Archive for July 2009
Maru’s owner is moving
My next cat is a Scottish Fold mail with unfolded ears. Here’s Maru:
Nicholson Baker weighs in on the Kindle
Just guessing, but I bet he doesn’t like it. See whether I’m right:
I ordered a Kindle 2 from Amazon. How could I not? There were banner ads for it all over the Web. Whenever I went to the Amazon Web site, I was urged to buy one. “Say Hello to Kindle 2,” it said, in tall letters on the main page. If I looked up a particular writer on Amazon—Mary Higgins Clark, say—and then reached the page for her knuckle-gnawer of a novel “Moonlight Becomes You,” the top line on the page said, “ ‘Moonlight Becomes You’ and over 270,000 other books are available for Amazon Kindle—Amazon’s new wireless reading device. Learn more.” Below the picture of Clark’s physical paperback ($7.99) was another teaser: “Start reading ‘Moonlight Becomes You’ on your Kindle in under a minute. Don’t have a Kindle? Get yours here.” If I went to the Kindle page for the digital download of “Moonlight Becomes You” ($6.39), it wouldn’t offer me a link back to the print version. I was being steered.
Everybody was saying that the new Kindle was terribly important—that it was an alpenhorn blast of post-Gutenbergian revalorization. In the Wall Street Journal, the cultural critic Steven Johnson wrote that he’d been alone one day in a restaurant in Austin, Texas, when he was seized by the urge to read a novel. Within minutes, thanks to Kindle’s free 3G hookup with Sprint wireless—they call it Whispernet—he was well into Chapter 1 of Zadie Smith’s “On Beauty” ($9.99 for the e-book, $10.20 for the paperback). Writing and publishing, he believed, would never be the same. In Newsweek, Jacob Weisberg, the editor-in-chief of the Slate Group, confided that for weeks he’d been doing all his recreational reading on the Kindle 2, and he claimed that it offered a “fundamentally better experience” than inked paper did. “Jeff Bezos”—Amazon’s founder and C.E.O.—“has built a machine that marks a cultural revolution,” Weisberg said. “Printed books, the most important artifacts of human civilization, are going to join newspapers and magazines on the road to obsolescence.”
Why did Columbus sail south?
The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies
by Nicolas Wey-GomezA review by Neil Safier
Nicolas Wey Gomez opens his learned and incisive study of cosmography and colonialism in the Age of Columbus with a simple observation: Christopher Columbus did not just sail west across the Atlantic in his search for a maritime passage to the Orient; he sailed south as well. The Genoese sailor’s westward movement across the Atlantic has long been seen as the essential vector in leading Europe toward its greatest colonial venture. But not enough attention has been paid to the fact that Columbus made a conspicuous move in a southerly direction, which allowed him to encounter the islands of the "Indies" and, on later voyages, the South American continent. By reconstructing the routes Columbus took, and by carefully analyzing his diaries and the manuscripts that he read and annotated, Wey Gomez shows in convincing detail how it came about that Columbus turned his prow toward the tropical portions of the globe as he conducted his famous voyages of discovery. His reasons for heading south and the geopolitical consequences of that move are the twin subjects of The Tropics of Empire, a hefty and impressive study executed with erudition, skill and considerable insight.
In Columbus’s day, ideas about the tropics were much influenced by the conceptions of ancient geographers and cosmographers, who viewed the earthly sphere as split into broad bands of temperature-specific climates: the frigid polar regions, a searing "torrid" belt around the equator, and between them, two comfortable temperate zones. These climatic zones were thought to determine human actions and characteristics, from the ethnic behaviors of diverse peoples to the contours of theological events, and it was understood that only the mildest climates were capable of supporting human habitation. Thus the civilized inhabited world lay in the temperate zone. Sub-Saharan Africa and India, which were in the torrid zone, "were…imagined as the hot, infertile, and uninhabitable fringes of the world."
