Dear Europe: No, it wasn't your imagination. In the year 2013, the only current African-American member of the 100-member U.S. Senate was NOT invited to the 50th Anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech. It wasn't an oversight, it was intentional by the event organizers. And some African-American members of the U.S. news media are quick to say they're happy about that decision. Really! When Obama arrives in Sweden soon, if you see some of these "journalists," like DeWayne Wickham, you might want to ask them about that

Screenshot of The Drudge Report of 2013-08-29 at 1:45 a.m.

Dear Europe: 

No, it wasn't your imagination. 
In the year 2013, the only current African-American member of the 100-member U.S. Senate was NOT invited to the 50th Anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech. 
It wasn't an oversight, it was intentional by the event organizers. 
And some African-American members of the U.S. news media are quick to say they're happy about that decision. Really! 
When Obama arrives in Sweden soon, if you see some of these "journalists," like DeWayne Wickham, you might want to ask them about that.

This was our front page after the #MarchonWashington in 1963 http://t.co/tYG67jHIYt pic.twitter.com/DkaCvTNWsW
— Washington Post (@washingtonpost) August 24, 2013

Amy Ridenour's National Center Blog
Where Was Senator Scott?
by David W. Almasi
August 28, 2013 at 10:12 PM

This morning, the Project 21 office received an e-mail asking for the organization’s comment on the fact that Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush would not be attending today’s event to mark the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington.

Obviously, the person asking for the comment assumed it a slight among the highest order of racism that neither living Republican president would be there while Democrats Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were there with the current Commander-in-Chief.

Read the rest of the post at:
http://www.conservativeblog.org/amyridenour/2013/8/28/where-was-senator-scott.html

Nobody is suggesting that South Carolina's junior U.S. Senator Tim Scott should've been speaking at the ceremony. 
Nobody -not even his supporters.
But why wasn't he even invited?

Here's what all honest and smart people I know inherently know, regardless of ideology.

If this had been a scene from a documentary film being directed by any number of the top dozen or so American film directors of the past 50 years, say Steven Spielberg or Sydney Pollack, they'd have figured out a way to not only shoot it on a day when it didn't rain, they'd have figured out a powerful way to end the film by showing via quick succession of shots of the assembled crowd the many elected Black leaders that make up American society, and show that it was many people, familiar and unfamiliar who benefitted from Dr. King's words.
Not just Barack Obama.
You know, inclusive, not exclusive.
Unlike the event organizers' way of doing things.

Lest anyone forget March on Washington 50th anniv is Al Sharpton production, Sharpton is introduced for keynote as 'the voice of this era'..
— Byron York (@ByronYork) August 24, 2013

CNN Guest: Why Should ‘Appointed’ Sen. Tim Scott Have Been Invited to MLK Anniversary?
by Noah Rothman, 5:13 pm, August 28th, 2013
Video at:
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/cnn-guest-why-should-appointed-sen-tim-scott-have-been-invited-to-mlk-anniversary/

Mini-History lesson for Today: Something to keep in mind as you watch this video excerpt.

In case some of you longtime readers of the blog have forgotten, or, you are one of the newer readers to the the blog who never knew in the first place, I was one of Bill Clinton's first supporters in Northern Virginia in early 1991, though to be honest, I'd been waiting since 1988 for him to run. 

1992 Bill Clinton for President buttons from my collection

(c) 2013 Hallandale Beach Blog, All Rights Reserved

I actually thought long-and-hard about running to be a DNC delegate to the 1992 Convention in Los Angeles from my Congressional District, then as now represented by pugnacious Jim Moran. In fact, in early 1991, I was the first person in the whole state to ask the Virginia Democratic Party down in Richmond for the information and forms I needed to file and run as a delegate. (They didn't have them yet.)

