The Wake

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about Barack Obama’s former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and how his name and reputation in the Black Community was being undermined and exploited by a media circus centered on a few YouTube clips of him criticizing the U.S. government. Now that the circus is over and labeled as old news, it might be an opportune time to present Rev. Wright in his own words, words that were certainly suppressed in the coverage of his past sermons. What follows is a letter to the editor intended for, but never published in, the New York Times and a video of Wright making the case for his church on Hannity and Colmes a few weeks before he was all over the news.

In …

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For the few weeks before the looped YouTube videos of Rev. Jeremiah Wright shifted half of the Democratic Presidential coverage to racial matters (the other half of the coverage being focused on the sinking economy), the topic of the talk was the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The trade agreement, which was put into law by President Clinton in 1993, restricts obstacles that corporations used to face when they moved their goods between Mexico, the U.S. and Canada. It essentially made free trade easier, prompting many U.S. corporations like General Electric to relocate across the border and hire Mexicans at lower pay (starting pay for a Mexican engineer at GE is equal to one-third of a U.S. salary).

Upon NAFTA’s inception, major trade unions were immediately against it, arguing …

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It’s best to begin this post by noting that 81 percent of the United States believe this country is headed toward a bleak future. Only a third of people believe that the next generation will be better off than the current generation. Fewer than half of parents — 46 percent — expect their children to enjoy a better standard of living than they themselves do. The other day, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, whose job requires a basic sixth grade knowledge of stubbornness, finally acknowledged the possibility of a recession.

And it looks like some politicians in Washington are continuing to poorly execute what are otherwise decent ideas. Today, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid sent a letter to President Bush …

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Sen. John McCain

In a time when consumers’ views of the economy are gloomier than they’ve been in five years, the Presidential candidates are devoting more and more rhetoric to fixing our stalled economy. While the Democratic candidates announced government remedies to help heal the situation, Republican candidate John McCain got more specific about his solution to the pending recession than ever before: let the market figure it out. Here’s an excerpt from his Tuesday speech in front of Latino businessmen:

“I have always been committed to the principle that it is not the duty of government to bail out and reward those who act irresponsibly, whether they are big banks or small borrowers.”

But last week, the Federal …

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In the past few days, news anchors, columnists and cable pundits have been rigorously masturbating over denouncing Obama’s pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the apparent anti-American jihadist. Decades after Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X and Huey P. Newton, white pundits are still acting as surprised as ever when they see a black man speak out radically against this country.

Att. Gen. Lori Swanson

Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson is eliminating whatever remains from the Farmer-Labor Party in the DFL in a classic case of Democratic hypocrisy. Namely, 50 of her 135 or so assistant attorneys general left her office in the past year due to its constant atmosphere of stress and fear.

MinnPost.com reported this:

“Assistant Attorney General Amy Lawler said she has been put in situations that made her uncomfortable where she had to weigh her own ethical standards against pressure to help Swanson get favorable media coverage and portray herself as the friend of the downtrodden.”

This type of pressure convinced those working under Swanson to support a unionization drive for themselves, something Swanson remains …

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Change?

Pundits and political junkies – from the left and right – have gotten so nostalgic about the Barack Obama bid for Presidency that they’ve started comparing his candidacy to South Dakota Sen. George McGovern’s 1972 bid against Nixon. Sure, like McGovern, Obama has broad youth support and is attempting to surprise the Old Guard Democrats by winning the Presidential nomination. But all comparisons should end there.

Obama is commonly labeled as the heroic anti-war candidate challenging a pro-war Hillary Clinton, in the sense that Obama was against the Iraq invasion from the start while Clinton helped authorize it and voted for blank Iraq War checks until last March. To the faux-mental-masturbating pundits, Obama resembles the antiwar McGovern going up against the pro-war …

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