These are a little late, but I promise that nothing that happened in today’s games changed what I have here. Whatever you do, don’t put any money on my picks. Unless you’re putting down money that I’m wrong. Then you’re golden.
Conference Champions
Pac 10: USC (duh)
Big 10: Ohio State (blech)
Big Twelve: Texas
ACC: Wake Forest
SEC: Florida (I have zero faith in Georgia)
Big East: WVU
Other four BCS teams: LSU, Oklahoma, Arizona St, Clemson
BCS Title Game: WVU defeats USC
Cynicism is easy. Especially in politics. It’s easy to believe that all politicians squelch on promises, that they only tell us what we want to hear so that they can get elected and then impose their own agenda on us. It’s SOP, and everyone knows it.
That’s why we who support Obama for president are so easily ridiculed and painted as naive. We’re buying into a message of optimism and hope built on the promise of a politics grounded in mutual respect and open dialog. We’re buying into the idea that the guy we vote for really does want to hear from us, really will privilege our ideas and opinions.
But I stand before you tonight because all across America something is stirring. What the nay-sayers don’t understand is that this election has never been about me. It’s been about you.
There’s little wonder that Obama is so appealing to my generation. For our whole adult lives, we’ve been at the mercy of an idiot who lies to us and keeps secrets from us, implying that we’re too dumb to handle reality. And now we’re confronted with someone much smarter, much more capable of leading the country – and he wants to hear from us?
But cynicism is easy, right? Of course he’ll tell us that this is a bottom-up movement, that our voices matter and will be heard in an Obama White House. That’s what politicians say.
Perhaps. But politicians are judged by how they deliver promises, and Obama has spent the last 18 months exposing some of the machinations of polity to a generation of eager, energetic voters. It’s a dangerous thing to promise this much and not follow through. Obama’s smart enough to understand that.
Besides, I’m not into cynicism, remember? I’m voting for a presidential nominee who thinks US citizens should have easy access to the workings of government, who’s interested in hearing what we want so that he can put us to work helping our neighbors get what they need.
I’m voting for Our Candidate.
As so often is the case, much love to rikyrah at Jack and Jill Politics
Rev. Susan K. Smith, writing for the WaPo faith blog, gets to the heart of why I’m so looking forward to Obama’s speech tonight. I’m excited for him, sure, but moreso for the moment that emerges from a history of men and women who have died, survived, and thrived in the face of (what should be) unthinkably inhumane odds
Righteous History
We are people of privilege. I say that because we are living in a moment in history that is almost too great to comprehend. From our beginnings as slaves in this country, we are witnessing the ascension of an African American to heights our ancestors might never have imagined. Many of us didn’t either.
When Senator Barack Obama accepted the Democratic nomination for president of the United States of America on Wednesday, a link in the chain of our history was broken. From slavery and the insult of being considered property, our people have moved to the possibility of one of our own being on the verge of the presidency.
It is almost too awesome to take in. At the moment Senator Obama was officially nominated, black people wept. My friends’ parents, both octogenarians and participants in the Civil Rights movement, sobbed. A little boy, fascinated but not fully understanding what was going on, asked, as he watched his parents cry, “Are we supposed to celebrate or something?”
A friend of mine recalled how her mother — who had told her of how her father had been lynched — called, crying. Another friend called, reminding me of how it had been for her and for her parents in the South, being called the “n” word at will and being challenged to do anything about it. A member recalled how her grandmother had been forced to leave the South because she had had a fight with a white woman.
I remembered my own father, a brilliant man who had memorized the entire dictionary but was consistently passed over for a promotion at the IRS where he worked. I remember the last time he was passed over, how he wept and how my mother comforted him. As I peeked at the two of them from around a corner, I could hear my mother remind him that he could do something else, that he didn’t have to take the insults anymore.
My father listened and began his own business as an accountant.
I remembered watching participants in the Civil Rights movement, being attacked by dogs and hosed down by firemen. I recalled going on long trips and not being allowed to even think about going to the bathroom in certain places, because the bathrooms “reserved” for “colored” people were too despicable for my mother to even consider letting us step inside.
I remembered learning about the transatlantic slave trade, where European traders left Europe, went to Africa to pick up Africans who would be enslaved, traveled to the Caribbean to drop the slaves off and pick up sugar and tobacco to take back to England, dropping the sugar and tobacco off and African captives as well. It was all … business.
I remember learning about the horror of the Middle Passage, a trip which took on the average of 50-60 days, with our ancestors stuffed in the bowels of a hot, dirty ship, ripped from Africa and taken to lands they knew nothing about.
