July 2011 Archives

That question is (partially) answered here on Wordpress.

G. Tz.

God is not doing that well right now. The Creator's numbers are tanking in the polls--and this is among believers. The firm of Public Policy Polling indicates that God has an approval rating of barely 52%! In the words of the great Dave Barry, I'm not making this up!

The faithful do not doubt You or Your power. But they are questioning Your judgment. Look, at best you're only 6 percentage points higher than President Obama and most of your American faithful are pretty sure You're neither Kenyan nor Muslim. You gotta do a better job--either with Your PR or our world. You can't afford to slip any more or some folks might start putting other gods before You. Dear God, and I mean this respectfully, I'm praying for You."
©2011 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com

Forget what you've heard or read. The real reason why some of the biggest ding-dongs in the GOP are at loggerheads with Obama is because we're in the Age of the Narcissist. It is a logical progression, after all. We've had the Iron Age, the Gilded Age, the Age of Aquarius, and the Bank and Auto Industry Bailout Age, which led to the biggest granddaddy of them all, the Narcissist Age.

That is why they won't raise the debt ceiling or close those tax loopholes benefiting the rich. It might put a dent in their campaign coffers and ruin their finances. Far flung conservatives like Michele Bachmann, will not vote to raise the debt ceiling though they must know that our credit rating will plunder, the stock market will crash and the people's confidence in the government, not to mention the world economy, will go by way of the Edsel. They know it because ex-President Bill Clinton and some economists told them so, which may be why they don't want to listen. It's the messenger they are judging and not the message, that and that darned age we are in.

So here's an SOS from a registered Republican with a credit rating that qualifies for special finance rate offers: Raise the debt ceiling, avoid cutting programs that help the elderly, limit campaign contributions and close the tax loopholes for the rich. If that doesn't raise the anthem and battle cry, then Obama is going to have to ditch the "can't we all just get along?" mantra, for not working, and invoke the Fourteenth Amendment.

Otherwise, it's going to be hari kari time.

Why is Obama Smiling?

Obama has the Republicans just where he wants them. They are stuck with policies and tactics that are hugely unpopular--and their standing will only get worse.

We are involved in a bad and costly self-inflicted wounding of our national standing and worldwide reputation. It is best for all to settle this long-term. However, politically speaking, revisiting the scene of this criminal stupidity will help, not harm, Obama and the Democrats.

©2011 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com

President Obama can probably recite this line in his sleep. Be bold, and rip a page from Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal playbook institute crash Works Project Administration and Civilian Conservation Corp. type programs. They would put tens of thousands of jobless back to work, pump up consumer spending, stave off a deeper recession, and trump the GOP mantra that only private industry can create jobs and boost the economy. It's a good line, and if 1933 America could be reprised again, putting government directly in the business of job creation would not only work, but be a necessity.
This isn't 1933. And President Obama can't make like FDR for several compelling reasons. The nation was flat on its back. One in three Americans were unemployed. The stock market, the banks and major industry had collapsed. The GOP was ridiculed and discredited. The labor movement was on the ascendancy, the until then small and totally marginalized Communist Party was getting a hearing from more and more down and out unemployed workers. The major financiers and industrialists genuinely feared social upheaval, even revolution. The horror of creating deficits by government spending and a drumbeat media echo chamber to turn the airwaves, (there were no TV networks), into a electronic bully pulpit to badger, hector, harangue and pillory FDR at every turn for spending too much didn't exist. There was an actual government surplus then, and no major debt.
FDR in effect had carte blanche to do something and do something drastic and fast. The dizzying array of alphabet New Deal programs government job creation programs were applauded by a majority of Americans, and effectively dampened the simmering sparks of rebellion.

President Obama has none of the luxuries FDR had and all of the liabilities that FDR did not have. One need not speculate about the wrath that he'd incur from millions who passionately believe that he's a closet socialist and his economic policies have doused the private sector if he advocated government job programs. The reaction to the stimulus package stirred hysteria among most GOP leaders, officials, voters and a significant number of conservative and even moderate independents. They railed at it as naked big government expansion, and reckless spending by a liberal Democratic president. The public vilification, political opposition, and conservative media pounding that Obama would take if he tried the FDR approach to jobs would be titanic.
The valid fiscal and economic argument that government job creation will put dollars in more consumers pockets, boost consumer spending, jumpstart small and medium sized business hiring, and increase business and personal income tax revenues would be drowned out in the harangue that a WPA style program would be too expensive and too wasteful. Even if Obama was willing to risk the firestorm of protest, and thumb his nose at the GOP, there's little chance that he'd get even a handful of Senate Democrats to back a government job creation program.

Let's turn back the clock again to the 1930s to get a better picture of what Obama would face if he tried to make like FDR and create government jobs. FDR won a landslide reelection in 1936. But two years later in the 1938 midterm elections, a resurgent GOP dumped dozens of Democrats from the Senate and the House. The issue that the GOP latched onto to ramp up their numbers is pretty much the same issue the GOP uses to sledgehammer Obama, and that's his alleged failures on the economy.
The economy had taken another nose dive after 1936, and unemployment crept up higher from its still double digit numbers. The GOP played hard on the feeling that the New Deal wasn't working. That it had run out of steam and that the real answer to the nation's economic crisis was to turn things back over to big business and let it run the economic ship without the Roosevelt and New Deal governmental restraints, agencies, tampering and meddling.

Roosevelt ignored the administration baiters and moved left. In a fireside chat, FDR talked bluntly with the American people immediately after the 1938 election and made it clear he would not reverse course and that he'd do everything he could to "create an economic upturn" by keeping the government firmly in the business of creating jobs and economic security for the millions still suffering from the Depression. He could do that and make it work because he still had the broad support of by now a powerful union movement and his intact electoral coalition of farmers, urban ethnics, and African-American voters behind him.

In 2010 the GOP took the House and a good chunk of the Senate back and it promptly followed the 1938 script with FDR. It claimed the near sweep was a total rejection of the Obama administration's program on health care, financial reform, and stimulus spending, and claim that Americans loudly clamor for a return to fiscal conservatism, permanent tax cuts for the super rich, and a dash backward on expanding government programs in education, housing, and highway and urban infrastructure construction and reconstruction.
Obama had no choice but to read the political leafs and conclude that though jobs was the real need of Americans and the only real way to ignite and stimulate a floundering economy, there was no political possibility to get even a tepid version of FDR's WPA program in place. The clamor for Obama to make like FDR ignores that this is 2011 not 1933. To think that Obama can make like FDR in these times is fantasy.

