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Karadzic defends Bosnian Serb "Holy" Cause at trial

Yogaforlife — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 05:58:59 -0800

Former leader Radovan Karadzic has said the Serb cause in the Bosnian war was "just and holy" as he began his defence at his genocide trial at The Hague.

Mr Karadzic, who led the Bosnian Serbs during the war in the 1990s, said there was a core group of Muslims in Bosnia - then and now - who wanted 100% power.

Speaking in The Hague, he insisted the Serbs were only acting in self-defence.

He insists he is innocent of all 11 charges from the 1992-95 Bosnian war, including genocide and war crimes.

The trial had been adjourned since November and the judge rejected a new request for a further postponement.

'Mere mortal'

Mr Karadzic, 64, suspended his boycott and appeared in court along with his lawyer on Monday as the trial resumed.

"I will defend that nation of ours and their cause that is just and holy," Mr Karadzic said in translated comments at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

"I stand here before you not to defend the mere mortal that I am, but to defend the greatness of a small nation in Bosnia-Hercegovina, which for 500 years has had to suffer and has demonstrated a great deal of modesty and perseverance to survive in freedom," he told the court.

"We have a good case. We have good evidence and proof."

After his initial remarks, Mr Karadzic began laying out a detailed account of the events that led up to the outbreak of the war.

The wartime leader is trying to show that there was no joint criminal enterprise - no plan or plot - to carry out the genocide or "ethnic cleansing", but that Serbs were only defending themselves from Muslim aggression, says the BBC's Dominic Hughes at the trial.

'War trick'

Mr Karadzic pointed to one defining event of the 44-month siege of Sarajevo - the 1994 attack on a market in which nearly 70 people died - saying it was a stage-managed "trick" for which Serbian forces were falsely blamed.

Mr Karadzic showed the court pictures of an empty marketplace, claiming it was the scene shortly before, as he put it, hundreds appeared and the attack was reported.

He is expected to present a two-day opening statement before prosecutors present their first witness on Wednesday.

Mr Karadzic faces two charges of genocide - including the killing in Srebrenica of more than 7,000 men and boys - as well as nine other counts including murder, extermination, persecution and forced deportation.

Prosecutors say he orchestrated a campaign of "ethnic cleansing" against Muslims and Croats in eastern Bosnia to create an ethnically pure Serbian state.

In his opening statement last October, prosecutor Alan Tieger said Mr Karadzic "harnessed the forces of nationalism, hatred and fear to pursue his vision of an ethnically segregated Bosnia".

Mr Karadzic had boycotted the proceedings, insisting on more time to prepare his case.

In November, the court appointed British lawyer Richard Harvey to take over the defence if he continued his boycott.

Mr Karadzic was arrested in Belgrade in 2008 after nearly 13 years on the run.

During his time in power, he was president of the self-styled Bosnian Serb Republic and commander of its army during the Bosnian conflict which left more than 100,000 people dead.

He is the most significant figure to face justice at this tribunal since the former Yugoslav President, Slobodan Milosevic, who died of a heart attack in 2006 before his own trial was concluded.

Source:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8542297.stm

Discount Savings When You buy themOnline

enjoymik — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 19:32:48 -0800

Did you know that there are plenty of discounts and savings to be had when you print online? Yes unlike traditional printing firms, an online printing company can be a great place to save some money on your printing. Most of these companies give discounts ed hardy belts, free services and fast schedules that can really help you save a lot of money and resources. So if you want to print online, here are the things you should look out for to get that extra savings.
Bulk your orders for a discount When you print online, you should always think of ways to bulk your orders. Not only should you print one type of material in large numbers, you should try printing all your needed materials in one order. By ordering in bulk, you can get great discounts for your whole order. So if you are printing catalogs, flyers and brochures all at the same time, the online printing company can give you a discount in printing and delivery since everything can be done in one batch. Moreover, you save a lot of time as you print all you need in one single printing process.
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Delivery and distribution perks You may also want to know that some printing companies also offer delivery and distribution perks. You do not need to have your prints sent to your location if you do not need to. If you plan on sending your prints to another branch of your company, you can have it delivered there ed hardy iphone. Moreover, if you plan on mail marketing, some printers offer courier service for it so you do not have to mail all of your marketing materials yourself. You can save a lot of money, time and effort doing it this way, so see if your printing company has the ability to do this.
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Its a dazzling diamond that amazes a womans eye the most in the world and nothing else. Thus, its a unanimous fact that a diamond wedding band would be the best gift you can present to your bride to make her the happy at the moment. Its not that there is no other choice but the diamond wedding bands, however it is the most astonished gift for that real momentous occasion. Another important fact stands with diamond: it represents a unique style and personality by itself that effects directly to the one who owns it. It has the exclusive power to reflect the extraordinary.
However, if you plan to gift a diamond wedding band to your fianc you should take her with you while shopping. Since a diamond ring is not a general ornament than any other ornaments and it holds its own personality, its important that the you are choosing for her should go with her present. It does not matter if the ring holds an ornate look or it has a very simple presentation, it should fit on her finger. Take your time, try to find out the best wedding ring that makes her the special to you for ever.
The above mentioned reason says only the ethnic part of the wedding ring shoppings story however; there is a practical reason that can be found to take your fianc with you to shop the wedding ring. In the process you can pick up the right size of the ring that would fit best on her finger because she would be physically around to try the ring before you buy it. There would be no place for any kind of confusion since she is around to choose her wedding band with you and she would definitely like that.
You would be astonished to the Variety of the collection of diamond rings once you look at the diamonds in the jewelry stores. If it is too high to afford a diamond ring with a diamond in the middle for you, you can look up for the rings that have various precious ed hardy iphone cover in the middle and small diamonds around it. You can choose the stone of the accordingly as her birthstone. Even that would looks stunning and attractive and of course precious. The reason you want to gift a diamond ring as a wedding gift would be still there.
Another important thing you need to remember while shopping for a diamond wedding ring. The metal that has been used for the band is as important as the diamond. The glorious platinum would be the best attachment with the diamond of course. Even, white gold can be a charming accompany with the diamond. Its true that diamond looks a bit dull with yellow gold however that even gives a noble and traditional look in it. If the money is not a factor with you, you should ask your fianc what does she needs with her diamond wedding ring. Or else, go for a platinum wedding band starred with a dazzling diamond which is the best you can afford for her.

Who Killed California?

