Sara Haile-Mariam

Simply hilarious.

I was born in 1987, well after a young man named Michael Jackson broke down the abc’s and 123’s of you and me.

As an artist, and a person, he evolved. Not having known the MJ of the 80s, it was hard to reconcile the fact that the youngest of the Jackson 5 was also the young man from Thriller as well as the grown man who resided at Never land.

Nonetheless, his music was, is, and always will be timeless.

I had a conversation with a friend once on how music should be categorized as a form of public service. It’s obviously different than giving food or clothes or serving in office– but that shouldn’t dismiss the fact that it still has the potential to serve the people. To make people smile, and feel, and yes, to make people dance.

So the media will probably focus on the man behind the music. On the controversies of his career and personal development. I’d rather not go there. I’d rather not pick a part the man but rather reflect on what he achieved.

He lives on through his music, and it’s his music that I intend to celebrate.

I hope he rests in peace and I offer my condolences and thoughts to all who knew him, and all who grieve him.

Long live the king….

My newest post on Global Grind grapples with the ramifications of new media on our expectations of political discourse and the metrics we use to evaluate our leaders.

“As it stands, social networking enables everyone to broadcast inside jokes, silly pictures, even indiscretions, in a forum that can be accessed by individuals from all over the world. Without context, these images and sound bites could prove damaging for those who decide to take the path of public service. Similarly, the days of blackmail are threatened by instant access. The time between action and confession is shortened by the tendency, and ability, to confess while in the act.”

You can read the rest here.

“If we’re going to be Ronald Reagan’s city on a hill, we don’t get to torture. We don’t do it.”

Jonathan Martin of Politico has a piece out today on the “unprecedented” criticism coming out against the Obama administration today from the New York Times. The article notes-

“It’s not unusual for Barack Obama to take a little friendly fire from the Times. But it’s perhaps unprecedented for him to get hit on the same day by columnists Frank Rich, Thomas Friedman and Maureen Dowd—and in the paper’s lead editorial. Their critique punctuated a weekend that started with a widely circulated blog post by Paul Krugman that said the president’s yet to be announced bank rescue plan would almost certainly fail. The sentiment, coming just two months after the president was sworn in, reflects elite opinion in the Washington-New York corridor that Obama is increasingly overwhelmed, and not fully appreciative of the building tsunami of populist outrage.”

Frankly, I read all of the aforementioned articles today and I didn’t really walk away with the same shock and awe that Mr. Martin did. Yes, they were all fairly critical but I would hardly say that it was unprecedented. “Elite opinion in the Washington- New York corridor” has spoken out against the President on numerous occasions, particularly throughout the Presidential campaign and I think that the Politico article today says more about elite opinion than today’s NY Times Op-Eds. Deliberation and dissent, particularly when spoken by those of similar political ideologies, has become almost taboo in contemporary times. A multiplicity of views is often categorized as some sort of indication of weakness or disarray. The Republican party tends to embrace this phenomenon chastising anyone who dares to stray from the party line as “not a real conservative”. Democrats on the otherhand don’t seem to employ the same strategy and the Obama administration has taken great strides to indicate that we’re in the era of inclusion.

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Thomas Friedman has a great Op-Ed out today on how the President could use his powers of inspiration to address the financial crisis.

This line from Dov Sidman’s book “How” provides insight on how the President might use rhetoric to help navigate us out of the crisis.

“Laws tell you what you can do. Values inspire in you what you should do. It’s a leader’s job to inspire in us those values.”

I couldn’t agree more with Friedman’s assessment, there’s an absence of values in our financial sector that culminate to create an agenda based on getting rich quick, gambling big regardless of how those bets might impact the collective, and the inability to accept responsibility.

Now to be clear, a blame game is not what we need. There are a variety of factors that led to this mess, and trying to dissect the crisis to identify the main culprits shouldn’t be a priority right now. What we do need to be doing is understanding the crisis so as to prevent a sequel.

Now where does the President fit into all of this? President Obama has been using his soap box as of late to lavish his praises on Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. Inspiring confidence in the architect of the solution is certainly important, however it fails to address the concerns associated with his proposal. An increase of transparency is necessary and the full roll out of the banking plan this week will hopefully include more details. Still, transparency alone will not make this a teachable moment. What needs to be addressed is how we go about changing the general approach of how business is done in Washington and on Wall Street. We already know that greed and irresponsibility lead to current crisis, now what will get us out?

That hasn’t been articulated as clearly- I’d like to see the President outline why investors and bankers should remain cognoscente of how their actions impact society as a whole- it seems like an obvious answer but perhaps this is a moment that requires stating and repeating the obvious until it sticks. The President has indicated that additional regulations will be put in place to prevent irresponsible wheeling and dealing from reoccurring, that’s great, but unless the attitude that inspired those transactions is confronted than surely the overly ambitious would find a way to get around those regulations.

In addition to new laws we need an ethical framework that helps us navigate those laws that goes back to a national sentiment that Barack Obama reminded us of when he first entered the national scene “E Pluribus Unum”

Out of many. One.

