Bessie Smith: “St. Louis Blues” (1929)

This is Bessie Smith in her only film appearance, a 1929 two-reeler titled “St. Louis Blues” based on W. C. Handy’s song by the same name. She sings the title song accompanied by members of Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra, the Hall Johnson Choir, pianist James P. Johnson, and a string section.

Bessie Smith (1892 – 1937) was an American blues singer and the most popular female blues singer of the 1920’s and 1930’s. She was a major influence on subsequent jazz vocalists. Billie Holiday, Mahalia Jackson and Janis Joplin are among singers who credit her with influencing their careers.

As a way of earning money for their impoverished childhood household, Smith and her brother Andrew began performing on the streets of Chattanooga as a duo, she singing and dancing, he accompanying on guitar; their preferred location was in front of the White Elephant Saloon at Thirteenth and Elm streets in the heart of the city's African-American community.

Her oldest brother, Clarence, had joined a musical group in 1904 but she was too young to join. However, by 1912, Clarence arranged for an audition for his sister. She was hired as a dancer rather than a singer, because the company also included Ma Rainey.

By the 1920’s Smith starred in theatrical music productions and soon became a recording artist. Within a few years she became the highest-paid black entertainer of her day. She made 160 recordings for Columbia Records.

Smith died from injuries suffered in an automobile accident in the fall of 1937. The funeral was attended by seven thousand people but her grave remained unmarked due to her estranged husband. In August of 1970, a tombstone was placed, paid for by singer Janis Joplin and Juanita Green, who, as a child, had done housework for Smith.

The 2008 election and the dawning of a new liberal order

Peter Beinhart examines in Time magazine this week the history of modern liberalism from the early 20th Century through the present (using Grant Park during the Democratic Convention in 1968 and Grant Park on election night 2008 as bookends for its temporary demise) and the dawning of a new liberal order under President-elect Obama:

In America, political majorities live or die at the intersection of two public yearnings: for freedom and for order. A century ago, in the Progressive Era, modern American liberalism was born, in historian Robert Wiebe's words, as a "search for order." America's giant industrial monopolies, the progressives believed, were turning capitalism into a jungle, a wild and lawless place where only the strong and savage survived. By the time Roosevelt took office during the Great Depression, the entire ecosystem appeared to be in a death spiral, with Americans crying out for government to take control. F.D.R. did — juicing the economy with unprecedented amounts of government cash, creating new protections for the unemployed and the elderly, and imposing rules for how industry was to behave. Conservatives wailed that economic freedom was under assault, but most ordinary Americans thanked God that Washington was securing their bank deposits, helping labor unions boost their wages, giving them a pension when they retired and pumping money into the economy to make sure it never fell into depression again. They didn't feel unfree; they felt secure. For three and a half decades, from the mid-1930s through the '60s, government imposed order on the market. The jungle of American capitalism became a well-tended garden, a safe and pleasant place for ordinary folks to stroll. Americans responded by voting for F.D.R.-style liberalism — which even most Republican politicians came to accept — in election after election.

By the beginning of the 1960s, though, liberalism was becoming a victim of its own success. The post-World War II economic boom flooded America's colleges with the children of a rising middle class, and it was those children, who had never experienced life on an economic knife-edge, who began to question the status quo, the tidy, orderly society F.D.R. had built. For blacks in the South, they noted, order meant racial apartheid. For many women, it meant confinement to the home. For everyone, it meant stifling conformity, a society suffocated by rules about how people should dress, pray, imbibe and love. In 1962, Students for a Democratic Society spoke for what would become a new, baby-boom generation "bred in at least modest comfort," which wanted less order and more freedom. And it was this movement for racial, sexual and cultural liberation that bled into the movement against Vietnam and assembled in August 1968 in Grant Park.

Traditional liberalism died there because Americans — who had once associated it with order — came to associate it with disorder instead. For a vast swath of the white working class, racial freedom came to mean riots and crime; sexual freedom came to mean divorce; and cultural freedom came to mean disrespect for family, church and flag. Richard Nixon and later Reagan won the presidency by promising a new order: not economic but cultural, not the taming of the market but the taming of the street.

Flash forward to the evening of Nov. 4, and you can see why liberalism has sprung back to life. Ideologically, the crowds who assembled to hear Obama on election night were linear descendants of those egg throwers four decades before. They too believe in racial equality, gay rights, feminism, civil liberties and people's right to follow their own star. But 40 years later, those ideas no longer seem disorderly. Crime is down and riots nonexistent; feminism is so mainstream that even Sarah Palin embraces the term; Chicago mayor Richard Daley, son of the man who told police to bash heads, marches in gay-rights parades. Culturally, liberalism isn't that scary anymore. Younger Americans — who voted overwhelmingly for Obama — largely embrace the legacy of the '60s, and yet they constitute one of the most obedient, least rebellious generations in memory. The culture war is ending because cultural freedom and cultural order — the two forces that faced off in Chicago in 1968 — have turned out to be reconcilable after all.

The disorder that panics Americans now is not cultural but economic. If liberalism collapsed in the 1960s because its bid for cultural freedom became associated with cultural disorder, conservatism has collapsed today because its bid for economic freedom has become associated with economic disorder. When Reagan took power in 1981, he vowed to restore the economic liberty that a half-century of F.D.R.-style government intrusion had stifled. American capitalism had become so thoroughly domesticated, he argued, that it lost its capacity for dynamic growth. For a time, a majority of Americans agreed. Taxes and regulations were cut and cut again, and for the most part, the economic pie grew. In the 1980s and '90s, the garden of American capitalism became a pretty energetic place. But it became a scarier place too. In the newly deregulated American economy, fewer people had job security or fixed-benefit pensions or reliable health care. Some got rich, but a lot went bankrupt, mostly because of health-care costs. As Yale University political scientist Jacob Hacker has noted, Americans today experience far-more-violent swings in household income than did their parents a generation ago.

