“My family gave me love. They gave me an education. And most of all, they gave me hope. Hope, hope that in America, no dream is beyond our grasp if we reach for it, and fight for it, and work for it.” Barack Obama, 2008

Ann Jackson of Hinesville, Ga., holds a fan with the image of President Barack Obama as she waits for his arrival at the Fort Stewart Army post - at The Obama Diary

from The Obama Diary:



President Barack Obama stops to view the moon and Venus before boarding Marine One in Boulder, Colo., April 24, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

President Barack Obama's hand is grabbed by students after he spoke about the rising costs of student loans while in Carmichael Arena at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill April 24, 2012. REUTERS/Larry Downing

President Obama heads to N.C. to speak about the rising costs of college loans.














President Barack Obama smiles while talking about the rising costs of student loans in Carmichael Arena at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill April 24, 2012. REUTERS/Larry Downing

IT'S a funny argument Ann Coulter is making because she's going to have to either accept that affirmative action actually gave minority individuals a lift to provide for the educational advantages and the rest of the opportunities that folks like Barack Obama and others who happen to be black may have used to pull themselves up the economic or social ladder, or, Coulter has to admit that those opportunities wouldn't have been there for folks like Barack Obama without affirmative action. She can't have it every which way she pleases.

"I wasn't born with a silver spoon in my mouth," Obama said in his remarks on the campus of an Ohio community college. "Michelle wasn't. But somebody gave us a chance - just like these folks up here are looking for a chance."

" . . . the silver spoon Obama got," Coulter complained, "— I mean that generation, it can’t be denied, you can’t support affirmative action and then pretend it doesn’t exist. You don’t transfer from Occidental . . . to a fine Ivy League university like Columbia if you’re not checking off ‘black’ on your application. So you know, the silver spoon since I’ve been alive has been an affirmative action silver spoon.”

So Coulter admits that affirmative action opened up the doors of institutions like Columbia to blacks who had previously not been able to crack the artificial barrier. It's not as if the man who was subsequently elected president of the Harvard Law Review was somehow unqualified for entrance into Columbia. His attendance there was very likely the result of the push for wider access for blacks to these 'ivy-league' colleges and universities. But it's, of course, false to suggest that this was some sort of unfair advantage for the handful of blacks in the beginning of Obama's time -- and the line of others who managed to follow him into that institution.

Moreover, it's just absurd to suggest that the opportunity Barack Obama took advantage of somehow elevated him to the same level of opportunity and future as someone who was not a minority and had personal wealth to enable them in their educational and employment successes.

Of course, Coulter probably knows this well, but, if she's speaking to her rabid, scapegoating base of republican voters, she's going to find agreement among them with her race-baiting nonsense. The rest of us just can't be as stupid to assume that being black during Barack Obama's formative years was anything but a generational challenge, or, that those who took advantage of affirmative action were anything more than worthy and qualified, as they weren't guaranteed or even positioned to completely overcome the vestiges and roadblocks of that racism and discrimination at the heart of the remedies and assistance offered.

The success that the President achieved in his lifetime was all on his own initiative, despite needing the lever that affirmative action provided to open the doors of opportunity which had been closed to blacks and other minorities for decades and decades after the enumeration of those rights under the Constitution. The federal government's enforcement and upward mobility assistance made those rights in the Constitution a reality for black Americans. Coulter obviously regrets this. Shame.

from The Obama Diary:



President Obama sits on the famed Rosa Parks bus at the Henry Ford Museum following an event in Dearborn, Mich., April 18 (White House/Pete Souza)

“I just sat in there for a moment and pondered the courage and tenacity that is part of our very recent history but is also part of that long line of folks who sometimes are nameless, oftentimes didn’t make the history books, but who constantly insisted on their dignity, their share of the American dream.”

Children gesture near President Barack Obama during a ceremony to restitute land to Afro-Colombians displaced from their homes by armed rebel groups in San Pedro Square in Cartagena April 15, 2012.



REUTERS/Ricardo Moraes

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton yesterday went dancing after midnight at Cafe Havana, a Cartagena bar known for its Cuban music, after a day of diplomacy at the Summit of the Americas.

Accompanied by security agents, Clinton had a drink at the salsa bar and then danced with a posse of her female aides, relaxing after a day at the side of US President Barack Obama at the roughly 30-nation summit . . .





“She looked like she was having a great time,” said a person who saw Clinton at the bar and spoke on condition of anonymity.

A US State Department official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, confirmed Clinton went dancing at the bar. Asked if she had fun, the official replied: “A lot.”


read: http://www.gulf-times.com/site/topics/article.asp?cu_no=2&item_no=499540&version=1&template_id=43&parent_id=19

President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton talk during the plenary session of the Summit of the Americas in Cartagena April 14, 2012. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque