The Iconic Beauty of Tennis Phenom Venus Williams

All,

Venus Ebone Starr Williams born June 17, 1980 is not only an extraordinary tennis player and one of my absolute favorite athletes in the United States but is also one of the most beautiful women in the world. Finally there is a major new book of photographs that does this inspiring and truly iconic figure of African American culture justice--both on and off the court...BTW: Don't forget to see this champion play at Wimbledon in England beginning June 23.

Kofi
 
From The Times
London 
June 7, 2008  
The fashion rebirth of Venus Williams


When fashion photographer Koto Bolofo spotted tennis star Venus Williams in a London street, he saw in her a grace and elegance that none had captured before. The result: a book of revelatory images of the world's most iconic female tennis player

By Hilary Rose

To most people, Venus Williams is the Amazonian tennis player, who has won Wimbledon four times, with a whomping serve and muscle-bound limbs that go on for ever. Yet, as a new book of photographs shows, she also has an astonishing elegance and beauty.

The book, Venus Williams, is a collaboration between the tennis player and South African-born photographer Koto Bolofo. The two first met four years ago when he spotted her walking down the street in London.

"I turned a corner in Covent Garden and there was this tall, beautiful black woman," remembers Bolofo, "and I thought, 'I fancy her!' I'd never seen such a graceful woman. She was wearing a bright fluorescent pink raincoat and stood out like a sore thumb." Bolofo contacted her agent, suggesting the project. He had wanted to photograph her ever since he watched her win Wimbledon on the TV. "There was such a strength of woman in her," he says. "I had never seen anyone like this. She was like a gazelle, so pure. But I wanted to photograph her my way - not as a sports star with lots of muscles, but as a woman."

"He wanted to work with me, a lowly tennis player!" is Williams's self-mocking take on the matter. "He saw something in me that no one else has ever seen, the side that's classic tennis player, with elegance and grace."

The two became friends and did a few magazine shoots together, including one for Italian Vogue. But Bolofo wanted more: he wanted to do a book. He had "a vision", Williams says, of doing a chronicle of her life.

"I thought the photographs I'd seen of Venus were missing the point," he says. "I wanted to say, 'This is a woman, not a sports machine.' I wanted to make an art book of a beautiful woman, not just someone who whacked a ball around."

Over the next three years, while Williams, now 27, toured the world, Bolofo tailed her, popping up in London, Istanbul, Paris and New York with photographic suggestions, a small team of helpers and a rack of clothes. He took inspiration from the Jacques Henri Lartigue photographs of junior tennis champion Suzanne Lenglen in 1915: the shot of Williams dancing round the court in a ball dress was one of the first they collaborated on. "Lartigue captured that sense of social class with a spontaneity and energy," says Bolofo. "That was the foundation of the book."

Then there are the Josephine Baker-inspired shots, taken in Paris when she was playing in the French Open. "I remember seeing clips of Josephine Baker doing the funky chicken sort of dance," says Bolofo. "The shots of Venus in the beret and with the dumbbells are a modern interpretation of that." Williams herself sums up the dumbbells shot by saying, "Surreal. I like that a lot."

Sometimes it was just Williams in jeans and a vest, strolling round Paris with Bolofo, doing her own hair and make-up, taking photographs wherever they fancied; other shots were more staged. Williams is an ardent fan of fashion, and the book itself is being launched with a swanky party hosted by Ralph Lauren, which is the official outfitter to Wimbledon and is clearly delighted to support a stylish celebration of a sporting icon. However, she was content to let Bolofo direct her. "I respect him so much. I just couldn't wait to find out what his next ideas were. It was just easy," she says of the process. "It was go with the flow, laid back." During the sessions they would talk about everything - photography, tennis, Africa, children. And is Bolofo a tennis fan? "He is now," she jokes.

But Williams finds that away from the camera she no longer enjoys the rigmarole of red-carpet events, such as the recent Costume Institute Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She says she spends most of her time wearing her own clothing line, EleVen (named after a childhood home address), which is brightly coloured sports/casualwear. "Event" dressing is no longer the fun it used to be. "I can hardly sit still long enough for all the hair and make-up," she says. "There are so many things I have to do that there doesn't seem to be enough time to get it all done."

As for tennis, she'll be defending her Wimbledon title this year. "I love playing there. I love winning there," she says. But is she going to win? She laughs raucously. "That's always the plan."

Venus Williams by Koto Bolofo, published by Steidl, is available exclusively from Ralph Lauren, New Bond Street, London W1, from June 19. Williams will be writing exclusively for The Times Sport during Wimbledon

American Racial Psychosis--The Real Danger Facing Barack Obama and his Family

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/12/fox-apologizes-for-michelle-obama-headline/

All,

QUESTION: JUST HOW CRIMINALLY RACIST AND SLEAZY ARE THE RIGHT WING REPUBLICAN ATTACKS ON THE OBAMAS GOING TO GET?

ANSWER: AS VICIOUS AND DEADLY AS WHITE AMERICAN RACISM HAS ALWAYS BEEN TOWARD AFRICAN AMERICANS...

Kofi


June 12, 2008

Fox Forced to Address Michelle Obama Headline
By JIM RUTENBERG

For the third time in less than three weeks, Fox News Channel has had to acknowledge using poor judgment through inappropriate references to Senator Barack Obama.

The network has released a statement saying it should not have referred to Mr. Obama’s wife, Michelle, as “Obama’s Baby Mama,’’ as it did on Wednesday in an on-screen headline commonly called a “chyron.”

“A producer on the program exercised poor judgment in using this chyron
during the segment,” Bill Shine, a Fox News senior vice president, said in a statement.

The chyron appeared during a discussion between the conservative columnist Michelle Malkin and the Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly about political attacks against Mrs. Obama. It read in full, “Outraged Liberals: Stop picking on Obama’s baby mama!” It was first publicized on Wednesday by Alex Koppelman of Salon.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the term as one “chiefly in African-American usage” that refers to, “The mother of a man’s child, who is not his wife nor (in most cases) his current or exclusive partner.”

Earlier this week, the Fox News anchor E.D. Hill had apologized for raising the possibility that the Obamas affectionate fist bump during the senator’s victory rally in St. Paul on June 3 was “a terrorist fist jab.’’ Two weeks prior, the Fox News analyst Liz Trotta said she regretted making a joke about a possible assassination of Mr. Obama.

Her mea culpa followed that of former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas a week earlier after he made a similar crack at a gathering of the National Rifle Association.

In other news, Fox News Channel announced today that it was hiring Mr. Huckabee as a contributor.


http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0608/11044.html

All,

To All Americans (and ESPECIALLY white, Latino, and Asian American citizens in this country):

ARE YOU GOING TO PUBLICLY SPEAK OUT AGAINST THESE KIND OF BLATANT CHARACTER ASSASSINATION ATTEMPTS AND VICIOUS, RACIST LIES IN SUPPORT OF THE OBAMA FAMILY'S HUMANITY-- OR SIMPLY SIT BACK AND DO NOTHING?

Kofi


Michelle Obama becomes GOP target
By: Carrie Budoff Brown
June 13, 2008

It’s less than a week into the general election campaign, but already Michelle Obama is a Republican target.

Former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger leveled the first blow, introducing Republican John McCain’s wife at a fundraiser this week as someone who is “proud of her country, not just once but always.” Obama wasn’t mentioned by name, but the audience got it.

The dig signaled the start of what Democrats expect will be a concerted effort to cast Michelle Obama — and, by extension, Barack Obama — as an unpatriotic radical. It also pointed out the urgency to define Michelle Obama to general election voters before the opposition goes too far in doing it for her, strategists said.

“We live now in an era where everything and everyone is fair game,” said Douglas E. Schoen, who was a pollster and adviser to former President Bill Clinton from 1994 to 2000. “It is certainly the case that Teresa Heinz Kerry was probably not an asset in John Kerry’s campaign, at least publicly, and the jury is still out on how the public will view Michelle Obama.”

Despite being a steady presence at her husband’s side on primary election nights, and sitting for occasional media interviews, Michelle Obama remains an unfamiliar figure to most voters, strategists said. When she campaigned in recent months, it was almost always alone and in small settings. The most sustained attention she received on cable news shows was for her controversial February statement leaving the impression that she wasn’t proud of her country until this year.

“There is no reason to expect her to have a brand. But the campaign needs to start doing that,” said Erik Smith, a Democratic strategist and aide to former Rep. Richard Gephardt during his 2004 presidential campaign. “Defining Michelle Obama goes a long way in defining Barack Obama. I am sure it is a campaign priority.”

