Elena Kagan, President Obama, and the Dire Necessity of Integrity and Vision on the Supreme Court

Washington -- President Barack Obama has nominated Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, saying she will demonstrate independence, integrity and passion for the law.

If confirmed by the Senate, Kagan will become the third woman on the high court. Obama introduced her today in the White House's East Room. He called her "my friend" and one of the nation's foremost legal minds.

The selection of Kagan came after nearly a monthlong process of consideration. Obama always had Kagan on his short list but still considered a broader group of candidates, interviewing four.

The president informed Kagan that she would a Supreme Court nominee on Sunday night. He then called the three federal judges he did not choose for the position, Diane Wood, Merrick Garland and Sidney Thomas.

Never a judge, Kagan is known as sharp and politically savvy and has enjoyed a blazing legal career. She was the first female dean of Harvard Law School, first woman to serve as the top Supreme Court lawyer for any administration, and now first in Obama's mind to succeed legendary liberal Justice John Paul Stevens.

At 50 years old, Kagan would be the youngest justice on the court, which would give her the opportunity to extend Obama's legacy for a generation.

Kagan must first win Senate confirmation. A source close to the selection process said a central element in Obama's choice was Kagan's reputation for bringing together people of competing views and earning their respect.

Republicans have shown no signs in advance that they would try to prevent a vote on Kagan, but they are certain to grill her in confirmation hearings over her experience, her thin record of legal writings and her objections to the military's policy about gays.
When she was confirmed as solicitor general in 2009, seven Republicans backed her: Sens. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, Susan Collins of Maine, Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, Orrin Hatch of Utah, Jon Kyl of Arizona, Richard Lugar of Indiana and Olympia Snowe of Maine.

Kagan came to the fore as a candidate who had worked closely with all three branches of government, a legal mind with both a sense of modesty and sense of humor. The source spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss factors that led to Kagan's impending nomination.

Kagan has clerked for Thurgood Marshall, worked for Bill Clinton and earned a stellar reputation as a student, teacher and manager of the elite academic world. Her standing has risen in Obama's eyes as his government's lawyer before the high court over the last year.

Yet Kagan would be the first justice without judicial experience in almost 40 years. The last two were William H. Rehnquist and Lewis F. Powell Jr., both of whom joined the court in 1972.

All of the three other finalists she beat out for the job are federal appeals court judges, and all nine of the current justices served on the federal bench before being elevated.
Kagan's fate will be up to a Senate dominated by Democrats, who with 59 votes have more than enough to confirm her, even though they are one shy of being able to halt any Republican stalling effort.

For the second straight summer, the nation can expected an intense Supreme Court confirmation debate even though, barring a surprise, Kagan is likely to emerge as a justice.

Supreme Court justices wield enormous power over the daily life of Americans. Any one of them can cast the deciding vote on matters of life and death, individual freedoms and government power. Presidents serve four-year terms; justices have tenure for life.

Democrats went 15 years without a Supreme Court appointment until Obama chose federal appellate judge Sonia Sotomayor last year to succeed retiring Justice David Souter. Just 16 months in office, Obama has a second opportunity with Kagan, under different circumstances.

Obama's decision last year centered much on the compelling narrative of Sotomayor, the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice, who grew up in a housing project and overcame hardship.

This year, Obama particularly wanted someone who could provide leadership and help sway fellow justices toward a majority opinion. The president has grown vocal in his concern that the conservative-tilting court is giving too little voice to average people.

Kagan is known for having won over liberal and conservative faculty at the difficult-to-unite Harvard Law School, where she served as dean for nearly six years.

Her background, including time as a lawyer and a key domestic policy aide in President Clinton's White House, would give the court a different perspective.

The White House is expected to frame Kagan's lack of service as a judge in upbeat terms, underscoring that there are many qualified routes to the top of the judiciary.

Kagan, who is unmarried, was born in New York City. She holds a bachelor's degree from Princeton, a master's degree from Oxford and a law degree from Harvard.

She served as a Supreme Court clerk for one of her legal heroes, Justice Thurgood Marshall. And before that, she clerked for federal appeals court judge Abner Mikva, who later became an important political mentor to Obama in Chicago.

Kagan and Obama both taught at the University of Chicago Law School in the early 1990s.

In her current job, Kagan represents the U.S. government and defends acts of Congress before the Supreme Court and decides when to appeal lower court rulings.
Kagan has the high task of following Stevens, who leaves a legacy that includes the preservation of abortion rights, protection of consumer rights and limits on the death penalty and executive power. He used his seniority and his smarts to form majority votes.

Rick Garnett, a professor of law and associate dean of University of Notre Dame Law School, voiced the concern of many conservatives.

"Future elections might undo some of the president's policies, but his more liberal views about the Constitution, the powers of the national government, and the role of unelected federal judges, are now being locked in securely," Garnett said in a statement.

Kagan would be the fourth woman to serve on the Supreme Court, following current Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor and retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.

She would be the third Jewish justice along with six Catholics. With Stevens' retirement, the court will have no Protestants, the most prevalent denomination in the United States.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/14/us/politics/14diversity.html?nl=us&emc=politicsemailema1

All,

Whoa folks...WAIT a damn minute here...let me get this straight: Does Obama and the African American supporters of Ms. Kagan who "just happen to be" some of the President's oldest black friends and colleagues at Harvard Law School (like Professor Charles Ogletree who taught Obama at the Law School during his time there as a student in the late 1980s) really, seriously think that they can get away with their strong and emphatic endorsements of Kagan's clearly abysmal record of hiring African American law professors for tenured positions at Harvard Law just because the President likes her and she too is a longtime friend and colleague of his? This position is absolutely bogus and quite absurd on its face. Kagan is on record of hiring ZERO African Americans (as well as Latinos) while Dean of Harvard Law School during her tenure there out of 32(!) positions. Nor did she hire any blacks of Latinos in her position of Solicitor General which she was selected for by Obama last year. NONE, NADA, ZILCH..C'mon! Let's get real--these numbers are atrocious and frankly indefensible. The President, his black cronies and associates at the Law School, and others who support her in her nomination for the Supreme court must be JOKING if they actually think this record is in any way acceptable. What kind of ludicrous standard for "diversity" is this? If a Republican or southern democratic nominee had this kind of insulting record of (not) hiring African Americans and Latinos at Harvard Law would we give that person a pass the way that the President and her personal friends are asking/demanding that we do on Kagan's behalf? Would this record be considered OK and worthy of support by Professors Ogletree and Kennedy? OF COURSE NOT! In fact they and Obama would be the first to publicly and quite justifiably raise very serious questions and objections if this were the case. So let's not play stupid little games here and give Ms. Kagan, the President, and their supporters at Harvard Law School a pass for pretending that this is fine just because the President is her personal friend...Nah... No way! That would not only be intellectually and morally dishonest but very irresponsible to say the least. Ms. Kagan and the President must be held publicly accountable for this serious problem and critical questions should and must be raised about this with regard to her general nomination, Merely refusing an endowed chair tainted with the blood money of slavery and taking one instead with the great Charles Hamilton Houston's name on it (the legendary Houston was Thurgood Marshall's mentor at Howard University and in his general legal career during the the 1930s and '40s) is simply not enough by a long shot.. Like both Houston and Marshall did during their extraordinary careers as courageous and stalwart legal protectors of social and economic justice Ms. Kagan AND President Obama must PUT UP OR SHUT UP on these crucial matters of genuine public diversity and equal employment opportunities for African Americans and Latinos in our higher education institutions and professions. In other words: NO ONE GETS A PASS ON THAT-- not even the President and a Supreme Court nominee. The ball (and the fate of the Supreme Court) is now in their hands...I sincerely hope they don't blow it...

Kofi



Nominee Scrutinized for Hiring on Race

By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
May 13, 2010
New York Times

BOSTON — When Elena Kagan became dean of Harvard Law School in 2003, she could have taken the endowed chair named for Isaac Royall Jr. The Royall family had donated more than 2,100 acres to Harvard in the 1700s, but the family had earned its fortune on the backs of the slave trade.

Ms. Kagan declined to take the Royall professorship. Instead, she chose a new chair in the name of Charles Hamilton Houston, the first African-American on the Harvard Law Review and a crusader against Jim Crow laws.