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 an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

There is little in the public discussion of the default crisis by politicians that is true. The distortions are extraordinary, and both sides are shaping this political battlefield for partisan advantage. To be slightly more accurate, there are three sides to this triangle--the Dems, the Republicans and the Tea Partiers. The Republicans and Democrats would have had this settled long ago but the bane of politics, in the form of true believers, has spoiled the deal.

In order to pass the Congress any deal will need Democratic votes. Will they vote for a two-step debt ceiling rise and have to revisit this six months closer to the election as Boehner is proposing? Would Obama really veto a two-step bill if it were to pass and get the Albatross of Default hung around his neck? I don't know but whatever they are saying now I don't believe. So far it is all politics without much concern for We the People.

©2011 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com

The great non-event of Carmageddon here in Los Angeles clarified for me Republican tax theory and its logical and factual flaws. Everything worked so well in here in general and in the Sepulveda Pass in particular during the closure that people have jumped lemming-like (or Tea Party-like) to ridiculous conclusions.

Cutting taxes and cutting jobs is the way to economic health the same way that closing freeways will eliminate congestion. An appealing faith but an appalling reality that will leave our both our personal and governmental coffers as empty as the 405 during Carmageddon.

©2011 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com

There is a helpless feeling when you see someone--or some nation--heading over a cliff. Like Gail-Tzipporah, I was not shocked or surprised when I learned of Amy Winehouse's death. No one who knows any part of her story is going to be waiting for the autopsy report. We all saw the self-destructive path she took. We also know that good people tried to intervene and help. From her parents even to her record company, folks tried to get her to rehab and demanded medical checks on her. Yet all were ultimately helpless in turning her away from this foreseeable catastrophe. Not love, not talent, not intelligence could prevent this.

Amy and America: Great promise self-sabotaged by the same stubborn denial of the cliff looming not in the distance but right in front.
©2011 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com

A few weeks before Amy Winehouse's death, her name and face flashed in front of my eyes with a sense of dread, but I thought no more about it until the news came last Saturday.

In spite of this, I still gasped when I learned that Amy Winehouse, that sultry-voiced, beehived mega-talent, had died at only 27.

I initially thought that if she knew of her fate, then she would have stopped using. But never having been an addict, I have no idea what it's like. It took comedian Russell Brand's observations to wake me up, for if anyone knows about addiction, it would be Russell Brand. A former addict who attends AA meetings three times a week to keep himself in check, he said that addicts strive for a dream-like state when they're awake and stumble through life in a brown haze.

I now know that Amy Winehouse had been forewarned but was too far gone to even care, though her genius and her ability to blend jazz, blues, pop and soul into one, couldn't be drowned out by booze and drugs. The very definition of genius, after all, the ability to combine the old and come up with something entirely unique and new. And that was Amy Winehouse, a genius who was infinitely likeable underneath it all.

Maybe it was her integrity and in spite of stumbling and getting in her own way, that she was here to live life on her own terms with verve and vigor and style.

When I first saw her in "Rehab," I thought here's the ultimate chick, a cross between a fifties waitress slinging hash in a roadside diner and a smoke-filled lounge house chanteuse, strutting around in that black beehive, heavily lined eyes and sailor tattoos. I tried imitating that style, but I couldn't because there's nothing like the original, and Amy Winehouse was nothing if not an original.

The speedy apprehension, public identification and incriminating right wing, white supremacist rants of alleged Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik partially doused the red hot fire building to launch yet another anti-Muslim witch hunt. The operative word is partially, because despite the steadily mounting evidence that Breivik's anti-Muslim hatred was a prime motive for the rampage, it didn't stop the avalanche of chatter on blogs, websites, and reader comments, that there had to be a tie somewhere with Islamic terrorism. This has been the reliable code word for fanning anti-Muslim hysteria. The pattern has been well established since the Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing in 1996.
At the time, then President Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno had the good sense not rush to judgment and scapegoat Muslims. The swift arrest of McVeigh squelched the building mob mania against them. But it didn't squelch public suspicions that all Muslims were potential terrorists. The federal building bombing propelled Clinton's 1996 Antiterrorism Act through Congress. Civil rights and civil liberties groups had waged a protracted battle against the bill. The law gave the FBI broad power to infiltrate groups, quash fundraising by foreigners, monitor airline travel, and seize motel and hotel records and trash due process by permitting the admission of secret evidence to expel immigrants. The implication was that present and future attacks would likely be launched by those with an Arab name and face rather than by men like McVeigh, or in the case of the alleged Norway terrorist, Breivik.
President Bush, as Clinton, took the high ground after the 911 attack. He did not reflexively finger-point Muslims. The Bush administration publicly assured that profiling was reprehensible and violated legal and constitutional principles, and that it would not be done. But the attack stirred tremors among Muslims that they would routinely be targeted, subject to search and surveillance, and profiled at airports.

The profiling alarm bells went off again after a soldier with a Muslim name Major Nidal Malik Hasan shot up the military base at Ft. Hood in November 2009. The Council on American-Islamic Relations wasted no time and issued a loud and vigorous denunciation of the mass killing. That didn't stop the pack of Fox Network commentators, conservative radio talk show hosts, writers, and some officials from again openly shouting for even tighter scrutiny of Muslim groups.

The scrutiny has taken two major forms. One is the persistent clamor to profile Muslims, those with Muslim sounding names, or those who appear to fit the stereotypical type of what a Muslim supposedly looks like. More than a few congressman led most notably by New York Congressman Pete King and GOP presidential candidate Michelle Bachman have openly called for profiling of Muslims or strongly hinted that there should be special attention given to them at airports, train, and bus stations.
The second major hit against Muslims has been the indelible stamp in the public mind that Al Qaeda, or other assorted, unnamed Muslim terror organizations or individuals perpetrate every act of mass violence in the world. The Norway massacre was a textbook example of how deep and dangerous the Muslim equals terrorist thinking is buried in the public consciousness. There was absolutely no reason to instantly finger-point Al Qaeda for the bombing of the government buildings or shooting up the summer camp. At peak Norway had 400 troops in Afghanistan as part of a UN mandated peacekeeping mission. It pulled the relative handful of troops it had in Iraq out years ago. It has passed no restrictive laws or actions as in Germany or France against Muslims. The closest it came was the revoke of a ruling in 2009 that permitted a Norwegian Muslim woman to wear her hijab, the traditional head covering for Muslim women, as part of her police uniform.
Norway's benign foreign and domestic policy, and its non-military involvement in the Middle East still stirred mounting fear and hatred among many Norwegians toward Muslims, They brand it the sneak Islamization of the country.

