MICHAEL O. ALLEN

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Sep 05
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Michelle Obama Rocks the House

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September 4, 2012
Charlotte, NC–Transcript of first lady Michelle Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention, as prepared for delivery:

Thank you so much, Elaine…we are so grateful for your family’s service and sacrifice…and we will always have your back.

Over the past few years as First Lady, I have had the extraordinary privilege of traveling all across this country.

And everywhere I’ve gone, in the people I’ve met, and the stories I’ve heard, I have seen the very best of the American spirit.

I have seen it in the incredible kindness and warmth that people have shown me and my family, especially our girls.

I’ve seen it in teachers in a near-bankrupt school district who vowed to keep teaching without pay.

I’ve seen it in people who become heroes at a moment’s notice, diving into harm’s way to save others…flying across the country to put out a fire…driving for hours to bail out a flooded town.

And I’ve seen it in our men and women in uniform and our proud military families…in wounded warriors who tell me they’re not just going to walk again, they’re going to run, and they’re going to run marathons…in the young man blinded by a bomb in Afghanistan who said, simply, “…I’d give my eyes 100 times again to have the chance to do what I have done and what I can still do.”

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Sep 05
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SEIU President Mary Kay Henry at the DNC

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CHARLOTTE —

The following is a transcript of a speech, as prepared for delivery, by Mary Kay Henry, International President of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), at the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday, September 4, 2012.

Mary Kay Henry

International President of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU)

Hello, delegates, and hello to my sisters and brothers in the American labor movement! My name is Mary Kay Henry. I am here tonight on behalf of millions of Americans who work for a living: the home care worker in Columbus, the janitor in Denver, the correctional officer in Raleigh. These are the men and women who make our country strong.

And these are the men and women whom President Obama is fighting for every single day. I grew up in Southeast Michigan, just a few miles from Mitt Romney. Just a few miles away, but a world apart. But here’s the thing: Even though Mitt Romney and I both call Detroit home, it seems like he learned a very different set of values.

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Aug 31
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Mitt Romney’s Extraordinary Lie

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He didn’t have to tell this particular lie because it gains him absolutely nothing. Yet, he felt need to perpetrate this particular fiction. Why?

Mitt Romney said during his acceptance speech last night that Republicans rallied behind President Obama when he won in 2008, hoping that he would succeed.

“We are a good and generous people who are united by so much more than divides us,” Romney said, cribbing a line from Obama.

I don’t understand. Why would Romney tell this lie?

I know it has been a particularly mendacious week at the Republican National Convention, that Romney is a lie machine and that his running mate, one Paul Ryan, gave an acceptance speech of his own in which he tried to see how many lies he could fit into a speech. But . . .

Did we have to listen to Republicans peddle this particular lie, that they rallied behind Obama on his election?

I know tradition dictates that we put our differences aside after an election ends and work for the good of the people, do the business of state, govern. That was exactly what the Republicans would not do.

On January 20, 2009, on a day when most Americans were celebrating the inauguration of Barack Obama as president of the United States, a cabal of Republican leaders and strategists met for four hours to plot how to derail the nascent administration. The American people had spoken by overwhelmingly electing Obama but that wasn’t good for Republicans.

In the prologue to his book “Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives,” Robert Draper described the unprecedented meeting. Masterminding this putsch were Representatives Eric Cantor (Va.), Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), Paul Ryan (Wis.), Pete Sessions (Texas), Jeb Hensarling (Texas), Pete Hoekstra (Mich.) and Dan Lungren (Calif.), and Senators Jim DeMint (S.C.), Jon Kyl (Ariz.), Tom Coburn (Okla.), John Ensign (Nev.) and Bob Corker (Tenn.).

Also invited were Newt Gingrich, strategist Frank Luntz.

If there was any doubt it was a coup d’etat, they spoke for several hours specifically how to drown every legislative initiative the incoming administration may attempt. Their opposition was tinged by a particular rancor, a nastiness that led them to not only disrespect the man in the office, but disrespect the office itself.

A few months into the administration, Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., shouted “You lie” from his seat on the Republican side of the chamber as President Obama was addressing a joint session of Congress about his health care legislation. Not long after that, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky declared that the goal of Republicans was to make sure Obama was a one-term president.

When the 2010 midterm elections ushered the so-called Tea Party Republicans, things go only worse, culminating in the budget debacle that led to the downgrading of the U.S. credit rating.

Things haven’t go much better. Republicans insist on fighting Obama even if it hurts the nation. They crippled the nation’s economy because they felt it was their best chance to regain power. It was plain for all eyes to see.

Romney could have said anything last night. He told many lies in his speech. He could have left that one about them rallying behind a new president. Why didn’t he? Is he just pathological?

Jan 25
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The 2012 State of the Union

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Remarks by the President in State of the Union Address
United States Capitol
Washington, D.C.
9:10 P.M. EST

THE PRESIDENT: Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice President, members of Congress, distinguished guests, and fellow Americans:

Last month, I went to Andrews Air Force Base and welcomed home some of our last troops to serve in Iraq. Together, we offered a final, proud salute to the colors under which more than a million of our fellow citizens fought — and several thousand gave their lives.

We gather tonight knowing that this generation of heroes has made the United States safer and more respected around the world. (Applause.) For the first time in nine years, there are no Americans fighting in Iraq. (Applause.) For the first time in two decades, Osama bin Laden is not a threat to this country. (Applause.) Most of al Qaeda’s top lieutenants have been defeated. The Taliban’s momentum has been broken, and some troops in Afghanistan have begun to come home.

These achievements are a testament to the courage, selflessness and teamwork of America’s Armed Forces. At a time when too many of our institutions have let us down, they exceed all expectations. They’re not consumed with personal ambition. They don’t obsess over their differences. They focus on the mission at hand. They work together.

Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example. (Applause.) Think about the America within our reach: A country that leads the world in educating its people. An America that attracts a new generation of high-tech manufacturing and high-paying jobs. A future where we’re in control of our own energy, and our security and prosperity aren’t so tied to unstable parts of the world. An economy built to last, where hard work pays off, and responsibility is rewarded.

We can do this. I know we can, because we’ve done it before. At the end of World War II, when another generation of heroes returned home from combat, they built the strongest economy and middle class the world has ever known. (Applause.) My grandfather, a veteran of Patton’s Army, got the chance to go to college on the GI Bill. My grandmother, who worked on a bomber assembly line, was part of a workforce that turned out the best products on Earth.

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Sep 17
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One True Sentence

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Hemingway writing

Hemingway writing

It was wonderful to walk down the long flights of stairs knowing that I’d had good luck working. I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day. But sometimes when I was started on a new story and I could not get going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.” So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut the scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written.

– Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

 

Sep 14
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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?

Sep 12
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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

Sep 10
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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.

Jan 13
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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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Aug 19
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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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