Monroe Anderson

Michael Moore previews something better than bitter in Pennsylvania

    Filmmaker Michael Moore lives in Michigan, so he didn't get an opportunity to vote for the candidate of his choice in the primary there. But just like in his documentaries, Bowling for Columbine, Fahrenheit 9/11 and Sicko, in an open letter to Pennsylvania voters, Moore cuts right to the chase: Hillary Clinton has blown a lifetime of good deeds with her bad behavior in her bid to become the nation's first woman president.

    "...the actions and words of Hillary Clinton have gone from being merely disappointing to downright disgusting. I guess the debate last week was the final straw. I've watched Senator Clinton and her husband play this game of appealing to the worst side of white people, but last Wednesday, when she hurled the name 'Farrakhan' out of nowhere, well that's when the silly season came to an early end for me. She said the 'F' word to scare white people, pure and simple. Of course, Obama has no connection to Farrakhan. But, according to Senator Clinton, Obama's pastor does -- AND the 'church bulletin' once included a Los Angeles Times op-ed from some guy with Hamas! No, not the church bulletin!

"This sleazy attempt to smear Obama was brilliantly explained the following night by Stephen Colbert. He pointed out that if Obama is supported by Ted Kennedy, who is Catholic, and the Catholic Church is led by a Pope who was in the Hitler Youth, that can mean only one thing: OBAMA LOVES HITLER!

"Yes, Senator Clinton, that's how you sounded. Like you were nuts. Like you were a bigot stoking the fires of stupidity. How sad that I would ever have to write those words about you. You have devoted your life to good causes and good deeds. And now to throw it all away for an office you can't win unless you smear the black man so much that the superdelegates cry 'Uncle (Tom)' and give it all to you."

    I hate to spoil the ending for you, but Moore goes on to encourage Pennsylvania Democrats to vote for Obama since he could not.

    Starting with the South Carolina primary, I have heard one Democrat after the next say that they have become disenchanted with the Clintons because of their campaign tactics. Who knew? The whining Republicans were whining for good cause.

    To read all of Moore's open letter, go to MichaelMoore.com

Old coot Imus belching same old shticks

                           

                                                                                                                                                           Don Imus is back to his same old name game. This time, at least, he's picking on somebody his size, his sex and who is tough enough to brush it off: Barack Obama.
    Media Matters reported that:

    During the April 17 edition of Imus in the Morning, host Don Imus asserted that Sen. Barack Obama is "almost a bigger pussy than" Sen. Hillary Clinton. While discussing the April 16 Democratic debate, Imus said he thought that co-moderator George Stephanopoulos was "great" and that the debate was "fine," adding: "I thought Senator Obama was on the defensive most of the night. But they're both sissy boys or sissy girls, or whatever. Because they talk big when they're out on the campaign trail, wolfing on each other." News anchor Charles McCord interjected, "But then," and Imus continued: "And then when they show up at the debate, they fold up like a couple of cheap lawn chairs. I mean, I don't understand that. And he's almost a bigger pussy than she is."

    I'm not even going to touch on how  that statement must strike women.    

    Unfortunately, Obama is too much the gentleman to ask an old fart like Imus to step outside where they settle this once and for all. Barack's also too smart to risk getting busted on involuntary grampsslaughter.

    I don't think that the O-Man should give the tough-talking I-Man a pass. He should  challenge the cowboy to a game of one-on-one b-ball.  Talk about a slam dunk in discovering who's the baddest.

    Here's a YouTube clip of what the shock jock needs to apologize for this time.

Deadly school drop-out rates are triggered by violence

Big cities with biggest school failures rack up most murders

April 15, 2008

By Monroe Anderson

    Coleman Young, yet another colorful Detroit mayor, but from an earlier era, was asked back in the late 1970s, if he supported gun control.
    “Why should I disarm the good citizens of Detroit,” asked Mayor Young, whose wardrobe included a holster complete with a loaded gun as accessory, “when they are surrounded by hostile suburbs?”
    The late mayor got it half right. His city was and still is surrounded by what might be considered hostile suburbs, but its citizens—both good and bad—should have been unconditionally disarmed.
    Three decades after Mayor Young’s refusal to establish gun control, Detroit maintains the dubious distinction of being one of America’s murder capitols. It’s also the nation’s high school drop out capitol—only one in four public school students actually are handed a diploma right after the valedictorian speech.
The Motor City is not alone when it comes to leaving its children behind.
      “Our analysis finds that graduating from high school in America’s largest cities amounts, essentially, to a coin toss. Only about one-half (52 percent) of students in the principal school systems of the 50 largest cities complete high school with a diploma,” according to a study, Cities in Crisis: A Special Analytical Report on High School Graduation, released earlier this month by the America's Promise Alliance. “That rate is well below the national graduation rate of 70 percent, and even falls short of the average for urban districts across the country (60 percent).”
    Every 26 seconds, according to America’s Promise Alliance, one student drops out of high school.
    To translate that information from percentages and time to other numbers adds up to this: each year a million students fail to leave our nation’s high schools in urban areas with a diploma in hand.

