Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author, syndicated columnist, political analyst and commentator.
He has been a frequent guest on Hannity and Colmes, The O´Reilly Factor, The Big Story, EXTRA, and numerous CNN News and Talk Shows.
He was a regular commentator on CNBC´s The Dennis Miller Show.
He has been a guest on the Today Show, Dateline, The Lehrer Hour, and BET News, America´s Black Forum.
He is a frequent commentator for the American Urban Broadcast Network and Ed Gordon´s News and Notes on NPR
He is a featured columnist for BlackNews.com, BlackAmericaWeb.com, and Alternet.org.
He is associate editor of New America Media
His op-ed columns appear in the Baltimore Sun,L.A. Times, Los Angeles Daily News, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Newsday, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Christian Science Monitor, and other major newspapers.
He is the author of nine books that include:
He has been a frequent guest on Hannity and Colmes, The O´Reilly Factor, The Big Story, EXTRA, and numerous CNN News and Talk Shows.
He was a regular commentator on CNBC´s The Dennis Miller Show.
He has been a guest on the Today Show, Dateline, The Lehrer Hour, and BET News, America´s Black Forum.
He is a frequent commentator for the American Urban Broadcast Network and Ed Gordon´s News and Notes on NPR
He is a featured columnist for BlackNews.com, BlackAmericaWeb.com, and Alternet.org.
He is associate editor of New America Media
His op-ed columns appear in the Baltimore Sun,L.A. Times, Los Angeles Daily News, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Newsday, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Christian Science Monitor, and other major newspapers.
He is the author of nine books that include:
Contact Information
Articles by Earl Ofari Hutchinson
October 31, 2009
In his spicy, tantalizing, tell-all inside the belly of the Obama campaign book, Obama campaign manager, David Plouffe says that Obama toyed with picking Hillary Clinton as his VP running mate and then junked it because hubby Bill posed too many complications. In less polite terms the thinking am...
October 29, 2009
In June 2007 presidential candidate Barack Obama told a New York crowd that much of the big money influence peddling in Washington is illegal and that he´d crack down on it once in office. Five months later in an Iowa speech he was even blunter. He warned corporate lobbyists that their days of setting the agenda in Washington were over. The difference between what Bush, Clinton, Bush Sr., Reagan and every occupant of the White House did and what the Obama White House does in showering perks on fat cat donors is that the other presidents knew enough to keep quiet about it. Obama didn´t. He denounced the practice. It practically became his campaign mantra.
October 22, 2009
President Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and a parade of House and Senate Democrats should get academy awards for their play act on the public heath care option. It´s as dead as a doornail. Yet, the principal players still tease the public with their talk about it. The public option ep...
October 19, 2009
The same day a fourth grade student asked President Obama why do people hate him a Gallup survey found that far more people like Hillary Clinton than Obama. The question and the poll implicitly asked and answered the youngster´s troubling question. Obama is plainly not liked by a lot of...
October 13, 2009
In the months after President Obama´s inauguration, he and other administration officials held more than two dozen secret meetings with top insurers and the major pharmaceutical groups. He met with registered lobbyist Karen Ignagni, president and CEO of America's Health Insurance Plans, ...
October 09, 2009
Publicly President Obama said all the right things when he got word that the Nobel committee awarded himits jewel in the crown peace prize. But privately I have to think that Obama had to scratch his head and wonder why me? With all due respect to the president, while we can applaud his admirabl...
September 20, 2009
The bitter truth is that President Obama can´t about race even if he wants to. This has absolutely nothing to do with his mixed racial upbringing, or his straddle of many worlds. It has everything to do with politics.
If Obama spoke out on race he´d confirm the deep suspici...
September 15, 2009
I´m puzzled. President Obama had absolutely no reservation about name calling hip hip mega star Kanye West a "jackass." Make no mistake West´s boorish, juvenile delinquent, antic at the MTV award show richly deserved a public reprimand. That is his act and his act alone. But West...
September 13, 2009
reported. It found that nearly 40 million Americans are living in official poverty ( less than $22,000 for a family of four). This is an 11 year high.
The Bureau figure does not take into count the number of persons tossed into poverty in the past year; the worst year so far of the recession. It also undercounts real unemployment.
September 11, 2009
Forget censuring Congressman Joe "You lied" Wilson. The Democrats should give him a merit plaque. His two blasphemous words was a dream for the Democrats. Rivers of cash instantly flowed into the Democratic National Committee coffers. It quickly made his almost sure to be beaten re-election ...
September 05, 2009
The loud clamor from progressives, some liberal Democrats, and even a few self-described moderates for President Obama to get down and dirty with the GOP on health care and other big ticket legislative issues will always fall on deaf White House ears. There are good reasons why.
August 30, 2009
In August 2007 Senator Barack Obama fresh on the presidential campaign trail made an impassioned promise at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars to wage what he dubbed the war that has to be won. The war is the war in Afghanistan. He promised to quickly get out of Iraq, corral America´s allies in a partnership to wipe out the terrorists and their mass destructive weapons, end corruption, hold free elections, and insure a stable government in Afghanistan.
Two years later and a shell out of $230 billion dollars, and more than 700 US dead, not one of these goals have been met.
August 21, 2009
In an interview on NBC's Today Show two weeks after he was sworn in President Obama was blunt. He said that if he didn't deliver he'd be "a one term proposition." Put this in the category of what did he know and when did he know it. The it is that he was under the white hot glare of the public...
August 19, 2009
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius found out the hard way that when you say what your boss may really be thinking or worse end up doing on a crucial piece of legislation you get quickly smacked down.Sibelius in an unscripted and unvetted moment said that President Obama´s publi...
July 27, 2009
The stock basketball one liner came to mind when I heard President Obama utter his now infamous "acting stupid" line referring to the cuffing of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates. The star player takes a wild shot and the livid coach screams "no," "no" "no" and then when the improbable hap...