“How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”
I remember how pained I was, once I learned about the Jewish Holocaust, to realize that African Americans had lived through our own Holocaust as well. It is estimated that 50-60 million Africans died during the era of the transatlantic slave trade.
I remember shivering with horror as I stood in the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool this spring, because I felt too close to the spirits of ancestors who had been involved in the brutality and inhumanity of slavery. I had to get out of there.
It has been a hard road for people of African descent in the United States. So we wept as Senator Obama accepted the Democratic nomination. People in Columbus and Chicago and Trinidad and Jamaica and Brazil and London. People all over the world whose lives were forever impacted by an era where people created by God were considered property, because in spite of all odds against us, we have kept on getting up.
Some people complain that Senator Obama is not a “real” African American, because his mother was white and his father a Kenyan. They say he didn’t live an “African American” life. But if your skin is bronzed in this nation, no matter where your people were from, you are treated as an American who descended from slaves. Senator Obama stands on the backs and shoulders of people who fought and died to make a way for black people in this nation. He is standing on the backs and shoulders of Harriet Tubman, Mary McLeod Bethune, Charles Drew, Benjamin Banneker, Frederick Douglas, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Paul Robeson, Ida B. Wells Barnett, Dr.Martin Luther King, Jr., Rev. Jesse Jackson, Jackie Robinson, Hank Aaron, and indeed many nameless who passed through the “Door of No Return” that still exists in preserved slave castles in West Africa.
Yes, Senator Obama is an African American.
When I was little, whenever anyone of our race accomplished something, hit a milestone, as it were, my mother would wake us up and make us watch in on television. We were too little to understand why she was crying, but we would watch and, finally, be allowed to go back to bed.
She was “writing our history” as “frontlets between our eyes.” She was helping us to see that we were once aliens in a strange land, but that God was with us, moving us forward, opening one Sea of Reeds after another, so we could pass through.
The weeping continues. People wept this week because the Senator from Illinois might very well become president of the nation that once enslaved his people. It is no less historic and fascinating than when Nelson Mandela became president of South Africa.
Tell your children. Write it as frontlets. This is history being made right before our eyes.
Update: I posted the above somewhat hastily and forgot to mention the significance of this date.
8/28/55 – Emmett Till is murdered.
8/28/63 – March on Washington, Dr. King’s Dream.
8/28/08 – A Black man accepts the presidential nomination for a major party.
As the presidential campaigns heat up, each candidate, as well as the mainstream media and blogosphere, increasingly resort to silliness in the desperation to catch another voter or another viewer.
On Biden
The focus on his statements about Obama’s experience is overblown. When he said it, they were running against each other in a primary. Of course he’s going to use his thirty years in the Senate in his favor. What’s remarkable is that he never said anything worse.
What’s especially ridiculous about the MSM’s fascination with these remarks is that they’re missing the opportunity for real critique. I watched four White talking heads on Hannity and Colmes (yeah, so it’s my own fault for watching) drone on about the experience remarks while completely ignoring Biden’s bass ackwards racial commentary.
From the left, we’re hearing that the selection of Biden flies in the face of Obama’s message of change. But the sentiment behind his message isn’t that seasoned politicians are on the outs. Rather, it’s that political decisions shouldn’t be governed by the artificial barriers that divide the two major parties and subdivide each party into cliques and unhealthy coalitions. Obama’s vulnerable to critique on the change front, but not in his selection of Biden or his outreach to evangelical Christians. Those moves are actually quite consistent with his message.
On Hillary Clinton
Wednesday’s Morning Joe on MSNBC looped the opinion that Clinton’s convention speech lacked a personal touch. That she simply delivered a Democratic stump speech and inserted his name, giving no indication that she knew him or trusted him beyond having to choose between him and McCain.
But that’s Clinton’s style. Her greatest strength as a speaker (it isn’t tone or cadence) is her ability to run down the Democratic platform convincingly and with gusto. Her hook throughout her campaign was to list things the Democratic party could do for the average voter, then claim that she would be the best Democrat for the job. Tuesday night, she gave the same speech, but credited Obama instead of herself.
Anything more would’ve been disingenuous. She can’t suddenly pretend that she’s been an ardent Obama supporter for months. She delivered the most that could’ve been asked of her – a fiery, at times witty, stirring paean to the Democratic platform with a heavy emphasis on Obama.
On Humanizing the Obama Family
Ugh and Double Ugh.
