Required Reading: A Truly Post-Racial America

From Florida Senate Candidate Marco Rubio:

“The true measure of our nation’s progress on issues of race and ethnicity is the freedom of people of conscience to disagree with one another based on sound philosophical reasoning, without fear of being negatively branded because the person they oppose is of a different background or skin color.

 Reasonable people can disagree, and, in fact, many do in this case. This competition of ideas is healthy when properly centered on policy and philosophy, as it has been. The debate is only poisoned when the color of one’s skin becomes a political football.”

It’s Funny Because It’s True

Symptoms of liberalism, accurately diagnosed by Bucky.

The confused look;

the do-nothingness;

the drool;

fear of the bible.   

 

For more free comic strips, go to comics.com.

It’s Hard Out Here for A Policeman

In the spirit of our president, I am going to make some definitive conclusions about an incident, despite lacking the full and complete knowledge of what actually happened.

I do not fully know what took place between Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates and Sgt. James Crowley. I can take time to read the complete police report filed by Sgt. Crowley or sit down to listen to the side of the story Prof. Gates has offered in several news outlets. Without having read any of that, my understanding is that Sgt. Crowley responded to a call about a possible burglary and when he went to the scene to investigate, he was accused of racism. Again, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, or knowing what role the cop’s profession played, I think it is fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry in the cop’s situation; number two, that the Harvard professor acted stupidly in accusing somebody of racism without even giving the officer an opportunity to do his job properly.

And number three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there is a long history in this country of police officers being disproportionately accused of racism compared to individuals of other professions. I think the recent incident is an example of how one’s profession remains a factor in society. Other examples in our society include popular film and television shows depicting police officers as racist, such as the movie “Crash,” or the repeated use of the word “pig” to refer to law enforcement. We are all too familiar with the de facto offense of “Working While a Policeman.”

And even when there are honest misunderstandings, the fact that police officers are accused more frequently of racism, and oftentime for no cause, casts suspicion even when there is good cause. And that’s why I think the more that we’re working with communities faced with high crime to improve cooperation and understanding with law enforcement so that we’re eliminating potential prejudices, the safer everybody’s going to be.

Sensitivity training would be a good start, and something from which Prof. Gates could benefit. It is important for our country to understand the hurtful stereotypes that persist about the police, and how these stereotypes divide communities and hinder opportunity. As an academic, Gates can understand the need to have established departments in our American universities dedicated to examining the issues affecting our police. A Police Studies department in every college would greatly advance the cause of tolerance.

What happened to Sgt. Crowley provides us with an important teachable moment. Despite the amazing progress we have made in police relations, there is certainly more work to be done. I applaud CNN’s recent television special that explores the stories and struggles of everyday Police in America.

No one should have to go to their jobs just to worry about being accused of something that they are not. We as a country should strive to understand each other, and not rush to make assumptions based on the type of uniform one wears. Moving forward from this event, we can remake a nation where police and professor work together toward one America, and presidents check their own prejudices at the door.

Conceived In Liberty

Happy Independence Day!

IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 1776.
THE UNANIMOUS
DECLARATION
OF THE
THIRTEEN UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

WHEN, in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s GOD entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the Causes which impel them to the Separation.

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their CREATOR, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate, that Governments long established, should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security. Such has been the patient Sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the Necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The History of the present King of Great-Britain is a History of repeated Injuries and Usurpations, all having in direct Object the Establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid World.

Long Live The King

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In nearly every home movie that documents my childhood, you will see footage of me trying my hardest to mimic the dance moves of Michael Jackson. At every family gathering, Christmas parties especially, you would find the four-year-old version of me doing the moonwalk to the laughter and applause of my aunts and uncles. Who didn’t imitate the King of Pop when they were kids?  I will never forget asking my parents to play and replay my VHS of Moonwalker  and rewinding the scene in the myserious prohibition-era nightclub when Michael performs Smooth Criminal . The scene simply defined “cool.”

With Michael dies part of the childhood of many in my generation. He was up there with The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Michael Keaton’s Batman,  and the Simpsons when it was still good. And he undoubtedly went beyond that with his unprecedented talent and amazing showmanship. What we knew and associated with Michael when we were growing up made his bizzare lifestyle and charges of molestation so difficult to accept. His death is tragic because of how we remembered him when we were young and how others remembered him in recent years.  However one remembers Michael Jackson, may his reign as the King of Pop never be forgotten.

