Reading List

Flickr: Election Night 11-04-08

From firedoglake, why Joe Lieberman really wants to keep his Homeland Security Committee gavel: So he can investigate Obama to death by a thousand "...gates".

Ta-Nehisi Coates, WaPo: The Man of Tomorrow
King trusted whites to stand up. Obama showed me he was right.

Frank Rich, NYTimes: It Still Felt Good the Morning After

The Newsweek series (embargoed news, stuff they've known for weeks but did not deign to tell us until after we voted) is a must read:

Hackers and Spending Sprees
Highlights from NEWSWEEK's special election project.

Chapter One: How He Did It
A team of NEWSWEEK reporters reveals the secret battles and private fears behind an epic election.

Chapter Two: Back From the Dead
By late spring of 2007, John McCain's campaign was adrift, if not sinking. Then the candidate found a new narrative: the comeback.

Chapter Three: The Long Siege
The fight between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama turned into a grinding stasis that played out until the very last primary day.

Chapter Four: Going Into Battle
McCain's inner circle altered the style, feel and direction of the campaign. The candidate's best hope was to bring down Obama.

Chapter Five: Center Stage
Obama's aides worried the Clintons might steal the show. McCain revved up his campaign with an impulsive choice—Sarah Palin.

Chapter Six: The Great Debates
McCain bridled at reducing his opinions to sound bites. Obama prepped as if he were taking the bar exam—nothing was left to chance.

Chapter Seven: The Final Days
Obama was leading in the polls, even in red states like Virginia. But McCain almost seemed to glory in being the underdog.

Jesus Was A Community Organizer

zazzle


Jesus was a community organizer, and John McCain is a POW: a Prisoner of the Wingnuts. Only a Republican wingnut like Sarah Palin would have the chutzpah to mock community organizers in her first major speech on the national stage.

Hey, you know another community organizer? John Lewis, Congressman from Georgia, chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee fighting for civil rights during the 1960s; beaten to a bloody pulp by police during the Selma march in 1965; recently cited by Republican hypocrite John McCain as someone he would look to for advice. So, McCain would look to community organizer and American hero John Lewis for advice, but he sends out his pitbull in lipstick Sarah Palin to attack Obama as a lowly community organizer.

The Rethugs have nothing. They don't have any policies to offer except for four more years of George W. Bush's failed policies. So they're on the attack. We're not falling for it this time.

Insightful diary from organicdemocrat at dailykos.

Jesus Was a Community Organizer

Martin Luther King was too. So was Gandhi. Mandela. Also John Hancock, who organized a boycott of [t]ea imported from China.

The Republican Party is run by powerful corporate interests who feel threatened by any citizen organization. Mitt Romney made money at his East Coast hedge fund by taking over companies, firing his workers and looting their pension fund. (While Mitt was talking, Nero called. Wants his fiddle back.) Rudy Giuliani, as Mayor, lived in fear of community organizers from Harlem and Brooklyn who held him accountable for his brutal tactics. They have no credibility even with their base. Even Huckabee's "Aww shucks" act falls flat.

So they go out and hire an attractive young spokeswoman. Write a speech for her. Attacking Obama at his core. Before even introducing her properly to the public. It is not going to work either. Because Obama's brand is more established than hers.

[]

The proper response is not to go after Sarah Palin. Instead, hit McCain at his core. If Obama is a community organizer, the defining trait of McCain is POW. Take over that word. Own it. Mock not his war record, but the way he has been exploiting it for cheap political purposes. Obama cannot do it. Nor even Biden. But the rest of us can. We are the community they are mocking. Let us organize to give them a piece of our mind. Two million voices.

Every American knew a year ago that McCain was a POW. By offering up nothing more than that, no economic plan, not even a coherent foreign policy ( supposed to be his strong suit), the Republican are risking over exposure. And there will be even more today. McCain does not really have anything else to talk about.

McCain's greatest weakness is his association with Bush. Obama has gone after that. But the tactic of attacking an opponent at his strength is effective. Do not be afraid to go after McCain's strength as POW. Trivialize him.

What does POW stand for again? Prisoner of Wingnuts. He can't even make a phone call without permission from his minders.

