Month: July 2008

So this is what Jackson means by "talking down to black people":

My appeal was for the moral content of his message to not only deal with the personal and moral responsibility of black males, but to deal with the collective moral responsibility of government and the public policy which would be a corrective action for the lack of good choices that often led to their irresponsibility.

And it doesn’t? Jackson still bristles with the politics of resentment; Obama, like many others, has moved on. Anyway, enjoy:

Robert Altman’s "The Player":

Marc reports McCain is sticking with cap-and-trade.

Megan pivots off Julian Sanchez’s thoughts on subtle racism:

The earlier anti-racism movements had clear goals. Free the slaves, change the Jim Crow laws, tell people they ought to treat black candidates the same as all the others. The new battle is…an endless battle against one’s own thoughts. This sounds fine for people who are professional intellectuals, especially if they are focused on race or gender issues. I think that when feminist blogs say, "Everyone is sexist–we are not blaming you, but we need your help to stamp it out" they think they’re extending an olive branch. But to most people, I suspect it just sounds exhausting.

Jesse Jackson hands Obama the kind of electoral gift any politician dreams of. The explanation:

My appeal was for the moral content of his message to not only deal with the personal and moral responsibility of black males, but to deal with the collective moral responsibility of government and the public policy which would be a corrective action for the lack of good choices that often led to their irresponsibility.

Obama gets his Sistah Souljah moment handed to him on a plate … by Bill O’Reilly.

I linked to a piece on the decline of cork-use in wine bottles. Audubon magazine has a great recent article on the environmental impact. Many historic cork forests sustain a rich biodiversity, it turns out.

Remember the glaringly anti-Semitic re-rendering of the photograph of the NYT’s Jacques Steinberg that Fox put on the air last week? Well, Vanity Fair has engaged in some petty, awful, lamentable, vicious turnaround. If you want to see what Brit Hume looks like after Fox-style photoshop has been done to the poor guy, it’s after the jump:

More dreadful image-wrecking here.

That’s the neoconservative position, and they’d better be right for their own sake:

They are blustering about the need to withdraw U.S. troops – eventually. But note that, unlike Barack Obama, they are not attaching any timelines to this withdrawal. Certainly they are not calling for U.S. troops to be gone by 2010, a pledge that the Democratic candidate once made and hasn’t quite renounced.

Well, Max is right about 2010:

"It can be 2011 or 2012," [Iraqi government spokesman, Ali] al-Dabbagh said. "We don’t have a specific date in mind, but we need to agree on the principle of setting a deadline."

Here’s Boot’s bottom line:

U.S. forces will need to remain in Iraq for years to nurture this embattled democracy–and not so incidentally to protect our own interests in the region.

Not so incidentally? The Iraq war was not sold on the basis of protecting US interests in the region. It was sold on protecting us from a massively over-stated threat, and then to allow for a post-Saddam democracy of sorts. If the Iraqis ask us to leave, we have no business staying. And posts like Boot’s today can only reinforce suspicions that the real motive for invading Iraq was rather different – not incidentally – from that given at the time.

While we’re on this thread, Orson Welles’ 1958 classic from "Touch Of Evil":

Obama’s top donors resist retiring Clinton’s campaign debt. Ezra writes:

The most powerful case against Clinton’s candidacy was always her political advisers. They were, and are, the sort who sign up with Fox News, and enter into business partnerships with Karen Hughes. And they do all that while they’re still associated with Clinton, and when their services might still be needed in the near future.

Why any Obama supporter would even dream about paying the debt of multi-millionaire sleazeballs is beyond me.