Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Unconfused in the Old North State

The gallused-overall wearing North Carolina farmers from whom I first learned to read a newspaper would have described current Democratic primary coverage in terms that may be best reserved for barnyards.

While I doubt Tar Heels are confused about it, anyone visiting from Mars or an extrasolar planet might be misled by hyperventilating media coverage into believing there is a cliff-hanger race between Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination.

We can enjoy the attention Clinton and Obama give to campaigning here in the Old North State, and will vote with enthusiasm come the May 6 primary, without buying into the myth.

Grandaddy always said "every vote counts," even if you know who's going to win. I believe that were he alive today, he'd observe that Obama is going to win. And to tell the truth, Grandaddy broke fresh starch on khaki trousers every day, but clothing is beside the point.

After what is under the circumstances appropriate sarcasm, Politico runs through the math in nice detail, explaining why Ms. Clinton's candidacy is history.

To maybe, perhaps, just ever so possibly re-create a chance of winning the nomination, some are suggesting Ms. Clinton has to win, well, North Carolina. Us.

Which whiplashes us back to extrasolar journalists and pundits, since the polling news in that regard forecasts no such possibility.

Obama now has and may be consolidating his lead here.

Could it be that "down home": we're collectively smart enough to understand issues like loyalty to one's home church, and make allowances, rather than have our heads turned by the spin?

If I am not being unduly sentimental about my fellow North Carolinians, absent some kind of substantial and unexpected revelation, Ms. Clinton and the extrasolar journalists can relax. Rural and urban Tar Heels alike have this thing sorted out, thank you.


Addendum: A survey by Public Policy Polling showed Obama with 55 percent to Clinton's 34 percent among likely North Carolina voters in the May 6 primary.

That was before Ms. Clinton admitted she "misspoke" about having braved sniper fire in Bosnia in 1996, and before she said she would walk out on her church community rather than endure sermons like those of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Monday, March 24, 2008

Helping troubled teens without killing them

Florida's largest black Baptist organization is trying to reminded us of the death of Martin Lee Anderson, exhaustivelydocumented at Wikipedia, and of the evil done by ideologically driven nonsolutions to serious problems.

Anderson died in a Florida "boot camp" -- a program based on principles military-derived of "shock incarceration", which are somehow ever popular among political conservatives.

North Carolina and a great many other states still run or permit private organizations to operate "boot camps," even though the National Mental Health Association, National Institutes of Health and others have concluded that they don't work.

An Oct. 10, 2007, Government Accountability Office investigation reported a nationwide problem with "Abuse
and Death" of troubled kids
in boot-camp programs.

Florida's Progressive Missionary and Educational Baptist State Convention seeks to inspire new programs aimed at keeping young men out of trouble.

State boot camps were shut down in Florida on June 1, 2006, and should be shut down elsewhere. As good empirical data has consistently indicated, they are a form of both private and institutionalized malpractice. Yet they remain resistant to reform, because they are yoked to a tandem political magic -- cheap for government and profitable for private companies.

Ethics Daily reported that the black Baptist organization "pledged to use the 2006 death of a 14-year-old African-American youth at a boot-camp style detention center to inspire new programs aimed at keeping young men out of trouble."

As Florida Social Justice Commission Chairman Walter Williams put it:

In spite of the pain we feel, we will not be traumatized to the extent that our silence be mistaken for social amnesia.

They're right in Florida, and for the sake of trouble teens still alive, we should follow their lead.

Sunday, March 23, 2008

DNA-track children and prevent crime (libety)?

The British are debating an outstandingly unproductive, potentially destructive idea: DNA-tracking youngsters.

Our unproductive and sometimes murderous system of public and private teen Boot Camps came from Great Britain amid empirical warnings that they didn't work.

They still don't work, as the National Mental Health Assocation says unequivocally.

Yet we've enshrined Boot Camps as though they were a benevolent industry.

So I'm just a little bothered that another, at least equally bad British idea may eventually take root here.

Gary Pugh, director of forensic sciences at Scotland Yard and the new DNA spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) make it plain that a big chunk of law enforcement there is hungry for permission to put this brand of DNA profiling right to work.

Forces of British good sense are pushing back, as Roger Graef of The Guardian did in his blog The usual suspects: Listing at-risk children on the DNA database risks breeding anger, resentment and defiance.

Shami Chakrabarti director of the British civil rights group Liberty
takes a somewhat harder swing that the proposal, saying:

Targeting innocent children to expand the DNA database is the Government playing the wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Any child who is stopped by police, even if under 10, can have his DNA taken and retained for life without being charged or cautioned.
If the Government wants a National DNA Database, they should say so and hold a public debate, not pick on our kids who can’t fight back.

