Netflix Bowling for Columbine. European countries are quite diverse, at least the ones I've visited have been.

correction Isabel

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabel_Toledo

It's unfortunate that he's inheriting such a bevy of seemingly intractable problems all at once; however, he seems to genuinely care and be intellectually curious, bright and competent in contrast to his immediate predecessor. That gives some level of hope. I was extremely proud today because his ascent to the highest office in the land despite his color, heritage, humble beginnings (single mom once on welfare), polarizing and problematic middle name for the ignorant, is a testament to the tenets our nation should abide by and realizing one of MLK's fervent wishes (judging on character, not color). The entire procession also just seemed representative of America as I know it and the VIP seats being a microcosm of the American mosaic and clearly evident in BHO's family - the half-sister, her spouse, Michelle's sister-in-law, etc. His speech was rousing, astute and inclusive (he even acknowledged atheists which was unexpected). And on the sartorial front, Michelle rocked the hell out of that Elizabeth Toledo ensem.

Thanks HooksJC for posting and elucidating and fleshing out the matter despite the sensationalist "divide and conquer" and scapegoating headline. Because this type of headline has been bandied about incessantly with blacks and Latinos being "blamed" for Prop 8 passing despite their being a lower percentage of the electorate, there have been instances of GWM activists showing their ugly sides. Not surprised.

http://www.stereohyped.com/la-prop-8- ... acks-20081110/#more-17729

Spare me the specious and implausible arguments as they are beneath most people on here. There is no credible effort nor impact in stopping urban white people from voting. Brian-Em and his ilk are clearly not scared or intimidated: "if they pulled that shit where I was going to vote...there would be some issues..." and as an earlier poster said, no one complained but FAUX news turned this into a big issue (blacks are scaring and intimidating white people at the polls) to rile up their viewership. This is classic Freudian projection. Please.

TWO (2) lone older 1960's decrepit activist black men intimidating white voters en masse in broad daylight? I am so sure. As Amy and Seth say "Really?!" It's like the Black Israelites in NYC who hate on whitey, capitalism, colonialism on a soapbox and passersby stare curiously and giggle. The KKK and non-KKK America actually has a history of voter intimidation, mayhem and murder and making more than idle threats (Rosewood, Black Tulsa Wall Street) -- hence yet another inapt comparison from you. www.withoutsanctuary.org

Anyways, your guy just can't help himself.

November 4, 2008
Editorial
So Little Time, So Much Damage
While Americans eagerly vote for the next president, here?s a sobering reminder: As of Tuesday, George W. Bush still has 77 days left in the White House ? and he?s not wasting a minute.

President Bush?s aides have been scrambling to change rules and regulations on the environment, civil liberties and abortion rights, among others ? few for the good. Most presidents put on a last-minute policy stamp, but in Mr. Bush?s case it is more like a wrecking ball. We fear it could take months, or years, for the next president to identify and then undo all of the damage.

Here is a look ? by no means comprehensive ? at some of Mr. Bush?s recent parting gifts and those we fear are yet to come.

CIVIL LIBERTIES We don?t know all of the ways that the administration has violated Americans? rights in the name of fighting terrorism. Last month, Attorney General Michael Mukasey rushed out new guidelines for the F.B.I. that permit agents to use chillingly intrusive techniques to collect information on Americans even where there is no evidence of wrongdoing.

Agents will be allowed to use informants to infiltrate lawful groups, engage in prolonged physical surveillance and lie about their identity while questioning a subject?s neighbors, relatives, co-workers and friends. The changes also give the F.B.I. ? which has a long history of spying on civil rights groups and others ? expanded latitude to use these techniques on people identified by racial, ethnic and religious background.

The administration showed further disdain for Americans? privacy rights and for Congress?s power by making clear that it will ignore a provision in the legislation that established the Department of Homeland Security. The law requires the department?s privacy officer to account annually for any activity that could affect Americans? privacy ? and clearly stipulates that the report cannot be edited by any other officials at the department or the White House.

The Justice Department?s Office of Legal Counsel has now released a memo asserting that the law ?does not prohibit? officials from homeland security or the White House from reviewing the report. The memo then argues that since the law allows the officials to review the report, it would be unconstitutional to stop them from changing it. George Orwell couldn?t have done better.

THE ENVIRONMENT The administration has been especially busy weakening regulations that promote clean air and clean water and protect endangered species.

Mr. Bush, or more to the point, Vice President Dick Cheney, came to office determined to dismantle Bill Clinton?s environmental legacy, undo decades of environmental law and keep their friends in industry happy. They have had less success than we feared, but only because of the determined opposition of environmental groups, courageous members of Congress and protests from citizens. But the White House keeps trying.

Mr. Bush?s secretary of the interior, Dirk Kempthorne, has recently carved out significant exceptions to regulations requiring expert scientific review of any federal project that might harm endangered or threatened species (one consequence will be to relieve the agency of the need to assess the impact of global warming on at-risk species). The department also is rushing to remove the gray wolf from the endangered species list ? again. The wolves were re-listed after a federal judge ruled the government had not lived up to its own recovery plan.

