According to the Wall Street Journal, this took place around January 2011, as Schwarzenegger was leaving office as governor. It's not clear why the plan was terminated, but that May, Schwarzenegger admitted to fathering a child with his nanny. Bullet: dodged.
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Carmelo Anthony is a friend of the Obamas, it seems. President Obama is a basketball fan and many basketball people are President Obama fans, so it was only a matter of time before Obama's reelection campaign involved some NBA talent. They're going big, too. The campaign announced today that there will be a basketball event on August 22 in New York — "The Obama Classic" — rounding up numerous basketball stars and raising some funds in the process.
There will be food and there will be basketball, though it's not entirely clear how much of each. If you donate three dollars or more (to the Obama campaign, mind you), you'll be entered into a raffle to attend the event and share the food and basketball with all the stars. Which stars? Well, Michael Jordan (Space Jam) appears to be the headliner, but some eminent Knicks and former Knicks will also be making appearances. In order of eminence/Knickness: Patrick Ewing (Space Jam), Carmelo Anthony, Jamal Crawford, Penny Hardaway, and Tracy McGrady will all be there, among many others.
As Dan Devine of Yahoo! notes, this is far from the first time basketball players (Knicks included) participated on Obama's behalf, though getting MJ himself involved seems like a big deal. If Mitt Romney wants to match this effort, there's always, uh ... Spencer Hawes?
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Barack and Michelle Obama walk across the White House lawn. The discovery that Barack Obama is descended on his mother's side from America’s first slave is a teaching moment, right? We learn that blacks triumph over adversity. That since our very beginnings whites and blacks have been mating, creating mixed folks who are — or should be — seen as just American individuals. From first slave John Punch’s apparently marrying a white woman, we learn that long before Loving vs. Virginia, mixed matings had not even always been coercive. In sum, the line from Punch to president is to remind us that after all of the nastiness of America’s racial past, we are a land of mutts and race is ultimately a meaningless concept.
That’d be sweet, but in reality, if Obama’s is the “story of America,” it’s not in the "Kumbayah" way we might like to think.
Phenotypically, Obama is certainly a blend. We even now know that Obama has actual black American blood in him as well as the African kind. However, his persona is anything but post-racial. The boy those white Midwestern grandparents loved is a black American man culturally.
This is clear in the speech cadence he adopts with black audiences and also dusts his mainstream addresses with (“responsibili-tih”). It is clear in his gait, which black voters warmly identified with as showing that he was “one of us.” Many black men of Obama’s age and education level marry white women, and David Maraniss’s biography indicates that Obama was no stranger to dating white women earlier in his life. He settled down, however, with a black American woman, and a dark-skinned, tall one at that — and black people love that, too.
Thus Obama is no Tiger Woods, whose conception of himself as “Cablinasian” is equal parts ahead of the curve and tone-deaf. Obama, comfortable for years with a pastor like Jeremiah Wright, spontaneously saying that he’s black in the eyes of cab drivers, and signaling, "If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon," is a Black Man indeed. A constructed one, also, however: His checkered ancestry is so mesmerizingly multifarious that we tend to forget that no one learns to talk, walk, date, or go to church like the Obama we now know in Indonesia or Hawaii.
And therein lies his true lesson to America, regardless of the antiquarian fascinations exerted by Mr. Punch. In America, the one-drop rule lives on, enforced partly by white perceptions, of course, but also by black people’s quest for cultural fellowship. Today it is common — although by no means universal — for bi- and multi-racials to “identify” as black even with little or no visual indication of African heritage. Obama did not craft an individualist “I’m just me” persona, but one much more specific — a definitively black one. John Punch may have married a white woman, but his eleventh great-grandson did not.
Did society require a studiously black identity of Obama, or did he embrace it for other reasons? Probably both, but if there’s a lesson in it, it’s that in some ways we are less past race in 2012 than Punch was 400 years ago.
However, the Obama story also teaches that getting past race in America will not only be about getting past blackness, but whiteness. Post-racial or not, the whites in America who elected Obama were open to his blackness — and even turned on by it — in a way that would have seemed like science fiction just 25 years ago. Who knew in 1987 that before long, blackness would help a man get elected president? Among younger whites (and many Asians), not only is rap their main music, but “Ebonics” and its associated mannerisms are now in the cultural DNA. White twentysomething men a generation ago were not calling one another “bruh” and greeting one another with the brotherly hug nearly as much. The color of America in the future will be café au lait.
