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In praise of ... American theatres | Editorial
Sunday, June 7, 2009

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Christopher Hitchens says that if you want to give a girl a good night out in Washington you should take her to New York. Barack Obama obviously thinks the same. Having promised his wife Michelle during the election campaign last year that he would take her to a Broadway show when it was all finished, he duly headed north at the weekend for a performance of Joe Turner's Come and Gone, a play by August Wilson about the migration of freed slaves from the deep south. A promise is a promise, so it is perhaps unfair to criticise the president too much for fulfilling his private campaign pledge. Nevertheless, a president who wants to wean Americans off their emissions-heavy travel habits was not setting a good example by taking two helicopter trips and a plane to New York and back, as the Obamas did. Nor, however excellent the Broadway performance, was the trip fair to Washington, whose theatres are one of its own great attractions. A few blocks from the White House, the Shakespeare theatre, under Michael Kahn's direction, is a particularly fine company, but the Arena and the Studio also do excellent innovative work. There are grander theatres at the Kennedy Center, the Warner and the National as well as the delightful small Folger, part of the Shakespeare library on Capitol Hill. Presidential trips to the Washington theatre have a bad history, of course, but the Obamas could have plenty of good nights out in their own city with a fraction of the carbon footprint it took to go to New York.

• Theatre


• Broadway


• Barack Obama


• United States

guardian.co.uk ? Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

posted by 88956 @ 11:41 PM, ,

Conservatives launch Sotomayor attack

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Prominent Republicans and conservative interest groups seek to portray Sonia Sotomayor as racist and un-American

Prominent Republicans and conservative interest groups have unleashed a campaign to portray President Barack Obama's supreme court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor, as racist for suggesting that white men don't always make the best judges and un-American for using a Spanish pronunciation of her name.

What Obama has portrayed as Sotomayor's strength as an American of Puerto Rican descent raised in the Bronx who made it to Princeton and Yale, bringing areas of experience and understanding not immediately evident among the white male majority on the supreme court, is being played by her opponents as evidence that she was nominated because she has a racial agenda.

Newt Gingrich, the Republican former speaker of the house of representatives, and Karl Rove, George Bush's chief strategist, have both called Sotomayor "racist" and said she should withdraw as a nominee over comments she made in 2001. In a talk at the University of California, she offered the view that a female Hispanic judge would better understand certain issues around race and gender than a white male.

"I would hope that a wise Latina woman, with the richness of her experiences, would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life," she said. "Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging."

To some Americans, Sotomayor's comments appear self-evident. They point to the personal experience that Thurgood Marshall brought as a black man elevated to the supreme court during the civil rights era. But conservatives said her comments are evidence that she will be biased against whites and men.

Gingrich, in a Twitter feed to more than 340,000 followers, said she should resign. "Imagine a judicial nominee said, 'My experience as a white man makes me better than a Latina woman.' New racism is no better than old racism," wrote Gingrich.

He sent a second tweet a few minutes later saying: "White man racist nominee would be forced to withdraw. Latina woman racist should also withdraw."

Rove and two Republican members of congress also called Sotomayor racist.

The White House warned the Republicans to be "exceedingly careful" about such language. Some Republican strategists said the tactic could backfire if it alienates large numbers of Hispanics who support the party.

But other conservatives took up the cudgel.

Rush Limbaugh, the country's most popular talk radio host with millions of listeners, said the party should press the issue.

"If the GOP [Republican party] allows itself to be trapped in the false premise that it's racist and sexist and must show the world that it isn't, then the GOP is extinct," he said.

Critics are also using Sotomayor's pronunciation of her own name as a stick to beat her. The judge, whose parents hail from the Spanish-speaking US territory of Puerto Rico, uses a Hispanic pronunciation. Some critics have taken up a call by a prominent conservative magazine, the National Review, arguing that she should Anglicise it. The writer, Mark Krikorian, said that "there ought to be limits" to the demands made on English-speakers to try and pronounce foreign names.

While the accusations of racism are considered extreme among many Americans, they are likely to shape the challenges to Sotomayor when she faces her congressional confirmation hearing.

Obama sees Sotomayor's background as reflecting the "quality of empathy, of understanding and identifying with people's hopes and struggles, as an essential ingredient" he said he wants to see in the next supreme court justice.

But that experience and understanding is being interpreted by some Republicans as bias. Senator Orrin Hatch, a member of the judiciary committee, portrayed Obama's desire for empathy in a supreme court justice as "a code word for an activist judge".

Hatch, said that while he is keeping an open mind, the judge will have to answer for her 2001 comments. He said he will not support her if she intends to use the law to implement social policy.

"I will focus on determining whether Judge Sotomayor is committed to deciding cases based only on the law as made by the people and their elected representatives, not on personal feelings or politics," Hatch said in a statement.

Critics have also latched on to Sotomayor's history of legal activism in the 1980s when she served on the board of a legal group tackling discrimination against minorities in New York and cases involving alleged racism involved in police brutality and the imposition of the death penalty.

The group won cases that redrew constituency boundaries to increase the number of Hispanic elected officials. It also launched a defamation case, and lost, against a former Reagan administration official for claiming that most Puerto Ricans in the city were on food stamps.