The Progress Party has been especially strident in demanding tougher immigration laws and enforcement, and has criticized government leaders for a too tolerant attitude toward Islamic law. A poll in 2009 found the percent of the public that backed the Progress Party had skyrocketed to more than thirty percent of the respondents. At the same time, the Labor, Socialist Left, and Center Party, support had dropped. Breivik was a Progress Party member.

Breivik may be every bit the whacked out, maniacal nut job he has been characterized as. But that doesn't change two things. One is that his deranged, horrific hate driven act of mass carnage was a grotesque aberration, but the hate and fear that drove him to it is not. And if Breivik hadn't been quickly fingered as the culprit, his mayhem would have fanned yet another full blown Muslim witch hunt. Even so it still was enough to get and stop the muslim bashing.

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 an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

The script is well worn. President Obama floats a proposal on the debt ceiling and the budget that appears to give away too much to the GOP. The Democrats howl that Obama is betraying principles to get the GOP to make a deal. Then when the GOP predictably says "no" to the alleged White House's betrayal concessions, the Democrats howl even louder that the president is hurting himself, the party, and worst of all minorities and the poor that will suffer the most from the meat ax hacking away of spending on vital programs.

Obama's plop on the bargaining table of formula changes for Social Security, Medicare hikes, and reported willingness to defer tax and revenue increases to get a deal loudly set off the alarm bells. Obama quickly scrambled to assure Democrats that he would continue to hold the line as best as he could against the GOP obstructionists. But the Democrats are disingenuous at best and hypocrites at worst for taking no blame for any cave to the GOP that they accuse Obama of.

The Democrats had an iron-clad majority in the House and senate for nearly two years after his election. A majority of voters demanded more not les spending on jobs, infrastructure projects, urban investment, housing foreclosure relief, the tightest possible clamps on Wall Street casino speculating, a wind up of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the end of the Bush tax cuts for the rich. A serious effort to cut spending on the wasteful wars and tax cuts and prime the economy would have made a major dent in the debt and deficit load, boosted the economy, and hiked revenue. If the Democrats had fought a hard and relentless fight for any one of these reforms, much of the pounding that Obama is now forced to take for trying to get the best deal he can out of a GOP that is using the debt fight as a cover to dump him in 2012 would have been rendered moot. This didn't happen. And the GOP quickly sniffed political blood in the Democrat's step back from Obama at every critical point.
Democrats now make the case that they are fighting to stiffen Obama's spine against the GOP and that Republicans stepped back from Bush when it was clear to many that he and his presidency were miserable failures. The analogy won't fly. Bush was discredited and loathed. The public blamed him and the GOP for two failed, flawed, costly wars, for making a shambles of an economy, the endless chain of sex and corruption scandals, and an unprecedented giveaway to Wall Street. It took nearly eight years and two terms for Republicans up for reelection to figure out that Bush was a political plague to be avoided at all costs. Unlike Bush, Obama has a string of impressive economic and legislative initiative accomplishments that have been impressive, even more in that they came in the teeth of the most vicious and vile opposition from a GOP that has made it clear in word and action that their sole goal is to make Obama a one term president.
The compromises that Obama has been forced to make to get any kind of budget deal says less about Obama's political worth than that of many Democrats. The health care reform gave warning of that. Democrats endlessly ticked off the ways that health care reform could help poor, working class and middle class by the elimination of pre-existing conditions, subsidies for the poor, broader coverage options, and coverage for millions of children into adulthood, and cost containment measures. Then when Obama to get a health care reform deal through made crucial compromises, they accused him of gutting health care reform. Then there was the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. Democrats again endlessly ticked off the ways that they benefited a handful of taxpayers that hardly need the savings, don't spend it anyway, has been a major deficit booster, and a tax giveaway to the wealthy elite that did not appreciably hike demand, business or job expansion.
Then when the GOP turned the issue around and threatened to block Obama's initiative to fund unemployment insurance extension, funding of some education programs, if he didn't agree to maintain the cuts, many House Democrats again accused him of caving to the GOP. When Obama had the temerity to take Democrats to task for wanting perfect instead of what was political doable, he was again roundly raked over the coals.
It's charitable to chalk the Democrats oft times cut and run from the president up to their political rage at his insistence on getting what he can squeeze out of an implacable foe bound and determined on his political destruction. But when far too many Democrats have consistently cowered at, and conciliated the GOP, while repeatedly second guessing the White House, then it's no wonder that Obama has been hung out on a GOP limb. And worse has to take Democratic heat for it.

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 an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

Now that the budget is tighter than a high wire string and Congress some Republicans are so tight, they squeak as they walk (and it has to be bad if I'm saying that because I tend to lean to the right), one portion of the budget that should be expanded is mental health services as we are in an emergency.

Someone on some message board pointed out that there is neither more nor less all-around craziness just that it's better documented. The Internet and all the world is flat theories aside, this is a special Rogues Hall.

Moments before flying a plane into his mother's house, 47 year-old Konrad Schmidt, called her to make sure she was home. He was allegedly angry about his parents divorce, though it appears that something else was bothering him.

Most people get angry at their parents at some point, but they usually take less drastic measures. Had Schmidt gotten help, he most likely would have emoted in some other way. He might have written in a journal, a letter to his parents that he never mailed or gone out for a drink or two. But now he's either taken up residence in a jail or a psych ward.

Seventeen year-old Tyler Hadley is another member of that group. The Florida teen bludgeoned his parents to death and covered their bodies with books and papers before hosting a party for 60 teens that he posted on Facebook. His best friend called the police after he showed him the bodies. They are treating the vicious attack as a premeditated crime.

In my day, about the worst thing that any kid did was fail to clean his room or run away from home for a few hours. Even so, about the craziest incident that happened was when a neighbor decided to take the family car out for a spin on his learner's permit when his parents were out one night and wound up driving the car through a neighbor's living room window. But he didn't first call to see if they were home, though it did cancel his learner's permit for a while.

Then everything bottomed out with Woodstock, the free sex and love era and when someone decided to tell kids that they are geniuses, even if they don't know how to add or read and write.

I don't know if it is hands off parenting, lousy movies and videos, drugs or something else, though the parenting gets my vote because someone had to (sort of) raise them. Let's face it because so much can go wrong, mental health services or a meteor may be the only answer.

Lizzie Borden was just one nut, but today there are the Konrad Schmidts and Taylor Hadleys and child-killer Levi Arons to contend with. If they aren't signs for a massive mental health budget, we might as well hoist up the mayday flag now.

Atlantis, our last space shuttle, landed safely today. This marks the end of a journey, but tragically it also puts an end to a dream--the dream of a new frontier for us to explore and for which to build technologies and concentrate educational efforts.

