March to a Different Drummer

The current 24/7 news cycle this week latched onto several clips from sermons from Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the pastor to presidential candidate Barack Obama for some 20 years. Most have now seen these clips of the minister’s theatrical and hyperbolic style. And it would be to walk among mine fields to attempt to defend the several sound bites that the networks have chosen out of the many sermons the minister’s church apparently makes available on video. Wright’s statements in these clips have been almost universally characterized as incendiary, outrageous, and anti-American. It may not be possible now, in this poisoned atmosphere, to view these in context, but I challenge you to do that. I challenge you to imagine you are in the congregation during these sermons and I challenge you to abstract yourself from the current controversy and honestly ask yourself if you had been there, would you, without the coaching of TV and radio’s talking heads, have the same opinion of this minister.

For the first six years of the Bush administration all three branches of government were under tight Republican control. It was no secret over those years that a housing bubble was growing. Speculation was rampant. Housing developments were carving a new landscape. Whole TV channels were being devoted to how to make fast money by flipping real estate. And TV commercials were full of enticements to buy and refinance at suspiciously low rates with lots and lots of small print. Where were the regulators of this industry? The mortgage bank regulators? The federal and state financial institution regulators? Were they all asleep? Bear Sterns demise over the weekend may be just one domino. And though I have little sympathy for the Bear Stearns execs and the threat to their multi million dollar salaries and loss of millions of their equity, what about all the middle class Americans who were lured into this market bubble and are now threatened with loss of home and hearth? When the D

Beginning before the January 3rd Iowa primary, there was a heady storm of general interest in November’s upcoming presidential election. Eight more primary election dates would build this crescendo of public attention before the Chesapeake primary on 12 February that included Virginia. Election Commissions and Registrars across the Old Dominion were gearing up for what was to be a very high turn out primary. But somehow this preplanning was far insufficient for one Virginia County – Chesterfield County. Early on the morning of 12 February red flags were going up in the county about long lines and long waits to vote at several insufficiently staffed precincts. And as the day progressed problems compounded to the point that disgusted voters walked away from lines that circled around polling sites. And then even worse -- precincts began running out of ballots. As the polls closed almost 300 votes had been placed on scraps of paper, countless voters had walked away from the long line