Which populations does Ginsberg think should be controlled?? If she were rational and fair her vote in the Connecticut Firefighters case would have been different.

I’m back from vacation now, glad to see trivial issues like Jonah Goldberg area being covered by CFLF while truly important issues affecting us all are ignored…

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Prologue to Obama 2012

We approach the future walking backwards, our gaze forever fixated on the past. Predicting the future is not a passive exercise; we invent it every day with our actions.

I began the sketches for what would ultimately become Obama 2012 in March 2007, a month after Barack Obama declared his candidacy. I had spent much of the previous 18 months living abroad as an entrepreneur and statesman of sorts, and I was slightly out of touch with the pulse of life on the street in the United States. I learnt about Sen. Barack Obama’s Springfield, IL speech formally declaring his candidacy for president of the United States through one of the international cable news channels and thought how great it would be to have a fresh start after years of mediocrity in Washington and a plummeting reputation around the world.

By September, after what seemed like raising a six-month-old child, my sketches had turned into Why the Democrats Will Win in 2008 the Road to an Obama White House. It was my answer to the burning question everyone had back in March: Can he really win? Actually, not everyone thought it was a question. For many people, including Mark Penn, director of the Clinton campaign, the answer was an easy “no way.” This strategic blunder made it that much easier for the Clinton campaign to be defeated. Then there were Black pundits like Shelby Steele, a fellow at the Hoover Institution, who came out with a 2007 book entitled A Bound Man, Why Obama Can’t Win.

Being Black did seem to be an automatic disqualification, but then why did someone need to write an entire book arguing what should have been patently obvious? Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Colin Powell came to my mind and I remembered that he could have run for president in 1992 as a war hero. But Colin Powell was Ronald Reagan’s protégé and got a special pass on the race question. Black conservatives like Justice Thomas, Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell were careful to disassociate themselves from liberal thinkers and activists like Jesse Jackson, who lost, as expected, the 1984 and 1988 Democratic primaries. Ultimately, Colin Powell, in spite of all his honors, declined to run for president. His wife Alma feared for his safety. Common sense said that a candidate like Obama, for numerous insurmountable reasons, didn’t stand a chance of winning the Democratic primary, let alone a general election in which 10% of the electorate is African American and Republicans controlled the White House for 20 of the preceding 28 years. But I decided that Obama’s chances merited a closer examination. In it, I would bring to bear my gambling skills.

As for Ginsburg’s comment, what I find interesting is how she misread the right’s ideology vis a vis abortion. The facts are that, contrary to the rational thinker, which Justice Ginsberg is, the right-wing zealots that would make abortion illegal if they could, live in a fantasy world where poor and rural women would keep and raise their babies with no problem if only abortion were prohibited; that the fact that other policies that they have pushed, “welfare reform” among them, opposing extending health insurance coverage to poor children, opposing the extension of unemployment benefits, opposing the raising of the minimum wage, opposing unionization, etc., make this basically impossible, never occurs to them. The unborn appear to them only in the abstract, and not as living, breathing human-beings that need to be fed, housed, and educated eventually. As abstracts, they become, as a friend puts it, “more souls for Jesus,” when, however, such children, often the product of a teenage mother, grow up, they become the “other” the “non-innocent” whose fate is less than interesting to those who made it their business to make sure that they were born in the first place.