EVENING UPDATE,  MARCH 28,  2008

AWFUL, AWFUL

There's a time to shut up.  Most people in public life never learn when it is, or their watches stop.

The latest non-learners are a group of African-American pastors and scholars who are doing their bit to sink Barack Obama by publicly embracing the words and style of his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr.:

More than two dozen well-known black preachers and scholars, in Dallas for a long-planned conference, offered unequivocal support Friday for one of their number who was not there.

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, now world-famous as the former pastor and spiritual mentor of presidential candidate Barack Obama, was to be the guest of honor at the Black Church Summit held by Brite Divinity School. Amid the controversy about some of his sermons, Dr. Wright decided not to attend, but the summit started as scheduled.

Most of the event was not open to the media, but several of the scholars and preachers spoke at a news conference. They said that Dr. Wright's fit into a longstanding black tradition of prophetic preaching — one that the Rev Martin Luther King also emerged from.

"We have learned in recent days that you cannot reduce any black church to a monolith, much less a sound bite," said the Rev. Fredrick Haynes, senior pastor at Friendship-West Baptist Church, which hosted the summit.

He said that if Dr. King were still alive, that his church would be like Trinity United Church of Christ, the Chicago church that Dr. Wright led until his recent retirement, and that Dr. King's sermons would be like Dr. Wright's sermons.

Dr. Stacey Floyd-Thomas, director of the Black Church Studies program at Brite Divinity School, said that the controversy about Dr. Wright is an indication of how little many whites know about what happens routinely at many black churches.

"It's news to you," she said.

Yeah, I'm afraid so, Dr. Floyd-Thomas.  But why do you assume that if we knew more, we'd approve or "understand"?  And as far as reducing Wright's comments to sound bites, how much more "context" do you need when a man says that the U.S. Government invented AIDS to kill blacks? 

And I doubt if Dr. King would run a church like Wright's.  He didn't build a multi-racial movement by attacking white people or inventing fantasies. 

There are black churches that do wonderful things. 

This is not helpful, not helpful at all.  It is too much a part of the excuse machine that has sometimes held African-Americans back.  With freedom comes responsibility.  We hear a lot about the freedom, too little about the responsibility.

Wright misled his congregation.  Even Obama has suggested that.  Accept the verdict and reach a higher level.  Yes you can.

March 28, 2008.  Permalink

WELL, THE LADY HAS SPUNK

Hillary Clinton, that is.  Yeah, but I remember the editor in "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," played by Ed Asner, saying, "I hate spunk!"

Well, hate it or not, Clinton is showing it.  After several more nudges by leading Democrats to get out of the race, she remains adamant.  I'm no fan of hers, but I do like a good fight, and I think it's pretty presumptuous of others to tell her to get out, after she's won so many important states.  The latest:

HAMMOND, Ind. – To answer questions that have been swirling around her candidacy all day, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton arrived here in northwest Indiana – just a few miles from her Democratic rival’s home on Chicago’s South Side – to unequivocally say she has no intention of leaving the presidential race.

“There are millions of reasons to continue this race: people in Pennsylvania and Indiana and North Carolina and all of the contests yet to come,” Mrs. Clinton said. “This is a very close race and clearly I believe strongly that everyone should have their voices heard and their votes counted and that includes Michigan and Florida.”

Then, she added: “There is a lot still to be done and I’m looking forward to campaigning hard over the next several months.”

The late-afternoon press conference came hours after Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, said Mrs. Clinton “has every right, but not a very good reason, to remain a candidate for as long as she wants to.” Other party leaders on Friday fretted aloud that the nominating fight between Senator Barack Obama and Mrs. Clinton would damage the party.

And...

It is worth remembering, Mrs. Clinton said, that neither she nor Mr. Obama will win enough pledged delegates to become the nominee. “I think that’s a very important fact,” she said.

“Superdelegates should exercise their right and their responsibility to determine who they think would be the best president and who would be the best nominee to defeat John McCain in the fall,” Mrs. Clinton said. “That’s the way our process is set up. That’s the way it will operate.”

As she prepared to depart for two more campaign events in Indiana today, Mrs. Clinton was asked to comment on a remark Mr. Obama made while campaigning in Pennsylvania. He said the presidential race was akin to a good movie, which had lasted too long.

With a smile, she said simply: “I like long movies.”

