Sunday, November 16, 2008

Sportys sweep Anchor Steam to win the ESPN Softball Championship



Sportys sweep Anchor Steam to win the ESPN Softball Championship

Behind their powerful bats, Sportys dominated Game 2 of the ESPN Softball Championship Series 28-8 to complete a clean sweep of the ESPN Softball Championship.

The Sportys team composed of all Studio Production assistants piled up 7 runs in the 1st inning including two pairs of back-to-back homers from Dan Presser and Nick Steger followed by Brandon Moore and Danny Corales. Sportys continued to crush the ball, hitting 10 home runs including a blast from SS Steger, that went into the middle of Route 229.

John Deaver improved to 10-0 as Sportys' ace. Deaver was helped out by great team defense, including a Web Gem diving catch in left field by Presser.

"I didn't know I had it in me. I guess all those times of practicing with the girls paid off," Presser explained

Along with Presser, Jean-Luc Ladoucer, Matt Smith and Brian Bourque played incredible defense in the outfield and kept the powerful Anchor's bats at bay. Meanwhile, 3B Ryan Bartlett went 4-6 with 5 RBIs and 1B Mark Eiseman went 5-6 with 4 RBIs to power the offense.

An excited Bartlett said, "Ira (Fritz) is one of the best pitchers in the league. However, B Moore reminded me before the game of the times Ira made those late bump changes and remembering those times made me focus a little harder on my at-bats"

Sportys completed an impressive playoff run that included a victory in extra innings with only eight players in the first round vs The Fraggles. They moved on and knocked out the regular season champs, The Bugs. Then they swept Research and Destroy before completing their championship run vs Anchor Steam.

Game notes: Steger was named MVP, after going 10-for-12 with 5 home runs in the 2-game series ... Sporty's starting outfielder Jim Serratore, did not play due to a prior committment, but did show up for the champagne celebration on the field ... Simon Baumgart, Matt Brooks, Chris Burns, Aaron Katzman and Andy Davison are also on the team but didn't play in the series.

Thursday, November 6, 2008

My President is Black


Nov 4th 2008

History in the making: Election 2008

My morning started with a flurry of text messages from friends and family telling me they had already voted and asking if I had voted yet. I was in a good slumber when I received the messages, but ended up getting up shortly after that. I was ready to get my vote on and be a part of history because I knew that this would be a historic day, a day that many people have suffered for, dreamt about and longed for. Barack Obama was about to become the first African American President of the United States.

Because of a 11am dentist appointment, I was up and ready to go the poll by 9am. Me, Boone and Bartlett went to polls together.
A small middle school down the street from our apartment building. On our way into the school, a group of people holding a sign to reelect someone said hello. This was enough to gain the votes of Bartlett and Boone, but I went with someone else for the local office that had mailed me a flyer about their campaign a few days prior. Jane Heinske or something like that for governer.

Lines were short in the polling location, two things i noticed, first, the old ladies that were working the lines looked like they had been trained for this day for a long time and you dare not walk down the wrong line or anything out of order. Second, I noticed and Boone were the only two black people in attendance, guess they knew who we were voting for!

When I got in my ballot booth, I took a couple extra minutes to read the directions on the ballot because I had seen so many emails about what to do and what not to do. So I wanted to make sure I didnt mess up and vote for McCain by accident. But after some careful reading I made my selections, Barack Obama for President and a few other selections. When I finished, I looked around and Bartlett was already outside and Boone was still in the booth. So Boone was a little slower than me, maybe he was reading the instructions too. Bartlett read the directions after he filled in his circles.

When we were all finished, I put my I VOTED TODAY sticker on we took a couple flicks to celebrate history in the making.
For the rest of the day I sported my sticker with tremendous pride.

Fast Forward to 8pm when some polls around the country started to close. Im at home with some friends switching between CNN election coverage and the Celtics / Rockets game. I moved down the hall to my neighbor Kofi's house for the second half of the game and the later election results. As I watched the end of the Celtics game, I got another text from my neighbor Bartlett, saying "Obama just won!" We immediately changed the channel and CNN was posting that it projected Obama had won. I complete feeling of joy overcame me once I realized that this moment had finally arrived.

My other neighbor Boone, rushed downstairs with some tequila shots for everyone in celebration. Then we went to Bartlett's house to listen to Obama's speech and enjoyed a victory cigar for the occasion.

As I listened to the speech, I thought back on how I had had the opportunity to interview Mr. Obama when he was running for Senator of Illinois in 2004, while attending Southern Illinois University and working for the local station. I recall not realizing how the big moment was when I held my microphone up to his face as we look at each other eye to eye and he answered a few of my questions regarding the senate race in Illinois. I remember spending time at one of his campaign hubs in Carbondale, while shooting stories for the station and feeling connected to him because of his color and his message. I remember listening to his speech during the democratic national convention and my pops saying "We could be looking at the first Black President of the United States, right here."

This also made me think about how special it was for people like my parents to see this moment come to fruition. Thinking about my Pops and grandparents who lived thru the civil rights movement and saw segregation in its darkest hour, this was indeed a special moment not just in black history but a moment in world history. Sometimes it hard for me to put things in proper historical perspective when they are actually happening in front of you. Because I always think of history as something that has already been done, which means most of the time it is just something to you read about and say, wow, that happended! But it didnt take much time to realize the magnitude of this occasion.

Barack Obama is President of the United States, and I am proud to be an American and I look forward to the future under his leadership.

My President is Black

BMoore Report over

Friday, August 15, 2008

YouTube's to watch

BMoore Report checking in. Been a minute since I have posted but I was out of town for a few weeks (Florida and Chi-Town) add that to my laziness and shady work schedule and you get no posts. lol. Here are a couple of youtube videos that have caught my attention over the past month or so. Shout out to Young Kof, oh you mad cause I'm styling on you....







And oh yeah...don't know if you have had a chance to check out Spain / Portland Trailblazers Rudy Fernandez. He is currently hooping with Pau Gasol and Espania in the Olympics. Fernandez and Spain figure to give the USA their toughest competition on the way to gold. Rudy appears to be pretty legit, not sure if those same skills will translate to the NBA. But he looks like the real deal. Add him to the Trailblazers already potent roster plus the debut of Greg Oden and the Portland squad may be a problem out west.

Sunday, June 29, 2008

Barack Obama the painting




Here's the finished product of my second painting. I finished it much quicker than I did my Biggie portrait for my peeps that are keeping score on my art.
Shout out to Barack Obama for his democratic presidential nomination....a change is near!

Let me know what you think

Be real, be you, BMoore

Friday, June 20, 2008

Finals Thoughts from a Lakers Fan



Greetings from a Laker fan who's lives in Celtic territory....

Alright well its over, its been over for over a week and it was over in my mind right after Ray Allen got his Jesus Shuttlesworth on for that layup past Sasha Vujacic and the Celtics put the finishing touches on the biggest comeback in playoff history in Game 4 of the Finals. After that defeat the Lakers and the little bit of mojo they were working with were closed like the refrigerator door to quote former Laker play by play announcer Chick Hearn. As a die hard Lakers fan who's been down since Abdul-Jabbar was hooking off the glass in the Forum, it was hard to accept and I must admit I have not been that pissed off about a basketball game in a while. But if the Lakers couldn't hold a 20 point lead with less than a quarter and half to play in front of the home crowd with pretty much the finals on the line then there was no way in Hollywood the Lakers would win the Championship. To make matters worse, after watching the first half of the game from work I stopped by some Enemies (normally I would say friends but in this case they were the enemy) / Celtic fans house. I figured I could stop by and at least gloat a little with the 20 point lead since I spent the game one loss across the same enemy lines. As soon as I walked in, Lamar turned the ball over and the snowball effect kicked in. Even as I watched the Celtics make stops, hit threes, make crazy reverses and frustrate the hell out of Kobe I didn't think they would make it all the way back. Even when things got tied at the end I still believed the Lakers would pull it out. But as I watched James Posey hit that three from the corner that put the Celtics up five in the final moments I looked up at the poster of the Celtics old big three (Bird, McHale and Parrish) in my Celtics friends house and went numb for a sec. The rest is finals history. And of course my Celtics friends thanked me for bringing the good luck of the Irish to them in the biggest comeback ever.

