You know we Africans are great orators. Our great oral tradition is the reason the world has embraced our proverbs and allegories. Remember this one, America? “Walk softly and carry a big stick.” Teddy Roosevelt borrowed it from West Africa.

So you can imagine how hard it is to piece together half a dozen interviews for a story I’m working on about what one of them, Cyril Ibe, a Nigerian-born assistant professor of journalism at Central State University, Wilberforce, Ohio, called “an explosion” of African media on the Internet.

Add high education to an African and the quality of the wisdom is elevated beyond the skies. (African immigrants are the single most educated group, per capita, in the United States. I didn’t make that up. According to the 2000 U.S. Census, 43 percent of them have at least a college diploma, compared to 24 percent among the general U.S. population. If you don’t believe the numbers, get counted in U.S. Census 2010 and prove me wrong).

Anyway, back to my story.

The interviews have so much information I’m tempted to just transcribe them and post unedited. That would make my editor mad, wouldn’t it? I want to wait until I’m done with the story to tell you about it, but I’m really bad at keeping things wrapped. Don’t ever tell me a secret.

Anyway.

I’m amazed by the ambitions of these Africans. In Boston, Paul Waithaka is launching the Kenya Monitor, both online and in print. Did you hear that? In this recession, this guy launching a print newspaper.

“I’m pleasantly surprised that people are more willing to buy ads in the print issue than for online,” he says.

Waithaka says he is ashamed to reveal how much he has spent out of his pocket.

In Houston, Chido Nwangwu runs USAfricaOnline, a multimedia company that published magazines, books and news.

“We were hit badly,” by the recession, he says. “The motivation driving me is that children like my son, Chido Nwangwu II, will grow up to know that some people made efforts to build the community they will inherit, expand and create their own network with other communities, while fully aware of their heritage. A dignified heritage, not the Tarzan, the 419 scams, you know, the stereotypical nonsense.”

And that’s not the best quote.

In Dallas, Charles Muigai recently spent more than $5,000 to build an Internet talks radio station. He, with his wife and a friend, broadcasts his two-hour Truthsayer Show to Kenyans.

“I’m not a journalist,” he says. “I just have an opinion.”

Then there is Julia Opoti at KenyaImagine.com, which provides “a bridge between the Diaspora and Kenya.”

Opoti and her partners have spent more than $10,000 to develop a reputable opinion, commentary and analysis Web site that the New York Times and the Guardian (UK) list as a resource on Kenya.

And you said journalism is dead? I think the kind of journalism that is dying, in my opinion, is the one that ignores ethnic folks. (60 million strong, baby!)
—Edwin Okong’o

Of course y’all knew I was going to do my obligatory/celebratory Pacquiao post after picking apart Miguel Cotto.

I thought that after demolishing Hatton, it was what boxing really needed right now. So if that was the treatment to prolong boxing’s life, then this fight could potentially have been the antidote that cures and resuscitates boxing’s vegetable state. Though, restructuring the way the sport is promoted and fights are set up need to be considered as a part of the rehabilitation process.

Earning a seventh title in a seventh weight class is of historic significance for boxing, but it cannot be understated how collectively significant this moment was for the Filipino people. My previous article for WireTap and this more recent one from The Ring mean so much more right now. With the pain placed upon the Filipino people due to Typhoon’s Ondoy and Pepeng, a lot was riding on the people’s spirits for a victory tonight*. The humbleness and upbeat mood he exhibited before, during, and after the fight shows why he possesses the charisma for folks to be drawn to him and consider him to be a “people’s champ”. Big ups to the “L”s for “laban” during Michael Buffer’s introduction.

I wonder if it would be possible for someone to create a graph of Pacquiao mentions in rap lyrics over the past year, and to see what type of spike takes place after this fight.

In my opinion, he’s already solidified his placement with the greats. When boxing historians look back at the greatest of all time, be on the lookout for Manny’s name with Sugar Ray Robinson, Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis, etc. That statmenet might be premature to make, but it is crazy to see how he has been able to carry along his power and speed, as he has gone up in weight, not to mention that his skills have also improved throughout this period.