That was probably her best line of the campaign.

Get out the first-aid kits and open the blood bank, dearies.  We have real combat ahead.

My heart breaks.

March 28, 2008.  Permalink

ABBY MANN

Abby Mann, screenwriter for "Judgment at Nuremberg," has died at 83. He was one of the last of the great "golden age" screenwriters. 

Although disagreeing with some of his political stands, I always admired Mann for his integrity.  As the obit in The Times suggests, he was an arduous and honest researcher. 

I was sorry that The Times left out what I consider to be one of his greatest efforts, "The McMartin Case," done for HBO, which portrayed the hysterical prosecution of the McMartin family in California on child-abuse charges.  The trial, the most expensive in the state's history, exposed a sloppy, politically driven prosecution and a compliant press.  The script was derived almost entirely from the trial record.  The film, along with the wonderful work of Dorothy Rabinowitz of The Wall Street Journal, laid bare the horror of the now-infamous child-abuse prosecutions of the 1980s, prosecutions that, to many observers, recalled the Salem witch trials.

Good man.  No replacement in sight.

I'll be back tomorrow, maybe sooner if events warrant.

March 28, 2008.  Permalink   

MORE AFTERNOON POSTINGS,  MARCH 28, 2008

Posted at 5:34 p.m., ET

MORE GORE

Earlier today I posted news that Al Gore will appear on "60 Minutes" this week to inform us that anyone who disagrees with him on global warming is a member of the flat-Earth society.  I know you'll want to set your recorders.

Urgent Agenda has a wonderful reader who's a soil scientist.  In response to the Gore posting he writes as follows:

Following is a quote from the well known pseudo scientist and pseudo intellectual, Al Gore:

"Nobody is interested in solutions if they don't think there's a
problem. Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to
have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous
(global warming) is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to
what the solutions are..."

- former Vice President Al Gore, in an interview with Grist Magazine,
May 9, 2006, concerning his book, "An Inconvenient Truth."

Hmm.  In other words, it's okay to twist things to get your point across. 

You know, I may be a bit stiff on this, but I prefer my science straight, without embellishment or superior "guidance" from the anointed.

I recall a quote from a professor of mine, who also was an ordained minister:  "Protect me o Lord from those who would protect me." 

Good prayer.

March 28, 2008.  Permalink

AFTERNOON POSTINGS,  MARCH 28, 2008

Posted at 3:12 p.m., ET

THE TRACKERS

Today's tracking polls show a slight loss of ground for McCain against Obama.  This may well be statistical fluctuation.  These polls just show general characteristics.  We are more than seven months away from the election. 

Specifics:  Rasmussen has McCain up seven over Obama.  Yesterday it was ten.  Gallup has McCain up two over Obama. 

Rasmussen has McCain up eight over Clinton.  Gallup has him up four over Clinton.

Latest North Carolina polls show Obama up by double digits.  Given the recent self-destructive flap over Senator Clinton's recollections of intense combat in Bosnia, that is unlikely to change.

March 28, 2008.  Permalink

DON'T GET MAD, GET EVEN

Senator Bob Casey Jr. of Pennsylvania has endorsed Barack Obama.  Casey is a moderate, the son of the late Governor Bob Casey, who was quite popular.  The endorsement may help Obama in a state where Clinton is heavily favored, but Clinton has the support of the current governor, Ed Rendell, who is a political powerhouse. 

Casey had a personal reason for endorsing Obama, although I have absolutely no way of knowing whether it played a key part in his decision.  In 1992, the year Bill Clinton was nominated for president, his father, then governor, was barred from speaking at the Democratic National Convention.  The belief at the time - and nothing has emerged to contradict it - was that Governor Casey's opposition to abortion made him unacceptable as a speaker. 

Such slights are not forgotten.

March 28, 2008.  Permalink

RED INK FOR THE PRINT PRESS

Newspapers have suffered the greatest decline in ad revenue in 50 years, according to Editor & Publisher:

NEW YORK The newspaper industry has experienced the worst drop in advertising revenue in more than 50 years.

According to new data released by the Newspaper Association of America, total print advertising revenue in 2007 plunged 9.4% to $42 billion compared to 2006 -- the most severe percent decline since the association started measuring advertising expenditures in 1950.

The drop-off points to an economic slowdown on top of the secular challenges faced by the industry. The second worst decline in advertising revenue occurred in 2001 when it fell 9.0%.