What war did he get taken Prisoner in? The Culture War. The man who once derided Falwell and Robertson as "agents of intolerance" is now pimping for them.

McCain is a coward. He runs in fear from the Press that once adored him. The "Angry Left" that he is running from is that well known young radical, Larry King.

[]

THIS is what they were mocking tonight.

Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world:

For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in:

Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.

Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink?

When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee?

Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?

And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

Matt. 25:34-40

168 More Days of Bushit

Smithsonian: Easter Island

Blogging is for people who have time, and I'm busy this week getting ready to go on vacation! So here are some links to news of the world:

That government scientist involved in the anthrax probe who committed suicide last week left lots of questions behind. The omnibus post on the subject is from the redoubtable Glenn Greenwald. A more abbreviated discussion here from Jay Rosen at HuffPo. The most interesting questions are these: Who were ABC's four off-the-record sources in 2001 who lied to ABC, telling the network's reporters that the anthrax came from Iraq? And why did John McCain go on the Letterman show on October 11, 2001 and say the anthrax may have come from Iraq? All of which will lead us to someone high up in the Bush Administration who was pushing for war with Iraq, no doubt. I put my money on Cheney. John McCain, Cheney's lapdog.

David Gergen went on ABC's This Morning with George StephaFlagPinHypocritanopoulos and informed the panel that yes, McCain's ads are dog whistles to racists, that McCain is calling Obama "uppity". You can watch the video at TPM, or here's the quote:

When McCain's camp calls Obama "The Messiah" and "The One", he's really calling him "uppity." I'm from the South, and we understand what that means. That's code.

When John McCain was asked why he has accused Barack Obama of playing the race card, and what he has ever done to advance the cause of civil rights, he couldn't think of anything to say for a quite a while (watch video here). Then he lied about his dismal record.

Today is Barack Obama's 47th birthday. He'll always be younger than John McCain. And smarter. And more honest.

Art Meets Politics

Shepard Fairey put his street-art sensibility to work for his candidate of choice, in hopes of "appealing to a younger, apathetic audience." (By Jonathan Alcorn For The Washington Post)

I love these Obama posters, partly because they bring to mind the graphic political posters of the 30s and 40s. Some examples: here, here, and here.

Compare the reception these posters have gotten to a similar attempt to bring back an old style. The Martin Luther King Memorial commissioned a Chinese sculptor to create a statue of MLK for the memorial. (So perfect in our current world of outsourcing, the statue is being created in China, by a Chinese artist - from Chinese granite.) Here's his vision in process:


That statue says "Lenin" or "Mao" to me, not Martin Luther King. It is 28 feet tall, and begs to be turned over in the city square after the government is overthrown. Definitely social realism style, propaganda style, having no relation to the actual person being portrayed. (Did you ever see MLK standing with his arms crossed?) Whereas the Obama poster, while stylized, seems to capture the man rather than trap him in an outmoded art form.

Martin Luther King deserves better. Maybe Shepard Fairey could design his statue?

WaPo: Obama's On-the-Wall Endorsement

All political art is propaganda (that is the point), but most political posters are bland, forgettable, wallpaper, like Fred Thompson on an off day. [Artist Shepard] Fairey wanted something more iconic -- aspirational, inspirational -- and cool. In other words, he wanted to make posters that the cool cats would want. The 2008 Democratic primary season equivalent of the Che poster (with all that implies). More Mao, more right now. The kind of poster that might make its way onto dorm room walls of fanboys. The kind of poster that might sell on eBay, as a signed Fairey Obama recently did, for $5,900. He wanted his posters to go viral.

"I wanted strong. I wanted wise, but not intimidating," Fairey says of the look for his Obamas. The agitprop pop art has become a must-have accessory among a certain subset of the candidate's supporters, who have gobbled up more than 80,000 of Fairey's posters and 150,000 postcard-size stickers since Super Tuesday.

Shepard Fairey on the creative choices behind his Barack Obama poster.

Martin Luther King Assassinated 40 Years Ago Today

dday at Hullabaloo on King's power.

John McCain and Dick Cheney voted against making Martin Luther King Day a holiday.