Because I'm me and have my personality, interests and background, and was blessed to have as my best friend in all of the world when I lived in the Washington, D.C. area in the 1990's, a wonderful woman was not only from the same small town in Arkansas that Bill Clinton was born in, Hope, a woman whose own mother had grown-up across the street from him before he and his mother moved him down to Hot Springs with her parents while she was out-of-state studying nursing -my friend had a framed photo of herself while in high school and then-Governor Clinton on her desk at the National Press Building two blocks from The White House, where she worked as a producer and sometimes on-air reporter and was a member of the White House press corps- there is almost nothing about Bill Clinton pre-1997 that I don't know, haven't heard and then heard repeated as well.

My "license" to talk about Arkansas -which I first saw in 1965. That is, my Arkansas key chain 'license' is courtesy of Shannon, my thoughtful, beautiful, brainy, beguiling, globe-trotting and multi-lingual friend. (And Asian foreign policy expert, too!)

So, that said, since many of you might not know it, when Clinton worked on Capitol Hill as an intern, he worked in the office of one of the most-powerful senators in the country, especially on foreign policy: Arkansas Sen. J. William Fulbright. 
(Correct, the Fullbright of the Fulbright Program.)
Another thing they had in common besides their great love of Arkansas was that like Clinton, Fulbright was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford.

But whatever else he was besides being a strong voice for an American foreign policy that has a strong multi-lateral approach, Senator Fulbright, being from Arkansas and having the background he had, was also an ardent segregationist.
No, being a Rhodes Scholar didn't prevent him from voting against the 1964 Voting Rights Act, as did a powerful senator from neighboring Tennessee -Al Gore's father, Al Gore, Sr.

(Blog historical nugget: My family moved from San Antonio where I and a younger sister were born, to Memphis on Easter Weekend in 1965. We left in 1968 for Miami just months after Dr. King was assassinated there while supporting striking city sanitation workers. I was there for all the rioting. Saw the Army tanks come rolling down the street from the armory towards downtown. Not that most people appearing regularly on TV today could even tell you who Dr. King was in Memphis to see unless a show producer whispered it into their hidden earpiece. But history matters!)     

The Voting Rights Act of 1964 only passed because of the votes and influence of Northern Republicans in Congress, and among the Black Republican voters in New York who championed it was someone whom you may've heard of: Jackie Robinson.
Did you know that Jackie Robinson was a Republican?

I'm guessing not.
Yes, given the generally sorry state of political discourse today, and the embarrassing lack of knowledge about basic American history among many people who regularly appear on U.S. TV, to say nothing of the Mainstream Media's well-known bias for liberal orthodoxy and hiring policies, there are a lot of otherwise smart people who would prefer that you not learn the true history that happened, but rather the history that best supports their political narrative and view of the world.
But as we know, facts are funny.
Sometimes they get in the way.

That's why in this particular case, with smug and history-deficient USA Today columnist DeWayne Wickham in the video above, it's great that he was given the opportunity to publicly show that when it comes to all sorts of common knowledge, he's someone who doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground -and certainly shouldn't be lecturing anyone on anything.
He's just further proof of the powerful role of the Peter Principle in American journalism.

And see, now you know that he's a horse's ass, so that mystery is solved and the next time you see him on TV, you'll know enough to change the channel.
The worst part of all is not his embarrassing performance, and showing his ignorance, but that by CNN putting someone of his ilk on the air, it prevented someone we've never heard of with something original and insightful from appearing and sharing their insight.
I'd love to play him in Jeopardy!!!

-----
The State (Columbia, South Carolina)
A Tim Scott-Rick Wade U.S. Senate race would be historic
Published: August 29, 2013
TIM DOMINICK/TDOMINICK@THESTATE.

By Warren Bolton — Associate Editor
http://www.thestate.com/2013/08/29/2947208/bolton-a-tim-scott-rick-wade-us.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._William_Fulbright

Even with his 57 states, Wash. Post says O is the loner president -'Beyond the economy, the wars and the polls, President Obama has a problem: People'

While we were busy dodging downpours of rain on Friday in South Florida, trying NOT to get drenched walking from a parking lot to wherever we needed to be, or NOT get blindsided on the local, often-poorly lit roads by one of the LARGE NUMBER of South Florida drivers who DON'T believe in using their headlights when it rains -a higher percentage in HB, it goes without saying- the Washington Post was running White House correspondent Scott Wilson's latest piece, and it's devastating.

