Presidential candidate John Edwards took part in the MTV/MySpace debate on Thursday, September 27, and was asked a question about what he would do to help keep inner city kids from taking part in violence to which he gave a curious response:

“We start with the president of the United States saying to America, ‘we cannot build enough prisons to solve this problem. And the idea that we can keep incarcerating and keep incarcerating — pretty soon we’re not going to have a young African-American male population in America. They’re all going to be in prison or dead. One of the two.”

Edwards seems to present an “if you build it they will come” attitude. He seems to think African-American men have just two choices: prison or death. Is he naive? Ill-informed? Patronizing? Beholden to contractors who build prisons and graveyards?

Jim Geraghty of The Campaign Spot points out that often cited statistics about more African-Americans being in prison than in college are incorrect, according to U.S. Census data:

Hyperbole much? Despite popular misperception and those who find it a convenient talking point to illustrate inescapable racism, there are more young African-American men in college than in prison. In 2005, according to the Census Bureau, there were 864,000 black men in college. According to Justice Department statistics, there were 802,000 in federal and state prisons and jails; between the ages of 18 and 24, however, black men in college outnumber those incarcerated by 4 to 1.

 

UPDATE: Some readers are finding the numbers above confusing. The first set of numbers (comparing 864,000 to 802,000) refers to all black men of all ages. The 4 to 1 ratio is among black men between the ages of 18 to 24. In other words, a large percentage of that 802,000 are black men above the age of 24.

 

Given those statistics, maybe John Edwards should help build more colleges.

And at 8:30 in the morning, no less. Not the typical Today Show outdoor concert:

The Plaza was packed for the unprecedented live concert on TODAY, with many people camping out overnight to get prime viewing locations.

And Springsteen didn’t disappoint, launching into songs even before the show began its broadcast at 7 a.m. EDT and continuing on and off for the next couple of hours, playing multiple encores, and being what he’s always been – arguably the best live performer in the business.

Lauer looked over the vast crowd and asked Springsteen what he thought of so many coming out so early to hear him sing.

“This is the same crowd you get for the dancing bears. They show up for anything,” Springsteen joked. Then, simply and humbly, he added, “I appreciate it.”

Later, addressing the crowd before another song, he quipped, “I must want to sell some records bad to be up here this early.”

At 58 years old and four years after the band last played together on tour, Springsteen has reunited the band first formed in the early 1970s, when he was a kid growing up poor with big dreams on the Jersey Shore. Their new album, “Magic,” acclaimed as a return to his musical roots, is being released on Tuesday, Oct. 2, and the band is starting a tour of the United States and Europe – their first in five years – on the same day in Hartford, Conn.

Watch videos of the concert here.

In a New York Times article, A.O. Scott quotes from a recent interview with Bruce Springsteen:

“I wanted one thing on the record that was the perfect pop universe,” Mr. Springsteen said, once the band had wandered off and he had finished an early lunch of granola with fresh fruit and soy milk. It was two days before his 58th birthday, and he looked trimmer and tanner than he had the last time I’d seen him, which was on the JumboTron video screen at Giants Stadium a few years back. “You know, that day when it’s all right there; it’s the world that only exists in pop songs, and once in a while you stumble on it.”

Not that “Girls in Their Summer Clothes” is untouched by melancholy. Its narrator, after all, stands and watches as the girls of the title “pass me by.” “It’s the longing, the unrequited longing for that perfect world,” Mr. Springsteen continued. “Pop is funny. It’s a tease. It’s an important one, but it’s a tease, and therein resides its beauty and its joke.”

And much of “Magic,” on first hearing, seems to unfold in a similar spirit. There is a brightness of sound and a lightness of touch that are not quite like anything else Mr. Springsteen has done recently. In the past five years he has released four albums of original material, a zigzag through new and familiar styles and idioms. “The Rising” (2002) brought the E Street Band back into the studio after a long hiatus (their sound updated by the producer Brendan O’Brien) and answered the trauma of 9/11 with the defiant, redemptive roar of solid, down-the-middle rock. With “Devils and Dust” (2005) Mr. Springsteen picked up the thread of Western stories and acoustic ballads that stretched back through other non-E Street projects like “The Ghost of Tom Joad” and “Nebraska” (as well as some parts of “The River”). “The Seeger Sessions,” released last year, was an old-time old-lefty hootenanny, with a big, unruly jug band rollicking through spirituals, union songs and Dust Bowl ballads.