Next up is the inevitable battle with Floyd Mayweather, as long as he doesn’t try to make excuses (Money May doesn’t deserve more than 50% from the fight).

Much respect to Manny Pacquiao, Freddie Roach, Restituto “Buboy” Fernandez, and Miguel Cotto.

Prayers to Z Gorres.

Michael Koncz, you can lean back with Fat Joe.

*I do digress a little bit, though, knowing the connections Pacquiao has with GMA and her own failed response to the disasters and almost every other aspect of the domestic affairs of the Philippines.
—Ninoy Brown

Talk about missed opportunities.

Since no real journalists are likely to get a sit-down with Sarah Palin during her book promotions blitz, it sure would’ve been nice for Oprah to have made a stab at a serious questioning of the former Governor of Alaska.
Remember in ‘06, when Oprah took apart that fabricating novelist James Frey and his enabling editor, Nan Talese? At that time, I gave The Big O big props for wielding a fine stiletto of truth in the name of defending the precious line between Fact and Fiction in print. Now, though, I wonder if maybe Oprah had rolled so hard on Frey at that time because his deception had put her reputation at risk, and the degree of personal humiliation she felt at having been duped by the dodgy writer created a volcano of Oprahnic anger, one that would only be sated by a Public Sacrifice.

Sure, she apparently apologized to Frey several weeks ago, in a weirdly-timed, but ultimately understandable gesture. (Oprah is big on forgiveness, so her apology to Frey for having flayed him in front of a billion viewers tracks as consistent.) Yet I anticipated a stronger roll on Palin from Oprah, not just because of what she’d laid down on Frey but also because Oprah kinda-sorta used to be a broadcast Journalist, and she has over the years expressed clear-eyed simpatico with the increasingly besieged practitioners of the Fourth Estate.

But no.

Instead, in her interview yesterday with Palin, we witnessed a spectacle of polite nudging and Girlfriend-ey winks and nods. How tellingly Show Biz was it, for example, when at the end of the 40+ minute talk, Oprah asked Palin if a national television talk show is in Palin’s future. “Should I be worried?,” Oprah asked playfully. To which Palin replied, with characteristic faux modesty, ‘Oprah, you are the Queen.”

Ack.

Their interview has been parsed, dissected, and chewed over ad infinitum ad naseum elsewhere—including on my Facebook page, where I live blogged it—so I won’t rehash it here now.

Instead, I present five questions that The Big O should have asked Sarah Palin….if only The Big O had decided to put her Journalists’ Hat, rather than her Show Biz Lid, squarely atop her well-coiffed head during her talk with the ex-Gov.

1) While campaigning with John McCain last fall, you repeatedly accused then-Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama of “palling around with terrorists.” Many more of your stump speeches contained references to Obama as promoting a “socialist” agenda. Do you still believe these things about President Obama? (Thanks to Donald Collins, who suggested this question.)

2) In your book, you describe the moment when you learned that the child you were carrying, your son Trig, would likely be born with Down Syndrome, and that for a fleeting moment, you ‘understood’ how some women might consider abortion. So isn’t it hypocritical of you to support anti-choice legislation?

3) Did you order or arrange the firing of your brother-in-law from his job supervising a unit of the Alaska State Troopers?

4) Did Nicolle Wallace advise you that Katie Couric had “low self-esteem?”

5) You studied journalism in college, and worked for a local news program for a time. How do you describe the role of journalism and journalists in a free, democratic society?

Now, that would have made for some Must-See TV.

A final point on the current Palin-palooza that is sweeping across the fruited plain: You may have heard that quite a few folks have mounted “rejoinder” publications to coincide with the appearance of the former Governor’s “autobiography” this week. (Yeah, I put quotation marks around “autobiography” since it is not likely that Palin actually WROTE her own book.)

