Looks like he's enjoying himself image courtesy Steve Myrick.V Times

So there I was, swimming in the waters of a private beach, off the village of Edgartown, on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, courtesy of knowing someone with a key to this private beach. Stroking along in the cool ocean on a flawless, hot day, not a cloud in the sky, I life my head out of the water to breathe, open my eyes, and there he is, the President of the United States, Barack Obama, swimming along beside me. “Hey, President Obama!” I yell when I turn my face up for air again, but before he can respond a wave rolls over me, my mouth fills with not air but water, I begin coughing and then wake up. Need I say that Barack Obama is nowhere in sight?

Which was, for the most part, exactly where he was during his vacation on Martha’s Vineyard. In spite of hope, expectations, and the prayers of many on this small island that has become the summer destination for many successful African Americans, the President and his family spent most of their vacation in private. Sure, you could feel the energy in the air, a combination of pride, suspense, tension, anticipation and celebration, but most people here didn’t see a glimpse of the President and First Family.  Thwarting great expectations, neither the President or the First Lady strolled the streets of Oak Bluff, or swam at the beach known as The Inkwell, or ate at Deon’s, the only black-owned restaurant in town, or visited Cousen Rose Gallery or C’est la Vie, two shops owned by people of African descent.  They came, they vacationed, they left. Press reports have it they enjoyed, too.  As did the rest of us, Obama sighting or not.

Speaking of sighting, the retreat begins tonight!!!! Please check my web site!!! Even if you’re not here, you can join us virtually!!!!

Jill Nelson 8/31/10 – The blog with the musical notes!

Even the cooked up controversy over the Islamic Cultural Center planned for lower Manhattan – which, contrary to right wing, Islamophobic ranting isn’t “The Mosque at Ground Zero” (but so what if it was?) – can’t drown out the sound of rushing flood waters and cries for help from either the millions displaced by last week’s catastrophic flooding in Pakistan or those in the city of New Orleans still traumatized, homeless and refugees in their own country five years after the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina with help from the Army Corps of Engineers and the United States government. Still, driven by FOX News this non-issue  - and insult to the Constitution, hundreds of Muslims who died on 9/11, and millions of Muslims worldwide – is giving reality a run for it’s money. But what’s new in a country where the exploits of marginal talents like Lindsay Lohan, Lady GaGa, and  a brilliant actor’s wannabe porn star daughter dominate the national consciousness?

Thanks to Spike Lee’s latest HBO documentary, If God is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise, for revisiting New Orleans and not allowing us to forget not only what happened there five years ago, but to who, how, and why. Part I aired last night on HBO, Part II airs tonight, and both parts will be available at HBO on demand. If you don’t have HBO, invite yourself to the home of someone who does. Lee’s documentary is not to be missed. To ignore it is to collude in the collective amnesia that we Americans seem to love so much.

Ditto following coverage of the floods in our fragile ally, Pakistan, where at least several thousand have died and 14 million - say the total population of Manhattan, Brooklyn, The Bronx, Queens and Staten Island doubled - left homeless. Unimaginable? As someone in “Da Creek Don’t Rise” eloquently puts it talking about the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, look around you today and then imagine that your home and everything in it, including some of the people, are simply gone tomorrow.

Where is the Marshall Plan like the one used to rebuild post-war Europe, for New Orleans? For Pakistan? It doesn’t take a degree in political science or a career in the foreign service to figure out that the disaster in Pakistan could and should be an incredibly important moment in U.S. relations with Pakistan. We should be on the ground providing emergency water, food, shelter, clothing, medical care and temporary housing to the displaced millions. Then we need to stay there and spearhead the rebuilding and upgrading of that country’s infrastructure: roads, electricity, housing, hospitals, institutions, whatever that nation needs to create a functioning, civil society. Al Quaeda, the Taliban, and militants wouldn’t have a chance against a Unitedd States government committed to real rebuilding, as opposed to propping up tired leaders and the corrupt institutions they are aligned with and the threat of military intervention.

Billions for the banks, the auto industry, wars (and warloads and corrupt U.S. allies/government officials) in Afghanistan and Iraq – yes, the one that “ended” but in which people continue to die – but just can’t find the money or the will to rebuild New Orleans for all it’s people or win the hearts and minds of the people of Pakistan? Absurd. A great opportunity is being squandered. This is the moment to implement a U.S. government financed resurrection and rebuilding of New Orleans and Pakistan, a Marshall Plan for the 21st century. Instead, we’re allowing ourselves to be emotionally manipulated and distracted from what’s really important by rabid Republicans, Tea Partyers, and assorted idiots who’ve created a false controversy about plans for an empty building blocks from where the World Trade Center once stood.

