Barack Obama Archives - Page 13 of 15

Me as fictional characters, plus Obama, Serling, Cosby

I’ll vote for Obama, in large part because the other guy will be far worse.

Chris from NYADP asks:
Which book/ movie/ TV/ comic book character best represents how you actually are right now?
That would be Bruce Banner. He is the guy who has anger management issues. Fortunately, I was raised well enough that I don’t act on my pent-up rage so I don’t Hulk out. But sometimes, things just infuriate me.

One example is the story of Kenneth Chamberlain, a 68-year-old veteran of the U.S. Marines, was killed in his home by the police in White Plains, NY, on November 19, 2011, after his medical alert device was accidentally set off. According to his son, the audio device installed in his father’s home as part of his medical alert system captured racial slurs – Chamberlain was black – and after the door was knocked down, being Tased before being shot dead.

You’ve probably heard about shooting death of unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin at the hands of “neighborhood watch” vigilante George Zimmerman on February 26. There may be disagreement over just what happened that night, but there’s little doubt that incompetent police work after the fact was involved.

From here: “Zimmerman, who is white, called police from his SUV and told them he was following a ‘suspicious’ character. The dispatcher promised to send a prowl car and told Zimmerman to stay in his vehicle. He didn’t. When police arrived, they found him with a bloody nose and Martin face down on the grass not far from his father’s door, a gunshot wound in his chest.”

The more overriding issue, though, is Florida’s controversial law, which protects from prosecution someone who uses deadly force if that person “reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.”

I was SO enraged for a couple of days that my stomach was in knots. And there have been others who have been victims of the “shoot first, ask questions later” laws in about two dozen US states. The Sunshine State’s version is clearly the worst. I thought President Obama addressed the issue quite well.

On the other hand, I’ve been disappointed in some of President Obama’s policies…which leads to-

Tom the Mayor, my old FantaCo buddy, asks:

Has Barack Obama disappointed you in any way, I feel that he has missed some great opportunities to enact more changes, especially after the election when he had majorities in both houses? I will still vote for him, but it is kind of sad.

I really think that the failure in the first two years of office was tied to his evidently false notion that he was dealing with rational people. In fact, given the vitriol he had to deal with by day 100, it became clear to me that the folks he was working with across the aisle were not playing the same game. He thought he’d have a honeymoon, which, in very many ways, did not occur. I believe he didn’t want to come off as the “angry black guy,” even though some painted him that way anyhow.

He was working harder in the interregnum than I’ve EVER seen a guy not yet President work. But he, like most, underestimated the depth of the recession. So, by saying that the unemployment rate wouldn’t get under 8%, he clearly miscalculated.

Still, there were things I liked (gay rights, e.g.), and a few I don’t like at all. A couple of recent examples of the latter:

H.R. 347 expands the power of the Secret Service and police to arrest protesters near a ‘protected person’ or at special public events like nominating conventions… [It] passed the House of Representatives by a 388 to 3 margin and was signed, shortly thereafter, by President Obama, on Friday, March 9, 2012.

The Obama DOJ’s decision to charge more national security whistleblowers under the Espionage Act than all other administrations combined.

When I probably end up voting for him, it’s only because the guy who will run against him would likely have championed the same things, and far worse.

Chris also asked:
Which book/ movie/ TV/ comic book character represents the person you’d most like to be?

Kwai Chang Caine from the TV show Kung Fu: “The demands of his training as a priest in addition to the sense of social responsibility which was instilled within him during his childhood, forced Caine to repeatedly come into the open to fight for justice. He would then leave his new surroundings in a further search for anonymity and security.” He had a certain calm, as well as skills to turn the fight back on the attacker.

I was so impressed with Democratic Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner, who, in response to those men wanting to legislate woman’s reproductive health, introduced legislation that would introduce new hurdles for men who want Viagra: proof that they have sought sex therapy, and a sexual partner’s notarized statement verifying their impotency. Very much turning the aggression back on itself. Brilliant; very Caine.

More from Amy at Sharp Little Pencil:

1. Do you think that when our hometown boy Rod Serling said, “Everybody has to have a hometown; mine is Binghamton,” he was being in any way sarcastic?

