Archive for the ‘[Pt]-Politics’ Category
Former Texas Rep. Charlie Wilson dies at 76
(Image Source: Associated Press)
By JAMIE STENGLE, Associated Press Writer
DALLAS – Charlie Wilson, the fun-loving Texas congressman whose backroom dealmaking funneled millions of dollars in weapons toAfghanistan, allowing the country’s underdog mujahedeen rebels to beat back the mighty Soviet Red Army, died Wednesday. He was 76.
Wilson died at Memorial Medical Center-Lufkin after having difficulty breathing after attending a meeting in the eastern Texas town where he lived, said hospital spokeswoman Yana Ogletree. Wilson was pronounced dead on arrival, and the preliminary cause of death was cardiopulmonary arrest, she said.
Wilson represented Texas’ 2nd Congressional District in the U.S. House from 1973 to 1996 and was known in Washington as “Good Time Charlie” for his reputation as a hard-drinking womanizer. He once called former congresswoman Pat Schroeder “Babycakes,” and tried to take a beauty queen with him on a government trip to Afghanistan.
Wilson, a Democrat, was considered both a progressive and a defense hawk. While his efforts to arm the mujahedeen in the 1980s were a success — spurring a victory that helped speed the downfall of the Soviet Union — he was unable to keep the money flowing after the Soviets left. Afghanistan plunged into chaos, creating an opening eventually filled by the Taliban, which harbored al-Qaida terrorists.
After the Sept. 11 attacks — carried out by al-Qaida terrorists trained in Afghanistan — the U.S. ended up invading the country it had once helped liberate.
“People like me didn’t fulfill our responsibilities once the war was over,” Wilson said in a September 2001interview with The Associated Press. “We allowed this vacuum to occur in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which enraged a lot of people. That was as much my fault as it was a lot of others.”
His efforts to help the Afghan rebels — as well as his partying ways — were portrayed in the movie and book “Charlie Wilson’s War.” In an interview with The Associated Press after the book was published in 2003, he said he wasn’t worried about details of his wild side being portrayed.
“I would remind you that I was not married at the time. I’m in a different place than I was in at the time and I don’t apologize about that,” Wilson said.
U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said that when he was at the CIA he knew Wilson, whom Gates said “was working tirelessly on behalf of the Afghan resistance fighting the Soviets.”
“As the world now knows, his efforts and exploits helped repel an invader, liberate a people, and bring the Cold War to a close. After the Soviets left, Charlie kept fighting for the Afghan people and warned against abandoning that traumatized country to its fate — a warning we should have heeded then, and should remember today,” Gates said in a written statement.
Charles Nesbitt Wilson was born June 1, 1933, in Trinity. He attended Sam Houston State University in Huntsville before earning his bachelor’s degree from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1956.
Wilson served as a Naval lieutenant between 1956-60, then entered politics by volunteering for John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign. He served in the Texas House and then in the Texas Senate before being elected to the U.S. House in 1972.
“Charlie was perfect as a congressman, perfect as a state representative, perfect as a state senator. He was a perfect reflection of the people he represented. If there was anything wrong with Charlie, I never did know what it was,” said Charles Schnabel Jr., who served for seven years as Wilson’s chief of staff in Washington and worked with Wilson when he served in the Texas Senate.
As a member of the House Appropriations Committee, Wilson helped secure money for weapons and worked with then-CIA agents Gust L. Avrakotos and Mike Vickers to get them to the mujahedeen. The Soviets spent a decade battling the rebels before pulling the Red Army from Afghanistan in 1989. Two years later, its economy in ruins, the Soviet Union fell apart.
Vickers, now assistant secretary of defense for special operations, said Wednesday that Wilson was a “great American patriot who played a pivotal role in a world-changing event — the defeat of the Red Army in Afghanistan, which led to the collapse of communism and the Soviet empire.”
Longtime friend Buddy Temple, who was with Wilson when he collapsed Wednesday, said that despite Wilson’s reputation as a playboy, he was serious about representing east Texas, including helping to create the Big Thicket National Preserve — almost 100,000 acres of swamps, bogs and forests.
“Charlie was a giant. We have lost a giant. There won’t be another like him,” Temple said at a hospital news conference announcing Wilson’s death.
Wilson left politics in 1996, after he no longer found it any fun. He lobbied for a number of years before returning to Texas. In 2007, he had a heart transplant after being diagnosed with cardiomyopathy, a disease that causes an enlarged and weakened heart.
