Some times the good guys or in this case the good gals win! This is a time for both celebration and some caution. The amazing, passionate and overwhelming outrage that greeted Komen for the Cure's ill-considered defunding of Planned Parenthood brought them to their senses. They announced the reversal of their policy a little over 24 hours from when the backlash began.

There are many factors in this quick victory by the forces of public opinion. It certainly helped that Komen's explanation of why they were severing ties with Planned Parenthood was palpably false and fooled no one. For them to hold that the mere announcement of an investigation gave them no choice but to withdraw funding was just silly--particularly since their new policy was clearly, and just recently, crafted for this specific purpose.

Nancy Brinker, the founder's assertion that politics and religion played no role was so patently risible as to diminish what remained of her credibility. The further assertion that the appointment of Karen Handel, a conservative politician and anti-choice activist, to their board had nothing to do with the defunding didn't approach the threshold of credibility and opened them up not just to anger but also to ridicule.

The anger and disappointment expressed in the blogosphere and in on-line petitions, the emails of shock and pain sent directly to Komen all brought home the seriousness of their miscalculation and the counter-productive absurdity of their denials. Brinker looked the fool on MSNBC.

Still, two more factors played decisive roles in this quick reversal. First there was pushback from the Senate and Congress with 22 Senators signing a petition urging them to reverse this policy and holding that Komen was putting women's health and their very lives in peril.

Second, special credit has to go to the brave women who, as a matter of principle, resigned their highly visible positions with Komen. One was Komen's top public health official, Mollie Williams, another was Dr. Kathy Plesser, a member of Komen's medical advisory board, and locally, Deb Anthony, executive director of Komen's Los Angeles County chapter, also resigned. They put it all on the line for women's health.

There is an important lesson here. The voices of the people, along with their wallets, make a difference. Indifference to injustice, and the passive acceptance of blatant prevarications, are irresponsible. People taking their support away and expressing their feelings and passions not simply in words but in actions, can make a difference.

But a word of caution is also required. Corporations often make mistakes and then seem to remedy them in the glaring light of publicity. Then quietly, months later, having learned their lesson but not changed their hearts, they often, quietly and gradually, re-impose the older policy. We'll all have to stay alert. It is good to celebrate the refunding of present grants. But we'll have to see if they fund new grants to Planned Parenthood in the future.

It's not the firestorm that the Susan G. foundation touched off by lopping off funding to Planned Parenthood last year and that it announced the other day. It's not even the foundation's right to lop off the funds. Though they could have done better than put out the weak, silly, half-baked line that it had nothing to do with abortion, or that it buckled to pressure from anti-abortion groups. It did, and everybody knows it. It's not even about sullying Komen's reputation. Since the foundation does good work in raising cancer awareness, and pours much money into women's cancer prevention education programs.
No, Komen's dumb move did exactly what anti-abortionists and presumably at least some of the shot callers at Komen didn't want to happen. And that's turn the funding hit against Planned Parenthood into a walking advertisement for PP. In the space of 24 hours, PP raised nearly a half million dollars in online donations from more than 6000 donors. And that's just online, almost certainly the organization will raise tens of thousands more in the days to come as cash and checks continue to pour in.

Komen's dumb move also gave PP something that spending thousands in ad dollars couldn't do. And that's promote PP's organization and cause. PP has and will continue to do just fine without Komen's cash. But there's a cautionary tale that Komen and anti-abortionists again told the world. That's be careful when you try to bully something into happening, the very opposite usually happens. PP is the latest proof of that.

What a shame, what a stain on the name of Susan G Komenthat the foundation named in her honor and memory has thrown living women under the bus of conservative anti-women politics. The foundation (I won't use its name and further besmirch her memory) has severed ties with Planned Parenthood. Their reason/rationale is completely disingenuous. They claim that a brand new regulation, that they just promulgated themselves, forces them to defund any group under investigation.

