Prometheus 6 has an NAACP report about voter suppression. It falls much in line with my own comments.
But questions arise. At what point is voter suppression and intimidation important. If 7 voters out of every 100 are faced with intimidation tactics (which does not measure how many are actually turned back) what are we to make of that? To be sure from what I know about Florida, that's an easy one. As far as I'm concerned it is enough to call in international forces. And anytime you've got an entire campus told not to vote, there is a problem.
But I wonder how big a problem it'd be if similar attempts were conducted to suppress their vote? What would such attempts even look like anyway?
Rustbelt cities like Detroit drained off thousands of folk like river water. Detroit used to hold 2 million people at its height. Now it has a population half that. What to do with the empty space?
A suggestion. With all of the talk about cities needing to bring "the creative class" to their centers, this approach sounds healthier, more sustainable, and closer in line with the future of cities.
"They think the role of government is to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of those who embrace their political, economic, and social views, leaving ordinary citizens to fend for themselves on matters like health care and retirement security," he said. "Since most Americans are not that far to the right, they have to portray us Democrats as unacceptable, lacking in strength and values. In other words, they need a divided America."Let me be clear. As a President, I hated Clinton's policies. I hated the way he scapegoated working class black people to pass his policies (and also to win the White House). I hated the way he misconstrued Sistah Souljah's comments after the disturbances in L.A. I hated the way he played Jesse (even though I don't have much love for Jesse either).
But LIKE Jesse, you can't sleep on him. Because every now and then Clinton makes a speech that makes everything so clear and crystalline, you got to bow down.
Several years ago I had a brief correspondance with Monster Kody Scott aka Sanyika Shakur. He had spent a great deal of time in jail writing about his theories of cohesion - essentially rediscovering something that great military leaders have known through the ages: boys need men and will do anything for them.
Every once in a while I get tossed a question for a link to Scott/Shakur, but I have no idea where he is. I heard that he has been baited a number of times since his last release - shades of 90 day detentions in SA. However one place he and Donald Bakeer might be found is over at a new site pitched my way this morning: Streetgangs.com.
Sooner or later urban policy gets to this matter. We all know the investment is in cops and that's never going to be disinvested. The question is whether we are signed on to permanent low-level warfare. Of course this begs a question of racial solidarity, what do we care that body bags goet filled with brown bodies. It's still bodies, and we needn't pollute our great country with this kind of internal chaos & drama. It's no good having cops coming home from a long day shooting Crips. Its no good having boys think they're soldiers because they taunt cops and beat up civilians.
The only kind of draft that would be fair, is an unfair draft. I think someday I may come to advocate that position, because I can't think of a good reasons to have a prison population which is bigger than any branch of the Armed Services. Just another reason to crank up the Empire.
Meanwhile, thanks to Y for the link.
"If we do not suppress the Detroit vote, we're going to have a tough time in this election."
More here. I've already noted that the Carol Mosely Braun event I attended was cut short because of a bomb threat. These are the stakes we face.
Today's version of The Black Slate deals with some random thoughts on Cosby and on the NAACP. Because Jelani, Neal (I think), and Izrael already offered their thoughts on homeboy I was going to take a pass. But when the Bush NAACP thing came up I thought there might be a way to weave the two in together. I don't like the NAACP as far as I can throw them, and to a certain degree I sympathize with Cobb when he throws down the gauntlet. I even agree a bit with McWhorter here.
But the bottom line is a simple one. In making the decision to speak to the Urban League instead, Bush is taking the line that he's taken for a while--that the poor shouldn't rely on government to deal with their problems. In as much as we need an inside/outside game, SOMEONE has to talk to Bush with that perspective in mind, and the Urban League is the best thing we've got going here. In fact, they are probably the closest thing to a conservative black organization that we have--Armstrong Williams and the rest of the black conservative crew don't really have mass black organizations to stand on.
However at the same time we need someone to push for changes in government policy. The Urban League doesn't do that. The NAACP barely does it. But right now, especially because of the loot they are giving out to organizers...I'll take them.
Fitting Cosby in was a bit of a stretch I think...but I was able to push his stomach in a bit and get him in there. With all of his bluster he is pretty much saying the same thing that the conservatives are saying anyway--fuck politics. The more I think about it the more we need conversation starters like this. All we need afterwards are the folks with policy proposals in hand for those in agreement with Cosby, and for those in disagreement.
As an aside I gave a few workshops at the League of Independent Voters Smackdown 2004. I have never been more hopeful in the future than I was seeing those young brothers and sisters. We've been waiting YEARS for them. As opposed to the pie in the sky approach taken by many (we want reparations NOW), they fully recognize that we're running a relay marathon, not a sprint. I can't wait.
I remember when the University of Michigan added digital photographs to their ids. Made it so that your picture would be stored in the system, and you had to ask to have it removed. I pitched a fit, thinking about all the nefarious purposes that stored picture could be used for. By that time they had already begun to track our purchases, and our travel (to get into the dorms after hours instead of using a key, you had to use your id).
Of course I got used to it. We all did. And now that I'm on the other end, I have access to pictures of students and all types of sensitive data.
How long do we have before this becomes commonplace among professionals? How long before Falwell, Cokely, and the others tell folks to get their guns and watch out for the black copters?
Dean Esmay analyzes the two party system vis a vis its seemingly fixed relationship to The Black Vote.
Fact is Republicans have learned through hard experience that no matter what they say, no matter how much money they spend, black people will not vote for them. So why try?And why should Democrats ultimately really care what black voters want, so long as they know black people feel like they have nowhere else to go?
Gay voters need to learn the same lesson too. If Republicans know they can never get your vote, then quite seriously, why do they care what you think? I mean, other than to be nice? If you'll never support them, what motivation do they have to care what you think? About anything?
And you know, it really doesn't help much when the few blacks who do vote Republican get called Uncle Toms and Aunt Jemimahs and sellouts.
He's being wry here so don't fret none. But his points are on target and generally observable. The parties are gaming the vote, and right now the party bosses don't seem concerned that their abstractions are incorrect because nothing seems to be changing.
He reminds us of some points made before as well:
To say that it's "natural" that blacks should only support Democrats means you're saying that the black man's opinions are predetermined. It says the black woman's vote is to be taken for granted. It says that the color of your skin pre-determines your position on all the big issues of the day. You can be pigeonholed because of your skin color.
So he shows that he understands an important point about, but there a couple other things missing in this analysis. and that is black apathy.
Political Diversity
One of the things we in the Brotherhood are doing is being constantly out here spewing our angles. And you cannot read across our blogs without recognizing that we come from varying perspectives. So if there's one thing that must be recognized, as blackfolks started to demand in the 80s, is that African Americans cannot be taken as a monolith. That means political monolith. So try this: don't say 'The Black Vote'. Say African American voters. At the very least you acknowledge that there are individuals out there. Again, since the Brotherhood is working to make visible the political diversity that already exists in African America, we're attuned to the costs of the assumption of singlemindedness.
There are regional differences in African American populations. My particular focus is on the class differences that trump the racial solidarity established by Black Nationalism. Nothing William Juilius Wilson didn't say a generation ago, but
Apathy & False Abstraction
I should also like to bring up the point that African American voters are not particularly more energized these days. The majority say both parties suck. They sit out elections. Most of my contemporaries tell me that they remain uninspired and cannot decide between which way to go not only because of the unattractiveness of the parties, but based upon their lack of faith in the political process itself. So when we talk about what 90% of 'The Black Vote' does, what we're really talking about is 90% of what something like 30% of us did which is a far cry from describing what any of us think. This extrapolation of what 30% of registered African American voters do as a proxy for what blackfolks think is the same kind of problem as Angry White Math. You know the old statistical tricks about x% of the population causing y% of the crime and saying it's a black problem, when it's not.
Nevertheless, while I be presumptuous in saying so, my contemporaries in the Old School are a highly influential group. The direction we take will be inordinatly significant.
Reductionism
Thirdly, I will invoke what I will coin the Drylongso Imperative. Don't second-guess what blackfolks do and assume you know the reasoning by which they arrive at what you observe to be their behavior. You just don't know. There are a wide variety of issues of concern to African American families which must be addressed in the context from which they arise. This also means that there are a wide variety of solutions to these problems.
You know, I gotta admit when I am wrong, and I think I've been caught in something of a dilemma. That being the case, I tend to think the subject is exhausted. I keep torquing the nut until it doesn't move, then I back up off it a half-turn. And so I have to talk about it.
