Now that Sen. Barack Obama has become President-elect Barack Obama, and Congress has beefed up its Democrat majority, what can we expect?
We have elected the most liberal senator in Congress. Do we expect that he will govern that way too? He talks eloquently about uniting this country. It makes everyone feel good when he talks that way. Who could argue with rhetoric like that? Yet, I haven’t heard him elucidate exactly what it is about the American people that need uniting.
Now, as Obama moves through his transition to the White House, this effort to square the political circle becomes the defining challenge in the months ahead. Which Barack Obama will dominate as he begins to govern?
Too much of the ambitious liberal, and he rekindles partisan squabbles he was supposed to transcend.
Too much the cautious mediator who reaches across the aisle to compromise with Republicans, and he risks losing the energy and idealism that attracted millions to his candidacy.
The historical significance of America’s choice is inescapable. Has Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream been realized? And what impact will this have on the race industry for Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton? An industry that ought to go bankrupt, with no federal bailout.
For a legislator that has no record of reaching across the aisle, President-elect Obama certainly has his work cut out for him.
Responding to the news and pictures of Republican VP Candidate Sarah Palin hanging from a noose as part of a Holloween display, Sen. Obama had this to say: ” ”
I’ll fill in the quote as soon as he says something about it.
Oh wait. Is it too late for Obama to speak to this issue, now that it reportedly has been taken down?
Well, I went to my first City Council meeting to provide my input on the above subject. The meeting room was packed, but thinned out after the first two agenda items finished, which concerned downtown development and appointing some people to terms on some community redevelopment board. While listening to that go on, and on, I came to realize that these meetings sometimes go late into the night. The term cruel and unusual punishment came to mind for having to sit there and listen to it, let alone report on it.
I did have a brush with greatness though, well, aside from speaking to the entire (except for Donovan) city council. I sat in the front row next to Mark O’Brien and not far from Sam Hall.
As I pointed out in my previous post on this subject entitled Pensacola Call To Action, I was not aware of any groundswell of public opinion to change the remaining portion of Alcaniz St. to MLK Drive. On that, I can report that the driving force behind it is an organization headed by Leroy Boyd called Movement for Change.
Being unfamiliar with the proceedings, I let several others offer their public input before I offered my two cents.
Mr. Boyd was the first to speak. I was interested to hear why Mr. Boyd wanted to revisit this issue and replace Alcaniz Street entirely, since this matter had already been decided eight years ago in a way that both honors Dr. King and preserves the historical aspect (Alcaniz is a city in Spain) of Alcaniz Street.
He couldn’t have made a worse case for wanting to change it. He told the city council that people on Alcaniz St. south of Cervantes are racist. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, but that is the case he presented. He said it was all about race, and that that was the reason that the entire street didn’t get renamed eight years ago. The historical aspect of Alcaniz St. totally escaped him, and, he did not accept the others’ opinions from eight years ago that it was about history and not race.
When it was my turn, I was pretty nervous. I hope I didn’t make too much of a fool of myself while speaking to the Council. I attempted to make my case that the council ought to just leave the street where they left it eight years ago. That way, they won’t be erasing a part of Pensacola’s history from a few centuries ago for the sake of the civil rights movement of the last century. The way it is, everyone, except perhaps Mr. Boyd, can be satisfied by respecting history and Dr. King.
Then I stated that, although I did not know Mr. Boyd, that his making a street name change proposal all about race was not the best way to get anything done. I said something like pushing the race button on this issue is not the way to go. What happened next was kind of cool.
Mr. Boyd took to the floor again to address me and what I had said, as though he was going to carry on a debate with me or something. Mayor Fogg correctly told Mr. Boyd that he had his one chance for public input. When I heard that, since I hadn’t met Mr. Boyd yet, I felt that the time was right. So I got up, walked over to him, and motioned for him to follow me out of the room so we could meet each other, let the council resume their business, and discuss the issue further.
Mr. Boyd followed me into the open space where the elevators are and I introduced myself. A few other people followed too, I suppose to insure our mutual safety. ?? Our meeting was nothing but civil. My question to him was simple. ‘Why are you making the street name issue a racial one?’
Boyd: Because it is. It’s all about race.
ross: How can you say that? I don’t see any signs down there that say ‘whites only.’
Boyd: Because the prices of homes there are too expensive. The whites have priced blacks out of the neighborhood.
ross: Real estate values are not racist. They are what they are. Barack Obama could get a place down there if he wanted to.
Boyd: I probably could too, but Aragon Court was supposed to be affordable and it isn’t. You can’t name 10 black families that live down there.
ross: What’s Aragon Court got to do with renaming Alcaniz Street? So, because it is expensive, that makes it racist? Are people on Pensacola Beach racist also? It’s even more expensive there.
Boyd: Oh, you don’t want to go there. Many blacks have disappeared on the beach.
ross: What? I’ve been here for 26 years and I haven’t heard of anything like that.