    "While Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton trade rounds in the state of Killadelphia on who is bitter and who is not, the more important issues that should be discussed and debated remain a mere dismal backdrop."

     The vast majority who exit are students of color. Nearly half of all African American and Native American students won’t graduate with their class. Hispanics, with a 60 percent graduation rate, fare only slightly better. Almost all these former high schools will pay dearly by ending up in prison or on the welfare rolls.

    The dropout rate of more than a million students each year "is not just a crisis; this is a catastrophe," said former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, the founding chairman of America's Promise Alliance, the organization that presented the research, examining graduation statistics from the 2003-04 school year.  The study also found a 17-point graduation gap between urban and suburban students in those metropolitan areas of the 50 largest cities. I’ll let you guess which students were more likely to end up in college.
    Which brings me back to the Motor City where, I believe, one catastrophe drives the other:  A high murder rate, fuels a low graduation rate. 

    The two have a perverse and tragic symbiotic connection. The top five cities with the lowest graduation rates all have murder rates well above the national average.    

    Detroit’s is more than five times greater. Indianapolis, with a graduation rate that’s not quite one in three, has a murder rate that’s twice the national average. Ohio’s two city’s Cleveland, which graduates a mere 34 percent of its high schoolers, and Columbus, which graduates just over four out of ten, have nearly twice the national murder rate.  Baltimore’s homicide rate is even greater than Detroit’s, and graduates about 35 percent of its high school students.

    While Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton trade rounds in the state of Killadelphia on who is bitter and who is not, the more important issues that should be discussed and debated remain a mere dismal backdrop. 
    Violence, of course, isn’t the only factor that’s jacking up the dropout rates, but it is a major culprit. And it doesn’t take a doctorate of philosophy degree to understand why big cities with high murder rates bear low graduation rolls. Kids are afraid to go to school. They fear for their lives. So even the good kids who want an education drop out because they don't want to get caught up in the violence—or get murdered.

    The choice between dropping out and death equals a lose-lose sum total. They may be skipping the possibility of real death only to suffer a virtual one. Without at least a high school diploma, theirs lives are all but over even before they begin.

Olympic protests are not for sport

                                                                                                                                                                                   

   

    Hillary Clinton has it right on China. George W. Bush should skip the Olympics opening ceremony in Beijing. The president’s presence will only serve to aid and abet China’s dispassionate behavior in Tibet—and more importantly in Sudan.
    "The violent clashes in Tibet and the failure of the Chinese government to use its full leverage with Sudan to stop the genocide in Darfur are opportunities for presidential leadership," she said, charging the Bush administration "has been wrong to downplay human rights in its policy towards China."
    Three years ago, Bush officially declared that genocide was taking place in Darfur, and then promptly did nothing about it. This summer, the man who feverishly wanted to get rid of the dictator, Saddam Hussein, is apparently unfazed by the murderous tactics of the dictator, Sudanese President Omar al Basir.
    Changing course on his Olympic journey should not be that difficult a choice for Bush. Protesters in England and France today has demonstrated so fervently that organizers have been forced to play hide and seek with the Olympic torch and ended up cancelling the final leg of the run in Paris.
Bush says he will attend the Olympics because it is a sporting event, not a political event. Will somebody please explain to the president that the protests are political, not for sport?
And will somebody explain to Barack Obama that he can’t play this one two ways. China’s backing of al Basir has left women raped, children maimed and hundreds of thousands dead.
    "On the one hand, I think that what has happened in Tibet, China's support for the Sudanese government in Darfur, is a real problem," he said, before adding: "I am hesitant to make the Olympics a site of political protest because I think it's partly about bringing the world together."
    Do we really want the world to come together behind this atrocious behavior?
    If Bush and Obama won’t take a stand, let's hope the black athletes will. (Less than 24 hours after this  post went up, Barack got off the fence, also calling for Bush to boycott the opening ceremony. Obama's statement wasn't as strong as Clinton's but he did manage to put himself on the right side of this issue.)

