Crunched shoulder to shoulder on a cold bench in The Tombs, with the courtroom hundreds of feet above us on the surface of Manhattan, up there beyond the reach of these hundreds of African-American and Hispanic men.  Well, there was me, and then a couple guys who looked like elderly Keith Richards, but without the money to replace their blood.

The floor was covered with men in fetal positions, trying to ball up for warmth.  I took my turn on the floor, hoping against all odds to make my white polyester suit into some kind of sleeping bag.  I closed my eyes – warming up on thoughts of Savi and Lena.  Only charged with misdemeanor trespass – I should have gotten signed out of Midtown North.  I did the freezing 18 hours in the Tombs (went ‘into the system’) on the request of the UBS bank security people.  But maybe after our sermons and songs in their lobby, those guys knew now what mountaintop removal and fracking and tar sands are.  That’s what they are defending.

Time this time was hard.  I usually force myself into vivid movie-dreams.  (I call it my ‘jail Zen.’) Maybe it was the cold – I couldn’t do it this time.  I usually have memories that I go to, and I remember carefully the details of old pine trees in from my grandparents’ backyard, and then a cat will turn in the grasses and say something to me, and a dead friend will walk up smiling.  And then I’m off to the races, having a movie to watch while my body is cramped in the cold.

I’m in a jet now two days later, flying west toward California where some young people have created a festival called “Think Before You Buy.”  There is a video screen inches from my face, in the back of the seat in front of me.  Will I start a movie-dream there?  If I did – it would destroy my writing.  That screen is dark now, but when I took my seat it featured an image of Santa Claus on it.  He held a bottle of Coca Cola in the air, chugging its contents into his white bearded smile, under the phrase OPEN HAPPINESS.  This was soon replaced by an automobile ad, the new Lincoln Towncar.  The tag line for this gleaming item was MORE THAN JUST LUXURIOUS.  ITS SMARTER THAN THAT.  I spent some time wondering what this means.

The jet is essentially a consumer environment.  We are dazzled with repetitive recordings and sky shopping and media, but are told to keep our seat-belts fastened.  It is freezing cold here too, but in another way.  We’re frozen in recycled warmth.  In the Tombs, the grandfathers and brothers could burst into laughter, a shouted story always flamboyantly unfolding.  Here my transcendence and human contact is my letter to you.

Corporate profits are up, especially in finance, and yet hiring and wages aren’t. No matter how much productivity spikes, wages stay stagnant. They haven’t budged. That means workers doing more work for less pay. So what’s a Democratic administration to do?

Freeze federal workers’ wages! That’s what. President Obama on Monday announced a two year pay freeze for civilian federal workers. “The hard truth” is that controlling the deficit’s going to “require some broad sacrifice” that public workers are going to have to share in, said the Pres.

A brave move to take on those overpriced slackers on the federal dime. . . Right?

Not quite. Federal workers are an easy target because it’s been drilled into us that public workers are soaking up taxpayer largesse. But it’s not true. As Lawrence Mishel at the Economic Policy Institute notes, federal workers’ pay actually lags behind the private sector about 22%–according to the government’s own figures.

And although that $2 billion Obama estimates he’ll save in cost-of-living increases for federal employees sounds like a lot of money, it isn’t. I mean, compare it to the $700 billion that we handed over to Wall Street, or the $700 billion we pour into the war budget…

But where else is the government going to get $2 billion? Well, journalist and Das Krapital blogger Moe Tkacik points out that if we wanted to raise taxes on the wealthiest one percent instead, we’d have to raise them a whole lot! Like, 0.072 percentage points! (“Tax only billionaires and centimillionaires, and you could do it with an extra 0.275% in taxes at most,” she notes.)

But why tax bailed-out billionaires when there are struggling federal workers you can squeeze?

And a public employees union you can stick it to?

I mean, who ELSE are they going to vote for?

The F Word is a regular commentary by Laura Flanders, the host of GRITtv and editor of At The Tea Party, out now from OR Books. GRITtv broadcasts weekdays on DISH Network and DIRECTv, on cable, and online at GRITtv.org and TheNation.com. Follow GRITtv or GRITlaura on Twitter and be our friend on Facebook.

Crossposted on Tikkun Daily

By Neil Hanson

The flap over the TSA searches of airline passengers highlights just how far we’ve fallen into the deep chasm of slavery to fear and the illusion of security.

I have zero doubt in my mind that the deep and exhaustive searches that we submit ourselves to when we fly reduces the threat of violence on aircraft, and reduces the risk that we’ll experience another event like 9/11 employing passenger airliners as weapons.

We’re absolutely mitigating a risk, and we’re paying a price to do so. The annual budget of the TSA is about $6.3 billion, and that doesn’t count all the collateral financial costs of a nation submitting to this level of scrutiny. We also pay with the loss of one more portion of our privacy.

Is this collection of prices worth the benefit we receive in the form of a risk that is partially mitigated?

There is no doubt that if we give the state complete power to invade our privacy, and complete visibility into the private lives of all citizens, we will be able to greatly reduce the risk that we will experience violence. But is that a price we’re willing to pay?

In the nearly 9 years since 9/11 occurred, we have instituted and maintained very intrusive and rude personal searches of anyone who travels the public airline systems. In that time, we have the deaths of approximately 3500 people on 9/11 as the toll of the risk that we’re trying to mitigate. Let’s put that into the context of the other risks that we gladly accept each day of our lives.