Indeed, when the campaign launched a website today to combat rumors about Barack Obama's patriotism, his religion and his family, the first entry dealt with his wife.

Other efforts are on tap. She joins the candidate Friday for a roundtable in Ohio with senior citizens and appears as a guest host next week on "The View," the popular daytime talk show, giving her access to friendly, high-profile platforms. Campaign aides said they are “staffing up across the board,” including for Michelle Obama — a move that Schoen said reflects the need to “manage the image and utterances of the spouse.”

The heightened scrutiny “requires a level of staffing and attention to detail that goes beyond what spouses have typically gotten,” Schoen said.

Most voters likely won't decide which candidate to support based on wives. Only 22 percent of respondents in a Rasmussen Reports survey released Wednesday said their perception of the spouse is very important to how they vote. But the more people learn about her, the more people understand her husband, strategists said.

The Rasmussen survey showed Michelle Obama, at this point, as a more polarizing figure than Cindy McCain. Forty-eight percent of voters hold a favorable impression of the presumptive Democratic nominee’s spouse, while 42 percent view her unfavorably, including a “startling” 25 percent with a very unfavorable opinion, Rasmussen wrote in its release.

Cindy McCain earned a favorable assessment from 49 percent of voters and an unfavorable review from 29 percent, including 10 percent who held a very unfavorable opinion.

Michelle Obama receives lower ratings than first lady Laura Bush did during the 2004 campaign but fares better than did Heinz Kerry, whose numbers dropped as Election Day drew closer. Obama is drawing comparisons to another presidential spouse: Hillary Rodham Clinton, who, like Obama, was 44 years old, was Ivy League-educated, earned more money than her husband and raised a child in the spotlight. Clinton also became a lightening rod for the conservative right.

But unlike 1992, the debate isn’t a proxy battle about the traditional bounds for women. Obama, to a greater degree than Clinton, makes her family life the centerpiece of her public image, talking frequently about family-work life balance and her two young daughters.

This time, the criticism is rooted in a combustible mix of race and patriotism.

The Obama campaign and PolitiFact, an independent fact-checking website, have debunked chain e-mails in the last month claiming she advocated racial separatism in her college thesis. Long the domain of rumors about her husband, the e-mails also focused on her February remark: “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country.”

Michelle Obama later clarified her statement, saying that her pride was in the political process and that she was “absolutely” always proud of the country.

The Tennessee Republican Party picked up on the remark, however, and posted a Web video last month that juxtaposed her statement with average voters claiming pride in their country.

The video reaped considerable national media attention and drew a sharp response from Barack Obama (“Lay off my wife,” he said at the time). He did the same last week when he was forced to respond to rumors of a video showing his wife using a derogatory term for white people.

“There is dirt and lies that are circulated in e-mails, and they pump them out long enough until finally you, a mainstream reporter, asks me about it,” Barack Obama said to a reporter who asked about the purported video, for which there is no evidence to support its existence. “That gives legs to the story. If somebody has evidence that myself or Michelle or anybody has said something inappropriate, let them do it.”

His comments followed a month of chatter from conservative pundits that the video's release was imminent. The fact that Barack Obama was personally pressed on the matter is said to be a reason why the campaign launched the website, which states on the front page: "No Such Tape Exists."

Chris Lehane, a veteran of Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, said the Obama campaign faces a choice similar to the one they faced with Hillary Clinton. As she, too, became a target of Republicans, “we made the decision to put her out there and not go into the bunker,” Lehane said.

The campaign gave her “an entire support system,” including more than a dozen aides, he said. By the late summer, attacks on Hillary Clinton at the Republican National Convention backfired as polls showed the criticism had turned off moderate and independent voters.

“They are going to try to make her a focal point of the campaign,” Lehane said of Michelle Obama. The McCain campaign will likely avoid attacks, but independent expenditure groups “will take selectively used phrases, manipulate and exploit them.”

The biggest concern for McCain, said a Republican media consultant, “will be controlling renegade county chairmen and people who have a tendency to be less disciplined about the right thing to say."

“This is an area where people have to be extremely careful," said John Brabender, who is serving as an informal adviser to the McCain campaign. "Voters have grown to believe that spouses are often well off-limits.”

Campaign aides said they expect Michelle Obama to maintain her schedule of several days a week on the campaign trail, at least until her daughters finish the school year. They view her as Barack Obama’s best character witness, introducing him as a father and a husband, and making connections with other women, particularly as the campaign attempts to lock down Clinton voters.

Tucker Bounds, a McCain spokesman, said the Arizona senator is “committed to running a respectful campaign” that is focused on the issues. Bounds, however, did not respond to a request for comment on Eagleburger’s remark.

“She is more likely to be an issue during the slow summer months than the real campaign after Labor Day,” Brabender said. “It is a distraction that campaigns can just not afford.”

© 2008 Capitol News Company, LLC

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0608/11041.html

All,

Just how sleazy and criminal is the Republican attack on Obama going to get? GUESS....

Kofi

Rezko: Feds pushed for dirt on Obama
By KENNETH P. VOGEL | 6/12/08


Rezko was a prominent fundraiser for Obama’s campaigns for state Senate, U.S. House and U.S. Senate, though not for Obama’s presidential campaign.


Imprisoned Chicago businessman Antoin “Tony” Rezko has accused federal prosecutors of improperly pressuring him to implicate Barack Obama in a corruption case.

In a letter to the U.S. District judge who presided over his trial, Rezko, who was convicted this month of 16 corruption-related counts, including fraud and money laundering, called prosecutors “overzealous.” And he singled out what he said were their efforts to get him to turn on Obama, an Illinois senator and the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, and Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

“They are pressuring me to tell them the ‘wrong’ things that I supposedly know about Gov. Blagojevich and Sen. Obama,” Rezko wrote in an undated letter released by the court this week. “I have never been party to any wrongdoing that involved the governor or the senator. I will never fabricate lies about anyone else for selfish purposes. I will take what comes my way, but I will never hurt innocent people.”

Randall Samborn, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago, wouldn't comment on Rezko's allegation.

Rezko was a prominent fundraiser for Obama’s campaigns for state Senate, U.S. House and U.S. Senate, though not for Obama’s presidential campaign.

Though Obama was not implicated in any wrongdoing in the Rezko case, his name was mentioned sporadically during Rezko’s trial.

Obama’s campaign released a statement after the letter was made public, stressing that Obama hasn’t been accused of “any improper action or conduct involving Tony Rezko” and reiterating that he hasn’t been contacted for an interview or for any information about Rezko. “Nothing in this letter indicates anything to the contrary.”

Still, Republicans have seized on the relationship between the two, which includes a real estate deal that enlarged the Obama’s Chicago homestead, to question Obama’s judgment.

Blagojevich — who, like Obama, staked out an image as a political reformer — repeatedly found himself the subject of plenty of unwanted scrutiny during the trial, which prosecutors used to detail a complicated pay-to-play scheme involving state government boards and commissions.

Chicago media have reported that Rezko is being pressured to cooperate with ongoing investigations of Blagojevich’s campaign and administration.

But Rezko’s lawyer, Joe Duffy, told the Chicago Tribune that he did not know of any investigation into Obama’s dealings with Rezko.

“I'm not aware of any impropriety related to Rezko and Obama,” Duffy told the Tribune. "At no point has the government ever asked me a single question about Obama or any wrongdoing involving Rezko and Obama."

It’s not uncommon for prosecutors to try to get defendants to implicate more powerful or wealthy officials, said Stan Brand, who has represented scores of public officials both in private practice and as legal counsel to the U.S. House.

“Prosecutors are always interested in trading up,” Brand said. “They put subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle pressure on people.”

But proving that “they’ve actually crossed an ethical line and asked this guy to embellish or shade the truth in a way that’s helpful to them in some other case,” Brand said, is “a very difficult case to make absent some express coercion, which is very rare.”

The letter, apparently written during the two-month trial, was actually a plea to allow Rezko to see his family.

But its allegations about pressure to implicate Obama will surely give ammunition to partisans on both sides.

For Democrats, Rezko’s claim dovetails with allegations that the Department of Justice targeted high-profile Democrats.

For Republicans, it will be used to suggest Obama’s relationship with Rezko drew warranted federal scrutiny.


http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/05/nyregion/05exhibit.html?_r=1&oref=slogin


All,

This is the actual country and world we live in...Don't forget that...PASS THE WORD...