    Here’s a commentary I wrote for ebonyjet.com last summer.

Passing The Torch

If China wants to hedge bets around its involvement in darfur, let’s change the rules of the game

08/13/2007
By Monroe Anderson

Communist China's rush to become a world-class capitalist power has gone gangsta in more ways than one. Beijing has been pirating goods, dabbling in state-sponsored gunrunning and short-changing the yuan. Earlier this week, nearly a million made-in-China Mattel toys were recalled because they were covered in lead paint. We have recently learned that Beijing has been exporting melamine-laced pet food and tainted toothpaste.

Although thousands of American cats and dogs fell deathly ill or died from eating China's tainted pet food, it could have been worse: Ten Chinese citizens are known to have died from fake medicine after the former director of China's State Food and Drug Administration accepted $990,000 in bribes in exchange for approving the drugs.

But neither bad medicine nor poisonous products have taken the toll that China's adventures in Africa can claim: In a four-year genocidal offensive in Sudan, more than 200,000 blacks have been killed by marauding bands of the Janjaweed militia, the Arab soldiers of misfortune hired by and backed up with the air support of Sudanese President Omar Al Bashir's government. Entire African villages have been pillaged and burned, driving 2 million black Darfurians into refugee camps where women and children are routinely raped and starved. The bulk of the arms used to kill and maim the black Africans, according to Amnesty International, are being imported from Beijing. China says that's not so.

While it is true that China -- reluctantly and belatedly -- has coaxed Khartoum into finally agreeing to admit U. N. peacekeepers into the troubled region, it is also true that in April China agreed "to boost military exchanges and cooperation" with Bashir's government. And it is fact that China buys two-thirds of Sudan's oil and has signed a 20-year agreement with that country to help it develop offshore oil–a resource China naturally covets and desperately needs to propel its development into a First World nation.

It is in China's quest to compete with the other major players on the world stage that we might stop the madness–and the mass murdering. Next year the 2008 games will take place in Beijing. China sees the Olympics as an excellent propaganda ploy–a way and means of wowing the world as it hosts its first event viewed by the other four-fifths of the earth's population. When next year's Olympic flame is extinguished, China's rulers are counting on brandishing a bunch of shiny medals and a ton of glowing media–all highlighting their coming out party. But, as the old '60s saying asks, "what if you gave a party and nobody came?" I say we shouldn't go unless China exerts real pressure on Khartoum to stop the killing.

I say we boycott the Olympics. I am not alone in this notion that the games are a good way to get to China's conscience. Mia Farrow, the American actress and U.N. goodwill ambassador, has designated the Beijing games as the "genocide Olympics" while proposing an Olympic-style torch relay through countries with histories of mass murders. Steven Spielberg, the movie producer, is threatening to drop out as the artistic adviser for the spectacular 2008 Olympics opening ceremony.

The party line from the Chinese government is that the 2008 Olympics should be games for games' sake–with no political competition. "We are absolutely opposed to politicization of the Olympics," said Jiang Xiaoyu, one of the committee's executive vice presidents. "This is against the Olympic spirit and against the Olympic charter."

Well, yes and no. The charter and spirit dictate one thing but reality and history has dictated another. Adolph Hitler tried to use the Berlin Olympics as a political and propaganda platform for Aryan supremacy in 1936. An African American, sprinter Jesse Owens, vanquished that big lie on Hitler's own turf by breaking three world records and tying another. Thirty-six years later, again in Germany, 11 Israeli athletes were kidnapped and murdered by Palestinian terrorists after demands that 200 Palestinians held in Israeli jails be released went unheeded.

Three unrelated but successive boycotts followed the Munich Olympics. Twenty-eight African nations boycotted the Montreal Olympics in the summer of 1976 because New Zealand's national rugby team continued to compete against South Africa's rugby team although the South Africans had been banned from the Olympics in 1964 because of its apartheid policies. The 1980 Moscow Olympics were boycotted by the United States after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan a year earlier. Four years later, the Soviet Union retaliated with its own boycott of the Los Angeles Games.

