Our Man in Panama

Earlier today, President Obama released his 'long-form birth certificate' on the premise that doing so would enable American political discourse to move on to more important matters. Here is his explanation from the official White House transcript:

We're not going to be able to do it if we just make stuff up and pretend that facts are not facts. We're not going to be able to solve our problems if we get distracted by sideshows and carnival barkers.

Before we put the 'birther' issue to rest forever, I would like to offer my thoughts on how this rubbish started during the 2008 campaign. You see, one of the two major-party candidates for president had the problem of being born outside the United States. I am speaking, of course, of John McCain, native of Panama.

What's that you say? You did not know that John McCain was born in Panama? I wonder why. Every reference source agrees. According to Wikipedia, for instance, John McCain was born on August 29, 1936 at the Coco Solo Naval Air Station, Panama Canal Zone, where his father, John Sidney McCain Jr., was stationed. I should point out, for what it's worth, that McCain has always refused to release his birth certificate. [Update: McCain did provide his birth certificate in 2008 to the U.S. District Court for the District of New Hampshire in the case of Hollander v. McCain (2008), which challenged his eligibility to serve.]

Although Panama is obviously not part of the U.S., are U.S. military installations abroad in any way, under any statute or provision, 'part' of the U.S.? Is someone born at a U.S. military installation abroad somehow 'in' the U.S.? In a word, no. Let's take a look at the United States Foreign Affairs Manual, Volume 7, §1113, entitled 'NOT INCLUDED IN THE MEANING OF "IN THE UNITED STATES"'. According to paragraph (c)(1),

Despite widespread popular belief, U.S. military installations abroad and U.S. diplomatic or consular facilities abroad are not part of the United States within the meaning of the 14th Amendment. A child born on the premises of such a facility is not born in the United States and does not acquire U.S. citizenship by reason of birth.

Why is it such a problem for a presidential candidate to have been born outside the U.S.? According to Article II of the U.S. Constitution:

No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

The truth is, no one knows for sure what this clause means. No court has ever ruled on it regarding presidential elections, and legal experts are divided. (See summaries of facts and opinions here and here.) In the absence of clear constitutional or jurisprudential guidance, a president born outside the U.S. could be subject to suspicions of constitutional illegitimacy.

Aside from the obviously racist intent, the point of accusing Obama of being foreign-born in 2008 was to draw attention away from McCain's foreign birth. And it seems to have worked. Far more people have heard the lies about Obama's birthplace than the truth about McCain's. Once Obama won the election, the lie took on a life of its own.

I doubt that Obama's statement and document release today will be the final chapter in the history of the 'birther' conspiracy. But I do believe that the need to draw attention away from McCain's 'birther' problem was the first chapter.

shout it from the mountaintop

I have grown as weary of President Obama's premature compromises and bad salesmanship as the next Democrat. As I have pointed out elsewhere, his failure to trumpet his achievements is particularly keen in the matter of mining regulation. Case in point: the New York Times reported yesterday that the EPA has revoked the permit for a massive mountain-top removal coal project in West Virginia. According to the Times, 'It was the first time the agency had rescinded a valid clean water permit for a coal mine.' Yet somehow this major eco-political event has failed to become a major news item, nor should we expect to hear Democrats talk about it.

The permit was issued in 2007 by the Bush administation to the Arch Coal company to blast off the mountaintops over an area of 2,278 acres in order to mine the coal underneath. The millions of tons of debris would fill valleys, block streams, and pollute drinking water. The EPA's revocation comes in the form of a 99-page 'Final Determination' which you can read here.

Mining companies and West Virginia's 'Democratic' Senator Joe Manchin have unsurprisingly expressed outrage at the EPA's decision. Less interested parties have also objected, including the National Realtors Association, the American Road and Transportation Builders Association, and the National Cattlemen's Beef Association on the grounds that the government ought not revoke permits, i.e. do its job.