Kofi

June 5, 2008

Secret Service Detains Artist Over ‘Assassination’ Exhibit
By SEWELL CHAN

New York City police detectives and Secret Service agents briefly detained and questioned an artist on Wednesday morning as he installed an exhibition with the title, “The Assassination of Hillary Clinton/The Assassination of Barack Obama.”

The artist, Yazmany Arboleda, tried to set up the exhibition in a vacant storefront at 264 West 40th Street in Midtown Manhattan, and had finished stenciling letters of the title on the plate glass windows at street level.

The police and Secret Service agents arrived about 9:30 a.m., and building workers quickly covered over the title with large sheets of brown paper and masking tape.

At first, police officers would not permit Mr. Arboleda to speak with reporters. But later, Mr. Arboleda, 27, talked about his exhibition in an interview.

“It’s art,” he said. “It’s not supposed to be harmful. It’s about character assassination — about how Obama and Hillary have been portrayed by the media.”

Mr. Arboleda said the exhibition was to open on Thursday and run all day. The interview ended abruptly as Mr. Arboleda was led to the Midtown South police precinct station for questioning.

Shortly after 11:30 a.m., Mr. Arboleda called reporters to say he had been released. “The Secret Service had to do a whole questionnaire with me,” he said. “It was about an hour of questioning. They asked if I owned guns, if I was a violent person, if I had ever been institutionalized.”

Mr. Arboleda said he answered “no” to the questions. Nonetheless, he said, the Secret Service asked him to take down the exhibition’s title from the window.

“I’m renting that space; the space was allocated for an exhibition, and it’s my right to put those words up,” he said. “They said it could incite someone to do something crazy, like break the window. It’s terrible, because they’re violating my rights. If someone breaks a window, they’re committing a crime.”

He added: “The exhibition is supposed to be about character assassination. It’s philosophical and metaphorical.”

Eric Joza, the manager of the 40th Street building, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, said of Mr. Arboleda: “I had no idea what he was going to do. All I knew is that he was an artist and was going to use the store.”

Special Agent Eric P. Zahren, a spokesman for the Secret Service in Washington, emphasized in a telephone interview that the agency was not seeking to shut down the show.

“We did not shut down that exhibit or request that anybody else shut it down,” Agent Zahren said. “This was brought to our attention, we went out there and had a conversation with the individual, but we did not shut it down.”

Speaking to reporters around noon, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said Mr. Arboleda had been questioned because the police wanted to determine his motives. “Obviously, they could be interpreted as advocating harm to protectees,” Mr. Kelly said. “Both of the senators, of course, are now being provided Secret Service protection.”

According to Web sites on Mr. Arboleda’s shows, including Yazmany.com, he was born in Boston in 1981 and lives in New York City. His family moved to Medellín, Colombia, shortly after he was born, and lived there until 1992. He holds a master’s degree in architecture and has been trained in photography, painting, fashion design and graphic design.

Comments touching on assassination during this political season have hit a nerve, and the safety of Senator Obama, the presumptive Democratic Party presidential nominee, has been an issue. When he was assigned Secret Service coverage in May 2007, it was the earliest point in a campaign that a candidate had been given protection.


Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

An Open Letter to Certain White American Women Voters--Your Whiteness is Showing

http://www.counterpunch.org/wise06072008.html

All,

Every single word in the following essay is not only TRUE but way overdue. To say I agree 100% with every single syllable by Mr. Wise is understating it by a very wide margin. There are so many white (and Latino and Asian) Americans who are completely fulla shit about the ugly reality of their heartfelt anti-African American racism that not even a massive national enema could possibly eradicate it at this very late date in our collective history.

As Sister Souljah (remember her?) once said so powerfully and accurately way back in '92 when "the first black minstrel President" (a certain blackedup and arrogant political cretin by the name of Bill Clinton) denounced her in order to publicly humiliate Jesse Jackson (he succeeded):

"IF THE TRUTH HURTS YOU'LL BE IN PAIN AND IF THE TRUTH DRIVES YOU CRAZY YOU'LL JUST BE INSANE..."

Ain't that the truth?...

Kofi



An Open Letter to Certain White Women Who Are Threatening to Withhold Support from Obama in November

Your Whiteness is Showing
By Tim Wise
June 7 / 8, 2008
Counterpunch magazine

This is an open letter to those white women who, despite their proclamations of progressivism, and supposedly because of their commitment to feminism, are threatening to withhold support from Barack Obama in November. You know who you are.

I know that it's probably a bad time for this. Your disappointment at the electoral defeat of Senator Hillary Clinton is fresh, the sting is new, and the anger that animates many of you--who rightly point out that the media was often sexist in its treatment of the Senator--is raw, pure and justified.

That said, and despite the awkward timing, I need to ask you a few questions, and I hope you will take them in the spirit of solidarity with which they are genuinely intended. But before the questions, a statement if you don't mind, or indeed, even if (as I suspect), you will mind it quite a bit.

First, for those of you threatening to actually vote for John McCain and to oppose Senator Obama, or to stay home in November and thereby increase the likelihood of McCain winning and Obama losing (despite the fact that the latter's policy platform is virtually identical to Clinton's while the former's clearly is not), all the while claiming to be standing up for women...

For those threatening to vote for John McCain or to stay home and increase the odds of his winning (despite the fact that he once called his wife the c-word in public and is a staunch opponent of reproductive freedom and gender equity initiatives, such as comparable worth legislation), all the while claiming to be standing up for women...

For those threatening to vote for John McCain or to stay home and help ensure Barack Obama's defeat, as a way to protest what you call Obama's sexism (examples of which you seem to have difficulty coming up with), all the while claiming to be standing up for women...

Your whiteness is showing.

When I say your whiteness is showing this is what I mean: You claim that your opposition to Obama is an act of gender solidarity, in that women (and their male allies) need to stand up for women in the face of the sexist mistreatment of Clinton by the press. On this latter point--the one about the importance of standing up to the media for its often venal misogyny--you couldn't be more correct. As the father of two young girls who will have to contend with the poison of patriarchy all their lives, or at least until such time as that system of oppression is eradicated, I will be the first to join the boycott of, or demonstration on, whatever media outlet you choose to make that point. But on the first part of the above equation--the part where you insist voting against Obama is about gender solidarity--you are, for lack of a better way to put it, completely full of crap. And what's worse is that at some level I suspect you know it. Voting against Senator Obama is not about gender solidarity. It is an act of white racial bonding, and it is grotesque.

If it were gender solidarity you sought, you would by definition join with your black and brown sisters come November, and do what you know good and well they are going to do, in overwhelming numbers, which is vote for Barack Obama. But no. You are threatening to vote not like other women--you know, the ones who aren't white like you and most of your friends--but rather, like white men! Needless to say it is high irony, bordering on the outright farcical, to believe that electorally bonding with white men, so as to elect McCain, is a rational strategy for promoting feminism and challenging patriarchy. You are not thinking and acting as women, but as white people. So here's the first question: What the hell is that about?

And you wonder why women of color have, for so long, thought (by and large) that white so-called feminists were phony as hell? Sister please...

Your threats are not about standing up for women. They are only about standing up for the feelings of white women, and more to the point, the aspirations of one white woman. So don't kid yourself. If you wanted to make a statement about the importance of supporting a woman, you wouldn't need to vote for John McCain, or stay home, thereby producing the same likely result--a defeat for Obama. You could always have said you were going to go out and vote for Cynthia McKinney. After all, she is a woman, running with the Green Party, and she's progressive, and she's a feminist. But that isn't your threat is it? No. You're not threatening to vote for the woman, or even the feminist woman. Rather, you are threatening to vote for the white man, and to reject not only the black man who you feel stole Clinton's birthright, but even the black woman in the race. And I wonder why? Could it be...?

See, I told you your whiteness was showing.

And now for a third question, and this is the biggie, so please take your time with it: How is it that you have managed to hold your nose all these years, just like a lot of us on the left, and vote for Democrats who we knew were horribly inadequate--Kerry, Gore, Clinton, Dukakis, right on down the uninspiring line--and yet, apparently can't bring yourself to vote for Barack Obama? A man who, for all of his shortcomings (and there are several, as with all candidates put up by either of the two major corporate parties) is surely more progressive than any of those just mentioned. And how are we to understand that refusal--this sudden line in the proverbial sand--other than as a racist slap at a black man? You will vote for white men year after year after year--and are threatening to vote for another one just to make a point--but can't bring yourself to vote for a black man, whose political views come much closer to your own, in all likelihood, than do the views of any of the white men you've supported before. How, other than as an act of racism, or perhaps as evidence of political insanity, is one to interpret such a thing?