During those 9 years, well over a million people have died of lung cancer. Tobacco is the leading cause of lung cancer – it is directly linked to the disease, and we know without a doubt that if you smoke, you’re about 20 times more likely to die of lung cancer. Yet, we have few restrictions at all on our ability to smoke tobacco if we choose. We accept the risk, and don’t believe our right to make our own private decisions should be impinged on by the state. Put this into perspective – for every life lost on 9/11, we lost 300 or 400 lives during the past 9 years to lung cancer.

During those 9 years, close to half a million people have died on the streets and highways of our nation. Again put into perspective, that’s 100 lives lost over the last 9 years for every life lost on 9/11. Yet, most of us are delighted in our ability to get into our car or truck and drive wherever and whenever we want, often putting ourselves in very risky situations, accepting the risk gladly. Would we consider banning the use of automobiles in order to reduce that risk? By doing so, we could reduce the loss of lives in this country each year by 10 times the loss that occurred on 9/11.

While I don’t smoke, I also don’t want the state telling me I can’t if I want to. If I did decide to smoke, I’d do so with the understanding of the risk. I will absolutely continue to drive my car or truck, and am not likely to give up that convenience. I understand the risk, and accept this as part of the deal.

Yet, we have no problem submitting to rude searches of our person and our personal effects each time we walk into an airport. We’re also going to begrudgingly accept even more intrusive searches going forward, allowing ourselves to be essentially stripped and searched.

I’m not trying to be insensitive to anyone’s loss either on 9/11, on our highways, or to lung cancer. I’ve personally lost people I love dearly to lung cancer, and I’ve lost people I love dearly to highway accidents. On 9/11/01, I worked for a company that was located in the WTC, though we were fortunate to have no loss of life.

I also understand completely that the administration that was in power when 9/11 occurred used the tragedy to whip up fear and patriotism in order to implement their political agenda. The mainstream media that largely supports the right wing in this nation did all they could to play into this orgy of fear – fear sells, after all. But time has passed, and we’ve shed ourselves of that regime. Isn’t it time to sit back and look at our actions in a logical and reasonable fashion?

I’m all for mitigating risks. Anyone who is in the risk mitigation business knows that to mitigate a risk, there will always be a cost. In the case of public safety, there are going to be multiple costs with every risk mitigation strategy. The strategy that we’ve chosen for air travel safety is to spend billions of dollars each year and to compromise the privacy of citizens in the process. If we didn’t spend this money, how many lives would we likely lose each year as a result? I know that some people will cry in indignation that a single life is one too many, but that’s just hogwash. After all, we accept 150,000 deaths a year due to lung cancer – an absolutely preventable risk that we allow. We accept 35,000 deaths a year on our highways.

Living is a risky business. Walking out the front door in the morning exposes each of us to way more risk than we’re willing to consider. Isn’t it time we accepted that flying is a risky business too? Give me back my privacy, and save most of the $6.3 billion we spend on the TSA each year. There’s a risk we’ll accept, just like the rest of the world accepts the risk, and just like we accept countless other far greater risks every single day.

Neil Hanson is a writer who lives and works in Colorado. He is a conservative who believes true conservatives and progressives have much in common. He also earns his livelihood working in corporate America as a project manager and software architect. He recently published Peace at the Edge of Uncertainty, (2010 – High Prairie Press). He can be found at his spiritual, nonpolitical blog and his Facebook page.

Land of the Free image was found here, unfortunately with no credit to the artist.

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A rather nauseating statement from a Government Accountability Office report on foreclosures:

Because they generally focus on the areas with greatest risk to the institutions they supervise, federal banking regulators had not generally examined servicers’ foreclosure practices, such as whether foreclosures are completed; however, given the ongoing mortgage crisis, they have recently placed greater emphasis on these areas.

You read that right. Bank regulators in the United States were not even looking at foreclosure practices before the media latched onto the foreclosure fraud outbreak. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Reserve acknowledged this in hearings two weeks ago, but it’s still harrowing to see the degree to which mortgage banking remains totally free of oversight, even after it drove the global economy off a cliff.

The rest of the report is about banks abandoning properties instead of proceeding with a foreclosure sale. Kind of sick– throw a family out, then just abandon the house altogether, don’t even bother to sell it. The GAO says it’s not happening too much, but any sane businessperson would make sure that it never happens. A simple loan modification would cut everybody’s losses here, but the banks can’t be bothered with that. And nobody is bothering the banks about it.

UPDATE:

The behavior by federal bank regulators here is outrageous enough that it deserves a second dose of criticism.

You may recall that there was a tremendous legislative battle earlier this year over the creation of a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency. The bank lobby and regulators at the Fed, the OCC and yes, even the FDIC, all argued that we didn’t need it, while essentially everybody else said we did. The existing regulatory chiefs all made the same basic argument against the CFPA: We have several regulators who oversee consumer protection, and they’re all just great at it. Creating a new agency that focused only on consumer protection would be end up destabilizing the financial system, because regulating consumer protection without looking at bank safety and soundness would jeopardize bank capital levels.

This argument was absurd at the time, most obviously because the existing regulators were simply awful. They totally failed to restrain predatory mortgage lending for nearly a full decade precisely because they considered “safety and soundess” regulation to be their only job. Safety and soundness was construed as “bank profitability”—if a bank had lots of money, it was less likely to fail. In practice, that meant regulators would allow consumer protection violations so long as they made money for the bank. With the mortgage crisis, this consumer protection failure ultimately lead to a safety and soundness catastrophe, but that’s not actually very common. Usually predatory lending is very profitable, which is why banks do it.

