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Showing posts from October, 2007

Obama/McClurkin: what's next?

I have had John Aravosis's AMERICABlog in my favorites bar for years now. I've followed John's take on the McClurkin story including his breakdown of the Obama press release and his latest blog offering... anti-Obama t-shirts . I can't object to John arguing against Obama's choice of McClurkin or McClurkin's views. Further, it's John's right to sell whatever T-shirts he'd like. Senator Obama's a public figure...calling him a "bigot"...well, we can call that free speech. I do think it's a fair question to ask John, however, what's next ? John, you've led this campaign highlighting McClurkin's views and, for a variety of reasons, it has became the story of the blogs for this week and even got the national press talking . Where are you going to take it from here? Is it enough that a wave of anti-Obama rhetoric has swept the web? Was that what you were after? Or were you looking for something more....say, engagement, poli

Must Read / Must See

This excellent Jon Gertner piece in today's NYT Magazine on water and the Western United States is essential reading . If reading this doesn't give you a moment's pause about how utterly perilous the last seven years of the Bush Administration have been...you just don't get it. We need a change of course in our environmental policy and we aren't getting one. Water supply is "the other global warming." The oh so confident anti-Gore naysayers don't have an answer to this. But, hey, after Katrina, what's one more major American city? "Must see" is this local television news piece out of South Dakota. If you want to understand how the politics of S-Chip and Health Care play in a state where the GOP thought they had turned the corner, look no further. 18,000 kids in South Dakota is a lot of kids. People get that. Unrelated update : this is the first I've read of this trend . This kind of thing has some pretty huge implications; this pass

James Watson: racism alive and well in the USA

I've spent the last 24 hours reading as the fires ignited by Nobel laureate James Watson have spurred hundreds of racist comments on message boards across the world . The racial views espoused by Watson are not simply pernicious, they are unamerican. The premise that you could walk out your door in the United States and make the claim, with a straight face and in a public place, that you presume that someone is less intelligent than you because of the color of their skin or ethnic background is abhorrent. Watson claims that everyone with Black employees “knows that they are not the equals of Whites” and, somehow, that is supposed to be acceptable? We are supposed to take him seriously…as a scientist? I don’t think so. Watson is about to lose his job and what was left of his reputation. The equality of every citizen, respect for each other including our differences and a sense of the potential inherent in each and every citizen, especially our children, is essential to what it m

NYT on China

This series is must read journalism.