Coming into the finals I really thought the Lakers had a decent shot at winning the championship. They were playing great ball and the run they made thru the Western Conference was pretty impressive. The sweep of the Nuggets, the close out of the Jazz in Utah, and the 4-1 victory over the Spurs in the West Finals all gave me reason to believe the The Lake Show was ready to rise to the top of the basketball world once again. Even the fact that the Celtics beat the Lakers in the two previous regular season meetings didn't really bother me because I thought we were a much better team and both losses came before the arrival of Pau Gasol; so much for that theory.

Game 1: Can be summed up in four baskets. Finals MVP Paul Pierce hits a three and gets fouled by Vladimir "The Space Cadet" Radmanovic for a four point play to start the second half. The Lakers five point half time lead is gone in less than 45 seconds. After doing his best Willis Reed impression Paul Pierce returns from his now infamous injury and drops back to back trey balls that kill the Lakers and really key a big Celtics run. Those three shots plus the free throw equal 10 points on 4 shots which was the equivalent of the Celtics game 1 victory margin. The Pierce injury and return definitely stand out from game 1. When Pierce went down it appeared he really was injured and when he was carried off by four teammates and wheel chaired into the locker room I thought he was down for the count. I honestly didn't want to see that from the competition aspect of it, but looking back at how bad he torched the Lakers and how great he defended Kobe. I wish he would have been hurt. Nothing serious just something to keep him out. Honestly, I didn't expect the Lakers to win game 1, how many teams go on the road and win the first game, not many but I felt good going into game two.

Game 2: The Celtics completely dominated game two. Leon Powe completely dominated game two. He was so dominant that he attempted more free throws (9-13) than the whole Lakers squad (10-10). He was so dominant that no one on the Laker team even attempted to get in his way when he went coast to coast for the big dunk that I'm sure he will be replaying in his mind this whole summer. A couple early fouls on Kobe sent him to the bench early in the game and took the Lakers out of there normal rotation. The Celtics capitalized and were off and running. In the second half Kobe finally penetrated the Celtics stiff defense and got whistled for a technical after giving the ref a little urging to call the foul. In my opinion the techincal was a little premature but who knows what Kobe said. Regardless of the whistles, the Celtics were the dominant and more aggressive team. Even when the Lakers were mounting their 4th quarter comeback they couldn't stop the Celtics they just outscored them. After this game, I still had optimism with the next three games at the Staples but 0-2 hole had me a bit leary.

Game 3: The Lakers came out aggressive as expected. Kobe was attacking the basket early on and got more free throws in the first half of game three than he got in two games in Boston. Despite a terrible game by Paul Pierce (2-14 for 6 pts) and an off beat performance by Kevin Garnett (6-21 for 13 pts) the Celtics stayed close behind a solid game from Ray Allen (25 pts, 5-7 3pt) and some solid defense. Late in the game Kobe was able to knock down some big shots while being single covered by Ray Allen. And while the rest of the Lakers starters struggled (7 fg's for 22 pts) the self proclaimed "Machine" Sasha Vujacic did his best to compliments Kobe's 36 pts with a solid 20 and some timely shooting. As game three came to a close, a few things were becoming evident. The Celtics were looking like the better team, the Lakers couldn't stop the Celtics offense, the Celtics could stop the Lakers offense and unless the Lakers started to got some better numbers from Pau Gasol and Lamar Odom there was no way the Lakers would hold off the Celts for the next two home games. Whatever the case, a win is a win and the Lakers were one home win away from tying things up.

Game 4: Lakers lose the biggest lead in playoff history and go down 3-1, despite double digit points from all five starters. As I stated earlier, this marked the end of the series for me. There were times in the mix of the Celtics comeback when i wondered why Phil didn't break away from the triangle and put Kobe at the top of the key and allow him to make some plays. I thought this would have at least forced the Celtics to double team Kobe up top or he would drive and dish or create something for himself. Regardless of strategy, the Celtics locked in on both ends of the court for the second half and made history. I still can't believe it.

Game 5: Turned out to be good game from a fan perspective but not from a die hard Lakers fan perspective. Despite the stay alive victory I wasn't impressed. Even with the hot start and early 19 point lead the Lakers could not stop the Celtics on offense. Paul Pierce (38 pts) was doing any and everything he wanted and at one point in the 2nd quarter he scored something like 10 straight points on a variety of tough finishes at the hoop. If not for Kobe's late poke away from Pierce for the steal and dunk and a couple missed free throws by Garnett the Lakers might have been watching the guys in green get money for the championship on their home court. I was so down after the game four loss and the unimpressive performance of game five that I began telling everyone I would feel good just to see the Lakers make it to game seven because I didn't see anyway they could steal two games in Beantown.



Game 7: The 39 point loss leaves me at a loss for words. After the first quarter the roof caved in. I didn't think the Lakers had a chance to win but 39 points is embarrassing. I must say I was proud of Kobe for not throwing his teammates under the bus in the post game press conference after the loss because he easily could have and then we may be right back to where we were last summer.

Here are some things that were made clear to me as the series went on and was finished off by the Celtics in 6 games.

-The Celtics were obviously the better team from top to bottom. That's why they were the best team in the NBA all season.

-Despite the Lakers impressive run thru the Western Conference playoffs they are still a young team and their lack of playoff experience came to the forefront in the the Finals.

-The Celtics were put together this year to win the championship, each and every piece of that team was there for the championship run. James Posey, Sam Cassell, PJ Brown and Eddie House were all brought to Bean Town for this reason and they full filled the preseason expectations brought on by the Big Three.

-The Celtics Big Three made the Lakers big three look little.

-The Lakers team defense was terrible the whole series. Not usually a staple of Phil Jackson teams.

-Phil Jackson got out coached by Doc Rivers for crucial parts of the series.

-The Lakers interior defense was non existent for the series.

-I couldn't help but think if things would have been different with a healthy Andrew Bynum.

-The Celtics defense was able to lockdown when it needed to.

-Pau Gasol was exposed in the series for being a soft player. It didnt help that he was matched up against the defensive player of the year Kevin Garnett but how many floppy half hooks can you throw up before you starting taking the ball strong to the basket? I started to see signs of this in the San Antonio series but the Celts made look Pau look bad.

-Pau Gasol should spend the summer learning the sky hook from Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, he doesnt like contact so this move would compliment his fragile game.



-Ray Allen was the most consistent player in the series. It seemed like once he decided to wear the Kobe arm sleeve he was back to the Ray Allen of old. How come he couldn't perform like the Ray Allen from the first two rounds of the playoffs?

-Paul Pierce was the best player in the series.

-Kobe Bryant was not the best player in the series.

-The Celtics defense on Kobe was reminiscent of what the Pistons did to Kobe in his last visit to the finals.

-James Posey might be the new Robert Horry, he just kept hitting big shots all series.

-The Lakers had no answer for Cali native Paul Pierce. Vladimir Radmonivic didn't stop Pierce from doing anything at any point in the series. His sub Luke Walton didn't stop Pierce from doing anything either. Pierce created things with his first step and never looked back.

-The Lakers have a two players in their starting lineup (Lamar Odom and Radmanovic) who are unable to lock in and concentrate for the entire 48 minutes. Both of these guys suffer from serious mental lapses and on the biggest stage their mistakes were magnified. Teams can get away with one player like this in your starting five but not two. There are times when the

-Lamar Odom may have played his way to a new address next season. I'll start the Ron Artest for Odom chants now.

-The 3rd quarter is typically the most important quarter of the game as Phil Jackson has stated many times. For the series the Celtics outscored the Lakers 165-122 in the 3rd.