July 24, 2009
President Obama may have used the wrong words when he called the actions of the Cambridge Police Sgt. James Crawley in cuffing Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates as "acting stupid." He backed off slightly from it in a follow up interview when he made it clear that he wasn´t indicting...
July 13, 2009
It doesn´t much matter whether Alabama GOP Senator Jeff Sessions speaks for himself or Rush Limbaugh when he goes for the jugular during his hectoring of Sonia Sotomayor during her Senate confirmation hearing. The shadow of Limbaugh and the ultra-conservative hit attackers will hang heavy ...
July 08, 2009
Websites, blogs and chatrooms pulsed with garish cracks about it. Legions of commentators and news reporters snuck it in every chance they got. More than a few of Michael Jackson´s fervent admirers and supporters made a dismissive reference to it. Even President Barack Obama in a cautious acknowledgement of Jackson´s towering contributions to American music and artistry still made reference to the "tragedy" in Jackson´s life which was a subtle nod to it. And New York Congressman Pete King skipped the niceties and flatly said it.
June 27, 2009
Dr. Conrad Murray can´t win. The Michael Jackson family through their surrogate Reverend Jesse Jackson hints that the doctor may have done something terribly wrong in the death of Jackson. Jackson fans were brutal. On the website vitals.com that rates physicians there were more than 100 comments (as of Saturday).
June 26, 2009
Near the end of the first week of Michael Jackson´s infamous child molestation trial in 2005, a large group of African-American community activists and leaders gathered at a community center in Los Angeles to talk about Jackson, the trial and whether he was a target because he was a rich, successful, and famous African-American.
June 21, 2009
Even by the nut case standard of the assorted pack of neo-Nazi unreconstructed Klan members, Aryan Nation haters, and the legion of loose screw religious cranks and loonies, the Reverend Wiley S. Drake´s public prayer for the death of President Obama stretched far past the outer limit of credulity. The unrepentant Drake did not back away from the prayer when asked about it by Alan Colmes on Fox News Radio on June 2. He pleaded that he didn´t understand why people were upset with his comments.
June 16, 2009
"I will tell you that I don´t believe in gay marriage."
"I believe in civil unions but it should not be called marriage."
Then Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said that during a campaign stop in Nelsonville, Ohio a day before the Super II Tuesday primary in March 2008. The great puzzle then is why so many are so hot at President Obama for backing the Defense of Marriage Act. He has not backed a step away from his Ohio campaign stump words.
June 12, 2009
There were two things wrong with the good Reverend Jeremiah Wrights´s grouse that "them Jews are keeping me from Obama." Oops, I mean the Zionists, not Jews. That was Wright´s nimble effort to take some heat off him for the silly crack. One was that he said it. The other is that h...
June 05, 2009
President Obama spoke forcefully, passionately and correctly at the Buchenwald death camp on the evil of the Holocaust. He implored nations to confront those who would deny its horror. Obama should do the same about the evil of slavery. There are two arguments against him doing that though. Then P...
June 04, 2009
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich backpedaled from his reverse racist slur of Supreme Court designate Sonia Sotomayor as a racist. A defiant Rush Limbaugh didn´t. There´s a reason. For more than four decades the reverse racist tag has been the most potent weapon in the arse...
June 01, 2009
The only thing wrong with New York Congressman Charles Rangel´s quip that President Obama had better bring his ID to East Harlem is that he limited it to East Harlem. A President Obama in his trademark baseball cap, sometimes hip clothes, and sneakers, sans White House entourage and li...
May 30, 2009
The Gay activists that picketed President Obama at a recent fundraising event in Los Angeles for allegedly not doing and saying enough to beat back Proposition 8 must have dropped in from another planet. Obama remains wildly popular among African-American voters and an attack on him for being less than resolute on gay rights does nothing but further tick black voters off. They´ll need those voters now more than ever if they plop another initiative on the ballot in 2010. The measure would reverse Proposition 8 and legalize same sex marriage.
May 23, 2009
The painful truth in former Vice President Dick Cheney´s spat with President Obama is that there are still far too many places where Obama´s policy resembles Bush policy on the terrorism war. In the waning days of his last term Bush scrapped some of the worst of the legally and morally obscene interrogation tactics. He partially emptied the bulging cells of terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay. He even tried to do a half hearted kiss and make up with European allies who vehemently opposed US torture tactics. The courts ruled that the Bush administration grossly violated constitutional and legal precepts by scooping up and holding terror suspects with no or flimsy charges and no trials.
May 15, 2009
Farrah Fawcett watched her personal, moving and life affirming story on ABC-TV. Millions applauded her for her valiant fight against cancer and her inspirational message to fight on to many others who wage their own private medical battle against the dread disease. Lawanda Jackson was not one of them who applauded Fawcett. The former UCLA Medical Center administrative assistant didn´t
May 11, 2009
The issue for the umpteenth time is and never has been about whether Carrie Prejean violated the dumb, probably legally challengeable, and possibly legally winnable Miss California contract she signed. The two supposedly most glaring offending sections of the contract that Prejean allegedly sloughed off state that a Miss winner can´t appear in a lewd, compromising, and sexually suggestive manner and that the pageant has exclusive right and control over all Miss´s personal appearances.
May 10, 2009
The first page of the Constitution of the nation´s oldest, most venerable and respected civil right´s organization boldly states that it will wage a relentless fight to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of all citizens. During much of its century of ex...
May 06, 2009
Miss California nee Carrie Prejean is right to scream foul at the scalp hunters who want hers after the pictures of her clad in revealing pink drawers with her back turned to the camera in a suggestive pose ripped around websites. Miss USA Beauty pageant organizers wasted no time in very pub...