This is not a battle between space and education. This is about how we bring people together to value education, to dream big dreams, to coalesce around a common vision and to reach for the stars.

©2011 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com

Oh, what a tangled web we weave when we practice to deceive. And so it goes with Rupert Murdoch and his eavesdropping titans at the now defunct World News.

Being a native Chicago girl, I first heard of Murdoch in the 80's when his empire began to unfold like an inflatable raft filling a small apartment with hot air. Amid protests, Murdoch bought the then illustrious Chicago Sun Times. The late, great columnist, Mike Royko said that "no self-respecting fish would be wrapped in a Murdoch paper," and defected to the Chicago Tribune. Others followed, and the building began to quake from the pitter-patter of big feet. Many Sun Times readers then defected to the conservative Chicago Tribune.

My parents switched, too, even though my father hated politics and hadn't voted since the Eisenhower campaign. But Murdoch, setting his sights set on being king of the rag world, said "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn" with an Australian accent and continued the ascent which, according to a law of physics, led to his eventual descent. Whatever goes up must come down, the law reads, and it holds true most of the time except for people like Oprah. It is especially true for people who hack, are rude, act bizarre, honk at other drivers for not hitting the gas quickly enough at stoplights and commit other crimes against humanity.

What do kings like Rupert Murdoch and Idi Amin do? They expand their empire through corruption and intimidation. That's what, and so it began, or continued. It's one thing for a country to spy on another to gain access to secrets, like what date and time they intend to drop by for a hostile take over. It's another to pay the police for information and spy on private citizens all in the name of sales. And their power expanded, as Andy Coulson, one of his rag princes, wound up as a Press Secretary at 10 Downing Street.

But now that is all over. Why, oh why, couldn't Rupert Murdoch been content to join an organization like the Sierra Club and hike through the woods classifying flora and fauna? Maybe then the state of journalism would be well, more journalistic.

The revelation that two former House Ethics Committee staffers secretly leaked materials to Republicans on the Committee and possibly outside the Committee to hammer California Congresswoman Maxine Waters and New York Congressman Charles Rangel is a near textbook example of how politics doesn't just taint congressional ethics cases, but makes them a bitter joke. The two former top staffers leak of the confidential documents to the Republicans on the panel blatantly violated the standard of confidentiality that's the cornerstone of any legal proceeding. In a criminal case the taint would have resulted in an instant dismissal of the charges against the accused. But this isn't a criminal case, and Congress is not a court of law, but a perennial nest of political infighting, backbiting, one-upmanship and cut throat intrigue between and among Democrats and Republicans. Waters was the perfect fall woman for their political intriguing.
Waters was accused nearly two years ago of influence peddling in an alleged scheme to get millions in TARP bailout money for a bank in which her husband had stock. The House Ethics Committee, then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the Congressional Black Caucus, and in fact all House Democrats reported and hashed over the allegations against her at the time and found no smoking gun proof that Waters did anything wrong. But that didn't stop Ethics Committee members from blaring the charges to the press and public that Waters was a graft ridden, conniving Democratic politician that deserved to have the ethics book thrown at her .

It was no accident that Waters was plopped on the political hot seat three months before the 2010 mid-term elections. House Democrats were scared stiff that the GOP would erase their majority. What better way for them to prove that they could police their own, and make good on Pelosi's oft quoted vow to cleanse the swamp in Congress than to make sacrificial lambs out of a handful of wayward Democrats. The choice of Waters had little to do with the actual charges and their alleged transgressions, or even whether they had merit or not. It was grimy politics, pure and simple.

Waters was not merely a rank and file Democrat. She is one of the highest profile, nationally known Democrats, and an African-American. This gave even greater veneer of credence to Pelosi and ranking Democrats contention that they will go after any Democrats no matter their party rank and stature that cross the ethics line. The ploy didn't work. The GOP still turned the November 2010 mid-term elections into a Democratic rout. That meant near total domination of committee chairs, and they determine what gets voted up or down, and when it comes alleged ethics violations who gets investigated and who gets a pass. Partisan politics again can't be separated from the political mix. With Waters, the damage was done. She was firmly imprinted in the media and public mind as the poster politician for congressional corruption.
The revelations of the improper leaks of the Waters ethics probe documents by the former committee staffers to Republicans was no surprise. This probably happens more often than not when partisan party committee members or staffers decide to take political license to go after a perceived vulnerable member of the opposing party. It was just as predictable that when the revelations of misconduct by the former staffer's first surfaced back in March that Ethics Committee chair Alabama Republican Jo Bonner moved quickly to put out the fire. He claimed that the committee members had acted with the "the highest ethical standards." This was beyond laughable. The reputation of Waters had been thoroughly dragged through the public and media mud by then and there was little sign of a public pushback by House Democrats against the committee probe.

The Democrats inaction on this was no surprise given their timid, club footed response to GOP initiatives that have kept them rocked back on their heels since November. The revelation of the leaks, though, are as close to iron clad proof that the Democrats will ever get of wrong doing by former Ethics Committee staffers. They had a clear political agenda and that was to discredit Waters, and further bludgeon the Democrats into political submission.

There have been calls for a special prosecutor to look into the leaks. But that would drag out the process against Waters even longer. The non-case against Waters has meandered off and on for far too long for anyone to take the probe or for that matter the ethics committee that's supposedly probing her seriously. The Democrats response should be quick and decisive to the Ethics Committee muddle. The response should be too loudly demand that the charges against Waters be dropped. Anything less reaffirms the terrible message that an Ethics Committee that is sworn to police wayward House members is nothing more than a shill and a sham that bends, twists, and mangles its own procedures for cheap partisan gain.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

Rupert Murdoch has been in the muck and mire before, and he is a survivor. He didn't get to his high position as the greatest "Media Baron" since William Randolph Hearst, without nearly miraculous survival skills and a will of iron. Still, this does look bad for his empire and his familial successors. Chances are either they won't inherit or what they inherit will be greatly diminished.

©2011 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com

Some have called the murder of eight year-old Leiby Kletzky senseless. But it wasn't that. It came at the hand of out-and-out negligence.

Allegedly, thirty-four year old Aron Levi, the accused murderer, had had scrapes before. After he admitted to the crime, a neighbor reported that he also tried kidnapping her son a few years before, but that she screamed and scared him away. Someone else came forward with a similar complaint. Things might have played out differently had they also gone to the police.

A while back, I befriended a woman who many found tightly wound and quirky. Her friends and acquaintances thought that the backpack loaded with papers she carried around peculiar and her insistence of whispering in certain rooms because someone might be eavesdropping, odd.

