Walmart’s not-quite-3/5th compromise

The buyers at Walmart are well-known for their marketing skills and their ability to leverage high volume into deeply-discounted prices and astronomical sales. Their sensitivity to the sensibilities of their customers is apparently another matter.

That much was obvious recently, when the Web site Guanabee.com published a photo said to have been taken at a Louisiana Walmart — a shot in the toy aisle, showing ebony and ivory Barbie dolls hanging on the racks together in perfect harmony. Everything in harmony but the prices.

The black Ballerina Teresa Barbies were priced at $3. The white Ballerina Barbies were sold for $5.93.

The photo and story moved from Guanabee and the humor site Funny Junk.com to the mainstream press; ABC News reported it on Tuesday, complete with damage-control statements from headquarters.

“To prepare for spring inventory, a number of items are marked for clearance,” Wal-Mart spokeswoman Melissa O'Brien told ABC News in an e-mail. “... Both are great dolls. The red price sticker indicates that this particular doll was on clearance when the photo was taken, and though both dolls were priced the same to start, one was marked down due to its lower sales to hopefully increase purchase from customers.”

“Pricing like items differently is a part of inventory management in retailing,” O'Brien said.

Not that the profit picture of a global economic raptor like Walmart exactly depends on how fast Barbie dolls are moving in the first place. From ABC News: “Whatever Ballerina Teresa's lagging sales may say about society, retail analyst Lori Wachs said Walmart may ultimately regret their pricing choice. The discount giant, which reported a quarterly profit of $4.7 billion last month, could have absorbed whatever loss it might have suffered had it kept Ballerina Teresa's price the same as that of Ballerina Barbie.”

Ah, but we’ve been here before. A reader, commenting on the story at Guanabee, cut to the chase with a refreshingly clear sense of the historical:

“3/5 of $5.93 is not $3.00.”

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Image credit: Funny Junk via Guanabee.com.

Juanita Goggins (1935-2010)

The state of South Carolina has been badly served lately by certain people in the public square and on the public dime. Rep. Joe (“You lie!”) Wilson and Argentine bush pilot Gov. Mark Sanford haven’t exactly been role models for the Palmetto State.

Sometime in the days of blizzard and low temperatures between Feb. 20 and March 3, South Carolina lost a real role model, one in the mold of the citizen-politician, someone for whom the phrase “serve the people” was a mission statement, not a slogan meant for a YouTube video or a Facebook page. That phrase was something Juanita Goggins lived, out loud and for real.

Let Seanna Adcox of The Associated Press tell the story:

COLUMBIA, S.C. — When Juanita Goggins became the first black woman elected to the South Carolina Legislature in 1974, she was hailed as a trailblazer and twice visited the president at the White House.

Three decades later, she froze to death at age 75, a solitary figure living in a rented house four miles from the gleaming Statehouse dome.

Goggins, whose achievements included key legislation on school funding, kindergarten and class size, had become increasingly reclusive. She spent her final years turning down help from neighbors who knew little of her history-making past. Her body was not discovered for more than a week.

Those neighbors, as well as former colleagues and relatives, are now left wondering whether they could have done more to help.

"I'm very saddened. People like her you want to see live forever. She had quite a gift for helping others," said state Sen. John Land, a fellow Democrat who was first elected to the House the same year as Goggins.

Goggins, the youngest of 10 children, grew up the daughter of a sharecropper in rural Anderson County, about 130 miles northwest of the capital. She was the only sibling to earn a four-year college degree. Her bachelor's in home economics from then-all-black South Carolina State College was followed by a master's degree.

She taught in the state's segregated schools, married a dentist and got into politics. In 1972, she became the first black woman to represent South Carolina as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention. Two years later, she became the first black woman appointed to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.

"I am going to Columbia to be a legislator, not just a black spot in the House chambers," she told The Associated Press in 1974 following her victory over an incumbent white man from a district just south of Charlotte, N.C.

Voters "were weary of poor representation. They were ready to accept a person who was sincere and concerned about things. Those feelings go beyond color," Goggins said.