Eleuthera — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 09:50:10 -0700

by Troy Senik
http://nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/who-killed-california
My apologies for having nothing originally in this post. The text was here but didn't show up.
Apparently this article is too long to be printed here, at about 11 pages. It is nevertheless worth reading, unless, as someone has already done, you have made your mind up what to believe before reading.

Liberal Lies About National Health Care: Third in a Series (Commemorative Plates On Sale Now!)

Eleuthera — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 14:02:19 -0700

by Ann Coulter
09/02/2009
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=33390

(9) If you like Medicare, you'll love national health care, which will just extend Medicare's benefits to everyone.

Hey -- I have an idea: How about we make everyone in America a multimillionaire by pulling Bernie Madoff out of prison and asking him to invest all our money! Both Medicare and Bernie Madoff's investment portfolio are bankrupt because they operate on a similar financial model known as a "Ponzi scheme." These always seem to run fabulously well -- until the money runs out.

Not only is Medicare bankrupt, but it is extremely limited in whom and what it covers. If Medicare were a private insurer, it would be illegal in many states for failing to cover hearing aids, podiatry, acupuncture, chiropractic care, marriage counseling, aromatherapy and gender reassignment surgery.


Moreover, Medicare payments aren't enough to pay the true cost of those medical services it does cover. With Medicare undercutting payments to hospitals and doctors for patients 65 and older, what keeps the American medical system afloat are private individuals who are not covered by Medicare paying full freight (and then some). That's why you end up with a $10 aspirin on your hospital bill.

National health care will eliminate everything outside of Medicare, which is the only thing that allows Medicare to exist.

Obviously, therefore, it's preposterous for Democrats to say national health care will merely extend Medicare to the entire population. This would be like claiming you're designing an apartment building in which every apartment will be a penthouse. Everyone likes the penthouses, so why not have a building in which every apartment is a penthouse?

It doesn't work: What makes the penthouse the penthouse is all the other floors below. An "all-penthouse" building is a blueprint that could make sense only to someone who has never run a business and has zero common sense, i.e., a Democrat.

(10) National health care won't cover illegal aliens -- as the president has twice claimed in recent radio appearances.

Technically, what Obama said is that the bill isn't "designed" to give health insurance to illegal aliens. (That bill, the "Health Insurance for Illegal Aliens Act of 2009," was still being drafted by Ted Kennedy at the time of his death, may he rest in peace.)

But unless the various government bureaucracies dispensing health care are specifically required by law to ask about citizenship status, illegals will be covered. We can't even get employers and police to inquire about citizenship status, but liberals assure us that doctors will?

And by the way -- as with the abortion exclusion -- the Democrats expressly rejected amendments that would have required proof of residency status to receive national health care.

Still not convinced? Day after day, The New York Times has been neurotically asserting that national health care won't cover illegal aliens (without ever explaining how precisely it will exclude illegal aliens).

So far, just this week, these Kim Jong Il-style pronouncements have appeared in the Treason Times:

    -- "Illegal immigrants will be covered. (Myth)" -- Katharine Q. Seelye, "Myth vs. Fact vs. Other," The New York Times, Sept. 2, 2009

    -- "(Sen. Jim DeMint) fueled speculation that a health care overhaul would cover illegal immigrants, although specific language says it would not." -- Katharine Q. Seelye, "Fighting Health Care Overhaul, and Proud of It," The New York Times, Aug. 31, 2009

    -- "'Page 50: All non-U.S. citizens, illegal or not, will be provided with free health care services.' ... The falsehoods include (that italic statement)." -- Michael Mason, "Vetting Claims in a Memo," The New York Times, Aug. 30, 2009

    -- "But that would not help illegal immigrants. Contrary to some reports, they would not be eligible for any new health coverage under any of the health overhaul plans circulating in Congress." -- Duff Wilson, "Race, Ethnicity and Care," The New York Times, Aug. 30, 2009

The last time the Times engaged in such frantic perseveration about a subject was when the paper was repeatedly insisting that Durham prosecutor Mike Nifong had a solid case against the Duke lacrosse players.

By August 2006, every single person in the United States, including the stripper, knew the stripper's claim of "gang rape" was a lie. That was when Duff Wilson -- quoted above -- co-wrote the Times' infamous cover story on the Duke case, titled: "Files From Duke Rape Case Give Details but No Answers." No answers!

(11) Obama has dropped his demand for the ironically titled "public option" (i.e., government-run health care), which taxpayers will not have an "option" to pay for or not.

Liberals never, ever drop a heinous idea; they just change the name. "Abortion" becomes "choice," "communist" becomes "progressive," "communist dictatorship" becomes "people's democratic republic" and "Nikita Khrushchev" becomes "Barack Obama."

It doesn't matter if liberals start calling national health care a "chocolate chip puppy" or "ice cream sunset" -- if the government is subsidizing it, then the government calls the shots. And the moment the government gets its hands on the controls, it will be establishing death panels, forcing taxpayers to pay for abortions and illegal aliens, rationing care and then demanding yet more government control when partial government control creates a mess.

Which happens to be exactly what liberals are doing right now.

The Real Tragedy of the Arrest of Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

stephley — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 15:26:06 -0700

By Melissa Harris-Lacewell, TheNation.com
Posted on July 22, 2009, Printed on July 22, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/141485/

Over the past several days a strange characterization of Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has emerged. Many are portraying him as a radical who easily and inappropriately appeals to race as an excuse and explanation. This image of Gates is inaccurate. In fact, more than any other black intellectual in the country Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was an apolitical figure. This is neither a criticism nor an accolade, simply an observation.

Gates is the director of the nation's preeminent institute for African American studies, but he is no race warrior seeking to right the racial injustices of the world. He is more a collector of black talent, intellect, art, and achievement. In this sense Gates embodies a kind of post-racialism: he celebrates and studies blackness, but does not attach a specific political agenda to race. For those who yearn for a post-racial America where all groups are equal recognized for their achievements, but where all people are free to be distinct individuals, there are few better models than Professor Gates.

Gates is largely responsible for the institutional investment in African American studies made by premier universities over the past two decades. Student activists and faculty advocates led the massive black studies movement of the 1960s; a movement that created substantial changes in course offerings, faculty recruitment, administrative structures, and student retention at many state universities. But the country's most privileged institutions remained largely untouched by this populist era of race and ethnic studies.

Rather than relying on techniques that mimicked the Civil Rights Movement, Gates helped innovate and perfected a market strategy for African American studies.

Gates used the inherent competitiveness of Ivy League institutions to create a hyper-elite niche for the very best black academics. His strategy improved the market value of black intellectuals throughout the academy and the public sphere. At one point Gates assembled a "dream team" at Harvard that included professors Cornel West, K. Anthony Appiah, Michael Dawson, Lawrence Bobo, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Lani Guinier and William Julius Wilson.

