FRIDAY,  MARCH 21,  2008

FAWNING MOMENT OF THE DAY

Well, I guess the Obama personal crisis is over.  I say that because the fawning season in the MSM has begun anew.  Take this story in today's New York Times:

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) -- Famed photographer Annie Leibovitz pointed her camera at Barack Obama on Thursday as the Democrat prepared to board a flight.

Suit jacket in hand, Obama smiled broadly for the photographer, who has captured the images of celebrities from John Lennon to Queen Elizabeth II and is best known for her portrait work and dramatic magazine covers. She is photographing Obama as part of an upcoming feature for Men's Vogue.

Obama has an elegant yet relaxed confidence about him that comes across in photographs, Leibovitz said after photographing the Illinois senator at a campaign stop at a sports bar. She said the trick is getting across his energy and excitement in a still image.

''It's kind of like seeing a live musician versus hearing the album,'' Leibovitz said. ''That's the challenge. You can try to capture it in the faces. The reactions to him are so emotional.''

Ah yes, an "elegant yet relaxed confidence."  The "live musician versus hearing the album."

What next?  Rings being kissed?

But I have a question:  Do you think there'll be riots all over the world if images of this prophet are published?  I mean, there are religious rules, aren't there?

Yuch.

I'm afraid this is something we have to anticipate once the general-election campaign gets under way.  John McCain's biggest problem may well be a horribly slanted and borderline-hysterical press.  Ronald Reagan overcame press hostility, but Reagan was running against the pathetic Jimmy Carter.  This is more difficult, and, in terms of the future of our country, may even be more critical. 

March 21, 2008.  Permalink 

AN ICONOCLAST'S VIEW OF OBAMA

Michael Meyers is known here in New York as an African-American civil-rights and civil-liberties activist, with, emphatically, a mind of his own.  Here, that independent mind goes at Barack Obama's race speech.  Meyers says - and I suspect many are thinking - that Obama must get beyond race, which he clearly didn't do:

In my considered judgment as a race and civil rights specialist, I would say that Barack Obama's "momentous" speech on race settled on merely "explaining" so-called racial differences between blacks and whites -- and in so doing amplified deep-seated racial tensions and divisions. Instead of giving us a polarizing treatise on the "black experience," Obama should have reiterated the theme that has brought so many to his campaign: That race ain't what it used to be in America.

He should have presented us a pathway out of our racial boxes and a road map for new thinking about race. He should have depicted his minister, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., as a symbol of the dysfunctional angry men who are stuck in the past and who must yield to a new generation of color-blind, hopeful Americans and to a new global economy in which we will look on our neighbors' skin color no differently than how we look on their eye color.

In fact, I'd say that considering the nation's undivided attention to this all-important speech, which gave him an unrivaled opportunity to lift us out of racial and racist thinking, Obama blew it.

And...

I waited in vain for our hybrid presidential candidate to speak the simple truth that there is no such thing as "race," that we all belong to the same race -- the human race. I waited for him to mesmerize us with a singular and focused appeal to hold all candidates to the same standards no matter their race or their sex or their age. But instead Obama gave us a full measure of racial rhetoric about how some of us with an "untrained ear" -- meaning whites and Asians and Latinos -- don't understand and can't relate to the so-called black experience.

Well, I am black, and I can't relate to a "black experience" that shields and explains old-style black ministers who rant and rave about supposed racial differences and about how America ought to be damned. I long ago broke away from all associations and churches that preached the gospel of hate and ethnic divisiveness -- including canceling my membership in 100 Black Men of America Inc., when they refused my motion to admit women and whites. They still don't. I was not going to stay in any group that assigned status or privileges of membership based solely on race or gender.

Finally...

The man or woman who talks plainly about our commonality as a race of human beings, about our future as one nation indivisible, rather than about our discredited and disunited past, is, I predict, likely to finish ahead of the pack and do us a great public service.

That is good.  That is very good.  It exposes what is becoming clear to those whose minds haven't been cooked by the left:  Barack Obama isn't a new-style politician.  He's a very old-style politician in a new, shiny wrapper, surrounded by reporters willing to mumble each of his words as if they are holy.  They are not.

March 21, 2008.  Permalink

MICHIGAN DOWN THE TUBES

No Republican can do to the Democrats what they're doing to themselves.  Now it appears there will be no revote in Michigan, meaning that large industrial state will not be represented at the Democratic convention:

CNN) -- Sen. Hillary Clinton's bid for the White House suffered a blow Thursday when Michigan's state Senate adjourned without passing a bill to schedule a new Democratic primary.

