THE MEDIA ISSUE: VOLUME 29, ISSUE 46
JACKASS NATION
by Malik Isasis
























We have in the United States, a jackass media who day after day drop shit on the heads of the American people; the American people have been shat on for so long that they believe this is the way things are suppose to be—that it’s normal for a government to treat its citizens as consumers rather than citizens. The shadow government that are the global conglomerates have broken Americans like wild horses into believing that healthcare should be in the private sector, that we should have only two weeks of vacation a year, that college should not be attainable to the poor, and that unions are bad.

Current polls have McCain and Obama tied. How is this possible after 8 years of George W. Bush? How is this possible for McCain who voted with Bush 95% of the time to be tied with Obama? The answer is much simpler than the questions, Americans are jackasses. The corporate media has legitimized bigotry, xenophobia and sexism and has made it easier for the Southern voting block to operate proudly in their ignorance, completely unaware of the moral conflicts and consequences that their voting patterns have on domestic and foreign policy. The neocons have been successful at getting the corporate media to portray conservatism as the only value on the political spectrum. Conservatism is the new center.

The corporate media, its parent companies and their subsidiaries have benefited well from Bush policies—such as no bid contracts, laws that deregulated energy, and further deregulated the telecomm industries and war, war, war. So, when his twin John McCain comes along and espouses the same ideology, of course they are going to provide cover for the inarticulate, bumbling imperialist who hasn’t met a war he didn’t like. Corporations thrive off of chaos, which is why the big media supports Republicans.

It is clear that both the Democrats and Republicans serve the same false idol, big business, though the Democrats are less malevolent than their Republican counterpart; they the Democrats are so frightened and careful of being called political heretics that they have become paralyzed, despite having power imbued to them by voters to do something. But it is the political inaction of the American populace that best fit the description of the Florentine Itailan Poet, Dante Aligheiri’s passage, “The hottest place in hell are reserved for those who in a time of great crisis maintain their neutrality.”

Only in Bush world, John McCain and Barack Obama are tied in the polls, and only in Bush world are we a nation of Jackasses.

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OFF THE GRID
by Malik Isasis






















While on vacation I managed to avoid the news and politics. I’ve also been slow on updating the blog. It’s because I’ve been on vacation for the past two weeks. On Saturday I spent 7 hours in the air flying from my hometown Seattle via Los Angeles, and on Sunday, I hopped the Amtrak to Montreal for another 10-hour trek where I’ll be for the next week.

So I’m in beautiful Montreal in a sublet that leans like the tower of Piza. It’s a little scary. I’m staying in the hip neighborhood Laurier. Everything is in French, and I do mean everything. Sometimes there are cognates, words that are similar to English that I can understand, but most of the time I look like a lost child searching for his mother in the supermarket. It’s fine; it’s the best way to learn the language.

My place is down the street from a bar. People smoke marijuana here like cigarettes. The police are ho-hum about the whole thing. I passed by a bar up from where I’m staying last night and there were three attractive women sitting at a table, smoking weed.

I’ve been off work for nearly three weeks now. So, this is how the Europeans and Australians must feel with all the time they get off from work. This is the first time I’ve had consecutive weeks off from work without having to quit my job.

I’m off to the Montreal film festival…I do have some shit to say about politics Obama's Vice Presidential pick, Bush, McCain and the corporate media. I’m letting it all germinate for the next update on Wednesday.

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THE Nth DEGREE: THE STRAIGHT DOPE
PAPER THIN
by N






















I have found the best thing for the bedroom since KY, a condom with an attached head. If you’re a prudish or squeamish this is not the blog for you. Frankly, I don’t know how this brilliant innovation made its way into the Amazing Superstores of Rhode Island and Peep Show/Porn Havens of NYC and somehow never made it into my adult nudie shopping bag at the store. This single use small, ranging from 2” to 4”, plastic penis head attached to a condom invention could have single handily helped me these last six months.