She sat on the powerful House budget-writing committee and was responsible for funding sickle-cell anemia testing in county health departments.

The former teacher also helped pass the 1977 law that is still the basis for education funding in the state. Her proposals to expand kindergarten and to reduce student-teacher ratios in the primary grades were adopted after she left politics in 1980, citing health issues.

"She was not bashful or anything. She liked to talk. I used to say she could sell an Eskimo ice," recalled Ilese Dixon, 88, of Pendleton, Goggins' last surviving sibling. "She was just lively and smart. She thought she could fix the world."

Poll: Every midterm goodbye ain’t gone

Voters generally don’t turn out in big numbers for the midterm races, especially black and minority voters. For the conservatives and for many political analysts and professional pol-watchers, that’s been not so much a talking point of the 2010 campaign debate as holy writ. The Republicans and their proxies with blogs and microphones in the wider world, have been relying on that historically proven assumption, counting on it as they ramp up their strategies for retaking the Congress in November.

They may want to retool their efforts: A newly released poll suggests — convincingly — that among those black and minority voters, past performance in the midterm part of the election cycle need not be a guarantee of future results.

According to the poll conducted by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, about two-thirds of black adults in four states with Senate races in the fall say they’re watching the political scene, and monitoring analysis about the fall elections, and between 74 percent and 80 percent said they’re very likely to go to the polls in November.

The nonpartisan D.C.-based organization, which monitors minority participation in matters of public policy, surveyed 500 black people in Missouri, Indiana, Arkansas and South Carolina. Despite the relatively small sample, its methodology makes sense, given recent events and established political history.

“In many competitive congressional districts, blacks make up a quarter of the electorate, and they vote overwhelmingly for Democrats,” the Associated Press reported Tuesday. “Their surge during President Obama's 2008 victory is widely credited with helping sweep many Democrats into office who might have otherwise lost.”

Dr. David Bositis, a Center researcher and the director of the poll, told The AP that, while the turnout would certainly be lower than poll estimates, the results reflect a continued support for President Obama.

“I think the Obama election and the fact that there is an African-American president is something of a game-changer,” he told AP. “African-Americans feel like they have a real investment in President Obama ... I think it's a major motivating factor.”

“A real investment”? Big time. From the poll: “Nearly all respondents feel favorably toward President Obama. In each of the states surveyed, between 94 and 95 percent of black adults said their feelings toward him were favorable. There has been no public figure in the past 20 years who has elicited such favorable feelings from African Americans. “

Sensibly, black Americans are focused on the economy and health-care reform; the poll found those were the top-tier concerns on the minds of black voters.

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Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University who specializes in African-American politics, had doubts about the poll’s turnout forecast. “One of the things you have to realize with polls is that if you ask people if they're going to vote, people can misrepresent themselves,” she told AP. “Nobody wants to look like a civic deadbeat.”

That’s true enough — and no more or less true today than it was in November 2008, when African Americans turned out in record numbers to elect Barack Obama president. And with health-care reform and jobs hanging in the balance, there’s at least as much at stake this election as the last one. Black Americans got that when the survey was conducted last year, between Nov. 11 and Dec. 1. They certainly understand it better today.

And black and minority voters are more plugged in today than they were in 2008, not less. A late-February survey from the Center found that black Americans and Latinos with college degrees and earning more than $50,000 a year are adopting broadband faster than any other cohorts of the population. About 94 percent of this African American group and 98 percent of the Hispanic group have broadband.

Those voters are more plugged in, they’re more attuned to life and culture, they’re more sophisticated, and more likely to avail themselves of the levers of our democracy. Simply put: they’re better citizens now than they were before, and with as much on the table as is on the table now, there’s no reason on earth to think they’ll walk away from the closest thing to full political empowerment they’ve enjoyed.

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The takeaway? Among other things, the Joint Center poll means that the GOP needs to resist the temptation to go native & go negative, two of the defining characteristics of contemporary Republican strategy.

They need to get focused on enhancing their own message, refining what the GOP has to offer the American people – instead of using the history of midterm voting patterns as the compass heading for its political direction. Past ain’t always prologue.