Starting in the 1990s, average Americans began deciding that the conservative economic agenda was a bit like the liberal cultural agenda of the 1960s: less liberating than frightening. When the Gingrich Republicans tried to slash Medicare, the public turned on them en masse. A decade later, when George W. Bush tried to partially privatize Social Security, Americans rebelled once again. In 2005 a Pew Research Center survey identified a new group of voters that it called "pro-government conservatives." They were culturally conservative and hawkish on foreign policy, and they overwhelmingly supported Bush in 2004. But by large majorities, they endorsed government regulation and government spending. They didn't want to unleash the free market; they wanted to rein it in.

Those voters were a time bomb in the Republican coalition, which detonated on Nov. 4. John McCain's promises to cut taxes, cut spending and get government out of the way left them cold. Among the almost half of voters who said they were "very worried" that the economic crisis would hurt their family, Obama beat McCain by 26 points.

The public mood on economics today is a lot like the public mood on culture 40 years ago: Americans want government to impose law and order — to keep their 401(k)s from going down, to keep their health-care premiums from going up, to keep their jobs from going overseas — and they don't much care whose heads Washington has to bash to do it.

That is both Obama's great challenge and his great opportunity. If he can do what F.D.R. did — make American capitalism stabler and less savage — he will establish a Democratic majority that dominates U.S. politics for a generation. And despite the daunting problems he inherits, he's got an excellent chance. For one thing, taking aggressive action to stimulate the economy, regulate the financial industry and shore up the American welfare state won't divide his political coalition; it will divide the other side. On domestic economics, Democrats up and down the class ladder mostly agree. Even among Democratic Party economists, the divide that existed during the Clinton years between deficit hawks like Robert Rubin and free spenders like Robert Reich has largely evaporated, as everyone has embraced a bigger government role. Today it's Republicans who — though more unified on cultural issues — are split badly between upscale business types who want government out of the way and pro-government conservatives who want Washington's help. If Obama moves forcefully to restore economic order, the Wall Street Journal will squawk about creeping socialism, as it did in F.D.R.'s day, but many downscale Republicans will cheer. It's these working-class Reagan Democrats who could become tomorrow's Obama Republicans — a key component of a new liberal majority — if he alleviates their economic fears.

Obama doesn't have to turn the economy around overnight. After all, Roosevelt hadn't ended the Depression by 1936. Obama just needs modest economic improvement by the time he starts running for re-election and an image as someone relentlessly focused on fixing America's economic woes. In allocating his time in his first months as President, he should remember what voters told exit pollsters they cared about most — 63% said the economy. (No other issue even exceeded 10%.)

In politics, crisis often brings opportunity. If Obama restores some measure of economic order, kick-starting U.S. capitalism and softening its hard edges, and if he develops the kind of personal rapport with ordinary Americans that F.D.R. and Reagan had — and he has the communication skills to do it — liberals will probably hold sway in Washington until Sasha and Malia have kids. As that happens, the arguments that have framed economic debate in recent times — for large upper-income tax cuts or the partial privatization of Social Security and Medicare — will fade into irrelevance. In an era of liberal hegemony, they will seem as archaic as defending the welfare system became when conservatives were on top.

There are fault lines in the Obama coalition, to be sure. In a two-party system, it's impossible to construct a majority without bringing together people who disagree on big things. But Obama's majority is at least as cohesive as Reagan's or F.D.R.'s. The cultural issues that have long divided Democrats — gay marriage, gun control, abortion — are receding in importance as a post-'60s generation grows to adulthood. Foreign policy doesn't divide Democrats as bitterly as it used to either because, in the wake of Iraq, once-hawkish working-class whites have grown more skeptical of military force. In 2004, 22% of voters told exit pollsters that "moral values" were their top priority, and 19% said terrorism. This year terrorism got 9%, and no social issues even made the list.

The biggest potential land mine in the Obama coalition isn't the culture war or foreign policy; it's nationalism. On a range of issues, from global warming to immigration to trade to torture, college-educated liberals want to integrate more deeply America's economy, society and values with the rest of the world's. They want to make it easier for people and goods to legally cross America's borders, and they want global rules that govern how much America can pollute the atmosphere and how it conducts the war on terrorism. They believe that ceding some sovereignty is essential to making America prosperous, decent and safe. When it comes to free trade, immigration and multilateralism, though, downscale Democrats are more skeptical. In the future, the old struggle between freedom and order may play itself out on a global scale, as liberal internationalists try to establish new rules for a more interconnected planet and working-class nationalists protest that foreign bureaucrats threaten America's freedom.

But that's in the future. If Obama begins restoring order to the economy, Democrats will reap the rewards for a long time. Forty years ago, liberalism looked like the problem in a nation spinning out of control. Today a new version of it may be the solution. It's a very different day in Grant Park.

Taliban targets teenage girls with acid and government office with car bomb

Since the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Afghanistan has become the neglected war for American policy makers. However, the violence of the unresolved conflict continues unabated and the Taliban operates quite freely in many parts of the country.

In Kandahar, two men on a motorbike attacked teenagers yesterday as they were walking to their all-girls high school. They threw acid in the faces of the girls injuring up to 15 of the young women. The Taliban have opposed education for women and the establishment of girls’ schools has been considered one of the significant achievements of the new government. The attack emptied the school the girls attended.

Reporters for Aljazeer English were working on the story of the attack on the girls when a Taliban car bomb exploded next to a government building during a provincial council meeting killing six and wounding at least forty-two Afghan citizens. The bomb ripped through the council office and flattened nearby homes.

Coleman Hawkins: “Stoned” (1964)

This is the Coleman Hawkins’ Quintet (Hawkins on tenor saxophone, Harry “Sweets” Edison on trumpet, Jimmy Woode on bass, Charles Thompson on piano, and Papa Jo Jones on drums) performing “Stoned” in 1964.

Coleman Randolph Hawkins (1904 – 1969) was a prominent American jazz tenor saxophonist. He is commonly regarded as the first important and influential jazz musician to use the tenor saxophone. He began playing professionally in the 1920’s and was associated with swing music but played a role in the development of bebop in the 1940’s and avant-garde jazz in the 1950’s and 1960’s.

He was nicknamed "Hawk" and sometimes "Bean".