In coming weeks, we expect the Environmental Protection Agency to issue a final rule that would weaken a program created by the Clean Air Act, which requires utilities to install modern pollution controls when they upgrade their plants to produce more power. The agency is also expected to issue a final rule that would make it easier for coal-fired power plants to locate near national parks in defiance of longstanding Congressional mandates to protect air quality in areas of special natural or recreational value.

Interior also is awaiting E.P.A.?s concurrence on a proposal that would make it easier for mining companies to dump toxic mine wastes in valleys and streams.

And while no rules changes are at issue, the interior department also has been rushing to open up millions of acres of pristine federal land to oil and gas exploration. We fear that, in coming weeks, Mr. Kempthorne will open up even more acreage to the commercial development of oil shale, a hugely expensive and environmentally risky process that even the oil companies seem in no hurry to begin. He should not.

ABORTION RIGHTS Soon after the election, Michael Leavitt, the secretary of health and human services, is expected to issue new regulations aimed at further limiting women?s access to abortion, contraceptives and information about their reproductive health care options.

Existing law allows doctors and nurses to refuse to participate in an abortion. These changes would extend the so-called right to refuse to a wide range of health care workers and activities including abortion referrals, unbiased counseling and provision of birth control pills or emergency contraception, even for rape victims.

?

The administration has taken other disturbing steps in recent weeks. In late September, the I.R.S. restored tax breaks for banks that take big losses on bad loans inherited through acquisitions. Now we learn that JPMorgan Chase and others are planning to use their bailout funds for mergers and acquisitions, transactions that will be greatly enhanced by the new tax subsidy.

One last-minute change Mr. Bush won?t be making: He apparently has decided not to shut down the prison in Guant?namo Bay, Cuba ? the most shameful symbol of his administration?s disdain for the rule of law.

Mr. Bush has said it should be closed, and his secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, and his secretary of defense, Robert Gates, pushed for it. Proposals were prepared, including a plan for sending the real bad guys to other countries for trial. But Mr. Cheney objected, and the president has refused even to review the memos. He will hand this mess off to his successor.

We suppose there is some good news in all of this. While Mr. Bush leaves office on Jan. 20, 2009, he has only until Nov. 20 to issue ?economically significant? rule changes and until Dec. 20 to issue other changes. Anything after that is merely a draft and can be easily withdrawn by the next president.

Unfortunately, the White House is well aware of those deadlines.

But maybe they are on to something.

http://www.visitdenmark.com/usa/en-us ... t-people-in-the-world.htm

Perhaps because it doesn't conform to the expectations of what they've read about or seen on American TV. My grandfather thought the "streets were paved were gold" had some element of truth when he left Panama as a boy. The gap is only getting wider.

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2008/10/22-7

These latest videos of people practically foaming out the mouth in Wisconsin and Ohio are quite strange and ugly. And really tired of people inciting fear by using his middle name which apparently means in Arabic "small handsome one" Saw this on another blog highlighting the absurdity:

"If Barack Obama is convicted of terrorism simply because of his middle name, then isn't John Sidney McCain III a murderer, even a serial killer by virtue of his first name?

John Hinckley: attempted to assassinate Republican president Ronald Reagan
John Wayne Gacy: Clown and serial killer
John Wilkes Booth: assassin of Republican President Abraham Lincoln

Why won't McCain answer questions about his association with these killers?

America, do you really know who John McCain is?"

September 23, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
The Establishment Lives!
By DAVID BROOKS
Once, there was a financial elite in this country. During the first two-thirds of the 20th century, middle-aged men with names like Mellon and McCloy led Wall Street firms, corporate boards and white-shoe law firms and occasionally emerged to serve in government.

Starting in the 1960s, that cohesive elite began to fall apart. Liberal interest groups took control of Democratic economic policy. Supply-side think tankers and Southern conservatives dominated the GOP.

In the 1980s, the old power structures frayed, even on Wall Street. Corporate raiders took on the old business elite. Math geeks created complicated financial instruments that the top executives couldn?t control or understand. (The market for credit-default swaps alone has exploded to $45.5 trillion, up from $900 billion in 2001.)

Year followed year, and the idea of a cohesive financial establishment seemed increasingly like a thing of the past.

No more. Over the past week, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner of the New York Fed have nearly revived it. At its base, the turmoil wracking the world financial markets is a crisis of confidence. What Paulson, et al. have tried to do is reassert authority ? the sort that used to be wielded by the Mellons and Rockefellers and other rich men in private clubs.

Inspired in part by Paul Volcker, Nicholas Brady and Eugene Ludwig, and announced last week, the Paulson plan is a pure establishment play. It would assign nearly unlimited authority to a small coterie of policy makers. It does not rely on any system of checks and balances, but on the wisdom and public spiritedness of those in charge. It offers succor to the investment banks that contributed to this mess and will burn through large piles of taxpayer money. But in exchange, it promises to restore confidence. Somebody, amid all the turmoil, will occupy the commanding heights. Somebody will have the power to absorb debt and establish stability.