The authority for the EPA's revocation comes from 33 U.S.C. §1344(c), also known as §404(c) of the Clean Water Act:

(c) Denial or restriction of use of defined areas as disposal sites

The Administrator is authorized to prohibit the specification (including the withdrawal of specification) of any defined area as a disposal site, and he is authorized to deny or restrict the use of any defined area for specification (including the withdrawal of specification) as a disposal site, whenever he determines, after notice and opportunity for public hearings, that the discharge of such materials into such area will have an unacceptable adverse effect on municipal water supplies, shellfish beds and fishery areas (including spawning and breeding areas), wildlife, or recreational areas. Before making such determination, the Administrator shall consult with the Secretary. The Administrator shall set forth in writing and make public his findings and his reasons for making any determination under this subsection.

To the EPA's credit, its Final Determination includes, amidst all its ecological and statutory data, a section on 'Environmental Justice'. In addition to noting the relative poverty of Logan County, West Virginia, it also sticks up for the idea of the commons:

The mountains affected by Spruce No. 1 Mine are an important cultural resource for many residents. In many cases the mountains have helped define their culture, and they are an integral part of their daily lives. For example, the mountain ridges of southern West Virginia have for over two centuries been viewed largely as a 'commons', where local residents have gathered wild medicinal herbs such as American Ginseng (Panax quinquefolius) and Goldenseal (Hydrastis canadensis) (Hufford 2003). In many cases, collection of these wild herbs provides much needed extra income to local communities during times of unemployment or economic hardship (Bailey 1999). Removing these mountains may have profound cultural changes on the residents in the area, and so it is important that cultural impacts be considered as well.

What dumbfounds me about all this is why the Obama administration allows stories like this one to be buried on page A14 of the newspaper and absent from television news. The mining interests are surely blasting this news to their constituents. Every mineworker who was hoping for one of the project's promised 250 jobs has surely heard from aptly-named Arch Coal that the project has been blocked by a tyrannical, overreaching government run amok. The people not getting the story are the everyday eco-friendly liberals whose votes the Obama administation will need in 2012. And so it goes.

I'll have the Beef Wellington, courtesy of the GOP

With the passage of H.R. 3590, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, by the House of Representatives on Sunday, many commentators have been quick to say that Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) was wrong last July when he referred to health care reform as President Obama's Waterloo:

'If we're able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him and we will show that we can, along with the American people, begin to push those freedom solutions that work in every area of our society.' (audio link)

DeMint may be demented, but he was right about one thing: health care reform is indeed Obama's Waterloo. DeMint was just wrong about which side had the Napoleon complex.

In warfare, there is typically a winning side and a losing side. Pacifists may prefer to think that in war everyone loses, yet ABBA grasped the essential zero-sum nature of war in their 1974 hit single 'Waterloo': 'Waterloo—I was defeated, you won the war.'



The British military leader credited with the victory at Waterloo was Field Marshall Arthur Wellesley, First Duke of Wellington. So epic was the victory that a dish was named for him: Beef Wellington.

As at Waterloo, someone had to win the epic battle to determine whether Americans deserve, like their counterparts in the other industrialized democracies, to receive medical treatment when they are ill. Waterloo was not just an epic defeat; it was also an epic victory. And like Wellington, Obama's name has already entered everyday speech by being attached to his unprecedented achievement in law: Obamacare.

Yet the Republicans in Congress still don't get it. Today they continued to try to impede passage of the so-called Senate reconciliation bill, intended by the Democrats to fix the shortcomings in H.R. 3590. Here, too, they would be well-advised to learn from the lyrics of Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus:

'My my, I tried to hold you back but you were stronger.
Oh yeah, and now it seems my only chance is giving up the fight.
And how could I ever refuse?
I feel like I win when I lose.'

Let's hope the Republicans keep on feeling like winners. Their delusional behavior only drives them deeper into defeat at the hands of President Obama, our modern-day Duke of Wellington.



Props also to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, our Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher.

stuck in a moment you can't get out of

I love President Obama. Last year I volunteered for him in Pennsylvania, I took on extra work so that I could contribute more to his campaign, and, as we all know, I took the middle name Hussein for nine months. I would even take the assassin's bullet for him if it came down to it. That is how strongly I believe that the world needs his unique talents. But even I have to admit that he does not deserve the Nobel Peace Prize, not yet anyway.

Now that he has won, what are we to think? Others have won the prize without deserving it, chief among them the unconvicted American war criminal Henry Kissinger (1973). Such comparisons are preposterous and insulting. Nothing that Kissinger could ever do could wash the blood from his hands. (I can think of a few others in that category.)

