Do not make the mistake of thinking that because my conclusion is the same as another person's that my reasoning is the same
Dizzying Dive to Red Ink Poses Stark Choices for Washington
By DAVID FIRESTONE
WASHINGTON, Sept. 13 — When President Bush informed the nation last Sunday night that remaining in Iraq next year will cost another $87 billion, many of those who will actually pay that bill were unable to watch. They had already been put to bed by their parents.
Administration officials acknowledged the next day that every dollar of that cost will be borrowed, a loan that economists say will be repaid by the next generation of taxpayers and the generation after that. The $166 billion cost of the work so far in Iraq and Afghanistan, which has stunned many in Washington, will be added to what was already the largest budget deficit the nation has ever known.
With a force that has surprised even critics of the administration, the Iraqi occupation has pushed to the forefront a budget deficit that had previously existed mostly as an abstract red stain on Democratic bar charts. With no extra money available for the foreseeable future, real choices are being illuminated on Capitol Hill — choices between electronic bombs and electrical grids, between low taxes now and lower retirement payments later.
Should Washington reconstruct Iraq's schools and hospitals, lawmakers are asking, or America's? Should it pay for more than 100,000 American troops to stay in Iraq, or for 40 million seniors to be offered prescription drugs through Medicare? And if it tries to do it all, should it keep cutting taxes?
The Bush administration says it can do all of the above, once the tax cuts inaugurate a burst of economic growth. Democrats and virtually every mainstream economist say that something will have to give, very possibly the government's retirement promises to millions of aging baby boomers.[p6: emphasis added]
Y'all boy Colin back in the news again…
GENEVA, Sept. 13 — The United States and other leading nations on the Security Council held intensive discussions over the future governance of Iraq today but failed to break the impasse over France's insistence that Iraq's transition to self-rule be overseen by the United Nations rather than the American occupation.
I get to take extended breaks from mainstream political topics because so many folks do it well, all I have to do is point and go, "Yeah, what he said."
Case in point one, from Brad DeLong:
Bush: "I do not need to explain why I say things. -- That�s the interesting thing about being the President. -- Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don�t feel like I owe anybody an explanation."
O, my heart sank when I read that quote. I�ve been thinking about it, off and on, ever since.
I recognize that behavior. Lord help me, I�ve seen it done. It�s one of the tactics you can use if you�re in an executive-level job that�s beyond your abilities, you have to have meetings with underlings who know more than you do, and your only concern is to save face while making sure they�re giving you what you want.
Case in point two, from Digby, discussion David Brooks' editorials on Bush:
In the first column he portrayed the muscular Bush administration as being unwilling to admit it was wrong --- but ending up doing the right thing nonetheless. Never complain, never explain. Just get the job done, dammit. Peggy Noonan and the girls sigh deeply and call for another Mojito. He's no jump roping Clinton. He'll take the heat to get the job done. Real Men never apologize. They're too busy saving the world.
Today, in a twofer, he twists Dean's straight talking image and real record of accomplishment into one of a phony blue blooded aristocrat who was bred for leadership and merely pretends to be a regular guy. This is designed to sow doubts among his followers about his authenticity.
Then, setting aside his obvious mental deficiencies and life long failures, he uses the same WASP association to elevate the image of the real inbred Little Prince to show that his silver spoon actually well prepared him for leadership.
The first two Brooks columns have very creatively made Bush appear to be a strong, decisive leader, who by birth and experience was destined to lead the world -- a man unaffected by the criticism of the chattering classes, focused only on results. He's done this in a much more subtle way than the bludgeoning you find on Fox or the Wall Street Journal editorial page, but we should not mistake it for anything but the Bush marketing it really is.
Let's see, there's Cecily at Formica:
And there's Lynne d Johnson
Plus we got Luis, who get's a whole post, just scroll down.
And of course, me and my comments--which includes a thought or two on Islamic bloggers by Al-Muhajabah.
Anyone else?
[LATER: Corrected Cecily's name in the title (damn spellchecker!)]
Colorado Luis (an instant addition to the blogroll, btw) has picked up on the "What does it mean" in his own Latino context:
Like S-Train (see the comments to "What Does It Mean To Be A Black Blogger?"), Luis decided right up front that the ethnicity gors right up front:
Why do I say "brown"? Because as I have mentioned before, the terms "Latino" and "Hispanic" are notoriously imprecise and intended to capture some people who enjoy the societal benefits of whiteness, while what I am talking about is blogging by people of color about the experience of being nonwhite in America. In an era when people had a more sophisticated understanding of race than most people have today, laws were passed banning discrimination on the basis of "race, color or creed." Today, people try to define "race" out of existence without addressing the reality that people in this country notice color and act on it pretty much constantly.
Defining race out of existance.
Don't. Get. Me. Started.
Buried in there are links to his previous stuff. Check 'em.
He also says:
I have a very serious reason for separating the idea of Black blogs and Black bloggers, which is there's still way too fucking much noise about who's authentically Black. I ain't having none of that discussion in here. General Powell is Black. Disappointing, but Black. Condoleeza Rice is Black. Her great intelligence perverted by her dedication to The Dark Side, but Black. Thomas Sowell is Black. A sellout, but Black. Fifty Cent is Black. A bad fucking example, but Black.
And Kos is Brown, but because his blog is totally oriented on mainstream issues I can't say his blog is. Again, he's not in denial; you can't say "I am MEChA" in the middle of all this noise and be in denial, but the noise is a mainstream issue and is the only reason you know.
