MICHAEL O. ALLEN

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Strange Political Seasons

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I keep hearing how the Congressional race in New York is, somehow, a referendum on the presidency of Barack Obama. Usually, I would scoff at such fatuous prognosticating. But then, it’s been a strange political season.

So, why not?

This one will end when Obama leaves office. Things will return back to normal.

The only comparable periods I could remember were when Harold Washington became mayor of Chicago in the early 80’s and when David Dinkins became mayor of New York City in the early 90’s.

Chicago's 51st Mayor

Chicago's 51st Mayor

Both times, the Democratic Party establishments in those cities willfully elected to sit on their hands and give up considerable political power and patronage just so the incumbent Democrat would lose.

In his first race for mayor of Chicago, Republican Bernie Epton actually had a fighting chance to win because the Democrats preferred him over the Democrat in the race, Harold Washington. Like the late Chicago Sun Times Columnist Mike Royko famously wrote, “Chicago doesn’t have enough Republican voters to win a Moose lodge election.”

When Washington won, the party establishment organized a coup d’etat in the City Council and resolved to run the city themselves. Washington (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Washington) was a Congressman before running for mayor. He was a tough political battler who was willing to fight for his political life.

From Wikipedia:

“Washington’s first term in office was characterized by ugly, racially polarized battles dubbed “Council Wars”, referring to the then-recent Star Wars films. A 29–21 City Council majority refused to enact         Washington’s reform legislation and prevented him from appointing reform nominees to boards and commissions. Other first-term items include overall city population loss, increased crime, and a massive decrease in ridership on the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA). This helped earn the city the nickname “Beirut on the     Lake”, and many people wondered if Chicago would ever recover or face the more permanent declines of other cities in the U.S. Midwest.

The twenty-nine, also known as the Vrdolyak Twenty-nine, was led by “the Eddies”: Alderman Ed Vrdolyak, Finance Chair Edward Burke and Parks Commissioner Edmund Kelly. The Eddies were supported by the younger Daley (now State’s Attorney), U.S. Congressmen Dan Rostenkowski and William Lipinski, and other powerful white Democrats.

During one of the first Council meetings, Harold Washington was

unable to get his appointments approved.

Harold Washington and the twenty-one ward representatives that supported him, walked out of the meeting after a quorum had been established. Vrdolyak and the other twenty-eight were able to appoint all of the boards and chairs. Later lawsuits submitted by Harold Washington and others were dismissed because it was determined that the appointments were legally made.

Washington ruled by veto. The twenty-nine could not get the thirtieth vote they needed to override Washington’s veto; African American, Latino and white liberal aldermen supported Washington despite pressure from the Eddies.”

So, in the Senate, after Obama came into office, despite having 59 United States Senators to the Republicans 41, Republicans somehow set the terms of the debate on legislation. Then, in the midterm elections, Republicans strengthened their hands by regaining the House of Representatives and gaining a couple of U.S. Senate seats.

Republicans became strictly obstructionists, not only unwilling to reasonably discuss any national issue, but actually working to harm the nation because it served their political purposes. They paid no political price for that. In fact, they gained more power.

But I am getting too far ahead of myself.

To get back to back to Harold Washington, he won reelection but had a massive heart attack at his desk in City Hall in early in his second term.

Dinkins (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Dinkins), like Obama now, was seen as weak. In New York City, people did not come out to vote. Think about it. Democrats outnumber Republicans by 5-1 in New York City. Winning the office meant not only that lots of people kept their jobs but that they got more jobs and patronage for four more years.

And they gave all that up.

So, yes, Obama—perhaps one of the smartest person to ever hold the presidency of the United r-bStates—will lose reelection in 2012. Maybe the people of our fair nation will start acting normal after that.

UPDATE: Just to prove Democrats are their own worst enemies, if not worse, some lame-brain Democrats now say they oppose the president’s job bill. The same bill that has put Republicans in a “damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t” quandry! How could make political hay against recalcitrant Republicans when Democrats are adding fuel to the Republican fire?

September 14, 2011
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President Obama's Remarks on the 10th Anniversary of 9/11

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The Bible tells us, “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.”

Ten years ago, America confronted one of our darkest nights. Mighty towers crumbled. Black smoke billowed up from the Pentagon. Airplane wreckage smoldered on a Pennsylvania field. Friends and neighbors, sisters and brothers, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters – they were taken from us with heartbreaking swiftness and cruelty. On September 12, 2001, we awoke to a world in which evil was closer at hand, and uncertainty clouded our future.