May 03, 2009
Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele must have been struck by terminal amnesia. He yukked at and agreed with the swipe a radio caller took at President Obama. The caller called him "the magic negro." That´s the goofy, tired, worn, ditty that tags Obama as a black man with the supposedly impregnable Teflon shield that renders him immune to any and all criticism, adversity, or just plain bad political luck.
April 27, 2009
Then Democratic Presidential contender Barack Obama did a prescient thing last October. He told an interviewer on a Colorado radio station that he thought the first 1000 days not the first 100 days would make the crucial difference for his presidency. Candidate Obama directly parodied the line from JFK´s inauguration address in 1961. Kennedy proclaimed the first 1000 days as the better time frame to measure how effective or bumbling an administration is. Obama and JFK were wise to cite the much longer time frame. They sought to damp down the wild public expectations that they can work quick magic and miracles in no time flat.
April 20, 2009
President Obama got it right and terribly wrong on the UN Racism Conference in Geneva. He rightly demanded that the conference convenors drop the stock Zionism is racism plank from the draft resolution of the conference. The Israel knock was the same sticking point that former President Bush used to dodge going to the anti-racism conference in Durban, South Africa in 2001. The convenors complied and sanitized the objectionable language from the resolution. That should have been enough to get a U.S. delegation on a plane to Geneva.
April 14, 2009
The only reason that Somalia is in the news these days is the spectacular desperation and criminality of the Somali pirates, an American sea captain held hostage by them, and Hollywood image sharp shooting by American Navy Seal commandoes to free him. This news will quickly fade but the reason...
April 11, 2009
Erma Bombeck, Hugh Downs, Howard Pyle, Jerry Colangelo, Art Buchwald, and Steve Allen to name a few from the check list of entertainers, sports owners, gossip columnists, and satirists that Arizona State University claims had lofty enough credentials to merit an honorary degree.
April 10, 2009
It´s not clear whether Arizona State University President Michael Crow had any say in the decision not to grant President Obama, the school´s commencement speaker, an honorary degree. But one thing´s for sure the dumbest thing that school officials said in telling why they wo...
April 04, 2009
Let´s cut the bull. The issue is not Mercy James. That´s the four year old Malawian orphan girl who Madonna wants to adopt. The issue is Madonna. Whether their motive is revulsion, disgust, secret wish fulfillment, sexism, or just plain, garden variety envy, legions just flat out loathe Madonna. Or in the street vernacular, there´s a thriving growth industry in playa hatin´ on Madonna.
March 31, 2009
First an outfit called Save the Children UK butted in and denounced Madonna for adopting Malawi orphan David Banda in 2006. Now another bunch has jumped into the adoption fray and branded her a"bully" for her plans to adopt another Malawi orphan. The Human Rights Consultative Committee pretty much rehashed the same tired complaint as Save the Children UK did three years back and that´s that Madonna is using her wealth and star power to end around Malawi´s adoption procedures.
March 28, 2009
President Obama and the Democrats should wave the white flag in their strawman war on Rush Limbaugh. The Media Research Center delivered the grim casualty figures for the Democrats. Since January, the top talk show gabber´s ratings have soared off the charts. Radio affiliates that carry Limbaugh´s syndicated show call the ratings boost he´s gotten from the Democrat´s orchestrated attack on him a "dramatic surge."
March 19, 2009
Florida Republican House Rep Connie Mack was the first in the door to demand that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner resign or get the boot. Mack bluntly said what more than a few Democrats and a lot of Republicans have grumbled privately in recent days. President Obama says that Geithner will stay. But things in Beltway politics change, and change fast.
March 18, 2009
AIG ignited the national firestorm of rage with its shell out of $160 to $600 million in tainted bonuses to its tainted executives. But what has gotten almost no attention is a big reason that AIG had to stiff the government and everyone else. That´s the role that the company played in...
March 16, 2009
The Yiddish/German term schwartza or schwarze is not in itself a racially demeaning and insulting term. It just simply translates to black or as used colloquially a "black person." But it´s a totally different thing when the word drips out of the mouth of shop worm comic Jackie Mason.
March 13, 2009
Chuck Norris claims that thousands of right wing cell groups exist and will rebel against the U.S. government. It´s tempting to laugh away his vow to wage war against President Obama as either the crackpot ravings of a washed up Z grade martial arts actor. Or as a cheap promotional stunt to get his mug back in front of the cameras. Norris´s bellicose rants against Obama are nothing new and they have gotten wide play in a shrill horde of on line blogs and websites, including the popular right wing sounding board WorldNet Daily.com.
March 11, 2009
Despised financial fraud Bernie Madoff may have one last scam in him. And this one may be the biggest and most infuriating of all. He may sleaze his way out of rotting away his last days in prison. Loud bells and whistles went off that that could happen when Madoff suddenly dropped any pretense of a court fight and said he´d plead guilty to every fraud, perjury, and embezzlement charge that the Feds could slap on him.
March 10, 2009
President Obama has heard all the arguments against universal health care. One he won´t hear from opponents, that is the private insurers and hospitals, is that of their fear of having to cover and treat the millions of black and Hispanic uninsured. According to the Commonwealth Fund, blacks and Hispanics make up nearly half of the estimated 50 million Americans that have no health care insurance. They are far more likely than the one in four uninsured whites to experience problems getting treatment at a hospital or clinic, and to have fewer if any choices in getting health care coverage.
March 06, 2009
Nothing that House and Senate Republicans and would be ex-officio Republican kingpin Rush Limbaugh have said or done to torpedo President Obama´s program has worked. So why not try one more thing, red baiting. In quick succession South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, one time Republican presi...