Spence, whom I salute again, mentions the following:
It was the knuckleheads that taught me the dozens--the value of using wordplay as a means of attack and defense. The knuckleheads taught me to stand up for what I believed in. The knuckleheads taught me what it meant to be confident in myself when all around me doubted. And it was the criminally minded knucklheads that taught me the value of having game even as they gave me strong anti-role models.
There's talk, now and again, about how many black middle class parents feel the necessity of sending their kids to live with their grandparents down South for the summer, or to stay with their ghetto cousins for a spell. Assuming these parents aren't complete idiots there is a reason I could agree with although I'd probably try to accomplish it a different way. That reason is to toughen up their otherwise dainty suburban offspring.
I know my kids ain't black. And when it comes to their adulthood, they won't need to be. They're brown - like the zillions in Africa, India and South and Central America. That's a good enough sample, and it's only skin color. They can't be black like me because my blackness was born of the times, not an essential, inescapable box, but a response to a condition. But so much of who I am is locked into that alternatively golden and grim experience. I wish I could teach them things I learned the way I learned them. I cannot send my kids back to the neighborhood I grew up in, but I understand why somebody might want to.
In the three-bedroom house I was raised in, we had Measles, Mumps, Chicken Pox, Rubella, Impetigo and Roaches. Every one of us five kids who bunked there survived them all and most of us, excepting my sister and I, grew taller than six foot two. In my neighborhood school, "Meet me after class" was most likely followed by "so I can kick your ass". I've played bicycle chicken with the Ice Cream Truck and been chased by more stray dogs and gangbangers than I care to think about. My sister swore to me last week that we used to jump from rooftop to rooftop. I don't know about that but we did make zip lines from the transformer level of power poles and hogtie each other for fun. I've talked about all kinds of ghetto games from suicide to slapboxing to stomp - but I never really wrote about 'Hide & Go Get It'. Use your imagination.
One of the reasons I don't back down about talking about my Black Nationalist roots is because, like my neighborhood, all that shit made me tough. And yes it was shit. You can't get that just by reading Ulysses. You get it from surviving the risk and the danger. Perhaps the Baby Boom was the lone exception in the struggles of life, and perhaps that cannot be compensated. Perhaps some folks feel the need to run with bulls in Pamplona, but I don't. Don't get me wrong, I got out of my hood before the Crack Wars. I would have needed a different kind of level of toughness, one perhaps completely incompatible with the life I live now, were I stuck back with Frankie, Mountain, Boo, Tissino, White Jerry, Nudie, Twin (and Twin), Shabazz, Ralphie, Rabo and KK. But I learned, and I overcame.
What do we owe our adversaries? What do we owe those thugs, knuckleheads, triflin' niggas (yeah that's what we called 'em), skanks and skeezers? We owe them not to punk out. They couldn't take us out of the game, so we shouldn't quit the game. I'll get mystical for a moment and talk about Lord not taking away my stumbling block. I don't thank God for creating temptation, but I understand purpose in the overcoming. But back from the abstract to the people. What do we owe them? I think we do owe them a little bit of respect for forcing us to deal with their reality.
After all, we know that achievement is real because we look at those who fell off. We faced the same choices they did and our choices landed us standing. And we've learned that the good are punished and the bad escape because of those knuckleheads. But we also know what works in the long term.
The Washington Post has moved to a pretty invasive signup process to get their news. This one is worth reading by hook or by crook. A snippet:
Lockheed Martin Corp., the Bethesda-based defense contracting giant, permitted a racially hostile work environment for black employees "to grow in intensity" at its Meridian, Miss., plant until an employee shot 14 workers -- 12 of them black -- there last summer, an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission investigation has found.
Wonder how long it'll take Discriminations to get to this one. I guess they're too busy reading social science fiction. The myth of Affirmative Action stigma is worthy of Bullfinch I think.
Cobb got it right.
I've never seen Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. A bit before my time, and not enough action to look it up. So I only know Sanford the way most of my peers probably do--through The Jeffersons.
I know this much. Esther Rolle and Isabel Sanford were the two of the three grand dames of black television comedy in the modern era (the other is LaWanda Page). As far as I'm concerned there is really only one left that could hold a candle to her.
Marla Gibbs.
Went to a Carol Mosely Braun talk. It got truncated a bit because of a bomb threat. They pitched it afterward like it was some "crazy" that did it, but I think that people often forget Clausewitz' idea that politics is war by other means. (if they ever knew about homeboy's ideas in the first place.) And people definitely forget the fact that in much of the world political parties operate a lot like gangs. Including drive-bys.
