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How is that, pray tell? Here’s the argument:

Perhaps because the poster is ultimately a racially charged image. By using the “urban” makeup of the Heath Ledger Joker, instead of the urbane makeup of the Jack Nicholson character, the poster connects Obama to something many of his detractors fear but can’t openly discuss. He is black and he is identified with the inner city, a source of political instability in the 1960s and ’70s, and a lingering bogeyman in political consciousness despite falling crime rates.

The Joker’s makeup in “Dark Knight” — the latest film in a long franchise that dramatizes fear of the urban world — emphasized the wounded nature of the villain, the sense that he was both a product and source of violence. Although Ledger was white, and the Joker is white, this equation of the wounded and the wounding mirrors basic racial typology in America. Urban blacks — the thinking goes — don’t just live in dangerous neighborhoods, they carry that danger with them like a virus. Scientific studies, which demonstrate the social consequences of living in neighborhoods with high rates of crime, get processed and misinterpreted in the popular unconscious, underscoring the idea. Violence breeds violence.

It is an ugly idea, operating covertly in that gray area that is always supposed to be opened up to honest examination whenever America has one of its “we need to talk this through” episodes. But it lingers, unspoken but powerful, leaving all too many people with the sense that exposure to crime creates an ineluctable propensity to crime.

Superimpose that idea, through the Joker’s makeup, onto Obama’s face, and you have subtly coded, highly effective racial and political argument. Forget socialism, this poster is another attempt to accomplish an association between Obama and the unpredictable, seeming danger of urban life. It is another effort to establish what failed to jell in the debate about Obama’s association with Chicago radical William Ayers and the controversy over the racially charged sermons of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Obama, like the Joker and like the racial stereotype of the black man, carries within him an unknowable, volatile and dangerous marker of urban violence, which could erupt at any time. The charge of socialism is secondary to the basic message that Obama can’t be trusted, not because he is a politician, but because he’s black.

Joker = “urban” = “inner city” = black. True, he’s white, Heath Ledger is white, but … But what exactly? All references to white “urban” criminals are actually secretly to blacks? The references to William Ayers were, too?

Also, if we’re looking for supposed racial connections here, wouldn’t the Socialism reference cut the other way? Karl Marx, François Mitterand, Bernie Sanders, no? Or does even Socialism (which to Americans is mostly a European phenomenon, with pockets of support among mostly white prominent American liberal academics) still become black when coupled with the Joker — who is white but of course black because he’s urban and a criminal?

Quite an argument, it seems to me. Thanks to Jules Crittenden for the pointer.

The Department of Transportation (DoT) recently launched its Car Allowance Rebate System (CARS), informally known as the Cash for Clunkers program. This program incents Americans across the country to trade in their gas guzzling vehicles for late-model, fuel efficient, finds by providing compensation for these trades. In the past week, 8,000 trades have been made, putting about $35 million into people’s hands, and facilitating thousands of new vehicle purchases.

The response to this program has been even greater than the Department of Transportation prepared for. The first day of the program, the DoT’s website crashed due to the overwhelming demand for trades at dealerships nationwide. In the first week of this program, over $35 million has been spent leaving $858 million dollars in CARS funding for car swappers to capitalize on between now and November. These swaps are subject to specific rules, so be sure to read up on the program before you drive to the dealer.

It’s tempting to think, due to the widespread reaction to the CARS program, that fuel economy is a new concern or one that Americans are just starting to care about, but that’s not the case — at least not in public school classrooms!

At DonorsChoose.org, over $70,000 in alternative energy materials have been delivered to public school teachers in the past 3 years to teach about energy and the fuel of the future. Even on summer break, over a dozen public school teachers have recently asked us for resources to teach about bio-diesel and alternative fuels.

As programs like CARS become more popular, we project requests like these to continue, especially from teachers at high-need schools. To check out what public school teachers are asking for to teach about bio-diesel, alternative energy, and the fuel of the future (or to learn what they’re teaching about any topic you care about), visit www.donorschoose.org.

