Africa is a Country
June 28, 2011 By 2 Comments
Must be our blog title.
Someone named STONE decides to vent on The Hill’s Congress Blog about US foreign aid in a piece about policing the already shrinking foreign aid budget that’s currently only 1.5% of all federal spending:
It does not matter how little the amount sent to foreign countries, it is the principal of the thing…why send aid to china, a country that continues to grow our debt and buy it up and yet we send them aid? why send aid to africa, we owe that country nothing, just as we owe nothing to every other country..we Americans fought our way out of our own tyranny and yet we did it…they should do the same without our help…we even had less and do less than those countries do now and yet we help them…why?
Geronimo
May 4, 2011 By 2 Comments
I wondered why initially few, if any mainstream news outlets, pretended to not care why the code word for terrorist leader, Osama bin Laden, among his Navy Seals executioners was that of native American leader, Geronimo. A 19th century Apache leader, born Goyahkla, Geronimo led defensive wars against illegal encroachment on native land by separate white US and Mexican armies. He was later captured by the IS government and died in 1909 after 23 years in captivity.
As many news outlets reported Navy SEALs confirmed the death of Bin Laden with the line: “Geronimo E-KIA.” E-KIA is short for Enemy Killed In Action.
According to ABC’s The Note Blog (which finally caught onto the odd association between Osama bin Laden and Geronimo) and linked to a report at Indian Country Network–native Americans are angry about the association:
The American President’s Mother
April 23, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Reporter Janny Scott in The New York Times, and the author of “A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother,” writing about Stanley Ann Dunham:
The president’s mother has served as any of a number of useful oversimplifications. In the capsule version of Obama’s life story, she is the white mother from Kansas coupled alliteratively to the black father from Kenya. She is corn-fed, white-bread, whatever Kenya is not. In “Dreams From My Father,” the memoir that helped power Obama’s political ascent, she is the shy, small-town girl who falls head over heels for the brilliant, charismatic African who steals the show. In the next chapter, she is the naïve idealist, the innocent abroad. In Obama’s presidential campaign, she was the struggling single mother, the food-stamp recipient, the victim of a health care system gone awry, pleading with her insurance company for coverage as her life slipped away. And in the fevered imaginings of supermarket tabloids and the Internet, she is the atheist, the Marxist, the flower child, the mother who abandoned her son or duped the newspapers of Hawaii into printing a birth announcement for her Kenyan-born baby, on the off chance that he might want to be president someday.
Obama Plans to Attack Africa Next
April 4, 2011 By 5 Comments
Last week Talking Points Memo had an item about US Representative Tom Marino (Republican Pennsylvia, BA Lycoming College, Juris Doctor Dickinson School of Law), who sits on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Marino was being interviewed by his local newspaper, The Scranton Times-Tribune. This, seriously, is Marino on Obama’s Libya strategy, and failure to consult Congress:
“The bottom line is I wish the president would have told us, talked to Congress about what is the plan. Is there a plan? Is the mission to take Gadhafi out?” Mr. Marino asked…. “Where does it stop?” he said. “Do we go into Africa next? I don’t want to sound callous or cold, but this could go on indefinitely around the world.
H/T: Naunihal Singh.
‘The Media-Savvy Autocrat’
April 3, 2011 By 3 Comments
Adam Hochschild, in the New York Times Book Review, writing about Jason K Stearns’ new book, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa:
Stearns is somewhat easier on Rwanda here than he has been elsewhere, for example, in a United Nations report he contributed to. But he does quote the Rwandan strongman and current president Paul Kagame as calling his military intervention “self-sustaining,” and cites an estimate that the Rwandan Army and allied businesses reaped some $250 million in Congolese minerals profits at the height of the second war. Such figures are backed up in abundant detail in a series of United Nations reports, and ultimately led Sweden and the Netherlands to suspend aid to Rwanda.
Not so the United States. It has supported Kagame for years, contributing indirectly to Congo’s suffering. How this media-savvy autocrat has managed to convince so many American journalists, diplomats and political leaders that he is a great statesman is worth a book in itself.
Is Hochschild calling out Philip Gourevitch?
Lupe Fiasco Knows Black Presidents
March 11, 2011 By 7 Comments
Update: I’m eating crow on this. Earlier today I posted an excerpt from an interview with the Chicago rapper, Lupe Fiasco, who gained some midlevel fame with his “Kick Push” song. Setting up the post, I noted that Fiasco generally has decent politics (the link is to his close association with the late historian Howard Zinn). In the interview Fiasco compared Barack Obama to Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. Fiasco, responding to a question about why he had a line in a new song “Words I Never Said” that dissed Obama (“Gaza Strip was getting bombed but Obama didn’t say shit/That’s why I didn’t vote for him, next one either”), responded:
I love Obama, and I love the fact that it’s a black president of the United States of America, but he’s not the first Black president,” Fiasco told Gigwise.com. “Robert Mugabe is a black president too so let’s not get to talking about precedents being set. The fact that he’s Black and American, that’s different. But that it’s anything special beyond that, that just because of that everything’s going to be a utopia, then that’s not true …
At the time, I asked what’s Mugabe got to do with it? And likened Fiasco to R&B singer Akon.
Well, I did not read it thoroughly and responded too quickly.