But was habitation in these more "torrid" climes truly unimaginable at the time of Columbus’s first voyage? …
Goodbye to Sarah Palin
As one The Eldest’s friends wrote: "Sarah Palin. Remember that name. At some point, you’ll need it for a trivia contest." Sarah now has taken her leave, and Suzy Khimm has a good article to send her off:
When Sarah Palin abruptly announced that she was planning to leave office, it was clear whom she blamed for her early exit. "I wish you’d hear MORE from the media of your state’s progress and how we tackle Outside interests—daily—SPECIAL interests that would stymie our state," she said in her July 3 resignation speech, which she later posted on her website. Blasting her adversaries for paralyzing the Alaska governor’s office with charges of "frivolous ethics violations," Palin and her representatives accused these unnamed "Outside interests" of harming her ability to govern after returning from the presidential campaign. "There were some complaints that were filed under pseudonyms that we believe came from down in the lower 48," Palin’s lawyer, Thomas Van Flein, told Fox News. "There is a connection to the Democratic Party in the lower 48."
There’s no doubt that Alaska’s state government has been paralyzed since Palin’s return, with anger and frustration emanating from both the governor’s office and the state legislature. All of Palin’s major bills failed to pass this year’s first 90-day session. But conversations with both Republican and Democratic legislators reveal that Palin’s inability to get anything done has little to do with the media attacks the Alaska governor claims drove her from office. The lawmakers say it has more to do with how national exposure changed her, moving her much further to the right than she had been and making her nearly impossible to work with. And state Republicans seem just as incensed about it as the Democrats.
Before Palin left the state to become John McCain’s running partner, she cultivated a good, if not exactly chummy, working relationship with Alaskan Democrats by pushing for an oil-tax increase and ethics reform. And state Republicans embraced Palin as the new face of a party that had been tarnished by scandal-ridden politicians like Ted Stevens. But upon returning to Juneau last fall, "she managed to alienate most of the 60 members of [the Alaska] House and Senate," says Larry Persily, an aide to state Republican Representative Mike Hawker. "It wasn’t a matter of burning bridges—she blew them up."
Palin made it clear that she wasn’t going to back away from the hard-line conservative ideology that had propelled her to national prominence—and her first high-profile target was
Here’s an example of CIA problems
Jeff Stein at Congressional Quarterly:
It took only a couple months and about 100 CIA operatives and Special Forces troops, supported by U.S. air power, to chase the Taliban out of Kabul in 2001.
In contrast, the only thing the four-year-old Directorate of National Intelligence seems to be accomplishing is hiring more Washington bureaucrats.
Meanwhile, the Senate Intelligence Committee has found that at least some of the spy agencies under DNI’s purview have not been reporting their true numbers of employees.
The revelation is buried in a new report from the Senate Intelligence Committee on the Intelligence Authorization Act for FY 2010, examined adroitly Wednesday by my CQ colleague Tim Starks.
"The legislation grants several DNI requests for flexibility to move personnel, and an explanation of the bill expresses an inclination to support the removal of a DNI personnel ceiling," Starks wrote.
Of course, the DNI has all sorts of rationales for removing the ceiling, among them one of official Washington’s favorites: It will actually save money.
"Exercise of this authority should result in an actual reduction of the number of contract personnel and not a shift of resources to hire other contract personnel," the bill says.
Right.
Starks noted that the DNI is claiming …
Congress may have had enough of the CIA
The CIA’s admitted failure to keep Congress informed, as it is legally required to do, may have been the last straw. Spencer Ackerman in the Washington Independent:
After years of examining CIA operations of dubious legality, an important member of the House intelligence committee is exploring an option that many in the intelligence community view with apprehension: a comprehensive investigation of all intelligence-community operations over years and perhaps even decades. The model is the famous Church and Pike committees of the 1970s, which exposed widespread CIA lawlessness; created the modern legal and congressional oversight structures for intelligence; and cleaved the history of the CIA into before- and after- periods.
Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.), a progressive who sits on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and chairs a special oversight panel that helps write the intelligence budget, has been increasingly comfortable talking about a new “Church committee.” He floated the idea in an interview with TWI on July 14, again to the Newark Star-Ledger the next day, and even attempted to discuss the Church committee’s precedents for congressional oversight with Lou Dobbs on CNN on July 20.
“I’d like to see something on the scope of the Church committee,” Holt told TWI in a Friday phone interview. The congressman said that it had been a “few decades” since Congress took a comprehensive inquiry into the intelligence community’s impact on “the relationship between the individual and her or his government, as well as the role that the U.S. plays in other countries around the world, outside of declared military activities.”