One day, she asked me to meet her for lunch. As we sat at a table with that loaded backpack next to her, she told me that the police were after her and that they'd burned her bandaged arms with lasers.

"What did you do?" I asked.

"They said I stole books when I was in college."

I knew she hadn't been a student in years and told her that she sounded crazy, but she persisted. I thought she might need a rest and invited her to stay at my home, which is airy and quiet.

When we drove to her house to get her things, it looked like something from a "Beautiful Mind." Closet doors were wired shut, light bulbs were missing from fixtures, and boxes and barricades were in front of windows and doors.

Having ample clues, I realized that she was schizophrenic when she thought that spies were crawling through my ceiling and sending poisonous gas through the vents. When she pulled out a gas mask, I invited her out for coffee to get her out of the enclosed space of my home.

After she became agitated and began yelling at me in my car, I became sacred to be alone with her. I also thought that she could be a danger to herself and others, so I drove back to my building under the guise of taking her to a burn center to have her arms checked, but she only went after I told her that she could never come over again unless she agreed.

The fifteen-minute ride was the longest one of my life because she thought we were being recorded and wouldn't let me talk.

After she checked in, I went into the hallway, and she watched me pace back and forth through the glass partition while I called every buff male I knew asking him to meet me at my house in case they sent her back with me.

Fortunately, they didn't.

When the male nurse asked what was wrong, she said she only wanted to talk to a doctor. He jotted this down and said she had to talk to him first. She then mentioned the burns on her arms.

"Remember you thought that men were hiding in my ceiling and that we were being gassed?" I said fearing that he might miss the real reason for our visit.

She told me to shut up and lunged at me, but he stepped forward. I called him aside and begged him not to send her home with me.

"Don't worry," he said summoning a doctor, "I already know she's crazy."

After the doctor was done talking to her, I followed him into the hallway just to be sure. I stayed by her side as the nurse shot her with a sedative, which she first refused because it was unfamiliar. He seemed happy to give it to her.

The nurse asked if she had any relatives I could call. I knew she had a sister in Vegas, so she gave me her cell phone and her sister's number. Once I got a hold her, she said that she too thought her a little eccentric, but she never thought she'd be hospitalized over it.

She drove in from Vegas and stayed in the house during her week of her hospitalization. A few days in, she said she was feeling better and enjoying drawing pictures and talking to those people everyday, even though she still thought that they were trying to gas her.

She called me a week later when she was released to let me know that she wasn't mad at me. But I understood and fortunately never heard from her again after that.

If someone had paid more attention to the Aron Levis, the Charles Mansons and the Casey Anthonys of the world, then maybe eight year-old Leiby Kletzky would be running and skipping and jumping like any other eight year-old kid, and his parents would still be tucking him in at night.

The news reports that President Obama was courting large campaign donors stirred complaints that this will put him even deeper into political hock to fat cat donors and the corporate rich if re-elected. This was the oft-heard knock against Obama in 2008. A study by the nonpartisan Campaign Finance Institute did confirm that a sizeable number of large donors oiled Obama's campaign. The big bucks Obama got from America's leading top cap political financiers supposedly was smoking gun proof that he had broke his promise that his campaign would be a populist financed campaign based on the nickels and dimes of tens of thousands of individual contributors. The inference was that Obama would be a hopeless captive of Wall Street and corporate interests.
This ignored too much then about what it takes to win the White House and it ignores it even more now. Obama, nor any other presidential candidate, could be competitive in a hard fought general election fight without the tens of millions that lobbyists, PACs, corporations, Wall Street, and labor unions shove into a presidential candidate's campaign coffers. With two exceptions, the best financially well-heeled candidate has won every presidential primary campaign since 1980. The 2008 presidential primary and general election was no exception.

Hillary Clinton was the near consensus early odds on favorite to bag the Democratic nomination. Her failure had nothing to do with campaign bumbles, policy stumbles, or voter rejection. She simply ran out of money to be competitive with Obama in the smaller state primaries. That enabled Obama to rack up what ultimately proved to be an insurmountable delegate lead. It was the same in the general election. Obama had a bulging campaign chest. Republican presidential foe, John McCain didn't. It was the financial head of stem that Obama had built up coming out of the primary battle with Clinton that made the difference for Obama in being able to saturate the airwaves with his campaign pledges and assaults on McCain. None of this comes cheap. In 2004, Bush and Democratic presidential contender John Kerry shelled out more than one quarter of a billion dollars on assorted media and advertising expenses alone. The figure spent on media was higher for Obama and McCain. There is no other way to reach and try to sell millions on the candidate's message.
The fault for the outrageous cost of a presidential campaign is certainly not with Obama. It just points up the bitter reality that politics is a hard, dirty, cash soaked game, and those with the most cash will always have the edge. But Obama even while bound to play within the tightly constricted rules of the big money presidential financial money game, has taken two major steps that at least could point the way for shaving some of the hard edge off of the built-in advantage the rich have in determining elections. He has not taken money directly from corporate lobbyists and maintained that he would aggressively seek contributions from small donors. In 2008, more than 60 percent of his final take came from donors that gave less than $1,000.

Obama took much heat for opting out of the public financing system. This again was supposedly more evidence that Obama had betrayed his pledge to be the little guy's candidate and was a naked grab for big dollars from the wealthy. That was not the reason. Obama faced two behemoth obstacles that McCain didn't. He had fought a bruising and costly Democratic primary fight with Clinton that drained millions from his campaign coffers. Given the past history of presidential campaigns the expectation was that McCain would be able to raise untold millions through independent expenditure committees. In the past that was the bread and butter for GOP candidates. These committees and donors are not bound by the strict reporting rules of the Federal Elections Commission. They've bankrolled GOP candidates with unlimited funds through this backdoor channel.

This didn't happen with McCain in part because he agreed to accept public financing and that sent a strong signal that his campaign would play it close to the vest in terms of where the dollars came from and how they were spent. Then there was the financial meltdown in the crucial two months before the November vote. McCain looked to many rich donors like a certain loser. It would have been money down the drain.
The 2012 campaign will not be a rerun of 2008. The presumptive GOP presidential front runner Mitt Romney is every bit the cash cow that Obama is. He will also have an advantage that McCain didn't. That's the Supreme Court's decision that allows corporations to give directly to campaigns. The early signs are that corporations will again give big to the GOP. Romney will turn the tables and hammer Obama on his alleged financial and economic failures. He will ask the question Reagan asked Carter during their 1980 presidential debate "are you better off than you were four years ago." The question worked again when Obama asked it about the GOP in 2008. History shows a president's fate hinges on how voters answer that question.
That costs money, and lots of it, to convince millions to answer yes. It's money that Obama has no choice but to raise.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst and Monday co-host of the Al Sharpton Show. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

In the end, Congress will just have to raise the debt ceiling. They'd better because I want to cash in on my 403B, and this is killing the stock market and my bundle. Sometimes, you really do get the fuzzy end of the lollipop (with certain Congresses), as Marilyn Monroe kind of said in "Some Like it Hot."

