Monday, March 24, 2008 - Posts
-
sponsorship
Gerry Ferraro thinks Obama's "base is African-Americans"? Noted campaign expert Obama Girl begs to differ. (Me, too, but I have nothing whatsoever to add to the tortured discussion of race vs. sex, so let's stick with Obama Girl for now.)
Anyway: Obama Girl has a new music video out—following on June's viral hit "I Got a Crush on Obama"—and her latest is addressed directly to Hillary Clinton.
Though Obama's gonna win it, you're sorta kinda staying in it
Sometimes in this campaign, you've got a crush on John McCain
Can't you see it's hopeless?
It's become an Obama-nation.
After calling on Hillary to drop out of the race—or at least stop attacking Obama—Obama Girl speculates that it's all just spurned love on Hillary's part:
"I know deep down, you're an Obama Girl ...
We all have a crush on Obama."
Take that, Gerry.
-
sponsorship
I thought I was onboard with Emily about all the benefits of openly airing this buried anger and rage about race and gender. I’d been arguing for months that it was past time to lance this boil and just have it out in the streets about how mad everyone in the Democratic Party feels.
Perhaps I’ve read one too many livid blogs today or listened in on a few too many enraged racially charged debates this weekend, but I am starting to go a little wobbly at the ankles. Can someone remind me what’s truly served by a “conversation” about race and gender for its own sake? Are we progressing toward something better here? Is all this dialoguing fostering some new paradigm for talking about personal identity and politics? Or is this just the sort of conversation that always goes badly in the end? The kind that starts when some guy in a bar says, “Wanna hear what your real problem is?”
-
sponsorship
Here is Geraldine Ferraro defending herself against Barack Obama's accusations. His base is African-Americans? What is it with this generation of American feminists? All she left out was "articulate."
Overall, Ferraro said, she thought the speech was "excellent," but she lamented that Obama did not go further in condemning Jeremiah Wright. She surmised that Obama was limited in that regard because he did not want to offend black voters, whom she called the base of Obama's support.
"I think they got as far as they could go politically," she said. "They're looking at their base. Their base is African-Americans. They're looking at that and they're trying to walk a very thin line. They don't want to offend the African-Americans, and this is the way he did it."
-
sponsorship
I am curious about what all those people who think immigrants have such a fabulous free ride in this country think about this New York Times story about a 22-year-old Colombian woman, married to an American citizen, who was informed by a U.S. immigration agent that her application for a green card would sail right through—after a couple of blow jobs, that is.
According to the story, this was not even an isolated incident: "Money, not sex, is the more common currency of corruption in immigration, but according to Congressional testimony in 2006 by Michael Maxwell, former director of the agency's internal investigations, more than 3,000 backlogged complaints of employee misconduct had gone uninvestigated for lack of staff, including 528 involving criminal allegations."
In a conversation the Colombian woman taped on her cell phone, she pleaded with the agent not to force her to have sex with him: "If I do it, it's like very hard for me, because I have my husband, and I really fall in love with him.'' But when she tried to get out of the car where this conversation was taking place, he stopped her and made her perform oral sex. Too frightened to take the tape to the police, she eventually went to the newspaper, and, because there is a God, found reporter Nina Bernstein. Now the immigration agent has been arrested, but the woman's new husband—no Silda Spitzer he—has left her.
Is it fair to immigrants like this poor woman to leave them effectively unprotected by the law? And to all of you who've canceled your NYT subscription because it was mean to your favorite candidate or added a conservative voice to the opinion page, have you really thought about what we'd do without newspapers? Or without reporters like Nina who have the time and the inclination to actually listen to this woman's story and say, That happened to you? We'll see about that. If that day ever comes, I don't want to hear a word out of you.
Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum
What did you think of this article?