So what happened after all the top regulators went out in public and repeatedly screamed that we absolutely can’t allow them to lose their consumer protection authority? They totally ignored consumer protection regulation. Look at the excuse that bank regulators fed to the GAO (emphasis mine):

Because they generally focus on the areas with greatest risk to the institutions they supervise, federal banking regulators had not generally examined servicers’ foreclosure practices.

Translation: Even after consumer protection violations wrecked the largest banks in the country, we still don’t look at consumer protection unless it actually hurts a bank’s bottom line, right away, right now.

The amazing thing here is that the legal liabilities from these foreclosure abuses once again could be putting bank solvency on the line. Global economy to Elizabeth Warren: Help!

Also, the link above is to a summary of the GAO report. The full report is here.

Yesterday, The New York Times ran an editorial opposing a new Federal Reserve proposal to eliminate predatory lending penalties. The rule under consideration is the same obscure regulation I blogged about a couple of weeks back, and it’s very encouraging to see major publications paying close attention to the technical workings of regulatory policy. Usually even important rules like this slide right by under the media radar, but this particular rule is a major signal as to how policymakers will deal with the ever-escalating foreclosure fraud problem. Will the Fed and it’s allies stand up for homeowners and the rule of law, even if it means sticking it to the banks? Or will they continue to screw homeowners to preserve capital at too-big-to-fail behemoths?

The Times editorial makes essentially the same argument I did, and it’s totally correct, if I do say so myself. Right now, when a bank is found guilty of illegally withholding information about a mortgage from a borrower, the borrower can “rescind” the loan. They still have to pay off the principal balance, but all profits that the bank would have reaped from the loan—interest, fees, etc.—are nullified, and the bank loses its right to foreclose on the borrower.

This process is called “rescission,” and it reflects a standard feature of contract law that dates back several centuries. If a contract is fraudulent, the minimum proper remedy is to undo the contract. With mortgages, this means the bank gets its money back, but it doesn’t get to keep the profits it would have made from an illegal loan. Restricting borrower access to information is a key tactic in predatory lending, and as The Times notes, rescission is essentially the only federal remedy available to homeowners who have been defrauded.

The Fed is now attempting to eliminate this remedy due to “concern over banks’ compliance costs,” as The Times describes it. This is a rather generous description of the proposal, given the depth and severity of the foreclosure fraud outbreak currently sweeping the country. There are three key places that banks can commit fraud in the mortgage process—when the mortgage is pushed on a borrower, when the mortgage is sold to an investor, and when a bank is collecting payments or foreclosing. Much of the fraudulent activity we see among investors and in the foreclosure process helps cover-up fraud at the original sale of the mortgage to a borrower.

If borrowers cannot obtain relief through rescission, then they have little reason to press claims about fraud in other parts of the mortgage process. This is an enormous gift to the nation’s four largest banks, with major public policy implications that go beyond the very critical problem of rampant, illegal foreclosures. If borrowers don’t press claims about foreclosure fraud, investors will not be able to access key information for filing lawsuits.

The single gravest threat to bank balance sheets (and bonuses) is a slew of lawsuits from mortgage bond investors. Banks packaged lousy mortgages into bonds and sold them off to investors, often without making proper disclosures to the investors, who subsequently lost a ton of money. Investors are currently organizing to take action against the banks, and in many cases have obvious, open-and-shut fraud claims against Wall Street titans if their cases come to court. But the key is actually getting their case before a judge. To do that, 25 percent of the investors in any bond have to file a lawsuit together. For multi-billion-dollar bond issues, that requires coordination among dozens of different institutions, often from different countries. That’s a difficult technical feat, but investors will be much more likely to participate if they have lots of evidence of fraud before them. That evidence is produced by homeowners pressing their own individual cases. If homeowners don’t go to court because they can’t get anything out of it, the investors will have a harder time organizing.

So the Fed isn’t really concerned about “compliance costs.” This is, in fact, a rather absurd notion. Predatory lending is a form of theft. Imagine if the shoe were on the other foot, and the bank was being robbed. Can you imagine bank robbers complaining about the “compliance costs” of having to give back stolen cash? They  would be laughed out of any courtroom. But the Fed is not only seriously considering such an argument from bankers, it is actively promoting it as official public policy.

The Fed’s proposal is itself illegal. Regulators like the Fed have the right to make rules that enforce laws passed by Congress. When Congress passed the Truth in Lending Act in 1968, it explicitly granted borrowers the right of rescission as a remedy for predatory lending. The Fed is now attempting to interpret that statute to mean that, actually, borrowers have no such right. If the Fed’s proposal is enacted, it will be a 180-degree reversal of the law on the books.

It’s hard to imagine a way for the Fed to disgrace itself any further than it did by failing to rein in the mortgage mess over the past decade. But if it proceeds with this effort to protect banks that engaged in predatory lending, it will not only be guilty of falling down on the job and looking the other way, but of actively encouraging illegal mortgage lending.

Whether the Fed withdraws its proposal or not, this is not what bank regulators are supposed to do, especially in the middle of a foreclosure fraud crisis. Elizabeth Warren and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will get formal jurisdiction over these issues in July 2011, and it won’t come a moment too soon. The Fed is proving, once again, that it cannot be trusted to protect the middle class from illegal abuses. Or even simply follow the law itself.

Written by Francis Kissling for RHRealityCheck.org – News, commentary and community for reproductive health and justice.

Last week’s published comments by Pope Benedict regarding the case by case permissibility of condom use to prevent the transmission of the AIDS virus was a welcome, if modest, shift in position.  After some back and forth, the Vatican clarified that–contrary to the hope of conservative supporters of the condom ban–it is applicable not just to “male prostitutes” but also to “a woman, a man or a transsexual.”   

