Brown Man Thinking Hard

Why Barack Obama Is GOP Enemy Number One

brownmanthinking@gmail.com (Brown Man) — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 01:44:00 PST

The first time I saw this video, I was not surprised at all.

What I wanted to know was where the directive came from that had all of these voices repeating the same type of phrases over and over, as if by the sheer force of their vocal cords and the machine gun like repetition of "Obama" and "rape", these radio and TV shock jocks could conjure the image of the black male rapist deep within their listeners psyches, throwing yet another log on the fire of racial animus the conservative minority still relies on, even in 2009, to do the dirty work of coloring the minds of their less sophisticated supporters against Barack Obama.

What I found out got me to thinking so deeply about what the purpose of Brown Man Thinking Hard should really be that I had a hard time getting my arms around what it was I wanted to say about the video above. So I pushed "PLAY" over and over while I wrote this.

I am a big believer in the power of language. And even though I struggle to use the most positive words I can, in some instances, I think this power, when used in a negative manner, far exceeds that of the largest caliber gun to terrorize people, to threaten their sense of security, to connect them to their deepest seated fears.

The GOP believes the same thing.

This video actually coincides with another thought I had in the last couple of days. Given the many millions more people who self-identify themselves as Democrats versus those who identify themselves as Republicans, why hasn't the Democratic Party simply extinguished the GOP by now?

George Lakoff, a fellow at the Rockridge Institute and the author of Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think, had the best answers I could find to my question in the excerpts below from an interview he did for UC Berkeley News back in 2003.

LAKOFF: "...conservatives, especially conservative think tanks, have framed virtually every issue from their perspective. They have put a huge amount of money into creating the language for their worldview and getting it out there. Progressives have done virtually nothing...And that's the problem. Liberals don't get it. They don't understand what it is they have to be doing."

QUESTIONER: How does language influence the terms of political debate?

LAKOFF: Language always comes with what is called "framing." Every word is defined relative to a conceptual framework. If you have something like "revolt," that implies a population that is being ruled unfairly, or assumes it is being ruled unfairly, and that they are throwing off their rulers, which would be considered a good thing. That's a frame.

If you then add the word "voter" in front of "revolt," you get a metaphorical meaning saying that the voters are the oppressed people, the governor is the oppressive ruler, that they have ousted him and this is a good thing and all things are good now. All of that comes up when you see a headline like "voter revolt" - something that most people read and never notice. But these things can be affected by reporters and very often, by the campaign people themselves."

QUESTIONER: Why haven't progressives done the same thing [learn how to frame their language]?

LAKOFF: "...conservatives, especially conservative think tanks, have framed virtually every issue from their perspective. They have put a huge amount of money into creating the language for their worldview and getting it out there. Progressives have done virtually nothing...And that's the problem. Liberals don't get it. They don't understand what it is they have to be doing."

"Conservative foundations give large block grants year after year to their think tanks. They say, 'Here's several million dollars, do what you need to do.' And basically, they build infrastructure, they build TV studios, hire intellectuals, set aside money to buy a lot of books to get them on the best-seller lists, hire research assistants for their intellectuals so they do well on TV, and hire agents to put them on TV. They do all of that. Why? Because the conservative moral system, which I analyzed in "Moral Politics," has as its highest value preserving and defending the "strict father" system itself. And that means building infrastructure. As businessmen, they know how to do this very well.

Meanwhile, liberals' conceptual system of the "nurturant parent" has as its highest value helping individuals who need help. The progressive foundations and donors give their money to a variety of grassroots organizations. They say, 'We're giving you $25,000, but don't waste a penny of it. Make sure it all goes to the cause, don't use it for administration, communication, infrastructure, or career development.' So there's actually a structural reason built into the worldviews that explains why conservatives have done better."

This interview was done a few years ago, as this next segment shows:

QUESTIONER: Do any of the Democratic Presidential candidates grasp the importance of framing?

LAKOFF: "None. They don't get it at all. But they're in a funny position. The framing changes that have to be made are long-term changes. The conservatives understood this in 1973. By 1980 they had a candidate, Ronald Reagan, who could take all this stuff and run with it. The progressives don't have a candidate now who understands these things and can talk about them. And in order for a candidate to be able to talk about them, the ideas have to be out there. You have to be able to reference them in a sound bite. Other people have to put these ideas into the public domain, not politicians."

If you take a step back and look at the political landscape of the past eighteen months, it becomes evident why Barack Obama is GOP Enemy Number One. Frank Luntz, the famed and feared GOP strategist who is a key influence on many of the party's political buzzwords and phrases, took his hat off to the Obama team last year, acknowledging that they had outwitted the McCain camp from Day One.

The organization Obama built, in terms of discipline, communication and ability to stay on task, was unprecedented for a Democratic nominee. Non-union citizens literally "bought in" to the political process with small donations that made them feel like they were a part of something big. Obama campaign members learned how to tap into the power of the personal narrative, successfully influencing and motivating reluctant citizens to not only register to vote, but also show up at the polls. Most of this was done by volunteers FOR FREE.

That's the kind of thing that really scares the people like the Koch family from Wisconsin or the Scaife interests in Pennsylvania, and others like them who are willing to lavish billions on a conservative media system designed to keep them in control of the political process.

I am already seeing Limbaugh and Malkin and Hannity and O'Reilly and Savage for what they are - mouthpieces, similar in function to the White House press secretary, who sit on top of the billions of dollars of really rich men, billions they get to see but not touch.

In a few weeks, after a healthcare bill gets to the president's desk, you will start seeing the words and phrases from the Republican "black box", words and phrases so inflammatory that they could be labeled "radioactive. The cacophony of vitriol will be at a fever pitch.

Don't be dismayed.

It will be the sign of progress - the sound of the GOP noise machine in decline.

Is The Obama Administration Under Siege From All Sides?

brownmanthinking@gmail.com (Brown Man) — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 12:46:00 PST

Despite the intense political media focus on Sarah Palin this week, the Brown Man found time to talk to my man Sean Yoes, a senior reporter at The Afro American. Yoes is the host of "The WEAA/AFRO First Edition", an hour-long political talk show on Baltimore's WEAA-FM (88.9 FM), which airs Sunday nights at 8 p.m.

You can click this link and push the "Listen Live" button at the top of the page to hear the show.

This week, we talked about the criticism of the president that seems to be coming from all sides these days as the Obama Administration deals with foreign wars, high unemployment, economic woes, and a high level of political animosity, not only from their opponents, but from many of the people who helped elect Barack Obama president.

Find out what Sean Yoes and the Brown Man think tonight at 8 pm on the show.

As always, it was fun. Check it out if you have a chance.

Queen High Flush: Round Of Senate "Holdem" Results In Healthcare Debate

brownmanthinking@gmail.com (Brown Man) — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 05:22:00 PST

Senator Mary Landrieau deserves an Oscar for her performance leading up to last night's Senate vote on cloture to officially open the Senate floor to debate over the long awaited healthcare legislation. She certainly won the best actor award among a cast of dozens last night, walking away with 300 million dollars in federal money as a trophy for the state of Louisiana.

Those fake pained expressions of Senators Landrieau and Lincoln have stared out from TV sets and websites for the past two weeks, as if they were agonizing over a decision that would end life as we know it in America. The White House has done a pretty good job of keeping up the ruse themselves, encouraging the heightened emotional tenor about what is really a cost containment bill in a way that tugs at the population's sense of what is right and wrong.

A more accurate, but decidedly less appealing name would be the "If We Don't Do This Your Government Will Go Broke Bill". But in the land of 29% credit card rates, mortgages with balloon payments, and payday lenders who have people knocking down their doors to get in, approaching something like this strictly from a dollars and sense perspective, with the idea that common sense and logic would prevail in the minds of the public and Congress, would have been a total waste of time.

My parents were in town this weekend. So we sat over an extended dinner and talked, with my father offering story after story of South Carolina politicians from the 50's and 60's who used every opportunity to enrich themselves or their cronies and extend the reach of their powers within the community at large. The same political charades that went on then in my home state are going on now in your Congress, with senators who will be playing the press statement version of "Texas Holdem" for the next few weeks, all of them posturing and bluffing each other for the inevitable deal making that will be required to secure their votes.