Schnabel said he had just been with Wilson a few weeks ago for the dedication of the Charlie Wilson chair for Pakistan studies at the University of Texas, Austin, a $1 million endowment. He said Wilson had been doing “very good” and said his former boss described himself as “a poster boy” for heart transplants.
Ogletree said Wilson is survived by his wife, Barbara, whom he married in 1999, and a sister.
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Associated Press writers Lolita C. Baldor and Suzanne Gamboa in Washington contributed to this report.
Pilfered Magazine – December 2009 Issue – Guest Editor: Yosi Sergant
To bow or not to bow…
Image Source ( AFP.com)
It seems that many American conservatives are upset with President Obama bowing to the Japanese Emperor, Akihito, during Obama’s Asian tour. I wonder what has people so upset about this gesture of respect. Is it due to Akihito’s pedigree? Will we always suffer from the sins of our father?
Some of the pundits say that Obama, being the current leader and symbol of the US, should always be firm, strong, and never show any kind of weakness on the world stage. The commentators find the President’s actions to be grossly inappropriate, but my question is why? Can we not show respect and still present an air of confidence and strength?
Check out the article and share what you think. I’d like to hear both sides.
Peace.
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WASHINGTON (AFP) – News photos of President Barack Obama bowing to Japan’s emperor have incensed critics here, who said the US leader should stand tall when representing America overseas.
Obama on Monday was in China, having wrapped up the Japan leg of his Asia trip two days earlier. But Washington’s punditocracy was still weighing whether or not the US president had disgraced his country two days earlier by having taken a deep bow at the waist while meeting Japan’s Emperor Akihito.
Political talk shows have played and replayed the moment from the second day of Obama’s week-long Asia tour, which set the blogosphere on fire and chat show tongues wagging.
“I don’t know why President Obama thought that was appropriate. Maybe he thought it would play well in Japan. But it’s not appropriate for an American president to bow to a foreign one,” said conservative pundit William Kristol speaking on the Fox News Sunday program, adding that the gesture bespoke a United States that has become weak and overly-deferential under Obama.
Another conservative voice, Bill Bennett, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” program: “It’s ugly. I don’t want to see it.”
“We don’t defer to emperors. We don’t defer to kings or emperors. The president of the United States — this coupled with so many apologies from the United States — is just another thing,” said Bennett.
Some conservative critics juxtaposed the image of Obama with one of former US vice president Dick Cheney, who greeted the emperor in 2007 with a firm handshake but no bow.
“I’ll bet if you look at pictures of world leaders over 20 years meeting the emperor in Japan, they don’t bow,” Kristol said.
Some said the gesture was particularly grating coming after Obama’s bow to Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah at a G20 meeting in April.
The US president’s Asia trip comes just over a year after he won election to the White House, and is designed to shore up US power in a region increasingly dominated by rising giant China.
But back home, Obama’s bow in Japan seems to have grabbed much of the attention being paid to the trip.
The gesture appears to have touched a particularly raw nerve among Obama critics who said the president has hastened America’s decline as a world superpower by being too apologetic and too deferential in his dealings with other world leaders.
While most of the commentary about the bow in Japan was decidedly negative, some political observers, like longtime Democratic activist Donna Brazile, came to the president’s defense.
“I think it’s a gesture of kindness,” she told CNN, adding that the bow appeared intended to show “goodwill between two nations that respect each other.”
Meanwhile, an unnamed, senior Obama administration official told the Politico.com news site that the president had simply been observing protocol.
“I think that those who try to politicize those things are just way, way, way off base,” the official told Politico.
“I don’t think anybody who was in Japan — who saw his speech and the reaction to it, certainly those who witnessed his bilateral meetings there — would say anything other than that he enhanced both the position and the status of the US, relative to Japan,” Politico wrote.
“It was a good, positive visit at an important time, because there’s a lot going on in Japan.”
My name is Julio de la Vego y Rodriguez, but you can call me Joe.
TAOS, N.M. – Larry Whitten marched into this northern New Mexico town in late July on a mission: resurrect a failing hotel.
The tough-talking former Marine immediately laid down some new rules. Among them, he forbade the Hispanic workers at the run-down, Southwestern adobe-style hotel from speaking Spanish in his presence (he thought they’d be talking about him), and ordered some to Anglicize their names.
No more Martin (Mahr-TEEN). It was plain-old Martin. No more Marcos. Now it would be Mark.
Whitten’s management style had worked for him as he’s turned around other distressed hotels he bought in recent years across the country.
The 63-year-old Texan, however, wasn’t prepared for what followed.
