"After many complaints, a Whole Foods store in New York City took down a sign..."

"... featuring an artist's depiction of President Obama selling whole organic chicken."

The drawing did not depict Obama actually eating chicken or holding any in his hand, but it did depict an open-mouthed Obama with a comic strip-style word-bubble telling customers the price per pound of the product.

Why did Jesse Jackson Jr. and his wife risk everything to buy such stupid stuff?

Spending $750,000 in campaign money on... what?! In with the Rolex watch and the furs, there's all this memorabilia: Michael Jackson memorabilia, Bruce Lee memorabilia, Martin Luther King Jr. memorabilia, Malcolm X memorabilia, Jimi Hendrix memorabilia, a football signed by American presidents. So embarrassing.

WaPo columnist  Michelle Singletary says:

Ironically, Jackson and his father in 1999 co-authored a book on personal finance, “It’s About the Money!: How You Can Get Out of Debt, Build Wealth, and Achieve Your Financial Dreams.” The Jacksons wrote: “Many of our churches breed material needs, as do many of our public schools, with peer pressure to buy expensive clothing.”

I was critical of the portions of the book in which the Jacksons found it necessary to chide blacks for what they characterize as shameless spending....

At least the Jacksons are showing remorse....

Before you pass judgment on the Jacksons, think about the mess you might have made of your finances or the financial follies of people you know. It might not be a crime to get what you want (not what you need), but acting as if you are rich without being able to afford it can ruin your life.

Hmm. Using debt to buy stuff is hugely different from diverting money that isn't yours to spend that way. But I guess we can look at Jackson's list of items and use it as an occasion to reflect on the idiotic crap we've felt tempted to buy. Get some distance. What if the newspapers published a list of the 100 stupidest things you've thrown your money away on over the course of a lifetime?

Look around. If you could snap your fingers and cause any item in your house to transform into the cash you spent on it (or even only half of what you spent), what percentage of your possessions would be left? The items suddenly turn into piles of dollar bills. Better gather them up quickly. How much have you got there? Now, bills disappear to eradicate your debts. What do you have left now in your hands and in your house? How do you feel?

And by the way, Singletary said she chided the Jesse Jacksons, Sr. and Jr., for chiding black people for spending too much money on stuff, but then she turned around and chided her readers for spending too much money on stuff. Isn't that a contradiction? Or is it a problem to speak specifically to black people? The Jacksons shouldn't write a book talking specifically to black people? What are the rules here?

"This photo cements stereotypes, perpetuates an imbalance in the power dynamic, is reminiscent of centuries of colonialism (and indentured servitude)..."

"... and serves as a good example of both creating a centrality of whiteness and using 'exotic' people as fashion props."

The SI swimsuit issue is troubling people again.

The Multicultural Student Center at the University of Wisconsin shifts from "a focus on cultural diversity to one of social justice."

The University's website reports what it calls a "transformation."

“We’re building on the legacy of this campus,” says [MSC director Donte] Hilliard. “A social justice approach is our interpretation of the Wisconsin Idea. If the borders of the campus are the borders of the state, or the world, the educational access that we get by being here in Wisconsin includes a responsibility to help transform our surroundings into more just, equitable places.”...

"It’s comforting to think, 'If we just fix the race or gender issue, the rest will be fine…' No. Oppressions are linked. We can’t get racial justice but keep destroying the environment. In America, who lives in neighborhoods with the worst environmental problems? Poor people – who are, overwhelmingly, people of color."

(If you don't know what "Wisconsin Idea" refers to — here, it has its own Wikipedia article. It's a tradition going back more than 100 years.)

After beginning its new design era with an Adorable Obama cover...

... which looked like this, The New Republic comes out with its next issue, addressing the subject of "The Republicans" ("The Party of White People"), and it looks like this:



That came in the mail today. Yes, I've subscribed. The toy robot is there to cover up my address label. And yes, I understand the reference to "The Beatles" (i.e., The White Album).

The editors of the Wall Street Journal: "Ben Carson for President."

Another egregious example of GOP types who gush with embarrassing enthusiasm in the presence of a black person who says some conservative things.

