As the Presiding Bishop of the Church of God in Christ, one of the oldest and largest Holiness-Pentecostal denominations in the world, with an estimated membership of six million people in fifty seven nations across the globe, I write in support of the law and urge Congress not to repeal the law or pass any amendments that will weaken it.

Presiding Bishop of the Church of God in Christ, Inc. Bishop Charles E. Blake released the following statement:

President Obama’s historic Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which was passed by Congress last year, has greatly benefited many in the United States, and in particular those among us who have not previously had health insurance. As the Presiding Bishop of the Church of God in Christ, one of the oldest and largest Holiness-Pentecostal denominations in the world, with an estimated membership of six million people in fifty-seven nations across the globe, I write in support of the law and urge Congress not to repeal the law or pass any amendments that will weaken it. I am joined in this position by our ruling council, our bishops and their Chairman. As I have argued before, based on our understanding of the Holy Scriptures it is not only our mandate to encourage men and women to come into right relationship with their Creator, but also to proclaim and advocate justice and compassion throughout all creation.

“Open your mouth for the speechless,
In the cause of all who are appointed to die.
Open your mouth, judge righteously,
And plead the cause of the poor and needy.”
Proverbs 31:8-9 NKJV

Therefore we petition Congress today, speaking on behalf of millions of Americans who have benefited from the health care law.

There are several historic provisions that we seek to preserve: the current restriction on insurance companies’ ability to deny coverage to children on the basis of pre-existing health conditions, the extension of coverage to children under 26 through their parents’ health insurance plans, the mandate for every American to have health insurance by 2014, and the provision of subsidies for the needy to cover health insurance are among the most important.

In this, the richest country in the world, thirty-two million Americans were without health insurance coverage prior to the passage of this law. Today the elderly benefit, as the law will close the “donut hole” in prescription drug benefits through Medicare by 2020. And the poor, who are of particular importance to us as Christians, benefit immediately from the expansion of Medicaid coverage to those within 133% of the poverty level and ultimately from the expansion of coverage to childless adults by 2014. Because of this law many will be spared untold hardship and unnecessary suffering due to ill health and death.

It is of particular importance to us as Christians that the law does not require any health care plan to offer coverage for abortion, and requires that taxpayer funds not be used for fees related to the provision of abortions.

As Christians is also critical for us to urge fiscal responsibility among our national leaders. For this reason we support the health care law as currently enacted which will reduce the national deficit by $143 billion over the first 10 years.

We urge the members of Congress, and in particular the leadership, to resist the temptation to make this vitally important piece of legislation, which has such important benefits for needy Americans, the subject of divisive, partisan attacks. Finally, we call upon all Americans of faith and on all Americans of good will to stand with the President in support of this historic legislation.

SOURCE: PR Web

The United States Supreme Court denied an appeal Tuesday from Bishop Harry Jackson to hold a ballot initiative in the District of Columbia that would, if approved, have overturned the District’s same-sex marriage policy.

In May 2009, the city council approved a measure that amended the city’s marriage act and said the city would recognize same-sex marriages from other jurisdictions.

Jackson and other religious leaders challenged the city on the measure saying the matter should be put to District voters in a ballot initiative. There initiative wanted to amend the law to say, “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid in the District of Columbia.” If that initiative had passed it would have effectively overturned the city’s legal recognition of gay marriage.

The DC Board of Elections denied the request for a ballot initiative saying it would violate the city’s 1973 Human Right Act, which prevents discriminatory ballot initiatives. They said the proposed ballot initiative would be discriminatory to gay and lesbian citizens.

Then in March 2010, the District passed the Marriage Equality Act which expanded the city’s definition of marriage to say, “Any person may enter into marriage in the District of Columbia with another person, regardless of gender, unless the marriage is expressly prohibited by law.”

Jackson and others challenged the Board of Elections in court over the denied ballot initiative.

Jackson is the pastor of Hope Christian Church in Beltsville, Maryland, but has residency in the District. He joined with a number of other DC residents on the case but was the lead plaintiff in Jackson v District of Columbia Board of Elections.

In July, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia issued a 5-4 ruling saying the DC Board of Elections acted lawfully in denying the initiative and the Human Rights Acts was also legally valid.

It was that ruling Jackson and others had appealed to the Supreme Court. The court was silent in issuing it’s ruling. It only listed Jackson’s case among many others as “Certiorari Denied,” meaning the justices would not hear arguments on the case and the ruling of the lower court would stand.

