Magna Cum Laude vs.Thank you Lawdy

A lot will be made this election cycle over McCain's years in public service versus Obama's. Hillary tried her best to breath life into the insinuation, "Look what putting inexperience in the White House has cost us the last 8 years."

Then today I get this e-mail:

"The academic records of the Presidential Candidates are clear:

Magna Cum Laude @ Harvard Univ Law School vs # 894 of 899 @ US Naval Academy.

Interesting facts, this is one of those situations where most right wing conservatives will ignore facts and just support McCain. If the shoe were on the other foot we all know they would be bashing Obama.

According to several sources (see link below) Senator John McCain graduated 894th out of 899 in his class at the U. S. Naval Academy in 1958, yet I've not seen this in ANY major media. I wonder if this would be the case if the roles were reversed and that unimpressive rank had been Senator Barack Obama's class ranking and Senator McCain had graduated MAGNA CUM LAUDE from Harvard Law School and been President of the Harvard Law Review--as did Senator Obama."

I think records are important and can't be ignored, but I wonder if we don't put too much emphasis on the past. Presidents have so many competent people around that, more often than not, it's not proven ability that matters as much as it is the direction and leadership. Bush has led us quite effectively (thanks to the competence of his camp) exactly where he wanted to. It's not where I want us to be, but he has no problems with it.

I would argue that the clearest indicators of Obama or McCain's future success in office is not their past, but their policy and vision of the present coupled with the nature and effectiveness of their current campaigns.

Scam

It's amazing that we are so used to being extorted by our own government that this even works. It's supposedly spreading fast so be prepared should you get this call.

Most of us take those summonses for jury duty seriously, but enough people skip out on their civic duty, that a new and ominous kind of fraud has surfaced. The caller claims to be a jury coordinator. If you protest that you never received a summons for jury duty, the con artist asks you for your Social Security number and date of birth so he or she can verify the information and cancel the arrest warrant. Give out any of this information and bingo; your identity was just stolen.

The swindle has been reported so far in 11 states, including Oklahoma, Illinois, and Colorado. It is particularly insidious because they use intimidation over the phone to try to bully people into giving information by pretending they are with the court system. The FBI and the federal court system have issued nationwide alerts on their websites, warning consumers about the fraud.

Check it out here: http://www.fbi.gov/page2/june06/jury_scams060206.htm

Since I've been all over the place looking for a job, this has me wondering how vulnerable I've made myself to identity fraud just by filling out applications.

Artistic ramblingS

I just published an Home-Training essay on GP about the Rene Marie controversy and the importance of artistic contribution (Part 1 / Part 2). This marks the first time I've liked the almost inevitable title change better than my own. My working title was "Artistic ramblingS," which my editor changed to "Good Art Gives--but Doesn't Always Sell." You go, Ryan!

The Ironies of Campaignin'

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Worth Reconsidering

To presume is human, to reconsider sublime. At least that's what I'm beginning to believe as a father of three. Fatherhood asks one to do a great deal with often incomplete, misleading, and sometimes outright false information -- from arbitrating disputes to meting out appropriate consequences to picking cereal. I am loathe to admit the number of times I've rushed to judgment or totally misunderstood something as a dad. Sometimes the only thing that spares me from acting on dubious presumptions are a loving pair of deep mahogany eyes staring up at me, begging me to reconsider.

Art functions in a quite similar fashion. It asks us to reconsider our biases, our preferences, our intuitions, our world. That's what Barry Blitt was doing when he inked the cartoon, "Politics of Fear," which made the front cover of The New Yorker this month. And, yes, I join the ranks of Clarence Page and Jon Stewart believing that Blitt did a pretty good job.

read more on GP>>>

Exactly

VeeP Watch

Tim Kaine, Governor of Virginia, is another not so bad looking prospect. He perhaps helps Obama bridge a connection with Southerners and Roman Catholics. A Roman Catholic constituency is one thing John Edwards doesn't bring to the table. Tom Daschle is Roman Catholic, but not a Southerner. Kaine brings them both together.

Brian Surgery with a Switch-blade

I'm not sure how I feel about this GP post—whether it says something that ought to be voiced or whether I just fell into the trap of being the Black guy who commented on the black thing just because I happened to be more qualified to do so than most other GP contributing writers.

If nothing else, I do love the quote by Ralph Ellison...

The 4th of July is always a weird holiday for me. It's not that I don't enjoy the nostalgia, picnics, barbeque, fireworks and romanticizing of history—I do—yet as a student of history I can't help but be reminded of the July 5, 1852, speech of Frederick Douglass, given at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, NY. If you haven't, you should read it. "This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn." This was a full 10 years and then some before Emancipation. Though I do not mourn in the same way or for the same reasons, I feel I owe such proud patriotism some homage. So I remember in (mostly) quiet yet hopeful ambivalence. January 1st (1863) is much more straightforward for me.

Exactly one week prior to the Fourth this year (not by accident, I'm sure), the largest segmented survey of African-Americans ever conducted was released by the research firm Yankelovich. The study was commissioned by Radio One, the largest radio broadcasting company primarily targeting African Americans in the U.S. USA Today was given the first opportunity to review it.

I am always amazed at how serendipitously life tends to sync up with what I am currently reading. On the very day Black America Today was released to the public, I coincidentally began reading Dark Matter, an anthology of speculative fiction. I was floored by the incisiveness of the following statement found in the anthology's introduction:

"In his 1953 collection of cultural criticism, Shadow and Act, Ralph Ellison cautioned readers not to stumble
'over that ironic obstacle which lies in the path of anyone who would fashion a theory of American Negro culture while ignoring the intricate network of connections which binds Negroes to the larger society. To do so is to attempt a delicate brain surgery with a switch-blade. And it is possible that any viable theory of Negro American culture obligates us to fashion a more adequate theory of American culture as a whole.'"

This became the lens through which I process the Radio One survey in the shadow of Independence Weekend. I'm not left with a cohesive image. Rather a disjointed vision cracked by nagging questions.

read more @ God's Politics blog>>>