While there is great respect in the AIDS community for the commitment of Catholic health care providers in the developing world to treating people with AIDS and for some aspects of their work on behavior change, as well as among advocates for the just provision of anti-retroviral drugs, questions remain about the extent to which religious beliefs about sexual morality should influence global AIDS policy. Catholic positions against contraception and limiting sexual intimacy to lifelong monogamous heterosexual marriage have been seen as the major reason the Vatican, bishops in various regions of the world, and Catholic AIDS providers have refused to provide condoms as part of the three-tiered AIDS prevention strategy known as “ABC” (abstain, be faithful, use condoms).

There is no doubt that the Pope’s nod to the use of condoms by an HIV-infected person under certain circumstances will lead to significant loosening of the strictures on condom provision, although the rapidity with which the U.S.-based Catholic Relief Services issued a statement saying that their “current policy holds: we do not purchase, distribute or promote the use of condoms” was disappointing.  CRS receives 75 percent of its funding from the U.S. government. Nonetheless, some Catholic workers are already ignoring the ban and doing just that.

Conservative supporters of the ban on artificial contraception immediately responded to the Pope’s comments in an attempt to play them down. George Weigel, who normally is telling Catholics that any statement by the Pope should be taken seriously, painfully explained that an interview does not constitute a really serious statement of church position, it is merely personal opinion by the Pope.

The Vatican seemed to take the Pope’s remarks more seriously. Read more

The whining of religious right groups newly named as anti-gay hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center is reaching the levels of absurdity.

Witness this statement regarding the designation by Concerned Women for America:

The SPLC began as a civil rights organization in the 1960s, but has been marginalized by “gay rights” organizations. They no longer simply focus on the noble cause of fighting racism and have, instead, become another tool for the left. This time, the SPLC has taken their liberal propaganda too far. By demonizing traditional family groups that support traditional marriage, they just put a huge portion of the African-American community in California in the same category with the rest us so-called bigots.

According to an Associated Press exit poll, 70 percent of African-Americans in California who voted for Barack Obama also voted for Prop 8 and in support of traditional marriage in 2008. The very people the SPLC supposedly seeks to protect from bigotry and “hate crimes” are heavily in favor of the very institution that the SPLC is fighting against.

I hope CWA’s statement alerts everyone to the true cynical nature of this so-called pro-family groups.

Seems to me that the simplest thing for the CWA (and the other organizations named as anti-gay hate groups or profiled) is to address SPLC’s charges head on with a simple statement such as “SPLC is inaccurate because we never said those things or took those stances,” or “our statements and actions have been misconstrued.”

But rather than doing this, CWA is attempting to drag the African-American community into this argument in a sad attempt to play that community against the lgbt community. And let’s face it – the CWA does not give a flip about either community.

No one should address the racial component of CWA’s argument because it is irrelevant to the facts, which is according to SPLC:

(CWA founder Beverly) LaHaye has blamed gay people for a “radical leftist crusade” in America and, over the years, has occasionally equated homosexuality with pedophilia. In 2001, she hired prominent anti-gay propagandists Robert Knight  . . . and Peter LaBarbera . . . to launch CWA’s Culture and Family Institute. Matt Barber was CWA’s policy director for cultural issues in 2007 and 2008 before moving on to similar work with the Liberty Counsel  . . .

While at CWA, on April 12, 2007,  (Matt) Barber suggested against all the evidence that there were only a “miniscule number” of anti-gay hate crimes and most of those “may very well be rooted in fraudulent reports.” In comments that have since disappeared from CWA’s website, Barber demanded a federal probe of “homosexual activists” for their alleged fabrications of hate crime reports.

CWA long relied on and displayed Knight’s articles and talking points, including claims that “homosexuality carries enormous physical and mental health risks” and “gay marriage entices children to experiment with homosexuality.” Most remarkably, Knight cited the utterly discredited work of Paul Cameron to bolster claims that homosexuality is harmful.

Today, CWA continues to make arguments against homosexuality on the basis of dubious claims. President Wendy Wright said this August that gay activists were using same-sex marriage “to indoctrinate children in schools to reject their parents’ values and to harass, sue and punish people who disagree.” Last year, CWA accused the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), a group that works to stop anti-gay bullying in schools, of using that mission as a cover to promote homosexuality in schools, adding that “teaching students from a young age that the homosexual lifestyle is perfectly natural … will [cause them to] develop into adults who are desensitized to the harmful, immoral reality of sexual deviance.”

As a gay man, I am amused by CWA’s sad attempts to drag the black community into the argument. But as a black man, I am very angry. The way the CWA has label lgbts as oversexed monsters seeking to molest or “indoctrinate” children is no different than the way racists labeled black men as mindless brutes seeking to rape white women.

How’s that for a racial component to the argument?

Meanwhile Bryan Fischer, the main reason why the American Family Association is considered as an anti-gay hate group, lodged his complaints against the designation.

It was one of those Freudian moments:

The Southern Poverty Law Center last week added five members to its list of “hate” groups, one of which is the American Family Association.

This illustrates one point and proves another. The point it illustrates is that the first and last refuge of a man without an argument is name-calling.

That would be an excellent point to make, except for one thing. As People for the American Way put it:

. . .it should also be noted that Fischer’s entire professional career is based on calling gays names like nancy-boys and sexual perverts and sexual deviants and pedophiles and domestic terrorists who are part of a “deviancy cabal” who “want to use the anal cavity for sex.”

People who live in glass houses definitely shouldn’t throw stones.