I have no idea, by the way, what the term "secular challenges" means.  I guess it's a term of art used at Manhattan publishing parties.

There's no doubt that competition from the internet plays a role here.  I would suggest, though, that another factor is equally important:  Many people no longer find newspapers necessary, in part because the mainstream media has lost so much of its credibility.  When people go into journalism to "make a difference," and put their opinions on the news pages, it's bound to make the kind of difference they never intended.  Readers lose confidence and stop reading.

Editors, edit thyselves.  A little improvement in quality might once more attract some of the better advertisers.

March 28, 2008.  Permalink

FRIDAY,  MARCH 28,  2008

THE TRIUMPH OF NON-SCIENCE

Remember Al Gore?  He was the guy who ran for president, and there was this really big argument over whether he won Florida.  Oh, do you remember Florida?  That's one of the two states his party now wants to exclude from its convention in Denver this summer.  I guess it's being punished or something.

But back to Al Gore.  Since running for president he's been on this global warming kick.  Some Norwegian guy said that if he stuck to it, he'd get the Nobel Prize.  So he did, and they gave it to him.

Now Al apparently thinks he's God.  He talks the way we think God would talk if he could get on CNN with Larry King.  Al thinks anyone who disagrees with him on global warming is, well, let him tell it:

(CBS) Self-avowed "P.R. agent for the planet" Al Gore says those who still doubt that global warming is caused by man - among them, Vice President Dick Cheney - are acting like the fringe groups who think the 1969 moon landing never really happened, or who once believed the world is flat.

The former vice president and former presidential candidate talks to 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl in an interview to be broadcast this Sunday, March 30, at 7 p.m. ET/PT.

Confronted by Stahl with the fact some prominent people, including the nation’s vice president, are not convinced that global warming is man-made, Gore responds: "You're talking about Dick Cheney. I think that those people are in such a tiny, tiny minority now with their point of view, they’re almost like the ones who still believe that the moon landing was staged in a movie lot in Arizona and those who believe the world is flat,” says Gore. "That demeans them a little bit, but it's not that far off," he tells Stahl.

I'm sure the question was fed to him by Stahl in that typical "you and I both know the truth" manner with which "60 Minutes" deals with liberals.  The idea that Dick Cheney would be used as an example of skeptics is irresponsible and willfully deceptive.  In fact, prominent experts in the very fields that study global warming have expressed serious doubt about the degree to which humans affect the warming of the Earth.  That doesn't make them right.  But these are respected, informed people.  It's pathetic of Gore to compare them to flat-Earth believers.

Gore's hype is not science.  It's pseudo-science.  Could he be right?  Yes.  A person can guess and be right.  But I want to see far more evidence.  I want to see confirming studies done by trained people.  I am not interested in the "opinion" of "scientists" who have no connection with the field under study.  Some of them, I fear, are really political scientists.

And I'd like to know who's making the money on this "crisis."  Someone gains every time a new "alternative" energy source is developed. 

We've seen too many examples of "science" being wrong.  Remember when heart-attack victims were kept in bed for six weeks and told they had to avoid any physical strain for the rest of their lives?  That was "science" also.  We don't do it anymore.

Interviews like this cheapen science.  They do not inform the public.

March 28, 2008.  Permalink

WILLIAMS ON OBAMA

Walter E. Williams, the distinguished African-American scholar, has written a remarkable critique of Saint Barack of Chicagoland, blessed be he.  Williams begins with Jackie Robinson:

He led the National League in stolen bases and won the first-ever Rookie of the Year Award. Without question, Jackie Robinson was an exceptional player. There's no sense of justice that should require that a player be as good as Jackie Robinson in order to be a rookie in the major leagues. But the hard fact of the matter, as a first black player, he had to be.

In 1947, black people could not afford a stumblebum baseball player. By contrast, today black people can afford stumblebum black baseball players. The simple reason is that as a result of the excellence of Jackie Robinson, as well those who immediately followed him such as Satchel Paige, Don Newcombe, Larry Doby and Roy Campanella, no one in his right mind who might watch the incompetence of a particular black player can say, "Those blacks can't play baseball." Whether we like it or not, whether for good reason or bad, people make stereotypes and stereotypes can have effects.

