Friday, May 16, 2008
More probing presidential questions
Conservative columnist George Will has penned a couple of recent pieces, asking probing questions of our two remaining presidential candidates. Here are the questions for Sen. Barack Obama. Here are the questions for Sen. John McCain. And here's a piece about Obama and foreign policy. (It starts off as a hard-hitting opinion piece but then shifts to a pretty informative interview about actual policy ideas.)
Thursday, May 15, 2008
The Big Race, Continued
The Big Race, Continued
Quietly Surviving in A Not-So-New Iraq
Quietly Surviving in A Not-So-New Iraq
By Cameron W. Barr
The Washington Post
In the last years of Saddam Hussein's rule, eager for some relief from Iraq's dreary state-run television, a businessman named Emad T. Yousif bought an illegal satellite dish. He set it up on his Baghdad rooftop, making sure that it couldn't be seen from the street or his neighbors' houses. Only then did he realize that he had gone too far.
Misguided loyalties
Misguided loyalties
By Yvonne Abraham/Boston Globe
They're trying to turn out corporate titans with big hearts over at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Part of the school's official mission is ''to develop principled, innovative leaders who improve the world.'' Each year, the school holds a Diversity Day, to teach students that protecting people's differences makes for good business as well as good ethics. The MBA curriculum is heavy with offerings on corporate responsibility.
So, is Sloan succeeding?
Barack Obama is a white man
A writer half-jokingly says he will begin calling Sen. Barack Obama white if others in the news media continue to refer to him as ``black'' or ``African-American,'' given his mixed heritage.
Does he have a point? It's interesting on the surface but not much further. The vast majority of us are racially mixed, including most of the Skin Heads who talk about the need to maintain racial purity. Beyond that, race, as we commonly refer to it, is more of a social rather than genetic construct, though science is still trying to give us a more definitive answer.
And finally, Obama is more African-American than I am (though we all can be called African-American, given that's where humanity originated). Obama's father is from Africa and his mother from America. How can you get more African-American than that? I had a white friend at Davidson College who was African-American. Why? Because he was actually born in an African country while his parents were there doing missionary and other work. He was a dual citizen.