Don’t Let Another McCain Mess This Up

While the good ‘ol boys of the Republican Party  (and that is meant to be both affectionate and critical) are offering their advice to our beleaguered GOP, Meghan McCain is offering to take us in a fresher, younger, hipper direction. For our party’s sake, let’s hope Meghan McCain’s vision doesn’t stick.

Meghan McCain, the daughter of our failed attempt to restore the GOP message, has been writing a weekly column for the Daily Beast. She has so far done an outstanding job following in her father’s footsteps, using her online space to tell us what is wrong with our values instead of what is wrong with our organization.  I have difficulty accepting the criticisms of those who disagree with our party’s beliefs; we usually call them “Democrats.”

Last week, Meghan criticized the GOP’s stance on sex education, in a column entitled, “The GOP Doesn’t Understand Sex.” Liberals, on the other hand, think they understand sex, but they can’t even come up with a clear defintion of “is.”

The reason Republicans advocate abstinence-only education, Meghan writes, is because we think birth control and abortion are one in the same. Convinced we have actually made a strange link between the two, Meghan provides us with the stunning revelation: “But using birth control and having an abortion are not the same at all.” Imagine that.

Meghan goes on to make a valid point about the need for parents to better communicate with their children about sex. But once again, Republicans have it all wrong according to her. Republicans fail at the sex talk with their children because they think sex is immoral, and they don’t like talking about immoral subjects. Meghan may or may not be on to something, but she might want to consider the idea that Democrats fail in this area too because they see no morality in the sex subject at all.

Abstinence-only education, she argues, fails to address the physical and emotional issues related to sex. Is liberal-based sex education any more complete, with its “well kids are gonna have sex anyway” attitude? If she wants a curriculum that really prepares young people for the heavy emotional baggage  attached to sex, she should urge us to stay away from the Democrat style of sex-ed. Abstinence-only education may have its shortcomings, but the slap-a-condom-on-it-and-call-it-a-day method is even less effective.

In most public k-12 schools (mine included), sex education was presented in the mechanical, unhelpful manner that Meghan McCain opposes. It should be noted that these public schools aren’t run by the conservative prudes that Meghan depicts in her column, but the liberal, so-called progressive teachers unions. Lessons on how to properly wear a condom were never followed by discussion on what to expect after all was said and done. You learned about sex in a liberal public school the way you learned how to tie your shoe; it’s something you were going to do anyway, and you would be apathetic about the whole process. A conservative-based sex ed curriculum would tell you, and rightly so, that sex is more than just sex.

The culturally embarrassing scandal of the Clinton years should be a lesson in why liberals should not teach your children about sex. Clinton’s defenders dismissed critics for overreacting to something that was “just sex,” and nothing more. It wasn’t just a daughter coping with the realization that her parent’s relationship would never be the same; it wasn’t just a wife dealing with the loss of trust in her husband; it wasn’t just a man forced to explain himself to his loved ones and his god; it wasn’t just a young woman facing the reality that she broke up a family. But don’t worry, liberals will tell you, all of that is “just sex.”

I competely agree with Meghan that more honest and open communication is needed among families, but I would not devalue the guidance provided by conservative parents to their children when it comes to sex. The essence of being a teenager is having the inability to use freedom responsibly, so unambiguous direction provided by parents is needed.

I hope no one else in the Republican Party is banking on Meghan McCain to lead our party into the future. Despite her support for the 2nd amendment, I’m still not convinced she can restore us. If she wants to lead us, she should take Colin Powell with her, because I’m definitely not following.

If you combine Meghan McCain’s presence with the ideas and values of Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, and the other “good ‘ol boys” I linked to earlier, we would probably have a winning spokesperson. An effective message requires an effective messenger. Without the proper messenger, our principles are lost, since it is our principles that shape our message. Meghan McCain is young, attractive, eneregtic, and can appeal to a younger population of voters, but she is arguably liberal.

When I use the term “good ‘ol boys” to describe Newt, Rush, Cheney, Romney, etc., it is in no way a reference to race. The good ‘ol boys aren’t the rich, fat, white old men caricatured by Democrats. To me, they are the old war horses of our party who still have great ideas, but lack the charisma and the fight to fit the times. Both parties have the  good ‘ol boys of my definition. They are the firmly established party elite that have too much Washington experience to pass on the reins to their sucessors. They do things a certain way, and if you don’t like it, you just have to wait a few years and make your bones.