March 03, 2009
First President Barack Obama stroked talk show kingpin Rush Limbaugh´s ego by proclaiming him the pied piper of the GOP. Next Republican National Chair Michael Steele showed some moxie and publicly told Limbaugh that he was the shot caller in the GOP. That didn´t last. In the next breath, he publicly pleaded for forgiveness from Limbaugh for his momentary pique. Then top Obama advisor Rahm Emanuel jumped in and lathered Limbaugh with praise and scorn as the boss of the GOP.
February 19, 2009
Mr. Rupert Murdoch it´s certainly no surprise to you that New York Post Editor-in-Chief Col Allan would hotly defend the racist Post cartoon comparing President Obama to a chimp. That´s what your shock and smut dealing Post is in the business of doing and it does it well.
February 13, 2009
President Barack Obama had barely finished uttering the oath of office when the talk started that he would be a one term president. This political doomsday talk was chalked up to a few bored reporters looking for something contrarian to say about Obama, the deluded hopes of hard bitten, spoil sport conservatives for a failed Obama presidency, and a few naysayers among economists who repeatedly warned that economic collapse would do in a young, inexperienced president. The first two reasons to think Obama would get a quick boot can be easily shrugged off.
February 09, 2009
The great mystery is still why President Barack Obama would whiplash obstructionist GOP congresspersons with Rush Limbaugh. A guy who a big majority of Americans don´t like and who rates lower than any other political figure. That was the finding of the Greenberg-Quinlan-Rosner poll taken back in late October. The poll released by a Democratic leaning polling firm may well be politically partisan and tainted, and Limbaugh and company loudly screamed that it was. But he is America´s long time great polarizing talk show gabber, and it´s a role he relishes.
February 06, 2009
In her NBC interview Octuplet mom Nadya Suleman was irked at getting pounded for being a single mother with fourteen kids. Or in her words, "it's not as controversial because they're couples so its more acceptable." She had good reason to be irked, but she should be irked at herself too for doing much to reinforce that stigma.
January 31, 2009
Two weeks ago this writer wrote that an African-American was the last and best hope for the GOP. That meant picking an African-American to head the Republican National Committee. And I said that that African-American had to be former Maryland Lieutenant Governor Michael Steele. For its sake, someone in the GOP didn´t listen with a metallic ear and picked Steele as the new RNC chair.
January 24, 2009
President Barack Obama needs to take a deep breath, and then a long look in the mirror, and repeat to himself that Rush Limbaugh can´t hurt me, and anything that I try to do with Congress. Limbaugh has fast become a fringe, self-marginalized non entity. He´s got as much chance to wreck Obama´s legislative agenda as disgraced Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, maybe even less.
January 14, 2009
The unchallenged article of faith is that the election of President Barack Obama fulfills Martin Luther King Jr.´s dream that the content of character should trump skin color. King uttered the words in his March on Washington speech in 1963. We´ll hear that said time and again in the march up to the King national holiday January 19 and Obama´s inauguration the next day.
January 09, 2009
There´s a good chance that former BART police officer Johannes Mehserle will be charged in the videotaped New Years day killing of Oscar Grant, a young African-American. But charging Mehserle with the fatal shooting of Grant and getting a conviction is a far different matter.
On the surfac...
January 05, 2009
Ann Coulter is a genius. All she has to do is shake that stringy blonde hair, prance around in tight mini skirts, show her rail thin, pale white legs, spew foul mouthed expletives about her favorite whipping boy, liberals and the so-called liberal media and the tongues roar furiously.
December 22, 2008
The soon to be release of a report on the contacts that President-elect Barack Obama or any of his staff members may have had with scandal-plagued Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich will likely quiet the rumors and gossip about Obama and the governor. That´s because Obama will release the report and it would defy credulity to think that he would release a report that showed anything inappropriate or worse in whatever dealings he had with the governor.
December 19, 2008
The instant that Caroline Kennedy faintly hinted that she was interested in Hillary Clinton´s possibly soon vacant senate seat she got pounded. Kennedy was take your pick, just an inexperienced part time education consultant, an Obama shoulder rubber, a Park Avenue dilettante, and her se...
December 18, 2008
President elect Barack Obama almost certainly knew that he´d take some heavy flack from gay rights and abortion rights groups for picking mega preacher Rick Warren to give his inaugural invocation. Warren backed the anti gay marriage Prop 8 in California to the hilt and rails against abortion. But Obama picked Warren for shrewd political and apparently heartfelt personal reasons.
December 16, 2008
Here´s the what is President-elect Barack Obama, black, bi-racial or multi-racial quiz. If he did not have one of the world´s most recognizable names and faces he would fume at being subjected to poor (or no) service in restaurants, bypassed by taxis, racial-profiled by police on street corner stops, landlords who refuse to show him an apartment, followed in stores by security guards, denied a loan for his business or home purchase due to redlining, find himself living in a resegregated neighborhood, or routinely passed over for a corporate management position.
December 13, 2008
Illinois Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. should bow out of contention for Obama´s Senate seat. True there is yet no evidence that he offered to grease Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich´s palm in return for the seat. But there´s a continuing probe into whether a Jackson family member or associates ac...
December 08, 2008
The Supreme Court has finally put to rest the nutty Obama birth certificate non-issue. Or has it? When the court rejected the lawsuit brought by a retired New Jersey attorney to have Obama declared ineligible to hold the presidency, the issue was seemingly rendered as forgotten as the Dodo Bird. The suit was so farcical that the Court didn´t bother to dignify it by giving a reason for rejecting it.
December 05, 2008
The harebrained lawsuit demanding disclosure whether President elect Barack Obama is a U.S. citizen or not was laughed out of New Jersey courts in October. A few weeks later Supreme Court Justice David Souter gave it just as short shrift. He denied a stay to get Obama removed from the ballot in that state. But that didn´t end the matter.