-Shaq is smiling somewhere

I guess I could go on and on and dissect the way the Celts dismantled the Lake Show but like I said at the beginning it was over after the comeback in LA so game six didn't hurt as much as it should have. Congrats to the Celtics, they handled their business and lived up to the hype. I can't hate I can only appreciate a team that fulfills its destiny. No matter what, there is one thing that hasn't changed in mind.

I still love LA.

Mike and Spike



Director Spike Lee is working on a documentary about Basketball Great Michael Jordan. Lee and Jordan became friends when they worked on a series of Nike commercials years ago. The documentary will focus on the final two years of Jordan’s career with the Washington Wizards. Definitely looking forward to that...peep the old school Mike and Spike Commercials. Probably the best series of commercials ever, ever ever....



The Corporate Takeover



Great article on the boy Young Hov from the folks at CorporateTakeovermag.com. Covers all of Hova's moves outside the booth. Shout out to my boy Marcus "Streets" Peterson for sending me the article.

http://corporatetakeovermag.com/2008/05/28/the-corporate-takeover-of-jay-z/

"Board room I'm lifting your skirt up....the Corporate Takeover" - Jay-Z; Corporate Takeover Freestyle

Real Talk Vol. 1

As I started my day I was thinking about how much I could get done, how many emails I could send, how many phone calls I could return (shout out to my sister's, and my boy Lemay) and about a meeting I had at work and I was all over the place trying to get the most of the day. But as I stopped myself, well it wasnt me the Lord spoke to me and told me to give him his time. So I opened my devotional book and it was so ironic because the message of the day was titled; The Most Important Appointment. It read,

Make an appointment with God everyday and then keep it as if you were meeting with the most important person in the world.

We all carry appointment calenders. Some of us have day planners, and others can't go anywhere without their palm pilots, iphones, sidekicks. We all keep calenders to keep our appointments. We dont want to miss out on anything or anyone that would help improve our lives. Neither do we want to dissapoint anybody who wants to meet with us.
That said, does it seem like a good idea to put God at the top of your appointment list? Of course it does. He's the most important person in the world to you, and his plans for you are the most important tasks. Seek God and what he wants for you everyday and to help you remember, put his name in your appointment book. That's one daily meeting you don't want to miss.

"In the morning you will see the glorious presence of the Lord" - Exodus 16:7

Now that's real talk...Be real, be you, BMoore

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Shout out to the Westside homie

BMoore Report checking in at 1:47 in the AM on Thursday live from Bristol, CT the 06010. Just wanted to send a personal shout out to my homie / fellow westsider and co-worker Young Cross, she was in a car accident yesterday on her way home from work at the world wide leader and got rear ended. She's a little banged up but doing alright... just wanted to send a shout out to the homie, get well, and go Lake Show. Check Cross out at the crossyclassifiedsblogspot.com

Be real, Be you, BMoore

Sunday, June 1, 2008

Recommended Listening - Wale; Mixtape About Nothing



BMoore Report checking in with some recommended listening for the ear hole. Wale out of DC has been my ear and is definitely worth a listen if you havent already peeped him. I just got up on his music about a couple months ago and ever since I have had him in heavy rotation in the ipod. While, he was knew to me...it appears Wale has been making noise for a minute. And of course as soon as you notice someone...it seems like they pop up everywhere. Since I first listened to him, I have seen him in Vibe Magazine for up and coming artists, he is featured on the Roots latest album, Rising Down, he was in a ad campaign for LRG clothing and allhiphop.com just posted a feature on the DMV (DC, Maryland, Virginia) representer. On top of that he is signed to DJ Mark Ronson. He definitely is bringing some freshness to the game and some much needed creativity. His latest mixtape release, the MixTape About Nothing plays off a Seinfeld theme. Now if you're anything like me two things I really appreciate are good hip hop and a Seinfeld rerun. So put the two together and you got some BMoore-Report approved listening. Check out Wale's internet spot for the download. Elitaste.com or you can check out getrightmusic.com my favorite internet spot for free mixtapes. http://www.getrightmusic.com/2008/05/30/wale-mixtape-about-nothing/#more-588

Monday, May 12, 2008

And the winner is Kob.....



And the winner is Kob....my man.....speech!

First of all I wanna thank Phil Jack, the most important person before and after Shaq. Thanks to the Staples fans....Jerry West and...the Lakers organization for giving up the cash!

That was my thinking about what Kobe would say if he had a little Jay-Z from his single "Roc Boys...and the winner is" in him after being announced as the NBA MVP last week. But actually he said, "This is a team award. This is not an individual award," and added "This gets done because we all do it as a unit and I can't thank these guys enough."
Well, back to the Jay-Z Kobe connection, anybody that knows me even a little bit knows that there are two celebrities that I hold in high esteem, Kobe and Jigga Man. Kobe, because he's a Laker and the best in the game. Jay because I love hip hop and no one does it better than him. Not to mention I have every verse ever spit by Hov committed to memory and I think I remember every hoop Kobe has had in his 12 year career, totally putting 5 on it, but you get the point. I think its because I love the passion, tenacity and basketball skill off Kobe and I love the straight smooth talk and cool guy persona that Jay translates into his raps and his business ventures. o yeah, Hov is married to that one singer from Destiny's child, she aight too. But I think most of all I love the ridiculous amount of swag (i must say the word swagger has had it's 15 minutes of fame and people have defintiely played it out but in this case the word is needed) that both of them have. I think if Hov was a hooper he would be much like Kobe. The best....just because he doesnt know how to be anything else but the best and because he goes harder than anybody else when it counts the most. I would attempt the say the same about my boy Kobe but let's not forget he tried to show what flow he had in him back in the day and it resulted in a brick of an album and a single with Tyra Banks. NO BUENO indeed.

Well it took 12 seasons for the league to recognize Kobe as the MVP. I think this is all Kobe has been wanting since he entered the league in 1996. He wanted to be seen as the best ball player and be able to lead his team to elite status. Well...the day has come. It's crazy because it's not his best season individually or statisically but it is his best season for the Lakers as a team since the Big Homie Shaq dipped for South Beach to kick it with DWade. ...............These dots represent my boy Ryno, he's is a major Kobe hater and a Spurs fan and he tried to sabotage the BMoore-Report by adding some unchoice words about my boy Kobe Bean. Thats what I get for leaving my computer open. Sa-da-tay Mr. Bartlett. A good writer always proofreads! lol.

But back to my boy Kobe the MVP. Like I said, it's been a long time coming. And this season came down to a two man race between Kobe and the Hornets 3rd year point guard Chris Paul. No doubt CP3 had a ridiculous year! He led the league in assists and steals. (Side note; Did you know...John Stockton of the Utah Jazz is the all time NBA leader in assists and steals.) Not to mention he led the Hornets to a 2nd place finish in the tougher than leather Western Conference. To me...its the 2nd place finish that seperated the two and made Kobe the winner for the voters. The Lakers played the Hornets three games before the season ended with 1st place in the Western Conference at stake. The Lakers won so Kobe won. If Paul and Hornets win that game, I guarantee the award goes to Paul. As the voters have proven they put a lot of stock in team's status over individual performance. In my arguments I have had with people this year on should be MVP I have used this statement as my thesis. Kobe is the best player in the league on the best team in the best conference. And then I would just fill in the blanks in the argument. I hate to say Kobe should have gotten the award because of status and time served, but c'mon.....CP3 has been in the league for 3 years, no doubt he's gonna win a couple MVP awards in his time but Kobe has been in the league 12 seasons give the man his due. Kobe lost a little in the scoring column during the regular season, falling from 31.6 points a game last season to 28.3 during the 2007-08 season, but his defense was notably better and he averaged 6.3 rebounds and 5.4 assists, numbers that were tied for the second- and fourth-best outputs of his career.

Here's what coach Phil Jackson had to say, "I don't know anybody who deserves it more.......I've never known anybody who has worked as hard to accomplish what he's accomplished in this game."

High praise from the man who coached Jumpman to 6 titles. But hey it's gotta be true. Kobe is the best in the game since Mike, people hate to hear that but it's true. But much like Mike I doubt if this MVP season will mean very much unless he wins the championship and proves once again that he's the best player in the game.