I guess the question for me is, what would be the Democratic equivalent? I can't imagine the DNC calling a GOP event and doing something similar...not because DNC folks are inherently "better" people. But perhaps because they are kindler and gentler.
Anybody hear about Reggie Hudlin and Aaron MacGruder's Birth of a Nation?
Hudlin and McGruder have written a couple of scripts and a graphic novel together. The book, called “Birth of a Nation,” reimagines the 2000 Florida election fiasco in East St. Louis, Illinois, and has the city seceding from the union to form its own country, Blackland. (In Blackland, Denzel Washington is on the twenty-dollar bill.) It will be published this summer.
If anyone is around the San Diego area for the Comicon they will be on a panel talking about it, along with Denys Cowan and Dwayne McDuffie of Milestone fame, and Kyle Baker (of Why I Hate Saturn fame). Saturday from 4:30-6:00pm. Should be interesting.
Check out this doozy:
The paucity of Hispanic voters on the felon list was first reported Wednesday, by The Sarasota Herald-Tribune, but officials said then that the problem was not systematic. After The New York Times examined the data, state officials acknowledged that the method for matching lists of felons to those of voters automatically exempted all felons who identified themselves as Hispanic.Hispanic Republicans outnumber Hispanic Democrats by about 100,000 voters in Florida. But more than 90 percent of the approximately one million registered blacks there are Democrats. The exclusion of Hispanics from the purge list explains some of the wide discrepancy in party affiliation of voters on the felon list, which bears the names of 28,025 Democrats and just 9,521 Republicans, with most of the rest unaffiliated.
Ok. I hear that Cosby put a couple of hardknock old school kids through school. If you hadn't heard, here's the story in editorial form. He's also donated at least a million to Spelman, and several hundred grand to Central State in Ohio.
Here's my question. While Central State is a working class black school, Spelman most definitely ISN'T. Cosby has done a great deal to improve the educational experience of middle-to-upper income African Americans...but not much (that I am aware of, granted) to improve the lives of poor African Americans. Except give a tongue lashing.
If we had heard that Bill Gates (who is worth 100 times what Cosby is) had given 200 kids tuition I wonder what we would think? On the one hand I would applaud him. That's 195 more kids than I figure I'll be providing tuition for.
But on the other hand isn't that getting off cheap? If Gates made it clear that it was his role as a software magnate to help educate those who wanted to work hard, wouldn't we think he was shirking his duty if he only provided for 200 kids? Wouldn't we think something more was required?
If as Cosby notes, our standards should be high, and we should be demanding more of those who aren't pulling their weight...then shouldn't we ask Cosby to do more than give lip service and give a couple of kids a free ride, and a seat on his jet plane?
Thanks to Prometheus I got a chance to actually hear Cosby's speech. To be fair to Dr. Cosby, I wish I could've heard the entire transcript. No telling what type of editing the Post did (and I don't say this out of any conspiratorial bent).
But as it stands he's still making a specious argument. That is what he says SOUNDS like common sense until you deconstruct it and locate the causal flows. They're all wrong.
And on top of that, he isn't all that funny.
Barbara Ehrenreich weighs in:
As for the black youth who so exercise Cosby, their pregnancy rates aren't "soaring," as he reportedly claimed; in fact, they're lower than they've been in decades. Ditto with crime rates. And if Cosby's worried about poor grammar and so forth, why isn't he ranting about the Bush 2005 budget, which would end a slew of programs for dropout prevention, recreation and school counseling?Or, if he's looking for tantrum fodder, what about the fact that a black baby has a 40 percent chance of being born into poverty? You can blame adults for their poverty — if you're mean-spirited enough — but you cannot blame babies, and that's, in effect, what we're talking about here.
As the sociologist Michael Males, who monitors youth-bashing outbreaks, told me: "Younger black America today is struggling admirably against massive disinvestments in schools, terrible unemployment, harsh policing and degrading prejudices, and they're succeeding amazingly well. They deserve respect, not grown-up tantrums."
More found here.
You know what? I've been remiss. Probably because on the one hand Cosby is a fraternity brother (didn't stop me with Jesse though), on the other that he's "done so much." Ms. Ehrenreich deserves a thank you for waking me up.
What do the numbers say? Cosby causal claim goes something like this.