For a fleeting moment Gates was the curator of the world's best living museum of black intellectual life. His Harvard cohort sent other prestigious schools into a competitive scramble to assemble their own collection, initiating a gilded age of black academia.

Some individuals would have approached this task as a racial mission; a chance to influence public policy and discourse toward progressive racial ends. This was not how Gates approached it. His style is more deliberate and more detached. By my reading, Gates is tremendously proud of his racial identity, history, and legacy, but he has no particular political agenda beyond the collection and display of black greatness, regardless of its political valence. For example, although their ideologies are profoundly oppositional, Gates finds both Colin Powell and Louis Farrakhan emblematic of black manhood and greatness.

Gates frequently compares himself to W.E.B. Du Bois for whom his institute is named. Aspects of the comparison are apt, but Du Bois, unlike Gates, was first and foremost, a race man with a political agenda. In the course of his long, prolific, academic and activist life Du Bois pursued every imaginable strategy to address America's racial inequality. He advocated education, research, patriotic military service, interracial coalitions, direct advocacy, legal strategies and journalism. He was first a staunch integrationist and later a socialist. His self-exile to Ghana was a final expression of his disillusionment with the American project.

Professor Gates is not disillusioned with the American project. He is enamored of it. His home casually mixes classic Americana with protest art of the black Diaspora. His dinner table is rarely segregated and his Rolodex certainly isn't. Even his more recent commitment to genealogy and fascination with the human genome project is prompted by his delight in uncovering the messy, unexpected, deeply American stories embedded in black life.

Du Bois was a product of the American racial nadir. He lived at the hardest moment in our history for black citizens. He was deeply suspicious of white America and constantly vigilant in his interactions with white Americans. Gates is possible only in our present moment.

Du Bois deplored the double consciousness the ripped at the black soul. Gates is remarkable, in part, because he doesn't wear a mask during interracial interactions. Gates is precisely the same man with an all-black crowd as with a predominately white one. Though he certainly perceives color he does not make the subtle rhetorical, political, or self-presentation adjustments that most African Americans consider both necessary and ordinary.

Gates is invested in black life, black history, black art, and black literature, but he has managed to achieve a largely post-political and even substantially post-racial existence.

Then he was arrested in his own home.

The Cambridge police and Professor Gates tell somewhat different versions of the story. But both sides agree that Gates came home to find his front door jammed. He used his key to enter by the back door. He and his driver then pushed at the front door until it opened. Witnessing this, someone called the police and indicated there may be a breaking-and-entering in progress. While Gates was on the phone with a property management company a police officer arrived. The officer requested identification. Gates produced it. Even after ascertaining that Gates had not illegally entered the property, the officer arrested him for disorderly conduct. The police report asserts Gates yelled and behaved aggressively. Gates denies this. The charges have been dropped. In short, Gates was arrested even though the police officer was fully aware that Gates lived in the home.

In a moment of overzealous policing a young officer in Cambridge managed to handcuff and detain the living embodiment of post-racial possibility.

And although Gates maintains "I thought the whole idea that America was post-racial and post-black was laughable from the beginning," as if in a testament to his apolitical sensibilities Gates said in an interview to TheRoot.com "I would sooner have believed the sky was going to fall from the heavens than I would have believed this could happen to me."

It is hard to imagine many other African American men who would indicate such surprise. Even President Obama has spoken of the difficulty in hailing a cab and First Lady Michelle Obama has expressed her understanding of black men's vulnerability to random violence. But Gates seems genuinely surprised and deeply hurt. His sense of violation and humiliation evokes great empathy, but also some incredulity about his astonishment with racial bias in the criminal justice system.

I like and respect Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Although we have had intellectual and political disagreements he has always welcomed dissent and encouraged individuality. Our personal connection is not why I was so devastated to see his mug shot or images of him handcuffed on his front porch. I was not even distressed because of class implications that reasoned, "If this can happen to a Harvard professor then no one is safe."

My distress is squarely rooted in feeling that I watched the police handcuff American possibility.

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Melissa Harris-Lacewell, an associate professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton University, is completing her latest book, Sister Citizen: A Text for Colored Girls Who've Considered Politics When Being Strong Isn't Enough.

Bibi and Israel at Dead End by Pat Buchanan

Eleuthera — Tue, 19 May 2009 14:10:00 -0700

5/19/09

If there are no peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians for an independent Palestinian state, war next year is inevitable.

So King Abdullah II of Jordan has told the London Times: "If we delay our peace negotiations, then there is going to be another conflict between Arabs or Muslims and Israel in the next 12 to 18 months."

Whether the king's timetable is correct, endless cold war, erupting into hot wars, seems the fate of Israel if "Bibi" Netanyahu holds to his pledge never to allow a Palestinian state on the West Bank.

For, as John Mearsheimer, author of "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," writes in the May 18 American Conservative, if there is no Palestinian state, there are only three possible alternatives.

All involve "creating a 'greater Israel' ... that effectively controls the West Bank and Gaza, or all of what was once called Mandatory Palestine."

What are Bibi's three remaining options?

The first is annexation of the West Bank. But this would bring 2.4 million Palestinians into Israel, giving her a population 40 percent Arab. With a higher birth rate, Palestinians would soon outnumber Jews and vote to abolish the Jewish state, thus creating a bi-national state.

That would mean the end of the Zionist dream.

The second option is the Meir Kahane solution. The late rabbi urged the expulsion of the Palestinians from the occupied territories. But the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands or millions of Palestinians would mean innumerable casualties, a severing of all ties to the Arab world, the moral isolation of Israel and a break with the United States. America could not stand by and let such a human rights atrocity take place.

The third option is the Netanyahu option: no annexation, no ethnic cleaning, no Palestinian state -- but permanent control of the West Bank to assure the "Hamastan" in Gaza is never replicated on the West Bank.

What is wrong with the Bibi option?

It requires permanent control of Gaza, with Israel holding its 1.5 million people in what amounts to a vast penal colony with no access to the outer world by land, sea or air, except by permission of the Israeli military.

On the West Bank, this means permanent control of the 2.4 million Arabs through confinement in enclaves bordered on the west by the Israeli wall, on the east by the Jordan, bisected by roads set aside for the exclusive use of Israelis and dotted with checkpoints. Travel inside and outside the West Bank would be by sufferance of the Israeli military.