I wonder how effective sound arguments will be against rightist efforts when our turn comes.


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Thursday, March 20, 2008

No immigrant crime wave

Date=May 1, 2006 |Author=Jonathan McIntosh |Permission=CC-BY-2.5

Here in North Carolina you'll find all the usual political rhetoric about immigrant-driven crime, and it's wrong.

It is morally wrong, or so I believe, because it fails to meet the "least of these" test.

We know, again yesterday, that it is scientifically wrong as well.

Reuters reports:

Robert Sampson, a sociologist at Harvard University who studied crime and immigration in 180 neighborhoods in Chicago over seven years, found that first-generation immigrants were 45 percent less likely to commit violent acts than third generation Americans.

"They" are once more not the primary problem here. Not even close. Sampson found in fact that during periods of immigration growth, crime rates fell:

Sampson also studied data from police records, the U.S Census and surveyed more than 8,000 Chicago residents. The study showed there was significant immigration growth, including illegal aliens-in the mid-1990s, peaking at the end of the decade.


But during that time the national homicide rate plunged. Crime also dropped in immigration hot spots, such as Los Angeles, where it fell 45 percent overall, San Jose, Dallas and Phoenix.

The data clearly says that political assaults on "them" are a distraction from the real causes of our nation's problems, and from the real solutions.

If we must have a stereotype about "them," we'll come very close to the truth by using phrases like "hard-working" and "law-abiding."


--------------------------------------------------------------

Addendum: I see now (March 20, 11:30 a.m.) that Talk Left did a good job of addressing the same issue several hours before me.

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Obama and with him others give voice to generations

Spiritual Politics at the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the
Study of Religion in Public Policy at Trinity College found two clusters of media reaction to Sen. Barack Obama's speech:


  • Those which saw it as exemplary of a presidentail candidate, even paralleling JFK's in 1960.

  • Those which saw it as doing too little to condemn Rev. Jeremiah Wright's comments, even finding guilt by association.

bald cypress in the dry season

Most media reactions were pabulum when compared to North Carolina blogger Frink, who found in Obama's oration a defiance of racism which paralleled his own grandfather's covert defiance of the KKK more than a century earlier in Columbus County.

His was the authentic voice of generations and community responding with affirmation to Obama's authentic speech about the generations and community embodied in his campaign for the presidency.

In Frink's reaction and others like it, even those felt but not given voice, we find the towering possibilities of this election to heal and grow once more toward a more perfect union.

All God's presidential candidates got pastors

Associate Washington Post Editor Eugene Robinson's blog at the offers admiring insight into Democrat Barack Obama's Road Map on Race.

(Public domain: OpenClipArt.org)

Republican soon-to-be Presidential nominee John McCain's relationship with Ohio megachurch pastor Rod Parsley is covered by Mother Jones' David Corn in McCain's Spiritual Guide: Destroy Islam.

Pastor John Hagee endorsed Senator McCain and IMHO is worth a visit to YouTube. In one video I found there, Hagee suggested that Hurricane Katrina was punishment to the U.S. for its role in removal of Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip. In another, he called for war with Iran.

After viewing those clips and reading Corn's blog you may even be interested in the view that McCain wants and believes in a permanent war.

One need not be either liberal or religious in orientation to be alarmed about a future with McCain as president. Cato Institute analyst Radley Balko, editor of Reason magazine, is similary wary of McCain's intentions today.

For my part, when I'm too sleepy to work but have to work to complete, I turn my thoughts to President McCain and my eyes are instantly wide.

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Obama's path to a more perfect union

During Barack Obama's speech, my thoughts returned to my late friends in Saint Paul, N.C., who made the long journey from our common heritage of racial bigotry to support of George McGovern's bid for the presidency and advocacy of equal rights.


Lost in those memories, I forgot for a time that Obama's epochal speech on American racial division was occasioned by Obama's handling of his relationship with his own pastor.


About that precipitating issue, Atlantic editor Andrew Sullivan anticipated Obama when he wrote:


Faith is not like a policy check-list; it's an unending engagement with a community and a set of truths. Any church, moreover, is its membership, all of it. And every Christian community speaks to a larger, eternal community of saints that redeems us even as we falter and even betray the Gospels.



Without attempting the prophetic voice of Dr. Martin Luther King, Obama nonetheless told us that community, family and our love for one another often bring us all to accept from one another speech and behavior we do not embrace in ourselves. That behavior may be in a grandmother, someone else, or even a minister.