For the foundation, otherwise dedicated to the transcendently important issue of breast cancer, to be intimidated into withholding support for the educational and diagnostic services that Planned Parenthood offers is reprehensible. We should all support the search for the cure, but I do not see how we can support this craven and cowardly foundation. My money will go to Planned Parenthood, The Jonsson Cancer Center at UCLA, the Norris Cancer Center at USC and City of Hope.
©2012 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com

When I left Tunisia following my two years in the Peace Corps, my government said something to me that was completely true. "Whatever your experience, good or bad, you will always read every story about 'your country'." Up until a year ago this was both true and easy. However, since the start of the Arab Spring in Tunisia, keeping up has been a nearly full-time job. Fortunately this also relates to my "day job," teaching Comparative Religion and Current Events at American Jewish University.

I feel both apprehension and hope for Tunisia. I am not ready to write off the mainstream Islamist party, because I remember fondly my teacher Si Salah Mamouri and his great, generous and open home, heart and mind.
©2012 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com

The bullet riddled tee shirt of President Obama posted brazenly on Facebook by seven semi-automatic gun toting men among them a Peoria, Arizona police sergeant was much more than the by now standard non-stop litany of racist cartoons, depictions, web postings, and kooky loose talk threats against President Obama. The gun toting men and the police sergeant were taking target practice on the president's likeness at an undisclosed desert locale. This is Arizona. The state where many legislators think it's ok to pack guns in the legislature, and for citizens to openly pack them in public. This is the state where former Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was nearly killed in an assassination attempt, and where there's a wide body of respectable opinion starting with a finger in the face of the president governor, Jan Brewer, that simply loathes the president's policies and in many cases him personally. The gun toting men made a virtual public call for the gunning down of the president comes on Facebook.
It comes against the backdrop of Secret Service reports that the rate of threats against the President Obama has increased 400 per cent from the 3,000 a year or so under President George W. Bush. He receives dozens of assassination threats continuously, and that number has been steady before and during the campaign and increased after he took office. Federal law is very clear on Threatening the President of the United States. It is a class D felony under United States Code Title 18, Section 871. It consists of knowingly and willfully mailing or otherwise making "any threat to take the life of, to kidnap, or to inflict bodily harm upon the President of the United States."
The Secret Service has taken the threats against the president seriously and has diligently investigated every one of them. In a few cases, prosecutors have brought charges. But here is the problem, in fact several problems. How seriously do other public officials take them, especially in places like Peoria, Arizona. Peoria, Arizona officials did not suspend the police sergeant pending review and investigation, let alone fire him, or call for a prosecution of him or his gun toting pals. Their weak, duck and dodge response was at worst that he may have violated the police department's employee conduct rules on the use of social media. There was no immediate response from Peoria, Arizona Mayor Bob Barrett or Peoria, city council persons to calls for them to take action against the officer and men involved.

The Secret Service also has had other worries, namely about staffing. At one point, in 2010 there was a report that in a budget request the Secret Service was understaffed and under-resourced. The Service denied it and insisted it had the resources and personnel to meet any security issue involving the president. But the president's hands on meet the people routine during his non-stop road travels throughout the country is a constant challenge to any protective and enforcement agency.

The intense concern over Obama's safety has been intense since he announced he would seek the presidency in February 2007. He had the dubious distinction of being the earliest presidential contender to be assigned Secret Service protection on the campaign trail. This didn't ease the jitters over his safety. Several congressional members even then demanded that Secret Service officials provide all the resources and personnel they could to ensure Obama's and the other presidential candidates' security. They heard the whispers and nervous questions from his constituents about Obama's safety.

During the presidential campaign in 2008, the flood of crank, crackpot, and screwball threats that promised murder and mayhem toward Obama continued to pour in. This prompted the Secret Service to tighten security and take even more elaborate measures to ensure his safety. This was especially important given the deep doubt and even paranoid suspicion that some blacks have that shadowy government agencies were complicit in the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr, and the fervent belief of millions of other Americans that the CIA or other government agencies were deeply complicit in the killing, if not outright murder of JFK.