It is this prospect that caused Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to blurt, "If the two-state solution collapses," Israel will "face a South African-style struggle." It is this prospect that caused President Carter to warn of Israel's becoming an "apartheid" state.

For what other comparison comes to mind if the 4 million Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza are to be confined to such Bantustans, with no country to call their own, their economy and movement subject to Israeli authorities and the Israeli military?

There is another and fatal flaw in the Bibi option.

According to the U.N. Population Division, the Occupied Palestinian Territories (West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem) will be home to 4.4 million Palestinians in 2010, but 10 million by the centennial of the Jewish state in 2048. Palestinians in the occupied territories alone will equal the population of Israel, and Israel's population of 10 million will itself be about 30 percent Arab. By mid-century, Palestinians west of the Jordan will outnumber Israeli Jews two to one. And there will be 6 million more Palestinians in Jordan.

Moreover, according to Mearsheimer, since 2007, more Jews have left Israel than have come in. Some 700,000 to 1 million Israeli Jews live abroad, and a 2007 poll reportedly found that nearly one-half of all young people are considering leaving.

Yet Netanyahu's case is not uncompelling. We left Gaza and got Hamas. Never again! And as Hamas is committed to the destruction of the Jewish state, we will never negotiate with Hamas.

Which means no negotiations and no peace. For, in any free election, Hamas will win 35 percent to 65 percent and control or be part of any government coalition. And there will always be the possibility that Hamas will be voted into power in a new Palestinian state.

Netanyahu wants Obama to commit to go to war if necessary to denuclearize Iran, but he cannot force Obama to fight a war he cannot want. Obama wants Netanyahu to accept a Palestinian state with its capital in East Jerusalem, but lacks the clout in his own country and Congress to force Netanyahu to comply.

Where there is no solution, there is no problem.

In the short run, we shall find out if the King of Jordan is right.

In the long run, demography is destiny.

British Police Fear Massive Neo-Nazi Attack

MartiniLush — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 07:47:30 -0700

British police issued public warnings this week about the possibility of a major neo-Nazi terrorist attack in England. Various extremist groups are suspected of plotting attacks in order to fuel tensions between different racial and religious groups. Muslims and Jews are among the groups that have been warned to be on the alert. Several ethnic and religious minorities also could be at risk, senior police officials say.

Neo-Nazis “are not choosy about which community” they target, explained Commander Shaun Sawyer of the Metropolitan Police's counter-terrorism command (SO15). Whichever group they target, they will hope to cause serious injury or loss of life, he said. Police believe British neo-Nazi groups are more likely to target Muslims than Jews, whose communities have reported an increase in the frequency of neo-Nazi style attacks on their institutions in recent years.

The warnings were issued shortly after police announced that they had uncovered a major extremist network. Officers in a counter-terrorism unit found that a group of far-right extremists had access to 80 bombs and hundreds of other weapons. Dozens were questioned in connection to the affair, which police believe involved a plot to bomb mosques.

Senior police detectives said departments would need to channel more funds towards preventing neo-Nazi attacks. The money is likely to come from funding currently used to monitor Islamic extremism, although detectives warned that Muslim terrorist groups remain a threat as well. "The big bad wolf is still the Al-Qaeda threat,” said senior police official Norman Bettison. “But my people are knocking over right-wing extremists quite regularly.”

Source

Camille Paglia ans. letters on Obama, talk radio, gay rights, abortion.

Grandpa — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 23:36:02 -0700

Bow-ow-ow: Obama's painful missteps
Let the new president grow into the job -- but he'd better do it fast!

Plus: Readers ask about everything from talk radio, morality
By Camille Paglia

Dear Camille,
In your column, you say, "President Obama has been ill-served by his advisors and staff."
The primary job requirement of a good senior executive is the ability to judge character and ability, in order to be able to select people to whom responsibilities may be safely delegated. If these advisors and staff are inadequate, the responsibility for their failures should be laid at the feet of the person who was ultimately responsible for their selection and placement.
Charles
Pennsylvania

ans:
You are absolutely correct! The buck stops with the top executive. But we all know how little executive experience Barack Obama has had. He was elected for his vision and his steady, deliberative character, not his résumé. For better or worse, Obama is learning as he goes -- and surely most fair-minded people would grant him reasonable leeway as he grows into the presidency, one of the hardest jobs in the world.

At a certain point, however, Obama will face an inescapable administrative crux. Arriving at the White House, he understandably stayed in his comfort zone by bringing old friends and allies with him -- a team that had had a fabulous success in devising the hard-as-nails strategy that toppled the Clintons, like crumbling colossi, into yesterday's news. But these comrades may not have the practical skills or broad perspective to help Obama govern. Like Shakespeare's Prince Hal ascending the throne, Obama may have to steel his heart and banish Falstaff and the whole frat-house crew.

Obama's staffing problems are blatant -- from that bleating boy of a treasury secretary to what appears to be a total vacuum where a chief of protocol should be. There has been one needless gaffe after another -- from the president's tacky appearance on a late-night comedy show to the kitsch gifts given to the British prime minister, followed by the sweater-clad first lady's over-familiarity with the queen and culminating in the jaw-dropping spectacle of a president of the United States bowing to the king of Saudi Arabia. Why was protest about the latter indignity confined to conservatives? The silence of the major media was a disgrace. But I attribute that embarrassing incident not to Obama's sinister or naive appeasement of the Muslim world but to a simple if costly breakdown in basic command of protocol.

Enough already! These slips are worsening the anti-Obama backlash, which began with the administration's bungled handling of the grotesquely swollen stimulus package. Conservatives seem deliriously drunk with their cartoon picture of Obama, to whom is glibly attributed every pathology in the book. Yes, there were ambiguities about Obama's birth certificate that have never been satisfactorily resolved. And the embargo on Obama's educational records remains troubling. But I am still waiting for hard evidence about the host of other charges that are continually being hammered against him -- from his alleged fidelity to the crypto-tactics of Chicago leftist Saul Alinsky to the questions raised by right-wingers about the production of Obama's two memoirs. Out of respect for the presidency, conservatives need to put up or shut up about these issues.