Recently, I’ve started the ugly and inexplicably suicidal like task of dating. Dating in NYC is like that quote by Emma Lazarus, “Bring me your poor, your hungry…” of course in the voice of the great NYC woman, the Statue of Liberty. Only my dating voice says, “Bring me a man who brings me flowers, to nice restaurants, picks me up in Brooklyn and whisks me away to his spacious apartment with great views of the city. Give me a man with a respectable job, a debonair smile, toned abs, ripped arms, a sense of humor to keep me in stitches for days, height that makes me want to climb him, who cooks, has an Olympic medal in kissing, loves his family and treats me like GOLD. No, scratch that, PLATINUM.”

Well, I’ve found those guys. I call them “great on paper men.” They literally look good on paper, make a list of their qualities or take a picture. They’re phenomenal. They have everything and more than I just mentioned. Except for, dare I say it, the extra 3” a man needs where it counts.

Now, I know not every man can be born with a porn star dick. Nor, do women always prefer an extraterrestrial sized penis coming at them full throttle but there are two things we can all agree on. 1. It needs to work properly and 2. We need to be able to feel it when you’re fucking us. This is where the “great on paper man” comes up short. (Yes, I just penis punned.) Allow me to explain.

Scenario One: Phil*
Blonde
Blue Eyed
6’ 3”
33 year-old Bartender/Phone carrier worker
Two apartments one in Manhattan and one in Brooklyn
Wants to be married yesterday
Loves children, traveling, and great wine

HIS PENIS WAS THE LENGTH AND WIDTH OF A BIC CIGARETTE LIGHTER.

Scenario Two: Jerry*

32 year-old Cartoonist/Web Designer (Owned his own company!)
Tall, Dark, and Gorgeous
Would trek from NJ to Brooklyn by train to meet me
Looking for an all expenses paid (by him) travel companion

HIS PENIS WAS AS THIN AND LIMP AS A WET (BROKEN IN HALF) PIECE OF LINGUINE.

I shit you not ladies. These were actual men I dated, attractive, smart, goal orientated, respectable, hardworking, emotionally available men; all just wanting what everyone wants someone to love them and make love to them. However, I couldn’t do it; not even with a plastic penis head. Great on paper did not mean great in bed, ipso facto meaning not so great for me.

So I ‘m going to keep looking and hope you do too. Because at the end of the day, if all we have to turn to are these new fangled sex products to “find” true love, then we all are being short changed and we are definitely worth more.

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THE MEDIA ISSUE: VOLUME 27, ISSUE 45
AMERICAN MINSTRELISM
by Malik Isasis




Ben Stiller’s Tropic Thunder has come under heavy criticism from various groups on its perceived insensitivity toward the mentally challenged. This particular displaced criticism is focused on the usage of the word retarded, which is used repeatedly by Ben Stiller’s action-hero character, Tugg Speedman, whose decided to make a “serious” turn in acting by portraying a mentally challenged character named, Simple Jack. The film’s critics have missed the mark.

Subtly may not be Ben Stiller’s strong suite, but broad comedy with a heavy helping of humiliation, and a dash of emasculation is where he shines. Stiller takes the Simple Jack character to an absurd level, but it’s not to poke fun at the mentally challenged, rather it’s to satirize the actors who portray them. Tropic Thunder is a send up, a well-done—if not occasionally, overdone satire of the over-indulgence and self-importance of Hollywood producers, actors, their handlers, entourages, and the people who love them. It is a brutal commentary on the vapidness, dick measuring, over-budgeted film projects that produces more of the same; read Pauline Kael’s essay, Why Are Films Bad?

Black Face

Ben Stiller and his writing partners’ have also come under some criticism on race. Robert Downey Jr. plays an Australian method actor Kirk Lazarus, who portrays one of two African-American soldiers, Sgt. Osiris. If the name Osiris sounds familiar it’s because it was one of dozens of Ol’ Dirty Bastards’ of Wu Tang Clan, monikers. The social commentary this film makes about race is as poignant an observation in a Hollywood film since Spike Lee’s Bamboozled (2000). The scathing critique on race is tucked into comedy to make it go down smoother, but it is no less as effective as Lee’s Bamboozled, which mainstream audiences were ready to hate.