We need the Newts, Rushes, and the Cheneys, but we need them as our party’s sages. We need people like Governors Palin and Jindal to be the messengers. Palin and Jindal (and many others who I won’t bother to name) have the ability to make the conservative message appeal to a broader audience. When Newt is on television, the grassroots conservative of any age will look upon on him admirably. The average voter, on the other hand, may watch his television set and think no one new has joined the GOP since 1994.

When a new Republican face emerges, people will want to find out more about him, and in the process, they learn more about conservatism. Ultimately, it isn’t about putting in place something new, but restoring what has been before. The Republican Restoration, not the Revolution, can take place with the right person leading it on television, the radio, and the internet.

Reagan’s efforts offer a prime example. While we can never replicate Reagan’s charisma, we can replicate his actions. Each speech he gave was not just a about him, but about a higher ideal. His rallies were not just for excitement, but for education.

I think we already have the leaders we’ve been looking for, but the good ‘ol boys and the Meghan McCains of our party are still in search mode.

We can bring sexy back to the GOP, but not the type that Meghan McCain envisioned.

It’s So Big Because It Isn’t: Pres. Obama’s 100 Days

After 100 days in the White House, President Barack Obama has yet to give my blog a bailout. I simply assumed the massive government coddling would reach my tiny corner of the web, but instead of writing my blog posts, federal burecrats were too busy tapping the phones of the Greatest Generation. Better luck next time I suppose. I could always secure my government check by converting this blog to a pro-Obama hub that the sycophants at MSNBC could appreciate, but don’t we have enough mind-bending articles comparing Michelle Obama to Jackie Kennedy?

I feel like I should deck the halls and blow up some balloons. Obama’s 100 day mark is no big deal, but the mainstream media is christening it as the greatest holiday in the world. I frankly don’t blame the media for getting so giddy. Someone with an absymally mediocre background that they supported has managed to keep the country in tact after 100 days. Despite President Obama’s poor leadership and lack of executive experience, America still lives. He is fortunate to be leader of  a nation that knows how to persevere under any administration.

100 days isn’t enough to determine greatness, but we’ve already heard our president compared to Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Kennedy. When did these men bow to Jefferson Davis, Hitler, or Castro?

A great president acknowledges, reveres, and promotes the greatness of the nation he stewards. President Obama seems to think that the United States is greatly only because it elected him President, but even that could not silence his profuse apologies to the rest of the world.

What good is an American President that doesn’t believe in American Exceptionalism? If you can’t cheer for your own team, you can’t expect to be a good team captain. America’s own team captain seems more regretful of the sport itself than the actual plays that supposedly lost the game.

Condemning a nation to correct the mistakes of its government does not make one humble. One can be humble without being apologetic, and President Obama is quite good at being the latter, especially when he is in other countries.

When President Obama offered his apologies for America’s behavior to a crowd in Strasbourg, France, he made little attempt to distinguish President Bush’s policies from America as a whole. Even though his likely intention was to apologize for Bush’s actions, Obama threw America under the bus without hesitation. America was dismissive and arrognt, and  America failed to appreciate Europe, our president declared. One couldn’t tell from Obama’s speech that Bush was the source of regret.

This isn’t the best time to feel sorry for being an American. When you’re jobless, broke, in foreclosure, and running from the Swine Flu, the last thing you need to hear is that your very citizenship is shameful. We are told to feel guilty at a time when we sorely need another Morning in America.

If the world is truly headed toward a post-American era, as some in the media are reporting, Obama’s apologies are truly unwelcome. It will be diffcult to reverse the post-American trend when our national pride is all but gone. Try getting someone to uplift their country when they are told repeatedly that their country is nothing special. If the world is truly facing a life without its greatest country, President Obama’s apologies are hastening our moral decline.

It would help if President Obama took his role a little more seriously. Aside from the numerous policy disagreements I have with this Preisdent, I find his style of leadership extremely annoying. Obama treats the presidency like a teenager that just got behind the wheel of his new car. He can drive his shiny new toy to different places and show it off, but forgets the immense responsibility that he has everytime he hits the road. I am especially reminded of President Obama’s appearance on the Tonight Show, where he gleamed with joy as he told Jay Leno how cool it was to ride Air Force One.

It goes back again to the issue of greatness. Presidents Reagan and Bush understood the enormity of their positions, and regarded themselves as servants to the principles embodied in the Oval Office. The Presidency was bigger than they were, which meant the virtues that they were elected to protect came from something more powerful and sacred. To show respect, they would never even be without a jacket in the Oval Office, a tradition quickly abandoned by President Obama.