His rules and his firing of several Hispanic employees angered his employees and many in this liberal enclave of 5,000 residents at the base of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, where the most alternative of lifestyles can find a home and where Spanish language, culture and traditions have a long and revered history.
“I came into this landmine of Anglos versus Spanish versus Mexicans versus Indians versus everybody up here. I’m just doing what I’ve always done,” he says.
Former workers, their relatives and some town residents picketed across the street from the hotel.
“I do feel he’s a racist, but he’s a racist out of ignorance. He doesn’t know that what he’s doing is wrong,” says protester Juanito Burns Jr., who identified himself as prime minister of an activist group called Los Brown Berets de Nuevo Mexico.
The Virginia-born Whitten had spent 40 years in the hotel business, turning around more than 20 hotels in Texas, Oklahoma, Florida and South Carolina, before moving with his wife to Taos from Abilene, Texas. He had visited Taos before, and liked its beauty. When Whitten saw that the Paragon Inn was up for sale, he jumped at it.
The hotel sits along narrow, two-lane Paseo del Pueblo, where souped-up lowriders radiate a just-waxed gleam in the soft sunshine as they cruise past centuries-old adobe buildings. One recent afternoon, a woman slowly rode her fat-tire bicycle along a cracked sidewalk, oversized purple butterfly wings on her back and a breeze blowing her long, blonde dreadlocks.
The community includes Taos Pueblo, an American Indian dwelling inhabited for over 1,000 years, and an adobe Catholic church made famous in a Georgia O’Keeffe painting.
After he arrived, Whitten met with the employees. He says he immediately noticed that they were hostile to his management style and worried they might start talking about him in Spanish.
“Because of that, I asked the people in my presence to speak only English because I do not understand Spanish,” Whitten says. “I’ve been working 24 years in Texas and we have a lot of Spanish people there. I’ve never had to ask anyone to speak only English in front of me because I’ve never had a reason to.”
Some employees were fired, Whitten says, because they were hostile and insubordinate. He says they called him “a white (N-word).”
Fired hotel manager Kathy Archuleta says the workers initially tried to adjust to his style. “We had already gone through four or five owners before him, so we knew what to expect,” Archuleta says. “I told (the workers) we needed to give him a chance.”
Then Whitten told some employees he was changing their Spanish first names. Whitten says it’s a routine practice at his hotels to change first names of employees who work the front desk phones or deal directly with guests if their names are difficult to understand or pronounce.
“It has nothing to do with racism. I’m not doing it for any reason other than for the satisfaction of my guests, because people calling from all over America don’t know the Spanish accents or the Spanish culture or Spanish anything,” Whitten says.
Martin Gutierrez, another fired employee, says he felt disrespected when he was told to use the unaccented Martin as his name. He says he told Whitten that Spanish was spoken in New Mexico before English. “He told me he didn’t care what I thought because this was his business,” Gutierrez says.
“I don’t have to change my name and language or heritage,” he says. “I’m professional the way I am.”
After the firings, the New Mexico chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens, a national civil rights group, sent Whitten a letter, raising concerns about treatment of Hispanic workers. Whitten says he sent them a letter and posted messages on the hotel marquee, alleging that the group referred to him with a racial slur. LULAC denied the charge.
The messages and comments he made in interviews with local media, including referring to townsfolk as “mountain people” and “potheads who escaped society,” further enflamed tensions.
Taos Mayor Darren Cordova says Whitten wasn’t doing anything illegal. But he says Whitten failed to better familiarize himself with the town and its culture before deciding to buy the hotel for $2 million. “Taos is so unique that you would not do anything in Taos that you would do elsewhere,” he says.
Whitten grew subdued as a two-hour interview with The Associated Press progressed. He said he was sorry for the misunderstanding and insisted he has never been against any culture.
“What kind of fool or idiot or poor businessman would I be to orchestrate this whole crazy thing that’s costed me a lot of time, money and aggravation?” Whitten said.
Whitten should have dealt with the situation differently, especially in a majority Hispanic town, said 71-year-old Taos artist Ken O’Neil, while sipping his afternoon coffee on the town’s historic plaza.
“To make demands like he did just seems over the top,” he says. “Nobody won here. It’s not always about winning. Sometimes, it’s about what you learn.”
My Son Works?!?!
(Image Source: Associated Press)
This is a great story of an African becoming king. Enjoy!
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KASESE, Uganda – For years, Charles Wesley Mumbere worked as a nurse’s aide in Maryland and Pennsylvania, caring for the elderly and sick. No one there suspected that he had inherited a royal title in his African homeland when he was just 13.