For most of the film, the Sgt. Osiris character is the only character walking around with his eyes open about what is really going on. He is the consciousness of the film.

Hollywood is replete with minstrel performances by white actors that dates back to one of the so-called greatest films, Birth of a Nation. African and Asian Americans were the biggest targets by Hollywood, propagating some of the most insidious stereotypes of the early twentieth century. The Black Mammy, the over sexualized Big Black Buck, the Buck-toothed Oriental servant, and other yellow peril hysteria that persists today (just watch Lou Dobbs discuss China).

Just recently in film history, Angelina Jolie blackened up for her role as Mariane Pearl in a Mighty Heart. Marissa Tomei browned up to play a latina in The Perez Family. Not a peep from the media. I think this was the point Stiller was making. Actors are applauded for putting on fat suits to portray overweight people, or dark make-up to portray an ethnic group.

Stiller’s critique of the history of Hollywood to cast white actors to portray people of color and receive accolades for such brave performances is spot on and some of the most poignant in a major Hollywood film since Spike Lee’s 2000 Bamboozled.

Like Lee, Stiller takes on the corporate rappers who between the colorful adjectives pussy, nigger, bitch, bitch-ass niggers have absolutely nothing to say, but have become pitchmen for products. See for yourself:




The film's only true African American is a rapper called Alpa Chino, played by Brandon T. Jackson, who in between hawking his energy drink Booty Sweat and candy bars Bust-A-Nut Bar, is trying to build an acting career. Stiller has captured the sad state of rap and the corporate rappers who have an inexplicable obsession with Al Pacino and the film Scareface.

Tropic Thunder at times is brilliant, and at others, it folds onto itself to contradict the stereotypes it is trying to critique. For instance, the Alpa Chino character is mostly a foil for Downey’s character. This was a $90 million dollar film, and in showing the foibles of over budgeted action Hollywood films, the film at times became a parody of itself using the same over-the-top explosions.

To criticize the film on its merit is fair, but to criticize the film without having seen it, or because it is trying to say something about how the mentally challenged and people of color are exploited by Hollywood is foolish.

The true perpetrators of the daily minstrel shows are the media, who on a daily basis, show Arabs and Muslims as inhumane monsters, Mexicans as job-stealing, disease-carrying peasants, and African-Americans as brutal, oversexed, and unAmerican. These are the images and parodies that are being fed to the American populace and the world on a daily basis from outlets like CNN, FOX News, MSNBC, NBC, CBS, and ABC.

Grade: B

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THE SELF-REALIZATION ISSUE: VOLUME 26, ISSUE 44
FLASHING, LIGHT
by Malik Isasis























On Tuesday morning I was at JFK airport taxiing down the runway on a commuter plane. As the plane sped up to take off, it suddenly lost power. After coming to a stand still, we sat for about ten minutes before the captain’s voice came on over the speakers.

“Sorry folks, it appears we’re having some mechanical problems, we seem to have lost power. The ground crew are going to pull us back to the gate where they’ll inspect the plane, fix the problem and get us back on track.”

Mechanical problems are not what you want to hear just before taking off on a plane.

“What if this had happened while we were in flight? I thought.

I began ruminating about my and the other passengers’ deaths. It would have garnered a brief mention in nightly news, probably a half minute. A news anchor would have dispassionately said, “A plane crashed in the Atlantic today in route to Washington D.C., there were 70 people on board, all perished. United is investigating the crash. And in other news, Golden Boy Michael Phelps has won another gold metal…”

I couldn’t remember the last time I told my friends that I loved them and that cute woman I saw in the cafe last week, I should have asked for her number. Damn, I’m not going to finish the book that I’ve been writing. I’m single, and didn’t get married, or have children. I didn’t get a chance to travel to Africa. There were so many things left undone, unsaid…I felt if I’d died in a plane crash, my life would have been incomplete.

An hour later the plane was fixed and the plane again taxied down the runway, this time taking off. The forty-five minutes it takes to get to D.C. from New York, I thought about death and how it measures your life.