And the winner is Kob

Friday, May 9, 2008

Die Hard Fans


BMoore-Report checking in on Friday night May 10. I passed by this story the other day on the news wire and had to post it on the blogspot. I have lived in CT / New England and worked for ESPN for the past 2 years and so I am smack in the middle of the New York Yankees / Boston Red Sox rivalry. I mean like 90 percent of the people I work with are either Yankee fans or Sox fans, I always find myself in the innocent bystander position listening to friends and coworkers argue back and forth about the two. But this story is out of line....really thou! I mean I have seen some pretty nice fights, heard some nice tongue lashings and heard some good arguments for both sides. But somewhere in New Hampshire they got it twisted and seemed to think the Yanks and the Sox were street gangs and not athletic teams. Well......read the story, let me know what you think.

A New York Yankees fan was charged with murder Monday (5/5).

Forty-three-year-old Ivonne Hernandez was accused of running over a couple
of
Red Sox fans outside of a New Hampshire bar, after arguing over the baseball
team rivalry.

Hernandez was charged with reckless second-degree murder among other things.

Prosecutors said she was drunk when she drove her car through the parking
lot,
running down two people early Friday (5/2).

The incident happened within minutes of arguing with them about the New York
Yankees and Boston Red Sox.

Twenty-nine-year-old Matthew Beaudoin died Saturday from massive head trauma
.
Twenty-one-year-old Maria Hughes is still recovering from minor injuries.

Prosecutors said Hernandez told police she had four beers before getting
into
the argument. She said the confrontation upset her so much, she drove her
car
towards the crowd chanting "Yankees suck!"

According to police, Hernandez said she thought they would be smart enough
to
get out of the way.

Hernandez is currently being held without bail.

This lady is outta line. Prayers go out to the families of the deceased and to the crazy lady who ran the people over, Lord knows she needs it.

Be Real, Be you, BMoore

Friday, April 25, 2008

And the Verdict is......



3 Police officers in the Sean Bell NYC shooting case were aqcuitted today. WTF! These three cops gun down an unarmed man to a tune of 50 bullets fired just before his wedding night two years ago and they get away clean free not even a couple weeks of community service...o wait...they are cops, it's part of their job duty to service the community!
Heres the link to the story if you have been under a rock.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89938081&ft=1&f=1001

I really want to say that I can't believe this but...really I can. That's part of the sad reality we live in where gas prices are bout to hit 4 dollars and cops shoot people innocent people like a scene from Grand Theft Auto. I really never have trusted the judicial system or the LAPD, NYPD, or whatever two letters go in front of your city PD.....for reason's just like this. I mean, how do you shoot an unarmed man more than 50 times, one officer let off 31 shots! dAMN! The Police Department is one of the largest organized gangs going and they have connections in all the right places. The reasoning behind the verdict was that the cops had a better story than the victims associates who were wounded in the fatal shooting. One of Bell's homies was an ex convict, so I'm sure the judge and the jury used that as an automatic reason for wrong doing on the victim's part. But wow.....you shoot an unarmed man 50 times and you get aqcuitted???

I think the great jherri curl wearing hip hop poet O Shea Jackson said it best.....

"Fuck the Police coming straight from the underground, a young brotha got it bad cause Im brown."

- Ice Cube / NWA - F**k the Police

Be Real, Be You, BMoore

Sunday, April 20, 2008

Bam Bam the Boxer

My boy V was telling me about this clip on youtube yesterday. This little kid named Bam Bam is a straight beast with the hands. I mean his boxing skills are nice, like V said, " I dont think anybody will be taking his lunch money."
Not to mention there is another clip of him busting 100 straight pushups. I dont need to say much more...just check out the clip.



Damn!

Saturday, March 15, 2008

Happy Birthday Dylan Royce!



What it is, what it do, what it look like, BMoore-Report checking in, I'm trying to get a little more focused on the spot or at least on my writing. I dont get to write much at the job, so this allows me to get it out. But that's a whole other point. March 15th was the bornday of my second nephew Dylan Royce. March 15th, 2007. Thats crazy! I think more than anything it makes me say, "damn time flies..." But, more than that it's like wow, my lil nephew is already one year old, and my sister told me today that he's been walking. Damn that's crazy! I don't know if he is growing up fast or he's just doing what he's suppossed to be doing, but either way i'm proud of him and love him like a fat kid loves cake. (Sidenote - Damn, I just used a Fiddy Cent qoute, not something I normally condone but that was the first thing that came to mind.) This is my sister Kia's second son, her first is my other nephew Demetrius. I remember how much I loved to be around him when was little and I wish I could be around my new nephew Dyl the same way. But one day that will happen, until then I'll continue to show love from a distance. There's really nothing like family, because I know I love my nephews like they were my own kids, I feel like I would do anything and everything for them at any given moment. There's so many connections with my nephew...lets see, i helped pick his name with my sister and he has my middle name, Royce. And I was given the middle name Royce by Dad (shout out to my OG) and he told me it was after the car Rolls Royce. Now that's some fly ish....
My nephew is also a pisces like myself...and he's born 5 days before my other nephew D...and everyone say's he looks like me when i was a baby. Again, I don't know if that's just my peoples putting five on it, or if he really looks like me when i was little. But I know he's damn cute so if I looked anything like him I was lucky. My mom actually got a chance to go to Atlanta last week and got to see my peeps; sister Kia, Dylan and Demetrius so I should have new pictures to post in the next week or so. When my mom called me, I could hea Dylan in the background trying to talk....it sounded something like.....ayayayayayayayayayayayayayayaya. LOL. Not quite sure what that means...but damn it sounded good.

Happy Birthday Dylan Royce. Uncle BMoore-Report loves ya.

Monday, March 10, 2008

R.I.P B.I.G.


March 9th marked the anniverary of the untimely death of the Notorious BIG, Biggie Smalls, Big Poppa, Francis M.H., The King of New York, Mr Frank White. Honestly I wasnt on point until my man Yaw Geez hit me with the text and reminded me. His text was more so a reminder of the actual day, but on the daily Big gets love in my world. Let's see theres the poster that hangs on the wall in my living room, then theres the painting of BIG that I have been working on for the last 10 months it seems like. Anyone that has been to my crib in that time period has said, "damn when you gonna finish that?" But hey, it's art and art takes time. At least that my rational and my excuse for not finishing. But back to the daily reminders, theres also the sketch of BIG I drew a couple years ago that sits above my book case. And if it's not those reminders, it's the best of Biggie playlist on the ipod and the iphone that stay in constant rotation.



I can remember when Biggie died, like damn that was a long time ago. I can only imagine how many more ridiculous verses Biggie would have dropped if he were still alive. On the date of his death, I was living in San Antonio, Texas and I got a call from my sister Kia while I was passed out sleep....and she was frantic saying, "Brandon, Biggie just got killed!" At the time I was so tired after a long night at some club it was nothing more than an afterthought, so I said, "Okay sis....love you, call me later." And I went back to sleep and didnt even think about it twice. But when I woke up it hit me, like whoa! My favorite rapper and your favorite rappers favorite rapper had been shot dead in LA, my hometown. On the real it was in my old neighborhood, which was even more crazy. Man me and my boys used to pass the spot where he got killed all the time skipping school going to the McDonalds on Wilshire Blvd. And to top that off he passed away in the same hospital where I was born, Cedars Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles, California. 6 degrees of seperation foreal though!

At the time he died, he was at the top of his game, he just dropped Life after Death the double disc with enought crack music to last a lifetime or enough at least to keep him in heavy rotation for the entire summer with me. Man when i first heard "I Got a Story to Tell"....."Who ya'll talking to...." I remember thinking this dude got it, not like that wasnt already evident, but sometime those revelations hit and just confirm the obvious. In honor of the death, heres my top 10 Biggie track list. Definitely subject to some dispute.