Don't you think if MLK were still alive today, Pat Buchanan would be screeching that he is a hateful Afro-centric preacher and condemning all who follow him?

Republicans and Martin Luther King: The Unvarnished Truth

wikipedia

They weren't that into him. They're still not, but they don't say so as blatantly any more.

* St. [John] McCain, a leading Republican presidential candidate, voted against the 1983 law to make King's birthday a national holiday

* Ron Paul, another Republican presidential candidate, published a newsletter that referred to the holiday as "Hate Whitey Day"

* Mitt Romney lied about seeing his father march with King [and, truth be told, also lied by saying he himself marched with MLK: "My father and I marched with Martin Luther King Jr. through the streets of Detroit."]

* 18 of the 22 senators who opposed that 1983 law -- including Trent Lott and Orrin Hatch -- were Republicans

* Vice President Dick Cheney, as a congressman, voted against a 1979 measure to make King's birthday a national holiday

* The red states of Arizona and New Hampshire, didn't recognize the King Holiday until 2000

* It took until 2000 for [Mitt] Willard [Romney]'s beloved Utah to finally change their "Human Rights Day" to officially honor Martin Luther King

* South Carolina, the reddest of red states, was the last state to recognize the holiday as a paid holiday for state employees

* Right-wing and Republican activists continue to peddle smears of Dr. King (see here, here, here, here, and here)

- Go to the original post by Blue Texan at firedoglake for links to all these Republican truths.

Obama Speech at MLK's Church

Some inspiration on Martin Luther King Day (celebrated.)



Transcript of Barack Obama speech
The Great Need of the Hour
Ebenezer Baptist Church
Sunday, January 20th, 2008
Atlanta, Georgia

The Mittwit 'Marched' 'With' Martin Luther King

I'm sure you read this latest Multiple Choice Mitt claim last week. First he said his dad George Romney marched with Martin Luther King. Then it turned out that the Mittwit had claimed to march with Martin Luther King himself!

"My father and I marched with Martin Luther King Jr. through the streets of Detroit."

Boston Herald, 1978 interview (as reported by the Boston Globe)

The Mittwit was forced to admit this was not true. (He didn't admit the lie himself; he had his campaign put out a statement: 'Yesterday, Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom acknowledged that was not true. "Mitt Romney did not march with Martin Luther King," he said in an e-mail statement to the Globe.') So Multiple Choice Mitt has been a liar for decades.

On hearing the news about him claiming George marched with MLK (we hadn't heard of the Herald interview yet) my brother & I began texting each other. My brother is a better texter than me and actually spells things write (Freudian slip!) & uses capitals and punctuation.

me: & mittwit's dad marched w/ m l king - not. pathological liar

BRO: That dude will say ANYTHING to get elected

me: he's big papi's father

BRO: Paul Revere changed his name from Romney

me: planted landmines while in france

BRO: Personally tore down the Berlin wall

me: built great wall of china

BRO: Spent a decade ministering to untouchables in Calcutta

me: son of god

BRO: Freed the slaves

me: will turn hillary to pillar of salt

BRO: Once escaped from chains and straitjacket and locked trunk submerged beneath frozen river.

BRO: Invented light bulb one morning, hypothesized theory of relativity that afternoon, cured polio that night.

me: ascended to heaven afterward

BRO: Planning to come again in glory to judge the living and the dead; also making longer-term plans for "kingdom that has no end"

BRO: Wrote the Magna Charta, built the pyramids, mapped the human genome, invented astroturf

me: mittwit invents fake grass - perfect

RIP Charles Langford, Lawyer for Rosa Parks

Rosa Parks leaving the Montgomery courthouse with her attorney, Charles Langford. Feb. 22, 1956. (photo via Academy of Achievement)

Farewell to a lawyer whose work changed our world.

Montgomery (AL) Advertiser: Editorial: Langford crucial to bus boycott

[H]e was best known as one of the attorneys for Rosa Parks and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. during the Montgomery Bus Boycott that began in 1955.

Langford assisted another young black lawyer, Fred Gray, in representing Parks during her trial and appeal for refusing to give up her seat on a city bus.