I am not living my life to its fullest potential, and most importantly, I’m taking my friendships for granted, hell I’m taking time for granted. So while on vacation at home here in Seattle, I’m telling all my friends and family that I love them and what they mean to me. I’m going to finish that damn novel. I’m going to live everyday as if it is my last. And for the next cute woman I see in café in New York, look out.

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THE MEDIA ISSUE: VOLUME 25, ISSUE 43
SHAME YOU CAN BELIEVE IN
by Malik Isasis















Former Democratic Presidential Candidate John Edwards was discovered to have had an affair with someone on his campaign staff, and now the corporate media has predictably formed a circle jerk with wall-to-wall coverage revealing themselves as the pornographers they really are. What a bunch of immature, childish imbeciles. I take that back, these flying monkeys know exactly what they are doing.

Just recently Republican Senator Ted Stevens was indicted for taken bribes from big oil in Alaska, but whoring for corporate oil conglomerates isn’t salacious enough for the media I suppose. The media likes to play to the naiveté of the American populace when it comes to human sexuality. Every time a politician has sex outside his marriage, the public and the media act as if they’ve never heard of such a thing, political pundits are dramatically indignant. This type of stupidity, or idiocy about politics and power are the remnants of the antiquated puritanical values that Americans continue to hold onto in spite of reality. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said it best, "Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac." Where you find power, you find men abusing it. Period.

The so-called progressive bloggers and punditry are jumping into the fray perpetuating nonsensical coverage over a private matter that has no effect on public policy. Personal affairs of the heart have no effect on public policy. On the other hand, taking bribes from big oil, does indeed affect public policy. The collapse of Bears & Stearns and Fannie May and Freddie Mac have real world consequences for instance. The cognitive dissonance is astounding, but I think about the intent of the media, and it begins to make much more sense. The media has long scrapped its role as an advocate, the fourth estate. Its sole purpose today is to sell us shit, bullshit, and products from the likes of Proctor and Gamble and such, but more importantly, the main objective of this matrix is to control us, mind, body, and soul.

Here is the corporate media’s real agenda on the Edwards affair. Take a gander at this video:



This is the real agenda to discredit the whole Democratic Party. This is clearly, obfuscation. Edwards’ brand of Populism politics never sat well with corporate media, therefore, when Edwards made poor choices in his personal life for reasons that are only known to him, the corporate media is using this as an opportunity to discredit the man, rather than the “sin.” By the time they are done picking at Edward’s bones, he will be of no use to the Democratic party, more importantly, he won’t be chosen as an Attorney General of an Obama Administration, therefore Republicans and their flying monkeys won’t be held accountable.

The Kentucky Fried Chicken media are using Edwards as another anvil on Obama’s heels to drag him down. Anything having to do remotely with Democrats or progressive issues become the burden of Obama or Democrats.

The corporate media are shameful, but they are shameless in their propaganda of American innocence. It is why Americans are so damn puerile when it comes to natural acts of human copulation; we rather see shit get blown up. We indulge in billions of dollars behind closed doors in pornography, better still, our government loves stacking naked Muslim men in a naked pyramid and raping them anally and yet, corporate media still has the audacity to judge others when they cheat on their spouses.

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THE REAL POLITIK ISSUE: VOLUME 24, ISSUE 42
AMERICA’S PETER PRINCIPLE
by Malik Isasis


















On June 28, 1980 the late, great film critic Pauline Kael wrote a scathing essay simply called, “Why Movies are Bad?” in which she eloquently listed eighteen systemic reasons why Hollywood films are bad. Even twenty-eight years ago, Kael had the foresight to see where Hollywood was going.

In the opening paragraph she says, “The movies have been so rank the last couple of years that when I see people lining up to buy tickets I sometimes think that the movies aren't drawing an audience — they're inheriting an audience.”

During the 1960s and 70s social upheavals of the Civil Rights Movement, Women’s Movement, Gay Rights Movement, Vietnam protestations, and the legalization of abortion were all backdrops to the era.