Liberals and conservatives generally dislike the plan. William Greider of The Nation writes: ?If Wall Street gets away with this, it will represent an historic swindle of the American public ? all sugar for the villains, lasting pain and damage for the victims.?

He approvingly quotes the conservative economist Christopher Whalen of Institutional Risk Analytics: ?The joyous reception from Congressional Democrats to Paulson?s latest massive bailout proposal smells an awful lot like yet another corporatist love fest between Washington?s one-party government and the Sell Side investment banks.?

Thanks to their criticism, the plan will be pinned back. Oversight will be put in place. But the plan will probably not be stopped. The markets would tank. There is a hunger for stability, which only the Treasury and the Fed can provide.

So we have arrived at one of those moments. The global financial turmoil has pulled nearly everybody out of their normal ideological categories. The pressure of reality has compelled new thinking about the relationship between government and the economy. And lo and behold, a new center and a new establishment is emerging.

The Paulson rescue plan is one chapter. But there will be others. Over the next few years, the U.S. will have to climb out from under mountainous piles of debt. Many predict a long, gray recession. The country will not turn to free-market supply-siders. Nor will it turn to left-wing populists. It will turn to the safe heads from the investment banks. For Republicans, people like Paulson. For Democrats, the guiding lights will be those establishment figures who advised Barack Obama last week ? including Volcker, Robert Rubin and Warren Buffett.

These time-tested advisers, or more precisely, their acolytes, are going to make the health and survival of the financial markets their first order of business, because without that stability, the entire economy will be in danger. Beyond that, they will embrace a certain sort of governing approach.

The government will be much more active in economic management (pleasing a certain sort of establishment Democrat). Government activism will provide support to corporations, banks and business and will be used to shore up the stable conditions they need to thrive (pleasing a certain sort of establishment Republican). Tax revenues from business activities will pay for progressive but business-friendly causes ? investments in green technology, health care reform, infrastructure spending, education reform and scientific research.

If you wanted to devise a name for this approach, you might pick the phrase economist Arnold Kling has used: Progressive Corporatism. We?re not entering a phase in which government stands back and lets the chips fall. We?re not entering an era when the government pounds the powerful on behalf of the people. We?re entering an era of the educated establishment, in which government acts to create a stable ? and often oligarchic ? framework for capitalist endeavor.

After a liberal era and then a conservative era, we?re getting a glimpse of what comes next.

A joke. A bunch of fat cats protecting other fat cats. Where are the goals for better transparency. Why not make it partly contingent on some of these executives making restitution as part of the bailout and disgorging ill-gotten gain. The fox cannot guard the hen house.

Op-Ed Columnist
A Fine Mess
By WILLIAM KRISTOL
A friend serving in the Bush administration called Sunday to try to talk me out of my doubts about the $700 billion financial bailout the administration was asking Congress to approve. I picked up the phone, and made the mistake of good-naturedly remarking, in my best imitation of Oliver Hardy, ?Well, this is a fine mess you?ve gotten us into.?

People who?ve been working 18-hour days trying to avert a meltdown are entitled to bristle at jocular comments from those of us not in public office. So he bristled. He then tried to persuade me that the only responsible course of action was to support the administration?s request.

I?m not convinced.

It?s not that I don?t believe the situation is dire. It?s not that I want to insist on some sort of ideological purity or free-market fastidiousness. I will stipulate that this is an emergency, and is a time for pragmatic problem-solving, perhaps even for violating some cherished economic or political principles. (What are cherished principles for but to be violated in emergencies?)

And I acknowledge that there are serious people who think the situation too urgent and the day too late to allow for a real public and Congressional debate on what should be done. But ? based on conversations with economists, Wall Street types, businessmen and public officials ? I?m doubtful that the only thing standing between us and a financial panic is for Congress to sign this week, on behalf of the American taxpayer, a $700 billion check over to the Treasury.

A huge speculative housing bubble has collapsed. We?re going to have a recession. Unemployment will go up. Credit is going to be tighter. The challenge is to contain the damage to a ?normal? recession ? and to prevent a devastating series of bank runs, a collapse of the credit markets and a full-bore depression.

Everyone seems to agree on the need for a big and comprehensive plan, and that the markets have to have some confidence that help is on the way. Funds need to be supplied, trading markets need to be stabilized, solvent institutions needs to be protected, and insolvent institutions need to be put on the path to a deliberate liquidation or reorganization.

But is the administration?s proposal the right way to do this? It would enable the Treasury, without Congressionally approved guidelines as to pricing or procedure, to purchase hundreds of billions of dollars of financial assets, and hire private firms to manage and sell them, presumably at their discretion There are no provisions for ? or even promises of ? disclosure, accountability or transparency. Surely Congress can at least ask some hard questions about such an open-ended commitment.

