tar baby ain't sayin' nothin'

Obama defends choice of pastor
By Associated PressThursday, December 18, 2008
CHICAGO - President-elect Barack Obama is defending his choice of Pastor Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at his inauguration.
The selection brought objections from gay rights advocates who say they’re troubled by Warren’s support for a California ballot initiative banning gay marriage. It was approved by voters last month.
Obama told reporters in Chicago that America needs to "come together," even when there’s disagreement on social issues. He also said it’s "no secret" that he’s a "fierce advocate for equality" for gays and lesbians — and he said that support will continue.
Obama pointed out that a couple of years ago, he was invited to Warren’s church to speak, despite their disagreement on some issues.
The president-elect says a "wide range of viewpoints" will be presented during the inaugural festivities.

val, baby, paleese

BY NATASHA KORECKI AND FRAN SPIELMAN Staff Reporters
President-elect Barack Obama's incoming chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, was pushing for Obama's successor just days after the Nov. 4 election, sources told the Chicago Sun-Times.
Emanuel privately urged Gov. Blagojevich's administration to appoint Obama confidante Valerie Jarrett, and the Sun-Times learned Tuesday that he also pressed that it be done by a certain deadline.
Sources told the Sun-Times that Emanuel urged Blago's administration to select Barack Obama's Senate replacement by a certain deadline.
Jarrett was initially interested in the U.S. Senate post before Obama tapped her to be a White House senior adviser, sources say.
The disclosure comes days after Obama's camp downplayed Jarrett's interest in the post.
At one point, an "emissary" who said he represented Jarrett had discussions with Blagojevich chief of staff John Harris and the governor about naming Jarrett to the post, according to a criminal complaint.
In addition to the discussions, Emanuel submitted a list of names of candidates suitable to the Obama team to the governor's administration. Jarrett was not among those names because she had pulled herself out of the running at that point, a source with the Obama camp said.
Obama said Monday that an internal report detailing any staff contacts with the embattled governor or his aide would be made public next week.
Emanuel's discussions do not indicate he was involved in dealmaking with the governor. However, his deeper involvement creates a sticky political situation for Obama.
An Emanuel source said it was "possible" that Emanuel discussed the appointment with Harris and that a specific date was mentioned. "Valerie was deciding whether she wanted to go the Senate. Others had talked to her about it. There were plenty of people who talked to her about it and thought she would be a good choice," the source said.
Jarrett could not be reached for comment about the conversations. Emanuel has refused to answer questions about his conversations with either the governor or his top aides.
Last week's explosive charges and arrest of Blagojevich have put into play impeachment proceedings against the governor, which continue today in Springfield. The arrest also triggered a request to the Illinois Supreme court to remove Blagojevich from office.
Blagojevich was charged with trying to leverage the U.S. Senate seat appointment for campaign contributions, an ambassadorship or job for himself and his wife.

mon mec aurait du m' du pardon

First lady of France, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy

sues to get naked pictures of her on handbags destroyed
Posted in December 13th, 2008
by Claudette Rothman in world
France first lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy is suing fashion label Pardon over her image being used on handbags without her permission.
Fashion label Pardon is selling black and white canvas handbags that have a naked picture of the first lady, which was taken in 1993, with her hands crossed covering her private area.
Attorneys for Sarkozy stated, the use of the picture on the bags amounted to theft of her image and want the bags removed from shops and destroyed. In a statement released to the public, he said, “Carla Bruni-Sarkozy has exclusive and absolute rights over her image; the photo has been used without her consent……and to promotional and commercial ends.”
Peter Mertes, owner of Pardon’s fashions argued that the picture was of a public woman, you could find photo of her everywhere.
April of this year, an authorized print of the photo sold for $75,000 at an auction for charity.

what didn't he know, and when didn't he know it?