There is nothing shadowy or conspiratorial about what police sergeant Shearer and his gun packing friends in Peoria, Arizona did. It was brazen and very open. The clueless Shearer for his part saw nothing inappropriate, let alone, dangerous, about what he did. He chalked it up to much ado about nothing or as he put it he didn't think that shooting up a t-shirt with President Obama's face on it "was that big a deal." It was more than a big deal. The target in their in gun sights, not a regular bull eye, a likeness of Howdy Doody, or a Cactus plant. It was President Obama. Federal prosecutors should see that they see it as the "big deal" that it is and bring charges.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the author of How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour heard weekly on the nationally network broadcast Hutchinson Newsmaker Network.
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

Words often don't mean what we think they mean, and this is particularly true in politics. Words become labels and labels become libels. Our political discourse has so deteriorated that in Republican circles calling someone a moderate is an insult--a pejorative.

©2012 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com

I've been planning this move for twenty years, which may rate on the Guinness Book of World Records for the world's longest move. The earliest stages started almost the day I moved from my beloved Chicago to sunny and smoggy Los Angeles. I talked about moving back so much that I sometimes felt like the Kunta Kinte on "Roots." Unfortunately, Kunta Kinte died before he got back home, and there were times I was afraid that that would be me.

I was between jobs anyway, and my parents thought it would be a step up because I wanted to be a screenwriter at the time and because screenwriting does not exactly happen in Chicago like it does out here. To some sunbirds, Los Angeles with its year-round sunshine is a Mecca, but those of us with Midwestern souls never quite get that or many of the nuances out here. We like our sunshine, but we also like our rain, hail, sleet and snow, too, and we get plenty of that out there.

And the culture doesn't register with many of us. There were times I thought that if English wasn't the official language, I would have thought I was in a foreign country. Like the times people in supermarkets waited for me to move rather than using their words and saying "excuse me," or the times people looked through me like I was invisible.

Besides, I missed the way the grass rustles in the Chicago breeze at springtime, the first snowfall and the gleaming glass buildings on Michigan Avenue. Chicagoans have a sense of pride and ownership in the city that comes from being born and raised in a place and from having grandparents and aunts and uncles who live there and from going to school there. If ever there were a place where the six degrees of separation ring true, Chicago is it. And Chicagoans are polite on the whole. Even ex-Governor, Rod Blagojevich, never lost his temper or his cool after getting busted. That is Chicago.

Besides, it is different being in a place you know is right for you or have to flee for political reasons. I know an Afghani man, a lawyer in his country, who came to this country because the Taliban jailed him for telling women they had rights.

I've thought of my city almost every day for the twenty plus years, and I visited as often as I could, sometimes in the dead of winter to see if I could tolerate it. One November when my father was ill, I went back to see him, and I looked out the window at night and noticed the bare branches of the trees blowing in the wind as the clouds raced by and thought that the place has passion and that this is where I need to be.

Maybe that's why we produced some of the best and most notorious politicians in the world from the late Mayor Richard J. Daley to Rod Blagojevich to Barack Obama. It's because no one is neutral on anything, ever. Everyone has an agenda and an opinion. On one visit, I saw a guy trimming his fingernails on the el train, seemingly oblivious as his nail trimmings flew all over the train. It was a real gaffe, but then it was all so earthy and all so Chicago. On another visit, I was standing at a stoplight downtown and saw a cabbie running the yellow light to avoid getting ticketed by the policewoman who was walking alongside the cab. Through the closed windows of his cab, she threatened to ticket his arse while he slowly drove through the intersection and off. This is all so Chicago, too.

Dan Castellaneta, who plays Homer Simpson on the "Simpsons," is from Chicago. In the mid-80's, we worked together on a kid's show called the "Magic Door." I always knew he'd hit it big even when playing the bumbling and confused Detective Farblunget, (lost and confused in Yiddish) or writing scripts for the show. John Malkovich is from there, too, and it is the home of the famed Second City theatre company where many of these people are discovered by Los Angeles talent scouts sitting in the audience. Maybe it's our passion they pickup on; maybe it's our Midwestern work ethic. I don't know, but they pick up on something.

So now that I am able to and still have breath in my body, it is time to go home. I have been patient, and I waited long enough. I will miss certain things about LA but my heart and soul are in the land of the amiable yet crooked politicians and the tree branches swaying against the sky in winter and hanging on for dear, sweet life.