I guess you could say that the next few weeks will really be like watching a poker tournament, with all of the subterfuge and bluffing that goes along with it. Except the stakes they are playing with, and the pile of money in the middle of the table - it's all ours.

Brown Man Has His Say On BBC Radio

brownmanthinking@gmail.com (Brown Man) — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 04:18:00 PST

I joined a panel yesterday on "World Have Your Say", a BBC Radio show that focuses on hot topics from around the world, to try to answer the question "if it’s not racism, why do some Americans hate President Obama so much?"

The online article touting yesterday's show actually featured a link to a piece here at Brown Man Thinking Hard from last year, titled "Obama Hate: "Obama Loves America Like O.J. Loved Nicole". Even though I'd never done a group discussion via phone on live radio, it seemed to be right up my alley.

Now I've got an idea of what a rookie must feel like when he hits the floor for the first time in a big time Division I basketball program.

The producers or production assistants over in England were very nice and unfailingly polite. It was so interesting hearing the tart, lilting way their tongues herded each word in a sentence along, with an extra lash for the final word if they were asking a question, that it was a struggle to pay attention to what they were saying to me at first.

The guests were a mixed bag - a reverend/political activist from Louisiana, a radio host from Cincinnati, a reporter/columnist from L.A., and a newspaper person whose title I can't remember. The host was pretty good, keeping the show moving by alternating between our comments, real time emails that he read on the air if they illuminated a point someone had made, or took the conversation in a more interesting direction, and call-in listeners from around the world, although most of ours were from the States.

But back to this rookie thing.

I have a new level of respect for the amount of time Sean Yoes gives me twice a month on the AFRO/First Edition at WEAA to basically say what I want to say, at a pace with which I'm comfortable. My fellow panelists yesterday were old hands at this, experienced enough to know how to use their "radio" voices to elbow their way into the ring to say something. So I didn't get to say much. And they all seemed to lead with their standard talking points, which got me hot under the collar after awhile.

It was as if I was listening to a chorus of Baghdad Bob's, each of them valiantly pursuing their line of patter as if the host had simply gotten bad information about the racial overtones that are becoming more distinct in the criticism of President Obama by certain Americans.

It's moments like these when I feel a little guilty for falling down on the job sometimes, for not coming up with more posts on more topics, for not hitting the bricks here each and every day to try to counter some of the misinformation that so often becomes the dominant discussion by the media.

When I asserted that FOX News was unprecedented in its nightly vitriol against Obama, a chorus of voices raised to denounce MSNBC's treatment of President Bush, as if Keith Olbermann's rants were the equivalent of FOX's entire lineup, hour after hour, yelling about our "Muslim, radical" president.

The guy from L.A., Ben Shapiro, used the phrase "radical policies" so many times I thought the topic had changed and we were talking about another country. As I sat there, phone to my ear, I pictured a computer server somewhere, silently tallying all the on-air uses of these kind of key phrases and relaying the running totals via Blackberries or IPhones to the army (and it IS an army) of right wing political zealots across the country in front of TV cameras and on radio shows, helping them to calibrate their patter accordingly in order for the group to hit their daily target.

Later in the show, when I actually tried to talk about some of the research on race and politics I'd done for a blog series last year, the Cincinnati radio jock jumped in to agree with my assessment that the number of actual racists were small before quickly adding dismissively "that these are people who have no power."

I countered "but when the people in power let these people speak unfettered in this country, that's a problem." I was a statement Mr.Cinncinati took personally.

I actually wasn't talking about anyone down at his level, though. When Mr. Cincinnati calmed down, I told him "It's not you, but the people who run our media companies." When the executive suite allows this kind of ridiculous behavior to typify their networks, THAT is a real problem, one all of us should be up in arms about.

But I was glad to hear Mr. Cincinnati get all huffy for a moment or two before he segued back into his stock speech for someone with a different point of view.

It was the moment that made the whole hour worthwhile.

I'll be back.

Suffering In The Name Of Freedom

brownmanthinking@gmail.com (Brown Man) — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 05:40:00 PST

It's bad for this president to bow to the Japanese, but it's good for the last president to kiss the Saudis.

With that kind of logic, I'd hate to think what President Obama should do for the Chinese.

After all, what's a couple of trillion between friends? Especially when we haven't got the cash to pay that "couple of trillion" in Treasury debt off that the Chinese seem to be patiently holding while we ~~make our bankers richer~~ fix our economy.

Between the punditocracy who pray at the church of "American superiority", and the punditocracy who worship Saint Sarah's every breath, I have been totally uninspired these last few days.

Our news media is suffering from a inability to reference anything other than itself, which means that there is probably going to be nothing but an endless loop of President Obama bowing to the Chinese emperor, Sarah Palin gossiping about her alternate universe, Levi Johnston struggling to express himself in front of a camera, and a hundred television reporters and experts analyzing THEIR OWN COMMENTS on this madness as if that is supposed to explain why these things should be important to us. But how much more do I really need to know about this stuff?

So I went to China myself to see what was really going on.

First stop, China Digital Times. The biggest issue in this publication is a raging debate about the Great Firewall of China. The internet there is very, very heavily censored by the state.

From Chinese twitterers:

@zhengyun: President Obama arriving China with the his spectacular army of Twitter, Facebook, Blogspot, Google Picasa, Youtube, Yahoo! meme ……

@philfenghan I will not forget this morning, I heard, on my shaky Internet connection, a question about our own freedom which only a foreign leader can discuss.
我不会忘记这个中午，断断续续听着一个他国领导人才会讲到的关于我们自己切身自由的问题。 #obama

@hecaitou: The Netease page about Obama answering the question of Great Firewall of Twitter survived twenty seven minutes.
网易关于奥巴马回答防火墙和Twitter的页面，存活了27分钟。

@blogtd: #Obama President Obama, if you cannot update your Twitter and Facebook while you are in China, I will be happy to provide humanitarian aid.

I am no foriegn policy analyst by a long shot, but as a life long student of human behavior, it looks to me that China is going to have to figure out if they really want to grow the ranks of their middle class citizens, which has been the source of stability in Westernized nations, or keep the type of totalitarian control they have now. You can't have your cake and eat it too, Emperor

And in case the Emperor isn't paying attention, our bowing president would be only too happy to take back boatloads of bright Chinese students to study in our universities.

I made a few other stops, at places like the Angry Chinese Blogger, but the picture of a country that restricted its citizens internet access had a hold on me. I thought about our freedom here to make fun of the president, or complain about the government. I thought about the freedom we have to support who we want for president, for congress, for the senate, for mayor or city councilman.

So I guess I'll be lumping it with the rest of you, enduring Sarah Palin and Levi Johnston as long as the people who sell us stuff figure they can make some money from our eyeballs.

I'll be suffering in the name of freedom.

Senor Dobbs: Adios!

brownmanthinking@gmail.com (Brown Man) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:48:00 PST

It just so happens that I was on the phone yesterday with a staffer from www.RedBrownandBlue.com, asking her about the reception they'd gotten from the black bloggers they'd reached out to recently as they launched their publication - we ended up talking about some of the very same attitudes towards our Latino brethren that cost Lou Dobbs his job today at CNN.

"Every...what's the phrase now...'undocumented worker'...every 'undocumented worker' is alright when they are cutting your grass or cleaning your house," I said to her. "If these 'undocumented workers' can do the work, and we want them to do the work, why can't they be 'citizens' and pay some taxes?"

I told her I was going to add their site to my blogroll. "Immigration is the next big issue coming up in Congress" the staffer reminded me. "Uh huh," I said. "I know. I might be interested in doing a column. Is that okay?"

She assured me that they were always on the lookout for good writing on relevant issues.

"Some leaders in media, politics and business have been urging me to go beyond the role here at CNN and to engage in constructive problem-solving," Mr. Dobbs said on his show tonight.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with ExecuSpeak, the English translation of Dobbs statement is "they told me to take my crabby ass home."

