Politically Minded

Mr. Kaine will succeed Howard Dean as the party chairman when the party elects officers at its meeting here this month. By tradition, the committee defers to the choice of a sitting president.

Now with this new revelation that he may or may not have served as a government informant, and then another press release indicating that he did nothing wrong -- all he was doing as a public servant was informing federal officials something that was going on -- that didn't meet the smell test.

But here’s a bipartisan solution: an electoral vote buddy system. Red and blue states of similar size should pair up and pass state laws to apportion their electoral votes by district.It would seem counterintuitive for a Democratic legislature in New York to cede a portion of its sure 31 Democratic electoral votes, but not if it opens up some of Texas’ 34 votes for the party. Washington State could make its 11 electoral votes relevant, in tandem with Tennessee, which also has 11. In this past election, voters in Louisiana (nine electoral votes) and Mississippi (six) could have focused the candidates’ views on Hurricane Katrina rebuilding had they buddied with New Jersey, which has 15 electoral votes.

In all, Obama's transition is budgeted at $12 million -- $5.2 million from the federal government and $6.8 million from private donations. Last month, I broke the story on how the "transition project" was created as a nonprofit in order to allow the Obama team to fund-raise to pay for pre-election transition work Podesta was quietly overseeing.

Podesta's briefing drew RSVPs from more than 200 journalists, so many that the transition arranged for a listen-only conference call -- in order to pare down the number of reporters actually attending.

Not so. Mr. Obama's 43% share of the white vote in the general election was actually a tad larger than that of John Kerry in 2004 (41%) or Al Gore in 2000 (42%).

Consider Iowa, with only a miniscule African-American population. The 5% of voters who said race was the most important factor in their choice of whom to vote for backed Mr. Obama 54% to 45%. Or consider Minnesota and Wisconsin, also overwhelmingly white, where Mr. Obama's lead was 18% and 21% respectively among the 5% to 7% of voters who made race their highest priority.

The aggressive federal interference in state and local districting decisions enshrined in the Voting Rights Act should therefore be reconsidered. That statute, adopted in 1965 and strengthened by Congress in the summer of 2006, demands race-driven districting maps to protect black candidates from white competition. That translates into an effort to create black representation proportional to the black population in the jurisdiction

The rhetoric, once again, masks racism through comparative oppressions - the prevailing misrepresentation of how the black vote, and also the Hispanic vote, supported anti-gay policies on the day that black history would be irrevocably altered.

Gay is the New Black

Offense #1: It presumes that, because we made significant racial progress through the election of Obama, somehow racism has been conquered while homophobia has not been. Obviously, racism hasn't been conquered, or that slogan would have never emerged in the first place.Offense #2: Such a slogan is designed to pit two marginal groups against each other, conveniently ignoring the fact that certain fundamental religious organizations whose congregations are overwhelmingly white were instrumental in enacting Proposition 8 in the first place.