In the finest tradition of American political rhetoric he went on to enjoin us to transcend our own current differences, to push aside the chorus of appeals to bigotry and to walk a little farther down the long American path to a more perfect union.

I cannot say him nay.



Addendum: Here are the text and video of Barack Obama's Tuesday, March 18, 2008, speech.

Sunday, March 16, 2008

The old "not a journalist" excuse

When a blogger tries to slip past correcting errors by declaring "I'm not a journalist," I usually mark them off my reading list (no appeals).


Predictable as sunrise, I applaude Jocelyn Newmarch's criticism of a fellow South Africa Mail & Guardian Thought Leader blogger for using that excuse. She also said that:


... the promise of blogging is that all this multiplicity may enable us to think more rigorously and critically, to deepen the level of debate, and to respond to our society with greater compassion. But it can only do that if we’re willing to find the truth, however quiet or mundane it may be.


Over at the Biblical Recorder Editor's Journal Buster addresses that challenge to religious bloggers, concluding:

Yes, the unofficial motto of the blogosphere -- "we fact-check your ass" -- can be relentless and unforgiving.
Shouldn't it be?

Andrew G.R. seems to me to be close to the mark when commenting on March's piece for the Blog Herald. Addressing the question, "Are bloggers journalists?," he concludes:

In my humble opinion, it all depends on the type of blog you are running. One thing, however, is certain: you should always tell the truth and be prepared to defend your post, regardless of your blog’s size.

Write honestly, with painstaking attention to the facts, and be prepared to honestly defend your work: Sounds very much like a job description for an old-fashioned newspaper editor.

Forgive me if you can, but I believe that bloggers who aren't journalists and who are blogging about matters of factual import should all aspire to be.

Earthdrums beat New Zeland today


This morning I awoke to New Zealand earthquake news from perl-mongering twitterfriend @br3nda:

"GAH.. EARTHQUAKE".

She said it only "wobbled a few ornaments on the book shelf here," but her Wellington friend @doublesided was unhappily swaying to the tremblors on the ninth floor of a ten-story building.

The quake was, as @br3nda said in the offhand way that I would have referred to the National Weather Service, on the drums (Geonet New Zealand's "Seismograph Drums" Web page -- clipped image at right).

Geonet New Zealand's home page indicated that @br3nda's quake had a magnitude of 4.6 -- altogether nontrivial if it had occurred here in comparatively earthquake-unprepared Raleigh, N.C.

Birdsong wells up outside, obscuring the Sunday urban background noise.

If the earth trembles beneath my feet this morning, it will find me bicycling on a park trail.

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Switzerland, Iran and Hillary LinksBlog

People do sometimes visit from abroad, where the health care systems are pervasively sane and humane, expecting the same here.


Stephanie Jane Booth of Lausanne, Switzerland, blogged her SXSW encounter with the most ordinary of American health care in A trip to Walgreens.

In response I wished Stephanie a friendly Welcome to my jungle.


Health care concerns were still on my mind when I stumbled over Sara Dopp's blog -- humane, personal, mental-health care.


Reflecting on her flight to last year's SXSW, Sara wrote less on How to Stop an Angry Man from Killing People and primarily about how to give appropriate, personal support to someone suffering from at least temporary, chronic mental illness.



Over at Frink, I offer a semi-musical warning of what may be yet to come for those of us still alive to pay the Iraq war debt: Good Night Iran [Irene], We Will Rock You


Karoli wrote a brief, straightforward assessment of Hillary Clinton’s Experience, and how Hillary has already misdemonstrated it.

Meanwhile, my recovery from a bout of flu continues apace.


Addendum: The Keith Olbermann Special -- addressed to Hillary Clinton and regarding the Geraldine Ferraro outrage -- via Crooks & Liars.

Sunday, March 09, 2008

Link blog on public ethics, Clintonesque confusion, Baptist diligence and abuse of the press

Sins and repentance found a better example in secular political activist and Harvard professor Samantha Power last week than in Southern Baptist Convention leader Dr. Richard Land, who claims special obligations and authority in that regard.

Gwfrink3 called the difference Real and feigned repentance.


Analyzing Clintonesque ruthlessness, Californian Karoli said Oops, Bill Clinton Forgot His Talking Points.

Karoli's points are in my opinion well taken, but I think there are worse, more personal things happening to Bill. More about that another time.


Biblical Recorder Editor njameson hit his stride with Workers Work, in which he details how Baptist "men and women consider the physical needs of others as a viable place to demonstrate the love of Christ and the power of God to heal."


The intellectually daunting Salon blogger Glen Greenwald attacked U.S. journalists as mere tools of the powerful, and drew deserved return fire in Right, Left and Wrong About Journalists.