Obama While Abroad Out-polled McCain

Barack Obama exported his oratorical gift of expectation during his tour de force trip, which also attracted the three TV network anchors who provided live coverage.

[What’s Going On]

 

WORLD NEWS IN REVIEW:  Barack Obama, Presumptive Presidential Nominee, returned from a triumphal 9-day international tour, aboard Obama One, a 757 jet, underwritten by his campaign.

He visited Middle East flashpoints such as Iraq; Afghanistan; Jordan; Israel and Ramallah, West Bank; and European capitals, Berlin, Paris and London. Some of his itinerary highlights, meetings heads of states in all foregoing destinations; attracting 200,000 Germans in Berlin; In Israel, a seminarian student removed his prayer request from Jerusalem’s Western Wall and disseminated same to media. It read. “Dear Lord, Protect my family and me. Forgive me my sins and help me guard against pride and despair.  Give me the wisdom to do what is right and just and make me an instrument of your will.” Obama exported his oratorical gift of expectation during his tour de force trip, which also attracted the three TV network anchors who provided live coverage.  The trip should have bolstered his foreign affairs creds.
 
Obama’s media week ended at the Unity Conference in Chicago on Sunday, July 27 where he addressed almost one third of the 7000 journalists of color in attendance.  Back to stateside business, he held an economic summit on Monday with a bi-partisan group of economists, business and finance leaders to address solutions to U.S. economy curatives. His campaign has invested in Olympics TV commercials. 

I recommend the 7/14 New Yorker Mag issue which includes an 18 page his campaign has bought TV ads which will air during the Olympics.  His trip won him foreign affairs cred!  I recommend an 18-page, coming-of-age-as-a-politico article, in the infamous 7/21  New Yorker Mag issue titled  “Making It: How Chicago Shaped Obama” by Ryan Lizza.  Visit www.newyorker.com.  Wishing Mr. O a Happy Birthday on August 4.


THE UNITY CONFERENCE:
  The quadrennial Unity Conference is a 4-day, behemoth media event organized and attended by four groups: the National Association of Black Journalists NABJ; the Asian-American Journalists Association; the National Association of Hispanic Journalists; and the Native American Journalists Association.  

Senegal  President Abdoullaye Wade, the first and only international leader invited to the 2008 Unity Conference, attracted some unwanted headlines. Angry anti-Wade Senegalese expats demonstrated in and outside Conference headquarters and  clashed with pro-Wade Senegalese. The Chicago police were summoned. It sounded like mini mayhem.  Referencing an Obama presidency, Wade said. “I don’t believe Barack Obama will be at the service of Africa.”

The NABJ named Fox News, journalist Pat Buchanan and news organizations with little to no diversity, in its political coverage, the 2008 recipients of the Thumbs Down Award, which is given annually to an individual or organization for especially insensitive, racist or stereotypical reporting, commentary or a cartoon incongruent with goals of  the NABJ. Buchanan’s remarks about white people in America going the way of the Mohicans because of  Blacks and Latinos’ reproduction rates. Armstrong Williams and Black Entertainment Television are precious Thumbs Down Awardees.


CHARLES RANGEL REDUX:
  Wassup with Harlem’s esteemed Congressman, Charles Rangel, 78, who chairs the Ways and Means Committee? He’s been targeted as an ethics abuser and  maligned in the pages of the NYT and the Washington Post.
It began with the NYT stories and editorials about his 4 rent-stabilized Lenox Terrace Apartments, which it is alleged could  be construed as gifts.  About a week later the WAPO breaks a story about Rangel using government stationery to solicit funds for the  Charles Rangel Center for Public Service at the City College of NY, a part of the CUNY complex, which opens when he retires. Whose invisible hand is pointing the finger of blame at the Congressman’s ethics?  Why are the nation’s two most prestigious papers, with their large mainstream audience,  allocating so much space to alleged Rangel ethics charges:  his residency and use of stationery


MICROFINANCING, NYC:
  If you need financing to grow your business and have been rejected by conventional sources like local banks,  check out user-friendly micro lenders, a few of whom were listed in the 7/14 issue of Crain’s NY.
I include four leading nonprofit micro lenders, whose loans portfolio ranges from  $500 to $50,000.  1) Accion NY @212.387.0494, New York City’s oldest micro lender 2) Business Outreach Centers Capital Corp 718-624-9115.   3) Grameen America, which issues collateral free loans. Visit  www.grameenamerica.com  4) NY Association For New Americans 212.898.4130. Immigrants from Liberia, Mauritania, Senegal, Bosnia and Russia  are among its diverse  lender roster  5) Project Enterprise. 212.678.6734. Loans determined by ability to repay.  These micro lenders serve a diverse group of entrepreneurs whose businesses run the gamut from livery services, to pre-school, to computer services, and to grocery stores.


GOVERNOR DAVID PATERSON:
   In three months,  NYS Governor David Paterson covered lots of political ground. He has named African-American jurists to the NYS Court of Appeals. He wants to create a low-cost college student loan program, focusing on lowering the interest rates to make NYS competitive with other states college loan programs.

He has collected $3.3 million for his campaign chest, something that he’ll need lots more of  to compete with  the ever-growing list of  Dems and Reps eyeballing his job, in two years. His work platter is full, considering the southbound economy patterns.  It’s estimated that NYS loses  $20 billion dollars in  2008/2009 tax revenues owing to  Wall Street layoffs and the looming national banking crisis.  NYS Blacks are watching to see how he reviews the Rockefeller Drug Law and/or its repeal; and we await full disclosure about  AG  Elliot Spitzer’s closing of the Harlem-based Black United Fund (BUF), and allocation of  its  assets.


MEDIA NOTES:
Would someone let Ms. Whoopie Goldberg, of WABC-TV’s “The View,” know that Sidney Poitier is an African American. Goldberg keeps saying on TV that she is African American, but Sidney is not. He’s Caribbean American, she enthuses. The terms are not mutually exclusive. U.S. Blacks are not the only AFRICAN AMERICANS.  All Blacks born in the New World – North and South America – descendants of enslaved Africans, are African Americans!!!  Sidney Poitier was born in Florida.  Among Sunday, 7/27  NYT must reads are the City section’s COLD SHOULDERS, a socio-economic study of the paradoxical relationship between Bill Clinton and Black Harlem, seven years into his commercial tenancy and a few months after the Clinton/Obama primaries and the Week In Review Op-ed by Frank Rich,  HOW OBAMA BECAME ACTING PRESIDENT. He says. “The job was open, and he was the only applicant”


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