Even the president of the IMF said that refusing to raise it could cause "severe shock" to the global economy, which would lead to an even bigger meltdown, so they'd better hop to it and do it while the getting's good.

Besides, it's not exactly a shocking idea, as Congress started raising it after enacting the Second Liberty Bond Act in 1917. Ever since, our debt has inched its way up from the millions to the billions, and this may be part of the reason that the Republicans are dragging their feet. Though that may be giving them too much credit as, no jewels themselves, they often act like a bunch of grumpy kindergarteners in need of a nap and some milk and cookies.

If the Repubs. don't want to become Kamikaze politicians, they'd better come up with a plan that doesn't involve genuflecting to the rich while throwing the poor and the elderly under the bus. After all, it is the good people that put them into office, and it will be the same ones who take them out unless they put a little hitch in their git along

It is insulting, condescending and demeaning, but it isn't really personal. As Tom Hagen in The Godfather explains to hot head Sonny, "Even shooting your father was business not personal, Sonny."

So, are the Republicans being really nasty to Obama? Are they often tasteless and out of line? Yes, but it's really not personal. They are cynically looking for any way of harming him. Why? Because they want power. Is this good for America? Of course not. The question, however, never really comes up. The Republicans are too busy doing the dirty business of politics. Thank goodness Democrats would never sink so low.*
*Please read last line with a glass of Beaune and a side-order of irony.
©2011 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com

The GOP's war over America's debt ceiling war is not about America's debt, it's about President Obama. The debt ceiling debate can't be separated from the GOP's never-ending hunt for any issue that can taint, embarrass, and ultimately weaken the Obama presidency. The GOP's goal is as it always been to make Obama a one term president. The issue of whether America can pay its bills or not, or reneges on its financial obligations, which would be the catastrophe that would result from failing to raise the ceiling, is secondary to the GOP's cynical political ploy.
The proof is how the debt ceiling jumped to center stage in political debate and the public's awareness of it. The debt ceiling was an absolute non-issue during George W. Bush White House tenure. It was raised ten times in those years with barely a peep that the U.S. was in mortal danger of a fiscal crash and burn under its great weight of debt. This debt was incurred almost exclusively by Bush's two wildly costly and wasteful wars, his two behemoth tax cut giveaways to the rich, a relentless gut of regulations that made banks and corporations tax liability fall to historic low levels, and then capped by a taxpayer giveaway to Wall Street banks and financial houses. The debt that would be hiked to near astronomical proportions if Congress ever approved the House GOP's budget plan, drafted by Rep. Paul Ryan, which would add $6 trillion in to the national debt over a decade. Strangely, there's no debt ceiling squawk from the GOP on this horrific prospect.

But the GOP didn't acquiesce in turning the debt into a non-issue solely to appease a GOP president. Congress jumped the debt ceiling 64 times since 1962 before Bush took office for Democratic and Republican presidents alike. The ceiling was raised even in election years without any public fanfare.
But when polls showed that a majority of Americans were concerned about mounting debt, and that a sizeable number of Americans wanted to rein in spending, the debt ceiling instantly became a fresh weapon for the GOP to barrage Obama. They calculate they can score three political pluses on the cheap. They can further tar Obama and the Democrats as reckless spendthrifts that want to run the country and the economy into the ground. They can wrap themselves even more snugly in the cloak of the defenders of fiscal prudence and responsibility with the solemn mission of guarding the nation's taxpayer's purse. They can drive a wedge between Obama and Congressional Democrats by forcing him to make concessions for a budget deal that will draw howls from Democrats. The concessions are of course, putting the Democrat's two sacred cow programs, Medicare and Social Security, on the chopping block.

The GOP ploy played out to predictable perfection. The instant word leaked out that Obama had offered to make a tweak in the cost of living formula for Social Security and raise the age limit on Medicare recipients; a legion of Congressional Democrats screamed betrayal and warned that any such deal on the two vital programs would have damaging consequences for Democrats in 2012. They are right. That was the whole point of the GOP forcing Obama to take the drastic steps of offering up Social Security and Medicare as bargaining chips to put him at odds with other Democrats and cause jitters among the Democratic voter base.

Democratic House Minority Leader Steny Hoyer glimpsed that this was indeed a calculated maneuver by the GOP and openly groused that the GOP could politicize the debt ceiling debate. But Hoyer was being far too cautious and generous in saying "could" about the ploy. The only way to make any sense out of the GOP's waging a World War II proportion battle out of something that had been as pro forma as the changing seasons for a half century was politics. The GOP leaders will eventually approve a deal on the budget and that will include raising the debt ceiling for the 75th time. But the GOP won't cut the deal without one more go at scoring a couple more political brownie points at Obama's expense.

They'll loudly proclaim that by waging the fight over the ceiling they thwarted the Democrats from continuing to bloat spending, held the line against any tax increases, and that this in effect prevented retarding the dubious recovery. And if in the process they've managed to sow enough ill will and division among Democrats then this is all the better in improving the prospects of whatever GOP presidential hopeful eventually emerges from the pack to challenge Obama.
President Obama almost certainly had the GOP's cynical scenario in mind when he blasted "professional politicians" for holding the government hostage while they jockey for partisan political gain. This shot at the GOP will fall on deaf ears precisely because the debt ceiling fight was never about debt but about Obama.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

Oh Gail-Tzipporah, that was interesting, ironic and nearly completely wrong-headed. So, your hippie-chick acquaintance of so many years ago sensitized you to the impact that every individual makes on the planet and ergo, undocumented folks make a destructive dent in our otherwise pristine society. Well, it is true that we all make a dent and no one makes bigger and deeper dents than we regular Americans. And, by the way, you and I are only recently considered to be "regular" Americans. Not so long ago, with or without papers, we were, as our cousin Emma Lazarus wrote, the wretched refuse of Eastern Europe's teeming shores.

