sexta-feira, 4 de julho de 2008
quinta-feira, 3 de julho de 2008
Racism or "cross-cultural gap issue"?
Argentines call Brazil the "monkey country" ("país de los monos") because large numbers of its people are of African descent. Men in gorilla suits have long served as metaphors for blacks in Brazil. In other words, the pejorative association of blacks, Africans and simians is known and recognised in South America, as well as in other Western regions and countries - including, of course, the United States. So when a Japanese company put a monkey in a podium, apparently imitating Barack Obama in a TV advert, many Westerners were shocked. But here's the thing - monkeys have an entirely different meaning in Japan - a very positive image, in fact - and the macaque is the company's mascot! However, as the Guardian points out, this isn't the first time a simian simile has been used in regard to blacks in Japan.
At any rate, the advert has been pulled, and now Japan can go back to its previous warm and fuzzy image of rooting for Barack in the town of Obama.
Read more about it here and here
Mighty Sparrow backs Obama
From The Mighty Sparrow website:Newspaper: Newsday
Date: Monday, September 3, 2007
Page#: 20
Brooklyn: “The respect of the world, which we now lack, if you want it back, then vote Barack,” proclaims the musical wordsmith, The Mighty Sparrow - Calypso King of the World, who on Wednesday, August 22, 2007 endorsed presidential candidate Barack Obama in Brooklyn. The endorsement was given at a brief exclusive meeting held at the Marriott Hotel at the Brooklyn Bridge.
During the backstage meeting, which was also attended by publisher and attorney Brian Figeroux, community activist Gerry Hopkins, political organizer Jordan Thomas, and Caribbean immigrant Derek Webster, The Mighty Sparrow also presented Sen. Obama with a CD of a calypso which he composed and recorded as a tribute to Obama.
The song gives an exposé which takes the listener through Barack’s humble beginnings and his rise to the top. The sharp lyrics, which are skillfully interwoven with a rhythmic Caribbean melody, present Barack as a true family man, capable intellectual, effective grassroots leader and legislator, and a progressive Presidential candidate with a solid agenda for real comprehensive reforms in education, healthcare, economic development, and foreign policy.
With respect to the issue of whether or not Obama is ready to govern the United States, Sparrow observes, “Were we ready for 400 years of slavery? Based on what I have heard, read and researched, I am very impressed by the resplendent vision of Obama. He is resilient and wise. It is easy to equate him to Solomon."
In more ways than one, Sparrow’s calypso captures the sentiment of most Caribbean-Americans interviewed by CAW for this story. And like The Mighty Sparrow, who is of Grenadian/Trinidadian origin, most of those interviewed about their opinions of Barack, believe that he stands out as a well-qualified candidate.
“Barack! Barack! He is fighting for openness and honesty in government. Barack – is doggedly defiant; phenomenal strength; and wisdom beyond comment,” Sparrow sings in the chorus.
The calypso single, titled Barack the Magnificent, is not yet available in record stores.Patriotism and the rumour mill
Thursday 03 July 2008
by: Michael Winship, t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Presidential candidate Barack Obama is fighting back against those who question his patriotism. (Photo: Reuters)
At the beginning of the week, a friend sent me a scurrilous, anonymous e-mail attacking Barack Obama that has been circulating around her elderly cousin's Jewish senior living community in New Jersey. Headlined "Something to Think About," it lists 13 acts of assassination, kidnapping, war and terrorism, all of which, it notes, were committed "by Muslim male extremists between the ages of 17 and 40."
After several other claims, including a bogus citation from the Book of Revelation, the e-mail concludes, semi-literately, "For the award winning Act of Stupidity Now ... the People of America want to elect, to the most Powerful position on the face of the Planet - The Presidency of the United States of America to A Muslim Male Between the ages of 17 and 40? Have the American People completely lost their Minds, or just their power of reason? I'm sorry but I refuse to take a chance on the 'unknown' candidate Obama."
To point out the obvious errors, that Barack Obama's a Christian, not Muslim, and that he's 46, not "between the ages of 17 and 40," feels a bit lame, like damning with faint fact-checking. Let's call this appalling missive what it is - bigoted, hysterical and more than a little nuts. Unless, of course, it comes from the hands not of a mere delusional crank, but one of those beneath-the-radar smear forces that we all know are out there, ratcheting into higher and higher gear as November gets closer.
E-mails such as the one my friend passed along are insidious, appealing to our deepest fears and prejudices. A front-page story in Monday's Washington Post profiled retired worker Jim Peterman of Findlay, Ohio. He's a decent guy who "believes a smart vote is an American's greatest responsibility," the Post's Eli Salsow wrote. "Which is why his confusion about Barack Obama continues to eat at him ...