The better comparison is to Oscar Arias (1987), president of Costa Rica. Arias, who again became president in 2006, is probably the greatest statesman that Central America has produced in our lifetime, although I admit the competition is not great. In the 1990s I heard him speak very astutely at Dartmouth about international development and the neo-colonial wealth transfers caused by Third World debt, an issue later popularised by Bono of U2. In 1987 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for brokering a multi-nation peace plan for Central America. The only problem was that the plan never went into effect. Arias essentially won the prize for something that might have been.

The Nobel committee does that sometimes: they will use the award in order to help push something into being. Thorbjorn Jagland, the Nobel committee chairman, said as much in today's New York Times:

"It's important for the committee to recognize people who are struggling and idealistic," Mr. Jagland said in an interview after the prize was announced, "but we cannot do that every year. We must from time to time go into the realm of realpolitik. It is always a mix of idealism and realpolitik that can change the world."

I'm assuming that Obama was an instance of 'realpolitik', not someone 'struggling and idealistic', but who knows?

Whatever the case, the Nobel committee's statement on this year's peace prize does make some cogent points. Here it is in part:

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 is to be awarded to President Barack Obama for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. The Committee has attached special importance to Obama's vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.

Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play. Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts. The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations. Thanks to Obama's initiative, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened.

Premature or not, the committee is factually correct—Obama has done what they say—yet I can't help but read the invisible words 'Unlike Bush' at the start of the second paragraph.

Obama's public statement about winning the prize reminded me of the title of a U2 song, 'Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out of'. Saying he was 'both surprised and deeply humbled' and that he did not deserve the honour, Obama looked genuinely uncomfortable. Tonight, the homepage of the White House's website almost wholly ignores the award. I had to use my web browser's Find command to locate the word 'Nobel' on the page. Here it is, in the sub-headline to a story about the Obamas' dog.



Many American conservatives are griping about Obama's Nobel, just as they cheered last week when the International Olympic Committee chose not to award the 2016 summer Olympics to the U.S. Wingnuts aside, who in the world has reason to regret Obama's award? The three governments most at odds with Obama's diplomatic goals: Iran, Israel, and Russia. If the award strengthens Obama's hand on the world stage, the Israeli government will have a harder time resisting Obama's calls to end settlements in the West Bank and to achieve a two-state solution with the Palestinians. Perhaps that was the 'realpolitik' on the committee's minds.

Who then does deserve the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009? By coincidence, I was in the presence, albeit at great distance, of a leading candidate just a few hours ago at a rock concert by the band U2. Yes, Bono deserves the peace prize. He has involved and educated people around the world in movements for human rights and debt reduction; he has raised money for antiretrovirals in Africa; he has added the relief of suffering to the agendas of international meetings of the world's most powerful governments; and his work as a singer and songwriter imbues millions with the spirit of peace and love that we all want to believe is the foundation of rock and roll. Their music makes me feel the spirit, and I don't even believe in spirits. The prize has been issued at least once before to someone whose main achievements were in the arts and humanities: Elie Wiesel (1986). The only problem with giving it to Bono would be that his ego would grow so large that it would block out the sun and cause worldwide destruction.



I can't say I mind that Obama won the prize. I just think the Nobel committee did him no favour by giving it to him before the great achievements that may or may not lie ahead. Those who believe that Obama won the presidency on the flimsy basis of a few eloquent speeches will seize the award as Exhibit A.

Filmmaker Michael Moore released a clever statement at his website today: Congratulations President Obama on the Nobel Peace Prize—Now Please Earn It! For everyone's sake, I hope he does. In the meanwhile, the Nobel committee should avoid premature salutations. I don't like being stuck with having to admit that the conservatives are right.

'You lie'? Bye-bye!