Finally to your point: Do they take up a lot of social services and are they disproportionately represented in our penal system? Yes, of course, as every other wave of immigrants has. Immigrants largely inhabit the lower socioeconomic quartile and, as every other mass migration, produce workers in various illegal activities. Anyone remember the Irish gangs in New York and Boston, the Italian mob in Chicago or the affirmative action policies of the Mafia who integrated Bugsy Siegal, Meyer Lansky and Mickey Cohen? In two generations they will be fully integrated and will join us in committing proper white color crimes. Immigrants use guns. Real citizens use computers.

©2011 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com

Long ago, when Nehru jackets and love beads were the craze, Karen and I were drinking coffee in an East Lansing, Michigan coffeehouse on the last leg of our winter break in college. We'd just sat down when in walked a hippie chick with that certain je ne sais quois hippie-chick type vibe. Her hair was long and parted down the middle, and she wore desert boots (women always notice those things) and a flowing top made from a strong cotton blend.

Recognizing her from class, Karen invited her to join us. Now I have forgotten many things since then. I have no idea what I ate for dinner last Tuesday, I've forgotten the names of all my teachers from high school and I often lose receipts, but I will always remember something that hippie chick.

"Wherever I go, whatever I do," she said, "I create a little dent in the earth and all the loose nuts and bolts come rolling down."

The comment spun around and stuck like a bad tattoo.

Last week, the latest nut and bolt to come rolling down wanted to know if I am a racist. Me, of all people, me, an upstanding American citizen with a so-so driving record, who tips more than 20% at the car wash regardless of race, creed or national origin, if they are polite and everything is still there.

Now let me make one thing perfectly clear: I have never joined a racist organization, not only because I hate going to meetings, but because I am not wired that way and my kin didn't exactly come over on the Mayflower.

But I do have my limits. I've got nothing against people from other countries because we are all from somewhere. It's just the illegal, sneaking across the border type that don't want to bother standing in line for a work permit or paying any taxes that do me in.
Though that is only half the story. I've been thinking things over since last week, and I am going to reverse my original stand, for I now believe that illegal immigrants help make this nation strong in three ways:

Way 1: They Create Jobs, especially in law enforcement, border patrol and the fire department. They also create jobs in hospitals after fights and for the media, who report on these things, and they have bolstered the court system from the translators.

Way 2: They Help the Environment. Many have taken up a gardening by growing funny little plants in places like the Angeles National Forest. Scientists know that foliage helps the environment by releasing oxygen in place of all the carbon dioxide that's out there, so we should be clean pretty soon.

Way 3: They Add to the Census: Some countries, like Finland, have an almost zero population growth. We should only have their problem. It would be easier finding parking at the beach or the mall.

Maybe it's something in their vodka or their dancing that keep people away. Or maybe they haven't got as many liberals.

Humberto Leal Garcia's name will hopefully be obliterated within the next week or so. The life he created for himself wasn't worth anything anyway.

In 1966, the then 22 year-old Garcia raped and bludgeoned a 16 year-old girl after meeting her at a block party and was given the death penalty. But as his day of dawning drew near, some said that as a Mexican citizen, he could have gotten help and perhaps had his sentence commuted to life in prison.

Fearing retaliation against Americans in Mexico, Obama asked that the execution be stayed to make sure that Garcia had been given every Constitutional consideration, like Mexico has been so considerate of us by printing all those maps to the US and sending over all those drug addicts and gang members. Hillary agreed and wanted to see if there were other legal avenues Garcia could have pursued to save his sorry life. The geniuses at the UN hopped on board.

The girl's mother, Rachel Terry, wanted the execution to go on.

Fortunately, Texas Governor, Rick Perry and the United States Supreme Court in a vote of 5-4 agreed that enough was enough and Garcia died by lethal injection in Hunstville prison yesterday.

"I'm sorry for everything I've done," he said before his execution. "I have hurt a lot of people. Let this be final and done. I take full blame for this."

Taking responsibility was probably the only sane thing he did in his life.

The Mulholland Bridge before the 405 opened in 1960
Note: This is the high bridge carrying Mulholland, not the bridge at Skirball

We in Southern California put the Car in Carmageddon, and it is our fitting karma that closing our 405 freeway will deliver us our just desserts. Closing the freeway in the Sepulveda Pass will bring us to our knees. 500,000 cars per weekend normally pass through the pass. They flow relatively freely on Sundays but Saturdays have become as bad as week-days. I suspect when we plug the pass we will all be in a weak daze.

If the pass doesn't open on time the $6,000 fine for each ten minutes might be an incentive to the contractors but will be no consolation to our community. Still whatever happens, it is only a token of what is to come. Repent! And remember, if we survive this, Carmageddon is coming again in a year when they take down the other half of the Mulholland Bridge!

©2011 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com

Hopefully, no one betted on the state winning the Casey Anthony trial because it would have been money out the window.

She won not because her lawyer, Jose Baez, is a silver-tongued orator who would cause the Supreme Court to break out in applause, but because the state couldn't prove how Caylee Anthony died. My legal expert was one of the few people who knew they were going to lose because they were asking for the death penalty without any proof as to how that little girl died.

Juries usually reserve the death penalty for those who are a danger to society like the John Gacy's and Jeffrey Dahmer's and Ted Bundy's of the world. Casey Anthony isn't a danger to society, though her lack of feeling for her parents, who were subjected to outlandish theories and public humiliation just to save her, is shocking. And I am sure they would do it all over again. I was hoping she wouldn't get the death penalty because losing their granddaughter and child would have put the Anthony's over the edge.

I believe Casey Anthony accidentally killed her daughter, but was relieved when it happened because it opened up a world long-lost for her under the pressure of raising a toddler. A normal mother would have been grief-stricken and would have gone for help in a last ditch effort to save her child. Anthony got a tattoo reading "the beautiful life" and partied.

The most sensible thing to come out of that three-ring circus of a case is a comment made by her ex-fiance, Jesse Grund, in an interview with Matt Lauer. After Lauer asked him what he would tell Anthony if he saw her again today, he said, "I would tell her that she has to repent because at the end she is going to have to answer for why Caylee isn't on this earth anymore."

How Casey Anthony will pick up the pieces after throwing her family and child under the bus is anyone's guess, but frankly, my dear, I don't think she gives a damn and never really did.

We are predictably fascinated when pretty little white girls go missing and turn up dead. We are even more interested when we feel we know the killer and then tune in for the real life version of Law and Order. As faithful watchers of the Law and Order franchise we know that sometimes the prosecution loses. But few were prepared for this reality TV verdict in Florida.

Well, I'm sure, this being America, the land that can't distinguish celebrity from notoriety, Ms. Anthony will do just fine with a book, paid interviews, eventually Dancing with the Stars, and a movie of the week special, Law and Order: Orlando.

