After flying well below the radar for the last few years, Barack Obama’s younger brother, Mark Okoth Obama Ndesandjo, surfaced yesterday—his first public speaking event—to promote his new, autobiographical novel, Nairobi to Shenzhen.

Speaking from Shenzhen, where he lives with his Chinese wife, Ndesandjo said little about Barack, but he did say, “We are family.  I love my family and we are in touch.”  Seeing his brother win the Presidency helped Ndesandjo come to terms with his painful past—enough, anyway, to finish the book, what the Brown and Stanford-educated Ndesandjo calls a search for “identity and self.”

In the 255-page novel, self-published through Aventine Press, Ndesandjo’s character is called David.  He makes no reference to his brother, Barack.  But he depicts their Kenyan father as an abusive alcoholic who beats David, and David’s Jewish American mother.

Barack Obama Sr. married Mark’s mother, Ruth Nidesand, while he was studying at Harvard, after divorcing President Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham.  The elder Obama and Nidesand lived together in Nairobi, Kenya, where Mark spent much of his childhood.  How much of the book is true?

‘It’s a work of fiction, but there’s a lot going on in there that parallels my life,’ Ndesandjo said.

 
The Washington Post: Obama’s Brother Speaks Out For First Time

 
(Above, Gore Vidal visits “Mary Hartman” (Louise Lasser) in the mental hospital on the Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman soap opera)
 
I have revered Gore Vidal my entire life. He’s a great writer and he’s a great American, perhaps THE great American gadfly amongst men of letters. The older he gets, the more spiteful he becomes about the state of this country. Interviews with Vidal in recent years fall into one of two categories, sometimes they’re terribly amusing, but alarming, other times just alarming. Lately, he’s really letting it rip. He’s 83, why should he pull any punches? In this long interview from London, a cranky Vidal holds forth on the Obama presidency with a jaundiced eye:

Gore Vidal is not only grieving for his own dead circle and his fading life, but for his country. At 83, he has lived through one third of the lifespan of the United States. If anyone incarnates the American century that has ended, it is him. He was America’s greatest essayist, one of its best-selling novelists and the wit at every party. He holidayed with the Kennedys, cruised for men with Tennessee Williams, was urged to run for Congress by Eleanor Roosevelt, co-wrote some of the most iconic Hollywood films, damned US foreign policy from within, sued Truman Capote, got fellated by Jack Kerouac, watched his cousin Al Gore get elected President and still lose the White House, and ?

 
In what reads like something out of High Castle-era Philip K. Dick, David Swanson describes what the American landscape might have looked like under a third Bush administration.  More warrantless spying, escalating military budgets, formalizing policies of preventive detention, Swanson’s list is long—and grim.  That’s just the set-up, though, to a far scarier punchline:

This dark fantasy of a third Bush term is also an accurate portrait of Obama’s first term to date.  In following Bush, Obama was given the opportunity either to restore the rule of law and the balance of powers or to firmly establish in place what were otherwise aberrant abuses of power.  Thus far, President Obama has, in all the areas mentioned above, chosen the latter course.  Everything described, from the continuation of crimes to the efforts to hide them away, from the corruption of corporate power to the assertion of the executive power to legislate, is Obama’s presidency in its first seven months.

David Swanson is the author, most recently, of Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union.

Spotted via The Nation: Bush’s Third Term?

From one of our most astute (and hilarious) political observers (and a personal hero). I can’t believe I missed this when it was posted, but I hardly think it matters as it’s still entirely relevant today:

Other countries prefer a healthy workforce and are willing to pay for it. Here we stick our workforce with fat, greedy insurance companies who serve no purpose but to act as a tollbooth or a gatekeeper and charge exorbitant fees before a person can even see a doctor. The result, of course, is the most expensive healthcare system with the least benefit for the buck of any in the industrialized world. You say the big insurance companies “should have a place at the table.” Aren’t these companies the problem?

Other counties want their workforce to be as well-educated as possible to better care for themselves and compete in the global economy. So they are willing to pay to make sure this happens, instead of kicking them in the face with back-breaking student loans and cutting school funding to the bone.

Other countries want their children to grow up well-nourished and loved instead of dysfunctional. They are happy to pay welfare for single parents to stay home with their little ones, and for 12-18 months maternity leave with 80-90% pay for either parent to make sure no child is left behind.

Traveling overseas it is not hard to notice that many European countries, and not just Scandinavia, have a higher standard of living than we do, and the gap is widening. The reason is they are willing to pay for it.

OPEN LETTER TO BARACK OBAMA from Jello Biafra