December 03, 2008
The instant O.J. Simpson was found guilty of robbery, kidnapping and weapons charges in a Las Vegas court, a lusty on line debate ensued between legal experts and bloggers over whether the judge would or should throw the book at Simpson at his sentencing on December 5. The debate was tinged wi...
November 30, 2008
At first glance it defied credulity that the staid, respected Chicago Tribune would do something as screwball as giving any credence to the issue of whether President-elect Barack Obama is really a U.S. citizen or not. But the Tribune will run not one but two big splashy ads paid for by a quasi libertarian outfit named www.wethepeoplefoundation.org based in Queensbury, New York. The group demands that Obama produce his original birth certificate with all the official markings and proper affixed signatures on it. The one that the Hawaii Department of Health officials made public last June was an electronic copy of the certificate.
November 24, 2008
Top Obama economic advisor Lawrence Summer is the consummate Wall Street, and yes another Clinton insider. His resume reads like a mini telephone book on the list of posts he´s held in and out of every financial and government monetary agency imaginable. Any other time, Summers would and...
November 20, 2008
Billionaire Obama campaign finance chair Penny Pritzker did the smart, maybe the only, thing she could when she quickly scotched talk that she wanted to be Obama's Commerce Department Secretary. Pritzker says she doesn't want the post because she can better help the administration by doing her part to create businesses and jumpstart the economy. That's admirable and probably heart felt. But Pritzker also knows a little something about politics too. If her name had ever gone up to the Hill it would have ignited a firestorm that could have blown back on her boss.
November 19, 2008
Before nominating Eric Holder to be his attorney general, President Elect Barack Obama quietly asked key Senate Republicans if there would be any potential confirmation problems with Holder´s nomination. Holder is his first cabinet pick and Obama wants to make sure that the pick will be hailed as a good one. The last thing he needs is a bitter, partisan, and contentious scuffle over Holder.
November 13, 2008
President elect Barack Obama´s close and long time confidant Valerie Jarrett was emphatic when she told a group of black journalists that Obama would not waver one bit in his commitment to diversity in his administration. The journalists were nervous at the paucity of African-American name...
November 07, 2008
The names read like a who´s who roll call of ex-Clinton staffers, officials, advisers, experts, handlers and bankrollers. This was not idle speculation, or musing out loud. The cast of Clinton usual suspects would not have been dropped without some nod from Obama. Indeed, Obama dropped his own hints that Clinton exs would play a big, if not dominant, role in his administration. The rationale for that made sense. They had run Clinton´s ship of state, and have the savvy, experience, and political know how to get things done, and get them done quickly. They also are well versed in the Clinton blueprint for political rule.
November 03, 2008
The instant that Barack Obama tossed his hat in the presidential rink nearly two years ago the twin mantra was that he could be the first black to be president and if that happened America had finally kicked its race syndrome. The twin mantra has been repeated ad infinitum, and it&acut...
October 30, 2008
Republican presidential contender John McCain got one thing right about Democratic rival Barack Obama. He told Larry King that he didn´t think race would be much of an issue in the final vote. As McCain put it only "a tiny, tiny, minority" will vote against Obama because he´s black. McCain was not just campaign bloviating to puff up his oft touted credential as a play it straight on race guy. The notion that because millions of whites passionately back Obama race is permanently off America´s table is more hope and prayer than reality.
October 27, 2008
The then freshly elected President Clinton had barely dropped his arm after taking the oath of office in January 1993 before they started in on him. The "they" was Rush Limbaugh (Remember his "Day one of America held hostage" daily rant), packs of radio shock jocks, legions of Christian broadcasters, and, of course, the Fox Network. Clinton was allegedly too pro abortion, too pro big government, too pro tax and spend, too unpatriotic, too personally sleazy, and too married to Hillary. But his greatest crime was he was a Democrat.
October 23, 2008
At first glance it seems absolutely incredible that Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama can´t shake Republican rival John McCain. Yet an AP poll calls the race a statistical dead heat. That´s only one poll, of course, and the mish mash of other polls show Obama with eith...
October 16, 2008
A handful of top advisors in the McCain camp were perplexed at their boss´s flat refusal to again slam Democratic rival Barack Obama on his ties to his former pastor Jeremiah Wright. Instead they picked the race neutral target of former Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers, and tried to tie Obama to him. That ploy had no public or media legs.
October 14, 2008
It was a tense and riveting moment at the recent McCain campaign rally in Minnesota when a flustered and livid participant shouted at Republican presidential contender John McCain that he was scared of an Obama presidency. The man is not alone in his professed terror of an Obama White House. E...
September 27, 2008
September 15 was a rare day for Democratic Presidential contender Barack Obama and Republican rival John McCain. They both lambasted the greedy and corrupt (their words) Wall Street wheeler dealers for wreaking financial mayhem and pain on Main Street. The tough talk grabbed headlines and made the two contenders sound like the proverbial men on the white horse populists ready to take on the Wall Street greed merchants.
September 23, 2008
Sarah Palin admittedly hasn´t had much of a track record when it comes to acknowledging let alone promoting diversity during her short tenure as Alaska governor. She´s on record with a terse utterance on hate crimes legislation and another one on cultural diversity.
During the 2006 gubernatorial campaign she told the Eagle Forum that she opposed expanded hate crime legislation. In her gubernatorial campaign booklet in 2006, Palin gave her equally terse view of discrimination.
September 15, 2008
The New York Post is no friend of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. Any knock of Obama by its editorial writers and op-ed columnists should be taken with the whole bag of salt. That´s likely the case with this stunning allegation that´s making its way around the internet courtesy of Post Columnist Amir Taheri. He alleges that in a private talk with Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari during his visit to Iraq in July, Obama allegedly tried to talk Zebari and other Iraqi leaders into stalling the phased withdrawal of U.S. troops from the country.