Langford and Gray also represented King and about 90 other Montgomerians when they were accused of violating the state's anti-boycott law.

Langford also was one of the team of attorneys who filed the Browder vs. Gayle lawsuit that ultimately resulted in Montgomery's segregated bus system being declared unconstitutional. The ruling ended the bus boycott after 381 days and served as a major step toward ending racial discrimination in public transportation nationally.

Montgomery (AL) Advertiser: Civil rights lawyer, veteran lawmaker Charles Langford dies

LATimes: Charles Langford, 84; Rosa Parks' lawyer and Alabama politician

WaPo: Alabama Senator Charles Langford; Rosa Parks's Lawyer

MontgomeryBoycott.com

We Love Lists

American Rhetoric: Top 100 Speeches of the 20th century (many with audio) Funny thing, the only Bush speech listed is Bar's 1990 Wellesley College commencement speech. Two speeches on the list by Carrie Chapman Catt, suffragist and foremother. The top ten:

1. Martin Luther King, Jr., "I Have A Dream"
2. John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Inaugural Address
3. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address
4. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Pearl Harbor Address to the Nation
5. Barbara Charline Jordan, 1976 DNC Keynote Address
6. Richard Milhous Nixon, "Checkers"
7. Malcolm X, "The Ballot or the Bullet"
8. Ronald Wilson Reagan, Shuttle ''Challenger'' Disaster Address
9. John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Houston Ministerial Association Speech
10. Lyndon Baines Johnson, "We Shall Overcome"

Harper's Index, February 2006

BTW, Harper's now has a blog.


Guardian (uk) Film of the book: top 50 adaptations revealed

Technorati's Top 100 Blogs (no, we're not on the list -- yet)

Not Just a Tired Seamstress

From Common Dreams:

The Real Rosa Parks
by Paul Rogat Loeb

We learn much from how we present our heroes. A few years ago, on Martin Luther King. Day, I was interviewed on CNN. So was Rosa Parks, by phone from Los Angeles. “We’re very honored to have her,” said the host. “Rosa Parks was the woman who wouldn’t go to the back of the bus. She wouldn’t get up and give her seat in the white section to a white person. That set in motion the year-long bus boycott in Montgomery. It earned Rosa Parks the title of ‘mother of the Civil Rights movement.’”

I was excited to hear Parks’s voice and to be part of the same show. Then it occurred to me that the host’s description--the story’s standard rendition and one repeated even in many of her obituaries--stripped the Montgomery boycott of all of its context. Before refusing to give up her bus seat, Parks had been active for twelve years in the local NAACP chapter, serving as its secretary. The summer before her arrest, she’d had attended a ten-day training session at Tennessee’s labor and civil rights organizing school, the Highlander Center, where she’d met an older generation of civil rights activists, like South Carolina teacher Septima Clark, and discussed the recent Supreme Court decision banning “separate-but-equal” schools. During this period of involvement and education, Parks had become familiar with previous challenges to segregation: Another Montgomery bus boycott, fifty years earlier, successfully eased some restrictions; a bus boycott in Baton Rouge won limited gains two years before Parks was arrested; and the previous spring, a young Montgomery woman had also refused to move to the back of the bus, causing the NAACP to consider a legal challenge until it turned out that she was unmarried and pregnant, and therefore a poor symbol for a campaign.

In short, Rosa Parks didn’t make a spur-of-the-moment decision. She didn’t single-handedly give birth to the civil rights efforts, but she was part of an existing movement for change, at a time when success was far from certain. We all know Parks’s name, but few of us know about Montgomery NAACP head E.D. Nixon, who served as one of her mentors and first got Martin Luther King involved. Nixon carried people’s suitcases on the trains, and was active in the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the union founded by legendary civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph. He played a key role in the campaign. No one talks of him, any more than they talk of JoAnn Robinson, who taught nearby at an underfunded and segregated Black college and whose Women’s Political Council distributed the initial leaflets following Parks’s arrest. Without the often lonely work of people like Nixon, Randolph, and Robinson, Parks would likely have never taken her stand, and if she had, it would never have had the same impact.