Boyd: That was more long ago than that.
ross: So why Alcaniz Street, that has history in it for the city? Whats the matter with W or A street for example?
Boyd: You’re not going to tell me where I can name a street. It is about race, and making all of Alcaniz to be MLK is my goal, and that’s that.
By this point there wasn’t anything else to discuss. He made his point and I made mine. We shook hands and I left. He went back inside. I don’t know what else went on at the council meeting. But at least I found out first-hand who and what is behind the name change. For Leroy Boyd, it is unfinished business, part of a movement. History be dammed.
This video is Leroy Boyd making his case on why the remainder of Alcaniz Street, from Cervantes Street south to Main Street should be replaced with MLK Drive.
And this is my public input to the matter. At the very end of the video you can hear me accept Mr. Boyd’s wish to talk to me by inviting him to follow me outside, which he did. And the dialog from that discussion is what appears above.
Isn’t it amazing how the media is all over ‘Joe the plumber?’ Within 24 hours, we know all about this man’s personal and professional business. And for over two years now, the media is still not motivated to tell us about Barack Obama’s alliances with people that hate America, and his proclivity for supporting directions in education that promote socialism. Then there’s his working for and with ACORN, and so much more.
It is more than an little ironic that Obama and his willing accomplices in the media chose to attack this hard working middle class guy, a union member no less, that hopes to one day buy the plumbing business he currently works for. ‘Joe the plumber’ is of the kind of people that Democrats purport to champion. Working hard to get ahead and having some financial difficulty, as the media is so quick to point out, but trying to overcome the obstacles he faces. What has Obama’s hair standing up about ‘Joe’ is that Joe isn’t looking for the government to bail him out. He is wondering whether the government is going to put more obstacles in his way. This episode really shines the light on how disingenuous the Democrat platform is. Which is more about maintaining a middle-class and ‘poor’ than helping them rise above it.
The Democrat party of today is the class-warfare party, and Barack Obama’s reaction to Joe personifies it. Barack came out and said what his vision for America is. That the government should spread the wealth, which means taking from the haves to give to the have-nots. ‘A government that robs from Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul,’ George Bernard Shaw.
Convincing people how harmful this Democrat doctrine is to this country remains conservatives’ biggest challenge. The amount and scope of education necessary to accomplish that begins in our elementary schools and goes right up to the college level. It is not a coincidence that people like Obama and William Ayers want to start socialistic indoctrination in elementary school, and earlier.
Need an example how there are always some people out there waiting to be offended? Here’s one from the second presidential so-called debate, that P Diddy Combs feels is ‘racist.’ The audience was faced with only two candidates. When McCain referred to legislation, and asks the audience who supported it, and points to Obama and saying ‘that one,’ is not racist by any stretch of an educated person’s imagination. It is to say, it isn’t this one, McCain, it is that one, Obama.
In a back-and-forth discussion Tuesday night of a Bush-Cheney energy bill, McCain had this to say about Obama: “You know who voted for it? You might never know: that one,” he said, pointing to, but not looking at, Obama as he sat nearby. “You know who voted against it? Me.”
We know that there are small sectors of people eager and waiting to be offended. As a result of this non-incident, I guess Democrats can be added to the list. Nevertheless, because someone feels that it is a racist comment doesn’t make it so. The Obama campaign reacted by notifying the public relations wing of their campaign, the media, in this way . . .
Within minutes after McCain referred to the junior Illinois senator as “that one,” an Obama spokesman e-mailed reporters – “Did John McCain just refer to Obama as ‘that one?'”
Here is how P Diddy reacted . . .
The McCain campaign’s response was the obvious one. McCain was merely distinguishing himself from his opponent regarding who voted for the Bush-Cheney energy bill. For the too easily offended, try getting a life, or at the very least, get on with yours. As for P Diddy, there is not much hope that he will change.
Are you beginning to see that the antics of the racist Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s pastor for over 20 years, is not so much of an isolated incident as Democrats would have you believe? On Wednesday, speaking to the National Jewish Democratic Council, a group that applied pressure to disinvite Gov. Palin from an anti-Iran rally in New York, the Democratic congressman said . . .
‘anybody toting guns and stripping moose don’t care too much about what they do with Jews and blacks.’
And he follows it up with this statement . . .
‘If Sarah Palin isn’t enough of a reason for you to get over whatever your problem is with Barack Obama, then you damn well had better pay attention.’
He will be criticized, of course, for his racist and bigoted comments. But it is obvious that what we are seeing is Hastings simply following the lead of his candidate who said to a democrat audience, without any substantiation, predicting that John McCain and his Republican allies will try to scare them.
“Nobody thinks that Bush and McCain have a real answer to the challenges we face. So what they’re going to try to do is make you scared of me,” Obama said. “You know, he’s not patriotic enough, he’s got a funny name, you know, he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.”
Then there’s this quote which I heard him say, ‘And oh, did I mention, he’s Black?’ Do you think that the Obama campaign can win an election by using such despicable tactics? Apparently, they think that they can.