If we can’t move past this as a nation, I’ll take the distractions of an addle brained Lindsay Lohan, the low on talent but high on manipulation Lady GaGa, and the machinations of a budding porn star, over an oblivious U.S. government. At least those gals know an opportunity when they see it.

Abbey Lincoln August 6, 1930 – August 14, 2010! Thanks for your talent, courage and integrity.  YOU ARE MISSED!

Finally, be sure to check out my web site next week and participate virtually in Making the Third Chapter Fabulous: Prose! Yoga! Passion! the retreat I’m hosting in Martha’s Vineyard. And stay tuned for information about 2011’s Retreat!

Jill Nelson 8/24/10 – The blog with the musical notes!

The war is winding down! What war? Which war? I conveniently forgot there is a war! The one allegedly ending is the one in Iraq, not Afghanistan, but tell that to the 47 Iraqi police recruits and their families – and the over 100 people injured – by today’s suicide bomber. Talk about giving the United States the finger as it tries to escape the debacle of its own creation in Iraq, except suicide bombers deliver not only the finger but arms, legs, torsos, heads, and all manner of body parts. (And let’s not forget U.S. soldiers killed in Operation Oil Hustle, er, I mean Operation Enduring Freedom.)

Joining that disappearing war are the estimated 4.9 millions of gallons of oil released into the Gulf of Mexico by the British Petroleum oil rig disaster, not to mention collusion by agencies of the U.S. government, etc. Now we’re being told the impact of 93 days of gushing oil was exaggerated, and that the oil has just conveniently disappeared. Presto! Chango! Another comforting illusion, like that rabbit in a magician’s top hat. President Obama and daughter Sasha even took a dip last weekend during a mini-vacation in Florida and released a lovely photo. Michelle was nowhere to be seen – doesn’t swim? hair issues? thigh shy? prefers her water oil free? – nor were the navy seals under water in scuba gear catching globs of oil before they could coat the President and second daughter. Nice photo op, but the First Family’s heading to Martha’s Vineyard, 1500 miles north, for their real summer vacation. Hey, I’m not mad at ya, Barack. In fact, see you there!

Which brings me to Making the Third Chapter Fabulous: Prose! Yoga! Passion, the retreat I’m hosting on Martha’s Vineyard, August 31 – September 5. Registration’s closed for this year, but we’ll be back in 2011. For more information, stay tuned to my web site, and we’ll be live blogging and posting photos during the retreat, so please check us out. History, and Paula Gidding’s wonderful book, When and Where I Enter : The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America, reminds us what can be achieved when women come together, so anything’s possible. Speak out against the madness! Don’t equivocate!

Jill Nelson 8/17/10 – The blog with the musical notes!

I spent the last two weeks eating crow for the folly of hoping that the current head of the NAACP, Benjamin Jealous, wasn’t an idiot like his recent predecessors. That desperate delusion went out the window when he attacked USDA employee Shirley Sherrod without even bothering to watch the tape of a speech she gave to the organization he heads. Of course he was wrong. Looks like kicking a sister to the curb with little information is at least one thing Ben’s got in common with Barack Obama.

And what’s with the hyped up brouhaha about the New Black Panther Party, a bunch of posturing idiots who have no politics, no program, and virtually no organization? Besides macho BS and playing black power dress-up, their raison d’etre is apparently to divert attention from real issues, serve as the current bugaboo of the Tea Partyers and other right wingers, who cry the idiotic “reverse discrimination” and then demand that other colored people dance the Repudiation Shuffle, previously reserved for anything having to do with Louis Farrakhan. Let’s be clear about these jerks: They call themselves the NEW Black Panther Party because members of the REAL Black Panther Party, the party started by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, sued them for appropriating their name. As for theatrical menacing and strutting around outside a polling place in 2008 brandishing a billy club, please. They’re either idiots or agent provocateurs, probably both. No more time or attention for them or Ben Jealous!

It almost makes me nostalgic, but then who’s there to be nostalgic about? I’m not calling for the reinstatement of Jesse Jackson as Leader of the Negro People. It’s impossible to forgive him for his comment during the 2008 campaign that he wanted to cut off Obama’s nuts, appointing himself Massa’, overseer, and lynch mob and ending his career in 15 seconds. Now that’s multi-tasking! So here we are with a president who tries so hard not to show favoritism that he’s negligent, the bumbling, inarticulate, reactionary Ben Jealous, the PHONY Black Panthers, and Jesse’s tawdry successor, the conked hair, FBI wire-wearing Al Sharpton. Talk about makes me wanna’ holla? That’s an under-statement.