Something about Sara

As the GOP recovers from the Sara Palin candidacy for Vice President in 2008 she is making moves to be the Republican nominee for President in 2012. It’s time to sit back and give some thought not only to Palin but the whole Palin phenomena. Andrew Sullivan does and is quite blunt in his assessment:

Let's be real in a way the national media seems incapable of: this person should never have been placed on a national ticket in a mature democracy. She was incapable of running a town in Alaska competently. The impulsive, unvetted selection of a total unknown, with no knowledge of or interest in the wider world, as a replacement president remains one of the most disturbing events in modern American history. That the press felt required to maintain a facade of normalcy for two months - and not to declare the whole thing a farce from start to finish - is a sign of their total loss of nerve. That the Palin absurdity should follow the two-term presidency of another individual utterly out of his depth in national government is particularly troubling. 46 percent of Americans voted for the possibility of this blank slate as president because she somehow echoed their own sense of religious or cultural "identity". Until we figure out how this happened, we will not be able to prevent it from happening again. And we have to find a way to prevent this from recurring.

It happened because John McCain is an incompetent and a cynic and reckless beyond measure. To have picked someone he'd only met once before, without any serious vetting procedure, revealed McCain as an utterly unserious character, a man whose devotion to the shallowest form of political gamesmanship trumped concern for his country's or his party's interest. We need a full accounting of the vetting process: who was responsible for this act of political malpractice? How could a veep not be vetted in any serious way? Why was she not asked to withdraw as soon as the facts of her massive ignorance and delusional psyche were revealed?

The Palin nightmare also happened because a tiny faction of political professionals has far too much sway in the GOP and conservative circles. This was Bill Kristol's achievement.

It was a final product of the now-exhausted strategy of fomenting fundamentalist resentment to elect politicians dedicated to the defense of Israel and the extension of American military hegemony in every corner of the globe. Palin was the reductio ad absurdum of this mindset: a mannequin candidate, easily controlled ideologically, deployed to fool and corral the resentful and the frightened, removed from serious scrutiny and sold on propaganda networks like a food product.

This deluded and delusional woman still doesn't understand what happened to her; still has no self-awareness; and has never been forced to accept her obvious limitations. She cannot keep even the most trivial story straight; she repeats untruths with a ferocity and calm that is reserved only to the clinically unhinged; she has the educational level of a high school drop-out; and regards ignorance as some kind of achievement. It is excruciating to watch her - but more excruciating to watch those who feel obliged to defend her.

North Kivu is quite possibly the worst place to be a child

The increasing violence in the eastern regions of the Democratic Republic of Congo is taking a terrible toll on civilians. The most vulnerable of these civilians are the children. Reuters has this report from the North Kivu Province (Province du Nord-Kivu) which is located on the DRC’s eastern border:

Packed into squalid refugee camps or roaming in the bush, hundreds of thousands of Congolese children face hunger, disease, sexual abuse or recruitment by marauding armed factions, aid workers said on Tuesday.

Weeks of violence have forced more than 250,000 people from homes or ramshackle camps where they had taken shelter, bringing to over 1 million the number of internal refugees from years of fighting in Democratic Republic of Congo's North Kivu province.

Most are children.

"North Kivu is quite possibly the worst place to be a child. There is no question that children have been the most severely affected by the recent conflict," said George Graham, spokesman for Save the Children in the provincial capital, Goma.

Fighting between Tutsi rebels and pro-government troops and militia fighters has subsided into sporadic clashes in recent days as African leaders staged summits and leant on both sides to avert a repeat of Congo's devastating 1998-2003 regional war.

"When children flee fighting they become more vulnerable to contracting diseases, to becoming malnourished, and vulnerable to predators like sexual abuse, exploitation, violence and recruitment into armed groups," U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF) spokesman Jaya Murthy told Reuters in Goma.

Sixty percent of the 1.1 million displaced are children, he said. "We estimate that there's around 2,000 to 3,000 children in armed groups and recruitment is going on right now."

"This has been a silent emergency for children for the last five years, only now it is re-exploding -- again."

Fighters on both sides have attacked, looted, raped and murdered civilians in raids the U.N. peacekeeping force in Congo, known as MONUC, says include war crimes.

U.S.-based Human Rights Watch quoted local sources and civilians as saying at least 50 civilians were killed last week in Kiwanja, 70 km (45 miles) north of Goma.

Nyrarukundo Rivera, 42, told Reuters she lost her children when fleeing violence in Kiwanja and hadn't seen them since.

Freddie Hubbard: “Children of The Night” (1963)

This is Freddie Hubard playing “Children of the Night" with Art Blakey, Wayne Shorter, Curtis Fuller, Cedar Walton, Reggie Workman at the 1963 San Remo Jazz Fest.

Frederick Dewayne Hubbard (born 1938) is an American jazz trumpeter known primarily for playing the bebop, hard bop and post bop styles of jazz. Freddie played mellophone and then trumpet as a teenager. He moved to New York in 1958 at the age of 20, he quickly astonished fans and critics alike with the depth and maturity of his playing working with veteran jazz artists Philly Joe Jones (1958-59, 1961), Sonny Rollins (1959), Slide Hampton (1959-60), J.J. Johnson (1960), Eric Dolphy, his room-mate for 18 months, and Quincy Jones, with whom he toured Europe (1960-61).

In 1961 he joined Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers (replacing Lee Morgan). Freddie had quickly established himself as an important new voice in jazz. While earning a reputation as a hard-blowing young lion, he had developed his own sound, distancing himself from the early influence of Clifford Brown and Miles Davis and won Down Beat's "New Star" award on trumpet.

He remained with Blakey until 1966, leaving to form his own small groups, which over the next few years featured Kenny Barron and Louis Hayes. Throughout the 60s he also played in bands led by others, including Max Roach and Herbie Hancock.

He achieved his greatest popular success in the 1970s with a series of crossover albums on CTI Records. Although his early 70s jazz albums Red Clay, First Light and Straight Life were particularly well received (First Light won a Grammy Award), this period saw Hubbard emulating Herbie Hancock and moving into jazz fusions. However, he sounded much more at ease in the hard bop context of his 1977 tour with the V.S.O.P. quintet, the band which retraced an earlier quintet led by Miles Davis and brought together ex-Davis sidemen Hancock, Hayes, Wayne Shorter and Ron Carter, with Hubbard taking the Davis role. In the 80s Hubbard was again leading his own jazz group, attracting very favorable notices for his playing at concerts and festivals in the USA and Europe, often in the company of Joe Henderson, playing a repertory of hard-bop and modal-jazz pieces.. He played with Woody Shaw, recording with him in 1985, and two years later recorded Stardust with Benny Golson. In 1988 he teamed up once more with Blakey at an engagement in Holland. In 1990 he appeared in Japan headlining an American-Japanese concert tour and at the Warsaw Jazz Festival in 1992.