See, black folks would have sucked it up, like they've had to do forever, and voted for Clinton had it come down to that. Indeed, they were on board the Hillary train early on, convinced that Obama had no chance to win and hoping for change, any change, from the reactionary agenda that has been so prevalent for so long in this culture. They would have supported the white woman--hell, for many black folks, before Obama showed his mettle they were downright excited to do so--but you won't support the black man. And yet you have the audacity to insist that it is you who are the most loyal constituency of the Democratic Party, and the one before whom Party leaders should bow down, and whose feet must be kissed?

Your whiteness is showing.

Look, I couldn't care less about the Party personally. I left the Democrats twenty years ago when they told me that my activism in the Central America solidarity and South African anti-apartheid movements made me a security risk, and that I wouldn't be able to get clearance to be in some parade with Governor Dukakis. Yeah, seriously. But for you to act as though you are the indispensible voters, the most important, the ones whose views should be pandered to, whose every whim should be the basis for Party policy, is not only absurd, it is also racist in that it, a) ignores and treats as irrelevant the much more loyal constituency of black folks, without whom no Democrat would have won anything in the past twenty years (and indeed the racial gap favoring the Democrats among blacks is about six times larger than the gender gap favoring them among white women, relative to white men); and b) demonstrates the mentality of entitlement and superiority that has been long ingrained in us as white folks--so that we believe we have the right to dictate the terms of political engagement, and to determine the outcome, and to get our way, simply because for so long we have done just that.

But that day is done, whether you like it or not, and you are now left with two, and only two choices, so consider them carefully: the first is to stand now in solidarity with your black brothers and sisters and welcome the new day, and help to push it in a truly progressive and feminist and antiracist direction, while the second is to team up with white men to try and block the new day from dawning. Feel free to choose the latter. But if you do, please don't insult your own intelligence, or ours, by insisting that you've done so as a radical political act.

Tim Wise is the author of: White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son (Soft Skull Press, 2005), and Affirmative Action: Racial Preference in Black and White (Routledge: 2005). He can be reached at: timjwise@msn.com

One Historic Night, Two Americas

All,

Still more outstanding evidence of why Frank Rich (former award winning drama critic and author of the extraordinary 2006 book "The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth in Bush's America") remains one of the finest writers and most insightful political journalists in the United States.

Kofi

OP-ED COLUMNIST
By FRANK RICH
New York Times
June 8, 2008

WHEN Barack Obama achieved his historic victory on Tuesday night, the battle was joined between two Americas. Not John Edwards’s two Americas, divided between rich and poor. Not the Americas split by race, gender, party or ideology. What looms instead is an epic showdown between two wildly different visions of the country, from the ground up

On one side stands Mr. Obama’s resolutely cheerful embrace of the future. His vision is inseparable from his identity, both as a rookie with a slim Washington résumé and as a black American whose triumph was regarded as improbable by voters of all races only months ago. On the other is John McCain’s promise of a wise warrior’s vigilant conservation of the past. His vision, too, is inseparable from his identity — as a government lifer who has spent his entire career in service, whether in the Navy or Washington.

Given the dividing line separating the two Americas of 2008, a ticket uniting Mr. McCain and Hillary Clinton might actually be a better fit than the Obama-Clinton “dream ticket,” despite their differences on the issues. Never was this more evident than Tuesday night, when Mrs. Clinton and Mr. McCain both completely misread a one-of-a-kind historical moment as they tried to cling to the prerogatives of the 20th century’s old guard.

All presidential candidates, Mr. Obama certainly included, are egomaniacs. But Washington’s faith in hierarchical status adds a thick layer of pomposity to politicians who linger there too long. Mrs. Clinton referred to herself by the first-person pronoun 64 times in her speech, and Mr. McCain did so 60 times in his. Mr. Obama settled for 30.

Remarkably, neither Mrs. Clinton nor Mr. McCain had the grace to offer a salute to Mr. Obama’s epochal political breakthrough, which reverberated so powerfully across the country and throughout the world. By being so small and ungenerous, they made him look taller. Their inability to pivot even briefly from partisan self-interest could not be a more telling symptom of the dysfunctional Washington culture Mr. Obama aspires to mend.

Yet even as the two establishment candidates huffed and puffed to assert their authority, they seemed terrified by Mr. Obama’s insurgency, as if it were the plague in Edgar Allan Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death.” Mrs. Clinton held her nonconcession speech in a Manhattan bunker, banishing cellphone reception and television monitors carrying the news of Mr. Obama’s clinching of the nomination. Mr. McCain, laboring under the misapprehension that he was wittily skewering his opponent, compulsively invoked the Obama-patented mantra of “change” 33 times in his speech.

Mr. McCain only reminded voters that he, like Mrs. Clinton, thinks that change is nothing more than a marketing gimmick. He has no idea what it means. “No matter who wins this election, the direction of this country is going to change dramatically,” he said on Tuesday. He then grimly regurgitated Goldwater and Reagan government-bashing talking points from the 1960s and ’70s even as he presumed to accuse Mr. Obama of looking “to the 1960s and ’70s for answers.”

Mr. Obama is a liberal, but it’s not your boomer parents’ liberalism that is at the heart of his appeal. He never rattles off a Clinton laundry list of big federal programs; he supports abortion rights and gay civil rights with a sunny bonhomie that makes the right’s cultural scolds look like rabid mastodons. He is not refighting either side of the domestic civil war over Vietnam that exploded in his hometown of Chicago 40 years ago this summer, long before he arrived there.

He has never deviated from his much-quoted formulation in “The Audacity of Hope,” where he described himself as aloof from “the psychodrama of the baby boom generation” with its “old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago.” His vocabulary is so different from that of Mrs. Clinton and Mr. McCain that they often find it as baffling as a foreign language, even as they try to rip it off.

The selling point of Mr. Obama’s vision of change is not doctrinaire liberalism or Bush-bashing but an inclusiveness that he believes can start to relieve Washington’s gridlock much as it animated his campaign. Some of that inclusiveness is racial, ethnic and generational, in the casual, what’s-the-big-deal manner of post-boomer Americans already swimming in our country’s rapidly expanding demographic pool. Some of it is post-partisan: he acknowledges that Republicans, Ronald Reagan included, can have ideas.

Opponents who dismiss this as wussy naïveté do so at their own risk. They at once call attention to the expiring shelf life of their own Clinton-Bush-vintage panaceas and lull themselves into underestimating Mr. Obama’s political killer instincts.

The Obama forces out-organized the most ruthless machine in Democratic politics because the medium of their campaign mirrored its inclusive message. They empowered adherents in every state rather than depending on a Beltway campaign hierarchy whose mercenary chief strategist kept his day job as chief executive for a corporate P.R. giant. Such viral organization and fund-raising is a seamless fit with bottom-up democracy as it is increasingly practiced in the Facebook-YouTube era, not merely by Americans and not merely by the young.

You could learn a ton about the Clinton campaign’s cultural tone-deafness from its stodgy generic Web site. A similar torpor afflicts JohnMcCain.com, which last week gave its graphics a face-lift that unabashedly mimics BarackObama.com and devoted prime home page real estate to hawking “McCain Golf Gear.” (No joke.) The blogs, video and social networking are static and sparse, the apt reflection of a candidate who repeatedly invokes “I” as he boasts of his humility.

Mr. Obama’s deep-rooted worldliness — in philosophy as well as itinerant background — is his other crucial departure from the McCain template. As more and more Americans feel the pain of spiraling gas prices and lost jobs, they are also coming to recognize, as Mr. Obama does, that the globally reviled American image forged by an endless war in Iraq and its accompanying torture scandals is inflicting economic as well as foreign-policy havoc.

Six out of 10 Americans do want their president to talk to Iran’s president, according to the most-recent Gallup poll. Americans are sick of a national identity defined by arrogant saber-rattling abroad and manipulative fear-mongering at home. Mr. Obama closed his speech on Tuesday by telling Americans they “don’t deserve” another election “that’s governed by fear.” Of the three candidates, he was the only one who did not mention 9/11 that night.