It is good to see some progress being made. It will be better to see that they have the perpetrator under arrest. But for now, we know this much . . .
A person who identified himself as a witness tells 10 News that agents with the FBI served a federal search warrant at the Fort Sanders residence of David Kernell early Sunday morning. Kernell lives in the Commons apartment complex at 1115 Highland Ave. David Kernell is the son of Mike Kernell, a Democratic state representative from Memphis.
No surprise there, if true. Bi-partisan condemnation, including jail time for the perpetrator is what would be surprising. The fraud involved in hacking the private email account is one felony, and disseminating that information is another.
Unfortunately, there is not a good history for prosecution in cases such as this. In December, 1996, Alice and John Martin who recorded a cell phone conversation of Newt Gingrich, which ended up in the hands of ‘Baghdad’ Jim McDermott, then ranking member of the House Ethics Committee, who turned it over to the New York Times for publication, never served time. And neither did McDermott. He was ultimately ordered to pay over $700,000 in damages and court costs. That’s it. He is still in Congress. So I wouldn’t get my hopes up for real justice in this case either. Now, if the shoe were on the other foot?
Beginning tomorrow, a response to Obama’s ad will run in Spanish, to tell Spanish-speaking Americans, and others, about how Barack Obama, the man running his campaign himself, has been lying to them and stoking racial prejudice about them, in order to get their vote. The self-professed ‘candidate of change,’ who professes to be above race and political party, is acting more like a segregationist from the 50’s and 60’s. Rush Limbaugh’s comments from a Wall Street Journal piece . . .
Mr. Obama’s campaign is now trafficking in prejudice of its own making. And in doing so, it is playing with political dynamite. What kind of potential president would let his campaign knowingly extract two incomplete, out-of-context lines from two radio parodies and build a framework of hate around them in order to exploit racial tensions? The segregationists of the 1950s and 1960s were famous for such vile fear-mongering.
In 2006, in the heat of the immigration debate, Rush put out the Limbaugh Laws, which is a parody of Mexico’s immigration laws. This was the source that Sen. (words, just words) Obama took out of context to make his ad.
From 2006, The Limbaugh Laws video . . .
What is Obama’s strategy? Divide with the race card. In this case, Hispanics. Because there is virtually no difference between McCain’s views of so-called ‘comprehensive’ immigration reform (McCain-Kennedy anyone?) and that of Obama, he will lie about Rush and tell the non-suspecting Hispanic community that McCain and Rush and, while he’s at it, Bush, are like three peas in a pod that don’t want or respect Hispanics.
When the truth about this finally reaches the Hispanic community, they will see who does not respect them and who takes them for granted. Obama is not acting very presidential. Well, unless this was Venezuela instead of the United States.
Here’s a statistic of what public education in Philadelphia is doing to its students.
Today, they saw the raw data, and were collectively horrified. One in 10 white students is classified as mentally gifted; just 3 in 100 black students are. Black and Latino students make up 79 percent of the district’s 165,000 students, but make up just 54 percent of students in the district’s prestigious magnet schools. Those groups make up 90 percent of all children labeled “emotionally disturbed,” and most of the students at the district’s lowest-performing schools.
Am waiting for Barack Obama to come out against school choice and vouchers. What do you think the parents of those kids would choose? More money into failing schools, or a choice to which school they can send their child? The schools system wants to pour good money after bad to train their teachers instead of replacing them. Teachers are supposed to know how to teach before they get a classroom. These schools can’t even give their students schedules on their first day. Sounds a lot like bureaucratic Washington doesn’t it?
Students did not have rosters on the first day of school, a glitch that will take weeks to sort out. Rev. Bryant Robinson, a member of the Germantown Clergy Initiative, was there on the first day. “It was dysfunctional. It was chaos,” Robinson said. Students were roaming the halls, unsure where to go, he said.
And, when schools excel, instead of concentrating on how to bring students up to the set standard, they want to lower the standards for racial and ethnic reasons instead of maintaining academic excellence.
The superintendent also took aim at some of the district’s special admittance schools. She said she can’t understand why the Arts Academy at Benjamin Rush, which opened last week in Northeast Philadelphia, requires students not only to audition but also score in the 85th percentile on state exams. “We know the numbers of African American and Latino students who are scoring at that level,” Ackerman said. “We are keeping these people out.”
Is it any wonder that the education system there is in shambles when their focus is more on race than academics?
This is a political season. Which of the two presidential candidates has the right answer to fix our educational system?
Founded and co-sponsored by the Women’s National Republican Club’s American Forum Series and the National Black Republican Association. The 2008 Black Republican Forum was held on August 6, 2008 and was broadcast on C-SPAN on August 19, 2008. It will be re-aired on Friday and Saturday on C-SPAN but can be viewed online at the links below. The Keynote Speaker was NFL Hall of Famer Lynn Swann who gave an inspirational speech on Race and the Presidential Election.
Session 2 has not been aired yet, which explains why it is not included in the links below. Session 2 is not yet available.
