No Quarter is no friend of Barack Obama but I have to say Melissa McEwan posed some really dynamite questions for Obama here.

The Slave Ship opens with an extensive and unforgettable inventory of the trade’s particular horrors. There are the accused conspirators in a failed slave ship revolt forced by their captors to eat the hearts and livers of the recently executed. A captive starves himself to death after several unsuccessful attempts to rip open his throat with his fingernails. A black sailor accused of fomenting an insurrection gets pinned to the mast by the ship’s captain, who leaves him to rot to death without food or water over the course of three weeks. Sharks trail slave ships from one edge of the Atlantic to the other, overgrown by the time they reach Jamaica from feeding on human carcasses tossed overboard en route. Captains embrace the spectacle of grisly executions with devilish glee. The desecration of human bodies becomes at once efficient, whimsical and sadistic. A London merchant orders the captain of his ship to brand each captive with the first initials of his wife’s and daughter’s names. One master lowers a shrieking woman feet first into the Atlantic; when “she was drawn up” moments later, according to Rediker, “it was found that a shark…had bit her off from the middle.” The Atlantic slave trade has been the subject of rigorous historical study for more than four decades, but no previous work comes as close to conveying its terror.
—The Slave Ship: A Human History by Marcus Rediker

I hope it’s her choice that she is not seen in these rapturous images of the victorious McCain clan. George Bush used her existence to smear McCain eight years ago and this was apparently a traumatic experience for young Bridget. But her invisibility in the current campaign is troubling.

Because of her endorsement of Barack Obama, some are saying Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius could be a vice-president nominee for Obama. I think a better choice would be Mark Warner, the former Virginia governor running for U.S. Senate.

It’ll be a better, tougher ticket against the troglodytic McCain-Huckabee ticket.

Caroline Kennedy this week sought to bestow on Barack Obama the aura of her father’s idealism. In hindsight, despite all we know about JFK, a certain saintly glow attends to his legend now. A martyred brother, RFK, buttresses the legend.

And his brother, Sen. Edward Kennedy, changed course on a wasteful life to become a champion of the poor and powerless.

And Obama, despite the taint of Rezko, still retains a certain purity, a neat trick, if I’ve ever seen one. Now, what does he make of all these endorsements?

The Los Angeles Times, for such a wonderful newspaper, always seems to think small.

I toiled briefly at the Associated Press many moons ago. It’s a fine service. But is there any reason why the Times would rely on the wires for this piece?

I was traveling this past weekend when my computer got sick (a complete system failure) and died. No amount of dancing, soothsaying, or human sacrifice could coax it back to life. I finally returned home Wednesday and spoke to Toshiba (well, to the outsourced customer service desk in Bangladesh, or thereabout). The agent got frustrated with me because I couldn’t understand him so he instructed me to take my dang blank laptop to an authorized repair center in the morning for diagnosis.

I was working on a long post about my travels and that is now trapped in the consciousness of my dead computer. My notes on a different post that I promised last week are also on that computer.

I have too many applications, too many programs on the computer that I do not want to lose. But, more than that, I have been working on a redesign of this site that I want to migrate over to its own website and that, too, is on the computer.

I will, of course, continue to post in the coming days and weeks but it may be sporadic until I either get my laptop back, or buy a new one.

So long . . .

“After the revolution there will be enough for all.”

* * *

“Because legality is just the name for everything that’s not dangerous for the ruling order, because the poor starve while the rich play, because the flickering system of signs is enticing us to give up our precious interiority and join the dance and because just round the corner an insect world is waiting, so saying we must love one another or die isn’t enough, not by a long way, because there’ll come a time when any amount of love will be too late.” *

—Hari Kunzru, “My Revolutions,” a novel, Dutton. 2008

On the day before the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, Senator Barack Obama delivers a speech to the congregation of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia.

The Clintons and the national media covering the Democratic Party race for the presidential nomination have broken out a new story line regarding Barack Obama: That he’s “angry” and “frustrated.” Hillary Clinton practically taunts him with this. It does not help that the media has not only totally bought into this, they’re mischaracterizing their news coverage to turn normal or innocuous exchange with the candidate into “tense” encounters. ABC News breathlessly reported on its website that it had filmed a “testy” exchange between Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times and Obama. Their tape, however, does not match their description of the encounter.

A measured Obama was trying to both sign autographs for voters and talk to the reporters as he campaigned in South Carolina. His voice was not raised. A bemused smile played on his face, as if he recognized the trap he was in. The reporters were trying to manufacture a story where there was none and he was not about to give them one. He even tried to go off the record at one point.

It’s a singular achievement of the Clintons that and the media in this campaign that they’ve managed to turn Barack Obama into the “Angry Black Man” without any evidence of him being one.

Obama once said, in response to people (the Clintons) who said he’s in too much of a hurry to become president, that what they wanted was for him to wait until all the hope is boiled out of him.

It was a good line.

He probably did not realize that there was not going to be any waiting involved.

How sweet is this for Hillary. Send Bill out to bang Obama, then jump up and say, see, Obama can’t take the heat.

So what if the Democratic Party gets burned in the process? Who cares. Power. Corrupts. Absolutely.