And I?ve been shocked by the number of (mostly conservative) experts I?ve spoken with who aren?t at all confident that the Bush administration has even the basics right ? or who think that the plan, though it looks simple on paper, will prove to be a nightmare in practice.

But will political leaders dare oppose it? Barack Obama called Sunday for more accountability, and I imagine he?ll support the efforts of the Democratic Congressional leadership to try to add to the legislation a host of liberal spending provisions. He probably won?t want to run the risk of actually opposing it, or even of raising big questions and causing significant delay ? lest he be attacked for risking the possible meltdown of the global financial system.

What about John McCain? He could play it safe, going along with whatever the Bush administration and the Congress are able to negotiate.

If he wants to be critical, but concludes that Congress has to pass something quickly lest the markets fall apart again, and that he can?t reasonably insist that Congress come up with something fundamentally better, he could propose various amendments insisting on much more accountability and transparency in how Treasury handles this amazing grant of power.

Comments by McCain on Sunday suggest he might propose an amendment along the lines of one I received in an e-mail message from a fellow semi-populist conservative: ?Any institution selling securities under this legislation to the Treasury Department shall not be allowed to compensate any officer or employee with a higher salary next year than that paid the president of the United States.? This would punish overpaid Wall Streeters and, more important, limit participation in the bailout to institutions really in trouble.

Or McCain ? more of a gambler than Obama ? could take a big risk. While assuring the public and the financial markets that his administration will act forcefully and swiftly to deal with the crisis, he could decide that he must oppose the bailout as the panicked product of a discredited administration, an irresponsible Congress, and a feckless financial establishment, all of which got us into this fine mess.

Critics would charge that in opposing the bailout, in standing against an apparent bipartisan consensus, McCain was being irresponsible.

Or would this be an act of responsibility and courage?

Indeed, well said. Let's hope.

As they say in popular culture, bring it on. Want to see Newark Avenue finally revitalized and not a relic of the past.

September 21, 2008

The Push to ?Otherize? Obama
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Here?s a sad monument to the sleaziness of this presidential campaign: Almost one-third of voters ?know? that Barack Obama is a Muslim or believe that he could be.

In short, the political campaign to transform Mr. Obama into a Muslim is succeeding. The real loser as that happens isn?t just Mr. Obama, but our entire political process.

A Pew Research Center survey released a few days ago found that only half of Americans correctly know that Mr. Obama is a Christian. Meanwhile, 13 percent of registered voters say that he is a Muslim, compared with 12 percent in June and 10 percent in March.

More ominously, a rising share ? now 16 percent ? say they aren?t sure about his religion because they?ve heard ?different things? about it.

When I?ve traveled around the country, particularly to my childhood home in rural Oregon, I?ve been struck by the number of people who ask something like: That Obama ? is he really a Christian? Isn?t he a Muslim or something? Didn?t he take his oath of office on the Koran?

In conservative Christian circles and on Christian radio stations, there are even widespread theories that Mr. Obama just may be the Antichrist. Seriously.

John Green, of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, says that about 10 percent of Americans believe we may be in the Book of Revelation?s ?end times? and are on the lookout for the Antichrist. A constant barrage of e-mail and broadcasts suggest that Mr. Obama just may be it.

The online Red State Shop sells T-shirts, mugs and stickers exploiting the idea. Some shirts and stickers portray a large ?O? with horns, above a caption: ?The Anti-Christ.?

To his credit, Mr. McCain himself has never raised doubts about Mr. Obama?s religion. But a McCain commercial last month mimicked the words and imagery of the best-selling Christian ?Left Behind? book series in ways that would have set off alarm bells among evangelicals nervous about the Antichrist.

Mr. McCain himself is not popular with evangelicals. But they will vote for him if they think the other guy may be on Satan?s side.

In fact, of course, Mr. Obama took his oath on the Bible, not ? as the rumors have it ? on the Koran. He is far more active in church than John McCain is.

(Just imagine for a moment if it were the black candidate in this election, rather than the white candidate, who was born in Central America, was an indifferent churchgoer, had graduated near the bottom of his university class, had dumped his first wife, had regularly displayed an explosive and profane temper, and had referred to the Pakistani-Iraqi border ...)

What is happening, I think, is this: religious prejudice is becoming a proxy for racial prejudice. In public at least, it?s not acceptable to express reservations about a candidate?s skin color, so discomfort about race is sublimated into concerns about whether Mr. Obama is sufficiently Christian.

The result is this campaign to ?otherize? Mr. Obama. Nobody needs to point out that he is black, but there?s a persistent effort to exaggerate other differences, to de-Americanize him.

Raising doubts about a candidate based on the religion of his grandfather is toxic and profoundly un-American, cracking the melting pot we emerged from. Someday people will look back at the innuendoes about Mr. Obama with the same disgust with which we regard the smears of Al Smith as a Catholic candidate in 1928.

I?m writing in part out of a sense of personal responsibility. Those who suggest that Mr. Obama is a Muslim ? as if that in itself were wrong ? regularly cite my own columns, especially an interview last year in which I asked him about Islam and his boyhood in Indonesia. In that interview, Mr. Obama praised the Arabic call to prayer as ?one of the prettiest sounds on earth at sunset,? and he repeated the opening of it.