I have 2 problems with Ben Carson:

1. He had the opportunity to speak at a prayer breakfast with President Obama alongside him on the dais, and he used it to deliver a political lecture. I don't think that's right. Whatever your opinion of Obama's politics or the process by which he became President — which included plenty of embarrassing enthusiasm in the presence of a black person— he is the President, and — especially at a formal occasion like this — he deserves the respect embodied in the office of the President.

2. Ben Carson read a speech. It was a good speech — though, as noted above, it was not appropriate for the occasion — but it was a written speech. Carson is a pediatric neurosurgeon, not an economist or a  health care policy wonk or a speechwriter. We don't know what contribution he made to the writing of the speech. I don't know how that speech got into his hands, but once he had that position on the dais at the prayer breakfast, those hands were very valuable hands in which to put a speech. Who is the speechwriter? If it was Carson himself, alone, I'd be extremely impressed. And extremely surprised.

"This Is The Most Depressing Version Of Google Maps I’ve Ever Seen."

What is depressing? That when people get more money they move to the suburbs? That people flock to cities when they are young and at the lower end of the income scale? That childless people often have these 2 characteristics: they aren't making enough money yet and they are comfortable with the housing options in the city? Our easily depressed map viewer assumes he's looking at an image of nothing but racial segregation:

What do you get when you combine Google maps and a bunch of info about household income? Only one of the most fascinating things ever to happen because of the census. Colder colors mean wealthier neighborhoods; warmer colors mean poorer ones. Whoever thought segregation could be this hypnotic, am I right? 

Since you are so fascinated, how about thinking your way out of that hypnosis, which perhaps is something you got put under in college. Wake up. Think of other dimensions. And look up the word "median."

Black man in a KKK outfit on a street corner in Philadelphia...

... holds a sign saying that black-on-black murder today exceeds — every 6 months — the total number of murders the KKK inflicted on black people over a period of 86 years. 

The man, Sixx King, is a filmmaker. A lot of people are angry at him.

"I am Essie Mae Washington-Williams, and at last I am completely free."

Said the mixed-raced daughter of one-time segregationist Strom Thurmond in 2003. She kept the secret — because "He trusted me, and I respected him" — at the age of 100. She inherited some of his longevity and lived to the age of 87.

She was born in 1925 after Thurmond, then 22, had an affair with a 16-year-old black maid who worked in his family’s Edgefield, S.C., home. She spent years as a schoolteacher in Los Angeles, keeping in touch with her famous father.

While Thurmond never publicly acknowledged his daughter, his family acknowledged her claim after she came forward. She later said Thurmond’s widow, Nancy, was “a very wonderful person” and called Strom Thurmond Jr. “very caring, and interested in what’s going on with me.”

"Michelle Obama's posterior again the subject of a public rant."

That's an actual headline at The Washington Post. The article informs us of an incident involving something that was said by a previously unfamous high school football coach. The erstwhile nonentity, Bob Grisham, said:

"Fat butt Michelle Obama.... Look at her. She looks like she weighs 185 or 190. She’s overweight."

For his sins, Grisham was suspended from his job, but that's clearly not enough punishment. He must be further humiliated. As if this is enforcing good taste in talking about the First Lady! The Washington Post published an article about her ass! Halfway through it gets to the provocative question:

But what is it with Michelle Obama’s critics and the fixation with her derriere?

Does using words like "posterior" and "derriere" make this okay? The Washington Post asked the question — I'll put it in plain English: Why are so many people talking about Michelle Obama's ass?

Now, the obvious answer would seem to be that she's made childhood obesity her issue, so that's somehow asking for comment on the subject of whether she herself is at all fat. (I disagree with that sort of critique, by the way. She's made the subject obesity and how it affects health, not mere fatness and how it affects beauty. For her issue, it's fine that she doesn't come across as thin. She looks robust and not health-impaired. If she looked thin, people would say she's pushing vanity-based dieting and insufficiently concerned with the scourge of anorexia.)

The WaPo article ignores that obvious answer but does not eschew obviousness. It goes racial.

The first lady’s critics “are reacting to the culture in which they’ve grown up or they are using it as a code to racialize Michelle Obama and remind people that she’s black,” says Andra Gillespie, an associate professor of political science at Emory University.

