Obama Denounces Reverend Wright’s Remarks

I honestly don’t know what to think. I’ve talked about Wright in the past; frankly he was over the top in some of his sermons (“US KKK of A”) and he made idiotic statements from time to time (U. S. government responsible for aids) but mostly his sermons were on point.

As far as the nutty stuff that Wright said: why is Obama responsible for that? Talk about double standards! How I wish that John “more of the same” McCain were held to the same standard.

Nevertheless, the Wright stuff didn’t really worry me, but then again, I don’t know people.

I suppose that there may be some truth here.

Jeremiah Wright is like the return of the repressed, a last desperate lunge of the undead 60s toward center stage. Wright represents a longing for enduring relevance so deep that it is willing to sabotage the very possibility of setting out on the long road that runs past race in order to preserve the claims of a certain righteousness, a certain rhetoric, a certain stance — a familiar and heroic sense of self-in-the-world.

It’s so hard to get old. It’s so hard to watch history pass you by. It’s so hard to look out across a public landscape in which your style of being once loomed so large and to realize that somehow — you are suddenly yesterday.

People who say Obama needs to confront Wright are correct. But he needs to do it simply, he needs to tell the truth. He needs to say, kindly but firmly: old man, I love you and I thank you for your service — but your day is done.

My two cents: Oh well, I didn’t expect this campaign to go smoothly the whole way. To be honest, I didn’t pay THAT much attention to Wright’s recent remarks; I figured it was a well intentioned older curmudgeon vying for attention. But at times I think that I exist in a parallel universe compared to most folks; what I see as trivial, idiotic matters, others find important.

I’ll never understand the average person in 1,000 years.

I think that this is a reasonable discussion.

In his Philadelphia speech last month Obama couldn’t openly repudiate Wright without risking a negative reaction from voters, especially African Americans, would see him as an ingrate, willing to cast aside people who’ve become inconvenient. Now, however, as Wright goes around the country performing as a caricature of what many white voters will perceive as “The Scary Black Man,” Obama has an obligation to repudiate Wright. Failing to repudiate Wright risks allowing the GOP (and until then presumably the Clinton campaign) to use Wright as the Black proxy with which to scare off white voters. White people who aren’t solid GOP voters aren’t personally scared by Obama, but they could be scared away from Obama if they’re afraid that as President he’ll bring a bunch of “Scary Black Men” along with him in to the White House.

As long as Wright continues to blab, Obama not only has the obligation to repudiate him, he has the opportunity. This afternoon, he took advantage of the opportunity.

Also read:

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright went to Washington on Monday not to praise Barack Obama, but to bury him.

Smiling, cracking corny jokes, mugging it up for the big-time news media — this reverend is never going away. He’s found himself a national platform, and he’s loving it.

It’s a twofer. Feeling dissed by Senator Obama, Mr. Wright gets revenge on his former follower while bathed in a spotlight brighter than any he could ever have imagined. He’s living a narcissist’s dream. At long last, his 15 minutes have arrived…

The thing to keep in mind about Rev. Wright is that he is a smart fellow. He’s been a very savvy operator, politically and otherwise, for decades. He has built a thriving, politically connected congregation on the South Side of Chicago that has done some very good work over the years. Powerful people have turned to him for guidance and advice.

So it’s not like he’s naïve politically. He knows exactly what he’s doing. Forget the gibberish about responding to attacks on the black church. That is not what the reverend’s appearance before the press club was about. He was responding to what he perceives as an attack on him.

This whole story is about Senator Obama’s run for the White House and absolutely nothing else. [...]

Faster than anyone could have imagined, the young Mr. Obama became Senator Obama and then the leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. Then came the videotaped sermons and the roof caved in on Rev. Wright’s reputation. Senator Obama had no choice but to distance himself, and he did it as gently as he felt he could.

My guess is that Mr. Wright felt he’d been thrown under a bus by an ungrateful congregant who had benefited mightily from his association with the church and who should have rallied to his former pastor’s defense. What we’re witnessing now is Rev. Wright’s “I’ll show you!” tour.

For a lively discussion, go here.

Just a bit of comic relief:

(Larger)

Workout notes 29 April

Workout notes yoga class, 2:17 worth of walking (somewhat over 10 miles); Michael Bridge, 4 x 1 mile (gooseloop miles) 12:00, 11:35, 11:35, 10:55 with 1 lap “recovery” (sort of). It went ok, though I was very sluggish.

Note: when I drove to the Riverplex, there was a duck couple (male/female pair; the green headed kind) in our neighborhood! Perhaps they mistook our driveways for water? (they were about 1 mile away).

From 3-quarks daily:

I just like the photo.

Barack Obama: we are Americans first, Democrats second.
Obama admits that he allowed himself to be pulled into the mud a bit.

Redstate Update sells out!

My Daily Kos Rant

Ok, I’ve seen the bickering, the fighting, and the mudslinging.

