The Obama Project@WindonWater.net

Peruvian child becomes symbol of US undocumented – Yahoo! News.

Difficult situation.  No easy answers – and an innocent child, American by birth, in jeopardy, because of her parent’s illegal status.  We need a better way.

QT

Utterly ridiculous story. I can’t see any reason why someone who favors restrictions on gun ownership can’t simultaneously admire the craftmanship of a gun. The fact that the article had to tell us what was “awkward” about this proves that the author is just making stuff up.

QT
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Many people are rightfully concerned about the creation of a police state in Arizona (and now, Texas, since apparently, Texas intends to put a similar law in place. MY fear is more long-term, more about the confluence of economic interests and insidious law. In America, we already have an example of a history of laws passing over time that gradually targetted a particular people, in pursuit of the agricultural interests of the south – and that example is what eventually became the legal framework of slavery. Here is a brief overview of some of the issues:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/1p263.html

Whatever the status of these first Africans to arrive at Jamestown, it is clear that by 1640, at least one African had been declared a slave. This African was ordered by the court “to serve his said master or his assigns for the time of his natural life here or elsewhere.”

The grounds for this harsh sentence presumabley (sic) lay in the fact that he was non-Christian rather than in the fact that he was physically dark. But religious beliefs could change, while skin color could not. Within a generation race, not religion, was being made the defining characteristic of enslaved Virginians, The terrible transformation to racial slavery was underway.

emphasis mine

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/1p270.html

• Philip Cowen Case: At her death in 1664, a Mrs. Amye Beazlye left to her cousin a black servant named Philip Cowen. The will stated that Cowen should work for the cousin for eight years, then be given his freedom and three barrels of corn and a suit of clothes. At the end of the eight years, the cousin extended the contract three years. At the end of those three years, he informed Cowen that another nine years of service was due. In 1675, Cowen petitioned the court for his freedom. The court sided with Cowen, asking the owner to release him from servitude and to pay him the corn and the cost of a suit.

• Fernando Case: A bondservant for life, Fernando petitioned the court in 1667 for his freedom, arguing that, since he was a Christian and had spent several years in England, he should serve no longer than an Englishman was required to serve. The court dismissed the suit. Fernando appealed to a higher court. (Unfortunately, no record of the higher court’s decision exists.)

(there are two other cases at this link)

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/1p262.html

Three servants working for a farmer named Hugh Gwyn ran away to Maryland. Two were white; one was black. They were captured in Maryland and returned to Jamestown, where the court sentenced all three to thirty lashes — a severe punishment even by the standards of 17th-century Virginia. The two white men were sentenced to an additional four years of servitude — one more year for Gwyn followed by three more for the colony. But, in addition to the whipping, the black man, a man named John Punch, was ordered to “serve his said master or his assigns for the time of his natural Life here or elsewhere.” John Punch no longer had hope for freedom.

That’s the legal background to the gradual erosion of even the limited rights African Americans had at the founding of this nation, until the legal framework was built up to decide, once and for all, that brown people born slaves should remain so their entire lives, and not as people even, but as property. So, a people arrive in the country with iffy legal status are gradually reduced to permanent slave status. But how about people whose legal status is known? How about free blacks?

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part3/3p325.html

The passage of the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act, fueled a huge and vastly profitable underground industry that took full advantage of the inferior legal status of free and enslaved blacks. The law made it possible for a white person to claim any black person as a fugitive, and placed the burden of proof on the captive. Free blacks living in Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and other cities near the borders of slave states were especially vulnerable, though several well-known cases demonstrate that no state was immune.

Slave speculators (or slavers) — who legally purchased the rights to runaways, captured them, and then resold them at a profit — often seized blacks at random, banking on their inability to prove their status to the satisfaction of a magistrate. In one case, a slave speculator who attempted to seize AME Bishop Richard Allen found himself in debtors’ prison, charged with attempted kidnapping, false accusation and perjury by Allen, who dropped the charges several months later.

I would like to think that we are so far past this as a country that this could never happen to Mexicans in the south, who are working as day laborers in agricultural fields, but since in some cases Mexicans have already seen slavery conditions, and given our low level of sympathy for Mexicans as our suspicions about the legal migrant status is provoked, are they really so far off from the precarious position African Americans were in so long ago?

I don’t think so.

QT

From Merriam-Webster.com:

politico

Main Entry: po·lit·i·co
Pronunciation: \p?-?li-ti-?k?\
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural po·lit·i·cos also po·lit·i·coes
Etymology: Italian politico or Spanish político, ultimately from Latin politicus political
Date: 1630

: politician

Apparently Politico (a political blog) wants to trademark the name. Except that this is already an established, well-known word in the English language. It’s a word that made sense as a blog name because it was an already well-known word. Not content with merely being offensive, Politico is also being a bully – suing a British blog for using a word that is in the public domain.

Bob Cesca has started a logo boycott. I’m not a “politico.” But I support the boycott.

Editing to say – in sensitivity to the plight of the Baha’is in Iran, I am re-thinking adding “Politico” to the name of this blog. But I’ve found a nice new way of showing my support…

QT

I’m reading everyone’s opinions regarding the Massachusetts election. Of all comments, what stands out most is a report prior to the election that President Obama was listless in his defense of candidate Coakley. Coupled with what I’ve read about the candidate, I thought “who could blame him?” But of course, the democratic party could blame him. He ran for president but he also inherited “head of the party.” The roles are in conflict, and there’s no way to enact his agenda while trying to also be the head of his party.