Dobbs may have quit today, but he had painted himself into a corner long ago.

Good riddance.

Sometimes, though, in a situation like this, you wonder, when a person like Dobbs leaves, if you are losing the devil you know to gain the devil you don't.

It's highly unlikely they will get anyone as cantankerously wrong as Dobbs.

But back to this new kid on the block, www.RedBrownandBlue.com...

...I'll have to admit that it was the name that drew me in. In fact, I had just spoken to my brother about this during our discussion the other day about the city of Atlanta mayoral race. "The only thing the AJC kept talking about were black and white voters," I groused. "The good only simplicity of the binary existence is all they want to deal with. I guess it makes for an easier story to report. But what about the Mexicans? What about the Asians? What about the Eastern Europeans? What about the Ethiopians? Did any of these campaigns have a significant presence on their campaign staffs of Spanish speaking people?"

Multiculturalism is more than a trendy moniker. It is a reality here in Atlanta. With the small number of votes cast in the mayor's race, I believe Kasim Reed, who so far is still my fantasy candidate (since I don't live in the city limits), would have had a chance to be the mayor last week if he had included a strong outreach effort to these communities.

To the people who feel a little discombobulated right now by all of this - to the people who want all of us brown and browners to hide under a rock somewhere, or go jump off a cliff en masse, or just simply assume our usual position of deference, waiting for them to take the lead, I'm not sorry to say it, I'm happy as hell to shout it - you are going to discombobulated for the rest of your lives.

And if you haven't visited one of my long time blogroll members Adventures Of The Coconut Caucus - "we put the panic in Hispanic" - you need to check them out. They are hilarious!

Watching By The People: The Election of Barack Obama

brownmanthinking@gmail.com (Brown Man) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 05:45:00 PST

I've been toying around with some comments on the Obama campaign documentary that aired last week, but every time I got started on them, something else came up. Election Night. The Fort Hood shootings. The healthcare bill passing in the House of Representatives. The latest goings on in the Atlanta mayoral race.

Now that there is a lull in the action, maybe I can get back to By The People: The Election of Barack Obama, the documentary directed by Alicia Sams and Amy Rice that HBO premiered last week.

Maybe it's the fiction writer in me, but somewhere around the forty five minute mark in By The People , I wondered how much more this would really resonate with viewers if, instead of watching this solo on a single TV screen, everyone who viewed it was sitting in front of a bank of flat screens, with the Obama documentary playing alongside Amistad, Roots, The March on Washington, Birth of A Nation and Guess Who's Coming To Dinner, the sound turned down on all of the screens except for By The People, the images of the past flashing across the screens in your periphery as you watched the main event, creating the most meta of meta-narratives you had ever seen...

...and even then, I don't think any stretch of video tape could possibly begin to contain the enormity of the idea of a black man being the president of the United States of America.

For me, what this documentary showed more than anything was how constrained we are as a nation by the febrile and inadequate imaginations of our media, a group of people who often pat themselves on the back for their self described open mindedness when they are usually the most narrow minded link in the information chain.

Add to that the endless hours of cable news punditry that was dedicated to the fluff, gossip and innuendo rather than the things that really wins campaigns, the nuts and bolts business of organizing and registering people to actually cast a ballot, and it becomes apparent why we hold the news media in such low esteem, even as we take our cues from them, for we are too lazy or too preoccupied to search out the raw facts and analyze them for ourselves.

I wrote over a hundred thousand words during the presidential primaries and the presidential election last fall. And in going back through all of them to put together a retrospective ebook culled from this very blog - an effort which is a lot harder and is taking a lot longer than I thought it would have three weeks ago - I got a chance to relive some of the feelings I had during this ground breaking and historic race.

In some ways it was like being in the kitchen of a fancy restaurant while top chefs prepared a ten course meal - seeing all the hard work and planning that went into it made the end result all that much sweeter.

By the end of By The People, you sense that the editors have done their job well, because they have strung enough emotional wellspring moments together to have you yourself get a little misty eyed when they show Candidate Obama tearing up on stage the day before the election while he speaks of the death of his grandmother.

The most poignant part of the film for me was an unremarkable moment early on, when the cameras were whirring in the Obama kitchen, taking in the sight of Michelle Obama playing a game with her children at the kitchen table when the phone rang. Daughter Sasha rushed to the phone, her eyes glancing into the camera to her right before remembering to look away as if the camera wasn't there.

It was a telling reminder of the way we are all influenced by the presence of recording devices, and how our real life instincts are often muted when someone is watching us. The lives of the Obama family have been forever altered by this election. Every once in awhile, when I see a moment like the one young Sasha had during this film, I want to believe that we can give them their real lives back after this is all over.

But the reality is, we will be watching this family for a long time to come.

Can Kasim Reed Leave Maynard Jackson "Amen" Corner Out Of Mayor's Race?

brownmanthinking@gmail.com (Brown Man) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 04:55:00 PST

Miles Davis might have had the right idea.

Sometimes you just need to turn your back to the audience and blow.

Bwwwwwwaaaap!

What is going on behind the scenes in the city of Atlanta's mayoral race?

Bwwwwwwaaaap!

Can Kasim Reed win without the help of the Maynard Jackson Amen corner?

Bwwwwwwaaaap!

Even though I don't live in the city of Atlanta, what goes on there is important to me and the other four million people who live in the Atlanta metro area that surrounds the city limits.

My brother, who does live inside the city limits, says voting was very light in his precinct in the Atlanta's northwest quadrant. "You had to stand in line when I voted here last fall," he said. "Last week I breezed in and out."

Why more of those newly registered Obama voters didn't return is not really a mystery.

I'd like to say that I don't understand why Kasim Reed, the candidate I still like despite the Jackson endorsement, didn't decide to adopt more of the proven winning strategies of the Obama presidential campaign, but I've got a theory about his lackluster performance last week.

It's an idea that began growing in my mind about the time that I heard Brooke Jackson-Edmonds, daughter of Atlanta's first black mayor, on the radio in the last days of the campaign, endorsing Reed as if she was a proxy for her late father.

Reed is a young, vigorous, well educated, clean cut candidate who can crisply articulate his ideas - the kind of African American candidate who could have taken advantage of the huge contingent of Obama organizers and campaign volunteers who live in the city to significantly boost turnout numbers.

Why didn't Reed have better voter turnout numbers? Is it because his advisors still meet at Paschal's and The Beautiful Restaurant, instead of emailing and conference calling?

There's more to it, though, than slapping an "e" in front of your campaign and slapping up a website. To gain access to this new force in American politics, Reed probably would have had to change his message a little bit too, to be more overtly inclusive of those white voters who feel their voices have gotten the short end of the stick at City Hall ever since Jackson was mayor in the seventies.

How bad could it be in the "City Too Busy To Hate" to have white and Latino and Asian Atlanta residents involved in significant numbers at meaningful levels of city government...

...unless your candidacy has been anointed by a clique that thinks it owns the keys to the city?

Jim Galloway, who writes the "Political Insider" column for the Atlanta Journal & Constitution, published eye opening emails between Bunnie Jackson-Ransom, Maynard Jackson's first wife, and other concerned citizens about the possibility of Atlanta having a white mayor. Galloway would probably lose his job for writing what I'm about to say, but somebody has to say it.

Maynard Jackson is dead.

Because it seems that within the city limits of Atlanta, there are too many people who won't let the spectre of Maynard Jackson's legacy as the first black mayor of Atlanta go. Too many people who are invested in trying to make the historical significance of Jackson's 1973 style of decision making remain relevant here in 2009, some thirty eight years later.

The unique time that the seventies in the South presented were perfectly suited to the young Jackson's talents. A son of the city, who appeared to inherit much of his political skill from his grandfather, John Wesley Dobbs, Jackson didn't crack open the doors for minority participation in city business and city contracts - he blew them wide open, probably because that's the only way he had a chance of changing the status quo.

