat with about fifty people we didn’t know — white, black, Hispanic, and Asian — in the perfect prelude to tomorrow’s presidential inauguration. Read More
My intense bias aside, it’s hard to imagine John McCain providing the depth and quality of leadership that our soon-to-be new president has demonstrated. Clearly Barack Obama’s first priority is leadership, not ideology. That means elevating pragmatism over politics and candidly communicating often with the American people: Read More