Ms. Kagan’s history on race issues at Harvard has come under scrutiny since President Obama nominated her to the Supreme Court on Monday. Critics say that she did not create enough racial diversity at Harvard, and that in the absence of any writings or opinions, her hiring practices serve as a clue to her thinking. Her supporters counter that she demonstrated a commitment to equality; her claiming the chair in the name of Mr. Houston, they said, is but one example.

In the nearly six years that Ms. Kagan was dean, from 2003 to 2009, she hired a total of 43 permanent, full-time faculty members, 32 of whom were tenured and tenured-track. Of those, 25 were white men, 6 were white women and one was an Asian-American woman. Of the other 11, 6 were white men, 2 were women and 3 were minority men (2 black and one Indian), according to a law school official.

Law school officials said the numbers did not reflect the whole story because offers were made to other minority and women scholars; some were declined and some still open. But others said the record spoke for itself.

“Kagan’s performance as dean at Harvard raises doubts about her commitment to equality for traditionally disadvantaged groups,” Guy-Uriel Charles, a black law professor at Duke, wrote last month in an oft-cited post.

During roughly the same period that Ms. Kagan was at Harvard, Mr. Charles wrote, Yale Law School hired just 10 faculty members; 5 were women, and only one was a minority.

Ms. Kagan’s track record on diversity improved during the last year when she became solicitor general. In that office, she has hired six people — three women and three men (one white, one Asian and one Indian).

Lester K. Spence, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, wrote on theroot.com, a Web site devoted to black issues, that Ms. Kagan appeared to be more concerned with ideological diversity than with diversity of race or gender.

“President Obama wants us to support his choice not because she’s got a strong record, not even because she has a particularly visible record, but because he knows her,” Mr. Spence wrote. “I’m not buying it,” he added. “And even if Kagan ends up being the best justice this side of Thurgood Marshall, you shouldn’t either.”

After it was clear that Mr. Obama, the first black president, would nominate Ms. Kagan, several black women wrote to him saying they were disappointed that he had not nominated a black woman.

The women, who included Melanie Campbell of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, also said they wanted to learn more about Ms. Kagan’s record on civil rights.

The administration has been pushing back against any suggestion that Ms. Kagan has been insensitive on racial matters, as have some of her black supporters.

Ronald S. Sullivan, a black law professor whom Ms. Kagan recruited to Harvard, wrote on thegrio.com, another site devoted to black issues, that “no elite law school has done enough” with respect to minority hiring. But, he noted, her spurning of the Royall chair “was a significant statement made by the dean of one of the nation’s top law schools.“

And, he said, Ms. Kagan had expanded the clinical teaching program at Harvard so that “thousands of indigent and under-represented citizens received quality legal services that they otherwise would not have been able to afford.”

Randall L. Kennedy, another black professor at Harvard Law, also strongly defended Ms. Kagan’s hiring practices. He said in an article in The Huffington Post that no dean was solely responsible for hiring faculty, with each one requiring a majority if not a supermajority of votes. This, he said, gets to be a complicated proposition.

Still, he said, Ms. Kagan supported programs that have helped advance minorities, and she helped form a committee to identify promising racial minority candidates.

While she was dean, an average of about 30 percent of the entering classes were minorities, up from about 25 percent in the previous six years, according to a Harvard official.

One of Ms. Kagan’s strongest backers has been Charles J. Ogletree Jr., perhaps the most prominent black law professor at Harvard. He has noted in interviews and articles that she has been supportive of men and women of color among both students and faculty.

“If you look at her whole record, ” Mr. Ogletree said in an interview on Thursday with Essence.com, “I think it tells you that she worked diligently to make opportunities available for others. The questions about who she recommended and who was tenured are fair, and I think she’ll be able to respond to them.”



http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/13/us/politics/13marshall.html?nl=us&emc=politicsemailema1


Kagan’s Link to Marshall Cuts 2 Ways

By CHARLIE SAVAGE
May 12, 2010
New York Times

WASHINGTON — In the spring of 1988, Justice Thurgood Marshall assigned a clerk, Elena Kagan, to write a first draft of his opinion in a case considering whether a school district could charge a poor family for busing a child to the nearest school, which was 16 miles away.

















Associated Press

Thurgood Marshall at his Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 1967. Elena Kagan clerked for him 20 years later

A majority on the Supreme Court ruled that the busing fee was constitutional. Justice Marshall, who was 80, was incensed and wanted a fiery dissent. But the 28-year-old Ms. Kagan, now a Supreme Court nominee, thought her boss’s legal analysis was wrong.

Ms. Kagan, recalling the incident in a 1993 tribute after his death, wrote that after she told him that “it would be difficult to find in favor of the child” under legal doctrine, he called her a “knucklehead.” He “returned to me successive drafts of the dissenting opinion for failing to express — or for failing to express in a properly pungent tone — his understanding of the case,” she wrote.

Because Ms. Kagan has never been a judge and has produced only a handful of scholarly writings, clues to her philosophy are rare. In that vacuum, liberals and conservatives alike are attributing special significance to her clerkship year with Justice Marshall, who led the civil rights movement’s legal efforts to dismantle segregation before becoming a particularly liberal Supreme Court justice.

But while Ms. Kagan, a former board member for the Thurgood Marshall Scholarship Fund, clearly relished the experience and admired the justice as a historic figure, she appears to have had a far more ambivalent attitude toward his jurisprudence, according to a review of his papers at the Library of Congress, her comments over the years about him and interviews with her fellow clerks and colleagues.

In analyzing why Justice Marshall was adamant about siding with the poor family in the busing fee case, for example, Ms. Kagan explained in her tribute that he “allowed his personal experiences, and the knowledge of suffering and deprivation gained from those experiences, to guide him.”

But Ms. Kagan did not share those experiences, notes Charles J. Ogletree, a Harvard law professor who heads an institute named after Justice Marshall’s mentor, Charles Hamilton Houston, and who has talked over the years with Ms. Kagan, a former Harvard Law School dean, about her clerkship.

“It’s absurd to compare Elena Kagan’s judicial philosophy to Thurgood Marshall’s philosophy,” Professor Ogletree said. “Their times and life experiences are different. They lived in different worlds. The reality is that Elena Kagan learned a lot from Justice Marshall, but she will not be overly influenced by Marshall or anyone else. She is her own person.”

Some differences in the views of Justice Marshall — who once described his legal philosophy as, “You do what you think is right and let the law catch up” — and of his former clerk are striking. For example, he believed that the death penalty was always unconstitutional. But during the confirmation process when she was named solicitor general last year, Ms. Kagan said she had no quarrel with the death penalty.

“I am not morally opposed to capital punishment,” Ms. Kagan wrote to a senator, adding that she “accepted” the Supreme Court’s precedents upholding “the death penalty as constitutional in a wide variety of cases and circumstances.”

Nevertheless, the political dynamics of Ms. Kagan’s nomination have led figures on the left and the right to gloss over such differences.

After some liberal commentators questioned whether Ms. Kagan could be trusted, President Obama declared that Justice Marshall’s “understanding of law, not as an intellectual exercise or words on a page, but as it affects the lives of ordinary people, has animated every step of Elena’s career.”

Conservative critics, too, have sought to link Ms. Kagan closely to Justice Marshall. Among them, Curt Levey of the Committee for Justice has decried a supposed “Kagan/Marshall judicial philosophy,” noting that in her tribute she described as a “thing of glory” her former boss’s view that courts should show special solicitude for disadvantaged parties.

By 1987, as the Rehnquist court was moving to the right, Justice Marshall was “in his decline and alienated, marginalized” and, in hiring clerks like Ms. Kagan, “looking for really bright people to kind of put a new charge in him” and to help him write dissents, said Juan Williams, a Marshall biographer.

“She didn’t come to him because she was necessarily of like mind, although she was coming out of the same political milieu,” Mr. Williams said.

Justice Marshall nicknamed Ms. Kagan “Shorty” and sometimes referred to her as “Little Bits,” though they all got called “knucklehead” from time to time, recalled Harry Litman, another clerk that year. The musty chambers were crammed with books, African artifacts, red Naugahyde chairs and ungainly desks.

Justice Marshall did a lot of work in an anteroom to his main office. There, he sat in a comfortable chair across a large table from his clerks to discuss cases, sessions that inevitably digressed into stories the justice would tell about his life.

“You’re at the same time laughing because he’s such a great raconteur and also thinking it’s unbelievable that these things happened in the lifetime of this person in whose presence I’m sitting, and their life made such a difference in re-creating a South where he had to be out of town by sunset or his life was in danger,” recalled Carol Steiker, another clerk that year.