One of the rejoinders dropping today is called (quite cleverly) Going Rouge: Sarah Palin, An American Nightmare. It is put out by a new publishing concern, OR Books, and edited by my colleagues at The Nation, the estimable Betsy Reed, Executive Editor of The Nation, and the dashingly brilliant Senior Editor, Richard Kim. I am a Contributor, one of several writers who published essays and articles in the Nation and elsewhere last year during the frenzied weeks after Palin popped up on the GOP presidential ticket.

My essay, titled, “Sarah’s Steel Ones,” makes the point that Sarah Palin is worthy of respect for a couple of reasons: A) she is a human being and B) she appears to possess a high degree of ambition, moxie and self-confidence, traits that, in and of themselves, are valuable inclusions in a woman’s personal arsenal.

A year later, even in light of the…unfortunate nature of many of her recent choices, I do not rescind my original argument. I will however take this opportunity to amend it: Self-confidence, moxie, and ambition are great, but they are most effective and self-sustaining when combined with equal measures of self-awareness, intellectual curiosity, honesty, and compassion.

I believe that women who successfully achieve this balance are often called “difficult” by men….while other women will choose the word “together.”
—Amy Alexander

Progressive advocates for elders must be wondering, “With Democrats like that, who needs Republicans?”

Last week, the Senate Budget Committee held a hearing on the proposal by its chair Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., and top GOP member, Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., to create the Bipartisan Task Force for Responsible Fiscal Action. The Conrad-Gregg task force would have the power to “improve the long-term fiscal balance of the Federal Government, including the fiscal balance of Social Security and Medicare.”

Washington is littered with official commissions and their reports, but this one would be set on an unusually fast track. The 16 committee members would include key powers in Congress and the White House. Both houses of Congress would get the task force’s plan late in 2010 but only for an up-or-down vote—no debate or amendments allowed. Each house would have to pass the measure by a 60 percent supermajority.

The plot thickened last week, when four prominent Democrats, plus Sen. Joe (“I won’t wiggle on the health care filibuster”) Lieberman, threatened to halt approval of an unrelated but critical piece of legislation unless congress lets them have their way with the task force.

Progressive economist Dean Baker explained in a Nov. 16 blog on Huffington Post that Congress must pass legislation by the end of this year to raise the level of the national debt, a normal periodic process without which the U.S. economy would be in even more serious trouble. Accusing the senators of being “hostage takers,” Baker, who co-directs the Center for Economic and Policy Research, asserted, “This commission would be stacked with people who want to cut Social Security and Medicare.”

Conrad, Gregg and their purple cabal want to fast-track the task force’s recommendations, as Congress did with base closings, in order to force-feed unpopular choices through a presumably ineffectual national legislature. Proof, say some purple dogs, is in the failure of the health care reform to cobble together bills that would do anything to control medical costs. Therefore, we need extraordinary action to save the nation. From its representatives. Such as themselves. Those advocating for the normal democratic process in this case argue that Social Security and Medicare are not like local military bases that might never close otherwise because of tit-for-tat political horse trading over claims of lost jobs and so on.

One of the debt-limit bandits, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein and others have proffered differing commission proposals, but all focus on social insurance protections that provide health and income security to America’s aging masses – you know, the ones conservatives call Greedy Geezers when they want to cut benefits and the Greatest Generation when they pander to senior voters.

All claim to skewer the presumed sacred cows of Social Security and Medicare, while none actually involve “responsible fiscal action,” that is, placing all U.S. spending priorities on the table. Cases in point: Wasteful military spending (especially but not exclusively related to two wars) and tax loopholes for corporate America. Take the $33 billion giveaway in tax breaks to the building industry – please! – that was secreted inside the extension of unemployment benefits passed last week, exposed in Sunday’s New York Times by business columnist Gretchen Morgenson.

In the Daily Kos last Thursday (Nov. 12), Mcjoan wrote that Sen. Conrad and his “unsurprising bipartisan ‘gang”—13 senators, among them Democrats Evan Bayh, Ind., Dianne Feinstein, Calif., Mark Warner, Va., and kosher dog Lieberman—have “put new pressure on Speaker Nancy Pelosi to turn the power to trim entitlement benefits over to an independent commission.” Mcjoan urged, “Go for it, guys. Form your national suicide pact. Tell the country that you are demanding deep cuts in Social Security and Medicare, or else you will personally cause the United States debt to double.”