It’s all a sorry state of affairs, and saying the struggle for civil rights is over, the playing field’s leveled, and we’re living in post-racial America don’t make it so. In these depressed times all does do is justify and rejuvenate white privilege so they can gobble up not only all the courses and dessert – as usual – but the crumbs too, the ones people of color and working class people used to subsist on. It’s not the issues that’ve disappeared, it’s leadership with integrity, brains and vision. We’re living in awful, awful times, and having a cool, stylish, smart Black president, First Lady and First Family isn’t enough. We need to demand and fight for jobs, an end to both wars, quality education for all, a revived infrastructure, extension of un-employment benefits, an end to Bush’s tax cuts for the rich when they expire the end of this year, the end of police violence and abuse – not just of the privileged class but of all of us – I could go on and on and on, but then I’d be accused of ranting, or being an emasculating, demanding black women, or, heaven forbid, old school. Well, at least there were schools back in the old days.

Finally, I’ve got nothing against recently confirmed Supreme Court Associate Justice Elena Kagan, but nothing for her, either. To my mind, the President could and should have appointed a Black woman to the court. There are Black women judges, law school professors, and others who are qualified. The appointment of Kagan seems yet another example of how when we learn the rules, the rules are changed. Ditto  as well as a repudiation of the old adage many of us grew up with, that to achieve what Caucasian have it’s not enough to be as good, we have to be better. Now here comes Kagan, who’s never been a judge, appointed to the court. Talk about damned if you do and damned if you don’t. I’m not a religious woman, but am I the only person unsettled by a court with six Roman Catholics and and three Jews on it? How about some religious diversity? On the same note, how about a Justice who didn’t attend Harvard or Yale?

Call me what you will, it’s time for us, WOMEN, we who have our feet in the earth and hit the ground running every day, to wake up, speak up, and take over. Or at least have a national convention in this time of tremendous crisis to decide which issues are most important to us and devise a plan of action. (I’m confident our collective priorities are deeper than Michelle Obama’s trip to Spain, Essences’s Caucasian fashion editor, Alicia Keys’ wedding, blah, blah, blogosphere.) If we don’t organize, no matter how educated and essential we may think we are, how progressively post-racial and ensconced in a privileged class that trumps racism, we’ll be relegated to an upgraded version taking care of the chill’ins and the kitchen garden – i.e. the brilliant Michelle Obama – or turned into popular cultural representations of male notions of black women, i.e. Precious, Madea, Rasputia, Big Momma, ad nauseum, or, more likely for most of us, simply disappeared. Rise up, sisters, our time has come round once again. The men have had their chance, and look where we aren’t.

Making the Third Chapter Fabulous: Prose! Yoga! Passion!, the retreat at my home on Martha’s Vineyard, runs from August 31 – September 5. Please visit my web site for more information, and be there with us virtually by following live posts and pictures from the participants during the retreat. Please check us out!

Finally, an AMAZING photograph!

Jill Nelson 8/10/10 – The blog with the musical notes!

Back from vacation, during which the news I consume pretty much consists of a glance at headlines and staying abreast of what’s truly urgent – and simultaneously hoping there isn’t anything –  I’m overwhelmed by the every day “news” that I’ve successfully managed to avoid during my week’s escape. Much of this information falls into the “beating a dead horse” category, anyway.

For example: Essence Magazine hiring a white fashion director. Is anyone surprised? When was the last time black women saw Essence as reflecting and affirming a black aesthetic, as opposed to a commercial one? Let’s be honest, the magazine wasn’t a must read for years before it was sold to Time Warner, a sale completed in 2005, and since then it’s been held aloft  on the vapors of faded nostalgia or it’s-the-only-thing-out-there-for-us desperation. Why should it suddenly become the path to Black women’s affirmation and the the Land of Kumbaya once it passed from the hands of Black capitalists to white ones? Yes, it’s too bad that one of the only major fashion editorial positions a sister could reasonably aspire to has disappeared, but that’s the way of the current tough economy. Everything is tight in the current depression, oops, recession, and now the jobs that used to fall to Black people are being snatched up by hard-up Caucasians.