While Hollywood was creating Elvis Presley musicals, other Hollywood musicals and comedies, a loose collection of French filmmakers known as the French New Wave in 1950s and 60s were rejecting classical cinematic form and told stories that aimed to raise consciousness making American cinema look childish, out of touch and very antiquated.

When studio execs finally began awakening they began creating such works as Bonnie and Clyde, Chinatown, Enter the Dragon, Shaft, Dirty Harry, The Godfather, Deliverance, The Exorcist, The Conversation, Shampoo, Taxi Driver, Apocalypse Now, Alien and Rocky. There were a lot of black folk in the movies too. The genre known as Blaxploitation, wasn’t a exploitation at all. Black artists were working creating films like Penitentiary, Black Belt Jones, Blacula, Cotton Comes to Harlem, Sparkle, Welfare, Cornbread, Coffy (all of Pam Grier’s films) the list goes on.

Two films that were also part of the 70s movement were Jaws and Star Wars, two exceptional films that also begun the decline of cinema. Jaws and Star Wars started the movie-event, blockbuster films.

“When Alien opened "big," Alan Ladd, Jr., president of the pictures division of Twentieth Century Fox, was regarded as a demigod; it's the same way that Fred Silverman was a demigod. It has nothing to do with quality, only with the numbers. (Ladd and his team weren't admired for the small pictures they took chances on and the artists they stuck by.) The media now echo the kind of thinking that goes on in Hollywood, and spread it wide. Movie critics on TV discuss the relative grosses of the new releases; the grosses at this point relative to previous hits; which pictures win pass the others in a few weeks. It's like the Olympics — which will be the winners?”

The decline of films anticipated by Kael was related to what she theorized as the lack of risk studio executives were willing to take. Shitty films still made lots of money, so their risk-assessment was validated at the box-office.

”The studios no longer make movies primarily to attract and please moviegoers; they make movies in such a way as to get as much as possible from prearranged and anticipated deals… There is an even grimmer side to all this: because the studios have discovered how to take the risk out of moviemaking, they don't want to make any movies that they can't protect themselves on.”

The Peter Principle

There is an interesting parallel in Kael’s essay to the decline politics of the last generation. During Bush’s 8 years we still have a gaping hole in the ground where the Twin Towers once stood; New Orleans still lay in ruins after Hurricane Katrina with a rebuild of the same failed levee system. Many of the country’s infrastructures lay in disrepair and on the verge of a catastrophe.

Politicians have developed a strong reptilian brain, that is, self-interest, self-preservation and the maintenance of power by all means necessary including starting wars in the case of the Republicans, and going along with them, in the case of the Democrats.

How did we get to this place? Why are politicians so bad?

The Peter Principle states that a person will be promoted to the highest level of his/or her competence and eventually advance to a level of incompetence. I believe the level of incompetence in our politicians began with the advent of corporate lobbyists and political consultants who advise and coach politicians during campaigns. As a result we began getting politicians both Republican and Democrat who are interchangeable, both offering an equal amount of nothingness, just hackneyed slogans.

The modern Republican Party overrun with neocons, and religious fanatics has made the party an unsustainable movement. The country needs more than Laissez faire tax cuts, fear and Jesus to remain a viable power in the world. Maybe it’s their political DNA, which tends toward fascism upon reaching the pinnacles of power. What is clear though, is throughout the 20th century; the Republicans have wrought disaster after disaster. During the 1920s there were three consecutive Republican Presidencies: Warren Harding (1920-1923), Calvin Coolidge (1923-1929) and Herbert Hoover (1929-1933). What we are seeing with Bush, and what we have seen with his father’s Administration and the Reagan Administration has all been seen before, but the American people treat history as if it were disposable. Political consultants understand this, which is why Republicans every election cycle are able to rise like the Phoenix to repeat the same mistakes.


Why should politicians change when they are rewarded for their incompetent governance? Bush was rewarded with a second term after a disastrous first term. We don’t expect much from the people we elect, and they in turn don’t expect much from us. Our leadership is a symptom of our failure, our lack of critical thinking, our ability to be easily frightened, easily manipulated and managed by superficial distractions, and easily misinformed. We are who we elect, right?