DC based Human Rights Campaign, a lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered civil rights group, lauded the court’s decision. HRC President Joe Solmonese said in a statement, “The DC Council and Mayor courageously made marriage equality a reality last year, and the courts have since upheld the rights of DC residents to govern ourselves and take the necessary steps to eliminate discrimination in our community.”

“We knew this direction was a long shot,” Bishop Jackson told CNN of the legal route to the Supreme Court. “The answer now is for us, return to the political process. All is not lost at the Supreme Court level, in that there still will no doubt be a case from Massachusetts or California that will reach the Supreme Court and get some direction on the issue of marriage.”

Jackson pointed out there are several cases moving through the legal system that deal with those states’ definition of marriage as well.

Jackson said legally his supporters move into the position of wait and see. “I’m confident that Massachusetts or California will eventually wind up in the Supreme Court and there, this thing will have another kind of viewing. [The court] may have been saying we’re not going to let your DC case be the defining issue on who can and can’t be married,” he said.

Source: Eric Marrapodi, CNN Belief Blog Co-Editor

For better or worse, those expectations have largely fallen flat.

“I think he doesn’t avail himself as fully as he could of the input of black religious thinkers, and this is not a judgment upon his regard for us,” said Obery Hendricks, a professor at New York Theological Seminary. “I’m not sure why that is.”

James Forbes, the former senior pastor of New York’s Riverside Church, said the White House is doing a delicate dance in the aftermath of Obama’s ties—and public breakup—with Jeremiah Wright, his former pastor, whose fiery sermons nearly derailed his campaign.

“It has to be a consideration: How does the first black president position himself in the public eye in regards to blacks?” said Forbes, who has neither been invited nor sought access to the Obama White House. “I think his handlers would assume that they want to make him as color-blind as he can possibly be.”

Black religious leaders say they’re not asking the president to help them; they want to help Obama. Some get calls and e-mails updating them on policy issues, including messages from Joshua DuBois, a black former Pentecostal pastor who directs the White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

Still, some want more.

“That’s not the president,” said Amos Brown of San Francisco’s Third Baptist Church, of DuBois, describing the phone calls as “for-your-information sessions.”

The White House declined to comment.

Hendricks noted “glimmers” of a change when the president unexpectedly “got on the line to thank us,” during a conference call with DuBois on March 21, after Obama’s health care reform package cleared the House.

Gerald Durley, senior pastor of Providence Missionary Baptist Church in Atlanta, said he and other clergy would like to sit down with the president—not staffers like DuBois—to discuss topics like unemployment, foreclosures and green jobs.

“I just want to certainly have that opportunity to give the kind of input to him personally rather than the advisers,” said Durley, chair of the Regional Council of Churches in Atlanta.

Timothy McDonald, pastor of Atlanta’s First Iconium Baptist Church, attended a White House meeting with dozens of black clergy last September, but left disappointed that it was “more informational than interactive.” The real loser in all this, he said, is Obama.

“Why haven’t we been engaged to counter the activities of the Tea Party and the birthers? Why haven’t we been engaged even now to prepare for immigration reform legislation?” asked McDonald, founder of African American Ministers in Action, a subsidiary of People for the American Way.

“One thing that you cannot do is ignore the clergy, whether you’re the first black president or not.”

The complaints, however, may be rooted in unrealistic expectations, generational differences or levels of political maturity, observers say.

Some black clergy, including those who served on an advisory panel for DuBois’ faith-based office, say they’ve had no problem getting their voices heard at the White House.

Otis Moss Jr., who just ended his one-year term on the council, said he has talked to Obama directly, but also knows from experience in previous administrations that connections to senior staff can be just as, if not more, significant.

“It is at that level that you get things accomplished that you may not get accomplished in a 15-minute audience with the president because … he is dealing with national and global issues that impact all of us,” said Moss, a retired Cleveland pastor whose son now is pastor of Obama’s former Chicago church, Trinity United Church of Christ.

Vashti McKenzie, bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, who also just finished her term as an adviser, said the council was a “major step forward” for blacks being included in communication with the White House.

What’s more, she said, it’s simply not “humanly possible” for Obama to meet with everyone.

“Is the president apprised of our concerns? I believe so,” she said. “Is he moving decidedly on a course to respond to the issues that are near and dear to us? I believe he is. Is he ignoring us? No. Is he keeping us out of the loop? No.”

Source

In an interview with The Daily Beast, the actor says Obama’s policies, so far, are no different than his Republican predecessor, George W. Bush.