"Does he trust a local newspaper article that details Obama's Christian faith? Or his friend Leroy Pollard, a devoted family man so convinced Obama is a radical Muslim that he threatened to stop talking to his daughter when he heard she might vote for him?
"'I'll admit that I probably don't follow all of the election news like maybe I should,' Peterman said. 'I haven't read his books or studied up more than a little bit. But it's hard to ignore what you hear when everybody you know is saying it. These are good people, smart people, so can they really all be wrong?'"
So it goes across the nation. Chances are, many of the perpetrators of this nonsense think they're being patriots, saving us from Obama and ourselves. And goodness knows, there's a long history of this kind of guttersnipery in American politics. As Obama pointed out in his Monday speech on the nature of patriotism, "Thomas Jefferson was accused by the Federalists of selling out to the French. The anti-Federalists were just as convinced that John Adams was in cahoots with the British and intent on restoring monarchal rule ... the use of patriotism as a political sword or a political shield is as old as the Republic."
Details of Obama's speech got buried in the wake of General Wesley Clark's politically lunkheaded comment about John McCain that, "I don't think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to become president." But over the Fourth of July weekend, it might be appropriate and enlightening to take a few minutes to read or watch the whole thing.
It's a good speech. The senator talks about American history and his own patriotism, about the need for service and sacrifice. "For those who have fought under the flag of this nation," he said, "for the young veterans I meet when I visit Walter Reed; for those like John McCain who have endured physical torment in service to our country - no further proof of such sacrifice is necessary. And let me also add that no one should ever devalue that service, especially for the sake of a political campaign, and that goes for supporters on both sides."
And this: "I believe those who attack America's flaws without acknowledging the singular greatness of our ideals, and their proven capacity to inspire a better world, do not truly understand America.... But when our laws, our leaders or our government are out of alignment with our ideals, then the dissent of ordinary Americans may prove to be one of the truest expressions of patriotism."
Which brings me to what I think was an unusual and especially fine expression of American patriotism. It's the June 19 closing argument of Air Force Reserve Maj. David J.R. Frakt, arguing for the dismissal of charges against Mohammed Jawad, a young detainee at Guantanamo, charged with throwing a hand grenade that wounded two GI's and their interpreter in Afghanistan. Frakt argued that Jawad should be released because sleep deprivation - two weeks' worth - was used to torture him. You can read it on the web site of the ACLU.
Frakt stood before the military commission upholding the inviolability of the American principle of due process, even for an alleged enemy of the United States. "Under the Constitution all men are created equal, and all are entitled to be treated with dignity," he said. "No one is 'undeserving' of humane treatment. It is an unmistakable lesson of history that when one group of people starts to see another group of people as 'other' or as 'different,' as 'undeserving,' as 'inferior,' ill treatment inevitably follows ...
"After six and a half years, we now know the truth about the detainees at Guantanamo: some of them are terrorists, some of them are foot soldiers, and some of them were just innocent people, caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. But the detainees at Guantanamo have one thing in common - with each other, and with us - they are all human beings, and they are all worthy of humane treatment."
Thus, in the face of adverse public opinion and White House opposition, Frakt bravely defended a constitutional principle as all-encompassing, including under its protections even those who might seek to destroy us and the very constitutional principles for which we stand. In fact, he said, "It is a testament to the continuing greatness of this nation, that I, a lowly Air Force Reserve major, can stand here before you today, with the world watching, without fear of retribution, retaliation or reprisal, and speak truth to power. I can call a spade a spade, and I can call torture, torture."
To me, that makes Maj. David Frakt a patriot and this a great country. Happy Fourth of July.
quarta-feira, 2 de julho de 2008
Clinton attacks against Obama vanish on Web
They say politics makes strange bedfellows...Ads show only positive images
Washington TimesChristina Bellantoni (Contact)
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has scrubbed all negative ads from her campaign Web site and YouTube page, leaving visitors with only the warm and fuzzy moments from her bid for the presidency.
Gone are the attack ads accusing Sen. Barack Obama of insulting Pennsylvanians, ducking debates and making misleading assertions about gas prices. In their place are some of the campaign's best and most positive ads and multiple "Hillary I Know" testimonials that have a shelf life should the former first lady ever run again.
The whitewashing took place quietly in the past few days as Mr. Obama cut his former rival a check to help relieve her campaign debt and as the Clinton family moved to fully embrace Mr. Obama as the presumptive Democratic nominee.