September 09, 2008
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama should do two things about GOP vice presidential pick Sarah Palin. The first is repeat: "I´m running against John McCain and I´m running for president not Vice President." He should keep repeating that as many times as it takes to get him to back off the distracting, pointless, and self-absorbing amount of time he´s spent knocking her.
September 07, 2008
There was the ever so fleeting moment during her speech at the Republican National Convention when Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin paid tribute to hubby Todd. She lightly mentioned that he´s of Yup´ik Eskimo background. Todd Palin beamed with pride at the acknowledgement in front of the packed convention crowd and in front one of the largest TV audiences to ever watch a candidate´s convention speech. But the cheering convention participants and millions of viewers won´t see the same smiles on scores of other of Palin´s Yup´ik Eskimos and many other Native Alaskans.
September 01, 2008
Republican presidential contender John McCain is if anything a good listener. The instant he heard the loud squeals from Republican pro-life hawks that his campaign would be DOA if he dared tried to shove former Homeland Security Chief Tom Ridge or maverick Senator Joe Lieberman on the ticket, he back pedaled fast. Both are moderates on abortion. And that made them anathema to the hawks.
August 19, 2008
The rule of thumb in picking vice presidents is that they must do three things. They must balance the ticket, make up a real or perceived deficit that the presidential contender has, and hopefully help him win the presidency, or at the very least don´t help him lose it. This rule of vice presidential thumb applies more than ever to presidential contenders Barack Obama and John McCain.
August 05, 2008
Former President Bill Clinton was probably shocked at the storm of rage that he drew back in January with his apparent Jesse Jackson slough off of presumptive Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama´s win in the South Carolina Democratic primary. And there was good reason.
July 16, 2008
On November 26, 2006 at a press conference in Los Angeles guess who said this: "We will challenge and urge all artists and comics to stop using this (n) word. What other group is subjected to such a degrading terminology?"
And then guess who called for this action: We will go after TV networks, film companies and comedians and demand that they stop using the word. We will boycott sales of the DVDs of Seinfeld´s seventh season TV show. The speaker of course was Jesse Jackson. The offender who dared utter the dreaded N word was comedian Michael Richards.
Now we hear that Jesse did a Richards like imitation with the N word in his infamous unguarded open mic dig at Obama on Fox.
July 14, 2008
New Yorker Magazine´s under fire cover illustrator Barry Blitt says his infuriating cover was intended only to show that the incessant rumor that Obama is a closet terrorist is preposterous and ridiculous fear mongering. Team Obama´s rage at the inflammatory cover was beyond ballistic and nearly everyone with eyes and an opinion about it, and that included Republican rival John McCain, expressed the same ballistic anger at the New Yorker.
July 05, 2008
"Let me be clear: There is no military solution in Iraq and there never was. The best way to protect our security and to pressure Iraq's leaders to resolve their civil war is to immediately begin to remove our combat troops. Not in six months or one year — now."
Senator Barack Obama said...
July 01, 2008
Presumptive Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama thinks he´s found the right script to beat Republican rival John McCain. It´s simple. Steal a big page from the GOP script. That means backing FISA, chastising Move on. Org for impugning the conservative´s notion of patriotism, reprimanding General Wesley Clark for maligning McCain, a mild saber rattle of Iran and Pakistan for promoting or harboring terrorists, and a deft pirouette on a full blown attack of the Patriot Act. In other words, try to out McCain McCain on terrorism, national security and a military ramp up.
June 27, 2008
One presidential candidate has brashly played the race card. It wasn´t presumptive Republican presidential candidate John McCain or his rival Barack Obama. Both have tipped lightly around race in the campaign. But Ralph Nader didn´t have any qualms about bring race into the campaign. The perennial political gadfly accused Obama of saying and doing nothing to threaten the white power structure.
June 22, 2008
Presumptive Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama wasted no time when he heard that New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg tooted his horn before a Jewish group in Boca Raton, Florida. Well, it wasn´t exactly a real toot since all Bloomberg said was that Jewish voters should pay no heed to the relentless sneaky, viral email and rumor monger campaign that slams Obama as take your pick, a Muslim, an extremist, or a closet anti-Israel, Palestinian rights backer.
June 16, 2008
Presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama thundered to long, loud and vigorous applause from a Father´s Day Chicago church crowd that black fathers don´t engage with their children. A month before Obama made this stereotypical and plainly false assertion, Boston University professor Rebekah Levine Coley, in a comprehensive study on the black family, found that black fathers who aren´t in the home are much more likely to sustain regular contact with their children than absentee white fathers, or for that matter, fathers of any other ethnic group.
June 16, 2008
Presumptive Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama gave the best answer to the question whether he´s black, mixed race or something in between. He recently told a Chicago fundraiser crowd that to some he wasn´t black enough, and he then promptly added that others say he might be too black. He´s right, the knock against him has either been that he is too black or not black enough, not that he is too mixed race or not mixed race enough.
June 07, 2008
In a talk with reporters in Louisiana, Republican presidential contender John McCain implored disgruntled Hillary Democrats to back him. His pitch was I´m the toughest, most knowledgeable and most experienced on national security. The unmistakable inference is that rival Obama is too green, fresh, and untested to gamble with on national security. McCain´s aim was to lop off disgruntled Hillary Democrats. But it also staked out what he must do to win the White House.
June 02, 2008
A day before the Puerto Rican primary election, I talked with several Mexican workers and business professionals during a visit to Mexico City. The subject was American presidential politics and the upcoming election. They had only the haziest notion that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama was the frontrunner for the Democratic Party nomination. They knew virtually nothing about his positions on the major issues, especially the hot button issue of immigration reform. They all readily recognized Clinton´s name and thought that if elected she´d do a better job on the immigration question.