Holt said he did not have a concrete proposal prepared for the creation of such an investigation, and was at the stage of seeing what colleagues and members of the intelligence community made of such a move. “There’s agreement with the idea,” he said. “An awful lot of people have not really thought about how many unanswered questions there are or unresolved issues there are out there about how we do intelligence in the United States.”
He declined to name …
US still fighting to imprison the child soldier
Daphne Eviatar in the Washington Independent:
It wasn’t until late Friday afternoon that the Obama Justice Department, after years of wrangling over the fate of Mohammed Jawad, the Afghan boy arrested for allegedly lobbing a hand grenade at U.S. soldiers in 2002, admitted that it does not have enough evidence to continue to hold him indefinitely without trial under the laws of war.
That admission comes just days after the not-so-subtle declarations of Judge Ellen Huvelle of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., that the case had been “gutted” by the government’s admission that Jawad’s confessions were elicited through torture, and the fact that it still, more than six years later, hadn’t produced a single reliable eye witness to the crime.
The Justice Department evidently realized it wasn’t going to get very far in the habeas corpus case. But it wasn’t prepared to relinquish its right to imprison Jawad altogether. On Friday, it insisted that it has sufficient “new” evidence to warrant a criminal investigation.
Here’s what the Justice Department said in the papers it filed with the court Friday:
Herb mixes for fried chicken
I’m going to be smoking another chicken today in the Orion cooker—I have to say that is turning out to be a good purchase. (One never knows in the beginning whether the new thing will work out.) But for you who like the fried bird, take a look at this article in which people vied to get the same flavor as KFC. The two finalists in the herb-mix competition:
‘KFC’ mix
1 teaspoon ground oregano
1 teaspoon chilli powder
1 teaspoon ground sage
1 teaspoon dried basil
1 teaspoon dried marjoram
1 teaspoon pepper
2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon paprika
1 teaspoon onion salt
1 teaspoon garlic powder
2 tablespoons Accent (MSG)GFC mix
1 tsp smoked paprika
1 tsp mustard powder
1 tsp sage
1 tsp celery seeds
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp dried onion flakes
2 tsp salt
1 tsp ground black pepper
1 tsp ground white pepper
But read the whole article for background and proper use of the mix. (I particularly liked the hint about marinating the chicken for 24 hours in milk and then poaching that chicken in the milk it was marinated in, and then using the poaching liquid as a basis for cream of chicken soup.
More on birthers
From the Center for American Progress:
Last Thursday, CNN President Jon Klein sent an e-mail to a handful of the network’s "Lou Dobbs Tonight" staffers informing them that he considered one of the stories pursued by the infamously anti-immigrant host to be "dead." On his radio show the week before, Dobbs declared that President Obama needed to "produce a birth certificate," picking up on a thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory that claims Obama was not born in the United States, and the birth certificate released by his campaign last year was fake. Dobbs repeatedly pushed the "birther" cause despite the fact that his colleagues at CNN have repeatedly called the story "total bull." In fact, while guest-hosting Dobbs’ own show on July 17, Kitty Pilgrim refuted the fringe theory, saying, "CNN has fully investigated the issue, found no basis for the questions about the president’s birthplace, but the controversy lives on, especially on the Internet." But Dobbs has persisted, attacking his critics as "limp-minded, lily-livered lefties" who hate him because he has "the temerity to inquire as to where the birth certificate was." As Dobbs continued to air the conspiracy theory, Klein backed off his admonition of the host, telling the Los Angeles Times that Dobbs had handled the issue in a "legitimate" manner and "if there are future news pegs, then we have to take that story as it comes." On Sunday, Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz used his CNN show to chastise media outlets that "give the birthers any airtime" to repeat their "ludicrous claims." Kurtz specifically criticized Dobbs for not acting "responsible."
Trying to make sense of the birthers’ argument
Josh Marshall tries valiantly to find some tiny thread of logic and common sense in the birthers’ position, but fails. Still, his attempt is worth reading:
For all the obvious reasons, I hesitate to even enter this discussion. But (famous last words) I can’t help myself.
As you know, high on the list of current right-wing conspiracy theorizing (and sort of a stalking horse for underlying beliefs that President Obama’s race and name make him rather less than fully American) is the claim that President Obama wasn’t really born in Hawaii but was rather born abroad. And because of this, we’re led to believe, he’s ineligible to serve as president and therefore actually is not, as we speak, president.