I still strongly believe in Obama's promise as a world leader. I was thrilled, for example, by his call this week for an end to nuclear weapons -- a goal that he frankly admitted would not be attained in his lifetime. We have waited a long time for an American president who dreams big. Yes, there are bitter cells of fanatics everywhere who hate America and want a repeat of 9/11. And yes, there will always be petty dictators who covet the bomb and conspire to get it. But the mass of people around the world want to be inspired to a higher good. Whether the Obama presidency succeeds or fails will depend on his ability to sustain his ideals in the face of the testing crises that will inevitably erupt in far-flung regions where ethnic or religious strife has been a way of life for thousands of years. And closer to home, Obama will need to cut the umbilical to his hometown posse, whose inefficiency and poor decision-making took the shine off his honeymoon and brought the dispirited Republicans back from the dead.
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As a former lover of talk radio, I too have wondered why programs with a liberal bent have fared so poorly in the free market. There are two specific factors that may be responsible for the disparity.

1) The vast majority of the talk radio audience listens in their car or from home. People driving around during the day and listening to the radio are probably demographically skewed toward the self-employed or people in some sort of sales. Admittedly, there are a large number of service jobs that require drive time, but I would bet those people are not interested in politics. The entrepreneur or six-figure sales professional is far more likely to be a conservative. People listening from home would either be stay-at-home parents or people working from home. These groups would also tend to be much more likely to listen to Laura Schlessinger than Al Franken.

2) The liberal talk shows I've listened to are not really all that entertaining. The jokes tend to be mean-spirited personal attacks and are rarely as clever as what I have heard on Rush Limbaugh's program. I think if the left wants to have a successful talk radio platform, they should be asking people like Jon Stewart for ideas and quit trying to silence the opposition.
Marty Grant
New York City

Ans:
Your theories about the talk radio audience are intriguing. The most rewarding aspect of talk radio for me is the callers, whose voices are heard nowhere else in the culture -- the feisty, super-organized home-schooling moms, the gruffly stoical transcontinental truckers, and the fiercely independent and self-reliant small-business owners, outraged by Washington's tilt toward bailing out corrupt, top-heavy corporations.

However, the popularity of conservative radio shows is a round-the-clock phenomenon. There are flamboyant evening hosts as well as night replays of the major daytime shows, extending well past midnight to dawn. Clearly, conservative hosts have an instinctive rapport with AM radio, which I have been arguing for years is a populist medium (an idea that finally seems to have taken wing in its invocation by other commentators).
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Salon reader Cecil W. Powell writes: "The failure of talkers on liberal radio is in large part due to an absolute inability to poke fun at themselves." How true! Liberal hosts like to snap and snip and chortle snidely, but they are weighed down by a complacent superiority complex, a paralyzing sanctimony. They mistake irony for wit. The conservative hosts love to rant and stomp and bring down the house. They're doing breakneck vaudeville while liberal hosts are primly stirring their non-caffeine green tea.

Why do you and others in the press keep misattributing this "magic Negro" comment to Rush Limbaugh? My understanding from listening to his radio program is that the phrase you are referring to from Rush's parody song was first brought to light in an article by David Ehrenstein in the Los Angeles Times. Why didn't you mention this in your column? Rush merely ran with it in one of his many parodies, which he is notably famous for. Often he takes comments made in the press or by politicians and parodies them -- most often to expose their hypocrisy.

The press has tied Rush to "magic Negro" as if he were the originator or instigator. Thus Rush is unfairly and routinely condemned for it.
L. Bryan
Columbus, Ga.

ans:
"Barack the Magic Negro" was a song parody by a longtime contributor to the Rush Limbaugh Show, Paul Shanklin, whom I consider to be one of the most brilliant satirists of our time. Shanklin has an analytic erudition about popular music, a genius for mimicry, and an astounding gift for creative rapid-response to hard news. The widespread and vitriolic misjudgments about what goes on during Rush's show could and should have been dispelled a decade ago had Shanklin's fiendishly clever parodies been released into general circulation. Yes, they can be purchased in CD collections, and they are also available online to subscribers to the Limbaugh Web site, but that draconian limitation has unfairly confined Shanklin's work to conservative partisans. My all-time favorite in the Shanklin oeuvre is "I Can't Recall," a parody of "Try to Remember" (from "The Fantasticks") with an air-headed Hillary on the witness stand claiming that she just can't remember a single darn thing about that silly old Whitewater deal because her mind has turned to Jell-O ... Jello-O ... Jello-O (fading off in echoes).
When I first heard "Barack the Magic Negro" shortly after the March 2007 publication of the Ehrenstein article (which was partly inspired by a term used by director Spike Lee), I found it very daring and funny. It was timely and had the shock of the new -- exactly like Lenny Bruce's violation of conventional proprieties. But Rush kept playing it and playing it well beyond its shelf date, and after a while it felt gratuitous and dismayingly oblivious to racial realities and sensitivities in the U.S. Although I'm a longtime fan of Rush's show, I started turning the radio off when this skit came on.
Here's the main point: The vocal in "Barack the Magic Negro" mimics grandstanding black ac
tivist Al Sharpton, while the namby-pamby melody is borrowed from "Puff the Magic Dragon," a children's song that when originally performed by folkies Peter, Paul and Mary was widely assumed to be an allegory for marijuana smoking. So the Shanklin parody went well beyond the Ehrenstein article in what was being implied about Obama as well as the turf wars of African-American politics. There are so many other wonderful parodies in the Shanklin collection that more richly deserve repeated airplay. And for heaven's sake, they all belong on YouTube. Unlock the vaults!
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Regarding your observations about the rehabilitation of Sarah Palin and the insufferable snottiness of Dick Cavett and other good liberals: Is it possible that there might be something really ugly at the core of contemporary liberalism? You call yourself a liberal, and you vote liberal, yet you are under constant attack by your liberal compatriots. Why? Because of your open-mindedness and your "real feminism" (as opposed to faux leftist feminism).
In the meantime, the torching of Sarah Palin's church in Alaska (children were inside when the fire with accelerant was set) evokes a collective shrug in the mainstream media and other liberal precincts (if you can find any reference to the event at all). Why the all-too-frequent and downright nasty face of contemporary liberalism?
Timothy Condon
Tampa, Fla.

ans.
Yes, something very ugly has surfaced in contemporary American liberalism, as evidenced by the irrational and sometimes infantile abuse directed toward anyone who strays from a strict party line. Liberalism, like second-wave feminism, seems to have become a new religion for those who profess contempt for religion. It has been reduced to an elitist set of rhetorical formulas, which posit the working class as passive, mindless victims in desperate need of salvation by the state. Individual rights and free expression, which used to be liberal values, are being gradually subsumed to worship of government power.
The problems on the American left were already manifest by the late 1960s, as college-educated liberals began to lose contact with the working class for whom they claimed to speak. (A superb 1990 documentary, "Berkeley in the Sixties," chronicles the arguments and misjudgments about tactics that alienated the national electorate and led to the election of Richard Nixon.) For the past 25 years, liberalism has gradually sunk into a soft, soggy, white upper-middle-class style that I often find preposterous and repellent. The nut cases on the right are on the uneducated fringe, but on the left they sport Ivy League degrees. I'm not kidding -- there are some real fruitcakes out there, and some of them are writing for major magazines. It's a comfortable, urban, messianic liberalism befogged by psychiatric pharmaceuticals. Conservatives these days are more geared to facts than emotions, and as individuals they seem to have a more ethical, perhaps sports-based sense of fair play.

