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Books by
Barack
Obama
Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
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The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the
American Dream
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Clinton and Obama Legislative
Records
I am not sure what to make of this
comparison/contrast. I'll have to take the word of the
author, Margo Bouchet, who places more emphasis on DOING
than TALKING. Since she does not deal with the
consequences of Obama's DOING, and I have no ready means
of checking out the aftermath of his DOING, I thus place
more weight on his TALKING, for there I can be my own
judge. . . .
But I put it before you to make your own judgment.
Anyhow in this comparison contrast, Obama wins hands
down over Mrs. Clinton. But lately that is much to be
expected—Rudy
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Clinton and Obama
Legislative Records
Who is more qualified?
Let's take a closer look at
who's really qualified and or who's really working for
the good of all of us in the Senate. Obama or Clinton.
Records of these two
candidates should be scrutinized in order to make an
informed decision.
Senator Clinton, who has served only one full
term—6yrs.—and another year campaigning, has managed to
author and pass into law 20—twenty pieces of legislation
in her first six years.These bills can be found on the
website of the Library of Congress
www.thomas.loc.gov
Clinton’s Twenty Pieces of
Legislation
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1. Establish the Kate Mullany National
Historic Site.
2. Support the
goals and ideals of Better Hearing and
Speech Month.
3. Recognize the Ellis Island Medal of
Honor.
4. Name courthouse after Thurgood Marshall.
5. Name courthouse after James L. Watson.
6. Name post office after Jonn A. O'Shea.
7. Designate Aug 7, 2003, as National Purple
Heart Recognition Day.
8. Support the goals and ideals of National
Purple Heart Recognition Day.
9. Honor the life and legacy of Alexander
Hamilton on the bicentennial of his death.
10. Congratulate the Syracuse Univ. Orange
Men's Lacrosse Team on winning the
championship.
11. Congratulate the Le Moyne College
Dolphins Men's Lacrosse Team on winning the
championship.
12. Establish the 225th Anniversary of the
American Revolution Commemorative Program.
13. Name post office after Sergeant Riayan
A. Tejeda.
14. Honor Shirley Chisholm for her service
to the nation and express condolences on her
death.
15. Honor John J Downing, Brian Fahey, and
Harry Ford, firefighters who lost their
lives on duty. Only five of Clinton's bills
are, more substantive. 16. Extend period of
unemployment assistance to victims of 9/11.
17. Pay for city projects in response to
9/11
18. Assist
landmine victims in other countries.
19. Assist family caregivers in accessing
affordable respite care.
20. Designate part of the National Forest
System in Puerto Rico as protected in the
wilderness preservation system. |
Obama Legislation in
Illinois and Washington—Now,
I would post those of Obama's, but the list is too
substantive, so I'll mainly categorize.
During the first—8—eight years of his elected
service he sponsored over 820 bills. He
introduced
233 regarding
healthcare reform,
125 on poverty and public assistance,
112 crime fighting bills,
97 economic bills,
60 human rights and anti-discrimination
bills,
21 ethics reform bills,
15 gun control,
6 veterans affairs and many others.
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His first year in the
U.S. Senate, he authored 152 bills and
co-sponsored another 427. These included
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**the
Coburn-Obama Government Transparency Act of
2006—became law.
*The Lugar-Obama
Nuclear Non-proliferation and Conventional
Weapons Threat Reduction Act—became law.
**The
Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act, passed
the Senate.
**The 2007
Government Ethics Bill—became law.
**The Protection
Against Excessive Executive Compensation
Bill, In committee, and many more. |
In all, since entering the U.S. Senate, Senator Obama
has written 890 bills and co-sponsored another 1096.
He's not just a talker. He's
a doer.
Law Office of Margo Bouchet
400 Corporate Pointe, Ste. 300
Culver City, California 90230
www.MargoBouchet.net <http://www.MargoBouchet.net>
(310)412-7058 (o) (323) 292-7038 775.257.9412 (f)
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Wow! His record is very impressive.—Miriam
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Rudy,
This is an
apples-and-oranges exercise, if I ever saw one.
Obama shouldn't be given points for his Illinois
legislative work - an entirely different political
environment - any more than he should be called a
"peace" candidate because of a 2002 campaign speech that
he would soon bury in 2003 after the actual war began,
and partially disassociate himself from in several
interviews in 2004. Clinton shouldn't be allowed to
cherry-pick her husband's record, either.
The only meaningful
comparison is VOTES while both were U.S. Senators,
wheeling and dealing in the same environment. Under this
standard, Obama and Clinton are twins, with
Clinton actually a nano-inch to Obama's left (Tort
Reform, Peru Trade).
If folks want to
support Obama because he's a "brother," or because he
lies more beautifully than Clinton does, they should
just say so. But the relevant data are what they are.
Watch him tack even
further to the Right in the general election. They
always do. But, of course, most of our folks will find a
rationale for that, too. Sincerely, Glen
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If folks
want to support Obama because he's a "brother," or
because he lies more beautifully than Clinton does, they
should just say so. Glen
If there was ever any veil, I
now pull it down. That is where I am, on both accounts:
He's black and he speaks beautifully. So you got me
pegged. And I don't feel shamed.
I am not able to measure the
issues or his political behavior with your exactness. I
wish I could. But status quo elections, by voters on the
ground, never work on the basis of the "issues," unless
they are extraordinary. The extraordinary issue before
us is that white people of America, including those in
Wisconsin, Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina
are voting a black man into the presidency. And he's no
Condi Rice.