In the decade since, much has changed for Americans. We’ve known war and recession, passionate debates and political divides. We can never get back the lives that were lost on that day, or the Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice in the wars that followed.

And yet today, it is worth remembering what has not changed. Our character as a nation has not changed. Our faith – in God and each other – that has not changed. Our belief in America, born of a timeless ideal that men and women should govern themselves; that all people are created equal, and deserve the same freedom to determine their own destiny – that belief, through tests and trials, has only been strengthened.

These past 10 years have shown that America does not give in to fear. The rescue workers who rushed to the scene; the firefighters who charged up the stairs; the passengers who stormed the cockpit – these patriots defined the very nature of courage. Over the years we have also seen a more quiet form of heroism – in the ladder company that lost so many men and still suits up and saves lives every day; the businesses that have rebuilt from nothing; the burn victim who has bounced back; the families that press on.

Last spring, I received a letter from a woman named Suzanne Swaine. She had lost her husband and brother in the Twin Towers, and said that she had been robbed of “so many would-be proud moments where a father watches their child graduate, or tend goal in a lacrosse game, or succeed academically.” But her daughters are in college, the other doing well in high school. “It has been 10 years of raising these girls on my own,” Suzanne wrote. “I could not be prouder of their strength and resilience.” That spirit typifies our American family. And the hopeful future for those girls is the ultimate rebuke to the hateful killers who took the life of their father.

These past ten years have shown America’s resolve to defend its citizens, and our way of life. Diplomats serve in far-off posts, and intelligence professionals work tirelessly without recognition. Two million Americans have gone to war since 9/11. They have demonstrated that those who do us harm cannot hide from the reach of justice, anywhere in the world. America has been defended not by conscripts, but by citizens who choose to serve – young people who signed up straight out of high school; guardsmen and reservists; workers and businesspeople; immigrants and fourth-generation soldiers. They are men and women who left behind lives of comfort for two, three, four or five tours of duty. Too many will never come home. Those that do carry dark memories from distant places, and the legacy of fallen friends. Read More

September 12, 2011
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A Brief Thought on 9/11

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I had not left home yet to go to work that day when an in-law called to tell me to turn on the television.

One heavily-fueled jet had already slammed into one tower. People were dying, desperate to be saved from whatever this was, wherever this attack came from. I was a reporter at the New York Daily News then and the biggest story in several lifetimes hit the city and I was separated from it by a river and bridges and tunnels that were blocked, with no way to get in.

I considered myself a hard-bitten reporter and I’d covered cataclysmic events, usually in other countries. But, the day after the attacks, as I walked through Lower Manhattan, I was shocked to see army tanks and heavilly-armed U.S. military personnel rumbling through the cindered city.

I quickly lost whatever degree of arrogance or pride girded my professional self. Feelings of loss, anguish and more than a little bit of dread nestled within me.

I ran into Daily News colleague Maki Becker walking toward me, coming seemingly from the deepest reaches of the disaster zone. We hugged, told each other where we were going and what we were doing, then continued on our ways.

In the days, weeks and months that followed, I remember covering funerals all over the place, in Jersey and on Long Island and in every borough–Cantor Fitzgerald traders in Passaic, New Jersey, firefighters, police officers and people from all walks of life. I was witness and chronicled those remembrances and memorials.

One of my strongest memories occurred the very day after the attacks. A friend of mine helped reunite a young family that had become separated after the attacks.

Usually, you try not to get too close to the people that you write stories about, or those who help you get those stories. You want to remain objective and keep a clear eye. In Rowena’s case, it was difficult to hew to that principle. I don’t remember when or on what story I first met Rowena but she was a bright shining light from the very first moment I met her, armed with an in infectious smile that would quickly grow into a chuckle, then a laugh.

It was  impossible not to like her. So we became friends.

I may have sought her out the day after the attacks because I knew she lived not too far from the towers. Or, maybe, I just ran into her. 
In the seemingly endless procession of lost people leaving those doomed towers and its neighborhoods, Rowena was busy reuniting a couple and their five-year-old son who had become separated after the attacks. Either the boy and his father were looking for his mother, or the boy and his mother were looking for his father. I forget which. Rowena came across a pair of them during the day’s tumult, cared for them in her apartment, then helped them scour the city until the whole family was reunited the next day.

