Entries for April 2008

Sen. Barack Obama's response to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's incendiary appearance on Monday at the National Press Club is not just a day late and a dollar short: It's a month and a half late and a few million dollars short.

Wright's self-promoting and racially divisive remarks have set back a half-century of progress on race relations in the United States. Obama's long-delayed denunciation of his former minister seems to have come too late to save the senator's political self-immolation.

The less things change, the more they stay the same. Earlier this month in this space, I wrote about a March "eventing" competition in Florida at a course called Red Hills. At that event, two horses died and one high-level event rider was critically injured because of the artificial difficulty of the course the horses were forced to complete.

Eventing, or cross-country equestrian trials, tests horse-and-rider duos in stadium jumping, dressage, and a so-called cross-country course of fences outside rings or stadiums.

This week, the North Carolina Republican Party posted a controversial ad on its website that linked the state's two Democratic gubernatorial candidates with Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama. Both North Carolina Democrats have endorsed Obama, but the ad extended their connections to Obama's controversial former pastor, Jeremiah Wright.

Sen. John McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee, has asked the North Carolina Republican Party not to run the ad, but it has thus far refused. Of course, they didn't need to pay to air it: The ad aired almost nonstop nationwide on the cable news networks late in the week. It was viewed online by almost 100,000 people as of late Thursday.

If you haven't viewed the "attack" ad that is generating so much anger against Sen. Hillary Clinton, at least in the ivory tower offices of the New York Times and among many of Sen. Barack Obama's supporters, you owe it to yourself to watch it.

If you're an Obama supporter, you'll most likely view it as an attack ad or, as an Obama supporter told me, "a subtle attack ad." If you're a Clinton supporter, you won't. In the wake of Clinton's Pennsylvania victory, voters' reactions to the ad raise questions not only about this race but about the future of the Democratic Party. Can the party hold together a crucial coalition of working-class, white "Reagan Democrats" and African-Americans? Democrats need both segments to win back the White House.

Kitchen-table talk here in the United States is rife with complaints about rising oil prices and their impact on everything from foodstuffs to commuting costs. But the crisis of rising fuel prices pales in comparison to an even newer worry. Skyrocketing global prices for rice and grain crops, especially in developing nations that depend on them to feed their populaces, stand to dwarf our fuel problems.

Today's British Guardian newspaper reports:

The UN secretary general issued a gloomy warning yesterday that the burgeoning global food crisis, in which rapidly rising prices have triggered riots and threatened hunger in dozens of countries, could have grave implications for international security, economic growth and social progress."

This is one of those "video moments" on which I cannot take a position but also cannot let pass unnoticed. Dear reader, please go to the two following websites and decide for yourself. Is Sen. Barack Obama using his middle finger, while talking about Sen. Hillary Clinton, on purpose— or was it an accident?

The Los Angeles Times first ran a blog entry about Obama's North Carolina appearance last night. The video was posted on YouTube and linked to by a Times blogger. The initial responses from readers were quite negative. Here's the link to the blog entry.

Every time government figures on unemployment, inflation and job creation are released, the phrase "economics disfigured," instead of "economic figures," pops into my head. Government data bear so little resemblance to reality, one wonders where they come from. An article in the May issue of Harper's magazine (harpers.org) sheds light on why these figures seem so out of whack.

Author and former Nixon appointee Kevin Phillips compiles a long list of government manipulation of economic data starting some four decades ago. Each re-calculation made slowly over time, he reports, was created to falsely boost economic indicators. These manipulations date back to the Kennedy administration. Most notably, Phillips describes that President Johnson masked deficits, that President Nixon hid inflation by excluding "volatile" food and energy costs from the consumer price index, and that the Clinton administration expunged many long-term, so-called discouraged unemployed Americans from the unemployment rate, by counting persons who'd been seeking jobs for only a year or less.