This should surprise no one: the call to prayer blasts from mosque loudspeakers five times a day, and Mr. Obama would have had to have been deaf not to learn the words as a child. But critics, like Jerome Corsi, whose book denouncing Mr. Obama, ?The Obama Nation,? is No. 2 on the New York Times best-seller list, quote from that column to argue that Mr. Obama has mysterious ties to Islam. I feel a particular obligation not to let my own writing be twisted so as to inflame bigotry and xenophobia.

Journalists need to do more than call the play-by-play this election cycle. We also need to blow the whistle on such egregious fouls calculated to undermine the political process and magnify the ugliest prejudices that our nation has done so much to overcome.

And seemingly everyone is so quick to disclaim and deny it (no matter how subtle or overt the comments) to the point that no one is a racist and it's just a figment of the imagination.

Presumably JAC meant the paradigmatic shift the party took after Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act and whites defected en masse. Look at this past convention. It didn't represent the America I know but rather some bygone era. and as BHO said, there are people (Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, Scarborough, Limbaugh) who have made their careers and built their fortunes on fomenting hate, division by denigrating blacks, Hispanics, gays, etc. in the process.


Republicans and Race
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Over the past few weeks there have been a number of commentaries about Ronald Reagan?s legacy, specifically about whether he exploited the white backlash against the civil rights movement.

The controversy unfortunately obscures the larger point, which should be undeniable: the central role of this backlash in the rise of the modern conservative movement.

The centrality of race ? and, in particular, of the switch of Southern whites from overwhelming support of Democrats to overwhelming support of Republicans ? is obvious from voting data.

For example, everyone knows that white men have turned away from the Democrats over God, guns, national security and so on. But what everyone knows isn?t true once you exclude the South from the picture. As the political scientist Larry Bartels points out, in the 1952 presidential election 40 percent of non-Southern white men voted Democratic; in 2004, that figure was virtually unchanged, at 39 percent.

More than 40 years have passed since the Voting Rights Act, which Reagan described in 1980 as ?humiliating to the South.? Yet Southern white voting behavior remains distinctive. Democrats decisively won the popular vote in last year?s House elections, but Southern whites voted Republican by almost two to one.

The G.O.P.?s own leaders admit that the great Southern white shift was the result of a deliberate political strategy. ?Some Republicans gave up on winning the African-American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization.? So declared Ken Mehlman, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, speaking in 2005.

And Ronald Reagan was among the ?some? who tried to benefit from racial polarization.

True, he never used explicit racial rhetoric. Neither did Richard Nixon. As Thomas and Mary Edsall put it in their classic 1991 book, ?Chain Reaction: The impact of race, rights and taxes on American politics,? ?Reagan paralleled Nixon?s success in constructing a politics and a strategy of governing that attacked policies targeted toward blacks and other minorities without reference to race ? a conservative politics that had the effect of polarizing the electorate along racial lines.?

Thus, Reagan repeatedly told the bogus story of the Cadillac-driving welfare queen ? a gross exaggeration of a minor case of welfare fraud. He never mentioned the woman?s race, but he didn?t have to.

There are many other examples of Reagan?s tacit race-baiting in the historical record. My colleague Bob Herbert described some of these examples in a recent column. Here?s one he didn?t mention: During the 1976 campaign Reagan often talked about how upset workers must be to see an able-bodied man using food stamps at the grocery store. In the South ? but not in the North ? the food-stamp user became a ?strapping young buck? buying T-bone steaks.

Now, about the Philadelphia story: in December 1979 the Republican national committeeman from Mississippi wrote a letter urging that the party?s nominee speak at the Neshoba Country Fair, just outside the town where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964. It would, he wrote, help win over ?George Wallace inclined voters.?

Sure enough, Reagan appeared, and declared his support for states? rights ? which everyone took to be a coded declaration of support for segregationist sentiments.

Reagan?s defenders protest furiously that he wasn?t personally bigoted. So what? We?re talking about his political strategy. His personal beliefs are irrelevant.

Why does this history matter now? Because it tells why the vision of a permanent conservative majority, so widely accepted a few years ago, is wrong.

The point is that we have become a more diverse and less racist country over time. The ?macaca? incident, in which Senator George Allen?s use of a racial insult led to his election defeat, epitomized the way in which America has changed for the better.

And because conservative ascendancy has depended so crucially on the racial backlash ? a close look at voting data shows that religion and ?values? issues have been far less important ? I believe that the declining power of that backlash changes everything.

Can anti-immigrant rhetoric replace old-fashioned racial politics? No, because it mobilizes the same shrinking pool of whites ? and alienates the growing number of Latino voters.

Now, maybe I?m wrong about all of this. But we should be able to discuss the role of race in American politics honestly. We shouldn?t avert our gaze because we?re unwilling to tarnish Ronald Reagan?s image.