As the world prepares for next year's fun and games in Beijing, there are Darfurian women and children starving in terrible, teeming refugee camps. They are not responsible for their plight but who is? In an era where "taking responsibility" is the catch phrase of the moment, why won't China? Why doesn't the Bush administration do something substantive to stop the killing? Shouldn't the Congressional Black Caucus act more effectively? And, if no foreign or national responsibility takes hold, what about personal responsibility?

Let the African-American Olympians (who will be responsible for making the games worth watching) choose to watch the 2008 competition from the comfort and safety of their homes in the good old U.S. of A.

Monroe Anderson is a frequent contributor to ebonyjet.com

   

The Three Stumpers--Barack, McCain and Hillary

   

    There have been farcical moments during this long presidential campaign season. 
    Lately there’s been Hillary Clinton suggesting she might make Barack Obama her vice presidential running mate at a time when she should have been--and still should be-- preparing to call it a day.
    There’s been Obama pooh-poohing the observation of radio talk show host Ed Schulz that John McCain is a warmonger—even as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee was wrapping up his tour down memory lane as the generational warrior.
    And there’s been McCain's position on our nation being stuck in a recession. Rather than approaching it from wannabe first hubby Bill’s “it’s the economy, stupid” successful presidential campaign in the 1990s, McCain's message is: “It's the stupid economy. And I’m not going to touch it.”
    Alright, already. I know this historical presidential election is both serious and important, but the photo-shopped depiction above of the new Three Stooges is a reminder that silliness can break out at any time in these three presidential campaigns.
    BTW, for those of us who will admit to ever watching the Three Stooges, you may have noticed that McCain is Curly, Hillary is Larry and Barack is Moe. 
    As if anyone needed better evidence that Obama is the best qualified among the three to run the nation.
    Nyuk, Nyuk, Nyuk!

Wright's words right into context

    Hillary Clinton broke her silence about Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright yesterday.
    Unlike Barack Obama, she would have, she said–and I’m paraphrasing here-- told any minister who spoke about America like Wright spoke about America to let the door knob hit ya where the good Lord split ya. The former First Lady said she would have parted ways with any minister who said the things that the former pastor of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ said.   

    Small problem.

    Those never ending loops, as seen on TV, took Rev. Wright’s sermon way out of context. The “Amerca's chickens are coming home to roost” quote was from a white ambassador Wright heard quoting Malcolm X  on TV and then a riff off the quote. Taken out of its sound bite status and given a little more airtime, Rev. Wright’s sermon shortly after 9/11 is an every-Sunday Christian message.

    “This is a time for me to examine my own relationship with God,” Wright preached. “Is it real or is it fake? Is it forever or is it for show? Is it something that you do for the sake of the public or is it something you do for the sake of Eternity?”

    In it, he called the terrorists attacks against the twin towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. “an unthinkable act.” In the sermon, he preached that “this is a time for self-examination” to see if you're good with God.
    Why would Christian Hillary, or should Christian Obama, part with a Christian minister who called on his flock to examine their closeness to God?
    “This is a time for me to examine my own relationship with God,” Wright preached. “Is it real or is it fake? Is it forever or is it for show? Is it something that you do for the sake of the public or is it something you do for the sake of Eternity?”
    Had Hillary sat through that sermon, then maybe she would have been saved from “misspeaking” about her misadventures in Bosnia.
    As for the maligned minister’s message, don’t take my word for it. Listen to Rev. Wright’s words. Words that last a little more than nine minutes rather than the length of a sound bite snippet.

Sermon snippets this Easter Sunday that should put Rev. Wright's to shame

    On this Easter Sunday, I thought it might be appropriate to post a couple of sermon snippets from two preachers who have their own favorite candidates--the reverends Rod Parsley and James David Manning.
    John McCain has called Rev. Parsley his "spiritual guide." Rev. Parsley has called Islam a false religion and called on Christians to wage war against it. Rev. Manning believe Barack Obama to be the anti-candidate. He rants about Obama Girl's "54 double D" boobs, about Obama's mixed-race pedigree and about blacks for not appreciating all the good things President Bill Clinton did for them.

    Since we're now into vetting preachers and what they have to say about their favorite presidential candidate, I thought I should bring these two righteous ministers into the mix. Let's see if they make the cable news and talk shows. I find their sermons much more outrageous than anything Rev. Jeremiah Wright has said.

    Happy Easter!