NYT reporter Jackie Calmes blogged (Nov. 10) that most members of Congress or budget analysts who now support the fast-track commission claim to be “reluctant converts . . . having concluded that Democrats and Republicans cannot reach the needed compromises on spending cuts and tax increases without some forcing mechanism.” Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (Nevada) oppose sidestepping debate, but House majority leader Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, issued a statement strongly supporting the task force idea.

Respected progressive blogger Digby, opining for Campaign for America’s Future, warned Nov. 12 that in Congress “talk of cutting Social Security right now would be hugely popular, so all the incumbent Democrats should be intensely interested in getting that issue on the agenda in an election year.”

She added, “Seriously, this is Shock Doctrine lunacy of the most obvious kind. Conrad and Bayh are out there saying it right up front. The government has poured trillions into the economy to save the banks and run useless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the old people and the poor are going to have to pay the price. That’s the way it works.”

The thin wonky line standing against the Senate elder abusers includes a group of eight veteran experts, who had prominent staff roles in the vaunted 1983 “Greenspan Commission,” credited with saving Social Security, sent a joint letter last to the Senate Budget committee, urging them not to pull an end-run around congressional debate.

“We all agree that social insurance programs have problems, especially Medicare,” said Nancy J. Altman, author of The Battle for Social Security (Wiley, 2005), who was a special assistant to Chairman Greenspan on the commission. However, Altman, serving as a “point person” for the distinguished group, emphasized that sidestepping the normal congressional process in the spirit of forcing “do-nothing” politicians to take necessary action could severely damage America’s already frayed safety net.

She noted that low-income elders, especially those of color, are particularly reliant on Social Security and Medicare. For instance, a recent report by the Hispanic Institute in Washington, D.C., notes that 50 percent of Latinas 65 or older in the U.S. rely on Social Security for 100 percent of their income, and 85 percent of them gain at least half of the income from Social Security. (Readers can see fact sheets on Social Securities demographic impact on different ethnic groups here.)

To justify suspending the normal legislative process, the quick-fixers point to a Government Accountability Office study showing that without change, the nation will hand the coming generations an “unsustainable” $63 trillion liability from federal entitlement programs by 2083. Others last week mentioned that amount as $37 trillion.

Reporters need to be wary about the scary numbers game. Not only are the figures suspect, but even the conservative think tanks (Heritage Foundation, Cato, etc.), which jiggered up the formula for these 2012 disaster-movie calculations, admit that most comes from projected Medicare costs. Medicare is absolutely in trouble – but because of overall rampant health inflation in the United States, not because too many baby boomers will have the temerity to grow old.

One might ask where or where to the purple dogs go so wrong. And who’s the mastermind behind this fiscal caper?

Altman observed that when Sens. Conrad and Gregg first introduced their bill in 2007, they included three letters of support from The Peter G. Peterson Foundation, the Concord Coalition and the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget—all three them connected to and funded by Wall Street Pete Peterson.

The grandfatherly octogenarian Peterson, who was Richard Nixon’s Secretary of Commerce and went on to found the private equity giant, The Blackstone Group, endowed his Peterson Foundation three years ago with $1 billion. Cutting and partially privatizing entitlement programs for elders is one of three stated missions of the tax-exempt organization. Peterson promptly hired then U.S. Comptroller General David Walker to head the foundation.

“This is really the Peterson Commission,” said anti-task force committee of eight in a background release. Peterson has spent almost three decades militating against Social Security and other federal supports for elders, and last Tuesday one of the main speakers called on to testify at Conrad-Gregg hearing on the task force was Walker.

As Altman stressed that the bipartisan 1983 commission, chaired by and informally named for Greenspan, accomplished major reforms of Social Security – which was in far deeper trouble then than it is now – through normal congressional debate and floor votes.

How quaint. Democracy actually worked. Maybe our representatives should try a little constructive nation building right there under the Capitol dome.
—Paul Kleyman

Photo by Marcelo Ballvé