©2011 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com

Casey Anthony is not O.J. Simpson in white female face. The only real reason that Anthony is even mentioned in the same breath as O.J. is because she was acquitted of first degree murder. And many of those that bothered to pay any attention to the case fervently believed she was guilty and expected her to be convicted. The resemblance ends abruptly there. The hard fact of the Anthony case and verdict is that other than what the media tried to make of it, this was never more than a case of an over reaching District Attorney trying to squeeze a first degree murder conviction out of what by all evidence was arguably at best a case of parental criminal neglect and lying. But the media in the usual clinical search for anything that smacks of a scintilla of salacious sensationalism moved heaven and earth to blow it into the second coming of the O,J, case dubbed crime and trial of the century.

Nearly sixteen years after the O.J. acquittal it's worth taking a look back to see exactly why a young, irresponsible, impoverished no-name white woman, could suddenly should never be talked of in the same breath as O.J. and the real trial of the century. In fact, the very starting point for debunking the Anthony-O.J. comparison is the very fact that it's even made in the first place. That is prima facie proof that a decade and a half later O.J. still gets tongues furiously wagging at the mention of the murders, and the name of the man accused of committing them, O.J. Simpson. That will not be said sixteen years or even sixteen days after the Anthony acquittal.

The reasons are simple. The O.J. case was the complete social, racial, celebrity, gender, and tabloid package. The murders of Brown and Goldman heightened racial tensions, as well as public awareness about domestic violence. They stirred rage against the double standard of wealth and celebrity privilege in the legal system, and elevated celebrity murder cases to media tabloid sensationalism.

Those were the gripping elements that made millions in the U.S. and globally gawk in awe and fascination for seemingly endless months at the often mundane and drab proceedings in the Simpson trial courtroom. This was the first real glimpse that these countless millions had of the inner workings of the court system. But that wouldn't have kept them glued to the TV set if the key player hadn't been one of America's most indulged, dashing, and famed celebrity-athletes who was cooed and fawned over by advertisers, Hollywood paparazzi, and had a beautiful and young white wife. O.J. was the American Dream personified. He was an African-American who rose to the top of celebrity pyramid and had true cross-over appeal to whites. But what truly made the O.J. case the lasting talk of the town was race, or rather the term that quickly crept into the American lexicon, the "racial divide."
In countless polls before, during and after the trial the majority of whites was absolutely convince that Simpson committed the murders and evaded justice, while a majority of blacks said he was innocent and that the verdict was a just one.

Prosecutors in the trial skillfully painted Simpson as an irresponsible, abusive and violent husband. This portrayal shoved the issue of spousal abuse and domestic violence into the public view. A number of states passed stiff laws mandating arrest and jail sentences for domestic assaults. Police, district attorneys and judges nationwide promised to arrest, prosecute and sentence domestic batterers.

The horde of Simpson media commentators, legal experts and politicians who branded the legal system corrupt also fueled public belief that justice is for sale. Simpson's acquittal seemed to confirm that the rich, famous and powerful have the deep pockets to hire high-priced, high-profile attorneys, experts and investigators who routinely enable their well-heeled clients to weasel out of punishment.
Then there was the media which struck pay dirt with Simpson.

The Simpson case turned the slow drift of much of the mainstream media toward tabloid sleaze sensationalism and a headlong rush into celebrity trials. Staid mainstream publications that in times past would have back-paged a murder case, even a celebrity case, morphed into the National Enquirer, Star and the legion of other tabloids. A gaggle of daytime gossipy talk shows have since successfully parlayed innuendo, rumor, half-truths and outright lies into hugely profitable empires and ratings bonanzas.
In the decade since Simpson's acquittal, newspapers and the TV networks have force-fed the public a bloated diet of Simpson-style sensationalism in the form of the Beltway sniper, Laci Peterson, Robert Blake, Phil Spector and other highly publicized murder cases. The Anthony case was only the latest in the sordid train of tabloid made court cases. The system worked the way it's supposed to work in the Anthony case. Jurors looked at the evidence and found simply that the prosecution did not prove Anthony committed first degree murder "beyond a reasonable doubt. The jurors did the same in the Simpson case. But that's the only thing about the Anthony case that remotely resembles O.J.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst and Monday co-host of the Al Sharpton Show. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

here at wordpress.

You know who by now.

Ay, the idiot brigade is out, and on the Fourth of July, no less. Except now they're stationed in Greece. They're like airborne amoebas, floating this way and that.

The latest cause celebre is the flotilla carrying passengers and commandeered by an American that was headed towards Gaza.

First, let's discuss the meaning of a flotilla: Even if the crew says it is carrying bandages, cookbooks, nuns' habits or whatever, it is really a ship carrying weapons to be used against Israel. And that's why Israel (and the rest of the world) must block them if we are to survive.

Its presence wouldn't be tolerated near the waters of any other country. If they pulled into New York Harbor, Obama would (hopefully) call on the Navy to send them scurrying back from whence they came, though he may also invite them to the White House for some hummus and tehina.

CNN has referred to the flotilla's crew as "activists," which means that the other news outlets will turn them into heroes, martyrs and humanitarian aid workers, but let's cut to the chase here and call them what they are in nice terms: terrorist sympathizers.

The news outlet featured some protestors chanting and waving their arms. Funny, not one of them looked Muslim. Maybe they never heard the word "jihad," but the same people they are whooping it up over are the ones that would blow them up, given their druthers.

Thank you, Greece for calling a spade a spade and for spotting a flotilla for the ticking time bomb it is.

Famed 19th Century abolitionist and fighter for racial justice Frederick Douglass thundered in a speech "What is the Fourth of July to Me." Douglass's asked the question and then proceeded to bitterly answer it. Put simply, it was a sham and hypocrisy of a holiday for a nation that pretended to extol the virtues of freedom and liberty yet continued to hold millions of blacks in chains, the lash, the gun, and every barbarism known to humankind. But Douglass did not just whipsaw America for its hypocrisy. He also offered hope for an America to redeem itself by making justice and equality a fact for all.
That was a century and a half ago. Douglass would probably still raise many questions about race, discrimination, poverty, and inequality, and injustice that still is deeply embedded in much of American society today. But he also would have at least a half smile of satisfaction that the nation has moved a long way in the past century toward shaving off some of the harshest and roughest edges of slave and later Jim Crow America.
The litany of civil rights laws, voting rights laws, affirmative action programs, court decisions, the spectacular rise of a prosperous black middle class, legions of top and influential black politicians, business leaders, and educators, and of course, the election of an African-American president all point to the partial fulfillment of America's promise. I'll remember both the failure and the promise, as Douglas did so long ago, on America's day of days.