At the start of Barack Obama's whistle stop tour to Washington today, the president-elect hailed the "outstanding" mayor of Philadelphia, Michael Nutter. In Wilmington, he acknowledged Mayor James M. Baker by name.
Not so in Baltimore. Mayor Sheila Dixon was one of thousands of Obama supporters braving hours of sub-freezing temperatures to greet him at War Memorial Plaza. "It's an extremely huge deal for me," she said in an interview before Obama's address. "Words can't describe how ecstatic we are."
But even as he gazed at City Hall, the man who will be the nation's first black president did not acknowledge that Baltimore's first black female mayor was in attendance. He thanked Nancy Pelosi, a Baltimore native and House speaker, as well as Gov. Martin O'Malley and all "state" elected officials, but not his municipal host.
Then again, neither Nutter nor Baker are facing criminal charges of public corruption, as Dixon is. Her attorney has said she is innocent of all charges.
Officially, the line from both the Obama and Dixon camps was that the 12-count indictment levied by a state prosecutor against the mayor last week had no impact on the ceremony. Demaune Millard, Dixon's chief of staff, said the indictment, which includes charges of theft and perjury, never came up in conversations between the mayor's office and the inaugural committee organizing Obama's triumphant train trip to the White House.
Chris Mather, a spokeswoman for the inaugural committee, deflected questions about Dixon, insisting that the team's entire focus was on "renewing America's promise."
Posted by: Fred ||
01/19/2009 00:00 ||
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the man who will be the nation's first black president did not acknowledge that Baltimore's first black female mayor was in attendance.
It's like Rahm told you Sheila, you and Rod are DEAD TO ME! Now... QUIT texting, please! Where is Bidens wife? I need to kiss her again, and again.
A year after then-candidate Barack Obama distanced himself from his controversial longtime pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright thrilled hundreds of churchgoers this morning in Washington, giving a sermon holding up Obama as a spiritual symbol of possibility.
People waited two hours to hear Wright preach the Sunday service at Howard University's Crampton Auditorium, a high-profile platform for clergy, black clergy in particular. Wright has preached the service, run by the school's Rankin Chapel, on the Sunday before Martin Luther King Day for the past five years and was booked months before the election, school officials said.
Howard students, alumnae and notables such as opera singer Jessye Norman and Morehouse College President Robert Michael Franklin Jr. attended the service, which overflowed into two other buildings. They came to see a man whose relationship with Obama became explosive, both among those who saw his words as racist and anti-American rhetoric and those livid with Obama for distancing himself from someone they saw as simply speaking truths about racism and war.
Posted by: Fred ||
01/19/2009 00:00 ||
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In the spirit of "unity" and "one-ness", how soon can we expect the Rev. Wright to deliver a sermon at white universities?
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
A year after then-candidate Barack Obama distanced himself from his controversial longtime pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright thrilled hundreds of churchgoers this morning in Washington, giving a sermon holding up Obama as a spiritual symbol of possibility. 