It's one of the most insightful and persuasive articles of the year, detailing how President Obama's own personality comes into conflict with what he needs to do on a practical level in order to be successful with his own supporters on Capitol Hill, let alone, House Speaker John Boehner and the Hill Republicans and the nation at large.

The Washington Post

Obama, the loner president

By Scott Wilson

October 7, 2011

Beyond the economy, the wars and the polls, President Obama has a problem: people.

This president endures with little joy the small talk and back-slapping of retail politics, rarely spends more than a few minutes on a rope line, refuses to coddle even his biggest donors. His relationship with Democrats on Capitol Hill is frosty, to be generous. Personal lobbying on behalf of legislation? He prefers to leave that to Vice President Biden, an old-school political charmer.

Obama’s circle of close advisers is as small as the cluster of personal friends that predates his presidency. There is no entourage, no Friends of Barack to explain or defend a politician who has confounded many supporters with his cool personality and penchant for compromise.

Read the rest of the article at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/obama-the-loner-president/2011/10/03/gIQAHFcSTL_story.html

WaPo reader comments at:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/obama-the-loner-president/2011/10/03/gIQAHFcSTL_allComments.html?ctab=all_&#comments

2,830 comments as of Sunday the 9th at 2:10 p.m.

But who's counting?

re 1/11/10 Ben Smith in POLITICO: Game over: The Clintons stand alone; Haiti

I've held off on posting this for a few days since
there was so much discussion of the contents
and short-term implications of Game Change
by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin
over this past weekend on the network chat
shows, I didn't want to add this to the pile
when you couldn't properly appreciate it.

I personally know that at least a handful of you
have actually started reading it, but Ben Smith's
overview below is the best I've seen so far
because he sees past the individual anecdotes
towards the larger un-mentioned story,
the fall of the House of Clinton.
After you've read it, I think you'll agree.

Last year I was running Ben's POLITICO
widget on my blog, along with their 44 widget
for Obama stories, so people could easily
access his entertaining and informative pieces,
but I seemed to run into constant technical
problems with those widgets, so I reluctantly
pulled them down.

Thursday 2:00 p.m.
By the way, it's just my opinion, but 46 hours
after the earthquake in Haiti, I find it completely
unbelievable that the the U.S. military and our
erstwhile Allies in the region seem NOT to have
established a working unit to coordinate logistics
and air traffic control at the Port-au-Prince
airport, the way we quickly did at the Baghdad
airport
after our invasion, which I supported.

I know the latter had many months of planning
overall, but on the other hand, I think it's fair
to remind you that this time, we know that
nobody will be shooting at us, right?

Sufficient number of trucks to move planes
stuck on the airport out of the way and placed
on the perimeter so they don't pose a safety
hazard, gas re-supply trucks to handle refueling,
mobile air traffic control units, modules,
helicopter techs, etc.

While I haven't seen these stories myself,
I have already heard from friends who know
about these things that UPS and FedEx
would like to use some of their planes to bring
supplies, starting initially from their hubs of
Memphis and Louisville down there, and
then return quickly, perhaps to Miami
and Hollywood-Ft. Lauderdale to keep
shuttling back-and-forth, and maybe
even deploy some of their logistics
professionals down there.

Why?

So we DON'T see the absurd sight of:
a.) people passing supplies hand-to-hand
instead of using conveyor belts or fork lifts, or
b.) well-meaning charity groups dropping boxes
of supplies into huge crowds of desperate people,
with the entirely predictable chaos.

But UNTIL the airport is completely cleared
and secured, they can't, and therefore nothing
of significance is going to happen.

At 2:10 p.m., I've yet to see a shot of the airport
under control.