Steven Tyler appears in drag on "American Idol" and quotes Bob Dylan's "Talkin' World War III Blues."

He came out as if he were the last contestant and maybe it took half a second to recognize the big rock star (who was on the judge's panel last season). The news reports of the little stunt emphasize the drag and the (miniscule) surprise, but even where the lyric is quoted, the attribution to Bob Dylan is missing. Here's the NY Daily News:

"What the, what?" Randy Jackson said when he got a first glimpse of his former co-star on stage.

"My name is Pepper. I'm going to sing a song called 'Tell Your Ma, Tell Your Pa, Our Love Going to Grow, Wah Wah,'" he joked to judging panel. "But before I do I'm going to judge you all (bleeps) first."

I'm not finding any news reports that place the lyric — which I have engraved on my brain — in the old Bob Dylan song. "Talkin' World War III Blues" has 12 verses of Bob talking his way through a dream he had about walking through post-nuclear NYC, with all the people gone from the "lonesome town." Here's the 9th verse:

Well, I remember seein’ some ad
So I turned on my Conelrad
But I didn’t pay my Con Ed bill
So the radio didn’t work so well
Turned on my record player—
It was Rock-a-day Johnny singin’, “Tell Your Ma, Tell Your Pa
Our Love’s A-gonna Grow Ooh-wah, Ooh-wah”

Tyler said "Ooh-wah, Ooh-wah," by the way, just like Dylan, not "Wah Wah," as the Daily News would have it.

Now that you get the reference, is there anything to be made of it? Maybe Dylan was making an in joke at the time and Tyler was referring to that joke. Maybe Tyler wanted to alert us to the threat of nuclear war. Maybe Tyler wanted to wink at Dylan fans. But the best clue I found — as I did a Google search to see if anyone had recognized the Dylan quote — was an article from back in November about  friction between Tyler and current-season judge Nicki Manaj. Tyler had said in an interview:

“If it was Bob Dylan, Nicki Minaj would have had him sent to the cornfield! Whereas, if it was Bob Dylan with us, we would have brought the best of him out, as we did with Phillip Phillips....”

Manaj thereafter tweeted:

“Steven Tyler said I would have sent Bob Dylan to a cornfield??? Steven, you haven’t seen me judge one single solitary contestant yet!”

And:

“I understand you really wanted to keep your job but take that up with the producers. I haven’t done anything to you. That’s a racist comment.” 

Racist because it's against her... or because sending someone "to the cornfield" is a reference to slavery?

“You assume that I wouldn’t have liked Bob Dylan??? why? black? rapper? what? go f— yourself and worry about yourself babe.”

To quote Bob Dylan — especially while dressed in a garish blonde wig and big inflated breasts — is to tweak Nicki. Talking blues is related to rap, somewhere in the ancestry. The quoted line, which is talked, is about singing, singing like a rockabilly guy — "Rock-a-day Johnny" — and Tyler was acting as though he were going to sing the song Bob Dylan heard. Dylan is all alone in his dream, looking for company, and in his desperation, he turns on the radio, and then puts on a record, and it's this pop culture idiot, singing nonsense — ooh-wah, ooh-wah —but it's very poignant, because, after the war, Bob is longing for any kind of a voice. In the 10th verse, he calls the telephone number where a recorded voice says the time, and he listens to that voice, repeating the same time — 3 o'clock, the time the war started — for over an hour.

So Steven Tyler had a lot to say, if anybody wants to notice. He's saying we don't get artists like Bob Dylan anymore. The music industry — like NYC after the bomb — is devoid of real people. We're desperate for a human voice. And Nicki Manaj is the embodiment — for all her voluptuous physicality — of emptiness. He was spoofing her, critiquing everything, crying out for real human art, which — for him — Bob Dylan embodies.

But did anyone hear him? He pranced out as a clown. He was dressed as a woman. It resonated in the hollowness that has always been television. In drag, with that wide smile, he even looked like Milton Berle.



IN THE COMMENTS: In this post where I chide others for missing the Dylan reference, Mumpsimus dings me for missing a reference:

"To the cornfield" refers to the SF/Horror story "It's A Good Life" by Jerome Bixby. Or, more likely in this context, to the Twilight Zone episode based on that story.