Ditto the USDA and Obama administration’s knee jerk firing of Shirley Sherrod after being manipulated by right wing blogger Andrew Breitbart. To call it precipitous is an under-statement. Why was it so easy for Obama to jump to defend Henry Louis Gates Jr. after his verbal altercation with a cop in Cambridge, Ma. last summer without having enough information, and equally easy for him to kick to the curb a Black woman accused of the non-existent bugaboo of “reverse discrimination” with as little, if not less, information? Black women were Obama’s early and strongest supporters, in many cases before the brothers, but where’s the big payback? Instead, there’s the folly of an elected official deserting his base, a recipe for failure if there ever was one. And no, I don’t buy it that Obama’s base was white until after Iowa, when the spin has it that Black people decided to vote for him once they saw white people would. That makes no sense, and anyway, how many Black voters live in Iowa? (What’s also sad is we have to wait for white journalists in the mainstream media to write about this before it gains any traction since there are so few black journalists working and even fewer with opinion columns. Oops, there go those formerly colored crumbs being gobbled up by you know who. My bad, how anachronistically old school of me! Who needs diversity in post-racial America? We have President Obama and a meritocracy has been achieved. Hallelujah!)

Then there’s the House investigation of Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-Ca.) on charges of ethics violations. And the current hearings on allegations of ethics violations of Congressman Charles Rangel (D-NY). If we weren’t living in post-racial heaven, I might be paranoid. (More on them next posting)

It seems to me the only Black woman who gets bigged up by the Obama presidency is Michelle Obama. I don’t begrudge the sister anything, she’s great, but it’d be sweet if some of her props and sister love bled onto Shirley Sherrod and the rest of us, you dig? The rest of us are on our own, like a rolling stone, to quote Bob Dylan. Although we’re not even rolling, we’ve been kicked to the side of the road and are so covered with dirt, mud, and debris thrown by passersby we’re virtually unrecognizable. Way past time for us to get up, dust ourselves and each other off, and build a movement by us and for us. Ya thinks that’s still possible in this post-racial America we loves so much?

Jill Nelson 8/3/10 – The blog with the musical notes!

I know I am fortunate to be able to leave where I am and escape from the every day, the familiar, to travel someplace different, to actually go away on vacation.

That’s where I am now, sitting on a porch in silence, looking at the ocean, easily avoiding the temptation to check email, surf the net, text.  Even my noisy little cell phone can’t harm me:  I’ve been too vacant while vacationing to remember to charge it. Not that I can find the charger, honestly.

I garden, swim, read what I want because I want, cook or don’t. On vacation, life is dialed down low, and so is my interior monologue, that mental running commentary shaved down to the essentials: air, water, a nightly mojito. I have vacated my so-called real life for a few days, come to a place where there is little need to talk, or network, or socialize. Here, I can turn off the external and internal chatter. I am learning every moment to put the vacant in vacation.

Jill Nelson 7/27/10 – The blog with the musical notes!

I’ve had my issues with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) over the years. In the last decades of the twentieth century the organization seemed absent a visionary agenda, out of touch, and mired in incompetent leadership. Most of the time, this organization that had once been pivotal in fighting for equality for Black Americans was simply irrelevant and invisible. For the most part, when it did register on my radar the news wasn’t good: bestowing the President’s Medal on gangster Don King; the brief, controversial tenure of former presidents Ben Chavis and Kwesi Mfume;  and the NAACP Image Awards, which sometimes seem based solely on who’s getting paid, the images of Black people – and particularly black women – be damned.

Enough of that. Love that road to rejuvenation, relevance, and redemption which Benjamin Todd Jealous, NAACP president and CEO, treads. Kudos to Jealous and the organization for efforts to invigorate the NAACP’s activist legacy and escape from irrelevance and mismanagement,  most recently calling out so-called Tea Party members for their racism and Tea Party leadership for not condemning it. The tragedy is that in 2010 confronting racism and racists is now characterized as racist. Do we really need the return of Bull Connor, snarling dogs, murdering Klu Klux Klanners, water hoses, the White Citizens Council, etc, etc, etc, to understand that racism is alive and well? Maybe. Sad to say, calling out racism is no small feat in this new, post-racial America that we loves so much.