    Here's Rev. Parsley sermonizing on pro-choice and black genocide.

    And here's Rev. Manning damning MacDaddy Obama and praising himself.

In Search of Intelligence in the Multiverse--Not DMX in the DMZ

   
 

   

    In an interview with XXL magazine, DMX succeeded in lowering the bar when it comes to expecting a certain circle of rappers to not be too ignorant. It’s one thing to proudly and loudly denigrate your  people as niggers--ahhhh, sorry, niggaz--and your women as bitches. WTF, one is supposed to be an expression of endearment and the other is apparently a shout out because you’re their baby daddy.
    But it’s something else not to know what time it is, whose time it is or that it’s about time. Apparently, the 37-year-old Earl Simmons, aka DMX, the sixth highest-selling rapper of all time, star of the easily forgettable movie, Never Die Alone, is out of this world.
    That’s the only explanation for his can’t-be-real knowledge on this year’s presidential race which has been talked about in cyberspace, in foreign countries, in the mainstream media, in the barber and beauty shops, in whore houses and in prisons.
    This is how XXL reported a portion of its interview with the rapper.

Are you following the presidential race?
Not at all.

You’re not? You know there’s a Black guy running, Barack Obama and then there’s Hillary Clinton.
His name is Barack?!

Barack Obama, yeah.
Barack?!

Barack.
What the fuck is a Barack?! Barack Obama. Where he from, Africa?

Yeah, his dad is from Kenya.
Barack Obama?

Yeah.
What the fuck?! That ain’t no fuckin’ name, yo. That ain’t that nigga’s name. You can’t be serious. Barack Obama. Get the fuck outta here.

You’re telling me you haven’t heard about him before.
I ain’t really paying much attention.

I mean, it’s pretty big if a Black…
Wow, Barack! The nigga’s name is Barack. Barack? Nigga named Barack Obama. What the fuck, man?! Is he serious? That ain’t his fuckin’ name. Ima tell this nigga when I see him, “Stop that bullshit. Stop that bullshit” [laughs] “That ain’t your fuckin’ name.” Your momma ain’t name you no damn Barack.

So you’re not following the race. You can’t vote right?
Nope.

Is that why you’re not following it?
No, because it’s just—it doesn’t matter. They’re gonna do what they’re gonna do. It doesn’t really make a difference. These are the last years.

But it would be pretty big if we had a first Black president. That would be huge.
I mean, I guess…. What, they gon’ give a dog a bone? There you go. Ooh, we have a Black president now. They should’ve done that shit a long time ago, we wouldn’t be in the fuckin’ position we in now. With world war coming up right now. They done fucked this shit up then give it to the Black people, “Here you take it. Take my mess.”

Right, exactly.
It’s all a fuckin’ setup. It’s all a setup. All fuckin’ bullshit. All bullshit. I don’t give a fuck about none of that.

We could have a female president also, Hillary Clinton.
I mean, either way it doesn’t matter. I don’t care. No one person is directly affected by which president, you know, so what does it matter.

Yeah, but the country is.
I guess. The president is a puppet anyway. The president don’t make no damn decisions.

The president…they don’t have that much authority basically?
Nah, never.

But Bush pretty much…
You think Bush is making fuckin’ decisions?

He did, yeah, he fucked up the country.
He act like he making decisions. He could barely speak! He could barely fuckin’ speak!
Can’t be serious. He ain’t making no damn decisions.

Well Barack has a good chance of winning so that might be something.
Good for him, good for him.

George W. McCain will strike again

 

   

    Forever the maverick, John McCain is mixing President George W. Bush’s politics of fear with his own creation: the politics of facetiousness.
    The presumptive Republican party nominee fears that al-Qaida might try to influence the November general election here with increasing attacks on our troops in Iraq. He worries about it, McCain said during a town hall meeting Friday in Springfield, Pennsylvania, because “I know they pay attention, because of the intercepts we have of their communications."
    What, he worry?
    A stepped up war in Iraq or a terrorist attack on America soil could be a godsend to the Arizona Senator, a bonafide war hero. Lest we forget, he’ll be running against either Sen. Barack Obama, whose national security experience boils down to a gutsy, well-thought out anti-war speech, or Sen. Hillary Clinton, whose foreign policy credentials are visits to 80 countries as First Lady in alternating capacities as Ambassador of Good Will or USO-style appearances.
    For your everyday American voter, right now it’s the economy stupid–something no one is counting on McCain to master. But a serious flare-up abroad will put the Iraqi war back on the front burner and put millions of American voters back on red alert.
    Of course, a major Iraq attack against our troops will increase the volume on calls to end the occupation but it will stampede the red-state bloc into wagon-circling-and-bunkering-down mode.  When the going gets rough, we’ll need a tough guy as the Commander-in-Chief.
    Who ya gonna call? The Iraqi buster! McCain will argue that only he knows what to do to put those evildoers down once and forever–even if it takes 100 years. The same lot of voters who believed Bush’s war to be a necessary evil will believe McCain too.
    In fact, should there be a major attack in Iraq–say the last week in September–I’m going to call an expert Crime Scene Investigator. Karl Rove’s fingerprints are bound to be somewhere.