[]

Think again about the different ways one can frame Rosa Parks’s historic action. In the prevailing myth, Parks decides to act almost on a whim, in isolation. She’s a virgin to politics, a holy innocent. The lesson seems to be that if any of us suddenly got the urge to do something equally heroic, that would be great. Of course most of us don’t, so we wait our entire lives to find the ideal moment.

Parks’s real story conveys a far more empowering moral. She begins with seemingly modest steps. She goes to a meeting, and then another, helping build the community that in turn supported her path. Hesitant at first, she gains confidence as she speaks out. She keeps on despite a profoundly uncertain context, as she and others act as best they can to challenge deeply entrenched injustices, with little certainty of results. Had she and others given up after her tenth or eleventh year of commitment, we might never have heard of Montgomery....

I first learned the "true" story behind Rosa Parks seven years ago while preparing a case for trial. I was trying to come up with a good analogy in a sex discrimination case where my client tried for years to get a job for which she was qualified, for which only men were hired. She didn't have any monetary damages as the law recognizes them, because the job she held instead paid just as much as the one she longed to hold. When I suggested using Rosa Parks as our analogy -- how much could that bus ride have cost, 5 cents, but how much was it really worth, to be treated as a human being -- my friend S asked me if I knew the real story, that Parks was a local NAACP activist. I was shocked, having never heard anything but the sanitized version.

While I was in England most of the English papers printed the true, NAACP activist story. Was that the case here in the US?

RIP Constance Baker Motley, American Hero

Constance Baker Motley, Civil Rights Trailblazer, Dies at 84

Constance Baker Motley, a civil rights lawyer who fought nearly every important civil rights case for two decades and then became the first black woman to serve as a federal judge, died yesterday at NYU Downtown Hospital in Manhattan. She was 84.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said Isolde Motley, her daughter-in-law.

Judge Motley was the first black woman to serve in the New York State Senate, as well as the first woman to be Manhattan borough president, a position that guaranteed her a voice in running the entire city under an earlier system of local government called the Board of Estimate.

Judge Motley was at the center of the firestorm that raged through the South in the two decades after World War II, as blacks and their white allies pressed to end the segregation that had gripped the region since Reconstruction. She visited the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in jail, sang freedom songs in churches that had been bombed, and spent a night under armed guard with Medgar Evers, the civil rights leader who was later murdered.

But her métier was in the quieter, painstaking preparation and presentation of lawsuits that paved the way to fuller societal participation by blacks. She dressed elegantly, spoke in a low, lilting voice and, in case after case, earned a reputation as the chief courtroom tactician of the civil rights movement.

Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama and other staunch segregationists yielded, kicking and screaming, to the verdicts of courts ruling against racial segregation. These huge victories were led by the N.A.A.C.P.'s Legal Defense and Education Fund, led by Thurgood Marshall, for which Judge Motley, Jack Greenberg, Robert Carter and a handful of other underpaid, overworked lawyers labored.

In particular, she directed the legal campaign that resulted in the admission of James H. Meredith to the University of Mississippi in 1962. She argued 10 cases before the United States Supreme Court and won nine of them.

Now this was a woman who should have been on the Supreme Court. She never worked for the powers that be. She worked for justice. No one ever wondered if she had a heart. She would not have denied the positions she took for her clients were her own. She believed in everything she ever did or said. The contrasts to the reptilian John Roberts loom large for me tonight.

When I was in law school, a friend clerked for Senator Ted Kennedy (Uncle Ted, as my friend called him). We had many discussions as to who the Democrats should nominate if Thurgood Marshall or William Brennan resigned or died. (We were sure we'd win the 1988 election -- wrong.) I mentioned Constance Baker Motley, and when my friend looked her up he was blown away by the breadth of her accomplishments -- and that somehow, he'd never heard of her. But by then (20 years ago) she was almost too old to be nominated -- Presidents love to appoint 50 year olds who can dominate the court for decades.

We've lost another of the great ones.

Federal Judge Constance Baker Motley Dies

(Yes, I keep bumping this post to the top. She deserves the attention far more than moral cretin Tom Delay.)

