Earl Ofari Hutchinson

An Obama will again address the NAACP’s annual convention, starting Friday in Kansas City. It just won’t be President Obama. First Lady Michelle Obama will give a talk, and it’s not really billed as a keynote talk, more an informal workshop-type discussion on her signature issue, the campaign against childhood obesity. She’s not listed in the 10-page schedule of speakers, panels and workshops.

The only surprise when Sarah Palin tweeted out her message to followers likening President Obama to Hitler was that it took so long for her to make the comparison. Her Tea Party pals, and a rogue’s list of GOP and right-wing hacks, bigots, loudmouths and spin artists took giddy delight in making the Obama to Hitler comparison even before he put a foot in the Oval Office.

Two surreal things happened within the span of two days last week.

[Editor’s Note: In this exclusive interview, South Carolina Democratic Senate candidate Alvin Greene discusses his shocking win last week in the South Carolina Democratic primary. Greene talks about the impact of his win on state and national politics, his campaign plans, his relations with the Democratic Party, charges that he is a GOP plant, and calls for him to drop out of the race because of felony obscenity charges. Here is a transcript of the interview Mr. Hutchinson conducted on his weekly program on KPFK-FM, 90.7, last Saturday.]

This one could have been mailed in.

Sarah Palin recently told an anti-abortion activist group that “mama grizzlies” will eat up the Democrats in November and shove the country back into the GOP’s arms.

Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan will plop an issue back on the nation’s table that hasn’t been seen or heard from in what seems like ages. Affirmative action. Even before her nomination, the word furiously circulated in some circles that during her six-year tenure as dean of Harvard University Law School, Kagan had an abominable record on recruiting and hiring minority professors.

Michael Steele has bungled money and staff, regularly mugs and grandstands on network talk shows, brags about being hip, a street guy, and even complains that he, as President Obama, is also subject to a racial double standard.

The comparison of then-Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama to Franklin Delano Roosevelt at the height of the Presidential campaign was hyped, overblown and made mostly to sell magazines and puff up TV pundit sound bites, by a few Democratic party campaign boosters carried away with themselves.

The influence of mainstream media has often made it difficult for Western women to draw parallels between sexist oppression of women in the West and that of Middle Eastern women.