Not surprisingly, the NAACP’s statement on racist elements of the Tea Party Federation, the umbrella group, is under assault by right wingers, including Sarah Palin, George Will, (Who characterized the NAACP’s statement as a “Desperate lunge for it’s vanished relevance”? Et tu, Georgie, with your tired self.) and my favorite, David Webb, a Black radio host and Tea Party activist.  Yet within days of the NAACP’s resolution the Tea Party was forced to expel Mark Williams and The Tea Party Express affiliate in response to Williams’ racist actions. (Can’t let one extremist ruin the Tea Party for the whole bunch, huh?) Jealous has asked all Americans to sign a pledge denouncing racism. ColorofChange.org is asking people to sign a letter to Tea Party leaders Dick Armey and Sarah Palin demanding that they take action against racist elements. Jealous seems determined to re-invigorate both the NAACP and the country’s consciousness. Denouncing racist elements in the Tea Party and the leaders who turn a blind eye has effectively forced a discussion. What we need next is collective and sustain actions against racism, a new activism. This is what has been systematically suppressed by those who benefit from white skin privilege and white supremacy, whatever they call themselves and whatever they drink.

A Few More Things: The officer who shot and killed 21-year-old Oscar grant on January 1, 2009 was convicted of involuntary manslaughter, the lesser of 3 charges. Here is the video of Grant’s murder. Involuntary manslaughter?

In New York State, Governor David Paterson has signed legislation to prohibit police from entering the names of people stopped, questioned, and frisked by employees of the New York Police Department but not arrested or charged, into a data base. Good news. Now on to dismantling the terrorizing, discriminatory, and criminalizing program, which stopped over 500,000 people in 2009, most of them Black and Latino males, and took no action 85% of the time. Let me see your I.D.

UPDATE: How about the awful treatment of USDA employee Shirley Sherrod, who was forced to resign after Andrew Breitbart, a right wing blogger, Tea Party supporter and FOX News ally posted a video of a speech she gave years ago, edited to suggest Sherrod is racist. Breitbart has admitted that he posted the video as an attack on the NAACP’s calling the Tea Party out for its racism.  In fact, the text of the full speech is Sherrod talking about how her work with a white farmer helped her to grow, understand the importance of class, and work more effectively for all her constituents. What’s with the Obama administration – and the NAACP, which condemned Sherrod and then had to backtrack after watching the full video –  making policy based on disinformation and  uninformed reaction to FAUX News. Are these racist, right wing idiots actually in control of the dialogue? What’s up with the President, who apparently has limitless patience with the GOP Neanderthals in Congress but none for a Black woman accused of the trope of “reverse discrimination.”? Has he forgotten the 2008 campaign when the right wing made up the lie that there was a tape of his wife, Michelle Obama, calling our Caucasian sisters and brothers “Whitey.” No such tape ever surfaced, not even one of Michelle cheering on N.Y. Yankee pitcher Whitey Ford.  Tom Vilsack, head of the USDA has since apologized to Sherrod and offered her a new job. Sherrod says she’d like to hear from the President, not for an apology, but for a chat. I say invite her to cook-out at the White House with the family, Barack. You had Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and the cop who messed with him over for a Beer Summit, it’s time for a Rib Summit with Sister Sherrod. (Let the President know you think it’s time to invite Shirley Sherrod over. Call 202 456-1111 or email him at the White House.)

Jill Nelson 7/20/10 – The blog with the musical notes!

A few days ago at a friend’s house I decided to sign onto Facebook using her computer. Even though I’d already established a username and password, the site informed me I’d have to answer 7 “security questions” to access my account. These questions consisted of photographs of groups of people, including at least 1 FB friend, in candid situations, accompanied by a list of 7 names. I was told to pick the name to match the face. This continued for 6 photographs, shots of people I know and don’t know dancing, laughing, relaxing, talking, etc., until I finally was allowed to sign in.

This whole process strikes me as an invasive assault on privacy. Why this extra layer of so-called security? Did FB ask, and would anyone give, permission for their personal photographs to be used in this way? What is the purpose of FB aggregating so much information? I’d appreciate answers to these questions, but the more important one is why am I even on Communication Lite, er FB? Answer to come as soon as I can stop friending, poking, tweeting, twittering and twitching long enough to have a coherent thought.

On the real side, my invasion of privacy via Facebook shrinks to less than zero in comparison to the experience of hundreds of thousands of young black and Latino men being stopped and frisked by members of the New York Police Department simply for existing while black or brown.  The vast majority of these young men are not suspected of a specific crime and are not arrested, yet their names are entered into a computer data base maintained by the police, allegedly to help solve future crimes. Why? (In other words, if you’re not a criminal when we stop, question and frisk you today, you probably will be in the future.)