Steven Johnson has a wonderful piece on the future of information. I really enjoyed it, but I do think that he overlooks an extremely important point.

The inherent digital divide created merely as a result of the cost and involvement that being tech savvy or even computer literate require. Currently there are millions of people who don’t have access to the internet so the future of information is not only reliant on what papers do, but how they respond to customers who will be marginalized if they cease to exist.

For instance, Johnson suggests-

“But I think it’s just as possible that all this innovation elsewhere will free up the traditional media to focus on things like war reporting because they won’t need to pay for all the other content they’ve historically had to produce. This is Jeff Jarvis’ motto: do what you do best, and link to the rest.”

However, if papers limit their content and link to the rest, then what’s to be of segment of our population who doesn’t have access to the rest? Are they then only bound to consuming that which the paper decides to print? I’ll write more on this- it’s a really important conversation and although I take issue with this point, I highly recommend the piece.

David Frum sounds off on Conservatives today to defend Steele saying:

“He’s not a black face, he’s just a different face,” he said. “We need different kinds of people. It isn’t ‘you put a black face on the party and you get black voters.”

Ehh… Yeah, they don’t need a different face they need a different approach and I don’t think that Michael Steele understands that. The whole party is so convinced that if they can just identify the right person, the Conservative Obama, to lead the charge that they’ll be ready to launch their come back. The truth is that their problem rests in their inability as a party to make room for multiple ideas. As Frum notes, their stance on abortion is nonnegotiable and although that appeals to certain people, it also excludes others. The Party seems to scoff at debate- I saw Tom Delay recently reject the notion that David Brooks was a “real” conservative simply because they held different positions.

Michael Steele is guilty of propagating this kind of strategy when he suggests that the GOP Senators who voted for the stimulus are going to get less funding from the RNC…

You can put lipstick on a pig…

This is a pretty big headline. President Obama signals an openness to reaching out to more moderate elements of the Taliban.

I do have qualms with some portions of the article though- this passage for instance:

The president spoke at length about the struggle with terrorism in Afghanistan and elsewhere, staking out positions that at times seemed more comparable to those of his predecessor than many of Mr. Obama’s more liberal supporters would like. He did not rule out the option of snatching terrorism suspects out of hostile countries.

Yeah, the President articulated that position in the Spring of 2007 and then was rebuked for it by Democrats and Republicans alike and then was vindicated when the CIA pursued that exact strategy in 2008. If countries are unwilling or unable to pursue terrorists, then the United States is willing to strike them in their stead. It’s extremely controversial but it’s nothing new- and it’s not the President moving to the center after getting elected which is what this passage seems to suggest.

On the campaign, the statement was made with regards to Pakistan but in the NY Times interview he seems to be opening up the parameters of this position to include other countries as well.
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“And for the leader of the Republicans? A man who is aggressive and bombastic, cutting and sarcastic, who dismisses the concerned citizens in network news focus groups as “losers.” With his private plane and his cigars, his history of drug dependency and his personal bulk, not to mention his tangled marital history, Rush is a walking stereotype of self-indulgence—exactly the image that Barack Obama most wants to affix to our philosophy and our party. And we’re cooperating! Those images of crowds of CPACers cheering Rush’s every rancorous word—we’ll be seeing them rebroadcast for a long time.”

Wow.

That was a pleasant surprise especially since I’m reading it after listening to Newt Gingrich on Meet the Press this morning.

First he throws in a one liner on how while dealing with the financial crisis we should admit that “controlling spending” is an alternative solution to raising taxes. To be clear, it’s not. Just moments before he made this argument they were having a discussion on how the Great Depression was caused in part because the government tried to control the deficit. In case you’re still trying to wrap you’re head around why Congress needed to pass the nearly 800 Billion dollar stimulus package-here’s a quick overview as I understand it.

Put simply, there’s a lack of capital and therefore consumption, the federal government needs to spend capital that is “stimulative” in other words that creates more capital through new jobs that put money in the hands of consumers who then go out and spend/ invest that money. It’s supposed to serve as a catalyst that gets the economy moving again. If people are spending than banks can confidently start lending money again, investor confidence rises, new businesses form which result in new jobs, unemployment rates go up etc. So the stimulus package is supposed to start a long term chain reaction. There are variety of other factors at play (the mortgage crisis, bad balance sheets, toxic assets). But so we’re clear, “controlling spending” would actually aggravate the problem.

Then he suggests Chris Matthews is the Democrats Rush Limbaugh..really? I’m sorry but there is really is no liberal equivalent to Rush. Democrats don’t have someone who carries so much sway that they feel the need to placate them. You don’t see Democrats apologizing to Chris, you don’t see MSNBC viewers calling in to Chris and Chris going back to the Democratic caucus demanding that they take a certain position or stance.

I’m honestly getting sick of the Rush Limbaugh fiasco and I apologize for spending so much time on it. There are so many other more important things going on that demand our attention.

Update: David Brooks also unloaded this morning calling the idea of a spending freeze insane.