This sad attempt by CWA and Fischer to sidestep SPLC’s charges continues to prove the main point of this entire controversy – you can’t portray yourself as a victim when a paper trail reveals you to be a bully.

And the lies continue

Last night on the news show Hardball, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council sought to defend his organization’s claim that gay men molest children at a higher rate than heterosexuals.

In attempting to do this, Perkins cited research by the American College of Pediatricians. However, there are several things about this group that Perkins omitted:

The American College of Pediatricians is not a legitimate medical group. It is a sham organization dedicated to the laundering of junk science about the lgbt community, i.e. the kind of “science” which demonizes the lgbt community. One of its chief researchers was George Rekers, that is before he got caught coming from a European trip with a “rentboy.”

Earlier this year, it tried to push a webpage, Facts About Youth, to American schools.

Among other things, this site made the following claims about gay men:

Some gay men sexualize human waste, including the medically dangerous practice of coprophilia, which means sexual contact with highly infectious fecal wastes

In addition, it also contained several errors in regards to research and other claims about the lgbt community.

But these things are irrelevant because the big story is how the American College of Pediatricians benefits people like Perkins.

Just as he did on Hardball, Perkins can cite the ACP without going into details about its errors. The official sounding name of the organization obscures all of that, and thus makes Perkins’s position sound accurate.

The sad thing is that I think Perkins knows this.

And apparently this was not the only distortion Perkins committed during his Hardball appearance. Perkins said the following:

If you go back to the Archives of Sexual Behavior, a peer-reviewed reviewed journal, that stated that in self-identified… 86% of men, homosexual men, or who engage… or men who engage in molestation of children, 86% of them identified as homosexual or bisexual. That study has not been refuted.

However, according to the site Box Turtle Bulletin:

The study was not “refuted,” in Perkins’ terminology, simply because the finding was not considered to be significant, not even by its authors. The study, “Behavior patterns of child molesters” by W.D. Erickson, N.H. Walbek, and R.K. Seely which appeared more than twenty years ago (1988, to be exact), didn’t set out to determine the sexual orientation of child molesters. The study, of 229 convicted child molesters in Minnesota, (which, by the way, was never intended to be nationally representative in any way) was focused on the types of sexual contact the men engaged in with their victims — vaginal or anal penetration, oral contact, and so forth. In this particular sample, 63 victims were male, and 166 victims were female. The “finding” that Perkins and company found so exciting is encapsulated in just one sentence: “Eighty-six percent of offenders against males described themselves as homosexual or bisexual.”

That’s right, one lone sentence out of a ten page document, buried deeply within the text. In other words, the authors themselves didn’t see it as a significant finding. And it may be because the authors didn’t delve into the adult relationship makeup of these offenders, or what criteria the offenders used in their self-labeling. Nor did they attempt to investigate whether there was any validity to their self-labeling.

Hat tip to People for the American Way.

Never would I have imagined that one day I would write the following: The Walking Dead television series on AMC is too positive and bright–that it problematically keeps hope alive in a way that the original source material never suggested possible.

Like most ghetto nerds, I was excited that The Walking Dead comic book series was going to be adapted for television. I was even more excited that it would be on the esteemed AMC network and helmed by Frank Darabont of Shawshank Redemption fame. But alas, be careful what you wish for, as it may indeed come true. While some are gushing over The Walking Dead television series I have reserved judgment. By nature, I am not a curmudgeon. I also reject the worst tendencies of those residents of snarky nerdville to reject all that the “mainstream” has discovered about our secret loves, rites, and rituals as the bandwagon saddles up, eager to take on any and all passengers.

In practice, I see a broader audience as a pragmatic good that can bring more attention to a given creative property. That caveat now having been noted: The Walking Dead television show is adequate. It is not great. At this very early point, in its surrender to the conventions of television (and perhaps even to the Twilight series soap opera demographic) The Walking Dead has to this point lost so much personality that the show is nothing more than a mere echo of its source material.

For some not so devoted members of the mainstream, the newbies with virgin eyes to the series, that reality is fine…perhaps even preferable. For devotees such as myself, The Walking Dead television series is a lost, great, missed opportunity.

The challenge of divergent forms overshadows The Walking Dead as its approaches next Sunday’s season finale. The original material is a comic book. Print media, the graphic novel in particular, allows a reader to digest material at a pace he or she sees fit. As visual story telling with text, comic books are a unique union of words and action. As legends of the graphic arts Scott McCloud and Will Eisner so thoroughly detail, comic books engage the reader by allowing our imaginations to fill in the gaps between panels, provide voices and details to the transitions between scenes, and create meaning where there is only empty space.

In addition, the graphic novel is not limited by the inconveniences of budget or scale: if you can dream it, you can draw it. And most important to our meditations on the questions surrounding what is lost in transition from the page to the screen, comic books are wonderful at communicating action (just consider all that can transpire in a few panels of a comic book’s page) and limited by the efficiency of words (how few can generally be written on the page). As different storytelling mediums, television and film do not share these relative limitations.

Frank Darabont and Robert Kirkman have been honest regarding these artistic and practical comprises. To point: Fans of the original medium should allow a broad leeway as the writers and producers of The Walking Dead negotiate the difficult process of translating page to screen. Moreover, fans of the comic should not expect a literal translation as the page is merely inspiration for the AMC series. Nevertheless, The Walking Dead has a beating heart, a set of relationships between the characters, a set of guiding principles, and dare I suggest a personality, that as of Sunday’s episode “Wildfire” the series is now woefully lacking.

