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The Wright Time for Obama to Consider Dropping Out
Tweet Share on Facebook April 30, 2008 Comment (87)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.
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More Horse Deaths at Equestrian Events
Tweet Share on Facebook April 28, 2008 Comment (57)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.
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GOP Dirty Tricks Dupe Media
Tweet Share on Facebook April 25, 2008 Comment (18)Updated on 4/25/08: While an earlier version of this blog cited news reports that the North Carolina GOP had agreed not to run a controversial anti-Obama ad, subsequent news reports indicate that the party made no such agreement.
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.
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Hillary's "Kitchen" Ad
Tweet Share on Facebook April 23, 2008 Comment (18)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.
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The Growing Oil and Food Crisis
Tweet Share on Facebook April 21, 2008 Comment (16)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."
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Obama's Wayward Finger
Tweet Share on Facebook April 18, 2008 Comment (44)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.
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The Feds' Fantasy Statistics
Tweet Share on Facebook April 16, 2008 CommentEvery 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.
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Who's Bitter?
Tweet Share on Facebook April 14, 2008 Comment (2)Pundits all over the Web are deconstructing Barack Obama's now infamous "bitter" remarks. By now, you know the Illinois Democrat told wealthy donors in San Francisco earlier this month that small-town Pennsylvanians and midwesterners "cling to guns or religion" because they are "bitter" about their economic situation.
Most of the Web chatter is about why or if small-town (read: white, lower-class) Pennsylvanians and midwesterners "cling" to guns and religion. But I'd like to focus on Senator Obama's use of the term bitter.
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Obama's Public Finance Flip-flop
Tweet Share on Facebook April 11, 2008 Comment (5)Which two senators, now running for president, promised last year to accept public financing if the other party's nominee did so as well?
Which one is sticking by his promise and which is not?
Sen. Hillary Clinton never promised to take public financing if she clinched the Democratic nomination. Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain did, provided the other would do so as well. McCain is sticking to his promise. Obama is dancing around his.
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Riding Kills Horses, Too
Tweet Share on Facebook April 10, 2008 Comment (12)Corrected on 4/11/08: An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified the location of the event at which two horses died in March. The event was at Red Hills.
While it is nothing short of thrilling that the New York Times placed a story about eventing fatalities on its front page yesterday, it is nothing short of infuriating that the report missed or bypassed a most important point.
Yes, riders are injured all too often on artificially pumped-up courses. Some even die. But equine athletes—the horses themselves—die trying to get through these courses. Unlike human riders, these horses do not knowingly undertake the risks. It is high time we stopped sacrificing horses' lives to massage human egos seeking unnecessarily tougher athletic tests.
Bonnie Erbe
Bonnie Erbe is a contributing editor at U.S. News & World Report and hosts PBS's weekly news analysis program, To the Contrary with Bonnie Erbe. She also writes a weekly syndicated newspaper column for Scripps Howard News Service.
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