New dog for the first family

As everyone has by now heard, President Obama finally made good on his campaign promise to get his daughters a dog.

Unfortunately, as we've also now learned, he's broken another campaign promise to adopt a rescued dog.

While it's true that the Obamas did not buy a dog directly from a breeder, they accepted a gift of a 6 month old Portuguese Water Dog from Senator Ted Kennedy, via the breeder that Kennedy originally bought the dog from. (The Obamas wanted a PWD because Malia is allergic to most dogs, but this breed does not cause allergies.)

Certainly, there are many more important issues for Americans, and certainly for the President, to worry about. So in some ways it seems trivial and small-minded for animal welfare advocates to criticize the President's decision. Not only are there many more things to worry about than whether or not the President adopted a dog, but most Presidents have bought purebred dogs.

But still, something about this decision just doesn't sit well. It's not just that Obama broke a promise to get a "mutt" like him (as he famously said). And it's not that we can shortly expect a rush to breeders and pet stores as idiots with a lot of money to spend will buy themselves this now-trendy dog. And it's not even that the timing of the whole thing seems oddly suspicious--as if this dog was planned for the Obamas the whole time, even while the President told the nation that he was planning to adopt a dog.

Besides all that, it just seems like it sends the wrong message to Americans, especially at this time. Not only did the President pick a purebred dog, originally purchased from a breeder and intended (probably) for the President's family, but at this time, many Americans, struggling to pay their bills, are surrendering their own animals to local shelters because they can no longer care for them.

It just doesn't feel right.

US should lead the way on civil rights for all

Last year, France proposed a new UN declaration which would encourage the rest of the world to decriminalize homosexuality, thereby giving basic human rights to perhaps 5% of the world's population. Homosexuality is currently illegal in approximately 85 countries and is punishable by death in a handful of them.

Sixty countries voted with France to support the measure.

The United States, under the Bush Administration, opposed the measure, joining China and all of the Muslim countries in opposition to this most basic of human rights.

This month, however, at the Durban Review Conference in Geneva, another proposal condemning discrimination based on sexual orientation was made, and this time, the United States under the Obama administration supported the measure, although it still failed to get a majority vote.

Thankfully, however, for those of us who see the United States as a leader in human and civil rights, we have finally made the right decision.

We ARE afraid to talk about race

Attorney General Eric Holder is in hot water right now, having said that America is a "nation of cowards" when it comes to talking about race. Conservatives immediately freaked out, maintaining that because we now have an African American President (not to mention an African American Attorney General), there is--voila!--no more racism in America.

Bigot radio show host Rush Limbaugh and idiot columnist Michell Malkin both chastised Holder, and Malkin, in another in a long line of ignorant statements, said that if anyone is a racial coward, it's Obama, because he sat in Jeremiah Wright's church, "saying nothing about the separatist demagoguery echoing from the pulpit to the pews." Malkin displays her astonishing ignorance about the realities of black churches in America and, in fact, the history of the segregated church.

It's true--we have come a very long way, since the days of our parents and grandparents when segregation was legal, and blacks could not attend the same schools or live in the same neighborhoods as whites. But those days are not very far behind us, and the legacy of those days, which lasted for over a hundred years after the end of the Civil War, remain with us today.

Blacks, and other minorities, still:

-suffer from poverty at much greater rates than whites
-suffer from, and die from, most major diseases at greater rates than whites
-have lower incomes than whites
-have less property, and wealth, than whites
-have a lower life expectancy than whites
-have a greater chance of being imprisoned than whites
-have a greater chance of being victimized by violent crime than whites
-have a harder chance getting credit or home loans than whites
-and, thirty years after Brown vs. Board of Education, still go to segregated schools that whites long ago fled

Yes, it's true; we have a black President. But Barack Obama, during his campaign, was careful to portray himself in a way that did not scare white voters, and that allowed us to think of him as "safe." White voters could safely vote for him as long as he didn't make them think too much about race, or about his own blackness.

While Obama was elected by both black and white voters, it's also true that in those states in which blacks made up more than 20% of the electorate (but less than 55% of Democrats), he lost among whites, who were less likely to vote for a black man. Obama won soundly in states with hardly any blacks, and states with huge numbers of blacks. Outside of that, he did not, even among Democrats.

So yes, we, and by that I mean white America, are afraid of race. We are afraid to talk about race, and we are still afraid of people who don't look like us, because we still think that they are different from us, and different is scary.

The New York Post cartoon in which two white cops shoot a chimpanzee while saying "They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill," is both a reference to the horrific shooting of Travis the chimpanzee, but it also, very clearly, draws from three hundred years of imagery relating African Americans to monkeys and apes. That the Post chose to ignore this obvious history, and simply shrug off the charges of racism by noting that Al Sharpton (one of the first to complain) is a publicity hound, just demonstrates that they are afraid to cop to the racial implications of the cartoon.

We are indeed a nation of cowards when it comes to race.

Stimulus package debate: Do Republicans want economy to fail?

So Obama's stimulus package, now filled with far more Republican-added tax breaks (which economists agree won't help the economy in the long term but which make Republicans look like they care about "main street"), is being debated in the Senate, with a vote expected tomorrow.

And even though economists (or, as the Republicans like to say, Socialists) maintain that direct spending on infrastructure is what is needed to stimulate the economy, Republicans continue to cut billions in proposed spending on education (who needs that?) and aid to states in the form of funds for health care, energy, roads, and other infrastructure. So ultimately, the bill that will be voted on (and which will be opposed by all but three moderate Republicans), will be a much worse bill, that will do far less, than the original House bill.

It's awfully easy to look at Republicans adding ridiculous amendments and removing important features from a bill they're going to oppose anyway, and think that they do it because they want the economy to fail. They certainly don't seem to want it to improve, given that their own proposal involves doing exactly the same thing that got us into this boat: cutting taxes for the wealthy. Because that will surely fix things this time.

And in other news, Obama bumped his head on Air Force One while traveling to sell the stimulus package to Americans!