More on Cars

In the midst of our cacophonic debate about national health care, we hear too little about the importance of preventive health care, and especially prenatal care. It’s a true disappointment that the entire Pro-Life community is not out in the streets shouting for free prenatal care for every pregnant woman in America. Is there anything more important for both the moral fiber and national security of America?

As pointed out recently by a California State University research group (Bengiamin et al., Matern. Child Health J., online 26 June 2009), the proportion of American women receiving adequate prenatal care is only 75 percent–which means 1 in 4 women in America are bearing fetuses in danger of compromised development.

As you might expect, the major reason for any lack of adequate prenatal care in low-income families is economics–it costs money. If a family with a pregnant woman just has enough income to put food on the table and new shoes on the growing feet of children, the pregnant woman either delays prenatal care or tries to avoid it as much as possible if payment for the care must come out of the family budget. Can anyone name another industrialized country where a pregnant woman needs to worry about the cost of prenatal care? It’s a uniquely American misery in our current health care circus–a circus in which various clowns in Congress are trying to convince the American people that everything can be left in the hands of private enterprise. Sure thing. Is private enterprise offering free prenatal care to anyone?

As noted by Marlene Bengiamin and her group, inadequate prenatal care is a well-known health risk for both infant and mother. No pediatrician will deny this. Woman who receive inadequate prenatal care are at risk for poor pregnancy outcomes. Any woman not receiving prenatal care during the first trimester of pregnancy, or not receiving the total number of visits appropriate for the gestational age of the baby at birth, is not getting adequate prenatal care–and that’s currently 1 in 4 women.

We need to stop dancing around this problem. We need to stop hoping to find a way to provide adequate health care without costing any extra money. Are we a people who would rather compromise our children than compromise our bank accounts? The only way to ensure we get all pregnant women into clinics for prenatal care is to make such care absolutely free to all women irrespective of family income.

If the federal government needs to hire its own obstetricians to run prenatal clinics, so be it. It’s truly a question of national security. We already hire military people and military contractors and defense contractors for national security–why not hire national security physicians to make certain that every pregnant woman in America gets adequate prenatal care? Either that or make certain that every pregnant woman has prenatal care insurance–no questions asked, no income statements, the only requirement pregnancy of the woman.

Why is it so difficult for us to recognize our necessary priorities? Do we hate ourselves that much? Do the rich hate everyone else that much? Does anyone take pleasure in the health of children wrecked before they even get born, or wrecked in the few years after birth–all of it because a family is on the edge of economic survival? Is America merely a monstrous paradox?

GARDEN CITY, N.Y. — An attorney says the woman who drove drunk and caused a New York highway crash that killed eight people rarely drank.

Dominic Barbara says 36-year-old Diane Schuler wasn’t an alcoholic but was diabetic and may have suffered a stroke before the July 26 crash north of New York City. He says she also had a mouth abscess for several weeks and a bump on her leg.

Schuler’s husband, Daniel, says he never saw her drunk since the day he met her.

Police say Schuler downed more than 10 vodkas and smoked marijuana before her minivan crashed into an SUV. Her 2-year-old daughter and three nieces were killed with her, and three men driving in the SUV. Schuler’s 5-year-old son survived.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.

GARDEN CITY, N.Y. (AP) – An attorney says the woman who drove drunk and caused a New York highway crash that killed eight people was diabetic and may have suffered a stroke.

Dominic Barbara says 36-year-old Diane Schuler had diabetes, a mouth abcess for several weeks and a bump on her leg before the July 26 crash north of New York City.

Barbara represents Schuler’s husband, Daniel. He says that “I think she had a stroke of some sort.”

Police say Schuler downed more than 10 vodkas and smoked marijuana before her minivan crashed into an SUV. Her 2-year-old daughter and three nieces were killed with her, and three men driving in the SUV. Schuler’s 5-year-old son survived.