The Baha’i Writings state definitively that the political systems of the world are failing. Today I smell the stench of the failure of our political system as our government fails almost entirely to meet the needs of its people and the existential challenges of the nation. So many good ideas that can’t happen because people have personal, political interest to force good ideas to fail.

QT

Andrew Sullivan seems to be in a tiff with Glenn Reynolds over a picture of President Obama and Vice President Biden. This is getting some play on both the left and the right. There’s an accusation of racism being floated at Reynolds, though nothing in his post suggests that that is most definitely the cause for Reynold’s complaint. And yet, some of Reynold’s commenters reveal their racialist bent of mind at his prompting – when asked to caption the photo, some commenters cast President Obama in the role of a drug dealer. Ugh. Because a black man, no matter how accomplished, can be ridiculed with drug dealer jokes, right? If there was no racial intent, my bad, but as the saying goes… if it looks like a duck and quacks like one – it just might be a duck.

More disturbing than cranks on the right with their willful viciousness, is the defense from the left. They assert that when one zooms up close, the president looks “uppity” or “condescending” to his white subordinate, and that this must be what got Reynolds riled up. Maybe so. But having looked at the whole picture, and the zoomed up version, I have yet to see any appearance of uppitiness, condescension, drunkenness, or any other such look. I saw the president listening intently to the vice president, from an angle that forces his eyes downward – because the president is in fact, taller than the vice president.

It seems to me that any attempt to see this in any other light is reaching … and the reach is because the president is black.

Editing to add two points: 1 – the controversy hipped me to the flickr stream – which is just AWESOME. So, I’m glad for that… and 2 – I guess it might be helpful if I upload the picture???

President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden talk before the start of the Kennedy Center Honors at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., Dec. 6, 2009. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

QT

Obama homed in on an Afghanistan pullout date — latimes.com.

I can make no comments on the wisdom of continuing this war, nor any hopes aside for the least amount of loss of life on all sides.  I pray sincerely for this.  But I must comment on my sincere appreciation for President Obama’s thoughtful process.  This is a great article about how the strategy announced Tuesday was arrived at – and it reaffirms my faith in this president.  It also reaffirms my conviction that President Obama indeed made friends with General Petraeus – that the manly comraderie evident in the pictures was genuine.  Years from now people will have to evaluate this presidency on its merits.  One thing that I believe will emerge is that we did in fact have a president – the claims of this administration’s incompetence, inexperience, etc., will have been proven largely false.  Here are some key parts:

On Veterans Day, after laying a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns in a cold drizzle, Obama convened his war council for the eighth time.

By this time, the staff was ready to present timelines. In a slide presentation in the Situation Room, the group looked at a bell-curve graph projecting a troop buildup over time — a few at first, then an increasing flow that would crest and trickle off.

To emphasize his desire to speed up the deployment, the president held up a printout copy of the bell curve and pointed to its apex, indicating the peak of the flow.

“He says, ‘I want to move this to the left,’ ” as one official recounted it, speaking on condition of anonymity. ” ‘We need more troops in sooner.’ ”

For months, said a senior officer, the military’s U.S. Command had been examining ways to insert forces faster. Logistics specialists held drills in Afghanistan, Kuwait and other locations to see how fast they could move people and equipment into the war zone.

Meanwhile, engineers in Afghanistan had begun preliminary work to see how quickly they could build austere infrastructure to house thousands of additional troops.

Armed with that work, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, head of Central Command and chief of U.S. forces in the Middle East and Central Asia, told the president that, yes, the military could pull off the buildup he was requesting.

“We did so in Iraq,” said Petraeus, who designed and oversaw the Iraq troop buildup. “We can do so again.”

By the time Obama summoned the war council for its ninth and final meeting, the Monday before Thanksgiving, he had almost all the information he wanted. All that was left was a final poll of his top advisors.

“I want you to tell me how you feel about this ‘max leverage,’ ” he said. If people had any objections, he said, he wanted to know.

One by one, team members weighed in on the tenets of the plan, a “conditions-based transfer of authority to the Afghans,” as one witness described it.

No one voiced objection, the two senior administration officials said.

QT

On President Obama’s Bow to the Japanese Emperor, An Academic Friend Writes That Both the Left and the Right Are Wrong – Political Punch.

This from the article:

“The bow as he performed did not just display weakness in Red State terms, but evoked weakness in Japanese terms….The last thing the Japanese want or need is a weak looking American president and, again, in all ways, he unintentionally played that part.

“BTW, Obama’s bow at Suntory Hall was much better. Correct angle, slight bow. His hands were wrong but the physical tone was correct and appropriate.

Sure. I agree.  Someone buy the President one of those “Doing business in… ” books.  The idea of the Japanese bow is that among equals you bow only slightly as a show of respect, not deeply as a sign of humility.  That said – I’ve read where “Slight bow” means to an equal height… and given the obvious height differences between the president and the emperor… that could have caused some confusion.
Still – we’re a year past the election, almost a year into the presidency, and basic protocols, the kind you can buy info on from Barnes and Noble, are lacking.  Whoever is the protocols overseer is overdue for a performance review…

QT

The White House continues to categorize Fox News as a biased source. There are many ways to look at this, but for me there are two obvious facts: 1, its true… and 2, so what?

Unless I missed something, the president’s advisors are saying that Obama will continue to appear on their shows. Maybe not as frequently, but he’ll show. Meanwhile, they are providing a reasonable service if they stop answering to lies and instead start calling them lies. There is value to having a conservative analysis of the news…. but no value in being lied to in the name of freedom of the press.

Baha’u'llah talks about the excess of liberty… when freedom of speech and freedom of the press is used to protect deliberately misleading statements, we are seeing an example of the excess of liberty.

QT