Obama '08?

Feel good capitalizing and coloring that Finn buzz?

revel wrote:

Feel good capitalizing and coloring that Finn buzz?

Whoahhh...revel gets salty!

Actually it comes with that color, and no the act of capitalizing doesn't affect my mood one way or the other. However,the sight and sounds of Gin Blossom Teddy making a fool of himself always puts a bounce in my step.

This little episode was a classic and far the worse gaffe than Ashcrofts. Funny though, you can't hear any boos in the background of Aquaman's clip, and I certainly don't recall anyone suggesting that his slip was intentional.

I do look forward to the continued public spectacle of The Hayannis Port Sybarite's further decent into dotage.I'm betting that he will provide us with even better theater than gnarled old Strom Thurmond admonishing a witness during the Clarence Thomas hearings to "TALK INTO THE MACHINE!"

(You know that capitalization didn't give me a thrill either. Am I missing something? A technique you can recommend?)

Race relations have devolved into a tit for tat of racial scandal, accusation and defensiveness ("You're a racist." "No, I'm not. You're just playing the race card.").

This was a gutsy move: It's possible that much of Obama's support among white voters came from people who saw Obama's candidacy as a free pass on racial justice issues. Instead of a free pass, Obama offers an arduous path, slogging through our unresolved racial anxieties. But he does offer a way through.

This means that rather than simply repudiate, we must try to understand people whose views may shock and offend us. It's a common politically correct trope today that whenever someone is "offended" - especially about an issue of race or gender - the conversation stops and the offending parties must repudiate their statement. But [h]onest dialogue about difficult and often personal issues will necessarily involve some bruised feelings.

America's racial injustices are a legacy of our nation's explicit racist past. Today, many urban neighborhoods and schools are more segregated than during the Jim Crow era, the incarceration rate of young black men is much worse than during that era, joblessness in poor black communities is so bad that many people in such neighborhoods don't know anyone with regular employment in the mainstream economy.

These inequities aren't, by and large, the result of ongoing racism - they're the legacy of the unaddressed racism of the past. But they are real social evils that provoke understandable anger among many African Americans. That anger is often misdirected [..] But Obama was right not to simply reject that anger and the legitimate grievances that underlie it.

The speech wasn't perfect. Obama was characteristically vague on specifics, declining to suggest how he would address the racial inequities that we continue to face. And although he was right to suggest that, in many ways, racial justice issues are part of the larger questions of economic equality and job security, it's also the case that some racial issues [..] will require distinctively race-conscious solutions.

Obama has been understandably reluctant to address explosive questions such as affirmative action and race-conscious integration head on, but segregation remains the single greatest unaddressed legacy of Jim Crow-style racism, and colorblind social policies will not be enough to change it.

But these are minor cavils. Obama's speech was the boldest and most direct statement on race relations by a major political figure in more than a generation. His willingness to take the risk of confronting one of America's most volatile and intractable problems head-on is striking. It gives us sense of how Obama might use his [..] rhetorical skills not just to win elections, but, also to lead and to govern.

Richard Thompson Ford is a law professor at Stanford University and author of "The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse," published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Please stay on topic, guys.

Presidential candidate Barack Obama [..] ridiculed likely Republican nominee John McCain on Wednesday for offering "not one single idea" to help hard-pressed homeowners facing foreclosure.

"George Bush called this the ownership society, but what he really meant was 'you're-on-your-own' society," Obama told a town hall meeting here [..]. "John McCain apparently wants to continue this."

OBAMA'S YOUTUBE SPEECH TOPS TV RATINGS...

[..] About 3.8 million people have now watched Barack Obama's Philadelphia address through the campaign's official YouTube channel [..]. "It is the highest viewed video ever uploaded by a presidential candidate to YouTube [..]," says Steve Grove, who directs News and Politics for YouTube.

Aside from the Obama channel, which promotes videos through blogs, news sites and supporter networks, another 520,000 people watched excerpts of the speech uploaded by random YouTube users.

Taken together, the total YouTube viewers for Obama's speech over the past week beat all the cable channels combined. Last Tuesday, about four million viewers tuned into one of the three cable channels to watch the speech.

This is not the first time that Obama's YouTube audience has rivaled cable news. His second most popular video ever, a rebuttal to President Bush's final State of the Union, drew 1.3 million views. The President's actual address reached 3.2 million homes through a Fox News broadcast [..]

capitalism is
despicable
deplorable,
detestable
detrimental
devoid of decency dmocracy and docorum