Feminists First: A white woman in the White House

    Gender versus race is a sad and dangerous division in the Democratic party's ranks that threatens to assure Sen. John McCain's ascendancy to the White House. Geraldine Ferraro, Cokie Roberts and Gloria Steinem have had their say. Now I've had mine. Here's my EbonyJet.com commentary, posted today, discussing the development.

Is History Deserved or Earned?
the ferraro debacle
Friday, March 14, 2008
By Monroe Anderson

Barack Obama's political success has white women of a certain age angry and frustrated.

"If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position," Geraldine Ferraro  told the Daily Breeze newspaper in Torrance, California. "And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is."

Ferraro, who was pretty lucky herself when she was chosen 24 years ago to become a first as the Democratic party's vice-presidential candidate, was not the only feminist to express her vexation over the ever increasing possibility that a black man may become Leader-of the-Free-World before a white woman does.  Before Ferraro vented her exasperation last Sunday, there was Cokie Roberts last month on ABC This Week  voicing her frustration.

"The only group she still really has is white women. And I do think that there's some possibility that you will see a sort of reaction among white women," Roberts said after Sen. Clinton's primary loss to Obama in Wisconsin.  "I had the opportunity to interview Billie Jean King this week, and she said, you know, 'I feel like everything I've worked for all of my life is going out the window.' And there is that sense. I mean, here is this woman who's worked hard, she's done it all the way you're supposed to do it, and then this cute young man comes in and says a bunch of sweet, you know, nothings, and pushes you out of the way. And a lot of women are looking at that and saying, 'There goes my life.'"

    "Facing a contest between melanin and the white Y chromosome, I saw no reason why the Y would not be the victor."

After Obama's unexpected Iowa win in January,  there was the Gloria Steinem essay in the New York Times where she complained that women have a tougher time than African American men. "Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life, whether the question is who must be in the kitchen or who could be in the White House," wrote Steinem, a cofounder of the Women's Media Center and Clinton supporter. "Black men were given the vote a half-century before women of any race were allowed to mark a ballot, and generally have ascended to positions of power, from the military to the boardroom, before any women"

Never mind that white men gave black men the vote, then took it away and that the number of women CEOs currently running Fortune 500 companies is in the double digits and there are less than a handful of African American men doing the same. There seems to be this sense of entitlement among white feminist that when it comes to running the Oval Office, it's their turn. Period.

Six months ago, the white women would have gotten no lip back from me. I assumed they were entitled to their sense of entitlement.  Facing a contest between melanin and the white Y chromosome, I saw no reason why the Y would not be the victor. My expectations were realistically restricted. I had high hopes that Hillary would break through the good ol' white boy barrier, paving the way for an African American to follow sometime in the near future.

Back then, of course, Barack was not the front-runner and Hillary was the Inevitable One. Back then, there were debates as to whether Sen. Obama was black enough to appeal to his own ethnic group and polls predicting that Sen. Clinton would command the biggest share of that vote.

That was before it became apparent that there wasn't a dime's worth of difference between the two candidates on major political issues and it became even more apparent to everyone, but older white women, that Barack was a better candidate than Hillary and running a better campaign as well.

There is also this obvious reality: Obama now leads in the dedicated delegate count, the popular vote and the number of states won. The former First Lady can only win if the party's super delegates hand her the nomination in a brokered convention this summer in Denver. Such an unacceptable  maneuver would surely turn off the party's fired-up youth and African American vote.

So unless Sen. Clinton and her supporters are willing to see the 44th white man take the presidential oath on January 20, it looks like they're going to have to accept this overwhelming probability: Their dream will be deferred.