Frankly I am getting tired of it. I’ve heard the idea that Hillary Clinton is planning to damage Obama so badly that he loses to John “more of the same” McCain in the general election so she can run against McSame in the 2012 election.

So I have an idea: concede. Let her win the primary. More below the fold.

Think about it: all HRC has done in this election is start with a huge lead in name recognition, the polls, and yes, in money too:

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/34931.html

Not many months ago, Clinton was the consensus front-runner, with a 30-point lead in national polls, $118 million raised in 2007 and the backing of most Democratic power brokers.

Today she trails Illinois Sen. Barack Obama in convention delegates, campaign cash and the popular vote.

But yet, she is the “ready on day one” candidate, the “one with the experience”. Evidently, this message sells with many.

After all, she is “tough”! (though some might say that she is “nasty”, not “tough”)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/guy-t-saperstein/hillary-is-nasty-but-she_b_98719.html

But I digress.

Ok, if she is so “tested” and “ready”, let her prove it in the general election!!

Why not? After all, I am too old to rejoin the military, I live close enough to walk to work, and I am healthy enough to bicycle for up to 100 miles at a time (ok, only one “century ride” to my credit), and have a job with ok job security. The house is paid off and I love peanut butter sandwiches (so cost of food isn’t a huge issue with me).

I can survive 4 years of John “more of the same” McCain; the person who thinks that we are better off after having Bush (about 5:30 into this video)

And so he has a bit of a White supremacist problem:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cliff-schecter/john-mccains-white-suprem_b_99014.html

From the many years he rejected a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday (pretty much the entire 70s and 80s) to his serial flip-flops on the Confederate Flag in 2000 (which he admits he did for political reasons — no way, not you Johnny!) to his close association with a white supremacist named Richard Quinn, who found himself hired as a political advisor by McCain in 2000 (and still is from what I can tell) after openly praising David Duke (he called him a “maverick”) selling t-shirts praising the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and writing/editing for a magazine (Southern Partisan) that reminded us that slave masters just really weren’t all that bad.

But hey, I can live with that for 4 more years.

Let HRC have it, and, well, you’ve got to admit that it would be fun to watch her lose 40-45 states; maybe that will shut her up for good!

Conclusion
I discussed this “strategy” with my wife and she told me “that is the dumbest thing that I’ve ever heard.”

Oh well, I guess that I’ll phone bank for Indiana this weekend.

Raw Replay – Revisiting History: Obama with a voter, Good old Alan Keyes, etc.

Hmmm, what do you think? I’d recommend caution.

from rawstory.com posted with vodpod

Do you miss Alan Keyes? Have some more; he compares himself to an aborted fetus!

Yes, he takes shots at Obama.

Candidate books: a set of reviews here (Clinton, McCain, Obama)

Going to Mecca: does it mellow out Muslims? A study seems to indicate that. (hat tip: 3-quarks daily)

Last December, more than 2 million Muslims from around the world converged on Saudi Arabia to participate in the Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to the holy site of Mecca. The Hajjis spent a month performing religious rituals, mingling with Muslims from all walks of life, and, in some cases, taking part in communal chants of “Death to America” led by Islamic extremists. This was understandably unnerving to the 10,000 or so Americans who made the pilgrimage, not to mention those who didn’t. Such behavior raised concerns that the Hajj is a breeding ground for anti-Western sentiment—or worse.

Then again, the spirit of friendship and community that typically prevails during the Hajj has also been known to promote tolerance and understanding across peoples. Malcolm X famously softened his views on black-white relations during his pilgrimage to Mecca, where he witnessed a “spirit of unity and brotherhood that my experiences in America had led me to believe never could exist between the white and non-white.”

So does the Hajj open minds, or does it expose Muslims to radical views that unite them against the non-Islamic world? To find out, researchers David Clingingsmith, Asim Khwaja, and Michael Kremer surveyed more than 1,600 Pakistanis, about half of whom went on the Hajj in 2006. In a recent, as yet unpublished study, they report that those who went to Mecca came back with more moderate views on a range of issues, both religious and nonreligious, suggesting that the Hajj may be helpful in curbing the spread of extremism in the Islamic world. [...]

Still don’t believe evolution?

Yes, this is what it appears to be:

A male orangutan, clinging precariously to overhanging branches, flails the water with a pole, trying desperately to spear a passing fish.

It is the first time one has been seen using a tool to hunt. [...]