President Obama must find humility in himself by reconnecting with the greatness of the country he serves. It shouldn’t take him 100 days to do this, but he may just be waiting for someone to spell it out on his teleprompter.

A Charge Kept

“I’ve often spoken to you about good and evil, and this has made some uncomfortable. But good and evil are present in this world, and between the two of them there can be no compromise.” -President George W. Bush, January 15, 2009

Tomorrow, we witness the departure of moral clarity. We bid farewell to a Commander-in-Chief that was not afraid to seperate good from evil and right from wrong. America will welcome the open-ended haze of buzz words meant only for Hallmark cards and elementary school self-esteem classes. We will miss the distinctions  made between freedom and tyranny as we walk the shaky ground of “hope” and “change.” We will miss the the unconditional love for America, the unreserved support for our troops, and most of all, the unwavering definition of life as the new guy struggles to cope with a definition he views as “above his pay grade.”

Hope’s true strength is drawn from firm principles, not a big government program. Change is believable only when it is attached to something meaningful. Crowds can chant “yes, we can,” all day long, but soon they will ask themselves, “what is it exactly that we can do?” Buzz words, we shall learn, wear thin during uncertain times.

Bush was certain about what was right and wrong, good and evil, and who was with us or against us. It was a firm worldview in a world that demanded weakness. Bush truly had a “charge to keep,” and he kept that charge, even at the cost of his popularity. We won’t have leadership, or character, like that in the White House for at least four years.

Obama will keep us happy. Bush kept us safe, but we were afraid to admit that safety made us happier than anything.

Thank You.

Berkeley’s So Excited, and They Just Can’t Hide It

UC Berkeley is giving students the chance to worship their dear leader. I received this e-mail from my old chancellor, Robert Birgeneau:

TO ALL MEMBERS OF THE BERKELEY CAMPUS COMMUNITY:

I invite you to join UC Berkeley students, faculty and staff and members of our local community at a public viewing of the inauguration of President Barack H. Obama on Tuesday, January 20, 2009, in Sproul Plaza.  A large screen will be installed at the main entrance to Sproul Hall, and proceedings from Washington, D.C. will be broadcast beginning at 7:30 am.  The Presidential Oath of Office will be administered by 9:00 am (noon EST), with the inaugural address following.  Note that the proceedings are outdoors and will be held rain or shine.  The University’s formal program will begin at 8:15 a.m.

Where was the JumboTron for Bush’s inauguration? The only  thing I remember when I was at Cal during the last Inauguration Day is the World Can’t Wait kids playing dress-up in their Guantanamo Bay uniforms. Now what will they do?

They get to change out of their orange jumpsuits and join the throngs of giddy Cal students that will scream louder than teenager girls at a Jonas Brothers Concert. Some women will faint, others will throw their underwear at the screen, and a few men will do a lap around Memorial Glade while speaking in tongues. Chancellor Birgeneau will give some remarks before he switches on the television, but he will be interrupted by his own uncontrollable weeping.

After Obama concludes his inaugural address, the students will be so moved that they will begin looting every business along Bancroft Avenue. They may even begin looting before Obama utters a single word, since Pastor Rick Warren’s opening prayer probably won’t sit well with any Berkeley locals. It will be a sight that that would have never been seen if the country decided to honor an American hero instead.

America gave us a president perfect for Berkeley and every other college campus across the country. Obama is the charismatic student sitting in the front row, whose answers sound brilliant only because he is good at explaining why he doesn’t have an answer. Obama is the young freshman that is willing to try anything, and be friends with anyone, since it is pretty cool to know an anarchist or a feminist when you’re away from your parents. His racist, anti-American friend is just a guy that sits in front of him in Sociology 3AC. The radical socialist and unapologetic domestic terrorist that he knows is just a dude living in his dorm. Obama is the the young, untenured professor that holds office hours in a coffee bar, and is quick to bump up your term paper grade unless you challenge his knowledge or question his brilliance. Americaan college students ultimately voted for one of their own.

America’s youth is drunk on Obama, and they will stay sloshed long past Inauguration Day. The media will order them more shots, prolonging the eventual hangover.

Berkeley’s non-Republicans should be grateful for the free party. My peers and I did not have the privilege of enjoying an early morning celebration on the University’s dime. Our attempt at celebration was inconvenienced by a few middle-fingers, some spit, and more curse words than a rant from Rod Blagojevich. But even in victory, something tells me that Berkeley’s liberals will be greeting campus Republicans the same exact way they did in defeat.  So much for Change.

MERRY CHRISTMAS