“I think the Obama administration has followed the same playbook, to a large extent, almost verbatim, as the Bush administration. I don’t see anything different,” the activist movie star said of Obama’s policies in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Middle East. “On the domestic side, look here: What’s so clear is that this country from the outset is projecting the interests of wealth and property. Look at the bailout of Wall Street. Why not the bailout of Main Street?”

“He may be just a different face, and that face may happen to be black–and if it were Hillary Clinton, it would happen to be a woman,” Glover said. “But what choices do they have within the structure?”

More in sorrow than in anger, Glover went on: “What choice does he have–in four years, eight years? Let’s just call a spade a spade. Really. There are no choices out there.”

SOURCE: EUR Web

The Arlington Independent School District was one of several across the United States that opted out of the live broadcast of the president’s speech challenging students to take personal responsibility for their own education. Facing concerns on the part of parents and teachers that the speech might be used to promote a partisan political agenda, other districts responded by allowing individual schools to decide or to allow individual children to opt out of viewing the speech at their parents’ request.

School officials in Arlington — a large suburb located between Dallas and Fort Worth — said students with appropriate parental notification could take a half-day excused absence to watch the president’s address at an off-campus location like a home, church or community center.

One of those sites was Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington. The 4,500-member, predominantly African-American congregation invited students from both Arlington and the neighboring Mansfield Independent School District to watch the message at the church and offered free lunches to the first 100 students requesting them.

Veronica Griffith, minister of communications and special events at Cornerstone Baptist Church, said 160 students and more than 35 adults showed up for the screening.

Dwight McKissic, the church’s pastor, said it should be up to parents, not school administrators, to decide whether or not students should hear the president’s address. “No one should be forced to hear the message,” McKissic said in a press release. “However, what parent, teacher or administrator would not want students to hear a message encouraging them to be persistent in succeeding in school and to be challenged to work hard, set educational goals, and take responsibility for their learning?”

Later McKissic learned the Arlington Independent School District had accepted an invitation to take 28 fifth grade classes to a Sept. 21 media event sponsored by a committee preparing for the 2011 Super Bowl to be played at Arlington’s new $1.15 billion Dallas Cowboys football stadium.

Along with the former president and first lady, the program will feature “legendary Dallas Cowboys,” along with business and community leaders from across North Texas. The event, being held to announce “the largest youth-education program in Super Bowl history,” will give invited students free lunches and a T-shirt. Planners were also working to “secure a performance by a well-known recording artist to cap the festivities in high style.”

McKissic responded with a second press release calling it a “blatant double standard” to not permit students to hear one message while busing them to hear the other.

“Why is it appropriate for students to hear from former President Bush on Sept. 21 at the Cowboy[s] Stadium, but inappropriate for the current president to address students while they remain on school campuses?” McKissic asked. “Why is President Obama’s message considered to be an intrusion on the school day, a disruptive and unplanned class activity, a message ‘not deemed appropriate’ for students to hear or a message regarded as ‘something students should not be exposed to?’ Yet it is accepted as an appropriate message for students to hear from unnamed Dallas Cowboys, business and community leaders?”

McKissic said students and the public “deserve and need to have these differences explained.” He said the double standard reveals “obvious duplicity” in the district’s decision making.

McKissic is a former trustee at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth. He resigned from the post in 2007 over controversy about a sermon he preached in the seminary chapel voicing disagreement with a new policy at the Southern Baptist Convention’s International Mission Board disqualifying missionaries who admit to using a “private prayer language” in their devotional life. McKissic said the experience — viewed by many as a form of speaking in tongues — was part of his own prayer life, and that he first experienced it while attending Southwestern Seminary as a student in 1981.

McKissic made news earlier this year when he called on the SBC to pass a resolution celebrating the election of America’s first black president. The convention responded in June with a resolution applauding Obama’s election as a sign of “our continuing progress toward racial reconciliation” while deploring many of his policies.

McKissic posted audio of a sermon he preached prior to Obama’s January inauguration on the Cornerstone Baptist Church website comparing questions raised about the sincerity and legitimacy of the president’s faith to similar criticism directed toward Martin Luther King in the 1960s.

“Whenever a black man ascends to prominence and power, the political establishment tries to demonize that person,” McKissic said. He quoted the late Jerry Falwell, who in 1961 questioned “left-wing associations” of Martin Luther King. “They were accusing him of being a communist and a socialist like they accuse Barack Obama of being a communist and socialist,” he said.