Now, I don’t want to get into all the claptrap about the birth certificate. Because the whole story is just unadulterated, raw nonsense. What I do want to figure out, however, is a question that’s been rattling around my head for something like a year now. I have never seen any serious argument that the child of an American citizen, even if born abroad, isn’t him or herself a natural born American citizen. Yes, it’s now and again been raised as a topic with a wrinkle of ambiguity in the law; but the issue has never been that people actually believe such children aren’t ‘natural born’, only that it’s a phrase that was never expressly defined and there’s never been an opportunity to have a court review it since there’s never been a case with the relevant set of facts.
But consider: …
My new Mühle razor
I used my beautiful new Mühle razor this morning for the first time. It has a long porcelin handle—longer than the Futur and almost as long as the Vision. The knob at the end, handy for shaving against the grain, is shaped exactly like a pipe tamp or a small, yet-to-be-engraved seal. Extremely classy and well made. I will have to explore Mühle razors further.
I couldn’t wait to use the Speick shave stick again, and I lathered vigorously with the Omega Pro 48 boar brush, but for all my lathering thet second pass was lightly lathered and I could get no lather for the third pass and had to bring out the Dovo soap container and build a lather just for the final pass. I’ll try again later, but for now if I use a shave stick, I’m sticking with a badger brush.
An incredibly smooth shave, with a new Bolzano blade in the Mühle. Speick aftershave is quite nice, and overall this is an exceptional shave.
The ghosts of Clintoncare
Very interesting column by Ezra Klein:
Barack Obama’s strategy to pass health-care reform seems based on a simple principle: Whatever Bill Clinton did, do the opposite.
Where Clinton and his team crafted their health-care reform plan in the executive branch, Obama has left the details of his effort almost entirely to Congress. Where Clinton pursued an ambitious reconstruction of the entire sector, Obama has sought to preserve existing insurance arrangements and win the support of industry players. Where Clinton spent a year developing his bill before even getting to Congress, Obama lashed his efforts to a tight (and apparently unrealizable) timetable. Even the atmospherics offer contrasts: Clinton’s big push for reform came in a soaring 1993 speech before a joint session of Congress, in which he offered painstaking details of his plans; Obama made his argument to the nation at a news conference last week, addressing concerns more than specifying proposals.
Obama’s reluctance to follow Clinton’s example is understandable: Few legislative failures have been as catastrophic as Clinton’s on health-care reform. Yet the ghosts of the early 1990s still hover over today’s debates.
Much as opponents derided the Clinton effort as Clintoncare or Hillarycare, some now speak of Obamacare, and Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) recently chortled in a conference call that a defeat on health care would be Obama’s "Waterloo." The president, for his part, told PBS’s Jim Lehrer last week that some Republicans are engaging in a 1994 redux. "They explicitly went after the Clintons, said: ‘We’re not going to get this done.’ . . . It was a pure political play, a show of strength by the Republicans that helped them regain the House," Obama said. "I think there are folks who think that we should try to dust off that old playbook."
Yet there are aspects of Clinton’s approach that could, and should, inform Obama’s effort — and not just as examples of what not to do. Clinton’s attempt …
The birthers: Loons, one and all
I’ve been ignoring the birther conspiracy theory since it makes no sense whatsoever—faking a birth certificate 40 years ago knowing the little mixed-race baby would someday be President of the US. But James Wimberley points out other problems:
Apart from being loons, it seems birthers like Lou Dobbs don’t understand what a birth certificate is. They think of it as a precious, unique document like a will, indenture or contract that is given you at birth. If they knew the truth, they’d be even more upset, so let’s give it a try.
There are no original birth, death, and marriage certificates in the birther sense. The originals are entries in master registers, kept by the government under lock and key, and you can’t see them. You have the right to ask politely at any time for any number of certified copies of all or part of your entries, and in the USA and UK of other people’s, but no duty to ask for any. In Britain genealogists complain they can’t even see 172-year-old original registers for 1837 when civil registration replaced the earlier parish registers. If this sounds a bit Orwellian, it’s because that’s exactly where it comes from: compulsory registration is an exercise of coercive state power, and its creation marks the beginnings of the surveillance state 500 years ago.