There's no way to know, no matter how much Monday morning quarterbacking you do, what might have happened to the city of Atlanta if Jackson had possessed a more diplomatic touch, but a look at just about every major urban city that was taken over by black mayors in the seventies will show you that white flight was a phenomenon that affected all of these locales. Losing that part of the tax base crippled most of these cities just when they needed money the most, making it next to impossible for these administrations to keep the pace with the kind of amenities the suburbs had to offer.

Maybe I am particularly sensitive to these kinds of black political machinations swirling around the Atlanta mayoral race because I grew up in a college town with two historically black colleges whose administrations, staff and faculty formed their own insular communities. The college presidents in the old days ran their campuses as veritable fiefdoms, doling out favors and privileges as if they owned their schools, Booker T. Washington style.

A buddy of mine from my hometown asked me years ago how come we didn't live on Atlanta's South Side. How come we didn't consider the Cascade Road area, where a lot of Atlanta's old school movers and shakers lived. "Because I didn't move here all the way from South Carolina to stand at the back of another Negro pecking order line."

A lot has changed in the thirty five years since Jackson was first elected mayor of Atlanta. Some of the walls between America's racial and ethnic cultures have begun to crumble. Things obviously aren't perfect - there are those who call themselves Tea Baggers or Tea Partiers or freedom fighters who are fighting mightily to rebuild those walls that deny non-whites access to power, walls a young Maynard Jackson did a lot to help crumble.

I don't begrudge Ms. Jackson-Ransom or any of the Jackson family and friends for any success or riches they may have garnered because of Maynard Jackson's three terms as mayor or from the many powerful connections he made while serving in office. That's the reality of the political process - "he who wins receives the spoils." And I'm sure the death threats against the Jackson family in the seventies were every bit as real as the ones against President Obama today.

But the handwriting is on the wall.

Without a vibrant city center as a magnet, the Atlanta metro area will devolve into nothing more than an agglomeration of five counties, their tip ends circling the perimeter like charred logs around an extinguished campfire.

Jacksonites, it's time to step aside and make way for the next generation of young political lions to challenge the status quo downtown, the same way Maynard Jackson did 38 years ago, so that ALL the players in the Atlanta of the new millennium can have a seat at the table.

Saturday Night Special: Healthcare Bill Passes House

brownmanthinking@gmail.com (Brown Man) — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 01:20:00 PST

It looks like the Affordable Healthcare For America Act, better known as the "healthcare act" if you support it, or "Obamacare" if you are against it, will live to see another day as it moved forward from the House of Representatives about 11 o'clock last night, passing with a final vote of 220 - 215. The bill will head to the Senate next, where legislators will repeat the same three ring circus act again to see if the bill can find enough support among the 100 members of its body to continue on the arduous journey of becoming the law of the land.

You know you're getting old when you look forward to watching the healthcare vote in the House of Representatives on a Saturday evening instead of Saturday Night Live.

Last night, the majority of the Democrats in the House looked like they had Saturday Night Fever - indeed, some of them seemed ready to start dancing in the aisles as the electronic vote totals began to accumulate on the tote board. They had withstood the last minute challenge the Stupak-Pitts Amendment presented Friday night, rallying around the House Democratic leadership's decision to allow an up or down vote on including in the Affordable Healthcare For Americans Act language that prohibits federal funds for abortion services in the public option and in the insurance "exchange" the bill would create.

What this latest wrinkle in the healthcare debate means for the general public is that for the next few weeks, political advertising will compete with holiday season commercials for your attention as special interest groups pull out all the stops in an attempt to sway public support in a direction beneficial to their own self interests.

President Obama released a statement shortly after the vote. "Thanks to the hard work of the House, we are just two steps away from achieving health insurance reform in America. Now the United States Senate must follow suit and pass its version of the legislation. I am absolutely confident it will, and I look forward to signing comprehensive health insurance reform into law by the end of the year."

The Silent Halls Of Death

brownmanthinking@gmail.com (Brown Man) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 04:38:00 PST

It is a cruel kind of sadness that the families of the dead at Fort Hood will have to endure. I would not want to see the story of the military gunman who opened fire on his fellow soldiers yesterday incessantly played and replayed on all the news stations for the next two weeks if I were a surviving family member.

Even as I write these words, there are news producers in studios across the country who are estimating how much of a ratings spike this horrific event will give them the next few days. There are Aryan brotherhoods who are incorporating Major Nidal Malik Hasan's name into their recruitment speeches. Muslim American soldiers who are steeling themselves for a potential backlash within the ranks of their own fellow troops.

These are the kind of real life things, real life but nonsensical, that will go on the next few weeks.

The blood has long stopped flowing from the bullet holes in those thirteen people who died yesterday. The eviscerated flesh around the edges of their wounds have begun to harden. Loved ones, still in shock, are having to scurry about, quietly digging up life insurance policies, forlornly selecting the last pieces of clothing their dead family members will ever wear in this world.

So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan which moves
To that mysterious realm where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged by his dungeon; but, sustain'd and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

From Thanatopsis
William Cullen Bryant

I was required to memorize the phrases above by Bryant almost thirty years ago in high school. It is in times like this that it comes back to me, as clearly as if I had only committed it to memory yesterday.

Yesterday, as I turned the channel to get away from scenes of the chaos, in my mind's eye those thirteen people whose lives were so suddenly snatched from them took their own chambers in the silent halls of death.

Political Spin: The Media's Election Night After Party

brownmanthinking@gmail.com (Brown Man) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 04:28:00 PST

The perennial stereotype of the horse racing gambler has been recounted in books and movies as the kind of person who is able to see attributes in the horses that they inevitably lose money on that just aren't there. It almost seemed that they got more pleasure out of not winning than they ever could if their horse actually came in first.

The post race political spin last night was starting to sound the same way as the Democrats began to explain why losing the governor's races in New Jersey and New York wasn't indicative of anything at all other than the will of the voters. "The president", said the White House spokesman, "is not watching returns."

This was one of the funnier quotes of the night - what the hell else would a wonkish pol like Obama, who lives at ground zero in the most political city in the country, be doing? Bowling? Playing Scrabble with the girls? Updating his Fantasy Football picks?

The article "It's The Spending, Stupid" that was released before the results were final in New York's District 23 by Cynthia Lummis, a Republican Congresswoman from Wyoming, was just as funny. "Doug Hoffman’s ascendance is a referendum on the reckless spending of the Obama administration and the Pelosi-Reid Congress." It's kind of hard to call this race a referendum on spending when an unknown Democrat actually won the race last night in District 23, but I'm sure Rep. Lummis will come up with an inventive way to recast this outcome into a positive development.

The races themselves almost seem incidental, so hungry is our political establishment on both sides of the aisle for a chance to trumpet their agendas. I've often wondered why, in such a large country, we can't just accept the fact that people who call themselves Democrats or Republicans in one part of the country may not have the same ideological beliefs as those in another part - that the membership in a political party is an affiliation of similarly minded people in the truest sense of the word, rather than a brain washing syndicate that attempts to indoctrinate its ranks from coast to coast the way fascist dictators do.

The people of New Jersey and Virginia and New York's District 23 know these people running for office better than anyone on the national level ever could. When the smoke clears, and the cameras and the reporters are gone, the voters don't care about the national agendas - they care about what's happening on their streets, in their school systems, and in their neighborhoods and downtowns.

But reporters don't call regular citizens to ask them what they are thinking. They call experts and analysts instead. Then they call Sarah Palin and Glen Beck and Keith Olbermann to get the final word on the matter. They use old articles for research. They listen to other journalists and op-ed writers, and end up publishing coverage that reinforces a binary version of reality, as if we are not a multi-dimensional, multiple narrative population who may or may not act in ways that protect our own self-interests.

It would be easy to say that we have devolved into a nation that is all talk and no action, but that isn't really the case. In many ways, to the people who package and sell political talk, reporting on the saying is is much more lucrative than reporting on the doing - how many ways can you describe the construction of a new bridge that will take two years to complete?

But view that bridge through the eyes of an editor, or a public relations specialist, and all of a sudden the building of forms and the pouring of concrete take on a whole new light as we are bombarded by accusations of graft and corruption, payoffs and kickbacks, shoddy workmanship and back room dealmaking.