A blog is a dangerous thing.

I recently smacked Harvey Silvergate for a piece in Reason Magazine that I believed was not sufficiently respectful of civil liberties.

I was wrong about Mr. Silvergate.

My post was a knee-jerk reaction to what I saw as a snide attack on the American Civil Liberties Union. A friend kindly pointed out to me that Silvergate is a member of the board of that organization.

Todd is a friend of mine. His blog is a must read for me. He recently posted to a different site. It’s a great piece, called “Gang’s All Here,” about many of the the characters that people his blog.

A friend, Jenny, sent me this today. It seems like the hard way to do it but . . .

My cold of the last several days has now abated. Replaced by a splitting headache. As Jimmy Breslin might say, beautiful.

I don’t know who Harvey Silvergate is but, before I read anymore about civil liberties from him, I’d prefer he spend a month captive in each of the following locations: Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan.

Silvergate is allegedly a lawyer but it appears he wouldn’t know the Constitution even if George W. Bush is standing right in front of him, shredding it.

So, last night, there was the evil dementor Newt Gingrish on Fox’s Hannity and Colmes decrying how Lord Voldermort, er, Bill Clinton, was trying kill off good little Harry (that would be Barack Obama) and it occurred to me, those are love taps that Bill is administering to Obama compared to what Republicans will do to the hopeful one when they get their hands on him.

Wow. That was a long sentence. I’ll try to curb that.

Bill Clinton, apparently, does not mind losing a little bit of respect if it means his wife gets to go back to the White House. Power corrupts. Absolutely.

Heath Ledger is dead. The tabloids, both print and electronic, are going to have a field day.

I’ve seen Ledger in one complete film, Casanova, and in parts of others, including in “Ten Things I Hate about You,” the film where he first made his name. He seemed like a good enough actor. What most impressive to me about him was a profile of him in the New York Times in November.

Ledger, according to that profile, turned down roles for a year after “Ten Things I Hate about You” because “I feel like I’m wasting time if I repeat myself,” he explained.

We should have been tired of Ledger right about now. Instead, he was an intriguing personality. He carefully considered his roles and left a respectable body of work. That is what we’ll be left with when all the piranhas move on to the next prey.

Dear Lord:

If You’re listening up in heaven, please grant me this one wish: Let not the Rudy Giuliani misadventures, otherwise known as his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, end. Not just yet. Could You let it run for at least one more week?

The thing is this. I was a newspaper reporter once. And, in that capacity, I covered Rudy when he was mayor of New York City. I think I have in me one dynamite post about Rudy and me. In any case, it’ll be such a shame to have to write the memoirs of those days—all the laughs we had, the tears we shed, such a guy!—after he’s left the campaign trail. What fun is that?

So, God, would You prolong his agony long enough for me to get the post in? No, You don’t have to let him win Florida. You know, Rudy G. has this “Big State” strategy? Just let him do well enough so he thinks he could still win the whole thing. Yeah, You can smite him on Super Tuesday.

I’ll try and get my post in before then.

Thank You, Lord.

Michael

I have said previously (as have others) that I believe Barack Obama is Bill Clinton’s truest heir.

The New York Times has a curious story today that I am still thinking about. I am not sure what I think about the strategy.

I know that I am happy that the Clintons are not ceding the ‘black’ vote’ to Obama. The most gratifying aspect of this campaign to me has been Obama’ run as a candidate who happens to be black, rather than as the ‘black candidate.’ For that reason, he has had to work hard to earn black support, which he still doesn’t have, not totally. Black women, for instance, may still end up supporting Hillary (because I may not return to this subject, consider this in the meantime).

Hillary, at first, did not think she would have to contest for the ‘black vote,’ such was the reservoir goodwill built by Bill Clinton over the course of his political career. Bill Clinton was no less exploitative of African-Americans in his political career than other Democrats. And the party during his reign still took African-Americans for granted. But, even if short of tangible gains for blacks, Bill Clinton was at least empathetic.

That was a change from the open hostility that Ronald Reagan in particular and Republicans in general have exhibited, something that continues today in some of the coded and overt gestures that the current crop of Republican candidates are making on the campaign trail.

Which is why Obama should have to explain better his apparent Nevada apostasy regarding Reagan and the gibe about the Republican Party being the ‘party of ideas.’

Reagan and those ‘ideas’ that the Republican Party continue to traffick in demonized African-Americans and devastated cities, preyed on communities of color , and the imperiled the poor during the past generation. It is not enough to say “I want me some’ Obama Republicans.’ ”

I remember some of the reasons the so-called “Reagan Democrats” deserted the party to vote with Republicans. I am not going to discuss them here but the consequences of that decision are still being felt today.

In any case, Hillary knows she’s in a race now and she’s truly fighting. I hope to take the cudgel to Obama some more on this subject but the person I want to talk about is Bill Clinton and his struggle for a tone against Obama.

Clinton has been too emotional, too hot, and some of his language too freighted for me not to wonder why he seems so bothered by Obama. This is a contest and Bill, of all people, should enjoy the arena and this battle. But he does not seem to.

Ok. I have to run now. I want to think more about this.