OBAMA/GOP
What matters most? Reelection or country?
Come now, let us reason together...'' Isaiah 1:18
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Chat live with Leonard Pitts Jr. from 1-2 p.m. Wednesdays, or submit questions ahead of time.
Leonard Pitts Jr. won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2004. He is the author of the novel, Before I Forget. His column runs every Sunday and Wednesday. Forward From This Moment, a collection of his columns, was released in 2009.
On Sept. 11, 2001, he wrote a column on the terrorist attacks that received a huge response from readers who deluged him with more than 26,000 e-mails. It was posted on the Internet, chain-letter style. Read the column and others on the topic of September 11.
You can also read Pitts' series, What Works?, a series of columns about programs anywhere in the country that show results in improving the lives of black children.
Leonard also wrote the 2008 series I Am A Man, commemorating the 40th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination.
Email Leonard at lpitts@MiamiHerald.com or visit his website at www.leonardpittsjr.com
It is the enduring paradox of our centuries here.
It is the paradox that stood its ground at Bunker Hill, paradox that made a doomed charge on Fort Wagner, paradox that stormed San Juan Hill, advanced through the Meuse-Argonne, landed on Iwo Jima, liberated Seoul and was taken prisoner in Hanoi.Come now, let us reason together...'' Isaiah 1:18
If he'd said it of Jews, he would still be apologizing.
If he'd said it of blacks, he'd be on BET, begging absolution.Don Lewis thinks white men can't jump.
What else explains the bizarre statement he issued last week? According to the Chronicle newspaper of Augusta, Ga., Lewis is the commissioner of something called the All-American Basketball Alliance, which hopes to set up shop in 12 cities. ``Only players that are natural born United States citizens with both parents of Caucasian race are eligible to play in the league,'' his statement said.Have you heard about the Jesus rifles?
Islam. In the third place, the coded scriptural references provided a recruiting tool to warlords and terrorists who could truthfully tell followers they were being shot at by Jesus guns.As babies were being pulled, crushed and broken, from the rubble.
One year later.
One year after that icy Washington day when Aretha Franklin sang and John Roberts muffed his lines and Barack Obama raised his hand and swore the oath that made him president of the United States, it turns out something fundamental has changed.
Sometimes, the earth is cruel. That is ultimately the fundamental lesson here, as children wail, families sleep out of doors, and the dead lie unclaimed in the rubble that once was Port-au-Prince.
On Christmas Day, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a student from Nigeria, allegedly tried to blow up a jetliner bound for Detroit. He failed due to some defect in his explosives and the quick reflexes of passengers who subdued him. As you might expect, this close call has some of us asking hard, but necessary questions:
Afew days from now and not a moment too soon, we say farewell to the Ohs.
Afew days from now and not a moment too soon, we say farewell to the Ohs.
Once upon a time, it was common to debate names for this first decade of the new millennium. We'd seen the Gay Nineties, the Roaring Twenties, the Swinging Sixties, we'd endured the Me Decade, the Greed Decade, The War Years, and people wondered what nickname should be attached to the Ohs.You'd think it would be a simple question: How popular is Barack Obama?
Please indulge me as I answer an e-mail from a guy named Dunbar. It says in part:
``Your column on Sammy Sosa's skin cream use is off base and sends a wrong message. The issue is the man's character -- not the color of his skin. Your column seemingly assumes he lightens his skin color out of shame and fails to recognize that he may simply be doing it out of vanity or his own sense of personal style. Plenty of fair-skinned people use skin-darkening creams, sun baths, tanning beds for that purpose and the only criticism leveled at them is vanity and stupidity for ignoring skin cancer warnings. The same should hold for Sammy.I wanna say I am somebody. I wanna say it on subway, TV, movie, LOUD. I see the pink faces in suits look over top of my head. I watch myself disappear in their eyes... I talk loud but still I don't exist.'' -- Precious
``We [should] wrap him in bacon and deep fry him at a state fair while Lee Greenwood stabs him in the face.'' -- Jon Stewart of The Daily Show on confessed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed
Dear Sammy Sosa:
Are you happy with yourself now? Are you more confident and self-assured? When you look in the mirror, do you like yourself better, now that you are white?They killed a killer last week.
I kept waiting to feel something when news came that John Allen Muhammad had been executed in Virginia. As a staunch opponent of capital punishment, I wanted some nugget of remorse at the knowledge that the government had taken his life.You figure the White House is probably feeling pretty good about itself right now.
After spending much of the summer as a punching bag for conservatives, Team Obama has begun throwing punches of its own. It has unleashed its marquee figures to tee off on high profile GOP personalities and institutions in a coordinated effort to marginalize the opposition.