"She's no longer campaigning for president," said Clinton spokesman Mo Elleithee. "She's focused on her work in the Senate, campaigning for Senator Obama and other Democrats."
Mr. Elleithee said the videos probably are archived.
Also missing are the dozens of speeches and hundreds of press releases running back to Mrs. Clinton's January 2007 campaign announcement. Many offered reporters details about important endorsements or the scripts of TV ads, but dozens were dedicated to countering the senator from Illinois.
"Misleading attack: Sen. Obama flubs in Ohio," one release read. Another blared, in capital letters, "NAFTA-gate: False denials from the Obama campaign."
Also gone are campaign memos, such as Mark Penn's Feb. 2 "Hillary is the Democrat to beat McCain," or the May 19 missive by Clinton communications director Howard Wolfson complaining that Mr. Obama was about to declare that he had won a majority of delegates: "Mission Accomplished? Not so fast."
The only releases left at HillaryClinton.com are a statement about the death of NBC's Tim Russert and the text of Mrs. Clinton's June 9 speech suspending her campaign after Mr. Obama earned enough delegates to lock up the nomination.
The separate "Fact Hub" Web site that rebuked the Obama campaign has gone dead, along with "Attack Timeline" that detailed every nasty remark by Mr. Obama or his surrogates during the long primary battle.
By contrast, the Obama Fact Check page on his campaign site still offers rebuttals to Clinton attacks dating back to its creation in fall 2007.
HillaryHub, a site showcasing positive press coverage, also has been removed.
The Hillary TV page that once featured fundraising appeals and dozens of ads — including those with Bill Clinton on a treadmill and the former first couple in a "Sopranos" spoof — now offers just five videos.
In one, she heartily endorses Mr. Obama's candidacy. In another, she thanks supporters and tells them, "I could not have made this part of the journey without you."
The site still has her Pennsylvania spot titled "Scranton," which features black and white photos of Mrs. Clinton as a girl, and the "Dreams" ad in which the senator from New York shows photographs of her parents, talks about the values they instilled in her and promises, "I carry with me not just their dreams but the dreams of people like them all across our country."
The final video shows Mrs. Clinton and former President Bill Clinton meeting the campaign's 1 millionth supporter.
Several upbeat videos also have vanished from the site and YouTube page.
Voters trying to view the Chelsea Clinton Mother's Day tribute are directed to an error page that informs them: "We've recently updated our site and we welcome you to explore the new content from the navigation above."
Although cleaning up a campaign site for the sake of party unity isn't unusual, the YouTube scrubbing is. Other failed White House hopefuls have left their free campaign "channels" — created before last summer's YouTube debates — intact, and ads for Republican Fred Thompson and Democrat Joseph R. Biden Jr. are still posted.
But the Clinton YouTube page is missing hundreds of videos, positive and negative alike. Her victory speeches, a showcase of enthusiastic young volunteers and her pledges to keep fighting through the primary season are history.
Yet nothing is ever truly gone in the YouTube age because Internet surfers have spliced, diced and saved every campaign ad of the cycle. Cable networks still can replay the ads, but any blogger who tries to link to the Clinton versions will get an error message: "We're sorry, this video is no longer available."
Still intact on the Hillary Hub YouTube page are remnants of some of the nastier moments of the campaign, including Mr. Wolfson's insistence that he would not accept Mr. Obama's delegate math unless the Florida and Michigan votes were fully counted, and a Clinton surrogate in North Carolina responding to Mr. Obama's comments about "bitter" rural Americans.
Also on that page is a clip called, "Confronted w/ facts Obama experiences technical difficulties," that shows a news report critical of Mr. Obama on the health care issue.
The HillaryClinton.com page is no longer funded by the presidential campaign, and a new disclaimer notes that "Friends of Hillary," Mrs. Clinton's Senate re-election committee, is paying for the site. She is not up for re-election until 2012.
Mrs. Clinton will be fundraising for Democratic candidates until the November election using her HillPAC political action committee. Its Web site, HillPac.com, was reactivated this week.
The Obama Agenda
by: Paul Krugman, The New York Times
Paul Krugman compares policies of Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
It's feeling a lot like 1992 right now. It's also feeling a lot like 1980. But which parallel is closer? Is Barack Obama going to be a Ronald Reagan of the left, a president who fundamentally changes the country's direction? Or will he be just another Bill Clinton? Current polls - not horse-race polls, which are notoriously uninformative until later in the campaign, but polls gauging the public mood - are strikingly similar to those in both 1980 and 1992, years in which an overwhelming majority of Americans were dissatisfied with the country's direction.
