Obama’s late to the party
Entries Tagged as 'race & culture'
Getting married is gay
In an interview with ABC News yesterday, the President finally came out of the closet — kind of. He stated for the first time on the record that he supports gay marriage. But he stopped short of promising any executive or legislative action toward this cause. How convenient. Just the night before, North Carolina voted by a wide margin for a constitutional ban on gay marriage, becoming the 30th state to pass such a ban.
I admit that Obama’s vocal support for gay marriage is monumental. I also recognize that the issue of gay marriage is the next social battlefield in America. However, I hope this election does not get bogged down with social issues. High unemployment, the poor housing market, and a disaster of impending debt are the urgent and important issues. No one is going to be able to afford gay wedding ceremonies, easily accessible birth control, or teenage abortions if we don’t fix the economy. [Read more →]
The summer of George
Conditions in Florida are dry and hot. General conflagration has not broken out but that is not from any lack of ignition. There has been a sudden squall but whether it delivers more rain than lightning remains to be seen. George Zimmerman is in custody, surrendering without incident with the public release of the charges against him.
This should be a moment of great relief, should it not? The Martin family has consistently said that what they want is Justice for Trayvon, as the copyrighted phrase has it. Further they have said that what they desire is an arrest and a REAL investigation inverting the usual order. The implication is that there has not been a real investigation until now, the one delivering charges of second degree murder on a set of facts that the original Sanford based prosecutors thought warranted no charges at all. It is easy to understand why observers might think that so but mostly because of faulty information or explicit DISinformation, all of which will now be hashed out in open court, as it should be, while much of it has been hashed and re-hashed in the public sphere. Here is another helping of hash, including leftovers that have since gone sour.
The initial cause of outrage has become moot as it has proven to be false. The Martin family advocates originally stated three untruths: first that Zimmerman never was taken into custody on that fatal night. That falsehood stood nearly unrebutted until the release of a security video showing Zimmerman in handcuffs at the cop shop. Team Martin also declared that the crime scene was never attended to in any meaningful way but we have since seen video of the usual technicians and procedures being performed promptly and as competently as we can tell. The third falsehood was that Zimmerman’s pistol was never taken in as evidence. This also we know to be a flat inversion of the facts. [Read more →]
Justice for Trayvon Martin
There has been a spark in Florida. Whether it proves igniting depends on the condition and volume of the available fuel. It has been hot and dry across the nation for some time so we should be cautious with cigarette butts and any other sort of burning. In that case, maybe Al Sharpton should have stayed home. Too late for that now. He has broken out the tropical suits and the high-humidity hair treaments. Rev Sharpton has been one of the leading voices championing Justice for Tayvon as this movement is aptly known, calling for patience and support for the Martin family as they brace for the possibly imminent arrest of their son. [Read more →]
Willard’s wingmen: Applied Crackology
The Island Hopping Campaign has been a wild success. Romunist advances have swept through the distant outposts of Guam, the US Virgin Islands and American Samoa which were left undefended. Only Puerto Rico produced some mild resistance from Rickist forces, crushed with the tried strategy of Divide and Scavenge. It may be a hard sell to blame malign and invidious Division for Mitt’s seventy-five point blowout. After all, how could one possibly get three-fourths of anything without smoothing over existing rifts and gently sweeping together the available bits? Such objections assume that Mitt Romney follows the Geneva Conventions. Nothing of the kind. Mitt went nuclear. Rick, that dope, never had a chance. He played it straight, going off to Puerto Rico for the old elbow-rubbing style of politics that is standard from Dicksville Notch down to Eureka, California. Taking on one of the main questions for our fellow Americans in the territory of Puerto Rico, the pasty but Catholic candidate said that any admission of that territory into the Union was contingent on English becoming the primary language of governance. It is unlikely that Team Santorum could be ignorant of the controversy and its potential for blowback. It is a century old. Only a seventh of Puerto Rico is fluent in English. For Crackologists, no es bueno, especially when Romney took the opportunity to declare that he was a-okay with Spanish being the chief language of the 51st State. [Read more →]
Elegy for Marcus Jones
Mister Jones wore a jumpsuit with thermals and waistcuffs. He smiled and waved, as best he could, to his family in the gallery. Three generations of Jones women attended; his mother, grandmother and sister. Also attending was a handful of ladies from the Brown family including Tyairr Brown, quite a normal looking toddler except that she did not toddle. She sat in a special pram with a thick foam harness that held her upright as her spinal chord has been severed at the ninth thoracic, right around the height of her elbows. Today was Judgement Day for Mister Jones. His most recent crimes and my peripheral role in them, you already know. [Read more →]
The Amazing Race