10. Juicy (Phone bill about 2 g's flat, no need to worry my accountant handles that)

9. Going Back to Cali (Going back to Cali for the weather, women and the weed...)

8. Get Money (Damn...why she wanna stick me for my paper? My moschino ho, my versace hottie)

7. The What (Like trees to branches, cliffs to avalanches, it's the preying mantis)

6. My Downfall (Catch cases come out fronting smoking something, sipping white russian...)

5. Unbelieveable (Badaging mc's, oxygen they cant breath, mad tricks up the sleave, where boxers so my d*** can breath)

4. Who Shot Ya (I can hear sweat trickeling down your cheek, your heartbeat sound like sasquatch feet)

3. Big Poppa (Soon as he buy that wine, I just creep up from behind, and ask you want your interest are, who you be with...)

2. I Got a Story to Tell (I dont know....one of them 6 foot niggas!)

1. One More Chance (Im not only a client, im the player president.)

As I finished that list...i just thought, there are so many more songs that I could add.....so consider my top 10 unofficial. Damn...how I leave out the 10 crack commandments (1,2,3,4,5, 6, 7, 8, 9, ten.......)
Bottom line Biggie left a lasting impression on the hip hop culture. Its crazy because for my generation he will go down like Marvin Gaye from my parents generation. Crazy to think that....but BIG is timeless, im sure i'll be 50 years old, telling my kids...."Boy when i was young, the Notorious BIG was the coldest....you hear me boy!"

R.I.P BIG

BMoore Report over

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

BARACK the VOTE



What up peeps, since I am on my political tip in the wake of the primaries I thought I would post an article on Obama that was forwarded to me from Uncle Skip and my Pops. The article is great and gives a laundry list of reasons on why to support Barack Obama in his run for Presidency. Im down with him for more reasons than him being a black man....but that doesnt hurt either. I got a chance to interview him in Marion, IL while he was on the campaign trail during his for Illinois Senator. I was thrilled to meet him and taken back by his ability to captivate a room. I remember my Pops telling my when he delivered the Democratic keynote address a few years ago, that I was looking at the first black president. Although it didnt take a genius to know that...my Pops has a way of always being right, expect on his sports picks, but he usually knows whats up.

The article is ridiculously long...but take some time to read it, read it in parts, to be continue it...whatever it takes. It some good insight on the soon to be first black president!

Is Iraq Vietnam? Who really won in 2000? Which side are you on in the culture
wars? These questions have divided the Baby Boomers and distorted our politics.
One candidate could transcend them.

by Andrew Sullivan
Goodbye to All That

The logic behind the candidacy of Barack Obama is not, in the end, about Barack
Obama. It has little to do with his policy proposals, which are very close to
his Democratic rivals’ and which, with a few exceptions, exist firmly within
the conventions of our politics. It has little to do with Obama’s
considerable skills as a conciliator, legislator, or even thinker. It has even
less to do with his ideological pedigree or legal background or rhetorical
skills. Yes, as the many profiles prove, he has considerable intelligence and
not a little guile. But so do others, not least his formidably polished and
practiced opponent Senator Hillary Clinton.

Obama, moreover, is no saint. He has flaws and tics: Often tired, sometimes
crabby, intermittently solipsistic, he’s a surprisingly uneven campaigner.

A soaring rhetorical flourish one day is undercut by a lackluster debate
performance the next. He is certainly not without self-regard. He has more
experience in public life than his opponents want to acknowledge, but he has
not spent much time in Washington and has never run a business. His lean
physique, close-cropped hair, and stick-out ears can give the impression of a
slightly pushy undergraduate. You can see why many of his friends and admirers
have urged him to wait his turn. He could be president in five or nine years’
time—why the rush?

But he knows, and privately acknowledges, that the fundamental point of his
candidacy is that it is happening now. In politics, timing matters. And the
most persuasive case for Obama has less to do with him than with the moment he
is meeting. The moment has been a long time coming, and it is the result of a
confluence of events, from one traumatizing war in Southeast Asia to another in
the most fractious country in the Middle East. The legacy is a cultural climate
that stultifies our politics and corrupts our discourse.

Obama’s candidacy in this sense is a potentially transformational one. Unlike
any of the other candidates, he could take America—finally—past the
debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the Baby Boom generation that
has long engulfed all of us. So much has happened in America in the past seven
years, let alone the past 40, that we can be forgiven for focusing on the
present and the immediate future. But it is only when you take several large
steps back into the long past that the full logic of an Obama presidency stares
directly—and uncomfortably—at you.

At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war—not so much the war in
Iraq, which now has a mo°©mentum that will propel the occupation into the
next decade—but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and
that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has
crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about
war—and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war,
Obama—and Obama alone—offers the possibility of a truce.

The traces of our long journey to this juncture can be found all around us. Its
most obvious manifestation is political rhetoric. The high temperature—Bill
O’Reilly’s nightly screeds against anti-Americans on one channel, Keith
Olbermann’s “Worst Person in the World” on the other; MoveOn.org’s
“General Betray Us” on the one side, Ann Coulter’s Treason on the other;
Michael Moore’s accusation of treason at the core of the Iraq War, Sean
Hannity’s assertion of treason in the opposition to it—is particularly
striking when you examine the generally minor policy choices on the table.
Something deeper and more powerful than the actual decisions we face is driving
the tone of the debate.

Take the biggest foreign-policy question—the war in Iraq. The rhetoric ranges
from John McCain’s “No Surrender” banner to the “End the War Now”
absolutism of much of the Democratic base. Yet the substantive issue is almost
comically removed from this hyperventilation. Every potential president,
Republican or Democrat, would likely inherit more than 100,000 occupying troops
in January 2009; every one would be attempting to redeploy them as prudently as
possible and to build stronger alliances both in the region and in the world.
Every major candidate, moreover, will pledge to use targeted military force
against al-Qaeda if necessary; every one is committed to ensuring that Iran
will not have a nuclear bomb; every one is committed to an open-ended
deployment in Afghanistan and an unbending alliance with Israel. We are
fighting over something, to be sure. But it is more a fight over how we define
ourselves and over long-term goals than over what is practically to be done on
the ground.

On domestic policy, the primary issue is health care. Again, the ferocious
rhetoric belies the mundane reality. Between the boogeyman of “Big
Government” and the alleged threat of the drug companies, the practical
differences are more matters of nuance than ideology. Yes, there are policy
disagreements, but in the wake of the Bush administration, they are
underwhelming. Most Republicans support continuing the Medicare drug benefit
for seniors, the largest expansion of the entitlement state since Lyndon
Johnson, while Democrats are merely favoring more cost controls on drug and
insurance companies. Between Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts plan—individual
mandates, private-sector leadership—and Senator Clinton’s triangulated
update of her 1994 debacle, the difference is more technical than fundamental.
The country has moved ever so slightly leftward. But this again is less a
function of ideological transformation than of the current system’s failure
to provide affordable health care for the insured or any care at all for
growing numbers of the working poor.

Even on issues that are seen as integral to the polarization, the practical
stakes in this election are minor. A large consensus in America favors legal
abortions during the first trimester and varying restrictions thereafter. Even
in solidly red states, such as South Dakota, the support for total
criminalization is weak. If Roe were to fall, the primary impact would be the
end of a system more liberal than any in Europe in favor of one more in sync
with the varied views that exist across this country. On marriage, the battles
in the states are subsiding, as a bevy of blue states adopt either civil
marriage or civil unions for gay couples, and the rest stand pat. Most states
that want no recognition for same-sex couples have already made that decision,
usually through state constitutional amendments that allow change only with
extreme difficulty. And the one state where marriage equality exists,
Massachusetts, has decided to maintain the reform indefinitely.

Given this quiet, evolving consensus on policy, how do we account for the
bitter, brutal tone of American politics? The answer lies mainly with the
biggest and most influential generation in America: the Baby Boomers. The
divide is still—amazingly—between those who fought in Vietnam and those who
didn’t, and between those who fought and dissented and those who fought but
never dissented at all. By defining the contours of the Boomer generation, it
lasted decades. And with time came a strange intensity.