Health problems since 1992 have slowed down his performance schedule.

Some sticky issues should be a little less sticky by the time Obama enters the White House

There is no question Barack Obama will face a number of challenges when he takes office in January. No small number of those challenges will be products of the Bush administration’s governance over the past eight years – governance in many cases that could reasonably be classified as malpractice.

Still, there are some hopeful signs that certain issues in foreign and military policy about to be dropped in Mr. Obama’s lap may be more workable that they would have been just a few months ago. Fred Kaplan reviews some in Slate:

Iraq. Just a few days after Obama's victory, the Iraqi political factions seemed much more disposed to sign a new Status of Forces Agreement with the United States. The SOFA, which is set to expire at the end of the year, outlines the conditions under which U.S. troops are permitted to remain in the country. One condition that Iraq has been demanding is the complete withdrawal of U.S. combat troops by 2011. Several Iraqi parties have been reluctant to ratify the accord even then, doubting that George W. Bush—or, had he won, John McCain—would really withdraw. But they believe that Obama will. So they're suddenly more eager to finalize an accord. Some factions are also more keen to settle their internal differences to avoid a political collapse or a renewed civil war once the Americans leave. Obama knows that early in his presidency he'll have to figure out a way to mount a major withdrawal from Iraq while minimizing the chance that the Baghdad government falls apart. This new tenor in Iraqi politics somewhat eases the task.

Iran. After refusing to talk with Iran for seven years, on the grounds that "we don't negotiate with evil, we defeat it" (as Vice President Dick Cheney once put it), the Bush administration is preparing to set up a U.S. interests office—not quite an embassy but the beginning of renewed diplomatic relations, a forum for communiqués, anyway—in Tehran. If Obama is prepared to offer more elaborate negotiations, as he should be, a forum will exist for doing so. At the same time, a smart-sanctions campaign run out of the U.S. Treasury Department for the last two years—in which international banks have been persuaded to stop doing business with Iran—seems to be having some effect. Meanwhile, plunging oil prices have slashed Tehran's cash flow. And President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has been riding high on this flow, is losing popularity at home. In short, the time may be ripe for a game of carrot-and-stick diplomacy with Iran, in which the carrot may be welcome and the stick might really hurt.

Russia. President Dmitry Medvedev's recent rumblings—his threat to place short-range missiles in Kaliningrad if the United States proceeds with its plan to install missile-defense batteries in the Czech Republic and Poland—may, if played right, redound to Obama's benefit. Obama clearly doesn't share Bush's misplaced enthusiasm for the missile-defense program; he has said several times that he would deploy a system if it were proved workable—a condition that's not likely to pan out. So Obama now has a good reason to drop the deployment plan—but with a caveat. He should reiterate Bush's point (whether or not it's entirely true) that the batteries in Eastern Europe were designed to shoot down Iran's missiles, not Russia's, and if he's going to let down our guard on that front, Russia has to help him keep Iran from building nuclear weapons in the first place—in other words, Russia has to stop assisting the Iranian nuclear program and join the sanctions initiated by the United States, the European Union, and the U.N. Security Council. If this trade can be made, other avenues of cooperation can also be reopened.

Efforts to revive relations with Russia—crucial for dealing with such vital issues as terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and stability in the Middle East—might also be boosted by the latest news from Georgia. Independent military groups monitoring Russia's withdrawal are reporting that Georgia might not have been the purely innocent victim of Russian aggression, after all. The evidence, though still tentative, seems to suggest that Moscow was responding to the Georgian military's indiscriminate rocket and artillery barrage against the semi-autonomous enclaves of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. This finding doesn't exonerate Medvedev or Putin from the brutality of their counterinvasion, nor should it prompt an abandonment of concern for Georgian independence. But it does create an opening for rapprochement with Moscow—for hardheaded national-security reasons—without seeming craven.

North Korea. After six years of refusing to talk seriously with the North Koreans about their nuclear program—for the same reason that he refused to talk with the Iranians about anything—Bush finally signed an accord that at least stopped North Korea's plutonium project. However, this was one case in which their obstinacy was justified. The deal signed last year was a multiphase arrangement. As part of the second phase, the North Koreans were to present data on their nuclear program—at which point the United States was to take North Korea off the list of nations supporting terrorism. The North Koreans submitted the data; Bush officials then demanded that the United States be allowed to verify the information on the list through on-site inspections. The North Koreans protested—correctly—that verification is a matter to be taken up in the third phase. When Washington kept refusing to take them off the list—largely at the instigation of officials in Cheney's office—the North Koreans threatened to cancel the whole agreement. Finally, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sent Assistant Secretary Christopher Hill to Pyongyang, and the deal was straightened out. The point is this: In 2000, Bill Clinton left George W. Bush on the verge of signing a far-reaching agreement with North Korea on nuclear weapons and missiles—and Bush tore it up and threw it away. Now Bush is leaving Obama with a much less-satisfying deal—during Bush's no-talking period, Pyongyang built and tested an atomic bomb and thus gained considerably greater leverage—but Bush is leaving Obama something to take to the next level without sparking (too much) partisan rancor.

Military spending. According to a story by Bryan Bender in the Boston Globe, the Defense Business Board, a senior advisory group appointed by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, recommended huge cuts in the military budget, noting that the current level of spending on weapons is "unsustainable." Several private and congressional defense analysts have been making this point for a few years now; the U.S. Government Accountability Office recently calculated that the Pentagon's 95 largest weapons systems have accumulated cost overruns amounting to $300 billion (that's just the overruns, not the total cost, which amounts to many hundreds of billions more). It's also clear, from the Pentagon's own budget analyses, that well over half of the $700 billion-plus budget has little if anything to do with the threats the United States faces now or in the foreseeable future. The past seven years have been a free-for-all for the nation's military contractors and service chiefs; the number of canceled weapons projects can be counted on one hand; they've otherwise received nearly all the money for everything they've asked for. Even many of the beneficiaries realize that the binge is coming to an end; the nation simply can't afford it. Obama's fortune is that he can order the cuts, invoking not his own preferences but the sober-minded urgings of a business advisory group in the Bush administration.