Popular South Florida blogger and activist
Chaz Stevens from Deerfield Beach, a veritable
one-man tidal wave of information and enthusiasm
and a sharp-eyed watchdog for public transparency
and accountability from state and local government
at his blog, Acts of Sedition,
http://www.actsofsedition.com/ wrote
in earlier that I may be wrong.

Actually, you are wrong I believe. Two Coast
Guard Cutters (one by the name of Forward)
are off the coast of Haiti providing air traffic control.

Chaz is no doubt right, but I was referring to the
airport itself, per se, though perhaps I was not so
clear when I sent this out as an email a few minutes
ago.

My sense of things is that some of the reporters
there are going out of their way not to criticize
the chaotic recovery efforts thus far, but once
that dam has been breached, it won't stop.

Then it's Obama's tar-baby, whether that's
fair or not.
With the MLK holiday on Monday and even
more Americans home watching the awful scenes
unfold before them on TV, right before his
State of the Union speech, our response
to this tragedy, such as it is, will be firmly
placed around his neck.
Just saying...

-----

POLITICO
Game over: The Clintons stand alone
By: Ben Smith
January 11, 2010 06:05 PM EST

A new book is out with a highly critical but unsourced portrait of Hillary Clinton. This familiar occurrence — it’s happened too many times to count over the years — has usually been greeted with an equally familiar response: A fast and furious counterattack from the Clinton inner circle.

What’s notable about the highly publicized release of “Game Change,” however, is the virtual silence from the Clinton camp. The lack of public outrage seems to mark the sputtering end of what was once known as the Clinton political machine and underlines a fact that onetime Clinton loyalists acknowledge: The book’s primary sources about the former candidate and current secretary of state are her own former staffers and intimates.

Read the rest of the story at:
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0110/31345.html#ixzz0cQXHlJSP

---------

See also:
The Atlantic Online
Marc Ambinder's excellent blog, which I get everyday
"The Juiciest Revelations In "Game Change"
January 8 2010
http://politics.theatlantic.com/2010/01/the_juiciest_revelations_in_game_change.php


Los Angeles Times
BOOK REVIEW 'Game Change' by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin
The political journalists provide juicy insider tidbits about the 2008 presidential candidates, their spouses and other players, but it's hard to see the enlightenment behind the entertainment
By Tim Rutten
January 13, 2010
http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-et-rutten13-2010jan13,0,4331192.story


An excerpt of the book that ran in
New York magazine last Saturday

Saint Elizabeth and the Ego Monster
A candidate whose aides were prepared to block him from becoming president. A wife whose virtuous image was a mirage. A mistress with a video camera. In an excerpt from the new book Game Change—their sweeping account of the 2008 campaign—the authors reveal that, inside the Edwards triangle, nothing was too crazy to be true.

Read the excerpt at:
http://nymag.com/news/politics/63045/

DCWATCH kindly reminds us how ineffectual Eric Holder was as U.S. Attorney for D.C.

Sunday, December 14, 2008 
5:25 PM

As a longtime reader of dcwatch.com -and more recently, an actual subscriber via email- I just wanted to send up another flare to you re Eric Holder, like some of my previous head's up,
where dcwatch was the first to really ring the bell on the Cult of Michelle Rhee and her failure to produce "any measurable improvement in student performance" in D.C., the lack of national media attention shown to Mayor Adrian Fenty's autocratic ways, etc., which you'd think even the cablenets would've noticed by now, once the election was over.

But no, and certainly not now that we all have Rod Blagojevich to keep the cablenets yakking.
Anger and Indignation http://www.dcwatch.com/themail/2008/08-02-03.htm
A City of Enemies http://www.dcwatch.com/themail/2008/08-08-20.htm
Practice Makes Imperfect http://www.dcwatch.com/themail/2008/08-12-03.htm

They have been all over the Michelle Rhee story in a way that nobody else in the country has been, even while columnists all over the country, who are unaware of the reality, jump on her media bandwagon and join the flack army with nary a thought.

I remember when I first read the Washington City Paper story below about Eric Holder eleven years ago. It immediately reminded me of another one of the corruption stories I heard about shortly after I moved to Capitol Hill, ironically, across the street from Sen. and Mrs. Moynihan, the man who first publicly defined deviancy down.
Right near the intersection of East Capitol Street and S.E. 7th Street where an early DC friend of mine who worked at the State Dept. was beaten robbed at gunpoint my first summer on 'the Hill.'

It was one of those news stories that made me stop and think, "Only in DC!," in the same incredulous way I'd always though about certain things being "Only in South Florida!" from having grown up done here and being deeply involved in Dade and state politics at an early age in the '70's -and having a father who worked as a Dade County policeman for over 25 years.
Usually, the "Only in South Florida!" story had the requisite foreign intrigue angle or something about crates marked bananas actually being weapons being smuggled out towards some distant war zone, or allegations about someone really being either a foreign spy or CIA or...

The DC Public Schools had decided to create a summer program for employees who were cafeteria workers at schools eight months out of the year.
The idea was to supplement their pay by during the summer to ensure they stayed afloat financially and ensure they'd be available once school started up in August.
Now as I recall it, once you signed up, you were assured of getting a paycheck, regardless of whether you actually were called in to do some work over the course of the summer.

Well, naturally, things being what they were in DC at the time, with little advance thought given to the overall process or what sort of audit control system they'd have, other than names being written down on a list -somewhere- things went about as bad as possible.
If there were X amount of legitimate workers entitled to be in the system, DCPS was actually paying something along the lines of 2.3X in checks, with hundreds of people who weren't legit actually receiving govt. checks for months on end.
Result: Most people getting DCPS' summer checks didn't actually work for the school system.

I don't recall now if there were any federal funds attached to the summer worker program, though my guess is yes, since the DC school system then wasn't exactly a great incubator of bright ideas or overflowing with cash.

It's also important to grasp a point the article hints at: DC juries then were a notoriously bad way to try to prosecute crime and corruption, because to many, the whole city was tainted, and not a place that respected the rule of law but rather the law of opportunity, with no judgment given or taken for how people got their hands on money.

Over 15 years of living in the area, I had my fair share of friends who served on DC juries who later told me that it was one of the worst experiences they ever went thru, largely because of the number of people on the jury with them who were not the least bit interested in upholding their responsibility.
Or, even in paying attention.
It literally scared them to death to think about all the people whose fates had been left up to such dis-interested DC residents, a subject they'd never hertofore considered, their personality and politics being what it was.
And if you don't think that experiences like this give people pause, and cause them to re-think their decision to eschew the suburbs for the city, for some abstract idea of living in a diverse urban village, you're very much mistaken.
Actually, in two specific cases I can think of, it proved to be the last straw, and led to them moving the family out towards me in Northern Virginia.

This laissez-faire attitude towards crime and corruption was brough home to me personally by a very brilliant and dedicated friend who was a prosecutor under Holder, but someone who, initially, took DC's culture of crime, cronyism and corruption a little too personally.
I felt like Jack McCoy trying to shake her out of her funk.

After I met her and we'd become trusted friends, I started attending her trials whenever I could manage, which -shocker!- often involved gangs, guns and lots of mayhem.
She later told me she thought it was odd that local DC media, who always seemed to be camped outside of the courthouse, and who came to recognize who all the other courthouse "regulars" were, never thought to wonder aloud on the air or in print, why so many young teens were always congregating inside the courthouse who didn't have a legitimate reason to be there.

She was right of course, as the sense of obliviousness by so-called security in the courthouse was palpable to anyone paying even the slightest amount of attention.

Yeah, witness intimidation was yet another thing that if not exactly winked at, got MUCH less
attention -and media attention- than it rightfully deserved then.
It finally got to the point that once she'd arrived at the Metro train station closest to our neighborhood, she'd walk thru a very large office building lobby, so she could be sure that nobody was following her home from the courthouse.

Having first heard and then seen what I had, what was I going to do, tell her that she was wrong to be concerned, when there was ample evidence she was right?

Personally, I think unless he's prepared to put the whole thing around President Clinton's neck, the more that Eric Holder tries to describe his own role in the Marc Rich pardon, the more difficult his nomination will be to swallow whole by the Senate.
Plus, there's the prospect of him having to discuss Elián González...
_______________________________________________
excerpt from the latest dcwatch.com posting

Partying in the mail, December 10, 2008
Dear Partiers:

For some reason, which is unrelated to local DC affairs and which we therefore won't mention (Blagojevich), we've been thinking about government corruption a lot today.
The problem with political corruption in the District of Columbia, as opposed to some other unnamed states (Illinois), is that political corruption is almost never prosecuted here, and there aren't any negative consequences for engaging in it. (The DC workers who stole from the Office of Tax and Revenue weren't engaged in government corruption; they were practicing just plain old-fashioned thievery.)
One of the best examples of official overlooking of official corruption occurred in the last term of Mayor Marion Barry. The US Attorney for the District of Columbia for three-and-a-half years of that term never prosecuted a single instance of official corruption, and his inattentiveness didn't seem to hurt his career (see Stephanie Mencimer, "Placeholder?", http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/display.php?id=12207). _________________________________________________
Washington City Paper
PlaceHolder?
With 12 years' experience prosecuting public corruption at the Justice Department, U.S. Attorney Eric Holder was a perfect choice to clean up a corrupt city. But after three and a half years, he may be moving on, and D.C. is still one of the most crooked cities in the nation.
By Stephanie Mencimer
Mar. 7 - 13, 1997 (Vol. 17, #10)

When President Bill Clinton tapped Eric Holder to be U.S. Attorney for D.C. in 1993, he immediately became the District's black sheriff in the white hat. The first African-American ever to hold the job, Holder's appointment broke a stretch of 12 years of white Republicans overseeing the predominantly black city. Not only was Holder representative of the city's majority population, but the former D.C. Superior Court judge had gone straight from Columbia Law School to the Justice Department's public integrity section, where he had spent 12 years successfully prosecuting corrupt public officials. Many people in the District were thrilled; Holder arrived with both exceptional qualifications and the moral authority to crack down on public corruption without the taint of racism that derailed his predecessors.

Up to that time, the city's relationship with the U.S. Attorney's office had been an awkward one. During the 1980s, the city watched as former U.S. Attorneys Jay Stephens and Joseph diGenova went after Mayor Marion Barry and his cronies only to be thwarted by juries that saw their prosecutions as politically and racially motivated crusades aimed at bringing down a popularly elected black mayor. Not only did Barry prevail in court, he came back and then some, reclaiming his old job in 1995. In spite of his history of personal malfeasance, a majority of city residents were willing to give Barry the benefit of the doubt. But many drew confidence from the fact that when Barry moved into 1 Judiciary Square, Holder would be a block away, looking over his shoulder. Holder seemed like a gold-plated insurance policy promising that Barry wouldn't get one over on the city. After all, Holder knew as much about prosecuting corruption as Barry seemed to know about perpetrating it.

After three and a half years on the job, Holder is still revered in the city's halls of power and widely respected by his peers in the legal field. He is the presumptive nominee to replace outgoing U.S. Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick, a major plum position. He is infinitely qualified by all accounts, and his appointment would be a historic one, since the position has never been held by an African-American. But for all the love Holder has engendered in the community as U.S. Attorney, he has had precious little impact on the city's endemic municipal corruption. Barry has returned to his old tricks, nudging contracts and city jobs to old cronies and new girlfriends. Holder is apparently leaving, and he hasn't thrown a punch.
It isn't for lack of targets.

To read the rest of this great article, go to
http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/display.php?id=12207

Stephanie Mencimer is now at Mother Jones.
For her more recent work, go to
http://www.motherjones.com/people/Stephanie-Mencimer.html