The former mistress of John Edwards arrived at a federal courthouse in Raleigh where a grand jury was meeting Thursday — an appearance that comes as federal investigators examine the two-time presidential candidate’s finances.

Rielle Hunter walked into the building through a back entrance and holding a young child.

Edwards adamantly denied during his confessional interview with ABC News last summer that he had fathered a child with Hunter, and he welcomed a paternity test. His wife, Elizabeth, has said while promoting her book that she doesn’t know if her husband is the father.

What do you think?

More on John Edwards

I’ll have a broader piece up soon about John Brennan’s speech about counterterrorism, which in many ways represented a stark departure from several key tenets of the Bush administration’s approach. But on one issue that I asked Brennan about, the president’s chief adviser for counterterrorism and homeland security seemed reluctant to clear up an issue about the past.

HOUSTON — The Charles Manson follower convicted of attempting to assassinate President Gerald Ford is set to be released from a federal prison in Texas later this month after serving more than 30 years behind bars.

Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme was a 26-year-old disciple of the cult murderer Manson when she aimed a semiautomatic .45- caliber pistol at Ford in September 1975 in Sacramento, Calif. Secret Service agents grabbed her and Ford was unhurt.

Fromme, now 60, is scheduled to be released on parole from the Federal Medical Center Carswell in Fort Worth on Aug. 16, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons and the court-appointed attorney who represented her at trial.

Fromme, who got a life term, became the first person sentenced under a special federal law covering assaults on U.S. presidents, a statute enacted after the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Ford was walking to the California State Capitol from his hotel when Fromme pushed through the crowd, drew the pistol from a holster on her thigh and pointed it at the president as he shook hands with well-wishers. She was restrained by Secret Service agents who wrested the gun away from her and led the president to safety.

Less than two weeks later, another would-be assassin, Sara Jane Moore, fired at Ford in San Francisco but missed.

It was unclear why Fromme was at Carswell, a facility that specializes in providing medical and mental health services to female offenders. A spokeswoman for the bureau of prisons did not immediately return a phone call Wednesday seeking comment.

“I knew some day she would be released,” said John Virga, the Sacramento attorney who handled her trial.

Fromme served time in at least two other facilities before Carswell.

She escaped from a female prison in Alderson, W.Va., on Dec. 23, 1987, and was recaptured about two miles away on Christmas Day after a massive search. She was sentenced to an additional 15 months in prison for the escape.

Fromme had said she escaped from prison to be closer to Manson.

Manson is serving a life term in San Quentin in California for the 1969 murders of actress Sharon Tate and eight others. Fromme, one of his “family” of followers, was not implicated in those attacks.

BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) — A shooting outside a home in a blighted neighborhood left two people dead and three others wounded early Wednesday, just hours after police and community members rallied for safer streets.

A 25-year-old man and a 19-year-old woman were shot and killed in a botched robbery about 2 a.m. on Buffalo’s east side, where the number of vacant properties rivals the number of occupied homes, police said. Joseph Lovett, of Buffalo, and Jamie Norton, of Derby, were pronounced dead at the scene, police spokesman Michael DeGeorge said.

Detectives said another man and two other women were believed to have been shot while sitting in a vehicle in front of the house.

Late Wednesday, a police official characterized the shooting as “an attempted robbery that went bad,” but relatives of Lovett said they believe Norton was targeted after testifying before a grand jury in an apparent homicide investigation Tuesday.

Police Deputy Commissioner Daniel Derenda declined to comment on the reports, which circulated among relatives and neighbors throughout the day. He stressed the investigation was less than a day old.

“We believe it’s an attempted robbery,” he insisted.

Police believe a lone gunman fired all the shots and fled on foot.

Mayor Byron Brown went door to door on the street asking residents to call a confidential police tip line with any information. Authorities said such efforts, called Working Against Violent Events, or WAVEs, have produced arrests in recent years.