May 29, 2008
What started as a trickle of puzzled queries on Oprah´s message board when she touted Obama in October eventually turned into angry complaints from many white women when she barnstormed for him in January. They raged that America´s long standing reigning queen of daytime talk TV had strayed way over the line. Oprah took note for a good reason. The loudest complaints came from middle-aged and middle class white women.
May 22, 2008
In March close-to-presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama was blunt when asked if he would be Hillary Clinton´s vice presidential running mate, "I´m not running for vice president." Clinton would likely give the same blunt answer to the silly talk that he should...
May 20, 2008
The obsessive talk still is that race might wreck close-to-presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama´s slog to the White House. Race is a hazard to Obama. But the even greater hazard is the knock that Obama simply is to green, too untested, and too soft to be a firm, and resolute commander in chief. Months before Bush hinted at it, and McCain attacked him on this point, the Republican National Committee shoved the inexperience rap to the front of the its keep the White House playbook.
May 18, 2008
The burning question is who close-to-presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee Barack Obama will pick as his running mate. The question is better asked of his GOP foe John McCain. His vice presidential pick is far more crucial than who Obama picks.
May 14, 2008
Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama has moved heaven and earth to keep race out of his campaign. He had no choice. He knew that if he gave even the faintest hint of a tilt toward black voters his campaign would be DOA. While early polls consistently showed that a crushing majority of whites said that competence, ability and experience, not race, are the only things they consider in voting for a candidate, he also knew that race still might be the great X Factor for him in the presidential contest.
May 10, 2008
If there were ever words that Hillary Clinton should take back it's her retort that hard working whites backed her in the primaries. The implication was that whites are the only ones who work hard. She obviously didn't mean that. Her awkwardly put point was simply that Obama has not cracked the resistance to him of blue collar, rural, and non-college educated, lower income whites.
May 06, 2008
Republican presidential candidate John McCain feigned fury at Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama for voting against the confirmation of Supreme Court justice John Roberts. This was not simply a cheap political shot at Obama, since Hillary Clinton, and 20 other Democrats also opposed Robert´s confirmation.
May 03, 2008
Color of Change which presumptuously bills itself as the premier national grassroots organization is the latest to jump into bully the super delegates for Obama game. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, DNC Chair Howard Dean tried their hand at it and failed. Now ...
May 01, 2008
On Sept. 4, 21-year-old Joshua Pomier will have served nearly four years in a detention center near San Bernardino, Calif. Pomier is charged with multiple counts of car theft and robbery. There are two deeply troubling problems with the amount of time he has spent behind bars. One...
April 29, 2008
Whoever on Team Obama keeps feeding into Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama´s seeming compulsive need to speak out on the Reverend Jeremiah Wright should get the swift boot. When Wright went on his latest public and media tear, Obama should have simply issued a statement saying this: Wright is no longer my pastor. And as I have said repeatedly, his views do not reflect mine, and then move on.
April 27, 2008
The much discussed, much defended, and much reviled pastor Jeremiah Wright can´t be blamed for his gross naiveté on politics. After all, he´s a preacher, and as he told Bill Moyers in an interview on PBS that he only talks "about the things of God." That´s the way it should be for men of the faith. But that´s not the way it is when one of your flock is a politician who´s at the top of the heap in the dash for the White House.
April 25, 2008
Even before the first witness was called in the Sean Bell trial, a defense attorney for one of the three officers charged with gunning down Bell flatly said that he thought his client and the other two officers would be acquitted in the killing of Bell. This was not typical attorney blu...
April 23, 2008
Obama´s Pennsylvania loss does not dampen his chance of eventually getting the Democratic nomination. But the voter demographics that stack up high against him dampen his chance of getting the White House.
April 21, 2008
A month before the crucial Pennsylvania primary an aide to a superdelegate bluntly told a reporter that top Democrats don´t want the people to think the Democratic presidential nomination was stolen. The aide referred to the whispers, grumbles, and even loud shouts from both the Obama and Clinton camps about the superdelegates and their possible votes after Pennsylvania.
Flipping off Hillary, Silly petitions, Chelsea´s tight Pants, and Obama´s Weather Underground Connec
April 18, 2008
Whoever called the presidential campaign grind, the silly season got it wrong. It´s worse. It´s the farcical season. Let´s look at some of the latest things on the campaign trail that got some tongues wagging.
April 13, 2008
Chelsea Clinton is incredibly naïve, incredibly sheltered, incredibly in denial, or maybe a bit of all three. In late March, Hillary Clinton´s daughter told a Young Democrats audience in North Carolina that she was shocked at the nasty things some male (and even female) folk on the campaign trail are saying about her mother such as "Iron my shirts," and "the nutcracker in your……." The vulgarities are heaped on top of the hard headed belief of many men and women that a woman just doesn´t have the right stuff to be the nation´s commander in chief.
April 11, 2008
As late as this past January, black talk show host Tavis Smiley was the darling of black America. Three months later he´s the butt of black America. The tip off that Smiley´s personal stock has plunged was his abrupt announcement that he was quitting his long standing post as pol...
April 11, 2008
There´s a good and bad note for Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama in the recent exit polls of white voters in Democratic primaries. The good note is that by a lopsided majority of six to one whites said that race was not a factor in considering whether to back Obama or not.
April 08, 2008
olitical analyst Earl Ofari Hutchinson says there's much less than meets the eye in Obama´s Victories in the red states.
April 01, 2008
Forty years later the FBI Still Has Some Explaining to Do About King´s Murder
"Dangerous," "evil," "colossal fraud," were the choice terms that then FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and other top FBI officials routinely spit out about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. They didn´t stop at th...
March 30, 2008
Here are ten troubling questions for Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama. There are others equally troubling but these are the starters. The questions were sent directly to him at his national campaign headquarters Friday, March 28. The questions are not campaign rhetoric, gossip, and partisan allegations. They are fully documented, and totally a matter of public record.