The Joint Center poll findings also mean that, contrary to some of the more downbeat assessments of Obama’s prospects coming from the punditburo, the president still enjoys the inaugural benefits from black American voters.

It’s not just a honeymoon anymore; almost fourteen months in, there’s a real marriage going on now, with highs and lows. And contrary to what the pundits think and what the conservatives wish, black Americans aren’t really having second thoughts.

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Image credits: Logo and chart: Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. President Obama: Still from NBC News.

‘Precious’ night, precious changes

Sunday was a big night for upsets at the 82nd Academy Awards. Most of the attention’s gone to “The Hurt Locker” and its surprising win as Best Picture, beating out the prohibitive favorite, “Avatar.” The Best Picture win for Kathryn Bigelow’s “Locker” is a triumph for cost-effective motion picture production. The film was made for about $11 million, and has recouped almost twice that amount. True, “Avatar,” made for about $237 million, has put $2.56 billion worth of butts in theater seats around the world. But the win for “Hurt Locker” (and director Bigelow’s Oscar for best director, the first for a female director) feels like a triumph of the underdog.

And for fans of the African American filmgoing experience, the underdog was top dog tonight. With two awards, black talent in Hollywood took a huge leap forward.

Geoffrey Fletcher, the screenwriter of “Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire” made movie history when he became the first black screenwriter to win an Oscar in the 82-year history of the Academy Awards. John Singleton was the most recent to come close; he was the previous black screenwriter to be nominated, for “Boyz n’ the Hood,” back in 1991. Fast forward, now ... 19 long years.

“I don’t know what to say,” an emotional Fletcher said. “"This is for everybody who works on a dream everyday -- precious boys and girls everywhere."

But Fletcher’s triumph is bigger than something just for him. The solitary process of sitting in front of a keyboard, a typewriter or a blank sheet of paper and writing, willing a world into existence from the stuff of your own imagination, is one of the more mysterious practices — maybe the most mysterious practice — of the movie business, and a definite exception (at least at first) to the groupthink mindset that’s a necessary part of making a major motion picture.

Black people have been doing that for generations. What’s different now for black and minority wordsmiths is doing it, for the first time, with the weight of Oscar’s gravitas in their corner. On Sunday a black screenwriter joined the pantheon of movie greats who have tapped into that special reservoir of the imagination that yields Oscar gold. From now on, that fact will fire the spirits of every other such screenwriting hopeful who dares to sit down with pen in hand (or keyboard at hand) and invent what comes after FADE IN.

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Just minutes after Fletcher’s victory, the Best Supporting Actress award went to Mo’Nique, the former Radio One talk show host, BET standup comedian and television actress whose incendiary portrayal of Mary Jones in “Precious” has provoked tears in audiences since the film hit the theaters.

With her win Sunday, Mo’Nique added the Oscar to a long list of awards for her “Precious” portrayal, including a Golden Globe award, and awards for best supporting actress from the New York Film Critics Circle, the Screen Actors Guild, the Boston Society of Film Critics, and the San Francisco Film Critics Circle.



"First I would like to thank the Academy for showing that it can be about the performance and not the politics." I want to thank Ms. Hattie McDaniel for enduring all that she had to, so that I would not have to. ... to my amazing husband Sidney, thank you for showing me that sometimes you have to forgo doing what’s popular in order to do what’s right.”

Not a dry eye nowhere.

From the beginning of Hollywood, and certainly from the beginning of black people trying to get over in Hollywood, success in motion pictures has been a matter of measuring progress by alien and unfamiliar yardsticks. More and more, that progress is measured by our own.

That’s a precious fact — precious without the quote marks.

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Image credits: Fletcher, Oscar statuette: Yada/Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Best Picture: A tale of two sensibilities

According to the smart money, tonight’s battle for Best Picture at the 82nd annual Oscars ceremony comes down to a choice between “Avatar,” James Cameron’s sci-fi animation morality tale/space Western/geopolitical fable, and “The Hurt Locker,” Kathryn Bigelow’s story of American soldiers fighting the insidious IED-borne dangers of the Iraq war. Both have been nominated for nine Oscars.