Black kids not acting right---->poverty
|
|
|------->Unemployment
But he's focusing on CHILDREN right? The kid who steals the pound cake. The kid who spouts off at the mouth after school. The kid who reeks of hiphop. How in the hell can you blame CHILDREN for their own poverty?
And George has even more figures.
I believe that mathmatical literacy and logic should be added to the old school criteria. By this token, I don't think Cosby has a leg to stand on. He may be old, but he ain't old school.
I made the following comment during a discussion with a black conservative:
This is where I become conservative. I employ a color-blind standard that is extremely high and very objective. You either meet that standard...or you don't. The vast majority of black conservatives don't meet that standard. A significant number of conservative blacks do.
The policy consequences of this ignorance are severe.
Cosby's at it again.
In using Cosby's rant to move passed Civil Rights politics Cobb's on the right track. But during the ensuring conversation an elderly sister notes that in many cities there exists a core group of folk who are escaping hiphop culture and embracing academic achievement culture. Now it is evident that this sister knows about identifying programs that we should model.
But it isn't quite clear she knows anything about hip-hop. Yes I'm a househead. But I wouldn't be where I am without hip-hop. Cobb talks a great deal about NSBE but I'm willing to bet that nothing but hip-hop is played at their national conference.
I've mentioned before that I wouldn't be here without the knuckleheads. It was the knuckleheads that taught me the dozens--the value of using wordplay as a means of attack and defense. The knuckleheads taught me to stand up for what I believed in. The knuckleheads taught me what it meant to be confident in myself when all around me doubted. And it was the criminally minded knucklheads that taught me the value of having game even as they gave me strong anti-role models.
Cosby can't feel that, because I'm not sure he ever needed a knucklehead. But those of us NOW in institutions like Michigan owe a great deal to them, because I'm not sure we are in those spots without them.
As an aside below are a couple of stories that exemplify the problems we encounter when we juxtapose an embrace of hip-hop against an embrace of academic success:
One of the afrofuturists (don't recall which one) dropped them on me.
My fourth column for Africana.com came out today. While I suppose I should have written something about the 4th of July I decided to hold back for a couple of reasons. The first is that Jelani Cobb is a much better writer than I am, and I was fairly positive he'd come correct. But the second is that the 4th of July only means one thing to me--my Gramma Tootsie was born on the 4th.
The web esssay as a form is tricky. You want to get in and get out. A tight 1200 words that takes a nice hardline. I don't think I'm good enough to be wishy-washy in 1200 words, which is sometimes why I am often harder on folks like Jackson, Sharpton, and Simmons than I probably would be had I a bit more space.
But here is what I wish I could've expanded on.
The impetus for the column was twofold. I'd read an article somewhere or another about Kerry's relationship with African Americans. I'm going to inevitably end up writing a piece about Kerry and the black church, because I'm pretty sure that somewhere along the line someone's going to take a picture of him shilling for black voters there.
But in this specific case I was more interested in tracing out the benefits of a diverse operative staff for black citizens. We know adding more blacks to the staff gets folks jobs, specifically folks from schools like Michigan, Harvard, and Washington University. But there should be benefits for "regular" folk too, right? I do think a large part of the call for more black campaign staffers is driven by crass considerations of loot and patronage. But I wanted to fight against my own knee-jerk reaction to these considerations.
The second was a sister I know. I didn't mention her name because I wasn't able to get in contact with her before hand, and I didn't know whether she wanted to be outed. But talking with her while she was on her gig, I realized how special she was. And I don't think SHE quite realized it. I tried to get her to write a book about the experience, or at least to journal about it but I'm not sure that she did.
After writing the piece I ended up hollering at a local campaign operative about it. He dropped a tidbit about Dean that I didn't know, but one that makes a lot of sense. Remember how Dean crashed and burned even though he had massive loot compared to the other candidates? It wasn't inefficiency that did him in...well it was, but it wasn't his fault.
The Democratic Party gives candidates a primer on how to run efficient campaigns, how to stretch a donor dollar. From what I understand four candidates received this primer. Dean wasn't one of those candidates. So whereas Lieberman was spending 6c for postage and mailing, Dean was spending a full 37c. No wonder he drained his resources five times sooner. All the more reason why we need a diverse campaign staff...not just diverse along racial lines. Dean got jacked because of a lack of information, as much as he did because of a scream.