The professionalization of the battle, and the emergence of an array of
well-funded interest groups dedicated to continuing it, can be traced most
proximately to the bitter confirmation fights over Robert Bork and Clarence
Thomas, in 1987 and 1991 respectively. The presidency of Bill Clinton, who was
elected with only 43 percent of the vote in 1992, crystallized the new reality.
As soon as the Baby Boomers hit the commanding heights, the Vietnam power
struggle rebooted. The facts mattered little in the face of such a divide.
While Clinton was substantively a moderate conservative in policy, his
countercultural origins led to the drama, ultimately, of religious warfare and
even impeachment. Clinton clearly tried to bridge the Boomer split. But he was
trapped on one side of it—and his personal foibles only reignited his
generation’s agonies over sex and love and marriage. Even the failed
impeachment didn’t bring the two sides to their senses, and the election of
2000 only made matters worse: Gore and Bush were almost designed to reflect the
Boomers’ and the country’s divide, which deepened further.

The trauma of 9/11 has tended to obscure the memory of that unprecedentedly
bitter election, and its nail- biting aftermath, which verged on a
constitutional crisis. But its legacy is very much still with us, made far
worse by President Bush’s approach to dealing with it. Despite losing the
popular vote, Bush governed as if he had won Reagan’s 49 states. Instead of
cementing a coalition of the center-right, Bush and Rove set out to ensure that
the new evangelical base of the Republicans would turn out more reliably in
2004. Instead of seeing the post-’60s divide as a wound to be healed, they
poured acid on it.

With 9/11, Bush had a reset moment—a chance to reunite the country in a way
that would marginalize the extreme haters on both sides and forge a national
consensus. He chose not to do so. It wasn’t entirely his fault. On the left,
the truest believers were unprepared to give the president the benefit of any
doubt in the wake of the 2000 election, and they even judged the 9/11 attacks
to be a legitimate response to decades of U.S. foreign policy. Some could not
support the war in Afghanistan, let alone the adventure in Iraq. As the Iraq
War faltered, the polarization intensified. In 2004, the Vietnam argument
returned with a new energy, with the Swift Boat attacks on John Kerry’s
Vietnam War record and CBS’s misbegotten report on Bush’s record in the
Texas Air National Guard. These were the stories that touched the collective
nerve of the political classes—because they parsed once again along the fault
lines of the Boomer divide that had come to define all of us.

The result was an even deeper schism. Kerry was arguably the worst candidate on
earth to put to rest the post-1960s culture war—and his decision to embrace
his Vietnam identity at the convention made things worse. Bush, for his part,
was unable to do nuance. And so the campaign became a matter of
symbolism—pitting those who took the terror threat “seriously” against
those who didn’t. Supporters of the Iraq War became more invested in
asserting the morality of their cause than in examining the effectiveness of
their tactics. Opponents of the war found themselves dispirited. Some were left
to hope privately for American failure; others lashed out, as distrust turned
to paranoia. It was and is a toxic cycle, in which the interests of the United
States are supplanted by domestic agendas born of pride and ruthlessness on the
one hand and bitterness and alienation on the other.

This is the critical context for the election of 2008. It is an election that
holds the potential not merely to intensify this cycle of division but to
bequeath it to a new generation, one marked by a new war that need not
be—that should not be—seen as another Vietnam. A Giuliani-Clinton matchup,
favored by the media elite, is a classic intragenerational struggle—with two
deeply divisive and ruthless personalities ready to go to the brink. Giuliani
represents that Nixonian disgust with anyone asking questions about, let alone
actively protesting, a war. Clinton will always be, in the minds of so many,
the young woman who gave the commencement address at Wellesley, who sat in on
the Nixon implosion and who once disdained baking cookies. For some, her
husband will always be the draft dodger who smoked pot and wouldn’t admit it.
And however hard she tries, there is nothing Hillary Clinton can do about it.
She and Giuliani are conscripts in their generation’s war. To their
respective sides, they are war heroes.

In normal times, such division is not fatal, and can even be healthy. It’s
great copy for journalists. But we are not talking about routine rancor. And we
are not talking about normal times. We are talking about a world in which
Islamist terror, combined with increasingly available destructive technology,
has already murdered thousands of Americans, and tens of thousands of Muslims,
and could pose an existential danger to the West. The terrible failures of the
Iraq occupation, the resurgence of al-Qaeda in Pakistan, the progress of Iran
toward nuclear capability, and the collapse of America’s prestige and moral
reputation, especially among those millions of Muslims too young to have known
any American president but Bush, heighten the stakes dramatically.

Perhaps the underlying risk is best illustrated by our asking what the popular
response would be to another 9/11–style attack. It is hard to imagine a
reprise of the sudden unity and solidarity in the days after 9/11, or an
outpouring of support from allies and neighbors. It is far easier to imagine an
even more bitter fight over who was responsible (apart from the perpetrators)
and a profound suspicion of a government forced to impose more restrictions on
travel, communications, and civil liberties. The current president would be
unable to command the trust, let alone the support, of half the country in such
a time. He could even be blamed for provoking any attack that came.



Of the viable national candidates, only Obama and possibly McCain have the
potential to bridge this widening partisan gulf. Polling reveals Obama to be
the favored Democrat among Republicans. McCain’s bipartisan appeal has
receded in recent years, especially with his enthusiastic embrace of the latest
phase of the Iraq War. And his personal history can only reinforce the Vietnam
divide. But Obama’s reach outside his own ranks remains striking. Why? It’s
a good question: How has a black, urban liberal gained far stronger support
among Republicans than the made-over moderate Clinton or the southern charmer
Edwards? Perhaps because the Republicans and independents who are open to an
Obama candidacy see his primary advantage in prosecuting the war on Islamist
terrorism. It isn’t about his policies as such; it is about his person. They
are prepared to set their own ideological preferences to one side in favor of
what Obama offers America in a critical moment in our dealings with the rest of
the world. The war today matters enormously. The war of the last generation?
Not so much. If you are an American who yearns to finally get beyond the
symbolic battles of the Boomer generation and face today’s actual problems,
Obama may be your man.

What does he offer? First and foremost: his face. Think of it as the most
effective potential re-branding of the United States since Reagan. Such a
re-branding is not trivial—it’s central to an effective war strategy. The
war on Islamist terror, after all, is two-pronged: a function of both hard
power and soft power. We have seen the potential of hard power in removing the
Taliban and Saddam Hussein. We have also seen its inherent weaknesses in Iraq,
and its profound limitations in winning a long war against radical Islam. The
next president has to create a sophisticated and supple blend of soft and hard
power to isolate the enemy, to fight where necessary, but also to create an
ideological template that works to the West’s advantage over the long haul.
There is simply no other candidate with the potential of Obama to do this.
Which is where his face comes in.

Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is
watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new
face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted
up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an
African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim
school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most
effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist
ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is
in ways no words can.

The other obvious advantage that Obama has in facing the world and our enemies
is his record on the Iraq War. He is the only major candidate to have clearly
opposed it from the start. Whoever is in office in January 2009 will be tasked
with redeploying forces in and out of Iraq, negotiating with neighboring
states, engaging America’s estranged allies, tamping down regional violence.
Obama’s interlocutors in Iraq and the Middle East would know that he never
had suspicious motives toward Iraq, has no interest in occupying it
indefinitely, and foresaw more clearly than most Americans the baleful
consequences of long-term occupation.

This latter point is the most salient. The act of picking the next president
will be in some ways a statement of America’s view of Iraq. Clinton is
running as a centrist Democrat—voting for war, accepting the need for an
occupation at least through her first term, while attempting to do triage as
practically as possible. Obama is running as the clearer antiwar candidate. At
the same time, Obama’s candidacy cannot fairly be cast as a McGovernite
revival in tone or substance. He is not opposed to war as such. He is not
opposed to the use of unilateral force, either—as demonstrated by his
willingness to target al-Qaeda in Pakistan over the objections of the Pakistani
government. He does not oppose the idea of democratization in the Muslim world
as a general principle or the concept of nation building as such. He is not an
isolationist, as his support for the campaign in Afghanistan proves. It is
worth recalling the key passages of the speech Obama gave in Chicago on October
2, 2002, five months before the war:

I don’t oppose all wars. And I know that in this crowd today, there is no
shortage of patriots, or of patriotism. What I am opposed to is a dumb war.
What I am opposed to is a rash war … I know that even a successful war
against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at
undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of
Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will
only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than
best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of
al-Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.