Several critics have made the assumption that “Avatar” has amassed so much momentum, both culturally and financially, that it’s the prohibitive favorite. That may be true, the critics may well be right, but for some of the wrong reasons.

If “Avatar” wins — and the Academy throws off the prevailing assumptions and elevates a dark horse like “Precious” or “A Serious Man” to the top spot — it may have as much to do with the Academy as anything else.

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The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is an old-line outfit. Founded in May 1927, it was and remains not only the primary arbiter of a movie’s esthetic qualities but also the standard-setter for the films that hold to the Academy’s sense of what dovetails with its world view, its idea of the kind of pictures that should be celebrated.

Demographically, longtime Academy voters skew older, whiter and more culturally conservative. These are filmgoers whose sense of cinematic spectacle has its roots in films like “Gone With the Wind” and “Cleopatra,” “Ben-Hur” and “Lawrence of Arabia” — a sense of spectacle that’s more recently found expressions in votes for “The Last Emperor,” “Crash” and “Slumdog Millionaire.”

An unproven but firmly-held conviction: Academy members are less enamored of the movies as sounding board for ripped-from-the-headlines expressions of reality; if given a choice between a Best Picture vote for a movie that’s captive to the here & now of modern life and one that’s principally captive to the imagination, they’ll go the imagination route much of the time.

Academy voters were faced with just such a choice back in 2001. That year, the two leading contenders for Best Picture were “Traffic,” Steven Soderbergh’s brilliant multilayered study of America’s drug problem and how it got to be what it’s become; and “Gladiator,” Ridley Scott’s sword-and-sandals epic of one man’s revenge against an emperor.

“Traffic” was held in high regard as a powerful social statement, a film that masterfully examined the different dimensions of America’s chemical infatuation. Stellar cast, top-notch script, characters you cared about — all of it suggested “Traffic” would be crowned Best Picture.

“Gladiator, directed by consummate craftsman Scott, brought a lot to the table. The film starred Russell Crowe, Djimon Hounsou, Joaquin Phoenix and Oliver Reed in a story that borrowed from the grand style of the “Ben-Hur” tradition. Stellar cast, top-notch script, characters you cared about ... For its supporters, “Gladiator” was a lock.

What the Academy was looking for then may well be a clue to which film the Academy voters picks tonight.

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In the Best Picture derby, the Academy often anoints the tale well told, the big-canvas film that advances the art of the storyteller, the fabulist who invents a world of his or her own invention, the story that owes little or nothing to the world we inhabit, a world at the mercy of the body counts and disasters delivered on the evening news.

When Academy voters made their Best Picture choice in 2001, it came down to picking between the sensibilities of two distinctly different motion pictures:

“Gladiator” was a movie whose subject matter was what you go to the movies for.

“Traffic” was a movie whose subject matter was what you went to the movies to get away from.

It was that embrace of the escapist possibilities of the motion picture that gave “Gladiator” the edge that year. It’s the same embrace of escapism adored by those older, probably more conservative members of the Academy that’s likely to give “Avatar” the advantage tonight.

Anything can happen, of course, and nobody knows for sure but the folks at PriceWaterhouseCoopers, and they ain’t talking. But barring a complete upset, “Avatar” director James Cameron should hoist another Best Picture Oscar tonight. If he’s “king of the world” again, it’s because he’s king of a world: the fully conceived, animated, realized and dramatized world of “Avatar,” a world the Academy couldn’t live without.

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Image credits: Avatar still: © 2009 20th Century-Fox. Gladiator poster: © 2000 DreamWorks/Universal Pictures. Traffic poster: © 2000 USA Films.

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'Vox update 9 P.M.: So much for trying to figure out the mood of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences: The Best Picture Oscar just went to "The Hurt Locker." Despite an 11th-hour campaign against the film launched by Iraq war veterans who angrily condemned it as highly inaccurate and a slap in the face to the U.S. military, "Locker" also won awards for best film editing, sound editing, sound mixing, original screenplay and best director — Kathryn Bigelow, the first woman to win a best director Oscar in the history of the Academy. And good on her.