One task of the clerks was to write brief memorandums evaluating the thousands of cases appealed to the Supreme Court. Most written by Ms. Kagan are straightforward, but some caution against taking a case because of how the conservative justices might rule or elevate outcomes over the law.

For example, on Oct. 7, 1987, she analyzed a case in which a judge dismissed an immigrant’s guilty plea over a minor infraction because it could jeopardize his application for permanent residency. The Justice Department appealed, saying the district court had exceeded its authority.

Ms. Kagan wrote that the Justice Department’s view was “almost certainly correct.” Still, she recommended against taking the appeal because the judge had “ensured an equitable result” at “no great cost to the Republic.” Justice Marshall scrawled “D” for “deny” at the top of her memorandum.

In her hearing last year, Ms. Kagan distanced herself from those writings, saying her job was to “channel” Justice Marshall’s mind-set.

A clerk to a justice is “trying to facilitate his work, and to enable him to advance his goals and purposes as a justice,” she said, adding: “He knew what he thought about most issues. And for better or for worse, he was not really interested in engaging with his clerks on first principles.”

Indeed, while her 1993 tribute is couched in fond terms, the bulk of her remarks about cases that arose in her clerkship year concerned their disagreements.

In one case, he voted not to let a man pursue a discrimination claim because his lawyer, who was blind, accidentally left his name off an appeal, and a deadline expired. Ms. Kagan and fellow clerks sought to persuade Justice Marshall to change his vote until he grew annoyed and, pointing to his framed judicial commission on the wall, asked them whose name was on it.

But the case Justice Marshall cared about the most that year, she wrote, was the school bus dispute in which she had trouble justifying his dissent. The final draft seems to implicitly acknowledge that his vote rested less on legal doctrine than on his notion of social justice.

The case, it says, asked “whether a state may discriminate against the poor in providing access to education,” adding: “I regard this question as one of great urgency. As I have stated on prior occasions, proper analysis of equal protection claims depends less on choosing the formal label under which the claim should be reviewed than upon identifying and carefully analyzing the real interests at stake.”

LENA HORNE: 1917-2010--GREAT ARTIST AND CITIZEN

In Memory of Lena Horne

Lena Horne passed away on May 9, 2010.

Lena Horne was born in Brooklyn, New York on June 30, 1917 and grew up in both New York and Georgia. Lena showed such talent and beauty from early on that by the time she was sixteen she was performing in the chorus line at the Cotton Club in Harlem. Horne then joined Noble Sissle’s Orchestra followed by a stint with Charlie Barnet in 1940. At the time Lena preferred New York to touring and began performing at Café Society and replaced Dinah Shore as the vocalist in NBC’s show The Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street. Already at this time Horne had starred in some lower budget films but was signed by MGM and became the first black performer to sign a long-term deal with a major Hollywood studio. Lena performed in the 1942 film ‘Panama Hattie’ and ‘Ziegfeld Follies’ in 1946. At this time the studios refused to put Lena in a leading role, aside from ‘Cabin in the Sky’ which featured all African Americans, because she was African American and all her scenes in movies had to be done in such a way that those scenes could be cut to be able to show these films in states where people had not yet evolved to the point of being able to handle seeing an African American on a movie screen.

Lena decided to focus on her music career in the early 1950s due in part to being blacklisted for her social views which included the idea that all people are created equal and should be given equal opportunity in America. Horne toured internationally and recorded one of her popular albums, ‘Lena Horne at the Waldorf-Astoria’ in 1957 which at the time became the best selling record by a female vocalist on RCA-Victor. Horne was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical in 1958 for her role in Jamaica. Also in the late 1950s and ‘60s Lena made appearances on all the popular television variety shows including The Ed Sullivan Show, Kraft Music Hall, The Dean Martin Show, The Judy Garland Show and The Andy Williams show among others. In 1970 she co-starred with Harry Belafonte in an hour long television special and in 1973 she did an hour long special with Tony Bennett. Horne also guest starred on many television sitcoms including The Muppet Show, Sesame Street, The Cosby Show, Sanford and Son and A Different World. In 1981 she received a special Tony Award for her one-woman show ‘Lena Horne: The Lady and her Music’. In 1988 Horne recorded the album ‘The Men in My Life’ with guests including Sammy Davis Jr. and Joe Williams and in 1989 Lena won the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

Some of Lena Horne’s achievements for civil rights include working with Eleanor Roosevelt to pass anti-lynching laws, attending the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963 as well as speaking and performing on behalf of the NAACP, SNCC and the National Council of Negro Women. Lena Horne was a warrior for civil rights and speaking out for the freedom of all people throughout her life as well as an incredible performer and entertainer. In the words of Quincy Jones, “Lena Horne was a pioneering groundbreaker, making inroads into a world that had never before been explored by African-American women, and she did it on her own terms. Our nation and the world has lost one of the great artistic icons of the 20th century. There will never be another like Lena Horne and I will miss her deeply."

“I don't have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort of hoped I'd become. I'm me, and I'm like nobody else.”

“You have to be taught to be second class; you're not born that way“

“Don't be afraid to feel as angry or as loving as you can, because when you feel nothing, it's just death.” – Lena Horne


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/arts/music/10horne.html?emc=eta1


All,

Lena Horne is a legend. There is no getting around that fundamental fact whether one considers it a cliche or not. Furthermore, it is impossible to understate the actual historical significance and social meaning of who Lena Horne was in the wider context of both 20th century American popular culture in general and African American culture specifically. It's also very important to remember that when the civil rights movement called on its popular artists to take open public stands on behalf of the goals and objectives of the movement for freedom, justice, and equality Ms. Horne was ALWAYS on the frontlines and never failed to make and maintain a strong outspoken committment to the larger principles of the movement whether it had a negative effect on her personal career or not. And despite the blatantly false assertion in the NY Times obit below Horne WAS blacklisted by both Hollywood and the television industry for at least 15 years because of her longtime intimate personal and political friendships with such important radical activists as Paul Robeson and W.E.B. DuBois which only added to the indifference, scorn, and criminal neglect of her and nearly every other well known black artist of the 1940-1970 era--especially those like Horne, who aside from being highly talented and beautiful also cared deeply about her people and the larger society and courageously put themselves and their careers on the line many times to say and do the right thing. Thus for many reasons--both artistic and political-- the strength, grace, luminous talent, and love of Ms. Horne will be sorely missed...

Kofi


Lena Horne, Singer and Actress, Dies at 92
By ALJEAN HARMETZ
May 9, 2010
New York Times

Lena Horne, who broke new ground for black performers when she signed a long-term contract with a major Hollywood studio and who went on to achieve international fame as a singer, died on Sunday night in Manhattan. She was 92.

Her death, at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, was announced by her son-in-law, Kevin Buckley. She lived in Manhattan. In a message of condolence, President Obama said Ms. Horne had "worked tirelessly to further the cause of justice and equality."

Ms. Horne first achieved fame in the 1940s, became a nightclub and recording star in the 1950s and made a triumphant return to the spotlight with a one-woman Broadway show in 1981. She might have become a major movie star, but she was born 50 years too early: she languished at MGM for years because of her race, although she was so light-skinned that when she was a child other black children had taunted her, accusing her of having a “white daddy.”

Ms. Horne was stuffed into one “all-star” film musical after another — “Thousands Cheer” (1943), “Broadway Rhythm” (1944), “Two Girls and a Sailor” (1944), “Ziegfeld Follies” (1946), “Words and Music” (1948) — to sing a song or two that, she later recalled, could easily be snipped from the movie when it played in the South, where the idea of an African-American performer in anything but a subservient role in a movie with an otherwise all-white cast was unthinkable.

“The only time I ever said a word to another actor who was white was Kathryn Grayson in a little segment of ‘Show Boat’ ” included in “Till the Clouds Roll By” (1946), a movie about the life of Jerome Kern, Ms. Horne said in an interview in 1990. In that sequence she played Julie, a mulatto forced to flee the showboat because she has married a white man.

But when MGM made “Show Boat” into a movie for the second time, in 1951, the role of Julie was given to a white actress, Ava Gardner, whose singing voice was dubbed. (Ms. Horne was no longer under contract to MGM at the time, and according to James Gavin’s Horne biography, “Stormy Weather,” published last year, she was never seriously considered for the part.) And when Ms. Horne herself married a white man — the prominent arranger, conductor and pianist Lennie Hayton, who was for many years both her musical director and MGM’s — the marriage, in 1947, took place in France and was kept secret for three years.