Miriam Makeba: “Pata Pata” (1979)

This is Miriam Zenzi Makeba (1932 – 2008) singing one of her most famous songs "Pata Pata" during a performance in the VARA TV-studios in Holland, 1979. Joining her on stage towards the end of the song is her granddaughter Zenzi. Zenzi's mother (the late Bongi Makeba) is one of the backing vocalists (in the blue dress). Makeba was known affectionately as "Mama Africa." She died earlier today.

Her professional career began in the 1950s singing a blend of jazz and traditional melodies of South Africa.

Makeba then travelled to London where she met Harry Belafonte, who assisted her in gaining entry to and fame in the United States. She released many of her most famous hits there including "Pata Pata", "The Click Song" ("Qongqothwane" in Xhosa), and "Malaika". In 1966, Makeba received the Grammy Award for Best Folk Recording together with Harry Belafonte for An Evening With Belafonte/Makeba. The album dealt with the political plight of black South Africans under apartheid.

She discovered that her South African passport was revoked when she tried to return there in 1960 for her mother's funeral. In 1963, after testifying against apartheid before the United Nations, her South African citizenship and her right to return to the country were revoked. She has had nine passports, and was granted honorary citizenship of ten countries.

Nelson Mandela persuaded her to return to South Africa in 1990. Makeba continued to perform onstage and record new albums. She was a proud United Nations goodwill ambassador and also set up a school for destitute young girls in South Africa.

On 9 November 2008, she became ill while taking part in an anti-Mafia concert in southern Italy. Makeba suffered a heart attack a few minutes after her performance and died soon after. In his condolence message, former South African president Nelson Mandela said it was “fitting that her last moments were spent on a stage, enriching the hearts and lives of others - and again in support of a good cause.”

Obama’s chances of success depend largely on whether his short-run economic plans are sufficiently bold

There’s much comparison of the economic situation faced by Franklin Roosevelt’s incoming government in 1933 to the current state of the economy about to drop in the lap of Barack Obama’s new administration. The economy is a mess and a recession is setting in that will impact negatively to one degree or another on all Americans.

Paul Krugman says Obama should learn from Roosevelt failures as a result of being overly cautious as well as his successes in today’s New York Times:

… Barack Obama should learn from F.D.R.’s failures as well as from his achievements: the truth is that the New Deal wasn’t as successful in the short run as it was in the long run. And the reason for F.D.R.’s limited short-run success, which almost undid his whole program, was the fact that his economic policies were too cautious.

About the New Deal’s long-run achievements: the institutions F.D.R. built have proved both durable and essential. Indeed, those institutions remain the bedrock of our nation’s economic stability. Imagine how much worse the financial crisis would be if the New Deal hadn’t insured most bank deposits. Imagine how insecure older Americans would feel right now if Republicans had managed to dismantle Social Security.

Can Mr. Obama achieve something comparable? Rahm Emanuel, Mr. Obama’s new chief of staff, has declared that “you don’t ever want a crisis to go to waste.” Progressives hope that the Obama administration, like the New Deal, will respond to the current economic and financial crisis by creating institutions, especially a universal health care system, that will change the shape of American society for generations to come.
But the new administration should try not to emulate a less successful aspect of the New Deal: its inadequate response to the Great Depression itself.

Now, there’s a whole intellectual industry, mainly operating out of right-wing think tanks, devoted to propagating the idea that F.D.R. actually made the Depression worse. So it’s important to know that most of what you hear along those lines is based on deliberate misrepresentation of the facts. The New Deal brought real relief to most Americans.

That said, F.D.R. did not, in fact, manage to engineer a full economic recovery during his first two terms. This failure is often cited as evidence against Keynesian economics, which says that increased public spending can get a stalled economy moving. But the definitive study of fiscal policy in the ’30s, by the M.I.T. economist E. Cary Brown, reached a very different conclusion: fiscal stimulus was unsuccessful “not because it does not work, but because it was not tried.”

This may seem hard to believe. The New Deal famously placed millions of Americans on the public payroll via the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps. To this day we drive on W.P.A.-built roads and send our children to W.P.A.-built schools. Didn’t all these public works amount to a major fiscal stimulus?

Well, it wasn’t as major as you might think. The effects of federal public works spending were largely offset by other factors, notably a large tax increase, enacted by Herbert Hoover, whose full effects weren’t felt until his successor took office. Also, expansionary policy at the federal level was undercut by spending cuts and tax increases at the state and local level.

And F.D.R. wasn’t just reluctant to pursue an all-out fiscal expansion — he was eager to return to conservative budget principles. That eagerness almost destroyed his legacy. After winning a smashing election victory in 1936, the Roosevelt administration cut spending and raised taxes, precipitating an economic relapse that drove the unemployment rate back into double digits and led to a major defeat in the 1938 midterm elections.

What saved the economy, and the New Deal, was the enormous public works project known as World War II, which finally provided a fiscal stimulus adequate to the economy’s needs.

This history offers important lessons for the incoming administration.
The political lesson is that economic missteps can quickly undermine an electoral mandate. Democrats won big last week — but they won even bigger in 1936, only to see their gains evaporate after the recession of 1937-38. Americans don’t expect instant economic results from the incoming administration, but they do expect results, and Democrats’ euphoria will be short-lived if they don’t deliver an economic recovery.

The economic lesson is the importance of doing enough. F.D.R. thought he was being prudent by reining in his spending plans; in reality, he was taking big risks with the economy and with his legacy. My advice to the Obama people is to figure out how much help they think the economy needs, then add 50 percent. It’s much better, in a depressed economy, to err on the side of too much stimulus than on the side of too little.

In short, Mr. Obama’s chances of leading a new New Deal depend largely on whether his short-run economic plans are sufficiently bold. Progressives can only hope that he has the necessary audacity.