“We need people to come forward and search their hearts and realize we have a killer,” the mayor said. “We are not going to spare any resource in trying to find this individual.”

The killings were the 33rd and 34th homicides in the city of 276,000 people this year. Buffalo saw 37 homicides in 2008, 56 in 2007 and 74 in 2006.

One of the injured women was identified as Lawanda Strozier, a resident of the house in front of which the shooting took place. She was hospitalized in serious condition Wednesday. Kimberly Caldwell, 20, also of Derby, a community west of Buffalo, was in fair condition at the same hospital. Joseph Cole, 29, of Buffalo, was released after being treated, DeGeorge said.

The gunfire erupted just a few hours after neighbors and police concluded their National Night Out events to promote safe neighborhoods.

The two-story home where the shooting happened is bordered by overgrown lawns and a vacant lot with an abandoned car. Neighbors stopped by to leave flowers on the front steps. A nearby well-kept house stood in contrast to other mostly rundown homes on the same street.

A man who said he lived three doors from the scene of the shooting and next door to the mother of the man who died said he recalled hearing gunfire earlier than the time reported by police.

“This neighborhood has gone from bad to worse. There’s always something going on,” said the man, who refused to give his name because he lives in the area and fears retribution.

Lovett’s aunt Linda Smith said her nephew was in the neighborhood visiting his mother and had walked a few doors down to talk with friends when the gunfire erupted.

“He was a good person. He had a son he was providing for,” she said. “My nephew was minding his own business, and he got shot.”

Bridgette Foster, who has lived on the street 10 years, said she heard the dead man’s brother scream. She ran down the street and found him standing over his brother.

“His brother was laying on the ground, basically just eyes glazed over. I tried to do a little CPR … trying to get him to at least talk or something,” Foster said. “He was unresponsive, and that was it. He died.”

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

CommonDreams.org is among progressive groups calling for a confrontation with President Obama. Five reasons why we should think twice.

CommonDreams.org, the prominent progressive news and opinion website, recently sent an email fundraising appeal with the subject, “It’s time for a confrontation.” Signed by Executive Director Craig Brown, it begins, “When Americans voted overwhelmingly for ‘Change’ last November 4th, I, like so many of you, was hopeful.” After a rundown of his post-election expectations, Brown proclaims, “but frankly, seven months into the new administration, my hope is fading.”

Brown quotes author and environmental activist Derrick Jensen: “We can follow the example of those who remembered that the role of an activist is not to navigate systems of oppressive power with as much integrity as possible, but rather to confront and take down those systems.”

As a lifelong progressive, I find this position exasperating. And what worries me is that more of my progressive friends seem to be adopting this position.

Here are five reasons why I hope cooler heads will prevail.

1. We won. We’re responsible, not entitled.

We successfully contested our own party’s establishment and thrashed the GOP because of the Obama campaign’s basis in movement politics. It was the real deal from the bottom up. Nobody imposed it on us — we opted in and created something miraculously inclusive and diverse. No single group can claim, “we got him elected.” Not big donors. Not party insiders. Not African Americans. Not labor. Not movement progressives. No one is entitled. Everyone is responsible.

2. Sabotage is not dissent.

Brown is absolutely right that, unlike conservatives, progressives tolerate and even welcome dissent, but “taking down the system” is not dissent. It’s a form of sabotage. It’s also the easy way out, not unlike the way that launching a cruise missile is easier than diplomacy. Dissent should include reasonable alternatives, and is taken more seriously if it comes from people who are in the game, not just sitting on the sidelines.

Confrontation in this context only serves to create resentment among all the people who are working so hard inside the government to make change happen. What those people need is a helping hand, not a slap down. I would urge CommonDreams.org and its network of 180,000 progressives to figure out how to mobilize broader support for the big ideas Obama has put on the table.