• Sonia Sotomayor


• US Supreme Court


• Obama administration


• Race issues


• Barack Obama


• United States

guardian.co.uk ? Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

posted by 88956 @ 10:27 PM, ,

Some Conservatives Have A Heart!

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Steve Levitt makes an astounding discovery.

posted by 88956 @ 9:14 PM, ,

The Party Of Nixon

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Fabio Rojas has a theory:

[C]onservative politics was not ?Sreborn? after the Goldwater campaign in 1964 and cemented by Reagan. Instead, the Nixonites allowed this new ideological trend to be the face of the party, but they retained control over the institutional functions of the party, as evidence by Nixon?"s resurgence. This observation explains a lot of other puzzling feature of Republican politics. This is not the party of small government, it?"s the party of national security. The party of individual liberty and self-reliance is actually the party of ?Senhanced interrogation.? The idea tying it together is national security, with superficial appeals to whatever helps win the election.

posted by 88956 @ 8:32 PM, ,

The other Susan Boyle

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The global success of the Britain's Got Talent star has had an unlikely impact on one unassuming Texas artist. Stuart Jeffries hears how

There is, you might think, room in the world for only one Susan Boyle. But you would be wrong. The American artist, Susan K Boyle, was living her quiet, unassuming life in the pretty hill country of Kerrville, Texas, when a friend sent her an email.

"It was a link to Susan Boyle's YouTube performance a few days after her audition," recalls Susan K. "I thought she was wonderful - what a beautiful voice and what a compelling story. But I thought it was just an interesting coincidence, nothing more."

Except that back in 2002, Susan K Boyle had set up a website, susanboyle.com, to display her artworks. That site had been rusting in cyberspace for a couple of years - until the Britain's Got Talent finalist sudenly came to the global consciousness last month, and something rather strange happened. "A journalist called me and said, 'Do you know your site is getting 1,800 hits per hour?' I had no idea - I hadn't upgraded the site for a couple of years." Yesterday, she calculated the cumulative total of hits to be more than 172,000.

Susan K's website shows her figurative line drawings and head studies in oil. Like her namesake, she has got talent, though not the sort to irrigate Simon Cowell or Amanda Holden's tear ducts.

And then the madness, as it does in such cases, began in earnest. "A couple of Susan Boyle fans emailed me to say they thought I sang beautifully. Another thought I sang beautifully and liked my artwork! Among the emails were inquiries for price quotes on a couple of my art pieces. However, I have had no sales as a result of this. Yet."

So is Susan K expecting a surge of sales as a result of the sudden celebrity of an unglamorous though sweet-voiced woman who lives on the other side of the Atlantic? "That would be too weird, wouldn't it?"

Next, she started getting calls and emails from people wanting to buy her website's domain name. "One guy, within a minute, had increased his offer from $100 to $500,000. I'm not sure how serious he was, but that sort of thing is very strange to happen to someone like me." She consulted a company called Sedo that sells domain names and, following their advice, has now put her web address up for sale for a cool $25,000. She hasn't sold it. Yet. (She has moved her artwork display, though, to sboyleart.com).

Surely she'll be rooting for her namesake to win tomorrow night's final? "I haven't heard the other finalists, so I can't say." Admirably diplomatic - but Susan K now has a pecuniary interest in the other Susan's success. According to Sedo's director of business development, Nora Nanayakkara: "The value of the domain name really depends on the sustainability of Susan Boyle's popularity."

I ask if Susan K's life story is as heart-rending as her namesake's. "I don't know much about her biography," she replies. I'm thinking of the fact that the 46-year-old singer from West Lothian claimed - apparently as a joke - never to have been kissed, at least until Piers Morgan made her life story even more harrowing by kissing her backstage last week. "Oh, I've been kissed," Susan K replies finally.

The 64-year-old from Kerrville is an art major who has drawn and painted throughout her life, while working mostly in the airline industry. "I was a stewardess, as they were called in the 60s, for PanAm. I left just before Lockerbie [the PanAm crash in 1988]."

In addition to Susan K's new website, her work can be seen in a show called Turning Point at the Hill Country Arts Foundation in Ingram, Texas, from 6 June. She is understandably eager for the media circus (ie me calling her at the prearranged time of 7.30am from London) to move on, so she can walk her "lovely old dog" and then get back to her art.

After the interview, she sends me a disarming email: "Please be kind to me in your article. Another outfit in the UK wrote about me yesterday and made me sound stupid AND greedy - and they hadn't even spoken with me!! Egads!"

For the record, Susan K Boyle is neither of those things (and I'm always a sucker for a woman who exclaims "egads"). She is, like her namesake, a breath of fresh air. The last thing the "other" Susan Boyle says sounds sweet coming down the line to this celeb-crazy nation. "I am an artist and am happiest in my studio working on my art. I don't deserve, or want, fame".

• Art


• Britain's Got Talent


• Susan Boyle


• United States

guardian.co.uk ? Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

posted by 88956 @ 7:19 PM, ,

What American "Socialism" Looks Like

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Obama's only been in office a few months in a steep depression but the ideological right already sees socialism here. For a little reality check, here's a chart from Conor Clarke of government control of the economy (click the link for the details):

posted by 88956 @ 7:09 PM, ,

DUE TO NUMEROUS EMAILS I POST THE FOLLOWING BOOK UPDATE

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posted by 88956 @ 6:03 PM, ,

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