Ms. Horne’s first MGM movie was “Panama Hattie” (1942), in which she sang Cole Porter’s “Just One of Those Things.” Writing about that film years later, Pauline Kael called it “a sad disappointment, though Lena Horne is ravishing, and when she sings you can forget the rest of the picture.”

Even before she came to Hollywood, Brooks Atkinson, the drama critic for The New York Times, noticed Ms. Horne in “Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds of 1939,” a Broadway revue that ran for nine performances. “A radiantly beautiful sepia girl,” he wrote, “who will be a winner when she has proper direction.”

She had proper direction in two all-black movie musicals, both made in 1943. Lent to 20th Century Fox for “Stormy Weather,” one of those show business musicals with almost no plot but lots of singing and dancing, Ms. Horne did both triumphantly, ending with the sultry, aching sadness of the title number, which would become one of her signature songs. In MGM’s “Cabin in the Sky,” the first film directed by Vincente Minnelli, she was the brazen, sexy handmaiden of the Devil. (One number she shot for that film, “Ain’t It the Truth,” which she sang while taking a bubble bath, was deleted before the film was released — not for racial reasons, as her stand-alone performances in other MGM musicals sometimes were, but because it was considered too risqué.)

In 1945 the critic and screenwriter Frank S. Nugent wrote in Liberty magazine that Ms. Horne was “the nation’s top Negro entertainer.” In addition to her MGM salary of $1,000 a week, she was earning $1,500 for every radio appearance and $6,500 a week when she played nightclubs. She was also popular with servicemen, white and black, during World War II, appearing more than a dozen times on the Army radio program “Command Performance.”

“The whole thing that made me a star was the war,” Ms. Horne said in the 1990 interview. “Of course the black guys couldn’t put Betty Grable’s picture in their footlockers. But they could put mine.”

Touring Army camps for the U.S.O., Ms. Horne was outspoken in her criticism of the way black soldiers were treated. “So the U.S.O. got mad,” she recalled. “And they said, ‘You’re not going to be allowed to go anyplace anymore under our auspices.’ So from then on I was labeled a bad little Red girl.”

Ms. Horne later claimed that for this and other reasons, including her friendship with leftists like Paul Robeson and W.E.B. DuBois, she was blacklisted and “unable to do films or television for the next seven years” after her tenure with MGM ended in 1950.

This was not quite true: as Mr. Gavin has documented, she appeared frequently on “Your Show of Shows” and other television shows in the 1950s, and in fact “found more acceptance” on television “than almost any other black performer.” And Mr. Gavin and others have suggested that there were other factors in addition to politics or race involved in her lack of film work.

Although absent from the screen, Ms. Horne found success in nightclubs and on records. “Lena Horne at the Waldorf-Astoria,” recorded during a well-received eight-week run in 1957, reached the Top 10 and became the best-selling album by a female singer in RCA Victor’s history.

In the early 1960s Ms. Horne, always outspoken on the subject of civil rights, became increasingly active, participating in numerous marches and protests.

In 1969, she returned briefly to films, playing the love interest of a white actor, Richard Widmark, in “Death of a Gunfighter.”

She was to act in only one other movie: In 1978 she played Glinda the Good Witch in “The Wiz,” the film version of the all-black Broadway musical based on “The Wizard of Oz.” But she never stopped singing.

She continued to record prolifically well into the 1990s, for RCA and other labels, notably United Artists and Blue Note. And she conquered Broadway in 1981 with a one-woman show, “Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music,” which ran for 14 months and won both rave reviews and a Tony Award.

Ms. Horne’s voice was not particularly powerful, but it was extremely expressive. She reached her listeners emotionally by acting as well as singing the romantic standards like “The Man I Love” and “Moon River” that dominated her repertory. The person she always credited as her main influence was not another singer but a pianist and composer, Duke Ellington’s longtime associate Billy Strayhorn.

“I wasn’t born a singer,” she told Strayhorn’s biographer, David Hajdu. “I had to learn a lot. Billy rehearsed me. He stretched me vocally.” Strayhorn occasionally worked as her accompanist and, she said, “taught me the basics of music, because I didn’t know anything.”

Strayhorn was also “the only man I ever loved,” she said, but Strayhorn was openly gay, and their close friendship never became a romance. “He was just everything that I wanted in a man,” she told Mr. Hajdu, “except he wasn’t interested in me sexually.”

Lena Calhoun Horne was born in Brooklyn on June 30, 1917. All four of her grandparents were industrious members of Brooklyn’s black middle class. Her paternal grandparents, Edwin and Cora Horne, were early members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and in October 1919, at the age of 2, Lena was the cover girl for the organization’s monthly bulletin.

By then the marriage of her parents, Edna and Teddy Horne, was in trouble. “She was spoiled and badly educated and he was fickle,” Ms. Horne’s daughter, Gail Lumet Buckley, wrote in her family history, “The Hornes.” By 1920 Teddy had left his job with the New York Department of Labor and fled to Seattle, and Edna had fled to a life on the stage in Harlem. Ms. Horne was raised by her paternal grandparents until her mother took her back four years later.

When she was 16, her mother pulled her out of school to audition for the dance chorus at the Cotton Club, the famous Harlem nightclub where the customers were white, the barely dressed dancers were light-skinned blacks and the proprietors were gangsters. A year after joining the Cotton Club chorus she made her Broadway debut, performing a voodoo dance in the short-lived show “Dance With Your Gods” in 1934.

At 19, Ms. Horne married the first man she had ever dated, 28-year-old Louis Jones, and became a conventional middle-class Pittsburgh wife. Her daughter Gail was born in 1937 and a son, Teddy, in 1940. The marriage ended soon afterward. Ms. Horne kept Gail, but Mr. Jones refused to give up Teddy, although he did allow the boy long visits with his mother.

In 1938, Ms. Horne starred in a quickie black musical film, “The Duke Is Tops,” for which she was never paid. Her return to movies was on a grander scale.

She had been singing at the Manhattan nightclub Café Society when the impresario Felix Young chose her to star at the Trocadero, a nightclub he was planning to open in Hollywood in the fall of 1941. In 1990, Ms. Horne reminisced: “My only friends were the group of New Yorkers who sort of stuck with their own group — like Vincente, Gene Kelly, Yip Harburg and Harold Arlen, and Richard Whorf — the sort of hip New Yorkers who allowed Paul Robeson and me in their houses.”

Since blacks were not allowed to live in Hollywood, “Felix Young, a white man, signed for the house as if he was going to rent it,” Ms. Horne said. “When the neighbors found out, Humphrey Bogart, who lived right across the street from me, raised hell with them for passing around a petition to get rid of me.” Bogart, she said, “sent word over to the house that if anybody bothered me, please let him know.”

Roger Edens, the composer and musical arranger who had been Judy Garland’s chief protector at MGM, had heard the elegant Ms. Horne sing at Café Society and also went to hear her at the Little Troc. (The war had scaled down Mr. Young’s ambitions to a small club with a gambling den on the second floor.) He insisted that Arthur Freed, the producer of MGM’s lavish musicals, listen to Ms. Horne sing. Then Freed insisted that Louis B. Mayer, who ran the studio, hear her, too. He did, and soon she had signed a seven-year contract with MGM. She was not the first black performer under contract to a major studio — MGM had signed the actress Nina Mae McKinney for five years in 1929 — but she was the first to make an impact.

Though she was not the first black performer under contract to a major studio - MGM had signed the actress Nina Mae McKinney for five years in 1929 - Ms. Horne was the first to make an impact.

The N.A.A.C.P. celebrated her contract as a weapon in its war to get better movie roles for black performers. Her father weighed in, too. In a 1997 PBS interview, she recalled: “My father said, ‘I can get a maid for my daughter. I don’t want her in the movies playing maids.’ ”

Ms. Horne is survived by her daughter; Gail Lumet Buckley; six grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. Her son died of kidney failure in 1970; her husband died the following year.

Looking back at the age of 80, Ms. Horne said: “My identity is very clear to me now. I am a black woman. I’m free. I no longer have to be a ‘credit.’ I don’t have to be a symbol to anybody; I don’t have to be a first to anybody. I don’t have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort of hoped I’d become. I’m me, and I’m like nobody else.”