Exhuming McCarthy 2.0

The Republican Party has been in an ethical wilderness for so long now, has so aggressively assisted in its own spiritual demise, it’s hard to remember when this deathwatch really began. Bereft of any vision for the nation, emotionally attuned to the punitive instinct, ready to oppose President Obama on any initiative out of reflex rather than principle, the GOP has been on intellectual and credibility life support for a long time.

Liz Cheney, Jim Bunning and the Republican National Committee just pulled the plug.

With three events that happened in such lockstep it makes you think it was intentional, the conservatives in Congress and outside have been badly served by some of their number who showed, by accident and on purpose, just how desperate and mean-spirited they’re willing to be in order to advance their agenda.

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The Republicans’ lock on their old strong suit, national security, isn’t what it used to be; two wars and responsibility for the worst attack on American soil won’t enhance its bona fides on that front over the long haul. And so, the former vice president Dick Cheney has, in speeches and op-ed pieces and a forthcoming book, been working furiously to rewrite history as it relates to the panoramically criminal actions of the Bush administration.

Daughter Liz has happily entered the family business. On March 1, Liz Cheney’s right-wing advocacy group, Keep America Safe, released a breathtakingly ridiculous Web video that suggests that lawyers at the Justice Department responsible for defending the military prisoners collectively misidentified as “detainees” share the ideological viewpoints of the al-Qaida network.



It was a revisitation of the same innuendo and character assassination perfected by Republican Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy and unleashed on the country for three harrowing years during the McCarthy hearings in the 1950's. And like her apparent ideological mentor, Liz Cheney had her Joseph Welch moment. In fact, she had more than one.

Cheney’s DoJ broadside got a lot of pushback from a broad range of conservatives, some from previous Republican administrations, who indicated that the video was off base in its ad hominem attacks of Justice attorneys. The Conservative Power Line blog called the video “vicious” and “unfounded.”

Reginald Brown, former Bush associate White House counsel said “the video is truly offensive … It’s beyond a cheap shot to suggest that a lawyer is an al-Qaida sympathizer because he advocates a detainee’s position in the Supreme Court ...”



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Cheney’s YouTube mal mot surfaced two days before a story in Politico, a piece highlighting GOP fundraising documents apparently lost or forgotten at a Republican National Committee leadership retreat for top donors and fundraisers, held Feb. 18 at the Gasparilla Inn & Club in Boca Grande, Fla.

The presentation was delivered by RNC Finance Director Rob Bickhart, Politico reported on March 3. The 72-page document was provided to Politico by a Democrat who was apparently at the hotel.

The docs, assembled as a PowerPoint presentation, shows one graphic that highlights desired motivational triggers for getting donations from conservative supporters. At the top of the column for “Visceral Giving” (read: spot donors) is the word “Fear.” In another column headed “Calculated Giving” (code for deep-pocketed donors), motivations the document said are ripe for exploitation include giving that’s “Ego-Driven” or powered by a desire for “Access” or “Personal” reasons.

Another slide in the deck reads: “What can you sell when you do not have the White House, the House or the Senate? Save the country from trending toward Socialism!”

From the Politico story: “In neat PowerPoint pages, it lifts the curtain on the often-cynical terms of political marketing, displaying an air of disdain for the party’s donors that is usually confined to the barroom conversations of political operatives.”

It was all too clear for former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean. “The Republicans simply don’t respect American voters,” he told MSNBC on Thursday. “What this shows is that they don’t even respect their own donors among their own voters.”

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As you’d expect, the damage-control machine went off loudly at RNC headquarters.

“This was an internal matter,” RNC Chairman and apologist-in-chief Michael Steele told Fox News. “Clearly it’s not something I would tolerate … We’re dealing with it administratively within the RNC.”

“They don’t get it,” Judson Phillips, an attorney and organizer of the recent National Tea Party Convention, told the Daily Beast. “They freaking don’t get it.” Phillips said he disagreed with the characterization of small donors as “reactionary” and motivated by “fear.” “Our motives are patriotic,” he said. “Can they be any more insulting?”