And Matthew Yglesias emphasizes that moderate and conservative members of congress need to do what’s right for the country:

… It’s those members in the most marginal districts who are most likely to look at plans for an expansive agenda and start getting queasy, but in truth it’s those very same members who aren’t going to win re-election unless dramatic action is taken. The bulk of the most liberal members have safe seats and will be congressmen for life if they want to be. But a lot of the more vulnerable Blue Dog types out there are going to need to choose between their instinct for trimming and the objective demands of their political survival — to say nothing of the country.

Good policy and good politics often don’t align, and they rarely align perfectly, but in this case the overwhelming political and substantive requirement of the new congress is big action to prevent a long and deep recession.

The end of evangelical foreign policy

The United States has suffered globally under the leadership of George W. Bush. The international community rallied to the United States following the September 11th attacks yet seven years later that good will has clearly been squandered by unprecedented arrogance guided by ideological blinders and undercut by incompetence and dishonesty. All of this has been has been justified (or rationalized) by an evangelical zeal that sees the world as black and white and as divided between the forces of good versus the forces of evil. Nuance is an alien concept. It is the evangelical world view that can be (and has been) detrimental to a foreign policy promoting the best interests of both this nation and the international community. Ironically, virtues such as human rights and political self-determination are shunned aside when they conflict with the evangelical world view.

Fortunately for the United States and the rest of the world this policy will end on January 20th with the incoming Obama administration. Andrew J. Bacevich contrasts Barack Obama’s foreign policy perspectives with that of George W. Bush in today’s Boston Globe:

WITH Barack Obama's election to the presidency, the evangelical moment in US foreign policy has come to an end. The United States remains a nation of believers, with Christianity the tradition to which most Americans adhere. Yet the religious sensibility informing American statecraft will no longer find expression in an urge to launch crusades against evil-doers.
Like our current president, Obama is a professed Christian. Yet whereas George W. Bush once identified Jesus Christ himself as his favorite philosopher, the president-elect is an admirer of Reinhold Niebuhr, the renowned Protestant theologian.

Faced with difficult problems, conservative evangelicals ask WWJD: What would Jesus do? We are now entering an era in which the occupant of the Oval Office will consider a different question: What would Reinhold do?

During the middle third of the last century, Niebuhr thought deeply about the complexities, moral and otherwise, of international politics. Although an eminently quotable writer, his insights do not easily reduce to a sound-bite or bumper sticker.

At the root of Niebuhr's thinking lies an appreciation of original sin, which he views as indelible and omnipresent. In a fallen world, power is necessary, otherwise we lie open to the assaults of the predatory. Yet since we too number among the fallen, our own professions of innocence and altruism are necessarily suspect. Power, wrote Niebuhr, "cannot be wielded without guilt, since it is never transcendent over interest." Therefore, any nation wielding great power but lacking self-awareness - never an American strong suit - poses an imminent risk not only to others but to itself.

Here lies the statesman's dilemma: You're damned if you do and damned if you don't. To refrain from resisting evil for fear of violating God's laws is irresponsible. Yet for the powerful to pretend to interpret God's will qualifies as presumptuous. To avert evil, action is imperative; so too is self-restraint. Even worthy causes pursued blindly yield morally problematic results.

Niebuhr specialized in precise distinctions. He supported US intervention in World War II - and condemned the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended that war. After 1945, Niebuhr believed it just and necessary to contain the Soviet Union. Yet he forcefully opposed US intervention in Vietnam.

The vast claims of Bush's second inaugural - with the president discerning history's "visible direction, set by liberty and the Author of Liberty" - would have appalled Niebuhr, precisely because Bush meant exactly what he said. In international politics, true believers are more dangerous than cynics.

Grandiose undertakings produce monstrous byproducts. In the eyes of critics, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo show that all of Bush's freedom talk is simply a lie. Viewed from a Niebuhrean perspective, they become the predictable if illegitimate offspring of Bush's convictions. Better to forget utopia, leaving it to God to determine history's trajectory.

On the stump, Obama did not sound much like a follower of Niebuhr. Campaigns reward not introspection, but simplistic reassurance: "Yes, we can!" Yet as the dust now settles, we might hope that the victor will sober up and rediscover his Niebuhrean inclinations. Sobriety in this case begins with abrogating what Niebuhr called "our dreams of managing history," triggered by the end of the Cold War and reinforced by Sept. 11. "The course of history," he emphasized, "cannot be coerced."

We've tried having a born-again president intent on eliminating evil. It didn't work. May our next president acknowledge the possibility that, as Niebuhr put it, "the evils against which we contend are frequently the fruits of illusions which are similar to our own." Facing our present predicament requires that we shed illusions about America that would have offended Jesus himself.

Obama has written that he took from reading Niebuhr "the compelling idea that there's serious evil in the world" along with the conviction that evil's persistence should not be "an excuse for cynicism and inaction." Yet Niebuhr also taught him that "we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things." As a point of departure for reformulating US foreign policy, we could do a lot worse.

Obama as the first post-ethnic U.S. president

Barack Obama is being hailed as America’s first African-American President. While that is significant, especially given this country’s complicated history on race relations, it overlooks something more significant and that is Obama represents a post-ethnic America. Obama received broad support from America’s diverse population and actually received more votes from white Americans than John Kerry did in 2004. Locally here in central Virginia, I served as a canvass captain sending volunteer canvassers out to go door-to-door. We had black and white volunteers going into black and white neighborhoods. No effort was made to direct certain volunteers to certain neighborhoods. There was a time in the not too distant past when campaigns in Virginia and elsewhere would dare not send black volunteers into a white neighborhood or white volunteers into a black neighborhood. That era is gone.

The Obama campaign promoted civic nationalism to transcended ethnic division. Significantly, post ethnic culture among growing ethnic diversity is an example the United States can hold up to a world where racial and ethnic conflicts plague many corners of the globe.