Peter Keepnews contributed reporting.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/10/AR2010051000091.html


Lena Horne dies at 92; performer altered Hollywood's image of black women
By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 11, 2010; B05

Lena Horne, 92, an electrifying performer who shattered racial boundaries by changing the way Hollywood presented black women and who enjoyed a six-decade singing career on stage, television and in films, died of a heart ailment May 9 at a hospital in New York.

Ms. Horne, considered one of the most beautiful women in the world, came to the attention of Hollywood in 1942. She was the first black woman to sign a meaningful long-term contract with a major studio, a contract that said she would never have to play a maid.

"What people tend not to fully comprehend today is what Lena Horne did to transform the image of the African American woman in Hollywood," said Donald Bogle, a film historian.

"Movies are a powerful medium and always depicted African American women before Lena Horne as hefty, mammy-like maids who were ditzy and giggling," Bogle said. "Lena Horne becomes the first one the studios begin to look at differently. . . . Really just by being there, being composed and onscreen with her dignity intact, paved the way for a new day" for black actresses.

He said Ms. Horne's influence was apparent within a few years of her leaving Hollywood, starting with actress Dorothy Dandridge's movie work in the 1950s. Later, Halle Berry, who won the 2001 Best Actress Oscar for "Monster's Ball," called Ms. Horne an inspiration.

Ms. Horne's reputation in Hollywood rested on a handful of musical films. Among the best were two all-black musicals from 1943: "Cabin in the Sky," as a small-town temptress who pursues Eddie "Rochester" Anderson; and "Stormy Weather," in which she played a career-obsessed singer opposite Bill "Bojangles" Robinson.

In other films, she shared billing with white entertainers such as Gene Kelly, Lucille Ball, Mickey Rooney and Red Skelton but was segregated onscreen so producers could clip out her singing when the movies ran in the South.

"Mississippi wanted its movies without me," she told the New York Times in 1957. "So no one bothered to put me in a movie where I talked to anybody, where some thread of the story might be broken if I were cut." In Hollywood, she received previously unheard-of star treatment for a black actor. Metro Goldwyn Mayer studios featured Ms. Horne in movies and advertisements as glamorously as were white beauties including Rita Hayworth and Betty Grable.

Nevertheless, Ms. Horne was frustrated by infrequent movie work and feeling limited in her development as an actress. She confronted studio officials about roles she thought demeaning, a decision that eventually hurt her.

James Gavin, a historian of cabaret acts who has written a biography of Ms. Horne, said: "Given the horrible restrictions of the time, MGM bent over backward to do everything they could. After MGM, she was an international star, and that made her later career possible, made her a superstar."

Ms. Horne appeared on television and at major concert halls in New York, London and Paris. She starred on Broadway twice, and her 1981 revue, "Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music," set the standard for the one-person musical show, reviewers said. The performance also netted her a special Tony Award and two Grammy Awards.

Gavin said Ms. Horne cultivated a "ferocious" singing personality through her flashing eyes and teeth.

"Unlike Perry Como and Bing Crosby, who were warm, familiar presences, Lena Horne was a fierce black woman and not a warm and fuzzy presence," Gavin said. "She was formidable and the first black cabaret star for white society."

Ms. Horne said she felt a need to act aloof onstage to protect herself from unwanted advances early in her career, especially from white audiences.

"They were too busy seeing their own preconceived image of a Negro woman," she told the New York Daily News in 1997. "The image that I chose to give them was of a woman who they could not reach. . . . I am too proud to let them think they can have any personal contact with me. They get the singer, but they are not going to get the woman."

For her repertoire, she chose the sophisticated ballads of Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin and Billy Strayhorn. She loved the music but also said she liked surprising the white audience who expected black entertainers to sing hot jazz or blues and dance wildly.

In her singing, Ms. Horne showed great range and could convincingly shift between jazz, blues and cabaret ballads. New Yorker jazz writer Whitney Balliett praised her "sense of dynamics that allowed her to whisper and wheedle and shout." In the early 1960s, Ms. Horne said she felt her sophisticated act sounded increasingly obsolete as she saw a younger generation at sit-ins and marches protesting racial discrimination.
'Good little symbol'

Ms. Horne struggled for years to find a public role on race matters. Her earliest mentors urged her to remain reserved and graceful in public, what she called "a good little symbol." In the late 1940s and 1950s, she chose to focus on quietly defying segregation policies at upscale hotels in Miami Beach and Las Vegas where she performed. At the time, it was customary for black entertainers to stay in black neighborhoods, but Ms. Horne successfully insisted that she and her musicians be allowed to stay wherever she entertained. One Las Vegas establishment reportedly had its chambermaids burn Ms. Horne's sheets.

In 1963, Ms. Horne appeared at the civil rights March on Washington with Harry Belafonte and Dick Gregory and was part of a group, which included authors James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry, that met with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to urge a more active approach to desegregation. Ms. Horne also used her celebrity to rally frontline civil rights activists in the South and was a fundraiser for civil rights groups, including the NAACP and the National Council of Negro Women.

Looking back, she said her legacy on race was complicated by her ambition. She said she married the white conductor and bandleader Lennie Hayton in 1947 -- her second marriage -- to advance her career, because "he could get me into places no black manager could."

"It was wrong of me, but as a black woman, I knew what I had against me," she told the Times in 1981. "He was a nice man who wasn't thinking all these things, and because he was a nice man and because he was in my corner, I began to love him."

Lena Mary Calhoun Horne was born June 30, 1917, in Brooklyn, N.Y. Her mother, an actress, was largely absent from Ms. Horne's early life because of work on the black theater circuit.

Shifted at first among friends and relatives, Ms. Horne was raised mostly by her maternal grandmother, a stern social worker and suffragette in Bedford-Stuyvesant, then a middle-class Brooklyn neighborhood. Ms. Horne said she was influenced by her grandmother's "polite ferocity."

In 1933, when she was 16, Ms. Horne was reunited with her mother and new stepfather, a white Cuban. It was the peak of the Depression, and they lived on relief in Harlem. Ms. Horne was pushed into a job at the Cotton Club by her mother, who knew the Harlem nightclub's choreographer.

"I could carry a tune, but I could hardly have been called a singer," Ms. Horne said. "I was tall and skinny, and I had very little going me for except a pretty face and long, long hair that framed it rather nicely." Ms. Horne began by wearing three large feathers and doing a fan dance, but she took singing lessons and gradually won better parts.

Ms. Horne made $25 a week for three shows nightly seven days a week. Her stepfather went to see the racketeering club owners to raise Ms. Horne's salary. In reply, they had his head shoved down a toilet, Ms. Horne said.

Exhausted by 19, she fled to her father's home in Pittsburgh and married a friend of his, Louis J. Jones, a minor Democratic Party operative. She and Jones had two children, Gail and Edwin, but the marriage disintegrated over money quarrels.

Helped by record producer John Hammond, she won a long engagement at Manhattan's Cafe Society Downtown, the first integrated nightclub in the United States. She had a stormy affair with married boxer Joe Louis, a regular at the nightspot, and befriended entertainer and social activist Paul Robeson. Her friendship with Robeson, a communist sympathizer, was a key factor that led to her brief blacklisting a decade later.

Challenged the system
The work at Cafe Society Downtown prompted ecstatic reviews and led to Ms. Horne's career onscreen. Working closely with NAACP Executive Secretary Walter White, Ms. Horne said she wanted to "try to establish a different kind of image for Negro women." They successfully challenged the casting system that had long marginalized black performers onscreen by having them portray servants, minstrels or jungle natives.

To Ms. Horne's surprise, her efforts to overcome servile screen parts were resented by many black actors who viewed her as a threat more than a pioneer. She said she was perceived as a danger to the system of informal "captains" in the black acting community, who worked as liaisons with film producers when they needed "natives" for the latest Tarzan picture.

"I was not trying to embarrass anyone or show up my colleagues," Ms. Horne told Richard Schickel for his biography, "Lena" (1965). "I was only trying to see if I could avoid in my career some of the traps they had been forced into. It was no crusade, though of course I hoped that if I could set my own terms in the movies and also be successful, then others might be able to follow."

Bored from infrequent movie work, she began taking outside singing engagements and devoted more time to advocating fair employment and anti-lynching laws. She also filed a complaint with the NAACP when she sang for soldiers at Fort Reilly, Kan., on a studio-sponsored tour and saw German prisoners of war seated ahead of black soldiers. This complaint irritated the studio.