The man was Egyptian and the woman was either a Swiss or German. They had met when the woman vacationed in the Egyptian resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh and, against impossible odds, had married. They were vacationing in New York City when the attackers brought death and destruction to us.

I was very moved by them, their story, which I never got to write, and by Rowena, who remained true to form.

Much, of course, happened in the intervening years since the attack. I wonder what happened to that couple and their son. Did their family grow, remained intact and thrived?

Or did the wars and the ugliness of the world that followed swallow them, too?

Me, I drifted out of journalism and out of touch with Rowena. My two sons–one was four and half years old the other was six months old–grew, with the older one growing taller than me this past summer and starting high school this fall.

Rowena got married and now lives in Brooklyn. Though we remain tethered by social network connections, we have not seen each other in years and those years have really worn away the very real connection we had.

I know wherever she is today, Rowena is brightening someone’s life, offering a hand of help or support, doing some good in the world.

My thought on this terrible anniversary is that we should all aim to be a little bit like my friend.

September 10, 2011
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To Salve the Hearts of a Wounded Land

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Obama Arizona Memorial Speech: FULL TEXT

Thank you. (Applause.) Thank you very much. Please, please be seated. (Applause.)

To the families of those we’ve lost; to all who called them friends; to the students of this university, the public servants who are gathered here, the people of Tucson and the people of Arizona: I have come here tonight as an American who, like all Americans, kneels to pray with you today and will stand by you tomorrow. (Applause.) There is nothing I can say that will fill the sudden hole torn in your hearts. But know this: The hopes of a nation are here tonight. We mourn with you for the fallen. We join you in your grief. And we add our faith to yours that Representative Gabrielle Giffords and the other living victims of this tragedy will pull through. (Applause.)

Scripture tells us: There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy place where the Most High dwells. God is within her, she will not fall; God will help her at break of day. On Saturday morning, Gabby, her staff and many of her constituents gathered outside a supermarket to exercise their right to peaceful assembly and free speech. (Applause.) They were fulfilling a central tenet of the democracy envisioned by our founders — representatives of the people answering questions to their constituents, so as to carry their concerns back to our nation’s capital. Gabby called it “Congress on Your Corner” — just an updated version of government of and by and for the people. (Applause.)

And that quintessentially American scene, that was the scene that was shattered by a gunman’s bullets. And the six people who lost their lives on Saturday — they, too, represented what is best in us, what is best in America. (Applause.)

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January 13, 2011
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Olbermann's SPECIAL COMMENT

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Finally as promised, a Special Comment tonight on the inaccurately described “Ground Zero mosque.”

“They came first for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist.Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist.Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for me and by that time no one was left to speak up.”

Pastor Martin Niemoller’s words are well known but their context is not well understood. Niemoller was not speaking abstractly. He witnessed persecution, he acquiesced to it, he ultimately fell victim to it. He had been a German World War 1 hero, then a conservative who welcomed the fall of German democracy and the rise of Hitler and had few qualms the beginning of the holocaust until he himself was arrested for supporting it insufficiently.

Niemoller’s confessional warning came in a speech in Frankfurt in January, 1946, eight months after he was liberated by American troops. He had been detained at Tyrol, Sachsen-hausen and Dachau. For seven years.

Niemoller survived the death camps. In quoting him, I make no direct comparison between the attempts to suppress the building of a Muslim religious center in downtown Manhattan, and the unimaginable nightmare of the Holocaust. Such a comparison is ludicrous. At least it is, now.
But Niemoller was not warning of the Holocaust. He was warning of the willingness of a seemingly rational society to condone the gradual stoking of enmity towards an ethnic or religious group warning of the building-up of a collective pool of national fear and hate, warning of the moment in which the need to purge, outstrips even the perameters of the original scape-goating, when new victims are needed because a country has begun to run on a horrible fuel of hatred — magnified, amplified, multiplied, by politicians and zealots, within government and without.

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August 19, 2010
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"A Tiny Ripple of Hope"

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I came across this speech (Facebook, then Daily Kos) and thought I should share:

Mr. Chancellor, Mr. Vice Chancellor, Professor Robertson, Mr. Diamond, Mr. Daniel, and Ladies and Gentlemen

I come here this evening because of my deep interest and affection for a land settled by the Dutch in the mid-seventeenth century, then taken over by the British, and at last independent; a land in which the native inhabitants were at first subdued, but relations with whom remain a problem to this day; a land which defined itself on a hostile frontier; a land which has tamed rich natural resources through the energetic application of modern technology; a land which once the importer of slaves, and now must struggle to wipe out the last traces of that former bondage. I refer, of course, to the United States of America.