On Monday, after years of political upheaval and financial struggle, Mumbere, 56, was finally crowned king of his people to the sound of drumbeats and thousands of cheering supporters wearing cloth printed with his portraits.
At a public rally later in the day, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni officially recognized the 300,000-strong Rwenzururu Kingdom. Museveni restored the traditional kingdoms his predecessor banned in 1967, but has been adamant that kings restrict themselves to cultural duties and keep out of politics.
“It is a great moment to know that finally the central government has understood the demands of the Bakonzo people who have been seeking very hard for recognition of their identity,” Mumbere told The Associated Press in the whitewashed single-story building that serves as a palace.
The Rwenzururu parliament sits nearby, in a much larger structure made of reeds. It was here the traditional private rituals were held Sunday night and Monday morning to crown Mumbere king.
Thousands walked several miles (kilometers) to see Mumbere, dressed in flowing green robes and a colorful hat, be officially recognized.
Old men clutching canes shuffled up the hill beside women in colorful Ugandan dresses called “gomesi.” Among them was Masereka Tadai, 43, proudly overseeing practice for a march that retired scouts and girl guides would perform before the king.
“Everyone is very happy because the president has accepted to come here and officially recognize the Rwenzururu Kingdom,” Tadai said over a nearby drumbeat.
The new King of Uganda‘s Mountains of the Moon has undergone many transformations — from teenage leader of a rebel force to impoverished student to a nursing home assistant working two jobs in the U.S., where he lived for nearly 25 years.
Mumbere’s royal roots only became public in Pennsylvania this July, when he granted an interview to The Patriot-News of Harrisburg as he was preparing to return to Uganda.
He inherited the title when his father, Isaya Mukirania Kibanzanga, died while leading a secessionist group in the Rwenzori Mountains, otherwise known as the Mountains of the Moon. The rebels were protesting the oppression of their Bakonzo ethnic group by their then-rulers, the Toro Kingdom.
The Bakonzo demanded to be recognized as a separate entity and named Kibanzanga, a former primary school teacher, as their king in 1963.
“It was very difficult growing up in the bush,” remembered Mumbere, who was 9 years old when his father took the family into the mountains. Although he received military training, Mumbere did not fight.
“Our country has been independent (from the British) for 40-something years but in Rwenzururu you may not find running water, there are no hospitals,” Mumbere said.
Shortly after Kibanzanga died, his son led the fighters down from the mountains to hand in their weapons. Mumbere went to the United States in 1984 on a Uganda government scholarship, attending a business school until Uganda’s leadership changed and the stipend was stopped. He gained political asylum in 1987, trained as a nurse’s aide and took a job in a suburban Washington nursing home to pay his bills, said The Patriot-News of Harrisburg in a July 2009 story.
In 1999, he moved to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania’s capital, where he worked for at least two health care facilities.
He was “very loyal, a very hard worker, a very private person,” said Johnna Marx, executive director of the Golden Living Center-Blue Ridge Mountain on the outskirts of Harrisburg.
Mumbere said he chose to train as a nurse’s aide because the work, “was more reliable. Other jobs you can be laid off easily.”
Living in the U.S., however, was “a very difficult experience,” he said. “Sometimes you have two jobs. You go to college in the morning, between 8 a.m. to 12 p.m. Then you go prepare to go to work at 3 p.m. and then return at 11 p.m.”
He is now a green card holder, and his son and daughter live in Harrisburg. But he never forgot the people he left behind. When the Ugandan government decided to reinstate the traditional kingdoms, Mumbere lobbied the Rwenzururu Kingdom to be among them.
After 10 years of negotiation, President Museveni announced in August the government would recognize the Rwenzururu Kingdom as Uganda’s seventh kingdom. Government recognition does not grant any executive power but allows the monarchs to determine cultural and social issues affecting their people.
Untitled…
Following the post about Bill de Blasio’s interracial family, this shit comes up.
“I’m not a racist. I just don’t believe in mixing the races that way,” Bardwell told the Associated Press on Thursday. “I have piles and piles of black friends. They come to my home, I marry them, they use my bathroom. I treat them just like everyone else.”
What do you think?
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By MARY FOSTER, Associated Press Writer
NEW ORLEANS – A white Louisiana justice of the peace said he refused to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple out of concern for any children the couple might have.
Keith Bardwell, justice of the peace in Tangipahoa Parish, says it is his experience that most interracial marriages do not last long.
“I’m not a racist. I just don’t believe in mixing the races that way,” Bardwell told the Associated Press on Thursday. “I have piles and piles of black friends. They come to my home, I marry them, they use my bathroom. I treat them just like everyone else.”