Thematically, The Walking Dead is about many things. Hope and loss; the pain of a new normal; hopelessness and survival; how real people–you and me–deal with the heretofore unimaginable. Perhaps most importantly, The Walking Dead is about “the walking dead,” that (as I and others have written here) in keeping with the conventions of zombie literature the survivors are now the Other, and in Robert Kirkman’s award winning comic series, that the survivors are the real and true “walking dead.”

Ironically, in the new AMC series where conventions of profitable episodic television melodrama override adherence to the source material, The Walking Dead perhaps ought to more rightly be called “The Walking Living“–two different shows; two different artistic and thematic sensibilities; and the latter not in keeping with the best of what The Walking Dead as a television series could in fact be.

Per our tradition, some thoughts, Easter eggs, and questions. Beware, there are spoilers ahead:

1. Okay. So Merle is going to be The Governor? I like the nice signal to the comic book offered by the amputation of his hand. This is good stuff that mirrors Rick’s eventual suffering…and Michonne’s revenge. But, the early introduction of Merle as The Governor seems unnecessary as it is a clear telegraph to a substantial future plot development.

2. There is some nice symbolism at work. The American flag, now simultaneously both a symbol of hope and lost dreams is featured prominently in the background of The Walking Dead. In “Wildfire,” Jim is dying in the Winnebago–another symbol of the open road, Route 66, and long gone Americana–the flag is a fitting accompaniment to his delusional and dying moments.

3. The Walking Dead comic book has established some pretty good common sense rubrics for survival. The characters maintain a constant watch, are strict with noise discipline, and are mindful of swarms and “herds” of zombies. Where are these common sense rules in the television series? Dale was always perched on top of the RV. Now, that chair it too often vacant. Moreover, the show went to great pains to establish that the blood is toxic. Why then be so careless this week? Hitting bodies in the head with a pickaxe, fluids flying about, and no fear of contamination?

4. The zombie infection is 100 percent fatal. It is also 100 percent communicable. Would you really not immediately kill a person who was bitten? And would you leave said person tied up against a tree, just to reanimate and become a threat? Sorry. Don’t buy it.

5. Second melodramatic television concession unnecessarily soap operaesque moment–Andrea holding her dead sister until she reanimates. Foolish. Unbelievable. Insert finger into mouth in order to induce vomiting.

6. Why have a large group of people just to whittle them down to a few key characters? Why the Red Shirt effect in The Walking Dead? Let’s cut to the chase and skip the teasing.

7. Gas. Supplies. Food. Clean water. Basics. These folks drive too much and worry too little.

8. Second point. Is this bring your kids to zombie Atlanta day? What is the logic here? No one guards the vehicles, all folks exit, and they could be easily surrounded as they try to gain access to the CDC. As zombie lore (and common sense point out) cities are death traps. Avoid them. And if need be, send a small group, not the entirety of your group to what could be a fubar zombie brain eating buffet. This is poor writing that damages the believability of the characters involved…especially Rick and Shane.

9. Two thematic points. First, the device of character gets bitten and we all go to Atlanta to find a cure suggests an adventure of the week model. The writers create a problem, the protagonists go on a quest to reaffirm their humanity to the viewers (and each other) and a problem is overcome…or a new one encountered. I always found this to be tedious, piss poor writing that only exhausts a keen and sharp viewer. Darabont needs to avoid this pitfall. He is better than that.

10. Second point. The Walking Dead comic book is about hopelessness and the unforgiving nature of the real. If there were a cataclysm tomorrow, a pandemic of the type shown in The Walking Dead, you/me/no one is likely to get the big reveal/satisfying answer. Kirkman expertly teased this in the comic book, by having a “scientist,” likely the basis of the CDC researcher in tonight’s episode suggest a “cure” that turned out to be a lie. Folks, there is no cure. We don’t know the disease vector of the zombie plague. There will be no epidemiologist present to conduct a seminar on the zombie apocalypse. Our prime directive is survival. Ultimately, as long time readers of The Walking Dead know, there will be no deus ex machina moment in which all questions are answered.

This sad truth is the beating heart of the comic book series. While I cannot divine the future, if the first season of AMC’s version of The Walking Dead ends with a grand reveal of what should remain a MacGuffin, the series will have truly jumped the proverbial shark into mediocrity. In that instance, The Walking Dead will become something quite different from its award winning source material. That my friends, would be a horrible shame.

The criticism Obama faces is unforgiving. But he made some serious mistakes too.

President Obama has been attacked, but he’s also made mistakes

Let’s just start off by saying expectations for the President were too high to begin with. The problems facing this country were much worse than any of us realized. Some of the criticism — being thrown his way by all sides — has been unfair. Yet, there have been some serious missteps that have helped propel the narrative that even though this President is obviously brilliant in many ways, he’s not that skilled politically, that his leadership has been at times misguided or lacking and that some of his policy proposals have drastically underestimated American individualism.

Here’s a list of 10 big mistakes President Obama made during the first two years of his first (and only?) term:

1.) Underestimating the jobs crisis
It was Dec, 2009 that Obama announced the big “jobs bill,” that’s nearly a year after he was in office. It should have been priority No.1 — as he must have known how a deep recession worsened by a financial collapse, credit crunch and global recession — would ultimately affect jobs. There is nothing more important to people than their ability to work, support their families, pay their bills and even their mortgage — regardless if they are upside down in that mortgage. But the jobs bill took a back seat to home loan remodification plan — which was ultimately not successful — health care reform, a surge in Afghanistan, the beer summit and a failed plea to host the 2012 Olympics. Then when he did so, he seemingly failed to understand that private industry is largely responsible for creating jobs in this country and that above and beyond the recession, outsourcing is primarily to blame for jobs hemorrhage.