Speaking of evolution: try making heads or tails out of this line of reasoning (on an alleged attack on “natural selection”):

What Fodor wants to know is whether the polar bear’s coat was selected-for because it’s white or because it matches its environment. According to Blackburn et al., the familiar adaptationist account, which they do not see as in need of revising, would have it that “[i]n some ancestral population there was a variant type that differed from the rest in ways that enhanced reproductive success. (White polar bears, for example, more camouflaged than their brown confrères, were better at sneaking up on seals, were better fed and left more offspring.) If the variant has a genetic basis, its frequency increases in the next generation.” For Fodor however, this is a “potted polar bear history,” since “for any trait X that was locally coextensive with being white in the polar bear’s evolutionary ecology[, s]election theory is indifferent between ‘the bears were selected for being white’ and ‘the bears were selected for being X.’” A good theory, Fodor thinks, should be able to generalize over possible but non-actual circumstances, that is, it should be able to support relevant counterfactuals, and this is something that natural selection doesn’t do.

I’m sorry, but this is downright stupid. Sure, I get it that not all mutations that survive have some sort of adaptive purpose (ring species prove that), but this has to be one of the lamest examples of reasoning that I’ve ever heard.

Gene Therapy helps combat blindness Check this out:

For the first time, researchers have used gene therapy to improve vision in patients who were virtually blind, offering new hope to hundreds of thousands with inherited forms of vision impairment.

The research, some of which involves Seattle biotech Targeted Genetics, marks a major milestone for gene therapy, a discipline many scientists find promising but that so far has failed to produce a marketable product in the U.S.

It also casts a positive light on the Seattle company, a gene-therapy research firm that was shaken last July by the death of an Illinois woman enrolled in its lead drug candidate’s clinical trial. Federal investigators eventually determined gene therapy was not the culprit and allowed the trial to resume.

Although the six patients studied have an extremely rare form of blindness called Leber’s congenital amaurosis, researchers believe the approach ultimately could be used for a broader spectrum of disorders, including retinitis pigmentosa and macular degeneration.

“It’s a landmark”

“In the field of retinal dystrophies, this is, I believe, the most important therapeutic discovery” in four decades, said Dr. Morton Goldberg, an ophthalmologist at John Hopkins University’s Wilmer Eye Institute. “It’s a landmark.”

The rarity of the disease could also help propel the launch of a commercial product by the Seattle company, as so-called orphan drugs — designed to treat diseases that affect relatively few — get preferential treatment with regulators.

“We’re making plans and evaluating that now,” said Targeted Genetics Chief Executive H. Stewart Parker. If everything goes well, approval could come “as quickly as 18 months,” she said.

The treatment, so far meant only to prove the safety of the technique, “made a real difference in patients’ lives,” said geneticist Robin Ali of University College London, the senior author of one of two reports presented Sunday at a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., meeting of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology. Targeted Genetics worked with the British researchers. [...]

Score one for science!

Keep that thought in mind while you watch this:

Politics

Ok, here is a DNC ad that hits below the belt (note: McCain’s “100 year” remark didn’t mean “100 years of war”; he did admit that regular citizens wouldn’t like 100 years of violence. Rather, he meant “indefinite period of occupation or deployment” (think: our bases in Japan, Germany) which, in my opinion, still isn’t a good idea, but it is a different issue.

I still think that McCain means “more of the same”. Check that; in some ways, he is actually worse than Bush!

One would have to strain to be shocked that a racist ad is finding its way out of the bowels of conservativism in North Carolina. For political observers from the 1980s and 1990s will remember that Senator Jesse Helms was a master of using divisive tactics inject race into just about everything he did outside of brushing his teeth — whenever he wasn’t straining through the holes in the sheet he was wearing to see his Jefferson Davis emblazoned toothbrush.

Yet, racism for electoral gain obviously did not go away with Helms’ retirement from politics. And neither has Republican timidity in doing anything to control the extreme elements in the party–or their base if you will. So once again, just as other conservatives sat idly by and claimed Jesse was just being Jesse, now John McCain throws his hands up in the air as if there is nothing he can do when a racist ad is run by the North Carolina GOP against Barack Obama:

ABC NEWS’ Bret Hovell and Russell Goldman report: Sen. John McCain said Thursday that if elected president — and becomes the de facto head of the GOP — he would not demand a change in the leadership of the North Carolina Republican Party despite condemning its plan to air an ad attacking Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill, and his controversial minister.

It’s good to know where the Senator stands on this issue (at least today). In my book, The Real McCain: Why Conservatives Don’t Trust Him And Why Independents Shouldn’t, I recount McCain’ questionable past on issues of race his entire career. From the many years he rejected a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday (pretty much the entire 70s and 80s) to his serial flip-flops on the Confederate Flag in 2000 (which he admits he did for political reasons — no way, not you Johnny!) to his close association with a white supremacist named Richard Quinn, who found himself hired as a political advisor by McCain in 2000 (and still is from what I can tell) after openly praising David Duke (he called him a “maverick”) selling t-shirts praising the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and writing/editing for a magazine (Southern Partisan) that reminded us that slave masters just really weren’t all that bad.

That’s The Real McCain for you. Now I’ll be waiting for the media to do their job and report on his close association with a white supremacist just as they have every aspect of Barack Obama’s life (and I’ll most assuredly be holding my breath).