So the odds are that this will be a "change" election - which means that it's very much Mr. Obama's election to lose. But if he wins, how much change will he actually deliver?
Reagan, for better or worse - I'd say for worse, but that's another discussion - brought a lot of change. He ran as an unabashed conservative, with a clear ideological agenda. And he had enormous success in getting that agenda implemented. He had his failures, most notably on Social Security, which he tried to dismantle but ended up strengthening. But America at the end of the Reagan years was not the same country it was when he took office.
Bill Clinton also ran as a candidate of change, but it was much less clear what kind of change he was offering. He portrayed himself as someone who transcended the traditional liberal-conservative divide, proposing "a government that offers more empowerment and less entitlement." The economic plan he announced during the campaign was something of a hodgepodge: higher taxes on the rich, lower taxes for the middle class, public investment in things like high-speed rail, health care reform without specifics.
We all know what happened next. The Clinton administration achieved a number of significant successes, from the revitalization of veterans' health care and federal emergency management to the expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit and health insurance for children. But the big picture is summed up by the title of a new book by the historian Sean Wilentz: "The Age of Reagan: A history, 1974-2008."
So whom does Mr. Obama resemble more? At this point, he's definitely looking Clintonesque.
Like Mr. Clinton, Mr. Obama portrays himself as transcending traditional divides. Near the end of last week's "unity" event with Hillary Clinton, he declared that "the choice in this election is not between left or right, it's not between liberal or conservative, it's between the past and the future." Oh-kay.
Mr. Obama's economic plan also looks remarkably like the Clinton 1992 plan: a mixture of higher taxes on the rich, tax breaks for the middle class and public investment (this time with a focus on alternative energy).
Sometimes the Clinton-Obama echoes are almost scary. During his speech accepting the nomination, Mr. Clinton led the audience in a chant of "We can do it!" Remind you of anything?
Just to be clear, we could - and still might - do a lot worse than a rerun of the Clinton years. But Mr. Obama's most fervent supporters expect much more.
Progressive activists, in particular, overwhelmingly supported Mr. Obama during the Democratic primary even though his policy positions, particularly on health care, were often to the right of his rivals'. In effect, they convinced themselves that he was a transformational figure behind a centrist facade.
They may have had it backward.
Mr. Obama looks even more centrist now than he did before wrapping up the nomination. Most notably, he has outraged many progressives by supporting a wiretapping bill that, among other things, grants immunity to telecom companies for any illegal acts they may have undertaken at the Bush administration's behest.
The candidate's defenders argue that he's just being pragmatic - that he needs to do whatever it takes to win, and win big, so that he has the power to effect major change. But critics argue that by engaging in the same "triangulation and poll-driven politics" he denounced during the primary, Mr. Obama actually hurts his election prospects, because voters prefer candidates who take firm stands.
In any case, what about after the election? The Reagan-Clinton comparison suggests that a candidate who runs on a clear agenda is more likely to achieve fundamental change than a candidate who runs on the promise of change but isn't too clear about what that change would involve.
Of course, there's always the possibility that Mr. Obama really is a centrist, after all.
One thing is clear: for Democrats, winning this election should be the easy part. Everything is going their way: sky-high gas prices, a weak economy and a deeply unpopular president. The real question is whether they will take advantage of this once-in-a-generation chance to change the country's direction. And that's mainly up to Mr. Obama.
terça-feira, 1 de julho de 2008
Critics of Obama's "flip-flop" on campaign financing take heed: does the NRA's $40M fall into the Republican campaign budget? I think not!
NRA plans $40M fall blitz targeting Obama
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The National Rifle Association plans to spend about $40 million on this year’s campaign, with $15 million of that devoted to portraying Barack Obama as a threat to the Second Amendment rights upheld last week by the Supreme Court.
“Our members understand that if Barack Obama is elected president, and he has support in the Senate to confirm anti-gun Supreme Court nominees, [the District of Columbia v. Heller decision] could be taken away from us in the future,” Chris Cox, head of the NRA’s political arm, told Politico.
The politically powerful gun rights group will split its message efforts between communicating with its 4 million members and the tens of millions more firearms owners across the country.
This fall, NRA members will get automated phone calls, mail pieces and pre-election editions of the group’s three magazines making the case against Obama. More broadly, the group will use an independent expenditure effort to hammer the Democratic nominee via TV, radio and newspaper ads in some of about 15 battleground states in the Midwest and Mountain West.
“We look forward to showing him ‘bitter,’” Cox said, referring to Obama’s statement this spring that some in rural America “cling” to guns and religion out of bitterness.