As Republican scare tactics against health insurance reform have reached new extremes of disgrace, I have taken comfort in the hope that such outrageous behavior would only sully the fearmongers and make President Obama shine all the more by comparison. Nothing they have done so far, from the lies about 'death panels' to the parade of forged foreign birth certificates, has surprised me. Tonight, during Obama's speech to a joint session of Congress, I was finally surprised. In the midst of refuting a lie that his reform would insure undocumented aliens, Obama was interrupted by Rep. Joe Wilson, Republican of South Carolina, falsely shouting 'You lie!' See the picture above for a mid-outburst shot of Wilson's angry snarl. For proof of Obama's statement, see the bill, H.R. 3200. Here is the relevant section in its entirety:

SEC. 246. NO FEDERAL PAYMENT FOR UNDOCUMENTED ALIENS.

Nothing in this subtitle shall allow Federal payments for affordability credits on behalf of individuals who are not lawfully present in the United States.

Someone definitely lied during the speech, but it was not President Obama.

Besides Wilson's lie about lying, what kind of savage shouts at a president speaking before Congress? The incident reminds me of the despicable conduct of another South Carolinian, Senator Preston Brooks. On May 22, 1856 on the floor of the U.S. Senate, Brooks beat Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts nearly to death, trapping him under his Senate desk and bashing his head with a cane. Sumner was unable to return to the Senate for three years. Brooks's constituents back home saluted his crime by sending him new canes to replace the one he had broken on Sumner's head.

How will South Carolinians respond to Wilson's disgrace? Will they applaud the shame brought on their state, or will they reply to Wilson's 'You lie!' with a resounding 'Bye-bye!' come the next election? I say, let's help them restore their state's good name.

Rob Miller is a Democrat and an Iraq war veteran running against Wilson for the U.S. House seat in the Second Congressional District. I just contributed money to Miller's campaign, and I urge you to do the same by clicking this link. Miller's campaign website provides more information on his positions and his career. NPR fans may want to listen to him in the January 7, 2005 episode of This American Life.

Whether you are from South Carolina or, like me, not, we all have a stake in restoring civility and respect to public dialogue. Please join me in ejecting a caveman from the halls of Congress and replacing him with a distinguished veteran of the U.S. Marines who served in Iraq and Liberia.

fearless leader takes on fearmongering

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Does anybody have any questions?

rope-a-dope

The verdict is in: Barack Obama is smarter than the rest of us. Throughout the 2008 campaign, many of us, including me, have wondered whether Obama had the anatomical-metaphor-of-your-choice to give as good as he gets from his opponents, be they the Clintons or John McCain. Two days into the Democratic National Convention in Denver, we were still wondering whether the party was going to play nice or play to win. John Kerry and Al Gore offered fighting words against the Republicans, but Obama saved the hardest blows not for his surrogates but for himself. He not only hit hard but he demonstrated his fire more convincingly than ever before. In that one standout word in his Denver speech—'Enough!'—he announced he was ready to throw down.

Today, amidst all the lipstick traces, he went one better by declaring 'Enough is enough!' Not by coincidence, he has now given the green light to liberal 527's to hit McCain with everything they've got. I, too, was skeptical when he tied their hands earlier this year, but consider the advantages of forestalling the attack until now:

1. By waiting until McCain's attacks reached new depths of disgrace, Obama can claim he was forced to release the hounds: the Republicans made him go negative.

2. By holding all his attack cards until now, Obama has not yet begun to fight, which means the best anti-McCain weapons are all still in the Democratic arsenal and will be deployed in the final weeks, when they count most.

3. Following from point two, the Republicans have exhausted their most potent weapons against Obama: there is nothing left to say about Jeremiah Wright, 'Hussein', 'present' votes, Bill Ayers, and so on. What is left to say against Obama?

Obama may have looked soft up until now, but I predict that all those soft-spoken weeks are about to seem like strategic genius. When the final chapter of this campaign is written in the history books, its title is likely to be 'Rope-a-Dope'.

keep going

Hillary Clinton's speech at the Democratic National Convention last night may prove to be an important event in party history. She has given spotlight speeches before, yet they were always utterly forgettable. Bill Clinton or Barack Obama can give a speech, and their phrases instantly enter political discourse and stay there for years: the bridge to the twenty-first century; there are no red states or blue states; a skinny kid with a funny name. Do you remember a word of her 2004 convention speech? Me neither.