To the people who need the bridge, the politics of it is secondary to actually getting it completed so they can drive over it to get where they are going.

It would be disingenuous to write all of this and not admit that there is certain amount of irony in my writing this, since I have my own political and cultural opinion blog. At the end of the week, I've written a whole lot more than anything I've done to take action. Maybe what I have to say ads to America's political narrative. Maybe it doesn't.

The upshot of all of this is that for the next two weeks, you will be bombarded with headlines like "Palin's Candidate Loses In NY Congressional Race", "How Will Obama Respond To GOP Wins In VA And NJ?", "Dems, Incumbents Get Wake-Up Call", "Analysis: Elections Not A Referendum On Obama", "A Warning To Democrats: It's Not 2008 Anymore", "GOP Wins Reveal Cracks In Obama Coalition", and "VA and NJ Elections: Obama World Stayed Home".

These headlines, however stirring, will do nothing to alleviate the high unemployment rate, and will have no bearing on any efforts to stimulate the economy, the two things America is really interested in seeing improve.

Why Is Newt Gingrich On The Cover Of My Alumni Magazine?

brownmanthinking@gmail.com (Brown Man) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:10:00 PST

Newt Gingrich and I have the same alma mater.

I had no idea that we both graduated from Emory University.

The publication the school put out for alumni was in the mail today. Emory Magazine, which has got to be one of the best put together university communications out there, is used mainly to let us know what's going on back at the ranch, remind us of how much all the educational majesty leading up to pomp and circumstance for this generation costs, and prime us for the fundraising phone call from a student...

...a solicitation phone call that ironically came between the time I flipped through the magazine and the time, half an hour later, when I sat down to write this piece.

Gingrich was on the cover of this issue, his white capped head covering nearly half the page in a jowly pose similar to the one in the picture above that made me think of Tip O'Neill in the twilight of his career. I didn't know that he was the founder of Emory's Young Republican chapter. What I had always felt was a deep respect for his intellect, even if I didn't agree with many of the political positions he has espoused over the years.

His latest reincarnation, in which he is teaming up with Al Sharpton to push for improvements in the nation's educational systems, may seem odd from the outside, but I have always been amazed at the idea of a professor with a PhD turning his theories into action. No matter how much you may dislike the conclusions he arrives at, there is no way to deny that Gingrich is a first rate thinker.

One of my buddies, another Emory alum, thinks Gingrich is biding his time until the Sarah Palin types wear out their welcome, when my buddy insists that "Newt can take this thing." What my buddy doesn't realize is how much credibility Gingrich's association with Sharpton has cost him with the army of wingnut zombies following Glen Beck and Michelle Malkin, an army who mistakenly believe that they are real Republicans.

The reality for Gingrich is that his time to run for president has passed him by. As he comments in the Emory Magazine article The Man With The Plan, "I was in an airport, and these students came up and said, 'you're in our history book,'", Gingrich says. "I felt very odd at that point."

I don't know what he and Sharpton and Arne Duncan are cooking up, but I think Gingrich's academic background, his political instincts, and his stature will serve the groundbreaking educational tour well. As a matter of fact, this threesome will be in New Orleans tomorrow, November 3rd, and in Baltimore on November 13th.

In a recent interview that included both Gingrich and Sharpton, Sharpton told NBC, "The parents need to be challenged with the message of `no excuses.'" Gingrich responded, "I think that he has it exactly right, that education has to be the No. 1 civil right of the 21st century and I've been passionate about reforming education. And we can't get it done as a partisan issue."

"Amen" to that.

AUDIO for November 1st AFRO/First Edition Interview

brownmanthinking@gmail.com (Brown Man) — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 14:04:00 PST

This is the audio from the radio interview I did with Sean Yoes on November 1st on WEAA, an NPR afiliate in Baltimore.

Healthcare reform, Joe Lieberman's latest antics, the race in New York District 23, and the ongoing feud between Sarah Palin and Levi Johnston were among the topics.

Audio Of Nov 1 FIRST EDITION Interview with Sean Yoes - Part 1

Audio Of Nov 1 FIRST EDITION Interview with Sean Yoes - Part 2

Audio Of Nov 1 FIRST EDITION Interview with Sean Yoes - Part 3

Enjoy.

AFRO First Edition: Sean Yoes And Kris Broughton Talk Politics

brownmanthinking@gmail.com (Brown Man) — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 04:01:00 PST

Between all of the pomp and circumstance of homecoming weekend at S.'s undergraduate alma mater, I found time to get back on the radio for an interview with Sean Yoes, a senior reporter at The Afro American. He is the host of "The WEAA/AFRO First Edition", an hour-long political talk show on Baltimore's WEAA-FM (88.9 FM), which airs Sunday nights at 8 p.m.

You can click this link and push the "Listen Live" button at the top of the page to hear the show.

This week, we talked about the latest incarnation of the healthcare bill in the Senate, the House of Representatives race in New York's 23rd district that will be discussed on all the Sunday morning political talk shows, and the growing feud between Sarah Palin and Levi Johnston.

Has the level of President Obama's leadership role in the healthcare debate been effective? Find out what Sean Yoes and I think tonight on the show.

As always, it was fun. Check it out if you have a chance.

Black Dynamite And The Atlanta Mayor's Race

brownmanthinking@gmail.com (Brown Man) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 04:00:00 PDT

S. and I flew the coop for a few days this morning. I was riding shotgun in the AM through the slow as molasses Atlanta traffic after we dropped the dog off. Seeing him enter the facility is always one of the high points of any trip we take for me. So I hit the road with S. and my favorite traveling companions - a stack of the day's newspapers.

Tom Joyner and his crew on the Tom Joyner Morning Show were too funny this morning, though, so we were halfway to Chattanooga before I remembered my stack of fresh news. But by then it was too late.

It was my turn behind the wheel.

It just so happened, though, that I had opened the Atlanta Journal & Constitution first, so I actually did get to read through a few articles about Atlanta's mayoral election next week before Kim Whitley did a call in interview about her new movie, the 70's black exploitation era parody Black Dynamite.

Somehow, the idea of a pimp named Captain Kangaroo snatched my attention from reading any more about what may turn out to be a ground breaking election for the city of Atlanta.

Because for the first time in over 30 years, the front runner in Atlanta's mayoral race is white.

Mary Norwood, who is currently the front runner, is a veteran of City Council. Lisa Borders is a former City Council president. And Kasim Reed is a Georgia state senator.

If I were an evening news reporter, I'd immediately run out and find a couple of black City of Atlanta residents who are riled up about the potential of having a white mayor. Instead, I have talked to my friends and acquaintances over the last couple of months, and they are in a bit of a quandary - the idea of having another black mayor and all its attendant perks, especially if you have a personal relationship with said black mayor, is losing big time in their minds to the idea of getting anyone in there who can do something to fix the chronic problems at City Hall.

None of them, however, feel that Mary Norwood is that person.

Neither do I.

But I'm tired of the same old same old, even though I can't vote in this election because I live out in the sticks in suburban (gasp!) John's Creek north of town. And I am a firm believer that the Obama presidency has raised the bar for the many, many black politicians around the country whose only real accomplishment has been getting re-elected, or holding down the "black" seat.

Maybe there is more than a coincidence that I've mentioned a black exploitation movie just after describing the glimpse I had of the latest projections on the Atlanta Mayor's race. The transition the city went through during the Maynard Jackson years was both positive and negative. It brought a new look to Atlanta's City Hall at the department level, where the real work gets done in a city, with minorities ascending to positions of real power within Jackson's administration. On the flip side, it was some of these same minority political appointees who simply did not get the work done, whether they fell down on the job, were ill prepared, or just didn't give a damn about anything but a paycheck.

This in itself was nothing new - it happens in every city in the country big enough to have a bureaucracy. It was certainly going on in Atlanta before the administration's skin tone began to darken.

But we don't need anymore "black exploitation" politicians here in Atlanta, or in Detroit, or D.C. or Baltimore, or Philadelphia.