Mr. Obama isn’t flawless. But it’s hard to see him hitching up with Mrs. Clinton, who would contradict his message, unite the right, and pass along her husband’s still unpacked post-presidency baggage. A larger trap for Mr. Obama is his cockiness. His own tendency to preen and to coast could be encouraged by recent events rocking the Straight Talk Express: Mr. McCain is so far proving an exceptionally clumsy candidate prone to accentuating everything that’s out-of-touch about his American vision.

Mr. McCain’s speech in a New Orleans suburb on Tuesday night spawned a cottage industry of ridicule, even among Republicans. The halting delivery, sickly green backdrop and spastic, inappropriate smiles, presumably mandated by some consultant hoping to mask his anger, left the impression that Mr. McCain isn’t yet ready for prime-time radio.

But the substance was even worse than the theatrics. Incredibly, Mr. McCain attacked Mr. Obama for being insufficiently bipartisan while speaking to the most conspicuously partisan audience you can assemble in today’s America: a small, nearly all-white crowd that seconded his attack lines with boorish choruses of boos. On TV, the audience came across as a country-club membership riled by a change in the Sunday brunch menu.

Equally curious was Mr. McCain’s decision to stage this event in Louisiana, a state that is truly safe for the G.O.P. and that he’d last visited less than six weeks earlier. Perhaps he did so because Louisiana’s governor, the 36-year-old Indian-American Bobby Jindal, is the only highly placed nonwhite Republican he could find to lend his campaign an ersatz dash of diversity and youth.

Or perhaps he thought that if he once more returned to the scene of President Bush’s Katrina crime to (belatedly) slam that federal failure, it would fool voters into forgetting his cheerleading for Mr. Bush’s Iraq obsession and economic policies. This time it proved a levee too far. The day after his speech Mr. McCain was caught on the stump misstating and exaggerating his own do-little record after Katrina. Soon the Internet was alight with documentation of what he actually did on the day the hurricane hit land: a let-us-eat-cake photo op with Mr. Bush celebrating his birthday in Arizona.

Anything can happen in politics, and there are five months to go. But Tuesday night’s McCain pratfall — three weeks in the planning by his campaign, according to Fox News — should be a clear indication that Mr. Obama must accept Mr. McCain’s invitation to weekly debates at once. Tomorrow if possible, and, yes, bring on the green!

Mr. Obama must also heed Mr. McCain’s directive that he visit Iraq — as long as he avoids Baghdad markets and hits other foreign capitals on route. When the world gets a firsthand look at the new America Mr. Obama offers as an alternative to Mr. McCain’s truculent stay-the-course, the public pandemonium may make J.F.K.’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” visit to the Berlin Wall look like a warm-up act.

The dynamics of translation

by Dr. Tyrone Williams

Long before Barack Obama secured the Democratic Party presidential nomination, long before Hillary Clinton began using him as a barometer of racial parochialism, pundits of all persuasions were overtly or covertly asking and wondering one thing: Can Obama translate a party nomination into a viable national campaign? The words translate and translation are rarely used in local campaigns but they show up frequently during statewide and national election years. Their usage presumes, from the start (actually, even before the start), that a particular candidate has “limited” appeal, which in turn presupposes a “general” consensus. And as the term translation suggests, limitation and generality are both linked to language. Despite the ritualistic appeals to “personality” and “likeability,” everyone recognizes the centrality of language during campaigns, which is why the media and voters tend to focus on what words are spoken by candidates. Of course, words do not alone constitute a language. If that were true, translations would be relatively easy. But translations are hard because of the different kinds of contexts that make words “mean.” And it is precisely certain contexts that the media excises, and certain contexts that it exaggerates (or invents), in much the way that media photographs are cropped to narrow “readings” down to incontrovertible and particular meanings. Recontextualizing words from one frame of reference to another, like cropping a photograph, is a form of translation, one which always has specific political, cultural and social—in sum, historical—effects.

The very act of translation opens up an aperture through which we glimpse the dynamics of history as an endless replaying of the slave-master dialectic—that is, the slavemaster and Master—or Mister—Slave. That is, one language, however defined, is always “master” and one language is always “slave.” One translates from one language into another for those who cannot—do not—will not—speak the language of origin. Capability, status and volition straddle the nurture/nature divide aslant—as though one “leg” were shorter than the other, as one though one language were “taller” (perhaps closer to divinity), as though one linguistic system were “normal,” another, “disabled.” One does not have to be conscious of this intrinsically unequal relationship between any two languages; inequality is the presupposition of translation.

Consider the examples of two men: Jeremiah Wright and Barack Obama. Among all the accusations and finger-pointing, I want to cite three commentaries that illustrate the ends of translation—and the beginning of the slave-master dialectic. In his New Republic essay “Cool We Can Believe In” novelist/poet Paul Beatty attempts to pin down Obama’s apparent invulnerability to closet skeletons, his anti-Tar Baby immunity, to that most ineffable of blues and jazz attitudes-sans-attitude—cool. This updated stoicism, for Beatty, is the very antithesis of translation—it does not convert, change or represent. It is before all morality, outside any ethos. It is the analogue to reading a poem in a language you do not understand. Or as Adam Clark, a theologian at Xavier University, put it: “The language of the black church that conveys this oppositionality [to empire] does not translate well into the arena of presidential politics. It was never intended to.” Cool cannot be translated—you either get it or you don’t. And so, writes Kofi Natambu, both men should have simply agreed to disagree. I concur but such a possibility depends on black men recognizing—no, remembering—that they are individual black men. But a preacher and a politician have a hard time remembering this since, in their chosen professions, they presume to speak for others, to surrender their individual selves for a larger cause. Of course, as everyone from the editors of the New York Times to FOX News has recognized, it would not have mattered much anyway since, truth to tell, in America there are no individual black men or women allowed in public. There are only translators who speak at least two languages, and those dead, as dead as Latin, as labor, so goes the story. The facts of his particular case aside, Mike Tyson’s arrest and conviction on rape charges several years ago was read by the media itself (and no doubt certain segments of the American public) as a referendum on the O.J. Simpson case, on that black man having “gotten away” with murder. I repeat: there are no individual black men or women allowed in public.

Ethnic minorities and women have known this for sometime, which is one reason why this particular presidential nomination race was so bitter. The fact is, rightly or wrongly, gender politics does figure into American public life—including elections—which does not obviate its racial politics (cf. Tyson and Simpson above). This dynamic is never easily “translated” from one sphere into the other, for as my comments above about translation in general suggest, translation between two “languages” (e.g. the black church and hegemonic “public” discourse, gender and race) is never performed on an even playing field. One language is always presumed “inferior” to the other (e.g., the American fascination with British English and royalty, the Diana cult, etc.). The Obama-Clinton campaigns thus resembled, all too cannily, the Susan B. Anthony-Frederick Douglass debates and ugly back-and-forth recriminations of the 19th century, a debate over “who” deserved the vote first—black men or white women, a debate which erased black women, as Sojourner Truth reminded both Anthony and Douglass. To argue over which was “worse”—the race-baiting or the subtle (and not so subtle) woman-baiting—is to fall into the translation trap, to assume that one has to choose one “language”(race or gender) over another.

If translation always presumes an uneven playing field, then it will not be difficult to judge which “language” plays the role of the inferior in the upcoming presidential campaign. The fact that John McCain doesn’t even have to deal with the question of “translation” speaks volumes. Obama will have to put black people and other people of color, to say nothing of working class people and young people in general, on the back burner, so goes the conventional political wisdom. But what if there is no dominant language out there? What if there are only particular ethnic, gender and economic groups all vying for their share of that ever-dwindling American pie. What if one refused to pick? What is translation in that scenario?



Dr. Williams is a poet, literary theorist, cultural critic, and Professor of English at Xavier University in Ohio.

Why Billary, Inc. is a Menace to Barack Obama and the Democratic Party--and What must be done about it

All,

The following messages were sent by me earlier today to friends and colleagues who asked me my take on the latest political debacle involving Billary, Inc. and the Obama campaign for the Presidency. If Obama doesn't want to be eternally held hostage by the divisive and destructive antics of the ruthless Billary, Inc. political machine he had better stand up to her NOW, reject her idiotic demands, assert his complete independence from her brazen bullshit, and then get on with the far more important task of winning the presidential fight against John McCain. Please read the letters and articles below.