Bardwell said he asks everyone who calls about marriage if they are a mixed race couple. If they are, he does not marry them, he said.
Bardwell said he has discussed the topic with blacks and whites, along with witnessing some interracial marriages. He came to the conclusion that most of black society does not readily accept offspring of such relationships, and neither does white society, he said.
“There is a problem with both groups accepting a child from such a marriage,” Bardwell said. “I think those children suffer and I won’t help put them through it.”
If he did an interracial marriage for one couple, he must do the same for all, he said.
“I try to treat everyone equally,” he said.
Bardwell estimates that he has refused to marry about four couples during his career, all in the past 2 1/2 years.
Beth Humphrey, 30, and 32-year-old Terence McKay, both of Hammond, say they will consult the U.S. Justice Department about filing a discrimination complaint.
Humphrey, an account manager for a marketing firm, said she and McKay, a welder, just returned to Louisiana. She is white and he is black. She plans to enroll in the University of New Orleans to pursue a masters degree in minority politics.
“That was one thing that made this so unbelievable,” she said. “It’s not something you expect in this day and age.”
Humphrey said she called Bardwell on Oct. 6 to inquire about getting a marriage license signed. She says Bardwell’s wife told her that Bardwell will not sign marriage licenses for interracial couples. Bardwell suggested the couple go to another justice of the peace in the parish who agreed to marry them.
“We are looking forward to having children,” Humphrey said. “And all our friends and co-workers have been very supportive. Except for this, we’re typical happy newlyweds.”
“It is really astonishing and disappointing to see this come up in 2009,” said American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana attorney Katie Schwartzmann. She said the Supreme Court ruled in 1967 “that the government cannot tell people who they can and cannot marry.”
The ACLU sent a letter to the Louisiana Judiciary Committee, which oversees the state justices of the peace, asking them to investigate Bardwell and recommending “the most severe sanctions available, because such blatant bigotry poses a substantial threat of serious harm to the administration of justice.”
“He knew he was breaking the law, but continued to do it,” Schwartzmann said.
According to the clerk of court‘s office, application for a marriage license must be made three days before the ceremony because there is a 72-hour waiting period. The applicants are asked if they have previously been married. If so, they must show how the marriage ended, such as divorce.
Other than that, all they need is a birth certificate and Social Security card.
The license fee is $35, and the license must be signed by a Louisiana minister, justice of the peace or judge. The original is returned to the clerk’s office.
“I’ve been a justice of the peace for 34 years and I don’t think I’ve mistreated anybody,” Bardwell said. “I’ve made some mistakes, but you have too. I didn’t tell this couple they couldn’t get married. I just told them I wouldn’t do it.”
Jungle Fever
(Source Image: Bill De Blasio.com)
In the article, it mentions that the US is in a new racial environment. It’s true that middle-aged, white politicians need to find a way to connect with other ethic groups to gain their support. de Blasio is doing so by sharing his family with the public.
Now I don’t think de Blasio purposely married this Ebony queen for political reasons. At the same time, I’m not fully convinced that showing he’s married to a black woman and has mixed race children will serve him well politically. But who know? Didn’t Black folks vote for Obama based on his skin color?
Check out the article and let us know what you think.
Peace.
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There’s nothing more traditional in American politics than the wholesome family portrait: a beaming candidate, beaming spouse, reluctantly beaming teenagers.
But when Bill de Blasio, a candidate for public office in New York City this fall, put his family in his campaign mailings and TV ads, there was nothing routine about it. De Blasio’s wife of 15 years, Chirlane McCray, is black, his children are of mixed race and, even in one of America’s most liberal cities, no one could remember anything like it.
De Blasio, 48, won the crucial Democratic primary in a runoff Sept. 29 and is in line to be the city’s next public advocate, a sort of high-profile ombudsman’s job that’s second in the line of succession to the mayor. The city councilman from liberal Park Slope, Brooklyn, had other things going for him — institutional support, newspaper endorsements — but in the view of his campaign, and of many of the city’s political observers, his interracial relationship was an almost unmitigated positive in a hotly contested election.
With Barack Obama having rewritten the history of race relations in this country, de Blasio may be demolishing one of its last taboos, “For so long in American history, interracial couples went out of their way to keep their relationships out of the public eye that it’s remarkable to see them used in a campaign like this,” said Peggy Pascoe, a historian of interracial marriage at the University of Oregon, who referred to the campaign as “a post-Obama phenomenon.”
That’s a perception McCray said she shared. Obama, she said, “opened a door” and “made it easier for us to go there.”