S. and I talked about this phenomenon in the car, after we'd dried our tears about the idea of a pimp known as Captain Kangaroo.

"As far as I'm concerned, Atlanta has basically had the same mayor for thirty years. Maynard has annointed them all, either in person or by proxy. Andrew Young got his okay. He fingered Bill Campbell to carry the torch next. And the whole Jackson coterie carried the flag for Shirley Franklin, an old Jackson crony from way back when, after Jackson's untimely demise.

Now it looks like Kasim Reed is next in line."

I actually like Kasim Reed personally. Every time I've met him, he has been willing to talk about the things I was dissatisfied with at the state level, where he worked in the Georgia Legislature as a state senator. I haven't always agreed with his stances, but I have always admired the sense of dogged professionalism he brings to any encounter.

So I guess, if Brown Man Thinking Hard was in the business of making political endorsements that really mattered, that I would unequivocally support Reed.

The question is, if he can hang in there for a runoff, or generate the kind of last minute support that allows him to claim victory on Tuesday night, what the hell will he do to get beyond the shadow of Atlanta's first black mayor?

Can he grow beyond the constraints of a legacy that Maynard Jackson himself was in danger of outliving?

Can he begin to select a more diverse staff, both in ethnic backgrounds and life experiences?

I guess we'll just have to see what next Tuesday night brings.

Joe Lieberman: There's An App For That

brownmanthinking@gmail.com (Brown Man) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 05:37:00 PDT

After spending a couple of hours wrestling with Microsoft's latest version of Outlook to try to get it to do something it used to do - switch between multiple email identities with two simple clicks - I felt the way I do when I go into our neighborhood big box grocery store and they've moved all the stuff around.

Lost and betrayed.

I guess it was ironic that I saw Bill and Melinda Gates on the news last night, talking about their efforts to combat Third World childhood diseases, as if they had whipped the software world into shape and left for bigger challenges, knowing that their customers were totally satisfied with all things Microsoft.

The next time I upgrade my operating system, I am going to take some classes to understand the nuances of what it can and can't do from the rip, instead of beating my brains out because some brilliant software designer decided that a task that used to be simple now needs to be complex because he's got the horsepower in the latest CPU to execute his code.

I am annoyed, but not surprised, because I've learned to expect this kind of stuff over the years from the software industry in general, and Microsoft in particular.

It's probably the same way Harry Reid and President Obama feel about Joe Lieberman's declaration that he will filibuster the healthcare bill after all - annoyed, but not surprised, because they've learned to expect this of stuff from old "Contrarian Joe".

Now that I think about it, Lieberman is a lot like the Microsoft XP operating system and all the software that are on my old desktop computer that I only use in emergencies - like when I've left my laptop upstairs. He probably started out like my old desktop, with features that were cutting edge years ago. With a memory that seemed prodigious, and and ability to run multiple programs with one arm tied behind his back.

But over the years, Lieberman has become corrupted, a lot like the registry on my old desktop has, so that he is prone to display a "runtime error" similar to the one my old computer does when it tries to keep up with the latest high definition video.

Lieberman is what happens in a seniority system, when the voters hold their noses while they vote because whether they like him or not, he can and does bring home the bacon. Its not much different than the way a sizable number of people hold their noses when they buy Microsoft software products - like it or not, they can and do help bring home the bacon despite their shortcomings.

Senator Lieberman has fared pretty well in the past because most of these "tempests in a teapot" that he has been involved in are over forgettable issues, during forgettable times, under presidents we barely pay attention to between baseball, football, basketball, NASCAR and hockey seasons.

I wouldn't bet against Lieberman winning re-election in two years when his term is up, but you never know. Why, Steve Job's Apple is even picking up a little more market share these days from Bill Gates and Microsoft.

So maybe there's an app for that.

Where Should I Begin Today?

brownmanthinking@gmail.com (Brown Man) — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 04:38:00 PDT

Where should I begin today?

I'm not so sure.

But that's never stopped me before, so let's get this thing started with the topic that is on the tip of everybody's tongue in - healthcare reform. (Unless you're a FOX News political commentator, in which case the only thing on the tip of your tongue is the phrase "ObamaisaCommunistMarxistSocialistsecretMuslim", which has been repeated so many times it has now become one long word).

Senator Harry Reid seems to have gotten tired of being the Democrat's whipping boy - (can you still say that? - was that racist? - is it safer to just call him a CommunistMarxistSocialistsecretMuslim?) so it looks like a public option of some kind is going to be in the final healthcare bill that gets voted on. But whatever kind of option it is, you can be sure that it will be the variety Senator Olympia Snowe won't be able to support.

The White House spokesman says the president is happy with the outcome. I don't think he means Obama is "happy" like "happy he won the lottery" though. From the subdued tone coming out of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave these days, it seems more like Obama is "gritting his teeth together 'happy' that these clowns didn't drag this out much longer."

Then there is the FOX News debacle that the White House has gotten tangled in. I wholeheartedly understand their point. I can't stand FOX News either. When I am out somewhere, like the McDonald's I used to frequent for breakfast, and they have FOX News on, I ask for the manager and demand that he turn the channel.

Not that CNN delivers the news the way Walter Cronkite used to - after all, they've got their own in house ingrate, Lou Dobbs, stinking up the airwaves nightly as he sneers into the camera and rants about illegal immigrants. Even so, CNN still does better than the Newsreader Barbies and Brylcream Bobs that FOX seems to swear by.

But the White House is in a pickle on this one, because as soon as some emergency other than swine flu comes along, they will have to abandon their stance to get back to taking care of business. (If you believe in Glen Beck, that "taking care of business" will be Obama instituting martial law so he can hypnotize us all and turn us into socialist communist do gooder Ivy Leaguers who will line up to check out books from the library by William Ayers and equip ourselves to DESTROY AMERICA).

Although it is good to see President Obama, in his remarks about FOX News, calling "a spade a spade" somewhere else besides a speech to the NAACP.

NOTE TO WHITE HOUSE: Let us out here in the general public take care of this dustup with FOX. I enjoy putting restaurant managers on the spot.

Although I did notice tonight, while flipping through the channels to Monday Night Football, that Bill O'Reilly was TAKING CARE WITH HIS WORDS when he spoke of the president. I don't mind you trying to indict Obama if he's screwed up, Bill, but you've got to move on from ACORN and William Ayers. Obama won. The race is over. He will be with you for another three years and three months. Guess what? Keep up this nonsensical conspiracy shtick, Bill, and it'll be SEVEN YEARS and three months.

Speaking of Monday Night Football - can ESPN send Mike Tirico somewhere? Ron Jaworski and John Gruden can call the game by themselves. All Tirico does is tell me statistics that I really don't want to know. Add to all of this the fact that I'm suffering from John Madden withdrawal since he left the National Football League's Sunday Night telecast, and that I am still P.O.'ed Madden had to leave Monday Night Footabll, and I am ready to eject Tirico from the broadcast booth my damn self. As a matter of fact, I'll give him a penalty myself - "unsportsmanlike commentating."

Maybe I need to get Glen Beck on the phone and tell him that Mike Tirico is a "socialist communist Ivy League pianist who only has six degrees of separation from William Ayers". While I'm at it, I might as well bend Beck's ear a little more, and throw in there that "having the World Series in NOVEMBER is a communist act, and unconstitutional, and has the potential to MESS UP THE FOOTBALL SCHEDULE...

..and what could be more UNAMERICAN than that?

I Didn't Vote To Have A Weatherman In The White House

brownmanthinking@gmail.com (Brown Man) — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 13:28:00 PDT

Sometimes, when you are playing both sides against the middle, you can forget where you are. But since Barack Obama is supposed to be one of the smartest presidents we've ever had, I won't be giving him the benefit of the doubt on his "now you see me, now you don't" stance on the public option.

There are so many trial balloons floating over Washington this afternoon, you'd think it was the Thanksgiving parade.

I didn't vote for a weatherman for president.

I'm not interested in which way the wind is blowing.

What I want to hear President Obama, "Mr. Noncommital" himself, tell me is something he can stick to this week and next week and the week after.