March 25, 2008
The instant it was apparent that neither fierce Democratic presidential rivals Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama would get the 2025 delegate votes needed for the Democratic nomination, the spotlight fell heavily on the party´s 800 super delegates. The super delegates are congresspersons, g...
March 24, 2008
"I believe abortion should be outlawed" and "The Bible is pretty clear about homosexuality, it specifically calls it a sin." Thus sayeth Pastor Dan Yeary. Normally the preachments of a Southern Baptist oriented minister in North Phoenix, Arizona wouldn´t stir much of a fuss. That kind of hard nosed saber rattle against gays and abortion is SOP within and among Southern Baptist preachers.
But Yeary´s comments deserve special attention for a couple of reasons. He´s the pastor of North Phoenix Baptist Church. And one among the faithful who can often be seen occupying a pew at Yeary´s Sunday services is John McCain.
March 20, 2008
Democratic Presidential contender Hillary Clinton will win the Pennsylvania primary April 22. That´s not a prediction made to denigrate or minimize the big effort Clinton rival Barack Obama has made in the state. The voter demographics perfectly match those in Ohio which...
March 11, 2008
Fire former Democratic VP candidate and Hillary Clinton advisor Geraldine Ferraro? She ought to get a merit badge pinned on her for having the guts to tell the truth. Ferraro got it right on both counts when she sad that race has made a difference with Barack Obama. He has gotten a virtual free ...
March 05, 2008
This was the worst night yet for the packs of obsessive charter members of the hate Hillary Clinton club. Their first bad night came back in January when despite the gleeful, hopeful but totally false and overblown anticipation of the wrong headed pollsters that predicted a smash Obama vict...
February 27, 2008
Here's what a spokesperson for Democratic Presidential contender Barack Obama said when he got wind of former Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan´s virtual endorsement of Obama´s White House bid, "Senator Obama has been clear in his objections to Minister Farrakhan's past pronouncements and has n...
February 21, 2008
Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama coyly hinted at something that has been virtually taboo during the fierce hunt for the White House in 2008. That´s likely GOP presidential candidate John McCain´s age. In a speech at the Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Virginia in early F...
February 15, 2008
The British newspaper the Daily Squib´s tongue-in-cheek fake news report that Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon Ron Edwards endorsed Democrat Presidential contender Barack Obama drew chuckles, sneers, and cracks. There was, of course, no such endorsement. But the reason it drew some press att...
February 13, 2008
This is an election with some strange things happening. One of the strangest is the penchant for so many white males to join with African-American voters in a few primaries to back Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama. It´s strange not because of anything Obama has said or done t...
February 06, 2008
There was absolutely no surprise at the results of Super Tuesday. This writer flatly said days before the first vote was cast that Super Tuesday would be anything but super for either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, and that neither would or could deliver the knockout punch.
The...
February 03, 2008
The odds are that Democratic presidential arch rivals Barrack Obama and Hillary Clinton will know no more about which of the two will be the party´s standard bearer the day after Super Tuesday than they did when the day started. The early talk about the "inevitability" of Hillary´s...
January 30, 2008
America just lost its best and brightest hope for real change when John Edwards gave up the presidential ghost. Edwards did something that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and certainly none of the Republicans would dream of doing. He made poverty no longer a dirty word in the mouths of many, and ...
January 28, 2008
A confident Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama shrugged off the buzz that he´d crash and burn with Latino voters, "Not in Illinois, they all voted for me." But not so fast; there was this retort from a reader, yeah, but you ran against Alan Keyes. Keyes, being the luckless ...
January 14, 2008
The Obama camp did it again. They manufactured yet another issue out of a non issue when they pounded Hillary Clinton for supposedly defiling Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. by minimizing his role in the civil rights struggle. Here´s Hillary´s terrible sin per the Obama campaign crowd. She said that Dr. King´s dream was realized when President Lyndon Johnson shoved the 1964 Civil Rights Bill through Congress. This was anything but a put down of King.
January 11, 2008
Ron Paul and his backers can sail through the ceiling, scream foul until their lungs burst, and say that it’s all a big conspiracy by mainstream media hit artists, a Paul hating and fearful political establishment, and on the make Republican and Democrats to smear and slander their hero as a racist....
January 08, 2008
A President Barack Obama will be the most scrutinized president since Abraham Lincoln. Ironically, the reason for this has less to do with race, though that will loom large in the lens of many, as it has to do with him. He’s lifted public passions and expectations to the clouds with his soar...
January 06, 2008
Barack Obama Exposed! This provocative, better to say inflammatory, headline screamed from the website and a handful of other websites virtually from the moment that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama announced his “dream campaign” for presidency on the steps of the State Capitol at S...
January 02, 2008
A win or a big showing by Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama in Iowa will do two things. It will prove that a significant number of white voters will vote for a black presidential candidate. It won’t prove that America has finally kicked its racial syndrome. From the moment that Ob...
December 30, 2007
No shot GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul tossed out yet another juicy zinger this time on Meet the Press when he said that Lincoln was a bad guy for fighting the civil war. Paul’s solution: simply shell out some cash, buy the slaves, and set them free. One would like to believe that Pa...
December 21, 2007
Boston Red Sox star pitcher Curt Schilling put it bluntly to Roger Clemens: Prove your innocence or cough up four Cy Young awards. It was a big, brash, and bold challenge to the icon pitcher. But so far Schilling has been one of the few within or without baseball to make that challenge.
When the...
December 18, 2007
If Hillary Clinton said that pedophiles should be barred from hanging out in front of elementary schools you can bet that some in the bash Hillary crowd would scream at her for violating the civil rights of molesters. This is not crass hyperbole. The pound Clinton obsession has gotten that s...