Obama's unsatisfyingly vague response

to the Blagojevich scandal

John Dickerson
When a president-to-be does anything for the first time, it's interesting. Today we saw Barack Obama give his first denial related to a scandal. It's good practice, because sooner or later, a scandal (real or manufactured) will confront him while he's in office. As New York Sun reporter Josh Gerstein (I think it was he) used to joke: On any given day, you could ask President Clinton, "Mr. President what about the allegations?"
How did Obama do when asked about Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich's effort to hawk his Senate post? It was a bit of a muddle.
Obama was asked: "Were you aware at all about what was happening with your Senate seat?" He responded: "I had no contact with the governor or his office and so we were not, I was not aware of what was happening." He didn't want to go any further, citing the ongoing investigation.
It's hard to know what to make of this. As I wrote initially, Obama and his team come off quite well in the indictment. They didn't want to pay-or-play in any of the governor's games. In fact, this is what seems to have propelled Blagoevich into several bouts of plenteous profanity.
But Obama's answer wasn't terribly nourishing. First, as Jake Tapper notes, this seemed to contradict a statement last month by David Axelrod, Obama's top strategist. "I know he's talked to the governor," Axelrod said about the Senate seat, "and there are a whole range of names, many of which have surfaced, and I think he has a fondness for a lot of them."
The second part of Obama's answer was so vague as to be nearly meaningless. "I was not aware of what was happening" can mean anything you want it to. It can mean you weren't aware of anything relating to the Senate seat, or that you weren't aware the governor was trying to sell the Senate seat, or that you weren't aware the governor was under federal investigation for trying to sell the Senate seat. Or it could mean you were not aware that Blagojevich was using hairspray (or not, as the case may be).
The answer has the whiff of imprecision we're familiar with from politicians. They want to sound definitive without being definitive. But it's also true that officials can also run into trouble by acting in good faith. They try to give a short, simple, digestible denial, and by going for brevity, they unwittingly leave a door open. Was Obama purposefully trying to be unclear? It's hard to say. It's a little hard to believe that he didn't know anything that was happening relating to his old seat. Maybe he's just really, really focused—though he did say on Meet the Press, when ducking a question about Caroline Kennedy being appointed senator from New York, "The last thing I want to do is get involved in New York politics. I've got enough trouble in terms of Illinois politics."
Obama refused to elaborate on the Blagojevich business, citing the ongoing investigation. But an Obama aide responded to my questions by telling me that Axelrod was mistaken.
So much for the first part of the president-elect's answer. We now know, according to transition officials, that Obama did not speak with the governor or anyone else from his office about who would replace him.
What we don't know, and what the aide would not address, is what Obama meant by the second part of his statement. Did he really know nothing at all about what Blagojevich was doing with his Senate seat? If so, that would seem to be as easy to clear up as the Axelrod mix-up. But the aide wouldn't go any further. This could just be a function of an aide not wanting to speak for the next president. That's a healthy instinct—for the aide's survival and for all of us.
So we're left with vagueness. Why does it matter? It always matters when a politician won't say the simple thing. Maybe it matters a little more with Obama, who can answer the dickens out of a question when he wants to. There's evidence that Obama wanted Valerie Jarrett to take his seat—the governor sure seemed to think the president-elect wanted that. Suddenly, in the middle of the process, Obama stopped wanting that. Why?