Absolutely NOT. I read his biography by Joel Engel last summer. Rod LOVED Binghamton, felt safe there. Here’s the fuller quote:
Everybody has to have a hometown. Binghamton’s mine. In the strangely brittle, terribly sensitive makeup of a human being, there is a need for a place to hang a hat or a kind of geographical womb to crawl back into, or maybe just a place that’s familiar because that’s where you grew up. When I dig back through memory cells I get one particularly distinctive feeling-and that’s one of warmth, comfort, and well-being. For whatever else I may have had, or lost or will find-I’ve still got a hometown. This nobody’s gonna take away from me.

BTW, did you see that story about Binghamton being the least hopeful city in America?

3. What is your favorite single cut of all time – 45 or album cut, and by whom?

Amy, you’re a cruel woman, you know that? I have so many tunes running in my head at any given time. Still, I’ll go with God Only Knows by the Beach Boys; incidentally, Brian Wilson turns 70 in June. Although there is a woman in my choir who’s having a baby in July; his code name is Rufus, and I’ve had Tell Me Something Good stuck in my head ever since.

4. Why is there air? (Haha, know you dig Cosby)

And I still have that Cosby LP, Why Is There Air? BTW, take this test to see how well you know that album. But going off from that, the air is there so politicians can make it hot; probably the REAL reason behind global warming.

Peace, Peace, When There Is No Peace

Thanks to Lt. Col. Daniel Davis, we now know that the progress that has justified the war during the Obama years is largely illusory.

Amy, the lovely singer/poet from Sharp Little Pencil, asked a few questions, only one of which I will address presently:

Do you think we should pull out of Afghanistan immediately to avoid engaging Iran if/when Israel sends the bombs flying?

Here’s the conundrum: one can appreciate the sacrifice that US military personnel make every day, and still have no idea what we’re fighting for in Afghanistan.

Joe Conason explains:
What keeps the United States engaged is a plausible concern that our departure will permit the Taliban to claim victory, and that our troops are making progress, slow but measurable, in recapturing territory from the enemy. There is no longer any illusion among Pentagon leaders or in the White House that foreign forces can permanently extirpate the Taliban, desirable as that would be. Instead, the real policy for the past few years, whether troops levels rise or fall, is to establish a basis for reconciliation between Kabul and its armed opponents, and to leave the Afghans prepared to defend themselves from extremism.

Thanks to Lt. Col. Daniel Davis, however, we now know that the progress that has justified the war during the Obama years is largely illusory. Generals like David Petraeus told the president and Congress that things are going well, but after spending a year on the ground, Davis discovered the opposite — and with great courage revealed his findings. (Watch this interview with Davis on PBS.)

I’m just not seeing a way out. After the Marines urinating on dead enemy combatants, then the Koran burning, which led to six American soldiers being killed, and then the massacre of 16 civilians – all revealed in the first ten weeks of 2012, no less – and I just find the situation all rather hopeless.

Moreover, as Ed Koch (!) points out, “Why do we remain when doing so causes the Afghan people to hate us more with the passing of each day, calling us occupiers, infidels, and murderers? The president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, is thought to be corrupt by many American observers.”

Can’t we declare victory and go home?

As for Iran, we can get sucked into a war there whether or not we are still engaged in Afghanistan. We’ll still have plenty of force in the region. I pray, literally, that we find a non-military way to deal with Iran. BTW, there is plenty of opposition in the Israeli Knesset to their country’s sabre rattling. I don’t think that it is inevitable, at least in the near term, that Israel will bomb Iran when it seems to have selective assassination in its arsenal.

Cartoon from The Bad Chemicals.com. Used by permission.

Transformative Presidency?

Did the election of this President, with a mixed record, no matter your political viewpoint, matter merely because he was black?

I’m watching this television program called JEOPARDY! On the episode airing way back on February 25, 2009, which I almost certainly watched at least a week later, there was a category called THE AFRICAN AMERICAN EXPERIENCE, with all of the clues given by black historian Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The $200 clue: “In a recent essay, I cited the election of Barack Obama as one of the 4 ‘transformative moments’ in African-American history; this 1863 event was the first.” The question, of course, was “What is The Emancipation Proclamation?” (The other two moments, which Gates revealed in a video clip leading to a commercial break, were Joe Louis’ victory over Max Schmeling in 1938 and the 1963 march on Washington that featured Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech.)

Around the same time, I had come across a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center: Fueled by non-white immigration, the economy and the rise to power of a black president, the number of hate groups rose to 926, a record, in 2008.

Let me admit my resistance to Obama’s election as “transformative.”