2.) Messaging Problem
“The danger here is an incoherent presidency,” said David Morey, vice chairman of the Core Strategy Group, who provided communications advice to Obama’s 2008 campaign. “Simpler is better, and rising above these issues and leading by controlling the dialogue is what the presidency is all about. So I think that’s the job they have to do more effectively.”

This is definitely the prevailing wisdom and I agree. Obama has won very few messaging wars since the first few months of his presidency. It’s difficult to win in this climate where the most popular news outlet is Fox News — whose current mission/business model is to destroy his presidency and prop up Republicans. But Morey brings up a good point. Obama has a problem delivering a simple message. He has a tendency to give nuanced statements that can, and frequently are, picked apart. He has also made some bad decisions, not responding to death panels in a timely manner, likely assuming American people are smart enough to figure it out, then taking the Fox News bait, when he probably should have let it go. Hindsight, I know, is 20-20. But here’s a little advice: Keep it simple.

3.) Skip Gates
President Obama is friends with Skip Gates.

Gates, of course, was arrested early on in Obama’s first year inside of his own house by the Cambridge Police Department. Personally, I think it was a little suspect that a man should be arrested in his own home. But Obama came out quickly and stated that police acted stupidly, then he confessed to not having all the facts. This entire little scuffle was entirely beneath his office. It gave the far right an opportunity to paint him as some anti-police radical who was simply looking out for his friends. And honestly, he had more important things to do. Gates is a grown man — a rich and extremely powerful grown man I might add — he can take care of himself. And the beer summit afterwards was just silly. And Rule No.1 of the Presidency: Never tell America you don’t have all the facts — especially while you are in the middle of a press conference casting blame.

4.) Health care reform
Health care reform — despite the fact that it does contain some nice things — was a complete disaster. It was badly sold. It was unnecessarily complicated. It included some — perhaps necessary — but seemingly ominous back-door deals with big pharmaceutical companies as well as individual legislators. But most importantly, it didn’t focus on reducing cost. This country has health insurance for the most severely marginalized, it’s called Medicare and most folks living below the poverty level are eligible for it. The stranglehold the health insurance has over this country most immediately affects the working poor and middle class, and by extension businesses who provide health insurance to their employees.

Health care insurance has gone up 60 percent in less than 10 years. Premiums soar while the services they provide are drastically reduced. Employers are increasingly abdicating all responsibility of providing health care insurance largely due to cost. So at the end of the day, if you can’t win the single-payer debate, if you can’t pass universal health care, the negotiation point should be to focus on drastically reducing cost. If the administration would have focused on that, it would have been largely more palatable, and it would not have been able to be spun into being yet another entitlement program.

5.) Alienating the base
You can blame former Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, you could even point to some ill-advised words of frustration from the usually affable Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. But Obama, through neglect, alienated and created enemies out of a likely small but very loud element of his base — yes, the professional left. The problem with that is they actually do influence the opinions of many people. He should have reined in his staff earlier. He should have outreached to these folks sooner. It was a huge tactical mistake, and he’s still paying for it.

6.) Getting enamored by his own mystique
This may be a bit subjective.

But I think this was a serious problem for Obama — especially among his many melanin-deficient voters — he kind of allowed his own hype to personify him. In a way, he fell into that black athlete trap. Everybody loves you one day, then the next day you’re Kobe Bryant and giving tearful interviews on ESPN trying to convince folks you can be humble.

It’s a very delicate balance for us black folks to be confident without coming off as being “cocky,” “full of ourselves,” or God forbid “uppity.” And somewhere along the line, a significant percentage of white folks in America have likely said all of the above about Obama. I don’t really know what he can do to solve this problem. After all, they are already waiting in the wings to call him weak as well. All I can say is my heart goes out to you brother!

7.) Not speaking to the people
President Obama is a great speaker. But he doesn’t do it nearly enough, not in settings or formats where it actually appears as if he is speaking to us. Sometimes, it seems as if he is lecturing us, or preaching to us, but he has a problem connecting with ordinary folks and speaking about policy issues in a manner that most folks can hear and digest.

8.) Failure to close Guantanamo
You do what you say. It’s pretty simple. You don’t let a few bumps in the road force you to detour or backtrack.

Even Obama laments his inability to fulfill this campaign pledge:
“I wanted to close it sooner,” Obama said. “We missed that deadline.”

The president, taking reporters questions in the White House East Room, said his inability to close the facility is “not for lack of trying.”

“It’s because the politics of it are difficult,” Obama said.

The president said al Qaeda operatives still use the facility as a recruiting tool and “as a justification for attacks against the United States.”

“There’s no reason for us to give them that kind of talking point when, in fact, we can use the various mechanisms of our justice system to prosecute these folks and to make sure that they never attack us again,” Obama said.

Obama has confessed the obstacles to closing Obama are entirely political. An honest answer. But in saying that, he invites the criticism that his inaction, his inability to do politically difficult things simply makes him another politician and not the advocate of change he campaigned as.

9.) Lack of leadership on DADT
Leadership requires many traits, including the courage to take a position that is morally correct, even if it isn’t politically expedient. Leaders defend their beliefs. Leaders don’t pretend to lack authority when they know they are the decision-maker — wrote Howard Steven Friedman.

And it really does capture Obama’s issue with many of his Democratic constituencies in regards to DADT, closing Guantanamo Bay, fighting for the public option, capitulating to Republicans, etc.