While de Blasio’s success in New York reflects the increased acceptance of mixed marriages, recent history suggests that the new tolerance may still be dependent on geography and race. A sharp counterpoint was the 2006 Tennessee Senate race which then-Rep. Harold Ford, an African-American, lost narrowly to Republican Bob Corker after the final days of the campaign were consumed by a Republican National Committee ad linking Ford to a scantily clad young blond woman. Ford’s allies charged it was a thinly veiled attempt to tap into old Southern fears about black men and white women.
And it seems to be a current that still remains just below the surface in Tennessee politics: Ford’s subsequent marriage to a white woman was widely viewed as a major barrier to another run.
While the Supreme Court legalized interracial marriage in 1967, attitudes were relatively slow to change in much of the country. When Dean Rusk, who was secretary of state at the time, learned that his daughter planned to marry a black man that same year, he offered his resignation, which President Lyndon B. Johnson declined. Former Massachusetts Sen. Ed Brooke, an African-American, was married to an Italian woman he’d met as a soldier in World War II, something he later said was sometimes used against him even in that liberal state. And Obama himself faced challenges to his racial authenticity as the child of a mixed marriage.
Gallup surveys indicate that only 48 percent of Americans approved of marriage between blacks and whites as recently as 1994, a number that had risen to 77 percent by 2007.
Other barriers fell long ago: Phil Gramm, for example, a prominent conservative elected to both the House and Senate from Texas, is married to woman of Korean heritage who was born in Hawaii. This year, in deeply conservative South Carolina, state Sen. Nikki Haley, who is of Indian descent, has put her husband, who is white, and their children front and center in her campaign for governor.
“It’s a total nonissue,” said her spokesman, Tim Pearson.
The politics of black and white, though, have always been more sensitive. But de Blasio’s campaign, like Obama’s, reflects a New York political environment in which the politics of race are changing fast.
“It’s the right city — particularly if you’re the white man running for a citywide office — to show that you can be connected to and understand the issues of people of color in the city as a public advocate,” said Maya Wiley, the director of the Center for Social Inclusion in New York.
For de Blasio, his family seemed to serve two political purposes: establishing his credibility with African-American voters, and projecting the image for all voters of a candidate suited to the Obama era.
“It’s not post-racial, and it’s not nonracial — but it’s a different racial environment,” said Doug Muzzio, a professor of public affairs at Baruch College in Manhattan. The image, he said “is simply more modern, it’s more American, and it’s sort of an apotheosis of New York.”
De Blasio said in an interview that he had little choice about projecting his identity. “This is literally who I am, and these are the most important people in my life, and my life revolves around them. My wife is my partner in everything,” he said.
McCray narrates de Blasio’s first ad, concluding with an arm around him, “Bill’s a great husband and father, and he’ll be a great public advocate. I should know — this big guy’s my husband.” His second television ad, narrated by their 12-year-old son, Dante, closed with an image of de Blasio and his family to underscore a message of inclusion: “I’ll stand up for all New Yorkers,” the candidate intones.
His wife’s prominence wasn’t all a matter of course — a poll done early on for the campaign specifically included a question on interracial marriage. But de Blasio said he always hoped his candidacy could have a larger impact.
“I thought if I could do this the right way and show a multiracial family in a very positive light that that was good for the public discourse and also for candidates,” de Blasio said. “Every time a candidate who’s different ventures out and succeeds, it opens up a lot more space.”
De Blasio and McCray met when a more traditional racial politics was at its height in New York. Then- Mayor David Dinkins’s fragile coalition-building had brought together black and Hispanic voters and enough liberal whites to win a narrow majority, but that coalition ultimately fractured when he ran for reelection against Rudy Giuliani in a contest dominated by violence between blacks and Jews.
The Dinkins movement “wasn’t sustainable, because we didn’t reach deeply enough and ended up with an incomplete coalition,” said de Blasio, who, like his wife, worked for Dinkins. “That was a foundational experience to me — that the only way you make real change in society is to create a full coalition and sustain it.”
His efforts to make his family a kind of symbolic coalition drew some resistance. A black nationalist city councilman, Charles Barron, called his mailing “disgraceful” and “an insult to the black community.”
Rival campaigns, meanwhile, were unsure of what to make of it. A senior aide to one rival said they tested de Blasio’s mailings in a focus group and left hoping that voters would find the appeal “crass.” On the campaign trail, though, the reception was overwhelmingly positive, McCray said in an interview. “People loved the literature. Some people have it hanging in their living rooms,” she said.