MGM producer Arthur Freed was also unhappy that Ms. Horne refused to act in a Broadway show he had backed, "St. Louis Woman." She said the black characters were cliches and offensive. She said Freed took revenge by turning down her requests for plum movie assignments.

Ms. Horne returned to a lucrative singing career. At one point in the mid-1950s, she made $12,500 a week singing at Las Vegas casinos. Her 1957 best-selling album of jazz standards, "At the Waldorf Astoria," captured her at a peak moment -- at the tony New York hotel where she long performed, backed by an orchestra conducted by her husband, Hayton.

Hayton, from whom she had long been separated, died in 1971; her son died about the same time from a kidney ailment. Survivors include her daughter, the writer Gail Buckley; five grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

Ms. Horne spoke of her 1981 one-woman show as the most liberating moment of her life, saying her identity was clear to her because "I no longer have to be a 'credit,' I don't have to be a 'symbol' to anybody. I don't have to be a 'first' to anybody. I don't have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort of hoped I'd become. I'm me, and I'm like nobody else."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/10/AR2010051003692.html


Lena Horne: A glamorous revolutionary By Eugene Robinson Tuesday, May 11, 2010; A15 Washington Post

"Lena Horne is coming on!"

When I was growing up, those words were the signal to drop everything and rush to the family room, where Ed Sullivan or Perry Como or Dean Martin had just announced the next performer. At the time, I didn't understand why it was unthinkable to miss one of Horne's appearances. I didn't yet realize that she was one of one of the most significant American entertainers of the 20th century -- and certainly didn't realize how burdened she was by her trailblazing success.

Horne, who died Sunday at 92, was an infiltrator. She strode confidently through doors that had been closed to African American entertainers, and she was able to do so because white audiences found her not just beautiful and talented but also non-threatening. Late in her life, she gave a sense of how difficult that role had been to play.

"My identity is very clear to me now," she said when she was 80. "I am a black woman. I'm free. I no longer have to be a 'credit.' I don't have to be a symbol to anybody; I don't have to be a first to anybody. I don't have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort of hoped I'd become. I'm me, and I'm like nobody else."

Indeed, she was different. She was light-skinned, with just enough tan in her complexion to make it evident that she wasn't white. Her nose was narrow, almost turned-up; her hair, in the fashion of the times, was always straightened. She was, by any standard, gorgeous. But she knew that the racial ambiguity of her looks allowed her to attain a level of stardom that was inaccessible to singers and actors who conformed more closely to white America's image of "black."

There was no ambiguity, however, in her sense of herself as a black woman -- or in her strong political and social views. She was the first black performer to sign a long-term contract with one of the major Hollywood studios, earning $1,000 a week from MGM in the 1940s; she made thousands more from radio and nightclub appearances, and in 1945 she was described in a magazine article as "the nation's top Negro entertainer."

MGM cast her in a series of musicals, showcasing not just her voice but her beauty and sophistication. But the studio made sure that her scenes could be easily scissored out of prints of the movies that were destined for theaters in the South, where audiences would not have accepted a black actor as anything but a servant or a savage. Meanwhile, Horne was envied and even resented by other black actors in Hollywood who had to play servants and savages to get any work at all.

"They didn't make me into a maid, but they didn't make me anything else, either," Horne wrote in her autobiography. "I became a butterfly pinned to a column, singing away in Movieland."

Horne was always outspoken about civil rights. During World War II, she complained about how black soldiers -- who had made her a popular pinup, essentially the black Betty Grable -- were being treated in the segregated Army. Her refusal to perform for segregated audiences got her disinvited from USO tours.

Horne blamed her activism and her associations for the waning of her movie career after her MGM contract expired in 1950; actor Paul Robeson and scholar W.E.B. Du Bois, both known for their left-leaning views, were among her good friends. There is no evidence that she was ever actually blacklisted, however. Tastes changed, and musicals became passe. By the time black actors began to get substantial dramatic roles in the movies, Horne was past leading-lady age.

She wasn't a great singer like Ella Fitzgerald or Sarah Vaughan. Hattie McDaniel and Dorothy Dandridge were better actors. But Lena Horne was a much more important figure in American social history, because she was able to bridge the gap between black and white in a way that others could not. She could be vocal, even strident in her advocacy for civil rights; she could be a proud black woman who stood up for African American causes and refused to back down. But she could do all of this without ever seeming alienated.

She would come on Ed Sullivan's show and sing "Stormy Weather," and she would own the stage -- a glamorous, elegant revolutionary who helped change the way American eyes perceived black and white.

The writer will be online to chat with readers at 1 p.m. Eastern time Tuesday. Submit your questions and comments before or during the discussion.

Why the American Left Needs A Coordinated National Media Voice and New Institutional Outlets

http://www.truthout.org/why-left-has-no-answer-right-wing-lie-machine59220

All,

An outstanding, important, and very informative article that goes to the very heart of why the American left and their various mass media representatives (such as they are) are currently being outflanked and marginalized by sheer right wing demagoguery, Orwellian media propaganda (and endless lies), and the increasingly mediocre to braindead corporate "mainstream media" sources--and what crucially needs to happen both practically and ideologically to turn this very serious crisis around...

Kofi



Why the Left Has No Answer to the Right-Wing Lie Machine
Wednesday 05 May 2010
by: Ernest Partridge | The Crisis Papers

An Uneven Contest:

What if there were a great debate concerning the nature and future of American society, and only one side showed up?

That approximately describes the condition of the U. S. media today.

The right wing is operating a super-charged carnival of hype, hysteria and hoopla, while the left struggles along with a pipsqueek sideshow: a few magazines like The Nation, Mother Jones and The American Prospect, with minuscule circulation among the already converted, some tolerated columnists like Paul Krugman, Bob Herbert, and Frank Rich, and of course there’s Shultz, Olbermann and Maddow on MSNBC.

Meanwhile, one by one, the lights are going out: in January, Air America Radio fell silent, and last month David Broncoccio’s outstanding investigative program, NOW, closed shop. Last Friday, Bill Moyers’ Journal on PBS broadcast its final program. Shultz-Olbermann-Maddow remain on MSNBC at the sufferance of the owners and managers of NBC and MicroSoft, while Comcast is attempting a takeover of NBC. If successful, how long will this lone outpost of progressive cable-TV commentary remain?

The good news is that the audience size of FOX News is vastly over-rated. On a good night, Beck or Hannity or O’Reilly will be seen by three million viewers. That’s less than one percent of the U. S. population. The worse news is that the progressive voices at MSNBC draw about a third as many.

The influence of FOX News is amplified as their antics and outrages – “birtherism,” climate change denial, baseless accusations of “socialism” or even “fascism” – are uncritically reported far and wide by the mainstream media (MSM). In addition to FOX, the airwaves are crammed solid with right-wing talk shows – about 90%, by some counts. Leading these is Rush Limbaugh, with an audience estimated from fifteen to thirty million.

To be sure, there are many admirable broadcast voices on the left, in addition to the MSNBC team: Thom Hartmann, Amy Goodman, Bill Maher, Stephanie Miller, Bill Press, Mike Papantonio, Cenk Uygur, and Randi Rhodes. But their messages are uncoordinated, dispersed, and poorly promoted. And unlike FOX and Limbaugh, etc., there is almost no corporate media amplification of progressive talk radio and cable TV. Strange to say, some of the most incisive liberal commentary seems to originate with the comedians, Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert. (A review and assessment of these efforts deserves a separate essay. Watch this space).

The regressive bias of the corporate media is starkly revealed by the coverage, and the non-coverage, of the public demonstrations of last month. When a couple of thousand tea-party or gun-rights enthusiasts show up on the Mall in Washington, or across the Potomac in Virginia, the mainstream media is there to cover them en masse. But when up to ten thousand protesters gather on Wall Street, or fifty thousand jam downtown Los Angeles to protest the Arizona “show your papers” law, these events might just as well have taken place on the far side of the moon.

If the MSM takes any notice of progressive talk radio or cable TV, it is usually to portray a false equivalence with the bloviators on the right, as an implied excuse for the latter’s rhetorical excesses and outright lies. Amazingly, that false equivalence was repeated last week by the President himself, at his University of Michigan commencement address.