Put "President" in front of Newt Gingrich and there's an even chance "white supremacy" could be put in front of his presidential moniker. The suddenly surging Gingrich upped his racially loaded pandering scorecard with the resurface of a handwritten first draft of a series of talks he prepared in 1993 a couple of years before his ascendancy to House Speaker for his prescription for "renewing American civilization". Gingrich initially scrawled that while Asians, and presumably whites, understood how to build businesses and acquire wealth, Latinos were sorely lacking in wealth and business acumen and blacks were even more hopelessly ignorant of what it took to succeed in the business world. Gingrich cited no figures, studies, or research to document his blatant falsehood. But he really didn't need to for two reasons. By the time a member of Gingrich's staff typed up the notes and prepared the speech for delivery at the National Review Institute, the racially inflammatory digs had been scrubbed out. By the time he delivered the talks they appeared to be racially neutered and came off as just Gingrich pontificating on the his stock tout of free enterprise, personal strength and values, American resolve, and America's alleged technological superiority.
The other reason Gingrich's racial pandering passed under the public radar scope is that the GOP had long refined the art of racial code speak. So Gingrich simply entitled his talks "the five pillars of American civilization." It was understood that talk of values, strength, enterprise, and technology punctuated with the caption "American civilization" was a not so subtle way of boasting of the alleged paramount role of whites in building American civilization and the alleged drain on building American civilization by Latinos, and especially blacks.

Gingrich's "American civilization" talks were more than bigoted, historically skewed pretensions of original thought and scholarship. They were talked up and more importantly acted out in House Speaker Gingrich's full throated attack on welfare, entitlements, and supposed runaway big government spending, all allegedly by Democrats. The dots from these themes connected directly back to the notion that blacks and Latinos were economic ignoramuses and chronic feeders at the government trough and that they had utterly failed to pull themselves up through business and entrepreneurship. The conclusion was inescapable that blacks and Latinos were dragging the government into a hopeless sinkhole of poverty and spending waste and this in turn put the free enterprise system in grave danger. Gingrich struck gold in those themes at the time. And at the height of his congressional power was able to bring government to a near screeching halt and whipsaw President Clinton into pecking even harder at reining in welfare, health care and education spending, and at times out GOPing the GOP in his talk of the Democrats taking the lead in taking the burden of government off the backs of the white middle class, and not placating minorities.
We fast forward nearly two decades and Gingrich hasn't missed a beat. He reached back and recycled some of the old coded racially front-loaded themes with his attacks on welfare and food stamps. And despite his profuse denials that tossing these terms out had anything to do with race, he knew full well that the stereotypes are so deeply ingrained in the popular mind that the prototypical welfare and food stamp grifter is poor, black, and female that it isn't necessary as two decades earlier to put black or Latino in front of the words. The mere mention of welfare and food stamps instantly pricks the emotional hot buttons of millions of Americans who consider these programs prime examples of the Democrats and President Obama's government giveaway to minorities.
One could cite fact after fact that the majority of food stamp and welfare recipients are white, and that the food stamp rolls increased more under President George W. Bush than Obama. But these are facts and they seldom get in the way of stereotypes. There is absolutely no danger that the press and much of the public will tar former President Bush with the label "the food stamp president."

There's as yet no solid evidence that Gingrich's presidential resurrection from what was thought to be an entombed candidacy and his even more dramatic surge to the top in the South Carolina primary and his bolt to the front in some polls in the upcoming Florida primary can be attributed to his crude play of the race card. But given the dump Obama at all cost rabid fanaticism of many ultra-conservatives, Tea Party leaders and followers, and plain, old school bigots, racial pandering can't be discounted as a factor in the headwind apparently gaining force behind Gingrich's presidential bid.
If that's the case, Gingrich will keep recycling and spewing out the shop worn racial code themes as the pathway to the GOP presidential nomination. If that's so, white supremacy would surely be on that same pathway back to the White House.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the author of How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour heard weekly on the nationally network broadcast Hutchinson Newsmaker Network.
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

is here @ wordpress.

A bientot.

G. Tz. ; )