On October 29, 2007 Zogby Poll released a poll that showed that 52% of Americans would support a strike against Iran. Is it that an obtuse American populace had suddenly and carefully read up on the region thoughtfully and had come to a reasonable conclusion, or was it a sales job by corporate [media] propagandists with their hands up Republicans’ and Democrats’ asses pushing for another oil grab?

Corporations and its news subsidiaries along with politicians have convinced Americans that they have choices and through those choices, power. Evidence A: the election of the Democratic Party in 2006 to take over Congress. What have the Democratic Party done besides aid and abet the Republicans and corporatists?

False Choices

In Americans’ lifetime they will have watched 3 years worth of commercials. While Americans have a plethora of choices, those choices are consumer choices rather than political choices. Notice how corporate pundits are touting Vice Presidential choices? The media’s vice presidential candidates are insiders, corporate Democrats and Republicans. If Obama were to choose someone outside of this list—say a real progressive, his candidacy would surely be targeted as too much of a risk. Obama understands this threat and will pick someone safe like Evan Byah, a conservative, corporate Democrat who will fight to maintain the status quo. Consumer choice and political choice are not the same.

While we are distracted with all of the consumer choices, corporate raiders are treating the federal government like a buffet. No-bid contracts and cronyism has fueled the prison industrial complex, the military industrial complex, and the health care industrial complex. These industries have created and worsen the very problems they claim to correct. The United States has the highest incarceration rate out of the Western world; the United States has been in a perpetual war for 57 years beginning with the Korean War; and the United States’ health care system exacerbates sickness and indebtedness. Who besides corporations, benefits when the federal government is privatized?

Building Consent

Corporations manufacture need and exploit the American people with constant fear of death, disease, Arabs, Mexicans and black people. Fear is how the corporate raiders build consent. Most Americans don’t know better because they are bombarded with misinformation. For instance the corporate media giant NBC according to Corporate Watch was rewarded with 2.2 billion dollars in defense contracts in 2005. Before the Iraq war and subsequent occupation, NBC and MSNBC all but saluted Bush and his build up to war and promoting it without question. Now we know the silence was worth 2.2 billion dollars.

As media critic Ben Bagdikian noted in his book The Media Monopoly, "At issue is the possession of power to surround almost every man, woman and child in the country with controlled images and words, to socialize each new generation of Americans, to alter the political agenda of the country" (Bagdikian, IX).

Under this new imperial paradigm, corporate expansionism, and acquisition and ownership of mass media by industrial corporations such as newspapers, book publishing, magazines, broadcast and cable news has allowed these corporations to exercise unprecedented influence over national legislation and government agencies. Uninformed Americans are clay to be molded as the corporate raiders see fit. The decay critical thinking will continue to rot our democracy from inside out.

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THE Nth DEGREE: THE STRAIGHT DOPE
YEAR ONE
by N


















I did it! This August has culminated my first year living in New York City. Here are ten things, in no particular order, that I love about living in the city that never sleeps.


1. That I can squat, take a pee in the subway station and not look completely insane. Only in extreme emergencies, I’m not a weirdo!

2. My ability to hop on a train visit my friends, shop, head to the beach or anything else NYC has to offer without giving up my left arm at the gas pump.

3. The fact that if you get caught in the rain there is a bar on every corner for you to rehydrate yourself in, of course in more ways than one.

4. That with a toothbrush, a swipe of mascara, and a clean pair of underwear and a little bit of gumption you’re ready for a night out or the proper walk of shame.

5. That even I look like an artist when I doodle on paper or take a photograph.

6. That my “family” is comprised of many different ethnic backgrounds.

7. That even though I’m Italian and Polish, I get mistaken for a sexy Chinese, Russian or Latino (“Aye Mami”) woman on any given day.

8. That people stopped giving me shit about my Red Sox Infatuation after I said, “I’d root for the Mets, if I had to choose a NY team.”