This is Timothy Garton Ash in today’s Guardian observing the election from Washington:

To say that he is the first black president in American history is more to write the last lines of the last chapter than the start of a new one. That chapter of pain is both remarkably ancient and shockingly recent. I observed people voting in a downtown polling station located in a church of the African Methodist Episcopal denomination, which, a sign records, was established to protest against segregated worship in 1787. Across the Anacostia river, in a poor neighbourhood where mine was almost the only white face, an election supervisor - a Baptist preacher in everyday life - told me how African-Americans, often voting for the first time, had brought their children to witness the moment of which Dr King had dreamed. Only by listening to their voices can you fully appreciate what will be the impact of the mere sight of a black family occupying that white house.

But Obama is much more than just black American. Like a growing number of citizens of our mixed-up world he is, as the columnist Michael Kinsley nicely puts it, "a one-man ethnic stew". This qualifies him to represent all those Americans, of every hue and mix, that I saw in the long queues of people waiting to vote in downtown Washington, and in that crowd before the White House. "Where are you from?" I asked a man who I guessed might be of North African origin. He stopped dancing for a moment, looked at me and said: "From my mother." A wonderful answer, also a rebuke, and minted for the age of Obama.

For Obama is simultaneously the first post-ethnic president. To reduce this story to the black-white dichotomy is as useful as a black and white photograph of a colourful scene. John McCain may have singled out Joe the plumber to represent an old-fashioned, putative "silent majority" of white working-class Americans, but actually they now constitute a (not so) silent minority. And José the plumber voted for Obama. In fact, Obama's vote benefited from almost every aspect of America's growing demographic diversity. Introducing him in Florida during the campaign, Bill Clinton highlighted this new diversity, saying that both Florida and Obama represent "the world's present and America's future". That seems to me the wrong way round: it's America's present and the world's future. Where once America lagged, it now leads.

Mark carefully, however, what the Obama model is. It deploys civic nationalism to transcend ethnic diversity. Many of Tuesday's revellers were waving the stars and stripes, or sporting it on some part of their dress. No right-wing Republican could insist more than Obama does on American uniqueness, exceptionalism, manifest destiny. His proclaimed purpose is "to make this century the next American century". If George W Bush said that, we from the rest of the world might regard it as rank nationalist arrogance. Because it's Obama, we somehow accept it.

Now comes the test. As he acknowledged in his sober acceptance speech, America has a huge mountain to climb. The very circumstances that ensured his victory make it more difficult for him to succeed. One can argue about "what would have happened if ...", but it's indisputable that the campaign turned decisively in his favour after September's financial meltdown. Now the crisis is really hitting the real economy, on his chosen terrain of jobs, homes, savings and healthcare for ordinary Americans. He inherits a soaring national debt from Bush, who presided over a massive redistribution of wealth from future generations to the present one. The country faces two wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a host of other challenges around the world.

Meanwhile, America itself is still divided. The gulf between red and blue may even be more difficult to bridge than that between black and white. Many Americans are still irrationally suspicious of Barack Hussein Obama, but an entirely rational observer could conclude that his instincts are more socially and cultural liberal than those of a cultural-conservative Republican, and less economically liberal than those of a libertarian Republican. …

Has he got what it takes: in himself, his team, and the power resources at his disposal? I spent the days before the vote talking to not a few Washington insiders, including some well placed in his campaign. Their unanimous refrain was: we don't know. We don't know which of the many policy options he'll plump for; we don't know who he'll choose for the key posts; we don't know what he'll be like on the job. Few presidential candidates have had less of an executive or legislative track record from which to guess their future performance in a job like no other.

On one thing all agree: if he can run the country the way he has run his campaign - one of the most effective ever - then America will be in good hands. But a country is not a campaign. He is, in every sense of that over-used word, cool. He barely looked excited even as he accepted the presidency before an ecstatic crowd. As president, his hard-power resources may be somewhat diminished, but no one in the world currently has more soft power. Where the Bush administration used military "shock and awe" to hunt down weapons of mass destruction that turned out not even to be there, Obama is himself a weapon of mass attraction.

And he can appeal to what is perhaps America's greatest power resource: the can-do spirit of innovation, enterprise and hard work, mixed with civic patriotism, which this country invites everyone to embrace, wherever they come from. This is the promise summed up in what Obama called in his acceptance speech "that American creed: Yes We Can". The American creed they were chanting outside the White House on that unforgettable Tuesday night.

If you ask me whether all this will be enough to surmount all the obstacles America now faces, I must in all honesty reply that, on a sober assessment, I doubt it. But we can again hope, and hope we must.

Why Obama won

Ben Smith and Jonathan Martin explain in Politico why Obama won:

Barack Obama’s sweeping victory to become president of the United States sends him to the White House to face what may be the worst national financial crisis since the time of Franklin Roosevelt’s election in 1932.

Obama won on his own terms, strategically and symbolically. He rolled up a series of contested states, from Colorado to Virginia, long out of Democratic reach. And his victory reflected the accuracy of his vision of a reshaped country. Racism, much discussed, turned out to be a footnote, and African-American turnout was not unusually high. Instead, Obama drew his strength from an array of racially mixed, growing areas around cities such as Orlando, Fla., Washington, Indianapolis and Columbus, Ohio, on his way to at least 334 electoral votes.

“Even as we celebrate tonight we know that the challenges tomorrow will bring are the greatest of our lifetime: two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century,” Obama told a crowd of more than 100,000 in Chicago’s Grant Park.

The assembled crowd had been strangely silent through the evening, even as Obama shut the door on John McCain by winning New Hampshire and Pennsylvania, and even after his victory in Ohio pointed toward a landslide, seemingly unwilling to accept or believe the impending victory.

Only at 11 p.m., when CNN declared that Obama had surpassed 270 electoral votes, did the crowd roar in approval.
“This victory alone is not the change we seek — it is only the chance to make that change,” Obama said, standing between two bulletproof glass walls.

McCain, speaking in a somber concession speech outside the Phoenix hotel where he married his wife, declared that he had done what he could.

“I don’t know what more we could have done to try to win this election,” he said.

Calling Obama “my president,” McCain vowed to work with him to help repair a nation facing profound challenges at home and abroad.

"These are difficult times for our country, and I pledge to him tonight to do all in my power to help him lead us through the many challenges we face," McCain said.

After booing Obama's name and offering a few jeers, the crowd came to recognize the history in the evening when McCain paid tribute to the nation's first black president by recalling his own favorite commander in chief.