The pioneers of this intrusive and systematic instrument of State and Church control were the lovable Cardinal Jimenez de Cisneros, later Grand Inquisitor of Spain, who introduced baptismal registers in 1497 in his province of Toledo. He was so proud of his invention that he campaigned for the system to be adopted all over Catholicism. He was followed by the equally cuddly Protestant statist Thomas Cromwell, who introduced compulsory registration of baptism, marriages and funerals by all parish priests in England and Wales in 1538, after the suppression of the Catholic rising known as the Pilgrimage of Grace. Cromwell’s scheme was maintained and tightened by Henry VIII’s children – down to keeping the registers under triple key security, one more than for the launch codes in US missile control bunkers. The purpose, for Catholic and Protestant rulers alike was to monitor and control sexual and religious deviants of whatever stripe. Any benefits to the subject, like proofs of descent, age or nationality, were entirely accidental. SFIK there was no system of standard certificates in England before 1837.
George III and Louis XVI were decent duffers stigmatised as tyrants by revolutionary propagandists, cheapening the insult. Ferdinand and Henry were the frightening real deal. Birthers, Rex magnus vigilat omnes...
George Wills’s dishonesty on full display
George Wills is a snake-oil salesman with negative integrity. Proof here.
Great news: the arbitration industry is dying
One of the two major firms just announced that they will take no new cases. This is great news. Read the details as recounted by Kevin Drum, including neat-o graphic.
The Cheney plan to deploy the U.S. military on U.S. soil
This new report today from The New York Times‘ Mark Mazzetti and David Johnston reveals an entirely unsurprising though still important event: in 2002, Dick Cheney and David Addington urged that U.S. military troops be used to arrest and detain American citizens, inside the U.S., who were suspected of involvement with Al Qaeda. That was done pursuant to a previously released DOJ memo (.pdf) authored by John Yoo and Robert Delahunty, addressed to Alberto Gonzales, dated October 23, 2001, and chillingly entitled "Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activities Within the U.S." That Memo had concluded that the President had authority to deploy the U.S. military against American citizens on U.S. soil. Far worse, it asserted that in exercising that power, the President could not be bound either by Congressional statutes prohibiting such use (such as the Posse Comitatus Act) or even by the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which — the Memo concluded — was "inapplicable" to what it called "domestic military operations."
Though it received very little press attention, it is not hyperbole to observe that this October 23 Memo was one of the most significant events in American politics in the last several decades, because it explicitly declared the U.S. Constitution — the Bill of Rights — inoperative inside the U.S., as applied to U.S. citizens. Just read what it said in arguing that neither the Fourth Amendment — nor even the First Amendment — can constrain what the President can do when overseeing "domestic military operations" (I wrote about that Memo when it was released last March and excerpted the most revealing and tyrannical portions: here). Here’s just a small sample to convey the rancid taste of that Memo (click on images to enlarge): …
Create your own global temperature maps
Check it out. Good resource for kids doing science projects.
Maybe Janet Napolitano wasn’t such a good choice
Daphne Eviatar in the Washington Independent:
Sheriff Joe Arpaio has made a name for himself using controversial tactics targeting illegal immigrants in Arizona. The chief law enforcement officer of Maricopa County and author of the book “America’s Toughest Sheriff,” Arpaio boasts that he’s arrested some 30,000 undocumented immigrants, many of whom he’s put to work on chain gangs, paraded in pink underwear before news cameras, and housed in sweltering plastic tents clustered behind coils of concertina wire.
But as William Finnegan recently documented in The New Yorker, Arpaio’s publicity stunts – enabled by a federal immigration program known as 287(g) that deputizes local authorities to enforce federal immigration laws — aren’t just humiliating. Prisoners have filed thousands of legal claims of abuse against Arpaio and his deputies – and by families of those who’ve died under his watch. A federal investigation found Arpaio’s deputies used “stun guns” on inmates strapped into restraint chairs; some have died in those chairs. One lawsuit brought by a dead prisoners’ family ended in an $8 million settlement after “a surveillance video that showed fourteen guards beating, shocking, and suffocating the prisoners, and after the sheriff’s office was accused of discarding evidence, including the crushed larynx of the deceased.”
Although Arpaio is now the target of a federal investigation for civil rights violations, he’s never lost his authority to enforce the federal immigration laws under the 287(g) program.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is in charge of that program, and recently announced its expansion to 11 more jurisdictions. The former U.S. Attorney and then Governor of Arizona, Napolitano was reportedly allied with the politically popular Arpaio and long tolerated his abuses, referring at a press conference to the lawsuit she settled with him while a federal prosecutor as “lawyerly paperwork.”