There is no equivalence. When Olbermann or Maddow make a trivial errors of pronunciation, attribution, or date of an event, etc. they make on-air corrections as soon as these slip-ups are brought to their attention. But when O’Reilly, Beck, Hannity, et al, tell flat-out demonstrable lies, they do so without fear of consequence and therefore without public correction. And their fearlessness is justified, for no one in the mainstream media is likely to hold them to account. To be sure, Ed Shultz calls them out in his “Psycho Talk,” and Keith Olbermann in his “Worst Persons,” and Rachel Maddow does not hesitate to call a liar a liar, but when they do the regressive talksters and the MSM take little notice, which only further demonstrates the insignificance of progressive media commentary.

Case in point: A couple of weeks ago, Bill O’Reilly told his audience that a “team of FOX researchers” had determined that, contrary to the accusations on MSNBC, no one at FOX had ever said that those who refused to sign up for health insurance under “Obamacare” would be jailed. Olbermann then promptly collected and strung together more than a half-dozen video clips of FOXers stating precisely that. The final clip was a segment from Bill O’Reilly’s show. A slam-dunk refutation, and by no means the first one. Did this embarrass FOX and O’Reilly? Not in the least.

And so it continues, almost daily: For example, the consensus of thousands of climate scientists and the conclusions of thousands of peer-reviewed scientific publications can not prevail over the well-orchestrated denialism of the oil and coal industries’ public relations campaign, a campaign that utilizes the familiar PR techniques that reassured millions of cigarette smokers that the health effects of smoking was no big deal, thus leading millions to an early demise. (See the Union of Concerned Scientists report, “Smoke, Mirrors, and Hot Air – how ExxonMobil Uses Big Tobacco’s Tactics to Manufacture Uncertainty on Climate Science.”)

No accusation is too absurd to be credited by the right-wing propaganda machine. Last week, Rush Limbaugh suggested that the Gulf oil disaster was the result of a plot by “wacko-environmentalists. Quoting Limbaugh: “What better way to head off more oil drilling, nuclear plants than by blowing up a rig?” And on FOX News, Bush’s Press Secretary, Dana Perino, introduced a conspiracy theory by saying: “I’m not trying to introduce a conspiracy theory, but was this deliberate? You have to wonder…if there was sabotage involved.”

Such irresponsible accusations by FOX News and Rush Limbaugh are nothing new. Far more significant was the behavior of the major broadcast media (CBS, NBC and ABC) and the once credible newspapers such as The Washington Post and The New York Times, in the months immediately preceding the outbreak of the Iraq War in 2002. As I reported in July, 2005:

On February 5, 2003, Colin Powell presented Bush’s case for war with Iraq to the United Nations Security Council. Subsequent events and exhaustive and unrestricted searches in Iraq proved the speech to be pack of lies. But at the time, US Editorial opinion was completely taken in. A sampling: “Powell lays out convincing evidence of Iraq defiance (USA Today); “[Powell] offered a powerful new case that Saddam Hussein’s regime is cooperating with a branch of the al Qaeda organization that is trying to acquire chemical weapons” (Washington Post); “The Powell evidence will be persuasive to anyone who is still persuadable” (The Wall Street Journal); “Powell laid out the need [for war] ... in step-by-step fashion that cannot be refuted without resorting to fantasy” (Chicago Sun-Times).

The mainstream media blitz had its desired effect:

In April, 2004, the Program on International Policy Attitudes [University of Maryland] reported that “a majority of Americans (57%) continue to believe that before the war Iraq was providing substantial support to al Qaeda, including 20% who believe that Iraq was directly involved in the September 11 attacks. Forty-five percent believe that evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda has been found. Sixty percent believe that just before the war Iraq either had weapons of mass destruction (38%) or a major program for developing them (22%).”

When I heard these lies immediately before the outbreak of the war, I was well aware that the UN inspectors had found no weapons of mass destruction and were unlikely to do so. “When the troops go in there and find nothing,” I thought, “there will be hell to pay.” Well, they found nothing and there was no hell to pay. Why? Simply because there was no independent media available to deliver the “hell” to the Bush/Cheney administration, to Colin Powell, or, for that matter, to the establishment corporate media that fed the lies to the public.

To be sure, liberal commentators like Amy Goodman, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, et al, along with numerous progressive websites were complaining to high heaven. But who pays any attention to them? They are all outside the bounds of “respectable” opinion. And who determines what “opinion” is or is not “respectable?” That same mainstream media, of course.

The oligarchy that owns and runs our government and controls our mass media has learned Goebbels's lesson well: A lie unanswered is a lie believed – more so if the lie is repeated, over and over again.

Accordingly, a successful propaganda campaign must accomplish two essential and coordinated tasks: (a) tell the lies, and (b) see to it that they are not effectively refuted. The six media conglomerates that now control most of the US media accomplished both tasks supremely well.

And what an impressive roster of lies it is! Here’s a sample:

In 2000: Al Gore claimed to have invented the internet. Gore also claimed to have “discovered” the Love Canal toxic site. Bush won the election fair and square. The Supreme Court decision, Bush v. Gore, was legally sound and, in any case, did not affect the outcome of the election. There was no reason to believe that the unverifiable touch-screen voting machines were not accurate. Lt. George Bush completed his required service with the Texas Air National Guard.

2002: “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.” (Dick Cheney).

2004. John Kerry’s alleged heroic war record in Viet Nam was a fake.

Etcetera, etcetera – a list of lies much too long to enumerate here. But if you can bear to read about them again, see Joe Conason’s Big Lies (St Martins, 2003) and Jerry Barrett’s anthology, Big Bush Lies (Riverview, 2004). (My contributions to this anthology on Political Propaganda and The Environment are available online at The Crisis Papers).

Three pages into this piece, I doubt that I have said anything that most of you don’t know and agree with. And those who are not persuaded are urged to read Eric Alterman’s What Liberal Media, and visit the website of FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Media www.fair.org) and Media Matters For America.

What Remedies?

What is to be done?

The GOP and the regressive right have pointed the way; in particular, in Lewis Powell’s notorious 1971 memo to the Director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. While there is considerable dispute as to the actual influence of this memo, this much is clear; whether by design or by mere coincidence, the Powell Memo accurately describes how the regressive right has achieved its current dominance in American politics. The left would do well to study that memo and, when appropriate, adopt its proposals. In particular:

Establish “think tanks:” progressive counterparts to The Heritage Foundation, The American Enterprise Institute, The Cato Institute, The Competitive Enterprise Institute, etc., then promote the publications of its resident scholars and their appearance on the mainstream media. There are, of course, progressive think tanks such as The Center for American Progress and Media Matters for America and their work is commendable. But the funding for these organizations is minuscule in comparison with financial support of their ideological opposites.

Endow academic professorships and establish scholarships and fellowships. Encourage progressives to participate in the governance of educations institutions, from local school boards to university boards of trustees.

Underwrite the writing, publication and promotion of progressive books, journals and websites. Establish publishing houses, like the regressives' Regnery, devoted exclusively to progressive ideas and policy proposals.

Gain editorial control of mass media outlets: newspapers, cable networks, radio, etc. Once in control, do not make them mere purveyors of left propaganda designed to “balance” the right. Instead, progressive media must restore the practice of responsible journalism: “just the facts” combined with aggressive investigative reporting.

When Lewis Powell wrote his memo in 1971, there was no internet. It has now become a major factor in the political/media equation, especially so today as the traditional print media are in severe decline.

Progressives have adopted this new medium with enthusiasm, and in some cases with noteworthy success. A few websites, such as Daily Kos, Talking Points Memo, Truthdig, Salon, Alternet and The Huffington Post, staffed by savvy professionals, appear to be thriving (although, I could personally well do without the HuffPosts’s clutter of celebrity gossip). Most progressive websites, however, carry on solely due to the dedicated toil of their meagerly compensated webmeisters and its uncompensated contributors. They deserve better. In general, the internet is undeveloped and underutilized resource that the progressive establishment (such as it is) will continue to neglect at its peril.

Also neglected is the advice of the liberal “brain trust” of social psychologists, cognitive scientists, and public relations gurus – the left counterparts of Frank Luntz and Newt Gingrich. Brilliant scholars such as Drew Westen, George Lakoff, Geoffrey Nunberg, write insightful books and papers, which are largely ignored by the Democratic Party establishment, which appears to prefer the counsel of such losers as Bob (Zero for Eight) Shrum and James (Mr. Matalin) Carvill.