"A century ago, President Theodore Roosevelt’s invitation of Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House was taken as an outrage in many quarters," McCain recalled. "America today is a world away from the cruel and prideful bigotry of that time. There is no better evidence of this than the election of an African-American to the presidency of the United States."

For the first time, claps and even a few cheers were heard from the dejected crowd.

Obama’s win came with Democratic gains in the Senate and House, though his broad victory — he swept swing states from Indiana to Ohio to Virginia — was perhaps even more dramatic than his party’s success in congressional races. Obama and other Democratic leaders quickly signaled their awareness of the risk of overreaching, with Obama avoiding any claim of partisan victory, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) going further.

"This is a mandate to get along, to get something done in a bipartisan way. This is not a mandate for a political party or an ideology,” Reid told Politico.

As grand as the symbolism of Obama’s victory was, it was also a victory for his steady, corporate campaign management. The campaign’s early decision to play on a more ambitious map than other Democratic nominees was the source of his mandate. And the result closely mirrored the PowerPoint presentation his campaign manager, David Plouffe, pitched to sometimes-skeptical audiences of reporters and donors.
McCain’s campaign blamed larger forces for the candidate’s defeat.

“We were crushed by circumstance,” communications director Jill Hazelbaker said after McCain’s speech. “The economic crisis was a pivotal point in this race.”

External factors aside, McCain and his campaign also lagged far behind Obama in every key metric — money, organization, discipline — and failed to embrace Obama's organizational model or the technology it borrowed from the private sector.

Earlier campaigns had celebrated their technological prowess, but in Obama’s cutting-edge campaign, new political technology was implemented and came of age, evidenced by the campaign's vaunted fundraising machine and its “Houdini” computer system, which enabled the campaign as late as Tuesday afternoon to identify and bring to the polls a last wave of supporters who hadn’t yet voted.

The coalition Obama assembled proved as modern as the technology his campaign employed.

In his clear-cut victory, Obama became the first Democrat to win a majority of American votes since Jimmy Carter’s 1976 election. He won states just months ago thought to be impregnable to his party, places that just four years ago went for President Bush by double digits: Virginia, Indiana and North Carolina among them.

Indeed, Obama won in all regions of the country but the Deep South, piling up big wins in the perennial Democratic bulwarks on both coasts and making deep inroads into New South states, the industrial and agricultural heartland and the fast-growing Rocky Mountain West.

But perhaps most spectacularly, he found victory with a multiracial coalition that has the makings of a formidable political base of power.

If his was the first 21st-century campaign, his victory was powered by a new face of America: made up of all ethnicities, hailing mostly from cities and suburbs, largely younger than 40, and among all income classes.

As they emphatically proved by obliterating the presidential color line, many of these voters are not guided by traditional cultural attachment to race, religion or region.

What makes his victory so resounding, and so daunting for Republicans, was that he combined support from African-Americans, Jews and young whites with other key groups. He also reversed Bush’s advances with Hispanic voters.

Further, and even more worrisome for the GOP, Obama was dominant among self-described “moderate” voters, a 60 percent swath of Americans larger than either self-described liberals or conservatives.

This 21st-century coalition allowed Obama to blow out McCain in cities and suburbs where Bush had narrowly won or lost by smaller margins four years ago, and to pull off narrow wins in Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Indiana and Ohio.

He ran up huge margins in heavily-black cities and counties in each but was able to edge out McCain thanks to big wins in populous, racially mixed localities such as Virginia's Fairfax County (59 percent), North Carolina’s Mecklenburg County (62 percent), Florida’s Orange County (59 percent), Indiana's Marion County (64 percent) and Ohio’s Franklin County (59 percent).

The coalition underscored the theme that made Obama famous in 2004, and one that he returned to in his victory speech, citing his support from “young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled — Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been a collection of red states and blue states: we are, and always will be, the United States of America.”

Protecting our right to vote

One person, one vote? Think again

The Electoral College allocates votes based upon a state’s congressional delegation. But while there is a wide range of populations among states each state is guaranteed two Senators regardless of population and is guaranteed at least on Representative regardless of population. Therefore, voters in tiny states exert a disproportionate influence when they vote. And then consider that congressional districts (that equal one Electoral College vote) are drawn to represent the entire population, not voters. The bottom line is when the Electoral College represents the will of the voters, it is more by coincidence than by design.

This is by Sarah K. Cowan,Stephen Doyle and Drew Heffron in yesterday's New York Times:

“THE conception of political equality from the Declaration of Independence, to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, to the Fifteenth, Seventeenth and Nineteenth Amendments can mean only one thing — one person, one vote,” the Supreme Court ruled almost a half-century ago. Yet the framers of the Constitution made this aspiration impossible, then and now.

Under the Constitution, electoral votes are apportioned to states according to the total number of senators and representatives from each state. So even the smallest states, regardless of their population, get at least three electoral votes.

But there is a second, less obvious distortion to the “one person, one vote” principle. Seats in the House of Representatives are apportioned according to the number of residents in a given state, not the number of eligible voters. And many residents — children, noncitizens and, in many states, prisoners and felons — do not have the right to vote.

In House races, 10 eligible voters in California, a state with many residents who cannot vote, represent 16 people in the voting booth. In New York and New Jersey, 10 enfranchised residents stand for themselves and five others. (And given that only 60 percent of eligible voters turn out at the polls, the actual figures are even starker.) Of all the states, Vermont comes the closest to the one person, one vote standard. Ten Vermont residents represent 12 people.

In the Electoral College, the combined effect of these two distortions is a mockery of the principle of “one person, one vote.” While each of Florida’s 27 electoral delegates represents almost 480,000 eligible voters, each of the three delegates from Wyoming represents only 135,000 eligible voters. That makes a voter casting a presidential ballot in Wyoming three and a half times more influential than a voter in Florida.

This system, along with the winner-take-all practice used to allocate most states’ electoral votes, creates the potential for an absurd outcome. In the unlikely event that all 213 million eligible voters cast ballots, either John McCain or Barack Obama could win enough states to capture the White House with only 47.8 million strategically located votes. The presidency could be won with just 22 percent of the electorate’s support, only 16 percent of the entire population’s.