Kofi

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/05/us/politics/04cnd-campaign.html?_r=1&nl=pol&oref=slogin&emc=pola1&pagewanted=all


Check out this article! Read the dirty details for yourselves. The vicious, ruthless, and virulently racist triangulation tactics of the Billary, Inc. machine--the dirtiest political mob in this country outside of the notorious Karl Rove and the Republican Party Dirty Tricks Division--is holding Obama and the entire Democratic Party HOSTAGE to their madness. If this madness is not completely stopped by Obama and especially the Democratic Party leadership of the DNC (e.g. Dean, Pelosi, Reid, etc.) not only will Obama lose in November but the Democratic Party will be destroyed (I know, I know some of you might think that would be a good thing but I assure you that none of us will have the dubious luxury of watching it disintegrate if the Republicans get back in office for a third term--and with a currently completely inept and clueless American Left we'll all be too busy DROWNING)...Don't believe me?--WATCH AND SEE...

Kofi



June 5, 2008

Top Democrats Press for Unity After Obama Secures Victory
By MICHAEL LUO
New York Times

With Senator Barack Obama crossing the threshold of delegates needed to win the Democratic presidential nomination, party leaders began to move on Wednesday to bring the lengthy primary battle to a close and unite the party, even as questions swirled about Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s next move.

In the morning, a group of top Democratic leaders asked all of the party’s uncommitted superdelegates, the officials and party leaders who get automatic convention seats, to make their preferences known by Friday.

While the group of leaders — including the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Howard Dean; the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi; the Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid; and Gov. Joe Manchin of West Virginia — did not formally endorse Mr. Obama or urge Mrs. Clinton to exit the race, they said in a joint statement: “Democrats must now turn our full attention to the general election.” They added that the party needed to “stand united and begin our march toward reversing the eight years of failed Bush/McCain policies that have weakened our country.”

Other party leaders began to coalesce behind Mr. Obama, including Representative Rahm Emanuel, of Illinois, a former aide in the Clinton White House but also a close friend of Mr. Obama.

“Look, I’ve known him for years, and I said that as the election came to an end, I would make my endorsement, come from underneath the desk — and I did that,” Mr. Emanuel said. “The fact is, he is the nominee.”

But Mrs. Clinton’s top aides continued to sidestep questions on Wednesday morning about when she would suspend her campaign, even as some of her supporters began ratcheting up pressure on Mr. Obama to take her on as his running mate.

Robert L. Johnson, a prominent Clinton backer and the founder of Black Entertainment Television, said Wednesday on the CNN program “American Morning” that he planned to enlist members of the Congressional Black Caucus to push Mr. Obama to accept Mrs. Clinton as his vice presidential nominee. He said Mrs. Clinton had not directed his efforts, but was aware of them.

Mr. Johnson argued that an Obama-Clinton ticket would have the best chance of winning in the general election and would help unify the Democratic Party.

Lanny Davis, who was an aide in the Clinton White House, said he was circulating a petition asking Mr. Obama to pick Mrs. Clinton as his running mate. Mr. Davis said he was acting on his own.

On a conference call with members of the New York Congressional delegation on Tuesday, Mrs. Clinton was asked whether she would be open to joining a ticket headed by Mr. Obama. She replied, according to some who were on the call, that if he offered the vice presidential nod, she would accept, and would do whatever she could to help Democrats win the White House.

Terry McAuliffe, the Clinton campaign chairman, however, insisted Wednesday morning on CNN that there had been “absolutely zero discussions” about whether she would accept a vice presidential nomination. Mr. McAuliffe said that Mrs. Clinton, whose speech on Tuesday night in New York was more defiant than conciliatory, wanted to talk things over with her supporters on Wednesday.

“There is plenty of time,” Mr. McAuliffe said, continuing to argue that Mrs. Clinton had won the most popular votes, a notion disputed by the Obama campaign.

Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton spoke by telephone just after midnight Wednesday. He congratulated her and renewed his offer to “sit down when it makes sense for you,” according to a spokesman for Mr. Obama, Robert Gibbs. Mrs. Clinton responded positively, Mr. Gibbs said, but he added there were no immediate plans to meet on Wednesday.

The focus now is on the delicate dance between Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton, a relationship that has been rife with complex tensions throughout the primary battle, which was riven by accusations of racism and sexism.

Both candidates addressed the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the most prominent pro-Israel lobbying group in Washington, on Wednesday morning. Mr. Obama took the stage first, and immediately offered warm words for Mrs. Clinton, saying, “She has made history alongside me over the last sixteen months.”

A short while later, Mrs. Clinton came to the podium and plunged straight into her speech, ignoring speculation about her political intentions. She digressed, however, to offer this assurance to her audience: “I know Senator Obama will be a good friend to Israel.”

Mr. Obama has struggled to combat the wariness about him that has been harbored by some Jewish voters, a wariness evidently fueled by e-mail messages spreading false rumors about his background and positions. In his speech, he promised to be uncompromising in his defense of Israel’s security. He also revived the contentious issue of how much to engage foreign adversaries, especially Iran, which promises to be a central dispute in his general election battle with Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee.

“Contrary to the claims of some, I have no interest in sitting down with our adversaries just for the sake of talking,” Mr. Obama said. “But as President of the United States, I would be willing to lead tough and principled diplomacy with the appropriate Iranian leader at a time and place of my choosing — if, and only if, it can advance the interests of the United States.”

Mr. McCain has attacked Mr. Obama for his response at a debate last year, in which he said he would be willing to sit down with the leaders of some America’s most ardent foes, including Iran, “without preconditions.”

But Mr. Obama said that a change in course was needed in the country’s diplomatic approach, and that Mr. McCain “refuses to understand or acknowledge the failure of the policy he would continue.”

For her part, Mrs. Clinton seemed to take pains to avoid bringing up issues where she and Mr. Obama have differed, including the question of when to meet with certain adversaries; during the primary campaign she, too, criticized Mr. Obama’s stance.

It was a last-minute rush of commitments by Democratic superdelegates, as well as the results from the final two primaries in Montana and South Dakota on Tuesday, that raised Mr. Obama’s total above the 2,118-delegate threshold needed to secure the nomination at the party’s convention in August. The victory for Mr. Obama, the son of a black Kenyan father and a white Kansan mother, broke racial barriers and represented a remarkable rise for a man who just four years ago was serving in the Illinois State Senate.

But to the end, the primaries reflected the party’s continuing divisions, as Mrs. Clinton won the South Dakota contest while Mr. Obama won in Montana.

The competition between Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama has been sharpening for weeks, but the close of the Democratic primary race formally raised the curtain on a five-month general election contest.

At a town-hall-style meeting in Baton Rouge on Wednesday, Mr. McCain announced that he had invited Mr. Obama to join him in a series of 10 such meetings between now and the Democratic convention in late August.

“I think Americans are tired about the ways presidential campaigns have been run in the past — all the gimmicks, the phony sound bits and photo-ops,” Mr. McCain said. “Campaigns always seemed to be more about the candidates’ interest than the public.”

Mr. McCain even proposed a date for the first event: June 12 in New York City.

Mr. Obama had earlier indicated that he might be open to such a proposal, though it is clearly to the McCain campaign’s advantage to push the concept. Mr. McCain will almost certainly be widely outspent by Mr. Obama, whose fund-raising has far outstripped his opponent’s, and joint appearances where the candidates would get equal attention could help offset the disparity.

Mr. McCain even joked about the financial aspect, suggesting that the candidates share the same airplane to the forums: “Given our expenses,” he said, “I know my campaign would agree to it.”

David Plouffe, the Obama campaign manager, later issued a statement saying the town-hall proposal was “appealing, and one that would allow a great conversation to take place about the need to change the direction of this country.”

But he said that his side would recommend a “less structured and lengthier” format, “one that more closely resembles the historic debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas.”

Nevertheless, Mr. Plouffe said he looked forward to continuing the discussion over the matter with the McCain campaign.

Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting.


N,

Regardless of the present or future superdelegate tally and despite the fact that Barack is the DP nominee the Clintons are creating a major problem for Obama that he and the Democratic Party leadership in general is going to have to address and eliminate. The ruthless and insulting manuevering that Billary, Inc. is currently involved in with the truly slimy likes of Lanny Davis and that opportunist cretin from BET Robert Johnson as well as others in and out of her personal camp is seriously undermining and even sabotaging Obama's campaign for the Presidency. The mere fact that she's trying to hold him and the rest of the Party hostage to the absurd and ruinous idea of a Vice Presidential spot on the ticket is a clear signal that there is no real Party unity at this point even though a nominee has already been chosen!