9. That a great haircut only has to cost ten dollars.

10. That you can have someone else wash, fluff, and fold your laundry and your groceries delivered to your door all while watching My So Called Life episodes and eating Thai.

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THE MEDIA ISSUE: VOLUME 23, ISSUE 41
REALITY IS MY WITNESS
by Malik Isasis


















Presidential candidate John McCain is NOT a racist. He’s a White Supremacist. McCain pretended to throw a hissy-fit when Obama said that McCain and his flying monkey-shit throwers will try and scare the electorate by saying that he had "a funny name and he doesn't look like all the presidents on the dollar bills and the five-dollar bills." What in Obama’s observation is not true?



It seems Barack Obama has not recognized his place. His audacity has given the white establishment a terrible time of boxing him in. The corporate media has a long history of diagnosing black folks with the Uppity Negro syndrome, that is, when black folk forget their social caste in the American white power structure, the media will do everything in its power to destroy them.

The reality is that Obama is about as threatening as a Cabbage Patch Kid. He has bent over backwards to avoid race—or anything that will wake the sleepy consciousness of racism lurking deep within a large part of the electorate. Throughout the 15-month long presidential campaign it has always been Obama’s opponents who brought up race, but somehow, Obama was always straddled with the job of soothing the irrational fears of racism the corporate media fanned. He surrounds himself with American flags. A flag lapel pin is a fixed part of his uniform, and every chance he gets, he states how much he loves his country and yet, when race is brought up this is how the media responds:

A dispute over whether black U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama has played the "race card" won't swing the election but could make it harder for voters to trust him, analysts said on Friday.

No African American has ever been elected to the White House and in a country where memories of racial strife and discrimination against the minority are still fresh, Obama must work harder to overcome his doubters, they said on Friday.

References to the Democratic senator's race, if they are seen as clumsy, do not help Obama make the case that he is the most reliable choice to lead the country as it struggles with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and an ailing economy.

WTF? It was a Republican and a Republican Congress who has destroyed the US economy and two countries. Does this Reuter writer make any sense? It only makes sense when you realize that corporate media are always whoring for Republicans, no offense to sex workers. Obama has walked through the eye of the needle, tap danced on the head of a pin in a 15-month presidential campaign to become the Democratic Nominee, yet whenever the subject of race comes up, the corporate media, creates a parallel universe in which Obama is clumsy. This is how white supremacy works, charge the victims of oppression with the crime of racism, and then have them be totally responsible for making white folks feel better over their acts of racism.

It is incredibly fascinating and equally frustrating watching rich white men with all the keys to power pretend to be indignant when there are accusations of racism. It’s bad theatre.

Obama and the Democrats

My criticism of Obama has been the criticism I have charged all of Democrats with, and that is accepting Republican talking points as a baseline for debating policy; accepting that Republicans are better with the economy; accepting that Republicans are better on national defense. Just because they say so doesn’t make it true. Reality is my witness. Democrats have internalized Republican hatred of them and over compromised, but when they compromise, the corporate media and Republicans call them “flip-floppers” or weak with no core values. When the Democrats understand that Republicans are out to destroy them, maybe—whom the hell am I kidding? Democrats will eventually wither away because of their inability to stand up to the corporate pirates who pay their election bills, and the Republicans who approval they constantly seek.

Onward.

McCain and the Republicans

Continuing his raid on the top talent from President Bush's 2004 reelection bid, Sen. John McCain has signed Steve Schmidt as a senior adviser to his presidential campaign-in-waiting.

Bitter McCain who pisses the most sour of vinegar has hired Flying Monkey-shit throwers from the George Bush’s 2004 election campaign to make the presidential campaign extra shitty. McCain’s strategy is the whack-a-mole strategy, that is, drop shit bombs and hide, drop shit bombs and hide and pretend to have nothing to do with them.

McCain will succeed because the corporate media wants to see him succeed. The media will continue to call McCain a Maverick regardless of his siphoning off Bush's 2004 election team. He'll still be considered fresh, and independent.

Only in Bush world, where failure is success would all of this make sense.

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