Probably the main reason for my unorthodox view of politics (as in my instant approval of Sarah Palin) is that I had much more childhood contact with working-class life than appears to be the norm among current American columnists. One of my grandfathers was a barber, and the other was a leather worker at the Endicott-Johnson shoe factory in upstate New York. Thanks to the G.I. Bill, my father was able to attend college, the only one in his large family to do so. I was born while he was still in college and mopping floors in the cafeteria. Years later, he became a high-school teacher and then a professor at a Jesuit college, but we never left our immigrant family roots in industrial Endicott. To this day, I have more rapport with campus infrastructure staffers (maintenance, security) than I do with other professors or, for that matter, writers. Don't get me started on the hermetic bourgeois arrogance of American literati!
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Friends of mine and I have found ourselves at the crossroads of the Washington, D.C., media, gay press and the murder of a straight man at the home of a noted gay rights and marriage attorney. Print may be morbid, but maybe citizen journalism/investigation may fill the void. There is a three-year-old unsolved murder of a straight man who was drugged, incapacitated, sexually assaulted, suffocated, then stabbed in the home of three gay men, one of them being an old college friend. One of the defendants -- not charged with murder, however -- is noted K Street attorney Joe Price, who is active in Lambda legal circles.

The crime scene in Dupont Circle is just a few blocks from where I, my partner and two close friends live. The murder of Robert Wone had all the ingredients of a D.C. scandal: sex, drugs and murder. Yet there is almost zero buzz on the streets about this. The D.C. mainstream print media gave minimal coverage, and you can guess how few column inches or how little airtime the TV guys gave it. The four of us launched a blog, and we've broken news.

Why does the death of a straight man in the home of three gay guys not become "news" à la Chandra Levy? The four of us gay Washingtonians are all plugged into the media in some capacity, yet we can't figure this out. Another question is why the gay media avoids this crime and issue. Some coverage, yet only a little.
The Web site dc.bilerico gave us space for a guest post. A recent Fox 5 / WTTG piece. And finally our site.

Craig Brownstein
Washington, D.C.

ans:
From your description of the appalling news blackout on this crime, it appears to be a blatant case of politically correct censorship. The 11th commandment of the liberal mainstream media is that no evil shalt be spoken of any gay persons, who have been sanctified by their precious victim status, without which liberalism would implode. You and your gay friends are to be congratulated for your passionate truth-seeking. I am very glad for the opportunity to publicize the facts in Salon. Please keep me informed of future developments.
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I'm confused. You say you are an atheist. It seems to me that if there is no God, then we are all simply pieces of animated dirt. To pieces of animated dirt, on what basis can something be considered right or wrong, ethical or unethical? Of what value is life except that which animated pieces of dirt place on it? What would it matter if some place absolutely no value on life?

Abortion is "murder"? That has moral connotations. What is wrong with the "murder of a child"? All pieces of animated dirt eventually become lifeless. What does it matter when or how? Morality is just an invention of animated dirt. What if humans managed to destroy all life on earth? What would it matter? Surely, some other form of animated dirt would evolve to replace us. I certainly don't know there is a God, but I choose to believe there is, because, for one, I don't want to believe that I am just animated dirt.
Bob Ryden

ans.
The ancient Greeks, whose art and thought deeply influenced me in my youth, created ethics as a branch of secular philosophy, detached from religion and its moral imperatives. Like artworks, codes of law and ethics are uniquely human constructs -- conceptual environments that separate us from animals, who are governed by biological instinct. It is rational to debate and define the rules by which any society exists. As a cultural relativist and atheist, I believe that values change over time and that there is no transcendent God who generates and enforces them. But societies have a right to require reasonable compliance from those who enjoy their material benefits.

Your vast panorama of "animated dirt" rising and sinking is actually closer to the Buddhist view of the cosmos -- which I also find inspiring for its contemplative acceptance of things as they are. The operations of the life force have inherent majesty. Human consciousness, when fully expanded, is for me the ultimate value. As Heracleitus said, "All things flow." To demand permanence or personal survival beyond death seems to me a tragically doomed quest. But by power of imagination, we each have the right to live in our own universe. All gods exist -- because thinking makes it so.
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In "Vamps & Tramps" you said that sex "reawakens and heals the 'family romance' of our personal biography." I was wondering if you could elaborate a little on what you meant by "heals." Do you mean that people who had a bad family life can, through their sex life, overcome the negative consequences this had for their psyche? I thought that because sexuality springs from the subconscious one couldn't change anything about it and therefore that no amount of awareness and observation and analysis of one's sexuality could change it. Is sexuality the only language the subconscious understands, a sexual act the only way to "talk" to one's subconscious and, possibly, change it?
Mariana Pinheiro

ans.
When human beings were scrabbling for survival in the nomadic and agrarian eras, sex was a reproductive necessity, a drive as basic and primal as hunger and thirst. However, as civilization developed, personality became more complex, and along with it the pageantry of courtship and romance. Freud's analyses of "family romance" were keyed to the hothouse environment of the bourgeois home. With the new intimacy of parents and children as well as the protraction of adolescent dependence (Shakespeare's Juliet got married at 14), sex became freighted with symbolism that it may never have had in the pre-industrial and pre-Romantic period.
The issue is not an atypical "bad family life" but a universal bourgeois problem of ambivalent over-involvement. Modern identity has gotten far too intertwined with unrealistic ideals of love as well as the embattled theatrics of sexual orientation. However, we're stuck with it, and it's given us a hundred years of fabulous Hollywood movies! My point is simply that the love life of everyone I've known from my baby-boom generation and afterward is a chess board ruled by shadowy forces that long predate puberty. Erotic choices yearningly follow or rebelliously diverge from a cast list imprinted on us in childhood. Changing the template may be virtually impossible. Self-knowledge is the most that we can hope for. But for that we need poetry and art -- not the rigid, sterile political ideology that still paralyzes gender studies.

The War on Terror has arrived in Latin America, and is headed our way.