Did the election of this President, with a mixed record, no matter your political viewpoint, matter merely because he was black? Surely a historical moment, but “transformative”?

Think of Jackie Robinson – whose entry into Major League Baseball, BTW, I would have put as one of Gates’ “transformative” moments, rather than Joe Louis. If he had failed as a player, would it have mattered as much that he was the first black player in a long while? I think he’d be a footnote in history. I still wonder if the added racial responsibility weighs on Obama, as surely it did on Robinson?

I’m reminded, oddly I suppose, of Vanessa Williams, the first black Miss America, back when Miss America still mattered in the United States. Know that there was some controversy in some black circles because she was so light-skinned, not dissimilar to conversations about Obama’s mixed-race heritage. Then Ms. Williams was booted as Miss America; her great strength is that she did not allow that incident to define her, but at the time, I thought it was a blow to some black people who said: “We make the breakthrough, then THAT has to happen?”

Also, with the increased number of nut jobs out there, I can’t help but continue to worry for Obama’s well-being. Not the least of which is the White Nationalist CPAC panel warning that America’s greatest threat is its diversity.

So I’m still mulling over how “transformative” the 2008 election turned out to be, in terms of justice, social/economic/racial/environmental, but it is not apparent in many aspects.

I’ve long stated that “the first” is important, but it’s not until it’s no longer an issue at all that real progress is made. And if you read some of the right-wing stuff I do, you know we are not there yet.
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My friend Dan lays out, not in a racial context but just as in a political one, how Barack Obama has NOT had a transformative presidency in far too many ways. While he tends towards harsher language than I, I’d be hard-pressed to negate his overriding premise.

There will be a Presidential inauguration one year from tomorrow

What about a third party?

I remember reading in someone’s blog late last year, “Please give me someone else to vote for besides Barack Obama.” It was a plea to the US Republican party regarding the November 2012 Presidential election. So far, that wish has not come true. The Republican base’s fear of Mitt Romney, I believe, is well-founded; his positions seem to follow the wind. The flaws of the rest of the field are too numerous, too exhausting to mention, but certainly including their collective racial polarization, Rick Perry’s sheer ignorance of even his own position on issues, and Newt Gingrich’s hubris.

This is not that I’m that enamored by the incumbent. There are all of the campaign promises he made that not only did not fulfill, he went 180. The recently-signed legislation which would deny suspected terrorists, including U.S. citizens seized within the nation’s borders, the right to trial and subject them to indefinite detention are among the elements that are terrifying to me. But which of his opponents would have taken a different position?

Andrew Sullivan, of all people, does note some of Obama’s accomplishments. I am happy about some of the President’s positions, notably gay rights, and remain cautiously hopeful about the outcome of SOPA. Also like some fun innovations of his administration such as this one.

What about a third party? There’s this mysterious Americans Elect, which is getting on the ballot in a number of states. Since there is no candidate (yet), it’s really difficult for me to gauge what its impact will be. Assuming, for the sake of argument, that the nominee is appealing to me, I would have to still weigh the notion of whether the candidate could win enough electoral votes nationally to win, or at least not give the race to someone worse. Since no third party has EVER won the US Presidency, because of the way the system is rigged, it would make it difficult to select that candidate, no matter how attractive.

Meanwhile, I Wish I Had a Super PAC of my own.

It’ll be an interesting year.
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Belated happy birthday to the FLOTUS, who turned 48 on Tuesday.

Roger Answers Your Questions, Tom, LisaF, Arthur, and Scott

In May 1980, when the semester was over, Tom nagged me to work at the store.

Lisa from peripheral perceptions, who has very nice toes, writes:
You may have already been asked and answered this one, but…How and why did you get into blogging?

The HOW question I answered, among other places, here, specifically in the fifth paragraph; curse you, Fred Hembeck! The WHY I’m sure I’ve answered, but, to reiterate, it’s mostly because I was composing things to write in my head, I didn’t have a place to put them, and the subsequent noise in my brain got too loud; I blogged to stay (relatively) sane. Now it’s so I can “meet” people like you.
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Thomas McKinnon, with whom I worked at the comic book store FantaCo, said:
Hey Roger
Tell us the story of how you met Tom Skulan and started working at FantaCo.
I have never heard the story.