The Senate's inaction makes it nearly impossible that a re-vote will occur.

Michigan held a primary in January, but the Democratic National Committee stripped the state of its delegates for scheduling the contests too early.

Sen. Barack Obama, in an interview with CNN's Larry King Thursday, responded to the Michigan decision.

"We're going to abide by whatever rules the Democratic National Committee puts forward, as we've done from the start," Obama said. "But I think that there should be some way for us to make sure that they're seated, figure out how their votes should count."

"I'm confident that some solution can be resolved that makes sure that they're represented."

When asked if he thinks there could be chaos at the DNC Convention in Denver in August, Obama said he believed it would be resolved by then.

Oh, come on.  Of course there'll be chaos.  Hillary will make sure there'll be hell to pay.  The Obama people are apparently putting forward a ridiculous plan whereby Michigan and Florida, also excluded from the convention for violating rules, would send delegations evenly split between Clinton and Obama.  In other words, their votes essentially won't count.

As I've written here before, this is a ticking time bomb, and no one is acting to defuse it.  You can't present yourself to the American people as the nominee of a party that doesn't permit two of our largest states to be represented accurately at your convention. 

I suspect Obama hopes Hillary's campaign will collapse by June, and that the Florida and Michigan issue will be moot.  But what if it doesn't collapse?  What if she roars ahead, in primaries and polls?

A fine mess, Laurel and Hardy used to say.  I love it, I love it.

March 21, 2008.  Permalink

ARE THESE THE WATCHMAKERS WE KNOW?

This story came in under the radar, and is being ignored.  It shouldn't be.  Switzerland - you know, the watches, the cheese, the music boxes - is emerging as one of the most irresponsible nations of Europe in regard to Iran policy.  And its foreign minister seems to have caught the spirit of the rub-it-in-their eyes anti-Americans of the old continent.  Israel is particularly concerned:

Stunned by Swiss Foreign Minister Micheline Calmy-Rey's presence in Teheran Monday to witness the signing of a multi-billion dollar gas deal with the government of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, senior diplomatic officials said Wednesday Switzerland has sold its principles for $28 billion.

Israel summoned the new Swiss ambassador, Walter Haffner, to the Foreign Ministry to protest the 25-year deal between the Swiss energy giant EGL and the state-owned National Iranian Gas Export Co. to buy 5.5 billion cubic meters of Iranian natural gas per year, starting in 2011, for between $28b. and $42b.

Haffner went to the Foreign Ministry from Beit Hanassi, where he had just submitted his credentials to President Shimon Peres.

And...

Switzerland has also come under harsh criticism from the US for the move.

No reaction was available Wednesday evening from the Swiss Embassy in Tel Aviv.

In Bern, however, Calmy-Rey on Tuesday brushed aside US criticism and the criticism from the local Jewish community, saying that the Alpine republic did not need permission from the United States to advance its strategic interests.

"Switzerland is an independent country that has its own strategic interests to defend," she told reporters. Calmy-Rey defended her trip to Iran, saying it was a success for diplomacy and business.

Diplomatic sources in Jerusalem said that Switzerland was the first country to allow such a deal, and that while in April the Austrian energy company OMV signed letters of intent with Iran valued at some $30b. to supply Europe with gas, that contract has yet to be finalized.

The sources said that Calmy-Rey's visit to witness the deal made matters even worse by giving it governmental legitimacy.

It's sad to see Switzerland, which has sometimes been useful as a go-between in international negotiations, behaving like a rogue state.  Sadly, its foreign minister, in terms of her personality, seems well cut out for that role.

March 21, 2008.  Permalink

RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS - WITH A CATCH

For those who love the Second Amendment, read on.

A district in India is now offering firearms to men who choose to have vasectomies.  I am not kidding.  The report from The Times of London:

A scheme that trades one male status symbol for another has achieved a large rise in the number of men undergoing vasectomies in a bandit-ridden region of central India.

Shivpuri district in the state of Madhya Pradesh, an overpopulated area renowned for its machismo culture, has started to offer fast-tracked gun licences for those who agree to be sterilised.

“This is a state with a high number of dacoits [bandits], where people like to keep rifles,” Manish Shrivastav, the administrative chief of Shivpuri and originator of the lateral thinking behind the plan, said.

“It also has a low level of vasectomies because of a perceived notion of manliness. I decided to match that with a bigger symbol of manliness — a gun licence. It has been a success.”

Now, do you think we can offer this to liberals?

Problem is, they never want guns. 

Well, maybe we can offer them tofu if they won't vote.  Think about it.  Maybe we can start a petition.

March 21, 2008.  Permalink