There is a point in any negotiation when you have to draw a line in the sand and stand pat. President Obama obviously has not reached that point yet, with his willingness to weaken the public option even more to accommodate Senator Snowe today.

I guess this was all just "negotiating practice" for the next initiative he wants to unveil, because at this point they are just killing time until a vote.

The ugly truth that the White House and Harry Reid and even the media don't want to face up to is how empty the threat of a filibuster has become.

Can you imagine John Boehner pissing in a trashcan at the senate podium? Can you picture Mitch McConnell fighting sleep as he reads Shakespearean sonnets in front of the entire senate?

Harry Reid himself was one of the last legislators to attempt use the filibuster to stop business in the Senate. From the accounts I've read it was a disaster.

In reality, it very likely would be a silent and faceless process, which would be even worse in these times of Youtube, Photoshop, and the blogosphere.

Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Bill O'Reilly don't have to run for office. Senators do.

Maybe the president and the Democrats haven't realized this yet, but as short as the attention span of the American public is, we will always see healthcare reform as a Democratic effort. As an Obama initiative.

The president can stand in the middle of the road all he wants. He can fake left and go right like does on the basketball court, but the public is not going for the head fake.

In basketball parlance, its time for the president to commit. To "take it in the lane" and bang his way to the basket.

The public, the same public who is still broke while the fiddlers serenade the Wall Streeters who are down to their last few millions, has no reason to be excited about a legislative victory, especially if it is an empty one.

Colson Whitehead Reading In Atlanta TONIGHT

brownmanthinking@gmail.com (Brown Man) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 12:40:00 PDT

S. and I are going to see Colson Whitehead tonight at 6:30 pm at a reading on the campus of the Atlanta branch of Savannah College of Art and Design. The last time I saw him here was about five years ago, before the dreads, or maybe they were baby dreads then, at at a reading he did at Emory University.

He opened that one by reading the lyrics from a selection from Public Enemy, one of his favorite all-time rap groups.

I've read all of his books but one, The Colossus Of New York, which was essays, not fiction, so I don't really think I've missed anything. Sag Harbor, his latest effort, was so funny (to me) that people I saw at lunchtime when I was reading it probably thought I was crazy.

Who knows what he'll do tonight.

The good thing about this outing is it will take me away from the TV - more specifically, the evening news. I erupted last night when a reporter talked about the pay cuts at AIG, and how they were likely to lead to the "talent" leaving for more money.

The example she used - why work for ONE MILLION when someone else will pay you FIVE MILLION for the same work - was so ludicrous I thought she was a character in one of Mr. Whitehead's books.

Recycling the same old tired ass anecdotes, when their is NO evidence to support these theories is why the networks are losing out to the internet.

Anyway, I digress. Check Colson Whitehead out if you like to read. I loved The Intuitionist. I hung in there with John Henry Days, and I struggled mightily with Apex Hides The Hurt. Sag Harbor is worth every bit of the hardback cover price. I liked it so much I reviewed it myself.

Tonight, it's all about fiction.

See you political junkies tomorrow.

Wall Street's Laughing Hyena's Hysterical Over Record Profits

brownmanthinking@gmail.com (Brown Man) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 05:14:00 PDT

One of the more annoying things I've been hearing the last few weeks is the phrase "free enterprise", especially as it pertains to the way modern businesses are supposedly being run these days.

President Obama's visit to Wall Street yesterday brought my thoughts into sharp relief. I saw a headline that read "Into The Lion's Den" and immediately recoiled - "Into The Laughing Hyena's Den" might be more like it.

There is nothing like bankers who were insolvent a year ago - bankers whose complicated liabilities that they created themselves would have totally annihilated the value of the assets they had on their books - who are ready today to pop the champagne again and pat each other on the back for "pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps" and piling up record profits.

They have conveniently forgotten that it was the American public (YOU) who provided the bootstraps AND sweetheart terms for their homegrown toxic securities.

Because the Jedi Mind trick your mega banks have been using lately have not only been successful at getting the media to give up the "bailout money = government cheese" theme, now they are repackaging the same damn securities that built the real estate bubble in the first place.

Guess who will end up buying them?

The people who run YOUR 401(k).

You gotta love these Laughing Hyenas on Wall Street, who are always going to be scavengers at heart.

The question that sits at the tip of my tongue every time I see a smarmy faced pundit or my buddy Rush Limbaugh insisting that we protect "free enterprise" and get out of its way so it can work its magic is, are we talking about "don't tell me what to do when I need government money" free enterprise or are we talking about "when my business runs out of money it closes down" free enterprise?

Real free enterprise at the corporate level did exist in this country, but it didn't look anything like what we have now.

The nineteenth century version of the corporate world made the shenanigans of the mobsters on The Sopranos look like child's play.

I own quite a few exhaustive biographies of business titans from the 1800's, including John Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie and Jay Gould. I've been reading Fortune, Forbes and the Wall Street Journal for over twenty years. Our modern day scandals are more creatively executed, but they don't come close to the old days in terms of human brutality and financial chicanery.

The one thing that jumped out at me after reading the fourth or fifth book about our eighteenth century business moguls was the disservice we do to our youth by teaching history and economics separately.

The amount of bribery of government officials that took place was staggering.

The abuse of laborers, and the murder of those who dared to form unions, would rival the kinds of conditions found in migrant worker camps in the 50's and 60's. The outright theft of a corporation's property by its officers was commonplace. The prosecution of such theft was far and few between.

Practically all of the stock market methods and procedures that were originally banned in the 1933 and 1934 Securities Acts were either perfectly legal, or were maneuvers that could be executed in such a manner as to escape the boundaries of existing law. This is the kind of thing we gloss over in the news, as if modern business emerged fully formed into a regulatory atmosphere that was always there.

Jay Gould, the least known titan of the four men I mentioned above, was the Michael Millken of his day, a master of manipulating minority bond holdings into controlling interests in a variety of companies, including Western Union, A&P, the Erie Railroad, and the Great Pacific & Western Railroad.

He was a master at "puffing" the stock price of companies who teetered on the brink of insolvency, selling out at a high price, then shorting the same stock before beating the price back down by controlling the release of inside information that would be damaging to the enterprise.

He owned an interest in a few banks, mostly so he could certify checks when he didn't have ready cash available.

The robber barons, though, with all of their bribery of government officials and sweetheart contracts, etc, were still men who feared the unknown. They operated their businesses at a time when America's government coffers were thin. There was no one to bail them out if they failed. The only thing awaiting a troubled enterprise in those days were the vultures, who would pick a company's carcass clean of its valuables and leave the rest to rot.

What we have now is a prostitution of the ideals of corporate governance. Try to organize a resolution to be voted on by your fellow shareholders in any company you own shares in today and see what happens. Even bankrupt companies who have generated massive shareholder rights groups who have figured out how to use the power of the internet to aggregate their proxies have demonstrated time and time again that in the end, you have no say so in what happens to the pile of money that you and your fellow shareholders have handed over to the companies executives.

Police Chiefs Gone Wild

brownmanthinking@gmail.com (Brown Man) — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 08:45:00 PDT

Chief Wayne Yates

Chief James Preacher

I've been in South Carolina for the last couple of days in my hometown, a small burg that doesn't have any outlet I know of that carries the New York Times. And don't even think about suggesting I go to the nearest Starbucks to get one, because it is forty miles away.

I know I can go to nytimes.com, but I have always been a hard copy newspaper kind of guy, probably because I grew up in a household that took both the local and the state newspapers.

So I've been reading the papers I grew up on this week. The stories are almost the same as they were fifteen years ago when I lived here - small town America crime scenes, new business spotlights, wedding announcements, and civic club events, sprinkled with a few human interest stories and AP News wire reports.

The two stories that tickled me the most this week were the ones about the "police chiefs gone wild" - one police chief was arrested after a bar fight at a bar called "Bubbba's", and another police chief is being sued because he tasered a satellite dish contractor when they got into a dispute over the bill for some work the contractor provided to the police department.