Grandpa — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 23:50:54 -0700

The War on Terror has arrived in Latin America, and is headed our way.

By Mario Loyola
Ronald Reagan helped to usher in a hopeful wave of democratization in Latin America. In one country after another, multi-party elections ended decades of single-party rule and military dictatorship. But today, that legacy is under threat - and so is our own homeland. The southern front in the War on Terror, which runs through Latin America’s institutions of state, is cracking under a combined assault of political revolution, Islamist terrorism, and the world’s most heavily armed drug cartels.

On Colombia’s frontiers, the radical “Bolivarian” governments of Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia have embraced Iran, and are in league both with revolutionary terrorist movements such as the FARC and with drug traffickers. In the Caribbean zone, states are drowning in a tidal wave of drug- and weapons-smuggling - and increased extremism among its Muslim immigrant communities. In Mexico, massive drug cartels compete for control of the drug trade, deploying dizzying numbers of heavily armed paramilitaries. The violence has begun to reach our own cities.
There may be no direct connection between recent kidnappings in Phoenix and high-profile visits by Hugo Chávez to Tehran. But connect the dots, and you will see a transnational extremist-terrorist wave challenging the institutions of liberal democracy in Latin America. If that wave begins to win in Latin America, we will soon be facing it here at home, with potentially grave consequences for our security and our way of life.

America’s “defense-in-depth” against this wave consists of Colombia, Central America, and Mexico. All three lines of defense are under assault and in danger of failing.

IRAN’S ALLIES TAKE ON COLOMBIA
In the Western Hemisphere, the most dangerous development of the last decade is perhaps the alliance between Venezuela and Iran, which has allowed the mullahs to expand dramatically their reach in Latin America. Hezbollah has long been present among the immigrant Syrian and Lebanese communities of the Tri-Border Area between Brazil and Argentina. Hezbollah has been linked to bombings of the Israeli Embassy in Argentina in 1992 and the Jewish cultural center in Buenos Aires two years later, in which a total of 115 people were killed and 500 injured. Hezbollah’s illicit activities in this region of South America were arrestingly documented in a 2002 New Yorker article by Jeffrey Goldberg.

The problem has only grown more serious since then. The public love-fest between Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez is just the tip of a sinister iceberg. Weekly flights from Teheran to Caracas are not monitored for personnel or cargo, in violation of international norms, mimicking the process by which Beirut’s International Airport became a hub of the terrorist underworld. Iran’s intelligence services cooperate with those of Venezuela, which have kept busy in recent years helping the radical regimes of Bolivia and Ecuador purge themselves of anyone with ties of sympathy to the U.S.

In the wake of Israel’s Gaza operation, there were signs of coordination on propaganda: Chávez had a chilling warning for Venezuela’s large Jewish community: “Tell your government in Israel to stop this genocide and leave Palestinian lands.” A Kristallnacht-style attack on the main Jewish synagogue in Venezuela was carried out by a large group of thugs that spent most of the night wreaking havoc in the compound before making off with computers that contain the names and addresses of most of Venezuela’s Jews. Chávez denied responsibility and blamed the opposition, just as he did when bands of pro-Chávez thugs destroyed the facilities of Venezuela’s last vestiges of independent media.

The “Bolivarian” revolution of Hugo Chávez - essentially, a reprise of the Cuban revolution in slow motion - has been mimicked in Ecuador and Bolivia, all of which have embraced Iran, revolutionary movements such as the FARC, and narco-traffickers. Those are the elements of the narco-radical threat that Colombia has been fighting for decades - and which it continues to face now on its frontiers, where neighboring governments have become, de facto, enemy governments. Last year, in the course of a raid by Colombia’s armed forces that killed one of the FARC’s key leaders, computers were captured that - as later verified by Interpol - contain clear evidence of high-ranking Venezuelan officials’ offering weapons and money to the FARC - an organization that has put Colombia through a terrifying decades-long civil war.

Colombia appears to have turned the corner against the FARC, and to some extent also in the drug war. The once-nightmarish city of Medellín has become a showcase of President Alvaro Uribe’s success in fighting the enemies of democracy in his own country. Combining “people power,” through civil society and cultural programs, with “alliance power,” through the U.S.-sponsored Plan Colombia, Uribe has been a rare success in our hemisphere’s War on Terror. But Plan Colombia has now largely run its course. Meanwhile, the narco-radical forces continue to get stronger, and President Obama’s left-wing base has weakened America’s support for Colombia at a critical juncture. The travesty of our failure to pass the Colombia Free Trade Agreement remains a serious self-inflicted wound in our fight against terrorism, a clear sign that the U.S. government has yet to grasp the gravity of the situation facing us in Latin America - or the precious value of allies in dealing with it.
TERRORISTS OF THE CARIBBEAN
In the Caribbean Sea, the trade winds now bring drugs and weapons - and Islamist terrorists. The seaborne and airborne smuggling from South America to Central America and the Caribbean islands is out of control. The governments of Central America are undermined by drug cartels with easy access to corrupt officials, and subverted by the electoral wins of radical Chávez allies such as Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua and the FMLN just this week in El Salvador - another ally gone. The region’s tiny, impoverished governments can hardly refuse Hugo Chávez’s offers of life-sustaining petroleum, and squirm at the “favors” he asks in return.

On top of this problem, the region’s large Muslim-immigrant communities - as well as local converts to Islam - have proven tragically susceptible to extremist proselytizing and recruitment. In 1990, an Islamist group in Trinidad and Tobago, Jammat al Muslimeen, staged an abortive coup against the U.S.-friendly government there, killing 24 people. In 2007, responding to complaints of apparent terrorist training activities, authorities raided the group’s five-acre compound, seizing weapons and grenades.
In June 2007, a plot to bomb the fuel-depot system of JFK International Airport was foiled, preventing another mass-casualty attack in New York City. Of the four terror suspects arrested, one was from Trinidad and the others from nearby Guyana. “Although Caribbean societies remain mostly a harmonious mosaic of ethnicities and faiths,” writes Amanda Farfel of the American Jewish Committee, “the JFK plotters, late converts to Islam, demonstrate the susceptibility of some local Muslims to the messages of international radical Islamic organizations.” One of the JFK-plot suspects was arrested in Trinidad on a plane bound for Caracas. His wife told authorities that his intended final destination was Iran.

