It occurred to me tonight that Pres. Obama seems to be having more trouble with his black acquaintances than with whites.

It was that Reverend Jeremiah Wright who took attention away from Obama's campaign with his outrageously racist remarks against whites during his campaign, and now he has to deal with another loudmouth -- an alleged Harvard scholar Louis Gates -- who derailed Obama's healthcare reform initiative two weeks ago. Then the President tried to bring this whole thing to a climax with the famous "beer summit" last Thursday. Now tonight, Louis Gates is once again trying to grab the media spotlight with his statement tonight claiming that he had received death threats.

In his first public appearance since sharing a beer at the White House on Thursday with President Obama and Police Sgt. James Crowley, who is white, Gates, who is black, said the debate over racial profiling sparked by his arrest shows that issues of class and race still run "profoundly deep" in the United States.

"They have not been resolved at all," he told a crowd of more than 150 who came to see him at the Martha's Vineyard Book Festival. Gates said he had to shut down his public e-mail and change his cell-phone number after receiving numerous death and bomb threats.

You know, it is old black men like Louis Gates, Jesse Jackson, and Al Sharpton, who apparently don't have anything better to do than to rant and rave about race and the racial divide between blacks and whites because they have become obsessed and infatuated with the glare of the media...cameras, lights, and microphones.

Part of being "scholarly" is knowing when to speak up, and when to shut up.