SCOTUS Writes

Documents Show Roberts Influence In Reagan Era

Roberts presented a defense of bills in Congress that would have stripped the Supreme Court of jurisdiction over abortion, busing and school prayer cases; he argued for a narrow interpretation of Title IX, the landmark law that bars sex discrimination in intercollegiate athletic programs; and he even counseled his boss on how to tell the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s widow that the administration was cutting off federal funding for the Atlanta center that bears his name.

No wonder James Dobson likes him so much.

All the Ideology That's Fit to Print

The New York Times executive editor, Bill Keller, has announced that the paper must get more "diverse", and hire more conservatives and write more about religion.

Can you say, "complete capitulation?" Sad, really.

Billmon breaks it down: The Red State Times

And so we're starting to get reporting like this (taken from the Times Magazine's recent kissy face look at religious conservatives):

But as I learned spending time among the cultural conservatives who are leading the anti-gay-marriage charge, they have their own reasons for doing so, which are based on their reading of the Bible, their views about both homosexuality and the institution of marriage and the political force behind the issue . . . As with abortion, conservatives see gay marriage as a culture-altering change being implemented by judicial fiat.

This is followed by a seemingly endless spew of bigotry and lies -- more than 8,000 words worth -- all dressed up in that Times Voice of the Narrator God prose style. This includes passages such as:

''Lifestyle'' is a buzzword in conservative Christian circles. It's a signal of the belief, and the policy position, that homosexuality is not an innate condition but a hedonistic way of living, one devoted to partying, drugs and wanton sex that ends, often, in illness and early death.

And:

At its essence, then, the Christian conservative thinking about gay marriage runs this way. Homosexuality is not an innate, biological condition but a disease in society. Marriage is the healthy root of society. To put the two together is thus willfully to introduce disease to that root.

And:

Once the definition of marriage is altered, in this view, you will have this group of people declaring they want to marry that group; middle-aged men will exchange vows with children or with Doberman pinschers.

**********

This is shameful reporting, especially coming from a paper that, for all its faults, aggressively and at times courageously covered the civil rights movement -- at a time when most Americans (and not just Southerners) either supported segregation or just wished the issue would go away.

It's as if the New York Times of, say, 1963, had published a long, respectful essay on the racial views of Sheriff Bull Connor and the White Citizens Council, one that relegated Martin Luther King to the second-to-the-last paragraph, but included extended passages along the lines of:

''States Rights'' is a buzzword in conservative Southern circles. It's a signal of the belief, and the policy position, that blacks are slow, stupid and lazy, and want nothing more than to collect welfare payments and rape white women.

Or:

At its essence, then, Southern conservative thinking about race relations runs this way. God intended for the races to be separate. Racial mixing results in miscegenation. Segregation is the root of the Southern way of life and to abolish it would be willfully to introduce disease to that root

.

Echidne of the Snakes: New York Times: The Wingnut Edition

In other words, the Gray Lady is on her knees (take that as you wish). The wingnuts have won. I used to hear the argument that true diversity is not racial and gender based but the acknowledgement of wingnut views (such as that minorities are lazy and women naturally unable to compete) on each and every issue. But I only heard this from wingnuts. Now the New York Times is repeating the same mantra.

Not Everyone Agrees with Lizard Brain (Lawrence Summers)

The Boston Globe weighs in on Lawrence Summer's 20th century faux pas remarks:


Harvard women's group rips Summers

In his talk Friday at a conference on women and minorities in science and engineering, held at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Summers listed three possible explanations for the small number of women who excel at elite levels of science and engineering. He said he was deliberately being provocative, as he was asked to do by the organizers, and relying on the scholarship that was assembled for the conference rather than offering his own conclusions.

His first point was that women with children are often unwilling or unable to work 80-hour weeks. His second point was that in math and science tests, more males earn the very top scores, as well as the very bottom scores. He said that while no one knew why, "research in behavioral genetics is showing that things people attributed to socialization" might actually have a biological basis -- and that the issue needed to be studied further.

Several participants said that in making his second point, Summers suggested that women might not have the same "innate ability" or "natural ability" as men.

Summers' third point was about discrimination, and he said it was not clear that discrimination played a significant role in the shortage of women teaching science and engineering at top universities. However, he concluded by emphasizing that Harvard was taking many steps to boost diversity.