McKissic went so far as to wonder if Obama’s election might have been foretold in an obscure reference in Psalm 68:31 prophesying, “Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God.”

“I don’t believe Barack Obama would be president if God hadn’t set him up to be president,” McKissic said.

McKissic said many white preachers want God to judge America for abortion and gay marriage. McKissic said he feels strongly on both of those issues but believes that racism is also a sin, and God must judge America for that sin as well.

“If I were God and I wanted to judge America for her racism, slavery, unjust wages — all the inequities that have occurred in this country — what better way to do it than go get a direct descendant of Africa?” he asked. “I’m talking about a man whose daddy comes from Africa — a people you thought were going to be your slave, to pick your cotton. If I were God, and I wanted to punish you for racism, I would go to get an African, and put [that] man as your president.”

Later in the sermon, McKissic chastised black teenagers for high dropout rates that he said dishonor earlier generations like the Little Rock Nine who faced threats and intimidation to improve educational opportunities for minority students.

“Folks paid a price for you to go to school and graduate,” he said. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

SOURCE: Associated Baptist Press News – Bob Allen

Gun-rights advocates say they’re exercising their constitutional right to bear arms and protest, while those who argue for more gun control say it could be a disaster waiting to happen.

Phoenix police said the gun-toters at Monday’s event, including the man carrying an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle slung over his shoulder, didn’t need permits. No crimes were committed, and no one was arrested.

The man with the rifle declined to be identified but told The Arizona Republic that he was carrying the assault weapon because he could. “In Arizona, I still have some freedoms,” he said.

Phoenix police Detective J. Oliver, who monitored the man at the downtown protest, said police also wanted to make sure no one decided to harm him.

“Just by his presence and people seeing the rifle and people knowing the president was in town, it sparked a lot of emotions,” Oliver said. “We were keeping peace on both ends.”

Last week, during Obama’s health care town hall in Portsmouth, N.H., a man carrying a sign reading “It is time to water the tree of liberty” stood outside with a pistol strapped to his leg.

“It’s a political statement,” he told The Boston Globe. “If you don’t use your rights, then you lose your rights.”

Police asked the man to move away from school property, but he was not arrested.

Fred Solop, a Northern Arizona University political scientist, said the incidents in New Hampshire and Arizona could signal the beginning of a disturbing trend.

“When you start to bring guns to political rallies, it does layer on another level of concern and significance,” Solop said. “It actually becomes quite scary for many people. It creates a chilling effect in the ability of our society to carry on honest communication.”

He said he’s never heard of someone bringing an assault weapon near a presidential event. “The larger the gun, the more menacing the situation,” he said.

Phoenix was Obama’s last stop on a four-day tour of western states, including Montana and Colorado.

Authorities in Montana said they received no reports of anyone carrying firearms during Obama’s health care town hall near Bozeman on Friday. About 1,000 people both for and against Obama converged at a protest area near the Gallatin Field Airport hangar where the event took place. One person accused of disorderly conduct was detained and released, according to the Gallatin Airport Authority.

Heather Benjamin of Denver’s Mesa County sheriff’s department, the lead agency during Obama’s visit there, said no one was arrested.

Arizona is an “open-carry” state, which means anyone legally allowed to have a firearm can carry it in public as long as it’s visible. Only someone carrying a concealed weapon is required to have a permit.

Paul Helmke, president of the Washington, D.C.-based Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, said people should not be allowed to bring guns to events where Obama is.

“To me, this is craziness,” he said. “When you bring a loaded gun, particularly a loaded assault rifle, to any political event, but particularly to one where the president is appearing, you’re just making the situation dangerous for everyone.”

He said people who bring guns to presidential events are distracting the Secret Service and law enforcement from protecting the president. “The more guns we see at more events like this, there’s more potential for something tragic happening,” he said.

Secret Service spokesman Ed Donovan said armed demonstrators in open-carry states such as Arizona and New Hampshire have little impact on security plans for the president.

“In both cases, the subject was not entering our site or otherwise attempting to,” Donovan said. “They were in a designated public viewing area. The main thing to know is that they would not have been allowed inside with a weapon.”

Representatives of the National Rifle Association did not return calls for comment.

source: Yahoo News

The event, held in the ballroom of the New York Hilton, drew several thousand dapper looking black men and women.

Speaking for about 45 minutes, Obama urged blacks to take responsibility for themselves, but also said the legacy of America’s discriminatory past was still being felt today.

During a White House reception last month with gay leaders, Obama said he would continue to speak on gay rights in front of unlikely audiences. Candidate Obama did so and often, but as president gay leaders had been feeling neglected.