That, rather than vanilla, will be the feel of the America “past race.” Barack Obama’s life choices and cheek-swab genetic history are not what can tell us that — but the signs are all around us if we know what to look for.
John McWhorter is a contributing editor at The New Republic and the author of many books on language and race.
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"Thanks for your support, Mr. President. Now how about that rebate check?" Today Michael Phelps and the five members of the U.S. women's gymnastics team got a treat when President Obama called them from Air Force One to commend them on their Olympic victory and make awkward small talk. ("I told these young ladies as I was congratulating them, how do you not bust your head every time you're on that little balance beam?" Obama said. "I couldn't walk across that balance beam.") However, the most exciting news came later in the day, when the Olympians learned that thanks to some grandstanding by Senator Marco Rubio, they might get to save a few thousand dollars on their taxes.
Rubio announced at a press conference that he's introducing a bill to make prize money won at the Olympics exempt from taxes, according to CBS News. While Olympians usually only talk about striving for the honor of winning a medal, they also earn cash payments from the U.S. Olympic Committee: $25,000 for gold, $15,000 for silver and $10,000 for bronze. Rubio's spokesman said questions about the Olympians' taxes were brought to his attention by Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform. On Tuesday the group wrote in a blog post that "American medalists face a top income tax rate of 35 percent." Using that figure, they calculated that athletes have to turn over up to $8,986 for gold, $5,385 for silver, and $3,500 for bronze. (They also have to pay taxes on the value of the medals themselves. A gold medal is estimated to be worth $675, silver is about $385, and just to add insult to injury, bronze is worth less than $5.)
Rubio offered this justification for his Olympic Tax Elimination Act:
It's unclear how adding new tax exemptions is supposed to make the tax code less complicated, and the word "extra" is also misleading. There's no special tax on Olympics earnings, the prize money and medals are just included with the rest of an athlete's income. According to Politifact, Americans for Tax Reform's suggestion that most Olympians will be giving the IRS 35 percent of their medal-related money is "mostly false." While the group's calculations may be correct for Michael Phelps, Olympians who've yet to score lucrative endorsement deals are probably earning far less, and are thus paying a lower tax rate on the money they make at the games (which many news reports didn't make clear, since apparently the media is still confused about how the tax system works).
While paying taxes certainly feels like a punishment, some would argue that it's actually patriotic. Plus, according to Politifact the "extra" tax athletes pay on their prizes would actually be balanced out by Olympians deducting things like travel fees, payments to coaches, and the cost of equiptment as business expenses. Of course, we're not saying that Olympians don't deserve a special tax exemption. Only a jerk would suggest that they should just pay the amount of taxes required by law, rather than getting a tax break for being inspiring and lovable.
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At an event in Ohio today, someone fainted while President Obama was speaking, and he handled it with poise. "I'm sure they're okay. Sometimes folks faint because they've been standing too long," he said, and he would know, having spoken for millions of people, thousands of times, all around the world. "So we just need a paramedic right here in the front. They'll be okay, just give them room. That's all."
But then he added, "This happens to me all the time," to a laugh from the crowd, and you can literally see the panic wash over his face as he realizes he's said something that can be misinterpreted or taken out of context. After a brief pause, the president — thinking on his feet — threw in some self-deprecation: "It means I've been talking too long," he added. Good save! Now he's definitely safe.
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The billboard in Caldwell, Idaho — juxtaposing photos of Obama and James Holmes, who opened fire in a Colorado movie theater just a week ago — is owned by the Ralph Smeed Foundation, which told local KBOI2 News that the intention was to draw attention to all the servicemembers dying overseas. Although the foundation appears to lack an official online presence, its deceased libertarian founder Ralph Smeed is described on his website as a "not-so quiet blend of Barry Goldwater, Walter Matheau and H. L. Menkin" whose billboard messages "amuse, tantalize and provoke the citizens of Caldwell and SW Idaho."
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