This is not only unprecedented in modern Democratic Party history (the closest historical comparison I could make is the 1980 debacle incolving Jimmy Carter vs, Edward Kennedy at the DP convention that year but even that wasn't as poisonous and destructive as what the Clintons are trying to pull). Something needs to be done NOW to stop this express train of division because if not and the Clintons get the VP spot all is lost politically against McCain and I for one would never support such a move under any circumstances!

Please respond when you get a chance...

Kofi

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2008/05/heilemann_what_hillary_wants_a.html

All,

I think the following analysis by John Heilemann from May 30 is right on target and provides the clearest and most reliable insight into precisely why and how Billary is going to try to undermine and sabotage Obama--and if she fails at that--she will simply run again for the Presidency at her earliest opportunity. Either way she's using her present support in the Democratic Party and in the primary elections as a bullying wedge to try to marginalize, dismiss, and restrict Obama's titular role as present (and future) leader of the Democratic Party. Billary, Inc. are sheer Machiavellians when it comes to politics which means that their first, last, and final "loyalties" are ALWAYS to themselves no matter what and that ALL OTHERS--supporters, opponents, friends, acolytes, and enemies alike are perceived and treated as nothing but mere cannon fodder for their self serving mercenary ventures into Politics. Billary, Inc. only runs to win and they don't give a damn as Heilemann brilliantly points out in this article who or what they have to hurt or destroy in order to achieve their goal--which in their manipulative and pathologically meglomaniacal minds always means that they are right and everyone else who disagrees with them are wrong PERIOD/ALL THE TIME/because they say so, etc.

That this fundamental attitude and value system makes them routinely dangerous and destructive goes without saying...

They are and will continue to be Obama's political enemy simply because he stands in the way of what they want, demand, and insist that they are entitled to and it will be to Barack's ultimate political peril and demise if he allows Billary, Inc. to dictate his political direction in any way...

Kofi


Heilemann: What Hillary Wants, and Why She’s Jesse Jackson ’88
May 30, 2008



There’s been a lot of talk over the past few months about whether the 2008 presidential campaign just might turn out to be 1988 all over again. The comparison has been driven by the fact that Republicans plainly intend to try to cast Barack Obama as a black Mike Dukakis — as too liberal, too inexperienced, too weak, and, crucially, insufficiently patriotic to occupy the White House. But a different analogy occurred to me the other day, one perhaps less comprehensively apt but so delightfully ironic that it would be a crime not to point it out. As anyone politically sentient in 1988 will vividly recall, the endgame of the Democratic primaries that year revolved around a challenger seen by his fans as a historic figure and his foes as a potential party-wrecker, and what concessions he might insist upon in order to fade quietly into the background. The inescapable question of the hour was, “What does Jesse Jackson want?”

Hillary Clinton, of course, is no Jesse Jackson (but neither, pace Bill Clinton’s comments on the eve of the South Carolina primary, is Obama). But the question posed by her behavior in the home stretch of this year’s nominating contest is precisely the same: “What does Hillary want?”

Whenever this query is put to me — which only takes place, oh, on the order of 100 times a day — my response is simple: She wants to be president. Duh. And if it ain’t gonna happen this year, then her central objective is to make it as likely as possible in 2012. As I’ve written many times, Hillary believes with every fiber of her being that Obama is going to lose this year. (And so does her husband.) So her aim is to put herself in the best position possible to stand up on November 5 and say, if perhaps a tad more subtly than this, “I told you so.”

From these core facts — and based on everything my reporting these past few months tells me, facts is what they are — flow plausible answers to a raft of more granular questions about Clinton’s motives and what she plans to do in the days ahead. For the purposes of brevity, let’s stick to the top five.

1. Is she going to quit sometime soon or fight on to the convention?
The former. Indeed, my guess is that she might very well be out of the race by the end of next week. For Hillary to be the Democratic nominee in 2012, she must limit the extent to which she’s seen as having caused Obama’s (in her mind, inevitable) loss this fall. And setting off on a scorched-earth march to Denver runs in diametric opposition to that goal. True, she keeps saying that she’s going all the way; true, she continues to press for the seating in full of the Florida and Michigan delegations. But Clinton has other things she might want from Obama, from a prominent speaking slot in Denver to help paying off her campaign debt. The more delegates she has in the end, the stronger her bargaining position.

2. Does she want to be offered the VP slot?
No, she does not. If it’s offered, she has to take it, because turning it down would be a signal to her supporters that she doesn’t support Obama (see above). And if she’s on the ticket and Obama goes down (again, as she’s convinced he will), she is then complicit in the loss, and her prospects in 2012 are damaged. Does Hillary want be the next John Edwards? The question answers itself.

3. So what’s with all the leaks that Bill wants her on the ticket?
He probably does. The idea of Hillary as veep must sound like a sweet deal to him: It would be history-making, it would cement the Clintons’ status as one of America’s great political dynasties, and in the second-fiddle job his wife would pose no danger of overshadowing him. But contrary to the notion that the Clintons are always in perfect sync on matters political — that they scheme together, choose a path to follow, then go charging down it together — there are many cases where their thinking diverges. And this is one of them.

4. Will she work hard for Obama or undermine him in the fall?
Implicit in all this analysis is that Hillary Clinton is a cold-eyed rationalist, and despite the occasional shard of evidence to the contrary, this is true. She’s aware that even as she’s become a much larger figure in the course of this race in one segment of the party, her reputation has taken a beating in another. She thinks it’s unfair, but she knows it’s the reality, and also that whether Obama wins or loses, it’s difficult to imagine a promising future for herself without repairing her standing among those who regard her poorly. I suspect there won’t be many louder Obama cheerleaders this autumn — or more insincere ones.

5. If Obama wins, what will she do next?
One rumor going around New York is that she’ll run for governor — an eventuality only marginally more likely than my pursuing that office. HRC cares not a whit about state government. She loves Washington, thinks of it as home, and of Albany as hell (smart gal!). Consider further that becoming governor would require taking on the incumbent, David Paterson, who has indicated no intention to be a temporary fill-in. Hillary challenging another African-American in a Democratic primary? Fat chance.

No, in all likelihood, Clinton will head back to the Senate and take her place as arguably the most powerful member of that body. There are those who say the hard feelings of this race will cripple her with her colleagues. What a crock. Having campaigned in all 50 states and won millions of votes in the process, Clinton will surely be the most sought-after fund-raiser in all of Democratic politics besides the putative President Obama. She will take the lead in the upper chamber on passing health-care reform, which will not only give her a shot at a place in history but a chance to make up for epic failure back in 1993–94. And, with the incumbent Obama sure to be the standard-bearer in 2012, she will set her sights on 2016, when, after all, she’ll be just 68 — three years younger than John McCain is now, for anyone who happens to be counting. —John Heilemann

Finally, I agree 100% with every single syllable of the following post about Billary, Inc. that appeared in the comments section after an article in today's Washington Post (see article below the quote).

Kofi


"Every time I am convinced that these despicable, mendacious frauds could not possibly sink any lower, they prove me wrong. Barack's gracious outreach was in jarring contrast to her self absorbed, delusional hypocrisy...The Clintons are an utter disgrace and if they succeed in getting McCain elected they will go down in history as the most vile, reprehensible couple ever to stain the political landscape."

Posted by: Shiva | June 4, 2008 4:49 AM


http://blog.washingtonpost.com/thefix/2008/06/obama_presumptive_nominee.html

Washingtonpost.com's Politics Blog

Obama Is the Presumptive Dem. Nominee

After 152 days of voting and more than 18 months of campaigning, Barack Obama has clinched the Democratic presidential nomination.

"Tonight I can stand here and say that I will be the Democratic nominee for President of the United States," Obama declared in a speech to a raucous crowd at the Xcel Center in St. Paul, Minn.

Obama went on to praise his Democratic opponents as "the most talented, qualified field of individuals ever to run for this office" and saved special plaudits for Hillary Rodham Clinton.

He referred to Clinton as "a leader who inspires millions of Americans with her strength, her courage and her commitment to the causes that brought us here tonight."

Obama was just getting started. "Our party and our country are better off because of her, and I am a better candidate for having the honor to compete with Hillary Rodham Clinton," he said.

Obama also made a direct appeal to those who may be unhappy about the tenor and the results of the Democratic primary campaign. "At the end of the day we aren't the reason you came out and waited in lines that stretched block after block to make your voice heard," said Obama. "You didn't do that because of me or Senator Clinton or anyone else."