a tale from the dark side

Dr. King’s Documents Withdrawn From Auction
By MOTOKO RICH
December 11, 2008

On the eve of a planned Sotheby’s auction of three documents related to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Harry Belafonte, the singer and a friend of Dr. King who owned the papers, withdrew the items for sale.
In a brief statement released on Wednesday afternoon, Sotheby’s said the items had been removed from the auction roster “at the request of Mr. Harry Belafonte.” Sotheby’s gave no reason for the withdrawal, and Mr. Belafonte did not return calls left with his agent.
The items scheduled for the auction on Thursday included a three-page handwritten outline of one of Dr. King’s most important speeches, “The Casualties of the War in Vietnam,” delivered in February 1967, and notes for a speech recovered from his suit pocket after he was assassinated in 1968. The third document was a typewritten condolence letter to Coretta Scott King, Dr. King’s widow, from President Lyndon B. Johnson.
After news reports early this week about the auction the King estate released a statement condemning the sale and saying that it believed the documents had been “wrongly acquired” by Mr. Belafonte.
“The King estate contends that these documents are the property of the estate of Martin Luther King Jr.,” the statement read. “Mrs. Coretta Scott King and the King estate stopped a previous attempt by members of Harry Belafonte’s family to anonymously and secretly auction wrongfully acquired King documents through a Beverly Hills auction house.” In the statement the estate said lawyers were “looking into issues related to the December 11th Sotheby’s auction of King documents.”
Joseph M. Beck, a lawyer representing the King estate, did not return calls or an e-mail message seeking comment. Calls to Bernice King and Martin Luther King III, children of Dr. King, were not returned. Phillip Jones, a King family representative, and Isaac Newton Farris Jr., a nephew of Dr. King and president of the King Center in Atlanta, did not return calls.
In a telephone interview before Mr. Belafonte withdrew the items for sale, David Redden, vice chairman of Sotheby’s, said that the outline for the anti-Vietnam War speech was written in Mr. Belafonte’s Manhattan apartment. The notes from Dr. King’s pocket, Mr. Redden said, had originally been given by Mrs. King to Stanley Levison, an adviser to Dr. King, who left the notes to Mr. Belafonte. Mr. Redden said that Mrs. King had given the condolence letter to Mr. Belafonte. Mr. Redden, who estimated the documents together could fetch from $750,000 to $1.3 million, declined to comment on whether the King family objected to the sale of the papers.
Mr. Belafonte originally met Dr. King, the civil rights leader, when he gave a speech at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem in the mid-1950s. In an interview this week with The Associated Press Mr. Belafonte said he met with Dr. King for four hours in the basement of the church outlining plans for the singer to help spread the civil-rights message through the entertainment industry. In the interview Mr. Belafonte said he later invited Mr. King to use his apartment during his visits to New York. In other news media interviews Mr. Belafonte said he planned to donate the proceeds from the auction to charities representing “the disenfranchised.”
Mr. Belafonte appeared to fall out with the King family around the time of Mrs. King’s funeral in 2006, when he was invited, and then disinvited, to give a eulogy.
The King family has been criticized for its handling of Dr. King’s papers and for trying to profit from them. In 2006 the family selected about 10,000 items from its collection of his papers to auction at Sotheby’s. At the last minute the collection was withdrawn from auction because the city of Atlanta secured a privately financed loan of $32 million and established a nonprofit organization to buy the papers and store them at Morehouse College, Dr. King’s alma mater.
David J. Garrow, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Dr. King, said that the Belafonte documents were historically important and that he hoped they would go to a “professionally respectable archive.” In addition to Morehouse, Boston University, where Dr. King received his Ph.D., holds a collection of his papers. “It is regrettable if Mr. Belafonte has been intimidated by the estate, if indeed he was going to put the proceeds to good social cause,” Mr. Garrow said in a telephone interview. “Given the years of intimate loyalty that Belafonte had with Dr. King, he is one of the last people who should be legally intimidated by the estate.”
Taylor Branch, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of a trilogy on Dr. King and a friend of Mr. Belafonte, said he was more concerned about the fate of hundreds of documents still stored in the King Center, the nonprofit foundation started by the King family in Atlanta. “Most of Doc King’s collections are locked up in the King archives, which have been essentially nonfunctional for years,” Mr. Branch said. “This is what really worries historians, which is that everything will get lost.”
Clayborne Carson, founding director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University and director of the King Papers at Morehouse, said that he was not so concerned about the content of Mr. Belafonte’s papers getting lost, because Mr. Carson had already obtained copies from Sotheby’s. “To me the buying and selling of papers is a whole other world from what my interest is,” Mr. Carson, a historian, said. “I wish we could go back to the days when people cared about the ideas as opposed to the commodity.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: December 12, 2008 An article on Thursday about Harry Belafonte’s withdrawal of documents related to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that he had planned to auction, including notes for a speech found in Dr. King’s pocket after he was assassinated, misspelled the surname of an adviser to Dr. King who left the notes to Mr. Belafonte. He was Stanley Levison, not Levinson.

BLAGO!#@$%

"...SUCK IT UP" FOR TWO YEARS AND DO NOTHING AND GIVE THIS "MOTHERFUCKER (THE PRESIDENT-ELECT) HIS SENATOR. FUCK HIM. FOR NOTHING? FUCK HIM"....."THEY'RE NOT WILLING TO GIVE ME ANYTHING EXCEPT APPRECIATION. FUCK THEM."

