Bummer Wednesday

The late Bayard Rustin and I joked about creating the Committee to Preserve White People in Basketball. Finally, the European leagues started to supply talented players to the NBA so the urgency somewhat diminished. But today out of Augusta, Georgia comes an announcement that there will be an All-American Basketball League that will ban foreigners and blacks. The league will play summerball in twelve cities. Maybe Rush Limbaugh can buy one of the franchises. The owner, a Mr. Moose, said that," It's not that we are against any race. It's just that whites are a minority now." This isn't what Bayard and I had in mind. And with our Senate, maybe we can restore slavery.

Obama's honeymoon is over. That's the headline today. Stop. Replay the tape. Didn't anyone listen to the interview this week with Arlen Specter about why he changed parties? Specter insists that upon inaugeration the Republican Caucus in the Senate held a closed meeting to demand absolute loyalty in voting against the stimulus package--which a broad range of economists supported. I would say the honeymoon stopped on day one. Or howabout the private meeting of the Republican caucus with the "captains of industry" to tell them not to invest until after the 2010 elections.

Speaking of white people. Republicans now have a Senator who posed nude for Cosmo, Diaper Dave Vitters ,whose New Orleans madam claimed had "exquisite taste in lingerie" and a Senator who pays the husband of his mistress hush money from campaign funds Senator Ensign. This gives white people a bad name.

We got the aid airlifts up to 200 yesterday, twice the number of the day before. People cheered, "USA! USA! USA!" when American rescue workers pulled live Haitians from the rubble. We opened two more airports in Haiti to accomodate more aid relief. But as this week is going, Haiti was hit with another 6.1 quake dashing some of the progress made. But, never fear, the Mexican Mole Men are coming to Haiti. Pound for pound this Mexican rescue team is considered the world's best at discovering living people buried under rubble. They excelled in the Asian tsunami disaster.

The Prop 8 trial continues with Boies and Olson checking off all the boxes on all arguments against marriage equality. Today's hearing had testimony on why gays can not be "converted" back to heterosexuality. This is important because of the anti-gay arguments that homosexality is a lifestyle choice and predetermined. Boies ran a videotape of the deposition of one of the defense witnesses who withdrew. During the testimony, Boies led the witness to run through the religious attitudes against homosexuality and got him to admit--frequently--that these beliefs were based on prejudice. This is a central point for Olson and Boies to prove to overturn Prop. 8. Of immense curiosity and legal wrangling was the demand by the Olson team for documents which showed how other anti-gay marriage efforts were connected and the interlinkage of personnel organizing these efforts. So far the anti-gay lawyers had to fork over 20,000 pages of documents but are fighting about the relevance of documents about other states. So far, Olson and Boies are wiping the floor with the opposition. It's such a pleasure to watch good attorneys work. I am getting very curious about what the anti-gay lawyers can possibly turn up to defend their case. Every strawman so far has been burned to the ground.


For those interested in a real expert on terrorism in the Islamic world, the person to consult is Dr.Olivier Roy, research director at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). The two books, which are appropriate for understanding the new generation of unassimilated terrorists, are Globalized Islam and Islamist Networks: The Afghan-Pakistan Connection. Roy has done the pioneer studies of how marginalized Muslims in Europe become drawn to terrorism.

Garry Wills weighs in with Bomb Power:The Modern Presidency and the National Security State, which analyzes the concentration of power within the Presidency. The last two chapters "the Unitary Executive" and "American Monarch" are the heart of the argument on today's problems.