The claim that we don’t know enough about Obama is a nonstarter on two fronts. First, he kind of has an autobiography in print. Sure, autobiographies aren’t straight fact, but can’t we learn quite a lot about a person from how s/he chooses to reveal him/herself? Second, the implication is that not knowing about Obama means that he’s a dangerous wildcard. Why? Oh, right, he’s Black. Meanwhile, I’m willing to bet that not many people have any idea where Cindy and John McCain’s money comes from and that not many people are all that disconcerted about what they don’t know.
On McCain’s Houses
I don’t like this ad:
Coming at McCain on this seems petty. Bloggers and the MSM are happy to overblow McCain’s gaffe, and Obama would have been better served by waiting until just the right moment in a debate, then laying down the perfect punchline at McCain’s expense.
…Christian ministers who enjoyed the spotlight a little too much and seemed more interested in self-promotion and television interviews than, you know, Christian ministry weren’t welcome in this election season?
Yeah, seems like forever ago.
I don’t have any inherent problem with Rick Warren asking candidates questions (though I also don’t think it’s too much to ask for a multi-faith forum), but I do think he was rather obviously favoring McCain.
The phrasing of questions leaned heavily toward the Republican platform. Candidates were asked at what point a baby is entitled to human rights, completely glossing the important distinction that many pro-choicers draw between a fetus and a baby, as well as overlooking the aspect of women’s rights and social inequality.
Then, both were asked to ‘define marriage,’ a phrasing that assumes that the term needs some sort of legal restriction. Again, the gay marriage proponent side of the argument was completely underplayed in the question (as well as in Obama’s answer). Here’s the place where human rights could’ve easily come up: ‘What threshhold do heterosexuals cross that entitles them to more human rights than homosexuals?’
I saw Warren a couple of nights later on Larry King Live, as the two tried to out-flatter each other. Here’s a jewel of quote from Warren, who is happy to let us know how admired and trusted he is:
I actually said, I’ll put together a panel and they can ask you the questions. And they said no, we will do it with two conditions. One, that you provide a free digital feed to everybody who wants to pick it up. And I said fine. And the other one was, Rick, you ask all the questions. And I think that was just evidence they knew I was trustworthy to do it.
Now how is it that Jeremiah Wright’s press junket to defend himself and his teachings against misrepresentations is more self-serving than what Warren’s doing?
I think it’s pretty easy to determine, really. Lots of people agree with what Warren says, whereas Wright’s message is harder to stomach and, for some, even to comprehend. This explanation makes sense of the matter, but it also raises some disturbing realities about the narrowness of the definition of ‘Christianity’ and – more broadly speaking – faith in America.
It’s not that the alternative questions I propose above are less partisan or absolutely should have been asked. It’s that it shouldn’t be so difficult to imagine an America whose notion of faith is broad enough to incorporate such questions in a mainstream religious conversation.
I think Neil Young put it best when he said
Tonight’s the night
Tonight’s the night
Tonight’s the night
Tonight’s the night
Tonight’s the night
Tonight’s the night
Tonight’s the night
Tonight’s the night
Okay, maybe ‘put it best’ is a bit of a stretch*, but tonight is, very much, indeed so, the night. So, before plopping down in front of tonight’s mystery-shrouded final dance-off, I’m offering a ranking of the remaining dancers.
4. Twitch – He’s number 4 because it’s the lowest number available to me. He’s this year’s Lacey Schwimmer: completely overrated with a rabid fan base that should be banned from texting for one year after promoting him over Will and Mark.
Things I don’t really like about Twitch include his ballroom dancing, his contemporary dancing, his jazz dancing, his Twitch-branded T-shirts, and his fans.
Deal with it.
3. Courtney – I like her a lot. She’s the most musical dancer on the show, and her grandparents are super-cute. She partners well, she solos well (that’s why she beat out Chelsie), and she deserves her spot in the Top 4. But the next two are simply too strong.
2. Katee – I think I actually prefer Courtney to Katee, but Katee’s technique, length, and fluidity can be breathtaking. After Will, she is probably the most technically gifted dancer this season, and the most technically gifted dancer in the Top 4 always gets to finish 2nd.
The upside is that we’ll get to see lots of reaction shots of her next year when her friend Natalie makes the Top 20.
1. Joshua – He’ll win because he’s likeable. He also dances really well, of course, but, like Sabra last year, what will separate him from other top-notch dancers is his irresistibility. He takes dancing seriously without taking himself too seriously, he hasn’t mailed in a single performance all year, and he comes off happily humble on-camera.
And he was inspired by a teacher, so Oprah and my mother-in-law will be voting for him…
*Though, in his defense, Neil Young was pretty drunk at the time.
…lambasting someone for saying something that’s true (and that many people know and profess to be true).
…being held responsible for what someone else says because you share roughly the same skin color. That’s ludicrous.
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