 

Bill O’Reilly states that his words from his September 19th radio show, in which he discussed his dinner at Sylvia’s Restaurant with Al Sharpton, were taken out of context. He also asserts that Media Matters and CNN have engaged in a smear campaign.

Karl Frisch, a spokesman for Media Matters, called O’Reilly’s remarks “insensitive and racially charged” and rejected O’Reilly’s contention that his comments were taken out of context.

Frisch said his organization has documented 765 instances since mid-2004 in which O’Reilly has misstated or misrepresented facts or made “insensitive” statements. “His knee-jerk reaction is always that he was taken out of context,” he said. “If he was caught robbing a bank, he’d say his actions are being taken out of context.”

CNN’s Sanchez denied his network was attempting to score points against O’Reilly. “The O’Reilly Factor” on Tuesday drew more than three times as many viewers as the Sanchez-hosted “Out in the Open.”

Sanchez, in a phone interview, said O’Reilly is perpetuating racism by using “the Mandingo argument” against black rappers. “The idea [is] that there’s a big, bad African American out there that we all need protection from,” he said. “It’s a dangerous way of looking at racial relations. The African American community is extremely complex. The thinking that black culture is confined to guys sticking their underwear out is just wrong, and many African Americans resent it.”

Let’s look at the context. First the transcript.

O”REILLY: Now, how do we get to this point? Black people in this country understand that they’ve had a very, very tough go of it, and some of them can get past that, and some of them cannot. I don’t think there’s a black American who hasn’t had a personal insult that they’ve had to deal with because of the color of their skin. I don’t think there’s one in the country. So you’ve got to accept that as being the truth. People deal with that stuff in a variety of ways. Some get bitter. Some say, [unintelligible] “You call me that, I’m gonna be more successful.” OK, it depends on the personality.

So it’s there. It’s there, and I think it’s getting better. I think black Americans are starting to think more and more for themselves. They’re getting away from the Sharptons and the Jacksons and the people trying to lead them into a race-based culture. They’re just trying to figure it out: “Look, I can make it. If I work hard and get educated, I can make it.”

You know, I was up in Harlem a few weeks ago, and I actually had dinner with Al Sharpton, who is a very, very interesting guy. And he comes on The Factor a lot, and then I treated him to dinner, because he’s made himself available to us, and I felt that I wanted to take him up there. And we went to Sylvia’s, a very famous restaurant in Harlem. I had a great time, and all the people up there are tremendously respectful. They all watch The Factor. You know, when Sharpton and I walked in, it was like a big commotion and everything, but everybody was very nice.

And I couldn’t get over the fact that there was no difference between Sylvia’s restaurant and any other restaurant in New York City. I mean, it was exactly the same, even though it’s run by blacks, primarily black patronship. It was the same, and that’s really what this society’s all about now here in the U.S.A. There’s no difference. There’s no difference. There may be a cultural entertainment — people may gravitate toward different cultural entertainment, but you go down to Little Italy, and you’re gonna have that. It has nothing to do with the color of anybody’s skin.

Now the audio. It’s in four parts.

Now that we have placed the full context of Bill O’Reilly’s comments herewith, we simply want to say that what we at Shallow Nation find illuminating in all of this is Bill O’Reilly’s defeatism. He says:

I couldn’t get over the fact that there was no difference between Sylvia’s restaurant and any other restaurant in New York City. I mean, it was exactly the same, even though it’s run by blacks, primarily black patronship.

And that is why we ask the question: what will it take for Bill O’Reilly to get over the fact that black people are people? We think it’s a fair question. We are not calling him a racist; we are just asking a question.

Perhaps Bill O’Reilly can take into consideration that Sylvia’s is not really like any other restaurant in New York City. Not that many New York City restaurants are world famous, and not that many New York City restaurants have had three cookbooks published by William Morrow Company and have a full product line of food, health and beauty products.

We hope that Bill O’Reilly has come away from the experience edified.