The man who opposed the war for the right reasons is for that reason the
potential president with the most flexibility in dealing with it. Clinton is
hemmed in by her past and her generation. If she pulls out too quickly, she
will fall prey to the usual browbeating from the right—the same theme that
has played relentlessly since 1968. If she stays in too long, the antiwar base
of her own party, already suspicious of her, will pounce. The Boomer legacy
imprisons her—and so it may continue to imprison us. The debate about the war
in the next four years needs to be about the practical and difficult choices
ahead of us—not about the symbolism or whether it’s a second Vietnam.

A generational divide also separates Clinton and Obama with respect to domestic
politics. Clinton grew up saturated in the conflict that still defines American
politics. As a liberal, she has spent years in a defensive crouch against
triumphant post-Reagan conservatism. The mau-mauing that greeted her
health-care plan and the endless nightmares of her husband’s scandals drove
her deeper into her political bunker. Her liberalism is warped by what you
might call a Political Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Reagan spooked people on
the left, especially those, like Clinton, who were interested primarily in
winning power. She has internalized what most Democrats of her generation have
internalized: They suspect that the majority is not with them, and so some
quotient of discretion, fear, or plain deception is required if they are to
advance their objectives. And so the less-adept ones seem deceptive, and the
more-practiced ones, like Clinton, exhibit the plastic-ness and inauthenticity
that still plague her candidacy. She’s hiding her true feelings. We know it,
she knows we know it, and there is no way out of it.

Obama, simply by virtue of when he was born, is free of this defensiveness.
Strictly speaking, he is at the tail end of the Boomer generation. But he is
not of it.

From Atlantic Unbound:

Listen to an excerpt from Obama’s interview with Andrew Sullivan

“Partly because my mother, you know, was smack-dab in the middle of the Baby
Boom generation,” he told me. “She was only 18 when she had me. So when I
think of Baby Boomers, I think of my mother’s generation. And you know, I was
too young for the formative period of the ’60s—civil rights, sexual
revolution, Vietnam War. Those all sort of passed me by.”

Obama’s mother was, in fact, born only five years earlier than Hillary
Clinton. He did not politically come of age during the Vietnam era, and he is
simply less afraid of the right wing than Clinton is, because he has emerged on
the national stage during a period of conservative decadence and decline. And
so, for example, he felt much freer than Clinton to say he was prepared to meet
and hold talks with hostile world leaders in his first year in office. He has
proposed sweeping middle-class tax cuts and opposed drastic reforms of Social
Security, without being tarred as a fiscally reckless liberal. (Of course, such
accusations are hard to make after the fiscal performance of today’s
“conservatives.”) Even his more conservative positions—like his openness
to bombing Pakistan, or his support for merit pay for public-school
teachers—do not appear to emerge from a desire or need to credentialize
himself with the right. He is among the first Democrats in a generation not to
be afraid or ashamed of what they actually believe, which also gives them more
freedom to move pragmatically to the right, if necessary. He does not smell, as
Clinton does, of political fear.

There are few areas where this Democratic fear is more intense than religion.
The crude exploitation of sectarian loyalty and religious zeal by Bush and Rove
succeeded in deepening the culture war, to Republican advantage. Again, this
played into the divide of the Boomer years—between God-fearing Americans and
the peacenik atheist hippies of lore. The Democrats have responded by
pretending to a public religiosity that still seems strained. Listening to
Hillary Clinton detail her prayer life in public, as she did last spring to a
packed house at George Washington University, was at once poignant and
repellent. Poignant because her faith may well be genuine; repellent because
its Methodist genuineness demands that she not profess it so tackily. But she
did. The polls told her to.

Obama, in contrast, opened his soul up in public long before any focus group
demanded it. His first book, Dreams From My Father, is a candid, haunting, and
supple piece of writing. It was not concocted to solve a political problem (his
second, hackneyed book, The Audacity of Hope, filled that niche). It was a
genuine display of internal doubt and conflict and sadness. And it reveals
Obama as someone whose “complex fate,” to use Ralph Ellison’s term, is to
be both believer and doubter, in a world where such complexity is as
beleaguered as it is necessary.

This struggle to embrace modernity without abandoning faith falls on one of the
fault lines in the modern world. It is arguably the critical fault line, the
tectonic rift that is advancing the bloody borders of Islam and the
increasingly sectarian boundaries of American politics. As humankind abandons
the secular totalitarianisms of the last century and grapples with breakneck
technological and scientific discoveries, the appeal of absolutist faith is
powerful in both developing and developed countries. It is the latest in a long
line of rebukes to liberal modernity—but this rebuke has the deepest roots,
the widest appeal, and the attraction that all total solutions to the human
predicament proffer. From the doctrinal absolutism of Pope Benedict’s Vatican
to the revival of fundamentalist Protestantism in the U.S. and Asia to the
attraction for many Muslims of the most extreme and antimodern forms of Islam,
the same phenomenon has spread to every culture and place.

You cannot confront the complex challenges of domestic or foreign policy today
unless you understand this gulf and its seriousness. You cannot lead the United
States without having a foot in both the religious and secular camps. This,
surely, is where Bush has failed most profoundly. By aligning himself with the
most extreme and basic of religious orientations, he has lost many moderate
believers and alienated the secular and agnostic in the West. If you cannot
bring the agnostics along in a campaign against religious terrorism, you have a
problem.

Here again, Obama, by virtue of generation and accident, bridges this deepening
divide. He was brought up in a nonreligious home and converted to Christianity
as an adult. But—critically—he is not born-again. His faith—at once real
and measured, hot and cool—lives at the center of the American religious
experience. It is a modern, intellectual Christianity. “I didn’t have an
epiphany,” he explained to me. “What I really did was to take a set of
values and ideals that were first instilled in me from my mother, who was, as I
have called her in my book, the last of the secular humanists—you know,
belief in kindness and empathy and discipline, responsibility—those kinds of
values. And I found in the Church a vessel or a repository for those values and
a way to connect those values to a larger community and a belief in God and a
belief in redemption and mercy and justice … I guess the point is, it
continues to be both a spiritual, but also intellectual, journey for me, this
issue of faith.”

The best speech Obama has ever given was not his famous 2004 convention
address, but a June 2007 speech in Connecticut. In it, he described his
religious conversion:

One Sunday, I put on one of the few clean jackets I had, and went over to
Trinity United Church of Christ on 95th Street on the South Side of Chicago.
And I heard Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright deliver a sermon called “The Audacity
of Hope.” And during the course of that sermon, he introduced me to someone
named Jesus Christ. I learned that my sins could be redeemed. I learned that
those things I was too weak to accomplish myself, he would accomplish with me
if I placed my trust in him. And in time, I came to see faith as more than just
a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death, but rather as an active,
palpable agent in the world and in my own life.

It was because of these newfound understandings that I was finally able to walk
down the aisle of Trinity one day and affirm my Christian faith. It came about
as a choice and not an epiphany. I didn’t fall out in church, as folks
sometimes do. The questions I had didn’t magically disappear. The skeptical
bent of my mind didn’t suddenly vanish. But kneeling beneath that cross on
the South Side, I felt I heard God’s spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself
to his will, and dedicated myself to discovering his truth and carrying out his
works.

To be able to express this kind of religious conviction without disturbing or
alienating the growing phalanx of secular voters, especially on the left, is
quite an achievement. As he said in 2006, “Faith doesn’t mean that you
don’t have doubts.” To deploy the rhetoric of Evangelicalism while
eschewing its occasional anti-intellectualism and hubristic certainty is as
rare as it is exhilarating. It is both an intellectual achievement, because
Obama has clearly attempted to wrestle a modern Christianity from the
encumbrances and anachronisms of its past, and an American achievement, because
it was forged in the only American institution where conservative theology and
the Democratic Party still communicate: the black church.