He had the speech on race because of the brouhaha over Rev. Wright's 9/11 speech based on Ambassdor Peck's statements. Prior to that, he was a quasi Will Smith raceless character as he didn't want to make his race a crucial aspect to his candidacy (knowing the issue would eventually surface) whereas you are hellbent on positing that he somehow hates white people and inserting race as the issue. JAC is right, you and your party are morally bankrupt.

Why should whites trust him??? So because Michelle appears in a picture with the wife of the leader of NOI that makes her husband, by extension, hate whitey? What a baseless preposterous argument. If you're that dimwitted to actually believe this, it's only because you possibly feel that you or white people are deserving of such hate or retribution.

September 18, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Need a Job? $17,000 an Hour. No Success Required.
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Are you capable of taking a perfectly good 158-year-old company and turning it into dust? If so, then you may not be earning up to your full potential.

You should be raking it in like Richard Fuld, the longtime chief of Lehman Brothers. He took home nearly half-a-billion dollars in total compensation between 1993 and 2007.

Last year, Mr. Fuld earned about $45 million, according to the calculations of Equilar, an executive pay research company. That amounts to roughly $17,000 an hour to obliterate a firm. If you?re willing to drive a company into the ground for less, apply by calling Lehman Brothers at (212) 526-7000.

Oh, nevermind.

I?m delighted to announce that Mr. Fuld (who continues to lead Lehman since it entered bankruptcy proceedings this week) is the winner of my annual Michael Eisner Award for corporate rapacity and poor corporate governance. The award honors the pioneering achievements in this field of Mr. Eisner, the former Walt Disney chief.

This isn?t a plaque that will simply gather dust in a closet. It?s a shower curtain to commemorate the $6,000 one that the former C.E.O. of Tyco purchased and billed to his shareholders.

So, Mr. Fuld, you?ll be pleased to know that I?ve picked out a lovely green vinyl number for you. Only $14.99! Why, I saved you $5,985!

Perhaps it seems frivolous to be handing out shower curtains to chief executives when we?re caught in a deepening economic crisis. Well, it is.

But one of our broad national problems is rising inequality, and it is exacerbated by corporate executives helping themselves to shareholders? cash. Three decades ago, C.E.O.?s typically earned 30 to 40 times the income of ordinary workers. Last year, C.E.O.?s of large public companies averaged 344 times the average pay of workers.

John McCain seems to think that the problem is that C.E.O.?s are greedy. Well, of course, they are. We?re all greedy. The real failure is one of corporate governance, which provides only the flimsiest oversight to curb the greed of executives like Mr. Fuld.

?Compare the massive destruction of wealth for shareholders to what he gets at the end of the day,? said Lucian Bebchuk, the director of the corporate governance program at Harvard Law School. A central flaw of governance is that boards of directors frequently are ornamental and provide negligible oversight.

As Warren Buffett has said, ?in judging whether corporate America is serious about reforming itself, C.E.O. pay remains the acid test.? It?s a test that corporate America is failing.

These Brobdingnagian paychecks are partly the result of taxpayer subsidies. A study released a few weeks ago by the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington found five major elements in the tax code that encourage overpaying executives. These cost taxpayers more than $20 billion a year.

That?s enough money to deworm every child in the world, cut maternal mortality around the globe by two-thirds and also provide iodized salt to prevent tens of millions of children from suffering mild retardation or worse. Alternatively, it could pay for health care for most uninsured children in America.

Do we truly believe that C.E.O.?s like Mr. Fuld are more deserving of tax dollars than sick children?

Perhaps it?s understandable that C.E.O.?s are paid heroically when they succeed, but why pay prodigious sums when they fail? E. Stanley O?Neal, the former chief of Merrill Lynch, retired last year after driving the firm over a cliff, and he walked away with $161 million.

The problem isn?t precisely paychecks that are huge. Baseball stars, investment bankers and hedge fund managers all earn obscene sums, but honestly ? through arm?s-length transactions. You and I may gasp, but that?s the free market at work.

In contrast, boards pay C.E.O.?s after negotiations that are often more like pillow talk. Relationships are incestuous, and compensation consultants provide only a thin veneer of respectability by finding some ?peer group? of companies so moribund that anybody shines in comparison. The result is what critics call the Lake Wobegon effect, which miraculously leaves all C.E.O.?s above average. Indeed, one study of 1,500 companies found that two-thirds claimed to be outperforming their peer groups.

John Kenneth Galbraith, the great economist, once explained: ?The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself.?

There are widely discussed technical solutions to C.E.O.?s overpaying themselves that we should move toward. We can also learn from Britain and Australia, which offer shareholders more rights than in America, redrawing the balance between shareholders and management and curbing pay in the process.

As for Mr. Fuld, unfortunately, he had no comment for this column. At $17,000 an hour, it probably wasn?t worth his time.