In December of 2010 my car was stolen from a packed pay lot on a Thursday afternoon. The cops thought it a routine event, and to them it was. The sentiment was that most likely it would turn up in a day or so, probably that very evening. As it happened it was a couple weeks before it was identified, chased and destroyed as a result. The offender, a Marcus Jones, 24 years old, drove my Jeep squarely into a light pole and grabbed his girlfriend’s five month old daughter to use as a human shield, leaving the mother at the scene with an impressive cache of marijuana and cocaine. He was apprehended but claimed to be an innocent bystander who had picked up the abandoned baby on this night of icy, driving winds. That diversion failed, as did his first attempt at legal defense. He told the court he was hearing voices. The State shrinks called BS on that. He complains that he is suicidally depressed, as well he may be, now facing some twenty charges including kidnapping and the considerable weight to his conscience added by the fact that the child in question is permanently paralyzed from her injuries and facing her second birthday in a few months’ time. Monday morning he will either plead guilty and receive his sentence or plead not guilty and receive a trial. I will attend. The grave nature of the baby’s injuries have been reported in no media I can find. A functionary of the Atlanta prosecutors’ office told me of the sad fact while informing me of the court date and their desire for my presence to add, however sparsely, to the bill of atrocities laid on this career criminal. All the parties involved, probably including the judge, are black. [Read more →]
A Bill of Claims
An alarming thing has happened and the most alarming bit is that no one is alarmed. Things seem to be proceeding apace in Egypt and the intellectuals are salivating at the prospect of a new Egyptian constitution, to be drafted by around June. That doesn’t leave much time so they are soliciting advice from foreign corners and from one corner was dislodged sitting Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader-Ginsburg who used the occasion to suggest that under no circumstances should the Egyptian reformers consider the US Constitution as any sort of guide. It is, after all, laughably aged and enfeebled. Much better ore is to be had in the post-War world. Look right at 10:00 to see where she swallows the Constitution she has sworn to defend in one gulp. Most emphatically does she advise the Egyptians NOT to look at this document for guidance even as she describes the ordinary Rights of public participation and arrest that have been made real in the world, in large part, because of the attention given them in our Constitution and the spread of these, through means fair and foul, to every aspiring society. How the Egyptian fellow did not show shock or even surprise is a bit mysterious but a larger puzzler is how this could have been on youtube for a week and only now drawing attention. Hopefully this was a clever bit of disinformation. The dimmest Cairo cabbie could not fail to realize, Ginsburg is a Jew. Perhaps the State Department and the Justice came up with a plot of reverse-psychology. “Ruthie,” Hillary might have told her. “You go in and you tell ‘em, don’t you look at our Constitution. There is NOTHING in there for you, and they will tear into it like Bill through a Ladies’ Auxiliary!” But no, with the specifics and enthusiasm it is plain, this is Ginsburg Unplugged. [Read more →]
The Paul Paradox
2012 is looking up. The first good news in months comes from the last poll before today’s Iowa caucuses. It reflects a tectonic upset of preconceptions in its leaderboard which shows Santorum third with 18%, Romney with 19 and Ron Paul, first among statistical equals, at 20. The best of it? Newt is not only fourth but down far enough (4 points) that he is excluded from the headlines. It seems the rally of those who actually recall Gingrich from his days in office was not in vain. The Newt Boomlet is deflated, for now, and if Iowa can discourage him from continuing she will have done the nation a great service. Sadly, piling on Newt has not become the national fad it deserves to be but there is another, longer suffering target of the dogpile, a man in public office so long he has a grown son who is a Senator. Of course we refer to the Texas Houseman, alleged Republican but frequent Libertarian, Ron Paul. [Read more →]
Le taunt francais surs touts le monde!
In days of old when knights were bold the French used to call being gay, The British Disease. Of course the yobs called it The French Complaint. With today’s accusations against the Brits from the French, it amounts to a similar near stalemate. France is pushing back on the ratings agencies warning that their Triple A is about to be cut. Mes amis, cut them, not us, you know why? Blah blah. It’s the classic diverting behavior of the addict, in this case the addiction is to printing money. And that is one I can understand quite well. I’m about ten stitches away from running off a few Benjis myself at the Kinko’s. But it doesn’t “work” for me or them in that the practice, like treating anemia with leeches, makes the underlying conditions of which the downgrades and high borrowing costs are a symptom, fatally worse.
But the ratings agencies DO have it right, at least in regards to France vs Britain. Sarkozy’s peeps point to minor advantages they have over Cameron’s crew on macro numbers like debt:GDP, total size and overall growth. The margins are not impressive although some of it was surprising. I thought Britain had more growth than France even now but nothing goes with snark like a bit of cherry picking which I’m not about to try to rubbish piecemeal.
The reason France is clearly a worse credit risk than the UK is obvious. [Read more →]