Of course, the program sketched above, requires an enormous amount of money in this new environment where, as never before, “money is speech.” After all, the regressive juggernaut owes its success to the generous contributions (better “investments”) of the likes of Richard Mellon Scaife, Joseph Coors and the Koch Brothers, whose fortunes have funded the aforementioned “conservative” think-tanks.

However, adequate financial resources are available to fund a progressive response to the right-wing propaganda machine. The progressives have their fat-cats too: George Soros, Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Sr. (And who knows, maybe Junior as well). In addition, the “Hollywood liberals” such as Spielberg, Cameron, Beatty, and Streisand, so much derided by regressives, have both deep pockets, in addition to their talents and public celebrity.

Still other wealthy individuals and institutions may have to be persuaded to help fund the progressive media counter-revolution. However, that may not be difficult once it is made clear that “The Democratic Mainstream” is today somewhat to the right of what used to be called “Moderate Republicanism,” that the success of the U.S. economy depends on a productive manufacturing base, an educated work force and a robust physical infrastructure, and that the present economy, as celebrated and promoted by The American Enterprise Institute, et al, is leading the country in a direction that no informed citizen, whatever his income status, would want to follow.

The scope and power of regressive propaganda now at work is enormous and profoundly discouraging to those who would oppose it. But, in the final analysis, the progressives have a formidable and invincible ally: reality. Facts, as John Adams observed, “are stubborn things.” And the scientists will continue to discover and validate stubborn facts, regardless of what the right would prefer them to disclose regarding evolution, global climate, or whatever. In addition, the majority of Americans are facing each day the brutal reality of regressive economic policies as they lose their jobs, their homes, adequate health care, and the prospect of sending their children to college and on to rewarding careers. No amount of high-volume propaganda and media dominance can obscure these hard facts.

Even so, this much remains compellingly clear: unless and until the progressive left develops an effective media voice, there can be no restoration of American democracy, no return to political sanity, and no establishment of economic justice.

Copyright 2010 by Ernest Partridge

May Day March for Immigration Rights in San Francisco

All photos taken by Chuleenan on May 1, 2010 in San Francisco

All,

On saturday afternoon May 1, 2010 Chuleenan and I joined a huge crowd of thousands in San Francisco on a march for immigration reform and in determined opposition to the new heinous and oppressive law sanctioning racial profiling of Latin0 American citizens in the state of Arizona. As the photos above clearly demonstrate a massive and well organized multicultural and multiracial throng of American citizens led by the Mexican American/Chicano Mission District community in San Francisco marched from the the heart of the Mission--one of the largest and oldest Latino American communities in this country-- to the downtown Civic Center where the march became a huge rally in front of San Francisco's City Hall. It was a wonderful expression of mass democracy in action and the boisterous and disciplined crowd gave voice to the paramount need and demand for real progressive federal government regulated immigration reform that doesn't oppress, harass, and exploit Latino American citizens and their labor as Arizona's new and clearly unconstitutional law does and as many other states are now trying to do following Arizona's ugly, racist example. This national struggle is a major one for all people truly concerned about justice, freedom, and equality under the law in this country and the coordinated immigration reform/anti racial profiling marches all across the nation on MayDay 2010 (like in Los Angeles where over 60,000 marched!) is a very clear signal that the Obama Administration and Congress will have to decisively act soon to seriously address these crucial national issues because they are most decidely not going away...

Kofi




http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/04/us/04poll.html?nl=us&emc=politicsemailemb1

All,

What we really need in this country at this point are onerous laws and regulations that racially profile and systematically harass white Americans for being....white. Seriously. It's the only thing that MIGHT make these venomously racist assholes actually see, feel, and suffer the consequences of being unjustly and oppressively singled out for punishment and scorn because of who THEY are and what THEY look like...But I'm dreaming aren't I? In a rabidly white supremacist nation like this one that will never happen...

Kofi


Poll Shows Most in U.S. Want Overhaul of Immigration Laws

By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD and MEGAN THEE-BRENAN
New York Times


LOS ANGELES — The overwhelming majority of Americans think the country’s immigration policies need to be seriously overhauled. And despite protests against Arizona’s stringent new immigration enforcement law, a majority of Americans support it, even though they say it may lead to racial profiling.
With the signing of the Arizona law on April 23 and reports of renewed efforts in Washington to rethink immigration, there has been an uptick in the number of Americans who describe illegal immigration as a serious problem.

But the poll — conducted April 28 through May 2 with 1,079 adults, and with a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points — suggests that Americans remain deeply divided about what to do.

The public broadly agrees, across party lines, that the United States could be doing more along its border to keep illegal immigrants out. The view was shared by 78 percent of the respondents.

That unity, however, fractures on the question of what to do with illegal immigrants who are already here and the role of states in enforcing immigration law, normally a federal responsibility.

A majority of the people polled, 57 percent, said the federal government should determine the laws addressing illegal immigration. But 51 percent said the Arizona law was “about right” in its approach to the problem. Thirty-six percent said it went too far and 9 percent said it did not go far enough.

The law has recharged the national debate over securing the border and what to do about the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants already in the country.

The Arizona law gives local police officers broad power to detain people they suspect are in the country illegally and check their legal status. Lawsuits have already been filed on several grounds, including the argument that it will lead to the racial profiling of legal residents and that the state has unconstitutionally intruded on federal authority.

Under a torrent of criticism, the Arizona Legislature and Gov. Jan Brewer made changes to the law on Friday that they say explicitly ban the police from racial profiling and allow officers to inquire about immigration status only of people they stop, detain or arrest in enforcing existing state law. But the new immigration law also now includes civil violations of municipal codes as grounds to check papers, and opponents were not mollified by the changes.

In follow-up interviews, poll respondents who embraced the thrust of the Arizona law still called for a national solution.

“The Arizona law is fine, but the federal government has to step in and come up with something — and they’re not doing it,” said Pat Turkos, 64, a library worker and Republican from Baltimore.

She said: “I don’t think they should be stopped just walking down the street, only if they’re stopped for speeding, for example. I believe everybody has the right to come here, but I think they have to be made legal citizens.”

Although the respondents broadly agreed that the Arizona law would result in racial profiling, overburden local and state law enforcement agencies and decrease the willingness of illegal immigrants to report crimes for fear of deportation, large majorities said it would reduce the number of illegal immigrants in the state, deter illegal border crossings and, to a lesser extent, reduce crime.

Some attitudes about immigration have remained stable among the public. Most still say illegal immigrants weaken the nation’s economy rather than strengthen it, and public opinion remains divided over how the United States should handle illegal immigrants currently in the country.

But American attitudes toward the law and whether illegal immigrants already here should have a path to citizenship differed markedly across regions and parties. Westerners and Northeasterners, for example, are significantly more likely than those in other regions to say the recent law in Arizona goes too far. And Democrats are much more likely than Republicans or independents to support a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants now in the country.

Just 8 percent of Americans said the immigration system needed only minor changes. The vast majority said it needed reworking, including 44 percent who said it needed to be completely rebuilt and 45 percent who said it needed fundamental changes.

Three quarters said that, over all, illegal immigrants were a drain on the economy because they did not all pay taxes but used public services like hospitals and schools. Nearly 2 in 10 said the immigrants strengthened the economy by providing low-cost labor and buying goods and services, a chief argument among many of their advocates.

“I do think the federal government should deal with it, because illegal immigrants don’t pay taxes and don’t contribute to our government,” said Deborah Adams, 53, a Democrat from Ephrata, Pa., and a paramedic who called the Arizona law a “necessary evil.”

“They take jobs from American citizens who need to work and pay into Social Security,” Ms. Adams said.

In fact, many illegal immigrants do pay taxes into the Social Security system, but never see a return on their contributions.

At immigration rallies in several cities on Saturday, demonstrators pressed the case for overhauling immigration law.

So far no bill has been introduced in Congress. President Obama, while supportive of the idea of immigration reform, has questioned whether lawmakers have the appetite for a divisive battle over it after a year of other political fights and in the middle of a campaign.

A delegation of Arizonans opposed to the law, including Mayor Phil Gordon of Phoenix, plans to meet with Justice Department officials on Tuesday to urge them to step into the brewing legal battle over the law.

On Monday, one of the law’s staunchest advocates, Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County in the Phoenix area, announced that after toying with the idea, he would not run for governor.



Randal C. Archibold reported from Los Angeles, and Megan Thee-Brennan from New York. Marina Stefan contributed reporting from New York