THE CARTELS VS. MEXICO
The Mexican elections of 2007 should have been a wake-up call for the United States. Current president Felipe Calderón only narrowly defeated the left-wing candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a Chávez sympathizer. The election of López Obrador would have brought the tentacles of the Bolivarian revolution and its Iranian allies right up to America’s border with Mexico. Allies of Venezuela and Iran may yet come to power in Mexico - borne aloft by support from drug cartels. The U.S. shows little sign of preparing for such a perfect storm.

Even with a staunch U.S. ally as the president of Mexico, the situation in that country already poses an unacceptable threat to U.S. security. Americans have learned to live with embarrassingly high levels of violence in places like Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles - but cartel violence is different. It is paramilitary. It involves tactically sophisticated assassinations and kidnappings, conducted by well-trained former military and police, often in the open, sometimes on a large scale, and usually with a lot of firepower.

Cartels don’t run from the police. They target the police. Indeed, in many parts of Latin America right up to the Rio Grande, they control the police. Some 7,000 troops are being sent to Ciudad Juárez, right across the border from El Paso, Texas, because the local police have lost control of the city. After narco-terrorists warned that they would kill one policeman every 48 hours, the police chief of Juárez resigned.

According to the Washington Times, the Pentagon estimates that Mexico’s drug cartels have as many as 100,000 foot soldiers, “an army that rivals Mexico’s armed forces,” and they “threaten to turn the country into a narco-state.” A thousand people were killed in Mexican violence in January of this year alone. Even the beheadings and unspeakable torture practices that became signatures of al-Qaeda in Iraq have arrived on our southern front; the cartels have taken to dissolving the bodies of many victims in vats of acid.

According to U.S. officials, Mexico now ranks with Iran and Pakistan as among the top threats to U.S. national security - but there are few indications that U.S. policy actually gives Mexico anything like the high priority it deserves. The U.S. has lavished about $10 billion on Pakistan’s military since 2001. We are about to send some $900 million to Gaza for reconstruction assistance, and Congress recently refused to require that the money doesn’t wind up enriching Hamas. But to help our friends in Mexico fight narco-terrorism in their own country so that we don’t have to face it here at home, we can manage only a pittance of barely $500 million over several years - a pittance sweetened with insults.

When the Bush Administration’s Merida Initiative - a baby step in the annals of security cooperation - came before Congress last year, some Democrats insisted that money needed for sophisticated helicopters, communications equipment, and intelligence gathering in Mexico be shifted to human-rights training for Mexican security forces. On the other side of the aisle, some Republicans wondered why we should help Mexico when its effort to stem immigration remains so ineffective. One answer is that both the money and the weapons that make the cartels so powerful come from America. The Mexicans were so offended by the tenor of the congressional debate surrounding Merida that they nearly rejected the initiative.
Now Mexican narco-terrorism has started to arrive in America’s own cities. There are reports of a sudden spike of kidnappings in Phoenix, Ariz. U.S. authorities recently arrested 52 cartel members in a single week. The cartels already control much of the distribution in the U.S.; now they are moving to control “retail” sales. The sophisticated networks they are developing - virtual pipelines that allow them to smuggle whatever people or things they please into and out of the U.S. - could be just as useful to Islamist terrorists. One wonders how long it will take for Hugo Chávez to start connecting the dots among his various friends.

PARTNERSHIP CAPACITY BUILDING
After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration asked itself a basic question: “How do we fight a war against an enemy that is present in 60 or more countries with whom we are not at war?” We focused on “partnership capacity building” as the answer.
Behind the scenes of the high-profile fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, partnership capacity building has in fact been the essence of America’s response to the attacks of 9/11. In scores of countries across the Islamic world, U.S. security-cooperation programs have bolstered the institutions of governance - training and equipping security forces, bolstering administration of justice, developing education programs, even assisting with budget management. We have countered a transnational threat with a transnational effort that seeks to create points of connectivity between our government and those of our partners - e.g., our military and theirs, our law enforcement and theirs, and our intelligence services and theirs.

These efforts - developed in the fight against terrorism across the Islamic world - need to become the hallmark of our fight against narco-radical-Islamist terrorism in Latin America. The same life-and-death struggle against narco-terrorist networks and violent revolution that gripped Colombia for decades has arrived in Mexico, our last line of defense. We have to defeat it there, if we do not want to face it here.

We have to strengthen our ties of alliance, cooperation, and friendship with the countries of Latin America. But in extending that hand of friendship we should not shy from calling on them to do their share. Latin America’s democracies remain desperately poor because their societies continue to embrace cultures of dependency, cults of personality, and corruption. Until Latin America becomes a more fertile ground for good governance, it will keep producing poverty, crime, radicalism, and terrorism.

GQ Names Barack Obama "Man Of The Year" With Ted Kennedy-Written Tribute

Woop — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 09:08:59 -0800

Huffington Post | Danny Shea | November 17, 2008 08:15 AM

GQ has named Barack Obama one if its "Men of the Year" with a cover and article - penned by Senator Ted Kennedy - that went to press before Election Day.

...

GQ named Obama "Game Changer of the Year," and an excerpt of Kennedy's piece appears below:

As I write this, Barack Obama and John McCain have just completed their final debate, and the country is a few short days away from a historic election. Of course, I'm doing all that I can for my candidate. But whether he wins or loses, Barack Obama has ushered in a new era of American politics with a limitless vision of a better future that will endure for many years to come. Through his candidacy, Obama has provided a glimpse of a stronger, better, fairer America, where change comes from the bottom up, where we all come together to meet the great challenges of our time. He has inspired millions of new voters of all ages, races, and incomes to lend their voices for real change. For in this man, Americans can see not just the audacity but the possibility of hope for the country that is yet to be....

That is what I saw when I enlisted in his campaign. I saw new hope for a way out of the economic wilderness and for a just and fair prosperity that rewards the many and not the few. New hope that this nation will at last lead the world to turn the tide of global warming and turn aside from an energy future that threatens the future itself. New hope that we will teach all our children well. New hope--and this is the cause of my life--that we will guarantee for every American quality affordable health care as a fundamental right and not as a privilege. New hope--and this is the great cause of America itself--that we shall overcome once and for all the setting of race against race, gender against gender, ethnic group against ethnic group, and straight against gay.

Win or lose, with the Obama candidacy the torch has been passed, and I hope I made a difference.

Kennedy's full article about Obama here: http://men.style.com/gq/blogs/gqeditors/2008/11/game-changer-of.html
...

The cover shot, which appears below, was taken by Mark Seliger in Philadelphia on October 3. The photographer was only given 1 minute, 45 seconds for the entire shoot:

This inside black and white shot was taken by Seliger at a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan on October 2:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/11/17/gq-names-barack-obama-man_n_144...