In announcing the expansion of the 287(g) program, which conservative and restrictionist groups have long been encouraging, Napolitano hailed its success at supporting “local efforts to protect public safety by giving law enforcement the tools to identify and remove dangerous criminal aliens.”
“The 287(g) program is an essential component of DHS’ comprehensive immigration enforcement strategy,” said ICE Assistant Secretary John Morton on July 10. “The new agreement strengthens ICE’s oversight of the program and allows us to better utilize the resources and capabilities of our law enforcement partners across the nation.” Perhaps in part because of the 287(g) program, criminal prosecutions of immigrants over the past year were up almost 150% over five years ago.
That’s not an unmitigated success in the eyes of immigrants’ advocates, however. Last week, 25 civil rights and community groups denounced DHS’s plans to expand the 287(g) program, citing previous findings of its abuse.
“DHS is fully aware that the abusive misuse of the 287(g) program by its current slate of agencies has rendered it not only ineffective, but dangerous to community safety,” said Andrea Black, Coordinator of the Detention Watch Network in a statement. “It is surprising Napolitano did not simply shut this program down,” she added. “Expanding this failed program is not in line with the reform the administration has promised.”
In addition to expanding the program’s reach, Napolitano promised to create …
The criminal roots of the financial crisis
Mary Kane in the Washington Independent:
One of the many unanswered questions about the current financial crisis is why there haven’t been more criminal investigations into what happened, including the highly suspect actions of the rating agencies, the banks, and mortgage brokers. At Salon, economist Simon Johnson and author and former investment banker John Talbott share a three-part email exchange about the roots of the crisis, and Talbott hits hard on this exact point.
Economists and media pundits — themselves mostly gentlemanly elites anxious to please corporate America — are slow to make the accusation that what happened here was truly criminal, and so miss the real story. The American people understand that when a group of bankers shuffle some paper unproductively and get away with hundreds of billions of dollars in bonuses, yet cause a loss of $40 trillion in global wealth and cause approximately 100 million people to become unemployed worldwide, there is only one word to describe it: criminal. [...]
Why isn’t the FBI breaking down the doors of the commercial and investment banks and grabbing computers so as to preserve incendiary e-mails that will most definitely implicate executives? Why are managements that caused this still in their jobs and still receiving bonuses? Are the bonuses paid to the folks at AIG that caused its collapse nothing more than hush money? How can the rating agencies still be in business? Why don’t we make one arrest and lean on the bankster to see if he will fold like the cheap suit that he is and name other conspirators? The FBI spends more time investigating $2,000 drug buys than they have to date investigating the biggest heist in the history of the world: $40 trillion, that’s trillion with a T, that’s 40 million bags each containing $1 million.
Talbott’s arguments bring to mind a recent investigative series by the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, which used public records to document who was behind the flipping and mortgage fraud that have decimated the area, with $450 million in defaulted loans: …
The conversation we avoid
Jonathan Capehart in the Washington Post:
This is what is likely to come of the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. at his home by a white police officer: nothing.
The July 16 arrest of the African American scholar by a Cambridge, Mass., police officer looks a little more complicated and a lot more nuanced today than it did when the story broke on Monday. But it has sparked another conversation on race in America that, I suspect, will end as quickly as it began, with no clearer understanding of the roots of the racial reactions that fueled it. I’ll explain why in a minute.
We’ve made enormous strides in the 46 years since the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. expounded on a dream of racial equality. America in 1963 envisioned neither a prominent, wealthy and powerful black professor at Harvard nor a black president of the United States.
"I am standing here as testimony to the progress that’s been made," President Obama said at the end of his news conference Wednesday night when asked about the confrontation in Cambridge. But then he added, "And yet the fact of the matter is, is that, you know, [race] still haunts us." It certainly haunted Obama.
Two days after the president said he thought the police "acted stupidly" in the Gates affair, he stood in the White House briefing room to ask everyone — himself included — to "take a step back" from the heated rhetoric from all sides. He acknowledged that he "could have calibrated those words differently" and that the controversy shows that "these are issues that still very sensitive here in America."