Despite the seeming conclusiveness of the delegate math, Clinton was clearly not in the mood to concede tonight. In a speech to a cheering crowd at Baruch University in New York, she congratulated Obama for the "extraordinary race" he ran, although she did not acknowledge the fact that he had effectively won the nomination. "I will be making no decisions tonight," she said.

Clinton repeatedly touted her popular vote strength, noting that she had received nearly 18 million total votes. "Even when the pundits and the naysayers proclaimed week after week that this race was over, you kept on voting," she said to roars from the assembled crowd. She said her campaign won the swing states "necessary to get to 270 electoral votes."

The speech was widely seen as attempt by Clinton to keep her political leverage as she sorts out what she wants (and what she can reasonably hope to get) in her political future.

What do you think she wants? And will she get it?


June 4, 2008

OP-ED COLUMNIST

She’s Still Here!
By MAUREEN DOWD
New York Times

He thought a little thing like winning would stop her?

Oh, Bambi.

Whoever said that after denial comes acceptance hadn’t met the Clintons.

If Hillary could not have an acceptance speech, she wasn’t going to have acceptance.

“It’s never going to end,” sighed one Democrat who has been advising Hillary. “We’re just moving to a new phase.”

Barry has been trying to shake off Hillary and pivot for quite a long time now, but she has managed to keep her teeth in his ankle and raise serious doubts about his potency. Getting dragged across the finish line Tuesday night by Democrats who had had enough of the rapacious Clintons, who had decided, if it came to it, that they would rather lose with Obama than win with Hillary, the Illinois senator tried to celebrate at the St. Paul arena where Republicans will anoint John McCain in September.

But even as Obama was trying to savor, Hillary was refusing to sever. Ignoring the attempts of Obama and his surrogates to graciously say how “extraordinary” she was as they showed her the exit, she and a self-pitying Bill continued to pull focus. Outside Baruch College, where she was to speak, her fierce feminist supporters screamed “Denver! Denver! Denver!”

Even as Obama got ready to come out on stage for his victory party, the Clinton campaign announced that it had won a Wyoming superdelegate and Terry McAuliffe introduced her at Baruch as “the next president of the United States.” She gave a brief nod to Obama without conceding that he was the nominee before rushing through a variation on her stump speech. She clung to her fuzzy math about winning the popular vote, and in one last fudge she said: “Thanks so much to South Dakota. You had the last word” — even though the Montana polls still had 25 minutes to go.

“What does Hillary want?” she mused, in her most self-aware moment in some time. “I will be making no decisions tonight,” she concluded, asking fans to go to her Web site to share their thoughts.

And, even though Democrats were no longer listening, Hillary’s camp radiated the message that Obama was a sucker who had played by the rules on Florida and Michigan, and then reached an appeasing compromise, and that such a weak sister could never handle Putin or I’m-A-Dinner-Jacket.

As he was reaching the magic number of delegates, she was devilishly stealing the spotlight. First, her camp vociferously denied an Associated Press report that she would concede and then, in a conference call with the New York delegation, she gave a green light to supporters to push for her to be on the ticket.

Clintonologists know that Hillary is up to something, but they aren’t sure what. Theory No. 1 is that it’s the Cassandra “I told you so” gambit: She believes intensely that he’s too black, too weak and too elitist — with all his salmon and organic tea and steamed broccoli — to beat her pal John McCain. But she has to pretend she’ll do “whatever it takes,” even accept the vice presidency, a job she’s already had and doesn’t want again, so that nobody will blame her when he loses on Nov. 4. Then she can power on to 2012.

Theory No. 2 is that it’s a “Bad stuff happens” maneuver, exemplified in her gaffe about the R.F.K. assassination, that she figures that at least if she moves a few blocks from Embassy Row to the Naval Observatory, she’ll be a heartbeat away from the job she’s always wanted.

Either way, by broadcasting that she’s open to being Obama’s running mate, she puts public pressure on him similar to the sort of pressure Walter Mondale was under from rampaging feminists when he put Geraldine Ferraro on the ticket. Mondale ended up seeming henpecked, as Obama would seem if he caved to the women who say they will write in Hillary’s name or vote for anti-choice McCain before they’d vote for Obama.

For months, Hillary has been trying to emasculate Obama with the sort of words and themes she has chosen, stirring up feminist anger by promoting the idea that the men were unfairly taking it away from the women, and covering up her own campaign mistakes with cries of sexism. Even his ability to finally clinch the historic nomination did not stop her in that pursuit. She did not bat her eyelashes at him and proclaim him Rhett Butler instead of Ashley Wilkes.

She just urged her supporters to keep the dream alive, and talked privately about what she would settle for. She has told some Democrats recently that she wanted Obama to agree to allow a roll call vote, like days of yore, so that the delegates of states she won would cast the first ballot for her at the convention. She said she wanted that for her daughter.

Obama supporters are worried that it’s a trick and she’ll somehow snatch away the nomination. Just as Hillary supporters have hardened toward him, many of Obama’s donors and fans have hardened against the Clintons, saying it would be disillusioning to see them on a ticket that’s supposed to be about fresh politics.

“It would be,” said one influential Democrat, “like finding out there’s no tooth fairy.”


Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

MARVIN GAYE: SINGER, SONGWRITER, AND POLITICAL PROPHET, 1972-Present

All,

In the summer of 1972 the late, great Marvin Gaye (1939-1984) composed an extraordinary song entitled "You're the Man". Gaye released this powerful and prophetic song in public support of leftist Democratic Party candidate George McGovern against Richard Nixon in the presidential race of that year. In November Nixon won reelection in a landslide. Less than two years later Nixon was ousted from the Presidency when he “resigned” in disgrace facing certain impeachment as a result of the Watergate scandal.

I reprint the words of this amazing song below in unequivocal support of Barack Obama for the Presidency of the United States in 2008 and as a direct, stinging rebuke and angry repudiation of every single thing the ruthless and thoroughly corrupt Billary, Inc. political machine and the insidiously criminal Republican Party (and their insipid standard bearer John McCain) represent and stand for. Brother Marvin, as always, told the whole unvarnished truth in 1972 and in his typically prescient, dynamic, and uncanny manner his words and legacy ring louder and more truthful than ever...But isn't that precisely what truly great artists always do?

Kofi


Talking, talking to the People
Trying to get ‘em to go your way
Telling us not to worry and we won’t be led astray
So blind from signifying
Your opponents always lying
Think about the mistakes you make
I believe that America’s at stake…

Do you have a plan with you?
If, if you have a plan
If you have a Master Plan
I got to vote for you (Hey! Hey!)
Got to vote for you ‘cause
You’re the Man

We don’t want to hear no more lies
about how you plan to economize
We want our dollar value increased and employment to rise
The nation’s taxation is causing all this inflation
Don’t give us no Peace signs
Turn around and rob the People blind
Economics is the issue
Do you have a plan with you?
‘Cause if you’ve got a Master Plan
I’ve got to vote for you
You’re the Man

(CHORUS—Multilayered voices singing and scatting various interlocking harmonies and rhythms are all sung via overdubbing by Marvin(!) with a hynoptically repetitive lyrical line weaving in and out of the complex musical and vocal tapestry. Amazing & Beautiful. An utterly innovative and seamless synthesis of Jazz, Blues, R & B, and classical forms also incredibly arranged by Gaye. His somber, ominous voice is foregrounded repeatedly intoning in a much slower incantatory tempo the following words):

Don’t you understand there’s misery in the land? [Repeat X 12]

People marching on Washington
Why not hear what they have to say
‘Cause the tables might just turn against you brother come
election day

Politics and Hypocrites are turning us all into Lunatics
Can you take the guns away from our sons?
Right all the wrongs this administration’s done?
Peace & Freedom is the issue
Do you have a plan with you?
‘Cause if you have a plan
If you have a Master Plan
I got to vote for you (‘cause)
You’re the Man…


--Marvin Gaye,
“You’re the Man”, 1972
Motown Records


NOTE: THIS SONG WAS EFFECTIVELY BANNED FROM THE NATIONAL RADIO AIRWAVES IN THE UNITED STATES FOLLOWING THE FIRST TWO DAYS OF ITS APPEARANCE ON RADIO PLAYLISTS. IT IS NOW CONSIDERED TO BE AN INTERNATIONAL ‘CULT CLASSIC’ AND THE SONG CONTINUES TO BE BOTH PLAYED AND SOLD THROUGHOUT THE GLOBE…


OBAMA OR NOTHING IN 2008!
"Dare To Struggle, Dare To Win"