SALON

Obama and the rules for Angry Black Men
Why does Barack Obama have to be Virgil Tibbs? Or Denzel Washington in "Crimson Tide"? Or any other angry black archetype?
By James Hannaham

Sep. 18, 2008 | By using the phrase "the angry left" in his speech to the Republican National Convention, George W. Bush pulled a classic bully move: provoke your opponent and then mock his rage. For if the left was merely irritated at the start of the last eight years, only W's puppet master, Vice President Dick Cheney, has done more to incite that anger -- or rather, to grind it, hone it, to plunge it headlong into a blazing kiln, to blast it through a Large Hadron Collider and create world-imploding black holes of fury. Republican presidential candidate John McCain has sucked up to the established kleptocracy, waging a Karl Rove-ish smear campaign, and cynically hired an ing?nue, Sarah Palin, as a running mate not only because she has a vagina but because she believes it should be strictly policed. The "angry left" has an OED-size book of good reasons to be wrathful where it concerns the Republican Party. So why won't Barack Obama channel the outrage surging through his constituency and explode in fire-and-brimstone oratory?

The conventional wisdom is that Obama isn't angry enough. After his speech at the Democratic convention, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann asks Obama, perhaps hopefully, "Have you thought about getting angrier?" Thomas L. Friedman, writing in the New York Times, implies that he wants to see more theater in Obama's oratory: "I thought his convention speech contained no memorable lines or uplifting visions. It never got me out of my seat." This sounds like someone complaining about the acting in a Wesley Snipes action film, not about the rhetoric of a presidential candidate. Friedman then implies that Americans respond best to the melodramatic package in which political ideas are sold, not the ideas themselves, and quotes Neil Oxman of political P.R. firm the Campaign Group, who conflates Sarah Palin's popularity with Roseanne Barr's. Will this campaign really come down to something as asinine as theatrics? In a close race, the answer can often be yes. There was something chilling in Walter Mondale's sadly resolute quip after losing the 1984 presidential election: "Modern politics today requires a mastery of television," he said. "I have never really warmed up to television and television has never warmed up to me."

Even Arianna Huffington, who 10 years ago considered herself a conservative, has found herself frustrated with Obama's unflappable demeanor. He has remained calm and collected, "professional" you might say, even when McCain accused him of promoting sex ed for kindergartners -- which is not that upsetting as a concept when you think about it; kids all want to know where babies come from. What's infuriating is that the ad represents the Republicans' roundabout way of implying that a vote for Obama might enable child molesters or cross some other undefined erotic line. "Now, as the crises facing our country intensify," Huffington writes, "and the campaign McCain is running becomes sleazier and more trivial, it's time for Obama to unleash his inner Atticus -- or at least the key element of Finch that Obama seems reluctant to embrace: righteous rage." By Atticus, Huffington means Atticus Finch, the determined lawyer from Harper Lee's novel "To Kill a Mockingbird" who risks his status and possibly his life to defend a black man accused of raping a white woman in mid-20th-century Alabama. Huffington's analogy begins with the obliquely racialized "Mockingbird" -- Gregory Peck plays Finch in the film version -- then goes overboard when she includes a cinematic montage of articulate black rage to illustrate the sort of indignation she demands of Obama: Denzel Washington vs. Gene Hackman in "Crimson Tide," Morgan Freeman in "Lean on Me," Don Cheadle in "Hotel Rwanda," and last but not least, "In the Heat of the Night's" Sidney Poitier defiantly asserting the respect he gets at home: "They call me Mr. Tibbs!"

Where to begin? There's something off-putting about choosing to demonstrate this point with exclusively black heroes -- and fictional ones, at that. No Thurgood Marshall? No MLK? Huh? Furthermore, rage has no color, especially not in an election like this, and after the hell Obama caught for refusing to renounce the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, why would he then do an impersonation of the guy? While different from the "angry black man," the "righteous black hero" is just as much a stereotype, a flat character created to promote the fantasy that oppression naturally generates moral fiber -- that is, the diamond formed by pressure, the rose that grows up through concrete. Morgan Freeman owes his fortune to playing roles that "reverse" our expectations about the status of black men in America -- God in "Bruce Almighty," and tellingly, in 1998's "Deep Impact," President Tom Beck. Like the words "articulate" and "clean" in the mouth of Joe Biden so many forgivenesses ago, or the big dick thing, it's a positive archetype, and therefore less likely to start fights. But it nevertheless diminishes a group of complicated people to a single mode of expression.

The media's in danger of falling into what I can only describe as a "take me, Mandingo!" mentality where it concerns Obama's anger. When you are a black man, many people (even other black men, and especially strangers) tend to react to your physical presence as if you are "a black man," whatever that happens to mean to them at the time. Sometimes these people indulge their obtuse assumptions in the face of hard evidence: No, I don't play basketball. The facts ought to be enough to limit these people's attempts to make themselves more comfortable by presuming that you conform to their expectations. But some bias seems hard-wired; it persists beyond logic. Old ladies may clutch their handbags, cross the street when walking in front of you, policemen may search your trunk on a routine stop, etc. It doesn't matter if you're Biggie Smalls or Urkel.

