The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr,'s children's struggles over the late civil rights leader's estate escalated to a lawsuit last week when The Reverend Bernice King and Martin Luther King III filed suit against their brother, Dexter King, administrator of their father's estate, claiming he had failed to provide his surviving siblings with essential documents, including financial records and contracts. The suit, filed July 10, claims that he and the estate "converted substantial funds from the estate's financial account ... for their own use" on June 20 without notifying his sister and brother. (AP)
Senator Barack Obama began a nine-day tour of Europe and the Middle East last week, receiving mixed receptions in Israel (where he was introduced as Barack Hussein Obama), and Germany, where he addressed over 200,000 cheering Berliners and was treated like a rock star. Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki fairly endorsed Obama's timetable for a pullout of U.S. troops from Iraq, and Republican Presidential candidate Senator John McCain, in a Friday CNN interview, seemed to agree. French President Nicolas Sarkozy of France warmly embraced Senator Obama at the Élysée Palace on Friday, saying his presidential candidacy presents a bold moment to change the United States’ image around the world. Obama leads McCain in European polls by a margin close to 4-to-1. Obama continued to demonstrate weakness in his responses to pointed questions from the media about his foreign policy inexperience, including general questions about what his weakest policy areas might be. No political candidate will enumerate his policy weakness for a network news anchor, but Obama's handlers really need to provide him better responses to those kinds of inquiries, as his evasive stammering put a blemish on an otherwise major week for the presidential candidate.
Senator John McCain, meanwhile, spent the week enlarging himself and gaining ground among uninformed, biased and, apparently, truly ignorant voters with wrongheaded, childish pouting, belittling Obama for going to Iraq and Afghanistan (this after McCain spent months criticizing Obama for not going to Iraq and Afghanistan), and for not visiting the wounded troops at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany (the Bush administration refused to allow him in). Desperate to not become lost in the Obama media blitz, McCain attacked Obama for just about everything, including Obama's taking the first question at a joint press conference with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and blamed Obama for high gas prices (?!). McCain did this knowing Obama likely would not return fire, but, if Obama did, McCain would then criticize Obama for criticizing a decorated veteran while on foreign soil. I suppose the goal was to push Obama off-message while stealing media attention from his overseas tour. The net effect, however, was to perhaps galvanize support for McCain among cousin-marrying tobacco spitters while pushing most any reasonable voters who completed sixth grade toward Obama's column. McCain's behavior during Obama's tour was bizarre, sophomoric, whiny, and unprecedented in its pettiness.For his part, Obama seemed to ignore McCain. If I seem a bit harsh on McCain this week, it's because he deserves it. Shame on you, Senator. Stop being a jackass.
The Republican National Committee site looks shockingly (and frighteningly) like a frat house web page or, perhaps, the home page for the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. The GOP homepage is burgeoning with sophomoric, low-brow attacks on Obama, things I suppose are supposed to be funny, but bandwidth better used to innumerate and elaborate on John McCain's policy positions and make his case for becoming the next president of the United States. Instead, the GOP homepage is almost insultingly low-brow, which suggests what they actually think of their own constituents. It's most consistent and clearest message: Don't Vote For The Black Kid. I'm amazed they left out the beer belch sound effect when the page loads.
It is an embarrassment of a web site, one seemingly unconcerned or, perhaps more sadly, unaware of how incredibly offensive and borderline racist it is. On the other hand, the GOP is flush with cash and very smart people whose entire purpose is to scare you into voting for a Republican. It is, therefore, much more likely that the general tone of the page (talking down to hillbillies and rednecks while counting on them to not read a newspaper or, say, a book--while freely pushing the limits of good taste and borderline racism) is indeed intentional. It is a blatant appeal to our worst fears about Barack Obama, a website ABOUT Barack Obama, rather than what the site should be: a testimonial to John McCain's plans and why they are better than Obama's. All of which should concern us because, by not ever going to these sites, by not even being concerned about such hateful attacks, we are, in fact, proving these folks right. The page stops short of calling us all the N-word, but not very. It is a borderline hate site. All that's missing is the Confederate flag.
Gospel Artist Timothy Wright continues to recover in a Pennsylvania hospital from critical injuries suffered in a July 4 head-on collision with a drunk driver on Interstate 80 which claimed the lives of his wife, Betty, and 14-year old grandson D.J.