Well, those are two very different things. I’m going to go back to the old days of comic book collecting when you had to get your comics off the spinner racks at the local convenience store. I started collecting comics by early 1972 (Red Wolf #1 was cover-dated May 1972, Luke Cage, Hero for Hire June 1972). My friend and I were at college in New Paltz, NY but we had to go to some little hole-in-the-wall store on 44/55 in Highland, the next town over, to get our four-color fix.

At some point, maybe as early as 1973, a guy named Peter Maresca started a comic book store called the Crystal Cave, buying from a direct market distributor (Seagate? Bud Plant?) It was right across from a bar called Bacchus. It later moved a couple of blocks.

The chronology fails me here, but at some point, Tom Skulan, Mitch Cohn, and Raoul Vezina all worked at the Crystal Cave, so I met them all there. Tom also put bicycles together at Barker’s department store just outside the village limits.

At some point, Peter closed the store and sold the comic inventory, I believe, to Tom. In any case, I would see Tom at these little comic book shows up and down the Hudson River periodically. Then on August 28, 1978, he opened FantaCo at 21 Central Avenue in Albany, with Raoul as the front guy/graphic designer in residence, the same function he served at the Crystal Cave.

I was living in Schenectady by that time, and lost my job at the Schenectady Arts Council in January 1979; the federal funding was cut off. So I couldn’t afford to buy comics for a while. I’d take the hour-long #55 bus from Schenectady to Albany, sometimes do some work in the store, and get store credit in return so that I could feed my addiction.

I did some work on the first FantaCon in 1979. I know I helped schlep stuff into the Egg convention center, and worked the front door and/or the FantaCo table.

In August 1979, I moved to Albany, to attend grad school at UAlbany (or whatever it was called at the time) in public administration. It was a disaster, in no small part because I developed a toe infection two days before registration and literally almost died; I spent nearly a week in the college infirmary and never really caught up. But it was also very cutthroat competitive, unlike my later time at library school, which was very cooperative, and it did not suit my personality at all.

So in May 1980, when the semester was over, Tom nagged me to work at the store. I told him that I didn’t want to work at the store; I needed to go back to college in the fall. But I COULD use a summer job. So I was hired on that basis, primarily doing mail order, and didn’t end up leaving until November 1988.
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Scott from the on-hiatus Scooter Chronicles – come back, Scott! – wonders: What is your take, if any, on the DC relaunch, with 52 new storylines and rebooted famous characters?

First, I know it’s inevitable that characters will get reimagined from time to time, in part a function of them not aging as the rest of us do. Still, the whole renumbering and reinventing the whole line smacks of both a frustrating disrespect for its own history and commercial desperation. If I hadn’t stopped buying new comics, this ploy might have motivated me to scrap the entire line. In other words, I HATE it.

That said, it appears that a couple of titles featuring female characters are specifically problematic.
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A fellow political science major in college, Arthur@AmeriNZ, asked about a story. AP Reporter Responds To Chris Hayes Panel Debate On Racism Of Droppin’ G’s From Obama Speech
On Sunday morning’s Up with Chris Hayes, the panel discussed the contrast between the way Politico reported President Obama’s speech before the Congressional Black Caucus and the Associated Press‘ reporting. Unlike Politico, who used the official transcription to pull quotes, the AP’s article reflected the President’s folksier delivery by quotin’ him without the dropped g’s. Karen Hunter called the AP’s treatment racist, John McWhorter disagreed, and Hayes got a laugh by saying, “I can go both ways on this.”

My first instinct was to say that, if that same news organization would drop the G when quoting, say, George W. Bush (which seems to be the case), it’s a non-issue, but would be if Obama were dealt with differently. However, it is NOT because, as McWhorter argued, “Black English is becoming the lingua franca of American youth, and that ‘America, including non-black America, loves that way of speaking.'” Yuck.

Hunter says she teaches “a journalism class, and I tell my students to fix people’s grammar because you don’t want them to sound ignorant. For them to do that, it’s code, and I don’t like it.” That was an interesting point. I’ve seen literal transcripts in the newspaper, often in criminal cases, sometimes with the (sic) or “as stated” designation, and I’ve been of two minds on that, how that might color the public’s perception of the case.

I guess I agree with Hayes when he suggested, “journalistically speaking, the AP’s transcription gave a more accurate impression of the flavor of the speech.” Especially when the President clearly intended to be dropping his Gs for the particular audience to whom he was speaking. Or speakin’.
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You have more questions? Just ask away!

Art from Sold Out #1 by John Hebert; story by Skulan, Green, and Hebert