3. Americans are renting our ideas month-to-month. They haven’t bought them yet.

America liked Barack Obama, but they had come to hate Bush-Cheney-DeLay Republicanism even more. Obama was able to reach new constituencies by articulating a pragmatic brand of progressivism. He didn’t seek to persuade Americans that our values and policies were morally superior. He persuaded Americans that, with him at the helm, they just might work.

While the president rebuilds “the system,” he must deliver results along the way. I’m sure the White House would, like many of us, prefer to rebuild the machinery first – like the banking and health-care systems — but that is not a luxury we enjoy.

4. Protest-by-default is seductive but deadly

There is a long and glorious history of progressive victories rooted in oppositional protest movements. It is seductive to conjure and reapply those feelings of righteousness in the service of the effort of the moment. But those movements existed in their own time and context, and there is a real cost when that tradition is misused.

This tendency was one of the things that Obama made a call to “turn the page” on. When he talked about getting past the dorm room debates of the 1960s this is what he meant. Stick-into-the-gears activism pulls us back into the ideological clashes of the culture wars, and to the tail end of the Clinton years when there was such disdain between centrist Dems and liberals that they could barely stand being in the same room together. Progressive ideas fare much better in the pragmatic frame of the Obama era.

5. Compared to what? That is the question.

By temperament, progressives tend to be idealists, but dreams that come true are built on the ground, not in the sky. We should always strive for better, but we can’t let the perfect eclipse what in reality is extraordinarily good — maybe as good as it gets in 2009 America.

Let’s put ourselves back four years ago when we were reeling from all the talk about a permanent Republican majority. Imagine we were told that in 2009 we’d have a progressive, African-American president who came of age in politics as a community organizer, who was being compared to Roosevelt in terms of his early accomplishments, but who, after seven months, had not yet revamped America’s energy policy. Could progressives imagine being in that situation and losing hope?

I admire CommonDreams.org’s devotion and passion. At the same time, I am dismayed by what I view as an appeal to our lesser instincts as progressives.

Bill Clinton used to quip that in affairs of politics Democrats want to fall in love, while Republicans want to fall in line. I’m not advocating for blind loyalty. I’m just saying that progressives should treat this presidency as a marriage, not a passing love affair.

This post is co-written by Mark Kresowik, Corporate Responsibility Representative for the Sierra Club Beyond Coal Campaign.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon professes profound concern for our future.  He has made numerous statements about how his company supports strong action on global warming. He waxes eloquently about how JP Morgan Chase is committed to investments in clean energy and he wants policy makers to provide leadership on curbing emissions of global warming.   

But Sierra Club’s diligent researchers have pulled back the curtain and uncovered that his rhetoric doesn’t match his company’s action.  JPMorgan Chase is pouring billions of dollars into dirty coal plant projects – projects that would dramatically increase global warming pollution and ensure runaway global warming.

At the same time, JPMorgan Chase is the big money financing the most egregious mining companies engaging in the most egregious mining practices. Specifically, JPMorgan Chase is financing Massey Energy and three of the four largest mountaintop removal coal mining companies in America.  Mountaintop removal coal mining involves blowing up the country’s oldest mountain range in Appalachia, leaving a desolate and polluted landscape.  More than 500 mountains have already been leveled and more than 2,000 miles of streams buried.

With such promises about global warming and being a good energy steward – why is JPMorgan Chase financing massive new dirty coal plants in Ohio, Indiana, North Carolina and South Dakota?

To help expose the disconnect between Jamie Dimon’s words and actions, we are launching a public education campaign to ask him to walk the talk.  We are delighted to be joined in this effort with our partners at Rainforest Action Network, the Waterkeeper Alliance, and the New York Public Interest Research Group. 

If you are outraged that one of America’s leading banks is betting on dirty coal, please take a minute to watch this short video our ever creative team put together.  It grabs clips of Mr. Dimon’s statements on clean energy and contrasts that with the dirty coal companies they are financing. 

Then please take a minute to click on this link and send an email to CEO Jamie Dimon urging him to kick the dirty coal habit.