Dust Bunny Queen links to this TZ clip.

"Vote for Cuomo, not the homo."

A campaign slogan from 1978. Noted in the new documentary "Koch," which opens today, the day Ed Koch died.

[Filmmaker Neil] Barsky... doesn’t varnish Koch’s shift rightward in 1978 against mayoral opponents like Mario Cuomo. But he does make you sympathize with Koch’s 1978 beard-and-pony show, in which he held hands with Bess Myerson, the first Jewish Miss America, and broadly hinted at a marriage announcement after the election. Flyers reading “Vote for Cuomo, not the homo” had been plastered all over the place...

Barsky poses the right questions to Koch but doesn’t bother asking them a second, third, or fourth time. He knows there are places the man won’t — or can’t — go. Bess Myerson was Koch’s good friend, and there was never anything more! Whether he’s gay or not is no one’s damn business! It would have been easier to cave in to pressure from the African-American community — maybe he should have — but he stuck to his principles! Blah blah blah....

Edward Koch has died.

He was 88.

With his trademark — 'How’m I doin?' — Mr. Koch stood at subway entrances on countless mornings wringing the hands and votes of constituents, who elected him 21 times in 26 years, with only three defeats....

I lived in Koch's legislative district in the early 1970s — before he became mayor — and I remember going to work, needing to get down into the subway, and he'd be there at the top of the stairs wanting to shake hands. Want to ride the subway? You'll have to get past Ed Koch. It seemed so small-time, such a corny, unlikely way to get somewhere in politics.

The 3 defeats were: "a forgettable 1962 State Assembly race; a memorable 1982 primary in a race for governor won by Mario M. Cuomo; and a last Koch hurrah, a Democratic primary in 1989 won by David N. Dinkins, who would be his one-term successor."

Black leaders were... unhappy with Mr. Koch’s decision to purge antipoverty programs and comments he made that they considered insensitive. He said, for example, that busing and racial quotas had done more to divide the races than to achieve integration, and that Jews would be “crazy” to vote for the Rev. Jesse Jackson in his 1988 presidential campaign after Mr. Jackson’s 1984 reference to New York as “Hymietown” and his call for a Palestinian homeland in Israel....

[I]n August 1989, a black youth, Yusuf K. Hawkins, 16, who went to Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, to see a used car, was attacked by a group of white youths and shot dead.

Mr. Dinkins, pledging to bring the city together again in a “gorgeous mosaic,” narrowly defeated Mr. Koch in the primary and went on to beat Mr. Giuliani, who ran on the Republican and Liberal lines, by a slender margin in the general election.

“I was defeated because of longevity, not because Yusuf Hawkins was murdered six weeks before the election, although that was a factor,” Mr. Koch wrote.... “People get tired of you. So they decided to throw me out. And so help me God, as the numbers were coming in, I said to myself, ‘I’m free at last.’ ”

"Today, on the national day set aside to honor Dr. King, an African American president will ceremonially begin his second term."

"Like presidents before him, he has had his ups and downs, mistakes and triumphs. There is, to be sure, an element of bigotry among some of his enemies, but in general it has had a kind of cowardly, subterranean quality to it. President Obama was assailed mostly for what his critics thought were wrong policies or judgments. In the end, as always, the final verdict was given at the polls; the president was reelected, and his inauguration will be celebrated today — not quite with the rapturous enthusiasm of four years ago but rather with something resembling blessed normality."

"Who of a certain age could forget when a bookish black woman named Anita Hill addressed a Senate committee of 14 white men..."

"... and candidly spoke of graphic sexual harassment by then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas? The explosive, race-tinged hearings in 1991 had all of America, especially black America, captivated. Sexual politics became part of the lexicon, and Hill became a divisive figure. We know what became of Thomas — now we get a rare glimpse into Hill's private life with friends and family, who stood by her through it all."

From "14 Films That Matter at Sundance" at The Root.

After 7 years of not speaking during oral argument, Clarence Thomas spoke...

... and whatever he said was drowned out by the laughter of those in the room. 