“That’s why I’ve spoken about these issues not just in front of you, but in front of unlikely audiences – in front of African American church members, in front of other audiences that have traditionally resisted these changes [gay rights]. And that’s what I’ll continue to do. That’s how we’ll shift attitudes. That’s how we’ll honor the legacy of leaders like Frank [Kameny] and many others who have refused to accept anything less than full and equal citizenship,” Obama said.

And Thursday night Obama delivered, linking gay rights and civil rights to an audience that finds itself struggling to reconcile with gay issues. While top NAACP leaders support gay rights, many of its most prominent board members and chapter leaders do not.

Obama said there might be “a temptation among some to think that discrimination is no longer a problem in 2009.”

“But make no mistake, the pain of discrimination is still felt in America. By African-American women paid less for doing the same work as colleagues of a different color and gender. By Latinos made to feel unwelcome in their own country. By Muslim Americans viewed with suspicion for simply kneeling down to pray. By our gay brothers and sisters, still taunted, still attacked, still denied their rights.”

“On the 45th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, discrimination must not stand. Not on account of color or gender; how you worship or who you love. Prejudice has no place in the United States of America.”

Source: The Free Library

Regina Benjamin’s Bayou La Batre Rural Health Clinic doesn’t perform abortions. A clinic employee who declined to be identified said by telephone that patients seeking information about abortions would be referred to providers in the state.

White House spokesman Reid Cherlin said, however, that Benjamin “supports the president’s position on reproductive health issues.”

Obama supports abortion rights and public funding of contraception and sex education.

Cherlin continued: “Like him she believes that this is an issue where it is important to try and seek common ground and come together to try and reduce the number of unintended pregnancies. As a physician, she is deeply committed to the philosophy of putting her patients’ needs first when it comes to providing care.”

Benjamin also was a board member for Physicians for Human Rights, an international group that has advocated access to safe abortions in its investigation of human rights conditions in some countries.

The surgeon general is the nation’s “chief health educator” according to the federal government’s Web site. The office oversees the operations of the 6,000-member Commissioned Corps of the U.S. Public Health Service. While the job requires Senate confirmation, the surgeon general doesn’t directly set policy, reporting instead to an assistant secretary within the Department of Health and Human Services.

Benjamin has broken barriers for black women in medicine, as the first named to the American Medical Association Board of Trustees, in 1995, and to lead a state medical society, Alabama’s, in 2002. She’s also the recipient of a MacArthur Genius award.

She notably kept afloat her clinic, which serves a poor minority population of shrimpers, after it was wiped out in Hurricane Katrina by borrowing against her home and maxing out her credit cards. She’s been honored by the Pope.

Lloyd Dean, the president of Catholic Healthcare West, the largest hospital system in California, issued a statement saying he’s “delighted” by her nomination.

Supporters and opponents of abortion rights have withheld comment on Benjamin’s nomination, saying they wanted to learn more about her stances on reproductive rights.

That included the National Organization for Women and NARAL Pro-Choice, as well as the Catholic Health Association, on which Dr. Benjamin serves on the board of trustees.

On its Web site, the CHA says it believes “in health care from the Catholic Church’s teachings on the dignity of the human person and the sanctity of human life from conception to natural death.”

Gregg Bloche, a doctor and lawyer who served on the Physicians for Human Rights board with Benjamin, said he didn’t know her views on abortion and that it was never a focus of her advocacy work. “That is not something she’s engaged in,” he said.

“The story of her appointment and the potential of the job are, in my view, about getting people in the worst circumstances in life to be proactive about their own health needs, a grassroots initiative as part of a larger sense of both individual and common responsibility,” Bloche said. “I think that’s what her appointment represents. To get hung up on abortion would completely miss the point.”

Msgr. Michael Farmer, Vicar General of the Archdiocese of Mobile, Ala., told the Catholic News Agency that he didn’t “explicitly” know about Dr. Benjamin’s abortion stance and never discussed it with her. “I would hope that her position would be in line with the Church’s position,” he added. “As far as I know she has been in conformity with the Catholic Church.”

Source: Miami Herald

“I love the folks who helped get us in this mess and then suddenly say, ‘Well, this is Obama’s economy,’” the president told an outdoor crowd at Macomb Community College, veering off his scripted words. “That’s fine. Give it to me. My job is to solve problems, not to stand on the sidelines and harp and gripe.”