But I am glad to come here — and my wife and I and all of our party are glad to come here to South Africa, and we’re glad to come to Cape Town. I am already greatly enjoying my stay and my visit here. I am making an effort to meet and exchange views with people of all walks of life, and all segments of South African opinion, including those who represent the views of the government.

Today I am glad to meet with the National Union of South African Students. For a decade, NUSAS has stood and worked for the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — principles which embody the collective hopes of men of good will all around the globe. Your work at home and in international student affairs has brought great credit to yourselves and to your country. I know the National Student Association in the United States feels a particularly close relationship with this organization.

And I wish to thank especially Mr. Ian Robertson, who first extended the invitation on behalf of NUSAS. I wish to thank him for his kindness to me in inviting me. I am very sorry that he can not be with us here this evening. I was happy to have had the opportunity to meet and speak with him earlier this evening. And I presented him with a copy of Profiles in Courage which was a book that was written by President John Kennedy and was signed to him by President Kennedy’s widow, Mrs. John Kennedy.

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June 7, 2010
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Souter's Harvard Talk

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Souter signing guest book inside Massachusetts Hall prior to delivering Harvard's 359th Commencement.

Text of Justice David Souter’s Harvard Commencement remarks (as delivered)

When I was younger, I used to hear Harvard stories from a member of the class of 1885. Back then, old graduates of the College who could get to Cambridge on Commencement Day didn’t wait for reunion years to come back to the Yard.  They’d just turn up, see old friends, look over the new crop, and have a cup of Commencement punch under the elms.  The old man remembered one of those summer days when he was heading for the Square after lunch and crossed paths with a newly graduated senior, who had enjoyed quite a few cups of that punch.  As the two men approached each other the younger one thrust out his new diploma and shouted, “Educated, by God.”

Even with an honorary Harvard doctorate in my hands, I know enough not to shout that across the Yard, but the University’s generosity does make me bold enough to say that over the course of 19 years on the Supreme Court, I learned some lessons about the Constitution of the United States, and about what judges do when they apply it in deciding cases with constitutional issues.  I’m going to draw on that experience in the course of the next few minutes, for it is as a judge that I have been given the honor to speak before you.

The occasion for our coming together like this aligns with the approach of two separate events on the judicial side of the national public life:  the end of the Supreme Court’s term, with its quickened pace of decisions, and a confirmation proceeding for the latest nominee to fill a seat on the court.  We will as a consequence be hearing and discussing a particular sort of criticism that is frequently aimed at the more controversial Supreme Court decisions:  criticism that the court is making up the law, that the court is announcing constitutional rules that cannot be found in the Constitution, and that the court is engaging in activism to extend civil liberties.  A good many of us, I’m sure a good many of us here, intuitively react that this sort of commentary tends to miss the mark.  But we don’t often pause to consider in any detail the conceptions of the Constitution and of constitutional judging that underlie the critical rhetoric, or to compare them with the notions that lie behind our own intuitive responses.  I’m going to try to make some of those comparisons this afternoon.

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June 4, 2010
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A Recurring Nightmare

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The BP Deepwater Horizon catastrophe is a perfect Republican Party trap: Watch as a Democratic administration and Congress drown in the oil disaster while they clean up at the polls. Then Republicans return to office and begin the cycle by laying the bombs that’ll detonate under the next Democratic administration.

Does anyone remember Dick Cheney’s behind-the-door meetings with energy executives in W.’s maladministration? Or the two wars they bequeathed Americans?

For those who have forgotten, Brian Conners has written a recap at Associated Content that I think is worth reading. His earlier piece pointed fingers also.

Sure, President Barack Obama has been feckless in dealing with a disaster-not-of-his-making.

How difficult can it be to say that British Petroleum, besides paying for every penny that it costs to clean up the Gulf and other regions affected by this disaster, should have all of its officers brought to account for this disaster.

Yet, the president has  not been able to summon the passion to condemn this crime. Fine, set up a commission, if you must. But, first, BP executives should be wearing prison jumpsuits.

Cheney has some explaining to do. Before Congress.

A final question: Why is it that Halliburton (Dick Cheney’s employer) is always around looking guilty whenever something is hurting our nation?

June 3, 2010
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