H. Clinton's speeches have always struck me as litanies of complaint without anything catchy and hopeful, a key ingredient. My favourite instance of the catchy and hopeful hook to the end-of-the-world speech is Al Gore's trope of the Chinese translation of 'crisis', which even has its own Wikipedia entry. I always thought it was Al Gore who first said that the Chinese word for 'crisis' is formed by two characters meaning 'danger' and 'opportunity'. Apparently, John F. Kennedy said it way back in 1959. I feel cheated.

Last night, practically everything that H. Clinton said was memorable: we can't have four more years of the last eight years; no way, no how, no McCain; the Twin Cities joke. I could not help but think it was B. Clinton's speech. When it comes to most things, she is probably smarter than he is, but not when it comes to rhetoric. Her mind does not frame her thoughts into rhetorical figures the way his compulsively does. (He did seem to be smiling a bit too proudly during her speech; didn't he?)

Whoever wrote it, I was relieved to see the force of her argument to her supporters that they must support Obama because this is about more than her. I expected calls for party unity and so on, but what she said was what those of us not enthralled to the Clintons needed to hear: that it was not about her but about the larger cause.

If my suspicion is right that this was a Bill speech, at least in spirit, then I have to think he is going to trot out an even grander speech for himself tonight. Finally, for the first time in this campaign, I am looking forward to a speech by Bill Clinton. Perhaps he may even restore the family name.

imaginary presidential art

It may be an idle thought of no interest to anyone but me, but I sometimes try to imagine what Jean-Michel Basquiat would have made of Barack Obama. Being a great admirer of both, I naturally imagine that Basquiat would have been inspired to add Obama to his pantheon of crowned heads, which included Joe Louis, Cassius Clay, and Charlie Parker. (Yes, that's an actual Basquiat crown that I added to Obama's image at the left.)

Although the similarities may be broad, the more I think about it, the more the two seem to have in common. Basquiat was born on December 22, 1960, just 225 days before Obama on August 4, 1961. Both rose like rocketships to dominate their fields, painting and politics, with a youthful vigor more desperately needed than we had thitherto realized. And both confounded the usual American racial categories by having black parents from outside the U.S. (in Basquiat's case, from Haiti and Puerto Rico), which may have something to do with a worldliness of vision uncommon to Americans of any color.

For what it's worth, I don't think for a second that Basquiat would have produced campaign-suitable propaganda, like Shepard Fairey's Obama posters, but I'm sure he would have painted something striking. That's the problem, among others, with people who die young: they stop making new work.

In lieu of producing anymore fake Basquiats for the campaign, I have a question for my readers: what artists do you imagine depicting the 2008 presidential candidates? Here are mine.

Barack Obama: Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Hillary Clinton: Lucian Freud.
John McCain: Goya.

Post your presidential artists in the comments.

Obama has already won

Here is something to keep in mind as we wait to see which Pennsylvania prevails in today's Democratic primary election: the Clintons were supposed to win from the start. The story here is not Barack Obama's inability to knock them out, despite lacking the winner-take-all formula of Republican primaries. The real story is that Obama has already defeated the stranglehold of the DLC over the Democratic Party.

Here, thanks to Wikipedia, is the list of DLC chairmen since its founding in 1985:
Rep. Richard Gephardt of Missouri (1985–1986)
Gov. Chuck Robb of Virginia (1986–1988)
Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia (1988–1990)
Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas (1990–1991)
Sen. John Breaux of Louisiana (1991–1993)
Rep. Dave McCurdy of Oklahoma (1993–1995)
Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut (1995–2001)
Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana (2001–2005)
Gov. Tom Vilsack of Iowa (2005–2007)
Former Rep. Harold Ford Jr. of Tennessee (2007–present)

For those who follow American politics closely, the names on that list speak for themselves. The DLC approach to politics is to follow the Republicans ever rightward on the false assumption that the country is going ever more conservative. DLC candidates generally forgo the party's progressive legacy, repudiate appeals to the poor and working class as 'class warfare', and beg conservative voters to trust Democrats again by 'getting tough' on core Democratic constituencies. Bill Clinton did this in 1992 by executing Ricky Ray Rector with great fanfare and scapegoating Sister Souljah. And what did it get him? 43% of the vote in 1992 and a Republican Congress two years later.