For the nation and for black people, the first black president should be the caliber of a Jackie Robinson, and Barack Obama is not. Mr. Obama has charisma and charm but in terms of character, values and understanding, he is no Jackie Robinson.

That is tough stuff.  It's good stuff.  Read the whole thing.

A personal observation:  During the 1960 campaign I was an intern for Senator Paul H. Douglas of Illinois, an outstanding public servant.  He was a national-defense liberal in the best sense of the term.  One of the things I learned that year is that, if a senator runs for president, you can tell a great deal about him by his reputation in the Senate.  The Senate is a select club of only 100 members.  They know each other.  They size each other up.  I heard great stories that year about senators who were heroic, and senators who were sleazy.  When a senator runs for the White House, the first thing I want to know is his (or her) reputation in the Senate.

The fact is that Obama, even according to a sympathetic recent article in The New York Times, is seen as a minor senator.  He has made no great impression.  Apparently, he's spent most of his time running for president.  You don't hear other senators praising his record, or any of his work at all.  We simply hear that he's "inspirational."

That worries me.  It should worry you.  They know this guy.

March 28, 2008. Permalink

STALE SWISS CHEESE

Last week we saw the Swiss foreign minister in Iran groveling before the esteemed president and exalted leader, who happens to deny the Holocaust.  Apparently no problem there, as long as the Swiss got the contract they wanted, which they did.

Now, another Swiss outrage.  The disgraced U.N. Human Rights Council, an association of thugs and murderers, has appointed Jean Ziegler of Switzerland to become one of 18 "expert" counselors.

Trouble is, Ziegler is also a booster of Holocaust denial.  He's also a supporter of some of the worst dictators on the planet.  Many human-rights advocates petitioned the U.N. to reject this appointment.  It didn't.

And what was the reaction of Switzerland to the protests?  Here it is:

Swiss officials dismissed the effort as politicking.

What has happened to Switzerland?  It seems to have a foreign ministry that has abandoned all pretense of decent values.  Of course, there are elements of Swiss history that are less than noble.  During World War II the Swiss, while officially neutral, did some solid business with the Nazis.  But we have a right to think that they've learned since then.  Apparently they have not.

The Japanese make good watches too, by the way.

March 28, 2008. Permalink

THE McCAIN FOREIGN POLICY

David Brooks has a fine piece this morning exploring John McCain's foreign policy. The Democrats are already going after McCain, asserting that he's just an extension of President Bush:

Barack Obama says: “John McCain is determined to carry out four more years of George Bush’s failed policies.” Obama is a politician, so it’s normal that he’d choose to repeat the lines that some of his followers want to hear. But before people buy that argument, I’d ask them to read three speeches.

Brooks then examines a speech McCain gave in 1983, some 25 years ago, on Lebanon.  McCain opposed President Reagan's dispatch of Marines to that country.  McCain was prescient.

Brooks then examines a McCain speech in 2003 on Iraq, opposing the Bush strategy for the newly liberated country.  Again, McCain turned out to be prescient.

Finally, Brooks spotlights McCain's speech this week, given in Los Angeles.  Brooks:

McCain noted that we are not only fighting a war on terror. The world is seeing a growing split between liberal democracies and growing autocracies. We are seeing a world in which great power rivalries — with China, Russia and Iran — have to be managed and soothed.

Moreover, the U.S. is not the sole hegemon. Power is widely distributed among many rising nations. McCain’s core purpose in the speech was to revive the foreign policy tradition that has jumped parties but that has been associated with people like Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Stimson, Dean Acheson, John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan.

In this tradition, a strong America is the key to world peace, but America’s role is as a leading player in an international system. America didn’t defeat communism, McCain said Wednesday, the American-led global community did.

And finally...

McCain opened his speech with a description of his father leaving home on the day of Pearl Harbor, and then being gone for much of the next four years. He harkened back repeatedly to the accomplishments of the Truman administration.

In so doing, he signaled that the foreign policy debate of the coming months will be very different from the one of the past six years. Anybody who thinks McCain is merely continuing the Bush agenda is not paying attention.

It's a very well-reported column.  McCain, whether one disagrees or agrees with him, is a serious man who reflects on events.  He has an independent, considered point of view.  Compare him to Obama, who speaks in worn leftist clichés.  My foreign-policy edition of a consumer magazine rates McCain as the best buy.  I'm ordering a McCain today.

March 28, 2008. Permalink