Summers' remarks were taped, but he has denied requests for a copy, saying it was a private, off-the-record meeting.

Perhaps it's gender block by Eileen McNamara

Personally, I blame PMS. Between the bloating and the foul mood, it was just easier to curl up with a heating pad and read romance novels than to measure the hypotenuse of a triangle.

I offer this possible explanation for the "F" I got in geometry in 10th grade, not in my official capacity as a columnist at The Boston Globe, but as a freelance provocateur. If unsubstantiated speculation about behavioral genetics is good enough for the president of Harvard, it's good enough for me.

I make no claim to the intellectual rigor that President Lawrence H. Summers brought to his unscripted remarks at a luncheon of the National Bureau of Economic Research the other day. I pulled my theory of female ineptitude out of thin air. Summers, on the other hand, characterizes as a "purely academic exploration of hypotheses" his idea that female scientists might be underrepresented in the academy and the professions because of innate differences between men and women.

To the untrained ear, that might sound like making it up out of whole cloth, but Larry Summers is the president of Harvard University, so let's just say his theory needs further study. Not that "anatomy is destiny" is exactly an original idea. Women have been hearing for eons that their lack of achievement, in the arts as well as the sciences, is the result of, variously, their weaker constitutions, their smaller brains, their delicate uteruses, and/or their unruly hormones.

GLOBE EDITORIAL
Summers's sense

ARE WOMEN and science like oil and water? Harvard's president, Lawrence Summers, says no, and in a statement Monday he described his deep commitment to the advancement of women in science.

But outrage flared last week when Summers spoke at a conference on women and minorities in the sciences and engineering. He raised questions about whether innate gender differences account for the low numbers of women in the sciences, the impact of long work weeks, socialization versus genes, and a possible dampening of discrimination.

**********

Are men and women innately different? It's a moot point, since women have already shown they can be first-class scientists.

DERRICK Z. JACKSON
Summers's tortured logic

HARVARD President Lawrence Summers had impeccable timing for his slip of the tongue. It was the beginning of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend. Summers spoke at a conference titled, "Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce: Women, Underrepresented Minorities and their S. and E. careers." The conference came 44 years after King said: "If we are to implement the American dream we must get rid of the notion once and for all that there are superior and inferior races."

Four and a half decades later, Summers took to the podium to wonder why women struggle in those highly technical fields. He said perhaps one reason was because women with children were not willing or were unable to work 80-hour weeks. Then he noted, according to newspaper reports, how more boys than girls in late high school had superior test scores in science and math.

He wondered if "innate differences," "innate ability," or "natural ability" could be involved.

**********

Summers's mind was fixed on a target as stale as a decade ago when Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein tried to revive notions of racial inferiority in their best-selling book "The Bell Curve." The authors cited IQ scores as fixed facts that should make us abandon the American dream.

**********

Summers of course would say he meant nothing so crude. But every time a privileged white guy blurts out something verging on the Cro-Magnon (instead of, for instance, decrying 80-hour work weeks and demanding that fathers better share the parenting), it puts the discussion of what really holds back women and people of color into a holding pattern. That means further discouragement for the young and silent destruction of careers for the groups that do not share such privilege.

Kerry's new slogan

"Let America Be America Again"

From a Langston Hughes poem.

It's a start. Kerry must be positive, hopeful and optimistic to win. He can't simply be against Bush's policies. And the majority of voters won't know or care what his policies are. They're too busy working -- that's what increased productivity is, fewer people working harder -- if you're in the modern American work force, you know what I'm talking about. Voters will respond to their general impression of the candidate. Do they like him? Is he going to be a good leader? Do they trust him?

I like this slogan because it reflects what has been coming out of me for the last few weeks every day when I turn on my computer to see the latest war atrocities. "This is not my America!" I think to myself, "This is not my country. I want my country back. We are better than this."

Kerry needs his own great line. John F. Kennedy: Ask not what your country can do, ask what you can do for your country. Robert Kennedy: "Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not." Bill Clinton: I still believe in a place called hope. Martin Luther King: I have a dream.

John Kerry: Let America be America again.

It's a start.