In the game of baseball, the sluggers — with the help of steroids of course — are fairly new phenom. It use to be in most sports that folks would say it doesn’t always matter that you win or lose but how you play the game. And in this case, your supporters wouldn’t necessary mind if at the end of the day you lose the debate on any of the above as long as you went down swinging. At the end of the day, no one should ever doubt where a true leader stands on an issue.

10.) Demanding a more civil tone — on all sides of the aisles
This is a difficult one to write because the guy has been demonized, vilified and mocked from Day One by the conservative media, talk radio and self-appointed tea party leaders. He’s been disrespected by legislators and at least one Supreme Court Judge. They have not played fairly. But the truth is President George W. Bush was also crucified by the left — not nearly to the same extent. But the real difference is Bush really didn’t seem to give a crap. Obama is a little thin skinned. I am too. But I am not the most powerful person in the world. And to be honest, he and the Democrats have more to lose when the rhetoric turns ugly. Conservatives vote when they are pissed. Democrats sulk and fight with each other. In fact, the nasty political tone, according to a Center for Political Participation poll actually kept many Democrats and Democratic-leaning Independents at home in the mid-terms.

• 63 percent of those polled during the final four days leading up to midterm elections said politics has become less cvil since Obama took office.
• 46 percent of registered voters said in the November poll this year’s election was the “most negative they had ever seen.”
• Another 26 percent said it was “more negative than in the past.”
• Only 4 percent said it was more positive.
• 30 percent of registered voters polled said the the tone of the midterm elections made them less interested in becoming engaged.

Here’s the rub — Independents and Democrats were way less likely to become engaged due to tone while a majority of Republicans were motivated to participate due to the negative tone.

Read the story.

This is a classic Depression for Black America, and few appear to be paying attention. Just look at the numbers.

This economic situation qualifies as a Depression for Black America

The definition of an economic depression is a severe economic downturn, one that typically last several years. The last depression the country as a whole experienced was in 1929. It lasted 10 years. It was marked by 25 percent unemployment, wages that declined 42 percent. And a total economic output that fell from $103 to $55 billion.

The current recession the nation is much worse for Black America. Of black men between the ages of 20 and 34, only 60 percent are currently employed. That’s down 10 points from 2001. Unemployment for African Americans is estimated to reach a 25-year high this year — nationally black unemployment is expected to reach 17.2 percent (compared to about 9 percent for the nation overall) with five states exceeding 20 percent. The real estate crisis that precipitated that recession has stripped black families of more wealth than any other single even in U.S. history.

This may have been a recession for the nation as a whole. But this is a classic depression for Black America, and few appear to be paying attention.

Key facts to consider:

• As of December 2009, 16.2% of African Americans and 12.9% of Latinos were unemployed, compared to 9% of whites
• From December 2008 to December 2009, the unemployment rate among Blacks grew by 4.3% and among Latinos by 3.7%, as compared to 2.4% for whites
• In several states, Michigan and Ohio for example, African-American unemployment is expected to exceed 20% in 2010
• Blacks earn 62 cents for every dollar of white income, and Latinos earn 68 cents for every dollar of white income
• Wages and salaries lost from 2008 to 2012 will total $142 billion for African-Americans and $138 billion for Latinos, out of a total $1 trillion loss for the entire nation
• Blacks and Latinos are 2.9 and 2.7 times as likely, respectively, to live in poverty as whites
• Black and Latino children are 3.3 and 2.9 times as likely, respectively, to live in poverty than white children
• In five Midwestern and Plains states — Nebraska, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Oklahoma — the unemployment for Blacks was at least 3 times that of whites
• In another eight a — Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Kansas, Colorado, Mississippi, and New Jersey — the unemployment rate for Blacks was at least 2.5 times higher than that of whites
• Among Latinos, the widest disparities were in Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Dakota
• Workers laid off in an economic downturn can take up to 20 years to replace their lost earnings

Yet, the loss of black wealth, black unemployment, suffering black families remain unseen and unheard during the recession. CNN had done a few reports on the State of Black America. But they have been broad strokes at a very complicated and historically layered problem. The only real job creation efforts so far has been the stimulus, which did not direct hardly any money to the sectors that most immediately impact high unemployment numbers among blacks, such as manufacturing.

The unemployment extension proposals now stalled in Congress has been used as political fodder. The vast majority of reforms passed with the Health Care Act, which could be useful for displaced workers, will not go into effect for several years. Black America has literally been stranded in this depression as policy makers pander to the far right, the tea party, and the banks.

Is it the illusion of post-racial America that prevents political leaders from addressing the unemployment and poverty gripping Black America? Is it simply another example of the most marginalized populations being the easiest to ignore? What I do know is that it will take generations for the black community to fully recover from this economic depression. Just think about the historical obstacles black family face in terms of accessing the economic engines of this country, accessing education, health care, etc. All these issues have been drastically exasperated by the current economic depression.

Policy Initiatives that could provide better outcomes for Black America

• Target job creation to high unemployment areas. It doesn’t have to be called a Black Agenda. But unemployment should be treated in the same way that a doctor approaches a triage. The victim’s suffering the most should receive attention first.
• Let the Bush tax cuts expire. Use those funds for increased job training for dislocated workers.
• Provide incentives for creating jobs domestically and provide immediate penalties for outsourcing.
• Expand the mortgage modification program and make it more accessible to working-class families.
• Strengthen financial reform to provide protection against predatory practices. Provide increased oversight into the payday loan, check-cashing and rent-to-own industries as well as other companies that exploit poorer families.

Read the story.