Coach K decides to stay at Duke. The most important line in ESPN's story? Here:
Duke officials had said they were open to modifying the lifetime contract Krzyzewski signed two years ago to improve it. It was not immediately clear whether any changes were made, though.
Looks like the new President decided to step up.
I'm working on an article on Detroit techno, and am rereading some of Cornel West's stuff. In Prophetic Reflections he tackles a range of topics through transcribed speeches and interviews, and short essays. In one of the interviews, West is asked about an intellectual concept (the concept of "life-world") best attached to a German social theorist by the name of Jurgen Habermas. West thinks the concept is a much watered down version of a richer set of ideas posited by Marxists, and that the only reason folks are talking about it is because Habermas has juice at the moment.
[Habermas] has become such a celebrity that he can drop a number of terms from a number of different traditions and they take on a salience they often do not deserve. More fundamentally, his encyclopedic knowledge and his obsession with the philosophic foundations of democratic norms also satisfy a pervasive need for left-academic intellectuals--a need for the professional respectability and rigor that displace political engagement and this-worldly involvement. At the same time, his well-known, but really tenuous, relation to Marxism provides them with an innocuous badge of radicalism. All of this takes place at the expense of an encounter with the marxist tradition, especially with Gramsci and the later Lukacs of the Ontology works. In this sense, Habermas unwittingly serves as a kind of opium for some of thye American left-academic intelligentsia.
In one albeit convoluted sentence, West describes what is both best and worst about black public intellectuals such as himself, Michael Eric Dyson, and Manning Marable.
With the exception of 1992 when they took out my boys, I considered myself a Duke guy. I liked most of the players, liked their approach to the game (even as I revelled in the Fab Five), and liked Coach K. That changed somewhat when I found out that K was supporting W, even as Dean Smith down the road was fighting to end the death penalty in NC. But still, K has done an admirable job in building an institution like Duke.
Note that I didn't say, build a strong athletic program at Duke...because the impact he has had on Duke has been far more significant.
So when it turns out that he is considering coaching the Lakers, what are we to think?
Most of the folks I've read focus on either "new challenges" or on being able to provide for his kids' kids. 40 million is nothing to scoff at...and as I grow older I recognize the important role of setting goals in staving off senility and ennui...but both of these accounts miss the mark. Kobe isn't all that important either.
Want to know what happened this week?
Duke installed a new President.
What he decides to do will make K's decision for him.
Duke's political science department is now one of the top ten in the nation. A number of factors come into play, and of course this stuff is even fuzzier than the Coaches College Basketball Poll...but usually some combination of faculty productivity (measured by number and quality of publications), peer assessments, and graduate student placement all play a role. I am fairly positive that if we were to trace that ranking over time (as well as the rankings of other prominent departments) that ranking would rise as Duke's basketball program rises.
The more successful the basketball program is, the more money donors give. The more students beg to get into Duke--increasing its ability to be selective, and charge more for tuition. The more money the institution has to spend on infrastructure and on human capital, the better the school is, the better the individual departments within the school are.
The former President of Duke realized this, giving K a lifetime gig at Duke as well as the title of Special Assistant to the President.
I'm thinking the new President may be loathe to give a basketball coach the same type of power and deference as his successor. The fact that K is thinking about the Lakers (and I'm not all that sure the gig would be a step up except for the pay) is an indicator that he's not sure about the President either.
Caught Moore's movie the other night. While my erstwhile colleague thinks Moore and the movie are wack, I have a very different perspective.
First things first. I didn't like the movie that much. I'll buy it on DVD, and still think that my daughter should see it...but a lot of it left me flat. I would've preferred that Moore focus more on Florida and the last election. Obviously doing this would've meant much less time focusing on the meat and gristle of war, but the audience needs to see that the way Bush conducts his foreign policy is the way he (and his staff) conducts domestic policy.
Now when Cobb says the movie is off, I'm at a loss. No film is perfect obviously, but I didn't see that many errors. Moore fudges a bit--note that neither Kerry nor Edwards nor Leiberman (all DNC Presidential candidates) signed the CBC's petition. And his interpretation of the facts may be wrong (I'm not sure that money drove Bush's desire to attack Hussein, nor were his contacts with Saudi Arabia responsible). Perhaps this is enough though.
What really got me about the movie was the response to it. I barely got a ticket, as the movie was continuously sold out of the two simultaneous showings run during the day. I went to a MoveOn event afterwards and there were some 250 people there. This election is going to be interesting.