De Blasio’s primary victory hardly marked the end of racial politics in New York, long split by tribes and their alliances, if shifting ones. The same day, a Dinkins-style minority coalition carried a Chinese-American, John Liu, to victory in a campaign marked by appeals to racial and ethnic solidarity —such as those from one black Brooklyn council woman, who said: “We stand with this minority because we, as members of a minority, recognize that when we stand together, we represent a majority.”
De Blasio, who is expected to win handily against a token opponent in next month’s general election, declined to offer a simple lesson from his win.
“We’re not in post-racial politics, but we’re in a politics of racial possibility,” de Blasio said. “Our obligation is to keep pushing it, … to keep trying all the permutations of it.”
Correction: Chirlane McCray’s name was spelled incorrectly in an earlier version of this story.
Barack Obama Awarded Nobel Peace Prize – WSJ.com
(Image Source: The New York Times)
Congrats to President Obama for being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Let us know what you think about this surprise win for the President.
Could the Windy City Be Next To Host the Olympics?
(Image Source: Reuters)
Looks like Chicago may have a chance at getting the bid. Tomorrow, International Olympic Committee makes it’s decision on the host city for the 2016 Olympic games. With President Obama being a Chi-town native, I wonder what effect it will have on their decision.
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When Barack Obama arrives in Copenhagen on Friday, he might be forgiven if he mistakes the International Olympic Committee (IOC) meeting for just another social call in his old Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago. A number of the President’s closest friends, biggest fundraisers and longtime political supporters will be making the trip as well.
Even before he committed to become the first U.S. President to attend such an event, the Chicago Olympic effort was already being substantially orchestrated by the group of people who are most responsible for supporting Obama’s rise to the White House. And while the White House denies that the substantial overlap between Obama’s personal and political network and the Chicago 2016 organizing committee played any role in his abrupt decision to reverse himself and attend the Olympic meeting in Denmark, the potential conflicts of interest have raised eyebrows.
Two of the 13-member board of directors for the Chicago 2016 committee who plan to attend the Copenhagen meeting, John W. Rogers Jr. and Marty Nesbitt, are close Obama friends, having worked for his presidential campaign as a member of the campaign’s national finance committee and campaign treasurer, respectively. Several other friends and important campaign advisers, including investment banker James Reynolds Jr. and Hyatt hotel heir Penny Pritzker, are expected to attend the Copenhagen meeting as well. Valerie Jarrett, a senior Obama adviser and close family friend, quit the Chicago 2016 board when she formally joined the White House, but she has promised “unprecedented” government support for the Games.
“To say Barack and Michelle and others like Rahm [Emmanuel] aren’t more interested in Chicago than Cincinnati just isn’t credible,” says Allen Sanderson, a sports economist at the University of Chicago. “It’s just like saying that Obama wouldn’t be more interested in his own daughters than two kids picked at random at the Sidwell Friends School.”
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs went to great pains on Monday to assert that Obama saw the trip to Copenhagen as an official duty, not a personal one. “If it had been Los Angeles, I think the notion that the President would have done less because it was a different U.S. city just doesn’t hold a lot of water,” Gibbs said. He later added that none of Obama’s friends would be flying to Copenhagen aboard Air Force One, though at least one might return on the official presidential jet.
Though Gibbs spoke of the economic impact of the Games as a boon for the entire nation, outside analysts expect most of the economic benefits to be focused in Chicago and the surrounding area, where many of Obama’s biggest boosters are heavily invested in the real estate and tourism industry. Estimates for the economic stimulus of the Games vary widely, from $4.4 billion in an independent study by Anderson Economic Group to $22.5 billion, according to a number circulated by the Chicago 2016 committee. Yet if the cost of the Games exceeds expectations, as happens with most Olympics, local taxpayers may find themselves saddled with much of the expense.
By deciding to travel to Copenhagen, Obama has opened himself to two political dangers. Much of the focus thus far has been on the diplomatic peril: It could come as a harsh setback for the world’s most influential leader to find himself rebuffed by a 2016 Olympic award to Rio de Janeiro or Tokyo. But even if Obama is successful, he faces a long-term danger of being associated with any potential mismanagement, overspending or outright corruption that occurs over the next seven years in the run-up to the Games.
On Monday, Gibbs said that Obama is confident that the city of Chicago, which has been plagued by what prosecutors have described as a “pay to play” culture, can responsibly oversee the multibillion-dollar building project. “Not only is he [confident], but [so] is the U.S. Olympic Committee that picked Chicago over [other] cities,” Gibbs said.