To say the least, suggestions like Huffington's and Friedman's promote a Hollywood notion of how black men should react to injustice. We think that it's fine to wonder why Obama refuses to conform to some cinematic dream of noble negritude. The eye-opener is that these kinds of expectations aren't even evidence of racism as much as generic prejudice -- women, white men, Asians, everybody has to face similar assumptions. The implications can be particularly dire for women and people of color, though, because the prejudicial beliefs tend toward viciousness: she's a whore, he's going to carjack me. So Obama is damned if he performs his black anger too fiercely -- that would give biased people the impression that he's an "angry black man" or worse, an extremist, and therefore unelectable. But now he has to face criticism from the left because he's not performing his anger -- a specifically black, unreal variety of anger, remember -- in the correct measure.

Like a lot of people, I too would like to see Obama draw more definite lines in the sand, or to see someone take the Republicans to task for their misdeeds without backing down or qualifying their statements with one of those they-must-love-their-children-too type concessions. But I have no desire to see Obama's revenge take the form of a snitty Mr. Tibbs or a Morgan Freeman hero. Obama clearly has his own style; we ought to see his intelligent use of understatement as a strength. Isn't his call for "enough" enough?

yeah and Sarah wants to take them off the endangered species list. Whatever.

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/200 ... ng-may-have-led-it-there/

Mmm Flame, Word word. where's the JC Spoken Word/ Gil Scott Heron "Revolution Will Not Be Televised" boite where I can sip my vodka tonic, don my shades and snap my fingers in agreement and channel my modern day beatnik sensibilities? Perhaps my house.

Okay, not trying to be Debbie Downer or anything, but doesn't it seem like a fin de si?cle moment of the United States where we're fed a surfeit of Gossip Girl, Privileged, Laguna Beach, New 90210, The Hills, MTV Sweet Sixteen, the "reality" shows of the rich celebrity families (and other similar programming) juxtaposed with serious economic turmoil that shows no signs of abating, a calamitous war, nation's infrastructure crumbling, unprecedented deficits, global warming/environmental devastation (e.g., the polar bear who swam to Iceland because of lack of ice caps to float on only to be killed). It feels like the Titantic when people were listening to the big band music.

An anxious commute for Merrill Lynch and Lehman workers
by Beth Fitzgerald/The Star-Ledger
Monday September 15, 2008, 9:23 AM
Workers for Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch filed grimly into work along the Jersey City waterfront this morning, waiting for word on their fate.

"The mood is uncertainty, really," said Meredith Lifrieri, an assistant vice president in product development for Lehman, as she headed to her office on Hudson Street. "I'm waiting to see if I still have a job."


Robert Sciarrino/The Star-Ledger
An employee of Merrill Lynch touches the company name plate as he arrives at the Jersey City offices at 15 Exchange Plaza.


Lifrieri, who is 25 and lives in Cranford, said she wasn't sure where she would look if she was let go by the firm, where she's worked the past three years.

"Well, maybe not in finance," she said. "Maybe in some other industry. We'll see."

Wall Street was rocked by a double shot of bad news Sunday, when Lehman Brothers announced plans to file for bankruptcy and Merrill Lynch said it would sell itself to Bank of America. In addition, the insurer AIG is scrambling for capital to avoid a devastating credit rating downgrade.

Jersey City is heavily dependent on the financial industry, with many of the towers that loom over the Hudson River filled with satellite operations for the nation's largest investment firms. As PATH trains disgorged commuters at Exchange Place before the market's opening bell, there was a distinct air of unease.

"I'm anxious, but hoping for the best," said Arti Dua, a relationship manager for Merrill Lynch. "I'm trying to keep a positive outlook."

One woman, who declined to give her name but works in Lehman's legal department, said she thought the investment house's situation may not be as dire as it seems from the outside.

"I don't think they'll just let the firm close," she said. "I'm looking for a brighter day."

Others were less optimistic about the toll the mortgage crisis has taken. Referring to Lehman Chief Executive Richard Fuld, another employee said: "Dick has survived so much before this, he's a never-give-up guy. That's probably his Achilles' heel. He probably should have seen the light earlier."

The "Bubbas" who Dick Armey mentioned, the pitbull Hockey Moms, and all these other small town folks are in love with Sarah simply because they literally see themselves in her whereas BHO (the exotic name, the color, the perceived religion, the Ivy League pedigree, the globetrotting upbringing and Cosby show wife and kids) is alien to them. Who cares if Sarah doesn't know what the Bush Doctrine is, at least she has heart and conviction and is ardent in her belief that Americans are always right and proud. Moreover, BHO is emblematic of our ever changing world and a harbinger of demographic shifts in America in the years to come and that scares them to death. If McCain wins, I wonder if they will be happy with their decision when he starts sending more of their kids, relatives off to this war and they lose further ground in these perilous economic times becoming more mired in debt. They can at least joyously resound that their VP knows how to dress a moose, isn't elitist, fears God and that they may have won the cultural war (gays, guns, god, etc.) against the left - but at what expense?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/opinion/14rich.html?em