At this point nothing else is
relevant, other than I like the way the man talks the
issues. So for me, again, it is not a matter of DOING,
but rather TALKING. I like the way the man talks and the
more I listen to him the more I like the way he talks. I
like so much the way he talks I am going out and acquire
one of his memoirs . . .
Let it be known Rudy is not
politically astute: When it comes to Obama, he votes
much like the rabble.
Obama's election is just as
improbable as the election of Abe Lincoln, of which
little was expected, for he too had very little
experience on the national level—a railroad lawyer who
spent one term in the House; lost the race for the
Senate from Illinois. He had less legislative work than
Obama. But now he's counted as one of the greatest of
American presidents.
Still I do not mind your
critiques of Obama as an outside observer with a unique
perspective. I embrace you for keeping us informed,
where Obama might be if he were in some other government—Rudy
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Hear! Hear! I agree! - Wilson
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I'm voting for Obama because he's a
brother, no two ways about it. How could it be
otherwise? I was a Kucinich guy, UFO sightings or not,
until he dropped out. Been a Kucinich admirer ever since
he took on Cleveland's banks as a twenty something mayor
decades ago.
I've been enjoying reading
Glen's oppositional musings about Obama; good discussion
is always relevant. But I'm unclear on who Glen is
supporting-the Green Party? I wish I could support the
Green Party but I witnessed too much in-fighting and
racial turmoil during the candidates forum in San
Francisco recently to go in that direction.
If Obama should get elected,
perhaps it will take the experience of a Black
presidency to convince masses of Americans that not even
so drastic a change as voting a Black man into the White
House will result in any meaningful change.
On the other hand, maybe comparing
Obama to Abe Lincoln isn't so outlandish a comparison as
it first may seem. Lincoln was thrust into extraordinary
circumstances that had been preceded by
inter-territorial warfare for a number of years.
Someday, when America's escalating
crime rates are more realistically interpreted as urban
warfare, as we now can safely say to be the case in
Darfur, as opposed to genocide, perhaps Obama, or
whomever is subsequently elected president either next
year or in later years, will find themselves in unusual
circumstances that will force them to oversee
significant and substantial changes in the way the US is
administered.
Stranger things have
happened. Peace Damu
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The Senate has held 645
roll-call votes during their shared tenure, and more
than 90 percent of the time the two senators stood
with other Democrats. They opposed John G. Roberts
Jr.'s nomination as chief justice, supported
increased funding for embryonic stem cell research
and backed the same nonbinding measure that urged
President Bush to plan for a gradual troop
withdrawal from Iraq.
Clinton-Obama Differences Clear In Senate Votes
(Washington Post, 2007)
Now let's look more closely at
Obama. I was blown away as I started going through
his record. I've already mentioned his bills on
health care and energy. In addition he had
introduced bills on Iran, voting, veterans, global
warming, campaign finance and lobbyists, Blackwater,
global poverty, nuclear proliferation, and
education.
Dailykos
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* Ethics Reform: Obama was the
Senate's point person on ethics reform, and
sponsored or co-sponsored the bills that made up
what the Washington Post called "the strongest
ethics legislation to emerge from Congress yet." I'm
also a fan of this bill, which I think of as the
Journalists, Bloggers, and Citizens' Muckraking
Empowerment Act: it creates a searchable database of
recipients of federal grants and contracts.
* The Lugar-Obama initiative to
strengthen the Nunn-Luger framework for securing
loose nukes, and to extend it to securing and
destroying stockpiles of conventional arms. (For
instance, shoulder-fired missiles that could be used
against passenger airlines, fired at our forces, or
used to make any number of ongoing conflicts more
deadly.)
* Various bills concerning the
response to Hurricane Katrina, including an
amendment putting strict limits on the use of no-bid
contracts after disasters, requiring planning for
the evacuation of people with special needs and
senior citizens, creating a National Emergency
Family Locator System, etc. There are also a lot of
good bills he worked on that did not make it. . . .The
Atlantic
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.—WashingtonPost |
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Incognegro: A Memoir of
Exile and Apartheid
By Frank B. Wilderson, III
Wilderson, a professor,
writer and filmmaker from
the Midwest,
presents a gripping account
of his role in the downfall
of South African apartheid
as one of only two black
Americans in the African
National Congress (ANC).
After marrying a South
African law student, Wilderson reluctantly
returns with her to South
Africa in the early 1990s,
where he teaches
Johannesburg and Soweto
students, and soon joins the
military wing of the ANC.
Wilderson's stinging
portrait of Nelson Mandela
as a petulant elder eager to
accommodate his white
countrymen will jolt readers
who've accepted the
reverential treatment
usually accorded him. After
the assassination of
Mandela's rival, South
African Communist Party
leader Chris Hani, Mandela's
regime deems Wilderson's
public questions a threat to
national security; soon,
having lost his stomach for
the cause, he returns to
America.
Wilderson has a
distinct, powerful voice and
a strong story that shuffles
between the indignities of
Johannesburg life and his
early years in Minneapolis,
the precocious child of
academics who barely
tolerate his emerging
political consciousness.
Wilderson's observations
about love within and across
the color line and cultural
divides are as provocative
as his politics; despite
some distracting
digressions, this is a
riveting memoir of
apartheid's last days.—Publishers
Weekly
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
1950
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
____ 2005
Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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posted 19 February 2008
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