Obama did not identify his target for those comments, but he has been under increasing fire from Republicans over the pace of the economic recovery and the soaring deficit. He brought his message to a state reeling from the loss of auto jobs. Michigan’s unemployment rate is 14.1 percent, the nation’s worst.

“The hard truth is that some of the jobs that have been lost in the auto industry and elsewhere won’t be coming back,” Obama said. “They are the casualties of a changing economy.”

To that end, he proposed an “American Graduation Initiative” to bolster the two-year community college field that serves millions of students as a launching point for careers or a step toward expanded higher education. The idea is to train people for jobs, such as those expected in the clean energy industry, when the economy turns around and begins to create jobs again instead of shedding them.

Under the plan, competitive grants would be offered to schools to try new programs or expand training and counseling.

High dropout rates would be addressed by designing programs to track students and help them earn an associate’s degree or finish their education at a four-year institution. Money would also be spent to renovate and rebuild facilities, and online courses would be developed to help colleges offer more classes.

The White House says the cost would be $12 billion over 10 years; Obama says it would be paid for by ending wasteful subsidies to banks and private lenders of student loans.

“Time and again, when we have placed our bet for the future on education, we have prospered as a result,” Obama said.

Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, a former education secretary, said Obama’s plan is a “typical proposal” that sounds better than it is. “When our biggest problem as a country is too much debt, he’s taking the entitlement spending he claims to be saving from the student loan program and adding it to the debt,” Alexander said.

Obama’s speech came a day after the White House issued an upbeat report predicting that health care and environment-focused jobs would help drive a jobs recovery but that education and training would have to keep up with a demand for higher-skilled workers.

Earlier on Tuesday at the White House, Obama said he expected the nation’s unemployment rate would continue to “tick up for several months.”

It is now at 9.5 percent, the highest in 26 years. Obama said renewed hiring tends to lag behind other signs of economic recovery.

In Michigan, Obama called the $12 billion in spending over the next decade “the most significant down payment” yet toward achieving his goal of having the highest college graduation rate of any nation.

Speaking in rolled-up sleeves, Obama said jobs requiring at least an associate’s degree are expected to grow twice as fast as those where college education is not required.

“We will not fill those jobs, or keep those jobs on our shores, without the training offered by community colleges,” Obama said.

Community colleges have been feeling pinched lately. Enrollments have been increasing for several reasons, including rising college costs at public and private institutions and the needs of people who have lost jobs and are eager to learn new skills.

About 6 million students attend community college, administration officials said. Obama is setting a goal of 5 million additional college graduates.

Meanwhile, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan told Republican senators on Tuesday at their private weekly luncheon at the Capitol that the government’s $1 trillion deficit was the single biggest hurdle to economic recovery. In his speech, Obama acknowledged the problem of debt but said again that the only way to start reducing deficits is to reform the health care system, his dominant legislative priority.

Obama’s trip wasn’t all about policy, however. Before returning to the White House, he changed into jeans and the jacket of his beloved Chicago White Sox to throw out the ceremonial first pitch at Major League Baseball’s annual All-Star game at Busch Stadium in St. Louis. It was his first pitch as president.

The fourth season of this series can be seen Wednesday nights this summer at 10 p.m. Eastern and Pacific times.

Williams joins Stellar Award winner J. Moss, and one of the music industry’s most respected executives, Mitchell Solarek. The show is co-hosted by Mike Kasem and Kimberly Locke, the first American Idol alumna to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard charts with a non-Idol single.

This season, contestants will be surprised by the addition of two major musical artists who will coach them during the season.

Thirty-seven contestants were selected from thousands of people, 16-40 years old, from all genres of gospel/Christian musical styles, who auditioned. From that group 10 finalists will be chosen to vie for the grand prize, which includes record and music video exposure.

Williams certainly understands the demands of a musical career, first as a member of the highly successful Destiny’s Child with Beyonce Knowles and Kelly Rowland, and then as a Grammy-winning solo artist with the success of her first Gospel album Heart To Yours, the best selling Gospel album of 2002.

Unexpected, Williams’ third solo studio album is also her first full length dance-pop project.  The album recently produced more No. 1 album solo honors in both Japan and Australia, and her recent single, “We Break The Dawn” reached the No. 1 spot on the US Billboard Hot Dance chart.

Williams also has found success on the stage, following runs in Broadway’s Aida and as Suge Avery in the touring production of The Color Purple. She is preparing for her debut in London in a run as Roxie Hart in a West End run of Chicago.

SOURCE: Black America Web