And this, of course, is the other element that makes Obama a potentially
transformative candidate: race. Here, Obama again finds himself in the center
of a complex fate, unwilling to pick sides in a divide that reaches back
centuries and appears at times unbridgeable. His appeal to whites is palpable.
I have felt it myself. Earlier this fall, I attended an Obama speech in
Washington on tax policy that underwhelmed on delivery; his address was wooden,
stilted, even tedious. It was only after I left the hotel that it occurred to
me that I’d just been bored on tax policy by a national black leader. That I
should have been struck by this was born in my own racial stereotypes, of
course. But it won me over.

Obama is deeply aware of how he comes across to whites. In a revealing passage
in his first book, he recounts how, in adolescence, he defused his white
mother’s fears that he was drifting into delinquency. She had marched into
his room and demanded to know what was going on. He flashed her “a reassuring
smile and patted her hand and told her not to worry.” This, he tells us, was
“usually an effective tactic,” because people
were satisfied as long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden
moves. They were more than satisfied; they were relieved—such a pleasant
surprise to find a well-mannered young black man who didn’t seem angry all
the time.

And so you have Obama’s campaign for white America: courteous and smiling and
with no sudden moves. This may, of course, be one reason for his still-lukewarm
support among many African Americans, a large number of whom back a white woman
for the presidency. It may also be because African Americans (more than many
whites) simply don’t believe that a black man can win the presidency, and so
are leery of wasting their vote. And the persistence of race as a divisive,
even explosive factor in American life was unmissable the week of Obama’s tax
speech. While he was detailing middle-class tax breaks, thousands of activists
were preparing to march in Jena, Louisiana, after a series of crude racial
incidents had blown up into a polarizing conflict.

Jesse Jackson voiced puzzlement that Obama was not at the forefront of the
march. “If I were a candidate, I’d be all over Jena,” he remarked. The
South Carolina newspaper The State reported that Jackson said Obama was
“acting like he’s white.” Obama didn’t jump into the fray (no sudden
moves), but instead issued measured statements on Jena, waiting till a
late-September address at Howard University to find his voice. It was
simultaneously an endorsement of black identity politics and a distancing from
it:

When I’m president, we will no longer accept the false choice between
being tough on crime and vigilant in our pursuit of justice. Dr. King said:
“It’s not either/or, it’s both/and.” We can have a crime policy
that’s both tough and smart. If you’re convicted of a crime involving
drugs, of course you should be punished. But let’s not make the punishment
for crack cocaine that much more severe than the punishment for powder cocaine
when the real difference between the two is the skin color of the people using
them. Judges think that’s wrong. Republicans think that’s wrong, Democrats
think that’s wrong, and yet it’s been approved by Republican and Democratic
presidents because no one has been willing to brave the politics and make it
right. That will end when I am president.

Obama’s racial journey makes this kind of both/and politics something more
than a matter of political compromise. The paradox of his candidacy is that, as
potentially the first African American president in a country founded on
slavery, he has taken pains to downplay the racial catharsis his candidacy
implies. He knows race is important, and yet he knows that it turns destructive
if it becomes the only important thing. In this he again subverts a Boomer
paradigm, of black victimology or black conservatism. He is neither Al Sharpton
nor Clarence Thomas; neither Julian Bond nor Colin Powell. Nor is he a
post-racial figure like Tiger Woods, insofar as he has spent his life trying to
reconnect with a black identity his childhood never gave him. Equally, he
cannot be a Jesse Jackson. His white mother brought him up to be someone else.

In Dreams From My Father, Obama tells the story of a man with an almost eerily
nonracial childhood, who has to learn what racism is, what his own racial
identity is, and even what being black in America is. And so Obama’s
relationship to the black American experience is as much learned as intuitive.
He broke up with a serious early girlfriend in part because she was white. He
decided to abandon a post-racial career among the upper-middle classes of the
East Coast in order to reengage with the black experience of Chicago’s South
Side. It was an act of integration—personal as well as communal—that called
him to the work of community organizing.

This restlessness with where he was, this attempt at personal integration,
represents both an affirmation of identity politics and a commitment to carving
a unique personal identity out of the race, geography, and class he inherited.
It yields an identity born of displacement, not rootedness. And there are
times, I confess, when Obama’s account of understanding his own racial
experience seemed more like that of a gay teen discovering that he lives in two
worlds simultaneously than that of a young African American confronting racism
for the first time.

And there are also times when Obama’s experience feels more like an immigrant
story than a black memoir. His autobiography navigates a new and strange world
of an American racial legacy that never quite defined him at his core. He
therefore speaks to a complicated and mixed identity—not a simple and
alienated one. This may hurt him among some African Americans, who may fail to
identify with this fellow with an odd name. Black conservatives, like Shelby
Steele, fear he is too deferential to the black establishment. Black leftists
worry that he is not beholden at all. But there is no reason why African
Americans cannot see the logic of Americanism that Obama also represents, a
legacy that is ultimately theirs as well. To be black and white, to have
belonged to a nonreligious home and a Christian church, to have attended a
majority-Muslim school in Indonesia and a black church in urban Chicago, to be
more than one thing and sometimes not fully anything—this is an increasingly
common experience for Americans, including many racial minorities. Obama
expresses such a conflicted but resilient identity before he even utters a
word. And this complexity, with its internal tensions, contradictions, and
moods, may increasingly be the main thing all Americans have in common.

None of this, of course, means that Obama will be the president some are
dreaming of. His record in high office is sparse; his performances on the
campaign trail have been patchy; his chief rival for the nomination, Senator
Clinton, has bested him often with her relentless pursuit of the middle ground,
her dogged attention to her own failings, and her much-improved speaking
skills. At times, she has even managed to appear more inherently likable than
the skinny, crabby, and sometimes morose newcomer from Chicago. Clinton’s
most surprising asset has been the sense of security she instills. Her
husband—and the good feelings that nostalgics retain for his
presidency—have buttressed her case. In dangerous times, popular majorities
often seek the conservative option, broadly understood.

The paradox is that Hillary makes far more sense if you believe that times are
actually pretty good. If you believe that America’s current crisis is not a
deep one, if you think that pragmatism alone will be enough to navigate a world
on the verge of even more religious warfare, if you believe that today’s
ideological polarization is not dangerous, and that what appears dark today is
an illusion fostered by the lingering trauma of the Bush presidency, then the
argument for Obama is not that strong. Clinton will do. And a Clinton-Giuliani
race could be as invigorating as it is utterly predictable.

But if you sense, as I do, that greater danger lies ahead, and that our
divisions and recent history have combined to make the American polity and
constitutional order increasingly vulnerable, then the calculus of risk
changes. Sometimes, when the world is changing rapidly, the greater risk is
caution. Close-up in this election campaign, Obama is unlikely. From a
distance, he is necessary. At a time when America’s estrangement from the
world risks tipping into dangerous imbalance, when a country at war with lethal
enemies is also increasingly at war with itself, when humankind’s spiritual
yearnings veer between an excess of certainty and an inability to believe
anything at all, and when sectarian and racial divides seem as intractable as
ever, a man who is a bridge between these worlds may be indispensable.

We may in fact have finally found that bridge to the 21st century that Bill
Clinton told us about. Its name is Obama.

Monday, January 21, 2008

HAPPY MARTIN LUTHER KING DAY

Bmoore-Report checking in on MLK day, gotta definitely salute Dr. King for his legacy and for the road he paved for not just African Americans, but all Americans.
Dr. King stood for justice and equality for all people.

Found this nice piece of art on Dr. King and had to post it. As some of you know im on my artist grind right now, so pieces I am feeling will definitely get some love on the spot.



Much love and major Salutations to Dr. Martin Luther King on this day and everyday.

MLK its not just a street!

BMoore-Report gone......