- ROD BLAGOJEVICH

PARIS VS. HAVANA

Paris vs. Havana
By ROGER COHEN
Paris
Since visiting Cuba a few weeks ago, I’ve been thinking about the visual assault on our lives. Climb in a New York taxi these days and a TV comes on with its bombardment of news and ads. It’s become passé to gaze out the window, watch the sunlight on a wall, a child’s smile, the city breathing.
In Havana, I’d spend long hours contemplating a single street. Nothing — not a brand, an advertisement or a neon sign — distracted me from the city’s sunlit surrender to time passing. At a colossal price, Fidel Castro’s pursuit of socialism has forged a unique aesthetic, freed from agitation, caught in a haunting equilibrium of stillness and decay.
Such empty spaces, away from the assault of marketing, beyond every form of message (e-mail, text, twitter), erode in the modern world, to the point that silence provokes a why-am-I-not-in-demand anxiety. Technology induces ever more subtle forms of addiction, to products, but also to agitation itself. The global mall reproduces itself, its bright and air-conditioned sterility extinguishing every distinctive germ.
Paris, of course, has resisted homogenization. It’s still Paris, with its strong Haussmannian arteries, its parks of satisfying geometry, its islands pointing their prows toward the solemn bridges, its gilt and gravel, its zinc-roofed maids’ rooms arrayed atop the city as if deposited by some magician who stole in at night.
It’s still a place where temptation exists only to be yielded to and where time stops to guard forever an image in the heart. All young lovers should have a row in the Tuileries in order to make up on the Pont Neuf.
Yet, for all its enduring seductiveness, Paris has ceased to be the city that I knew. The modern world has sucked out some essence, leaving a film-set perfection hollowed out behind the five-story facades. The past has been anaesthetized. It has been packaged. It now seems less a part of the city’s fabric than it is a kitschy gimmick as easily reproduced as a Lautrec poster.
I know, in middle age the business of life is less about doing things for the first than for the last time. It is easy to feel a twinge of regret. Those briny oysters, the glistening mackerel on their bed of ice at the Rue Mouffetard, the drowsy emptied city in August, the unctuousness of a Beef Bourguignon: these things can be experienced for the first time only once.
So what I experience in Paris is less what is before me than the memory it provokes of the city in 1975. Memories, as Apollinaire noted, are like the sound of hunters’ horns fading in the wind. Still, they linger. The town looks much the same, if prettified. What has changed has changed from within.
At dinner with people I’d known back then, I was grappling with this elusive feeling when my friend lit a match. It was a Russian match acquired in Belgrade and so did not conform to current European Union nanny-state standards. The flame jumped. The sulfur whiff was pungent. A real match!
Then it came to me: what Paris had lost to modernity was its pungency. Gone was the acrid Gitane-Gauloise pall of any self-respecting café. Gone was the garlic whiff of the early-morning Metro to the Place d’Italie. Gone were the mineral mid-morning Sauvignons Blancs downed bar-side by red-eyed men.
Gone were the horse butchers and the tripe restaurants in the 12th arrondissement. Gone (replaced by bad English) was the laconic snarl of Parisian greeting. Gone were the bad teeth, the yellowing moustaches, the hammering of artisans, the middle-aged prostitutes in doorways, the seat-less toilets on the stairs, and an entire group of people called the working class.
Gone, in short, was Paris in the glory of its squalor, in the time before anyone thought a Frenchman would accept a sandwich for lunch, or decreed that the great unwashed should inhabit the distant suburbs. The city has been sanitized.
But squalor connects. When you clean, when you favor hermetic sealing in the name of safety, you also disconnect people from one another. When on top of that you add layers of solipsistic technology, the isolation intensifies. In its preserved Gallic disguise, Paris is today no less a globalized city than New York.
Havana has also preserved its architecture — the wrought-iron balconies, the caryatids, the baroque flourishes — even if it is crumbling. What has been preserved with it, thanks to socialist economic disaster, is that very pungent texture Paris has lost to modernity.
The slugs of Havana Club rum in bars lit by fluorescent light, the dominos banged on street tables, the raucous conversations in high doorways, the whiff of puros, the beat through bad speakers of drums and maracas, the idle sensuality of Blackberry-free days: Cuba took me back decades to an era when time did not always demand to be put to use.
I thought I’d always have Paris. But Havana helped me see, by the flare of a Russian match, that mine is gone.