You can't make stuff up this funny.

I wasn't surprised in the least - growing up, all I heard about was how the sherriffs in a lot of South Carolina's smaller counties often worked both sides of the street, upholding the law by day and running their own illegal operations - gambling, strip clubs - unencumbered by any fear of being caught.

There is nothing like going home for a few days to make me realize why I don't have a lot of nostalgia for my home state. I love my hometown, but there are a lot of things about a lot of the rest of the state that I'd just as soon forget.

Oh well.

Off to grandmother's house we go.

Rush Limbaugh Plays The Victim After Rejection From NFL

brownmanthinking@gmail.com (Brown Man) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 03:49:00 PDT

I am back in my hometown again this week, which means that I couldn't help but listen to the Rush Limbaugh Show again yesterday as I drove down the highway from Atlanta to South Carolina. As I was listening to Limbaugh pontificate I remembered a guy I went to high school with named Micheal something or other who had red hair and was arguably the most obnoxious and aggravating person in the entire school.

My classmate was bombastic and ridiculous and took every opportunity he could to "get back" at the teacher if they admonished him for acting like an ass. Now they call it "ADD", but back then, he was just a loud mouthed, ill mannered, short attention spanned bully who was always biting his fingernails or fidgeting or ssomething, as if he was just a bundle of raw nerves.

Maybe he's a talk radio star now like Limbaugh.

Limbaugh wailed and huffed yesterday like Fred Flintstone did when the Water Buffalo Lodge refused to let him in. The irony is, he is probably more like some of the owners (except John Irsay, and maybe the Rooney's) than we want to admit - except they are smart enough not to pollute the airwaves with that old "cracker-assed cracker" race baiting garbage Limbaugh equates with "ballsiness" or some other ridiculous measure he fantasizes is the embodiment of white male manly prerogative.

For a guy like Limbaugh to want to own a piece of a team in a league where at least 70% of the players on every team are black speaks to the power of the profits and the prestige that the NFL generates. I don't have a problem with him owning a piece of a pro team, but I'd be lying if I didn't admit to reveling a lot in the comeuppance he got yesterday from other rich white men.

Or as I call people like them on this blog, "white people with good sense."

Limbaugh is right, though, when he says that it is wrong that rappers own pieces of teams and he can't - for once, he equates himself with someone who is actually at his level of importance to society.

They're out there on stage rolling up "stanky" and talking nonsense, and he's on the radio, crushing up Oxycontin and talking nonsense.

Wanda Sykes: "That's Not What We Do"

brownmanthinking@gmail.com (Brown Man) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 22:53:00 PDT

I guess I should have been watching the political pundits battle it out tonight after the historic vote on healthcare reform that took place in the Senate today. Instead, I watched Wanda Sykes new HBO special I'ma Be Me.

Maybe Wanda should have been on CNN at night instead of the more traditional political pundits. She certainly would have made more sense.

"And people are just nuts - just nuts - you know, scaring old people, talking about death panels.

'Oh, they gon' pull the plug on Grandma.'

Why would they even believe that?

You think we'd just start killing people because they're old?

That's not what we do."

Wanda Sykes
excerpted from I'ma Be Me

An enterprising stand up comedian could build an entire act out of the illogical absurdities that have passed for opposing viewpoints in the healthcare debate.

The usual suspects did what was expected the last few days before the big Senate vote, ratcheting up the volume on the anti-reform rhetoric, but their opposition seemed a little limp, as if they had expended all their energy this summer against the rising tide of public opinion FOR healthcare reform.

Bipartisanship doesn't really matter to the American public, so I don't know why Olympia Snowe's vote really means anything. Because if this reform effort doesn't work the way it was intended, nobody is going to blame the "bipartisan" effort - they are going to blame Barack Obama and the Democrats.

I'd pay money to hear Wanda's definition of "bipartisanship".

Pirate Fest Pulls Brown Man Away From Politics For A Few Days

brownmanthinking@gmail.com (Brown Man) — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 19:22:00 PDT

The Brown Man went to Pirate Fest at Tybee Island last weekend and he is still tired.

No one who attended seemed to be concerned, at least for the weekend, about politics at all. The restaurants weren't full but no one seemed to go hungry. And the beer as always continued to flow unabated.

I've never been much of a traveler, but I look forward to this festival every year. Maybe it's the chance to dress up as someone else for a couple of days. Or maybe it is the lack of barriers between the all of the active participants that gives the whole thing a feeling of joie de vivre. Or possibly, since we go there all the time year round, it's because we've developed a nodding acquaintance with a lot of the locals. Whatever it is, I like it. I'll head back next year.

In the meantime, I guess I'll have to get back in action here on the homefront, since this week promises to deliver plenty of fireworks in Washington surrounding the healthcare debate in the House and the Senate.

See you tomorrow.

AAAAAAAAAAAArrrrrrrggghhh!!

Just had to get that last "aaaarrrrggghh!" out.

Sarah Palin Is Giving Obama Foreign Policy Advice?

brownmanthinking@gmail.com (Brown Man) — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 05:13:00 PDT

Sarah Palin is giving President Obama foreign policy advice from her Facebook account...

...and the news media is eating up every word her ghostwriter writes.

In a nation of three hundred million people, there have got to be more than the three hundred names we see week in and week out who have opinions worth exploring.

In all the articles about policy, you never see the number "165 million dollars a day", which is how much it is estimated the U.S. spends each day we are in Afghanistan, mentioned at all. I guess the actual cost is just an abstraction that most of these commentators believe a cash strapped nation shouldn't be worrying about, but in my book, A BILLION DOLLARS A WEEK for anything means we are spending real money.

We are approaching the Afghanistan conflict as if we are engineering a corporate takeover - add a few troops here, deploy a few weapons there, redefine what a "successful" outcome is, and then call it a day...

...the same way we did in Iraq or the laundry list of other countries bigger than Grenada that we have battled over the years since World War II.

The last time we won a war where we crushed the enemy in body and spirit was World War II. Our leaders had a different mindset back then, namely, one that acknowledged more frankly, although not publicly, our vulnerabilities and weaknesses.

Our nation wasn't filled with "USA! USA!" chanters but with people who all were related to someone serving in the war effort. We were a nation whose fear of the possibility that we could actually lose caused a large majority of us to understand that our way of life was on the line.

We are not willing to send the one hundred thousand or two hundred thousand or three hundred thousand troops it could take to crush the opposition forces in Afghanistan. Our allies aren't willing to pony up any more than a nominal amount of their own forces.

The way we felt for a few months after September 11th was the way we felt for years after Pearl Harbor. It was a fear so great that we locked up Japanese Americans by the thousands.

We are not yet afraid enough of the things that could happen to do those terrible things to another nation that we know will work.

I champion Barack Obama's presidency on this blog week in and week out, not because I believe he is a perfect leader, but because I believe he deserves a chance to succeed or fail like any other president. Most of us have normally forgotten we even have a president by now, nine months after a presidential election, but our parochial and narrow minded press will continue to report practically every breath he takes as long as the public keeps tuning in.

Obama's not seasoned yet, not by a long shot, but no other president in the modern era has been either, whether they acted like it or not, in nine months. Somewhere between the fading of the hoopla after getting elected and the re-emergence of the hoopla to get re-elected, you find out what kind of president you really have.

President Obama is a pretty smart guy, smart enough to know how much of a sticky wicket that "eeny meeny miney mo" warfare in Afghanistan has become.

Our leaders in the 1940's didn't have to deal with fighting only the parts of a country that opposed us in WWII - we were committed to killing everybody we could until our opponents surrendered.

If we had danced around the idea that "war=killing people" in World War II the way we do now, we could have very well lost that war.

We had to kill a million people in Iraq before we could convince ourselves that we could leave in good conscience.

So boil it down to number, Mr. Obama, the way they do in corporate boardrooms - how many Afghans do we have to kill to make this mission successful?

I know you can't say this, Mr. President, but that's pretty much it - how many people are we willing to kill to get what we want, and how much is it going to cost? Or in liberal speak, how rich are we prepared to make our defense contractors?