According to a recent article in the N.Y. Times, the police stopped 52,000 people over four years in just one 8 block area of Brownsville, Brooklyn, as part of their “Stop, Question, Frisk” program. If the subtitle isn’t, “For Colored Only,” it should be. No need to be suspected of a specific crime. If you’re black, Latino, and young, simply being there is suspicious enough. Shades of the South African Pass Laws, Johannesburg via New York’s Finest. Can you imagine similar activities in an 8 block area of Park Avenue? (Although I could make the argument that the NYPD might well snag a number of the thieving criminals – er, investment bankers and derivative geniuses -  involved in the rapacious greed that brought on the current Great Recession, in that neighborhood.) Does anyone wonder why so many young men of color are alienated, traumatized, and enraged?

Check out the great work of The Center for Constitutional Rights and the New York Civil Liberties Union on this issue. Write your elected officials and urge them to end “Stop,Question, Frisk.” Donate if you can, get otherwise involved. To do nothing is to collude in the  criminalization and demonization of men of color. Freedom ain’t nothin’ but a word, ain’t nothin’ but a word. Let me see your I.D.

Jill Nelson 7/13/10 -  The blog with the musical notes!

In much of the country, the dog days of summer have arrived early. Here in New York, it was 80 degrees when I woke up at 5:56 this morning, and the temperature is projected to reach 100 today, maybe 102. To call it a heat wave is inaccurate. This heat is heavy, smothering, motionless, a heat blanket. Unfortunately, I’m too old to run through gushing fire hydrants or sprinklers as children do in summer, too young to spend the day in a city-sponsored cooling center – a.k.a. a big room with full blast air conditioning – and too busy to stay motionless in one place. Instead, I go about my business deliberately, wearing as little as possible and rushing even less, reminding myself that, hot as it is, summer still beats winter easily. Impossible not to wonder if this unseasonably hot weather is a manifestation of the way humans have abused and destroyed the environment, especially as a blanket of oil from the British Petroleum disaster in the Gulf of Mexico washes up on the beaches in Texas, and now impacts all the Gulf states. This is a snapshot of summertime in 2010. It could be, some say will be, worse. Then who will give us shelter? (8:39 am, 85 degrees.)

Please visit my web site!

Jill Nelson  7/6/10 – The blog with the musical notes!

Thank Michael Hastings’ leaked Rolling Stone article, The Runaway General, which led to last week’s resignation of Stanley McChrystal, top commander of the war in Afghanistan, for reminding us that there is a war in Afghanistan. Easy to forget, unless you’re in the military or fearful for a loved one who is. I don’t know about you, but in my hometown newspapers the box with the winning lottery numbers is larger and more prominently placed than the names of soldiers killed in the war(s). Let’s not forget the ongoing debacle in Iraq.  We’re at war at the cost of thousands of lives and billions of dollars, and for what? How long is President Obama going to perpetuate a war that was ill-advised from the get go;  serves no purpose other than to make our “ally,” puppet prez Hamid Kharzai, his drug dealing brother, and countless other corrupt “allies” millionaires; kills innocents and further solidifies the United States’ most loathed nation status; and after a decade is clearly unwinnable? I could go on and on and on. Now that the arrogant failure McChrystal’s out, it’s time for everyone else to get out, too. I would say “while the gettin’s good,” but I fear it’s too late for that.  Earn that Nobel Peace Prize, President Obama!

An added benefit of the Hastings article was to remind us how embedded, bought off, and dishonest much of the American corporate media is. Their response to Hastings enlightening scoop? Jealousy, disbelief, personal attack, absurd pronouncements about journalists conduct, and blaming “the culture of exposure” for McChrystal’s unmasking as undisciplined, disrespectful, and way guilty of conduct unbecoming. With a free press like this, no wonder MegaBucks trumps Kabul every time. Aaarggh! I’m not a magazine person, but I may have to subscribe to Rolling Stone on general principal.

Why does every Senator on the Judiciary Committee, all 19 of them!, have to pontificate/make a statement before the questioning of Solicitor General Elena Kagan, the President’s nominee to be an Associate Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court begins? Yesterday’s opening day of the hearings was hard to endure, and ended immediately after Kagan’s statement, a predictable evocation of the immigrant experience, the wonders of America, and that political oxymoron, self-effacing self-promotion, blah, blah, blah. Can a day of observing democracy at work, boredom and 90 degree temperatures cause brain death? If so, I’m a goner. Hopefully, real questioning sans bluster, blather, and staking out the usual positions, will commence today. I’ll be watching, listening, reading, and not holding my breath.

Jill Nelson 6/29/10 – The blog with the musical notes!