Apparently, it was some kind of joke about what a Yale law degree connotes. We know how he feels about his law degree. Here's what I wrote back in 2007 when he gave an interview to "60 Minutes":

"I was never a liberal. I was radical," he says, talking about how difficult it was for him to go to work for a Republican after he graduated from Yale Law School. His Yale Law degree was worth almost nothing, he says. Though he graduated in the middle of his class, he couldn't get a job, and he was enraged to see that the degree meant one thing for whites and another for blacks. Everyone assumed he got into Yale because he was black, and not because he had grown up in severe hardship, and yet had always done well in every environment -- from all black to all white.

ADDED: According to the NYT, Thomas leaned over to the microphone and uttered a remark that the stenographer captured as "Well – he did not —." Laughter is noted. The topic at the time was the definition of constitutionally adequate counsel, and Justice Scalia had just noted that one lawyer had gone to Yale Law School and another to Harvard. Supposedly, according to some people who were in the courtroom, Thomas said something that meant that a law degree from Yale could be proof of incompetence.

[Thomas has] complained about the difficulty of getting a word in edgewise on an exceptionally voluble bench. The garbled transcript offers some support for that final rationale.

Indeed. On the other hand, the intense interest we're all showing now might encourage him. Say anything at all and it will be big news.

"Powell: GOP has 'a dark vein of intolerance.'"

Dark?

So dark is... bad?

It's so hard to do racial politics. But keep trying, folks. It's worth building your skills here, because it's so helpful, so constructive.

"Only RGIII can make the Redskins change their name. Here’s why he won’t."

Says WaPo sportswriter Mike Wise:

Pro players who take on controversial social debates are gone, replaced by athletes whose goal is to not offend... There is no Muhammad Ali, who lost his heavyweight boxing title as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War. There is no Jim Brown, arguably the greatest running back in NFL history, who found more meaning in bringing rival L.A. gang members together than in playing on the gridiron, where, he realized, he was just “a highly paid, over-glamorized gladiator.”

There is no Arthur Ashe, the late tennis champion and civil rights activist, who in 1985 was arrested outside the South African Embassy in Washington during an anti-apartheid rally. There’s not even a Curt Flood, the St. Louis Cardinal who didn’t accept a trade to another team in 1969, appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court in a landmark case that paved the way for free agency.

Sports stars (and other pop culture stars) have clout, but what do they know about the political issues they could influence? Wouldn't the best, most ethical stance be to acknowledge their lack of qualification outside of their field of expertise?

“Have you thought about what it’s like to play for a team that’s named the Redskins?” I asked. “Because a lot of American Indians and others feel that’s a derogatory term.”

“I’m not qualified to speak on that,” Griffin said. “I didn’t even mean to stir up the other thing, so I’m not going to touch that one.”

Isn't that exactly right? Shouldn't more celebrities do that?

(By the way, "the other thing" refers to that "down with the cause... cornball brother" business.)

"I haven't been a black conservative since 1995..."

Glenn Loury talks about people he's known for 40 years who won't say hello, who won't look him in the eye because he USED TO BE a black conservative. USED TO BE! John McWhorter talks about those who think "it would be wrong to even print my name. They think of me as Satan. And that's just how it's been."



Much later in the diavlog, Loury and McWhorter weigh in on the affirmative action case that's pending in the Supreme Court. "Would you think it was a good thing if the Supreme Court outlawed racial preferences as we knew them?" McWhorter takes the "not nuanced" position that racial preferences should be proclaimed "obsolete." (Loury disagrees.)

The GOP needs "to be much more granular in our approach to partners in the community like African-Americans, Hispanics and Asians."

Says Reince Priebus, a man with a funny name, using a funny word.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines "granular" to mean:

Consisting of grains or granules; existing in the condition of grains or granules....

Mountains, which consist of lime stone or marble of a granular or scaly texture....

Having a granulated surface or structure....

On the [foot] pads or cushions of the cat, the cuticle is rough and granular.

Of the nature of a granule or granules....

Their [geckos'] skin is studded above with very small granular scales....

A "granule" is "A small grain; a small compact particle; a pellet."

1652   W. Charleton Darknes Atheism 45   Those Granules of sand, which suffice to make up the vast bulk of the World.