The Democrats cannot win with 43% of the vote anymore, at least not without Ross Perot. And the party won't win the electoral college with the Kerry-states strategy of the Clintons.

Obama has already slain the beast inside the party and will win the nomination. What matters is not whether the Clintons beat him in safe Democratic states like Pennsylvania but whether, in line with Howard Dean's fifty-state strategy, his insurgent campaign can energize the party in the western states and other places outside the tired DLC playbook. I think we already know the answer to that.

we are all Hussein

I don't know about you but I am sick of Republicans pronouncing Barack Obama's name like it was some sort of cuss word. It is a national embarassment that American political discourse stretches so far to the extremes of xenophobia and puerility that a candidate's name can become an object of propaganda. I'm not worried about the influence of such people. Like Bill and Hillary Clinton, the Republicans will learn that Obama is a bright, shining piece of rubber, and they are the glue. It just disappoints me to no end to hear it on the news day in and day out.

Jon Stewart made a clever joke about it when he reminded the audience at the Oscars of 'the ill-fated 1944 presidential campaign of Gaydolf Titler' (at 8.10 of this clip at YouTube). Shamelessly repeating his name over and over with seven months to go before the election will wear out whatever rhetorical force it might otherwise have in certain quarters. It's also a good example of what I like to call the 8 Mile defense, i.e. claiming one's own possibly vulnerable traits before one's opponent even opens his mouth, as in the Eminem film.

I think we can do even better than that. It's not just people named Hussein who are being insulted by the racist xenophobes among us. It's everyone who respects human dignity and who values things like courtesy and etiquette. There's a tradition on the left of identifying with the targets of injustice by saying, I am [those people you hate]. It shows up in popular culture sometimes disguised as comedy, as in the 1997 Frank Oz film 'In & Out' starring Kevin Kline. When Kline's character, a high school teacher, is fired after being outed as a gay man, his students rise to his defense, one after another, by declaring, 'I am gay.' More recently, and more apt in this case, Le Monde declared in its front-page editorial headline on September 13, 2001, 'Nous sommes tous Américains'.

'Dans ce moment tragique où les mots paraissent si pauvres pour dire le choc que l'on ressent, la première chose qui vient à l'esprit est celle- ci : nous sommes tous Américains ! Nous sommes tous New-Yorkais, aussi sûrement que John Kennedy se déclarait, en 1962 à Berlin, Berlinois. Comment ne pas se sentir en effet, comme dans les moments les plus graves de notre histoire, profondément solidaires de ce peuple et de ce pays, les Etats-Unis, dont nous sommes si proches et à qui nous devons la liberté, et donc notre solidarité.'

It's time for some good old-fashioned solidarité. With that in mind, I am changing my name for the rest of the campaign to Jeff Hussein Strabone, and I will urge others to do the same with their names. Between now and November 4, I will always try to include my new middle name, even when it might be difficult to do so.

In a broader sense, the law-haters have been coming for the Husseins for the past six and a half years. Right now I think we've got the haters on the run, but we can't let up. Many Americans can be proud of their activities in the fight for justice and the rule of law in this decade. If we recall the famous 'First they came' speech of Martin Niemöller, we can say that many among us did speak up and, if nothing else, at least put our money where our mouth was by giving to the ACLU and other groups. What if they came for the Husseins, and everyone was named Hussein?

In the modern era, we have an exaggerated sense of the fixity of names because of the legal exigencies of having definite, unchanging names. It was not, of course, always the case. Just a few centuries ago, people would spell their own names differently with each signature, as is the case with all of William Shakespeare's surviving signatures. If we adopted a more flexible approach to our names, we might be more awake to the possibilities of self-reinvention.

The name Hussein comes from the Arabic noun husn, which the Hans Wehr dictionary translates as 'beauty, handsomeness, prettiness, loveliness; excellence, superiority, perfection' and so on. Reader, do you feel beautiful? I surely do, and I invite you to feel the same way. For the next seven months I hope you'll join me in saying, 'I am Hussein.'


[Update: here are some pro-Obama sites that have reached out since I posted this blog entry. Check them out.

The Obama Minute posts action instructions and news for Obama supporters.

I Am Hussein is a proposal for YouTube videos of people adding Hussein to their names.]