Entries Tagged 'News' ↓

Two interesting political stories out of Albany, the first pertains to this year’s mayoral race in New York’s capital city, the other about next year’s governor’s race.

Columnist Paul Bray, writing in Sunday’s Albany Times Union dismisses the idea that City Councilman Corey Ellis (mentioned on this blog a day ago) is an impossible longshot to unseat four term incumbent Mayor Jerry Jennings. He likens Ellis’ bid to the miraculous path to victory taken by Barack Obama.

“Like Obama, Ellis is a community organizer…He has political experience as political director for Albany County District Attorney David Soares’ campaign and as chair of Albany for Obama, Ellis knows the political “ground game” of being up front and personal with voters. He is betting he and his supporters on the ground will make up for money he does not have.”

Meanwhile, all the money in the world may not be enough to save Governor David Patterson from almost certain defeat next year should he face either a Democratic primary challenge or a general election race against Republican Rudy Giuliani, according to political observers.

Patterson’s approval ratings are in the 20% range, lower than any governor in state history. Democratic insiders (and a lot of average citizens) are quietly hoping he’ll step aside and allow Attorney General Andrew Cuomo (son of former Governor Mario Cuomo) to run. Cuomo has a sizeable war chest already but has been coy about seeking the governor’s seat, although polls show he could beat both Patterson and Giuliani.

Tim Russert, NBC News’ Washington bureau chief and the moderator of “Meet the Press,” died Friday after a sudden heart attack at the bureau, NBC News said Friday. He was 58. More

Un-fucking-believable!

CHICAGO — A Chicago jury has acquitted R. Kelly on all counts at his child pornography trial. The verdict came six years after the R&B superstar was first charged with videotaping himself having sex with a young girl. Prosecutors had said she was as young as 13 at the time.

Kelly had faced a maximum 15 years in prison.

Both Kelly and the now 23-year-old alleged victim had denied they were the ones appearing on the tape, which was played for the jury at the beginning and end of the trial.

The prosecution’s star witness was a woman who said she engaged in three-way sex with Kelly and the girl from the video. Defense attorneys argued the man on the tape didn’t have a large mole on his back, as Kelly does.

In a stinging passage from a “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. condemned white churches for rejecting his pleas for support.

“In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churches stand on the sideline and merely mouth pious irrelevancies,” King wrote from jail during the 1963 Birmingham, Alabama, demonstrations.

The contemporary white church has largely accepted King as a religious hero. Yet some observers say there is one religious community that continues to shun King — the black church.

Forty years after his death, King remains a prophet without honor in the institution that nurtured him, black preachers and scholars say. King’s “prophetic” model of ministry — one that confronted political and economic institutions of power — has been sidelined by the prosperity gospel.

Full story here.

By TIM WISE

For most white folks, indignation just doesn’t wear well. Once affected or conjured up, it reminds one of a pudgy man, wearing a tie that may well have fit him when he was fifty pounds lighter, but which now cuts off somewhere above his navel and makes him look like an idiot.

Indignation doesn’t work for most whites, because having remained sanguine about, silent during, indeed often supportive of so much injustice over the years in this country–the theft of native land and genocide of indigenous persons, and the enslavement of Africans being only two of the best examples–we are just a bit late to get into the game of moral rectitude. And once we enter it, our efforts at righteousness tend to fail the test of sincerity.

But here we are, in 2008, fuming at the words of Pastor Jeremiah Wright, of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago–occasionally Barack Obama’s pastor, and the man whom Obama credits with having brought him to Christianity–for merely reminding us of those evils about which we have remained so quiet, so dismissive, so unconcerned. It is not the crime that bothers us, but the remembrance of it, the unwillingness to let it go–these last words being the first ones uttered by most whites it seems whenever anyone, least of all an “angry black man” like Jeremiah Wright, foists upon us the bill of particulars for several centuries of white supremacy.

But our collective indignation, no matter how loudly we announce it, cannot drown out the truth. And as much as white America may not be able to hear it (and as much as politics may require Obama to
condemn it) let us be clear, Jeremiah Wright fundamentally told the truth.

Read the rest here.

Tim Wise is the author of: White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son (Soft Skull Press, 2005), and Affirmative Action: Racial Preference in Black and White (Routledge: 2005). He can be reached at: timjwise@msn. com.