Under the plan put forward by the Chicago 2016 committee, as described in a report by L.E.K. Consulting, the city council would play a major role in making sure the billions of dollars for new Olympic facilities are spent appropriately. This may be an ambitious goal; since 1971, 30 members of the Chicago city council have been sent to jail, largely as a result of corruption investigations. In a sign of the incestuous nature of Chicago politics, L.E.K – which concluded that taxpayers would be mostly protected under the Olympic plan – disclosed in its report that it is seeking a major city contract for concessions at O’Hare International Airport. (Any potential conflict was dismissed as irrelevant by the Civic Federation, which requested the report.) “Historically, the city council hasn’t had a great record of transparency,” says Valerie Leonard, a community activist in Chicago’s North Lawndale neighborhood, which would host cycling events if Chicago wins the bid. “I don’t have confidence that’s going to change.”
The larger Chicago 2016 advisory committee – which has hundreds of members, including celebrities like Michael Jordan – is also populated with a number of close friends and major supporters of Obama’s presidential campaign. The personal friends include Eric Whitaker, who works at the University of Chicago Hospitals, Michelle Obama‘s former employer, and who has been a frequent visitor at the White House. The group also includes several members of two of Chicago’s wealthiest and most supportive families, the Pritzkers and the Crowns, heirs to the General Dynamics company. Both families were early supporters of Obama’s political career.
The city council and the bid committee have thus far rebuffed efforts to require the Olympic committee’s work to be subject to freedom of information requests, according to the University of Chicago’s Sanderson. Nor has there been any action on Sanderson’s proposal to ban members of the advisory committee from seeking Olympic contracts. One bid-committee member, Michael Scott, has served as a consultant for one of the developers that is vying to build the $1.2 billion Olympic Village. Scott has also consulted on a condominium project near the proposed location of the village, though he has denied to the Chicago Tribune any conflict of interest or financial gain.
But as the President prepares to depart for Denmark, his advisers say he does not share those concerns. Obama is scheduled to leave for Denmark late Thursday, make his case in private and public meetings with IOC members on Friday, and then board his plane to return to Washington just hours before voting on the host city begins.
- With reporting by Sean Gregory / Chicago
(Source: Time)
Pitching A Tent For Gadhafi
(Image Source: Cleaveland.com)
Imagine for a moment that the guy above came to your house and pitched a big ass tent in your backyard. Would you invite him inside for pancakes, too?
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NEW YORK (CNN) — The town of Bedford, New York, is not happy with a tent set up as part of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi’s visit to the United States for the United Nations General Assembly, a town attorney said Tuesday.
The tent is on property that Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi is renting in New York, WABC reported.
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“I discussed this matter with town officials, and the town building inspector believes that this would constitute a violation of several town zoning and land use laws,” Bedford town attorney Joel Sachs said. “I directed the town building inspector to immediately go to the property and issue a stop work order, which would the individuals to cease erecting the tent.”
Sachs said if he had to he would take the issue to a higher court to get the tent taken down.
New York state Sen. Vincent Liebell confirmed to CNN affiliate WABC that Gadhafi had rented the property.
“He’s not going to have many fans in Bedford or Westchester County, certainly not me,” the senator said. “There’s not going to be any welcome mat for him in Bedford.”
The property is owned by the Trump Organization, which said in a statement: “We have business partners and associates all over the world. The property was leased on a short-term basis to Middle Eastern partners, who may or may not have a relationship to Mr. Gadhafi. We are looking into the matter.”
County Executive Andy Spano said earlier Tuesday he had heard unconfirmed reports that Gadhafi may be staying there.
“There is no legal way to prevent this, as he is a head of state, despite the fact that he has a long history as a terrorist,” Spano said in a statement. “However, from my point of view, he is not welcome in Westchester.”
State Department officials said there are no limitations on Gadhafi’s visa that would prevent him from traveling to the area. They said their understanding was that Gadhafi was not staying at the tent, but was visiting and having meetings there. He is staying in New York, the officials said. The U.N. General Assembly begins Wednesday.
Under the Foreign Mission Act, the United States does have the right to restrict travel by diplomats to within a certain distance of U.N. headquarters, but the officials said Westchester County is within that radius.
Gadhafi travels with a trademark Bedouin tent.
Last month, Gadhafi stirred up anger when he permitted a large welcome for Abdelbeset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, the Libyan convicted of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, which exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1988. Al Megrahi was released by Scottish authorities on compassionate medical grounds, and the celebration of his homecoming infuriated some families of the Pan Am 103 victims.
CNN’s Ekin Middleton, Elise Labott and Jen Haley contributed to this report.
(Article Source : CNN.com)