And there nothing wrong with that; just as there's nothing wrong with Luis' blog or mine, or MB's or Baldilocks' or any of a great number of blogs or magazines or web sites or organizations.
In closing:
Seriously, I been easy to miss. I haven't been blogging for a year, and after all, Atrios and Tapped never read my blog If, instead of saying;
improvements in productivity means less workers are required to produce the same output
we said
improvements in productivity mean workers produce the required value with less effort
what would the impact on employment policy be?
The 500,000 people who live in Washington, D.C., are accustomed to being humiliated by Congress, which dictates everything from how the city spends its tax dollars to how it collects the garbage — while denying Washingtonians a vote in the body that runs their affairs. This arrangement becomes painfully obvious at election time, when Republicans typically grandstand for the far right by ramming outrageous proposals down the throats of the city's overwhelmingly Democratic voters.
Thanks to this dictatorial oversight, the District of Columbia is the only city in the country that is barred by Congress from spending locally raised tax dollars to provide abortions for impoverished women. For a decade, the same intrusive Congress barred the city from extending domestic partnership rights to gay people.
This year, Congress is trying to force the city to send about 1,300 public school children to private, mainly parochial, schools at public expense over the objections of the school board and a majority of the city's elected officials, including Eleanor Holmes Norton, the city's nonvoting representative in the House.
There are a handful of small voucher programs at work around the country. But voters have rejected statewide voucher initiatives in state after state, including California, home of Senator Dianne Feinstein, who has inexplicably endorsed the tyrannical Washington proposal — one that would lead to an uprising were it tried in her home state.
This proposal is antidemocratic, but its faults run deeper. It further erodes the wall between church and state by pushing children toward parochial schools, which make up a vast majority of Washington schools. Private school tuition would be covered by the proposed stipend of up to $7,500. This new federal money is likely to drive out the private money that Washingtonians have been raising for children trying to move into private schools.
This proposal sends the wrong message by funneling public money to private schools at a time when public schools are broke. It also brings attention to the fact that the Bush administration has failed to finance fully its vaunted public school initiative, No Child Left Behind, which was supposed to remake public education but is rapidly becoming just so much window dressing.
Man, Yu-Gi-Oh! would rock without the damn commercials.
via Billmon
by Werther*
As the administration's Iraq "policy" careens out of control like a car stolen by joy-riding teenagers, critics are confronted with the inevitable retort: "But what would you do? Be constructive!" In truth, this rejoinder is a red herring: people who had no role in creating this mess have no moral "responsibility" for solving it; the authors of the mess have. And to the extent one accepts responsibility for rescuing the situation, one implicitly believes that one actually has a role in governing this erstwhile republic. In reality, the neo-con-artists, Big Oil plutocrats, and "defense" contractors will not release their iron grip on U.S. foreign policy until their avaricious hearts cease to beat.
But in the constructive spirit of Jonathan Swift's "Modest Proposal," we herewith offer a few eminently constructive suggestions:
The suggestions are such that if they were followed even I would consider voting for the adminstration that did it.
By David S. Broder
Sunday, September 14, 2003; Page B07
…But there was one thing I found revealing about their performance, and it had nothing to do with the way they dealt with Iraq, Israel, the economy, health care -- or each other.
I was riveted by their reactions when backers of Lyndon LaRouche, the leader of a fringe political faction and chronic candidate for the Democratic nomination, repeatedly interrupted proceedings at the Congressional Black Caucus debate with loud complaints about LaRouche's exclusion.
The only candidate who knew how to deal with this unprogrammed event -- the only one who figured out how to profit from it -- was, believe it or not, Al Sharpton.
That doesn't erase the many liabilities he brings into the contest, but it does show he has a quality people crave in a president -- the ability to take charge of a situation.
The first time the shouting broke out, Sen. Bob Graham of Florida was speaking. He froze. So did almost all his rivals. Sharpton was the first person to find his voice. He told the hecklers, "Now, you all don't get to the Black Caucus debate and start acting up now."
The second outburst -- shouts of "Where is LaRouche?" -- came when Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut was answering a question. He just stood there looking pained. Former Vermont governor Howard Dean was quick-witted enough to comment, "I suspect he's in jail," where LaRouche had been on mail fraud charges. But again it was left to Sharpton to admonish the noisemakers.
Addressing the moderator, Fox News's Brit Hume, Sharpton said, "Brit, can we appeal to people? I mean, this is a historic night, the first time the Congressional Black Caucus had a debate. Would you all respect our right to be heard like we respected everybody else?"
A wave of applause signaled that most in the audience were glad somebody was taking charge.
Twice more, there were outbursts -- once interrupting Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts and then Lieberman again.
All the victims turned to Sharpton for help. In stern tones, he told the offending members of the audience that the candidates would not "tolerate the continual breakup of what we are trying to say here tonight to the American people…You've not done it at any other debate. You're not going to do it now. You're playing this phony liberal game, and you wait until our night to start acting up. We don't appreciate it. I don't care who's not on this stage. You're going to respect us on this stage because we've got something to say."
A relieved Lieberman said, "Well, first, let me say to my dear friend, Reverend Sharpton, amen."
When Racial Discrimination Is Not Just Black and White
By BRENT STAPLES
The historian John Hope Franklin is black to the naked eye. A boulevard named in his honor runs through Greenwood, the black section of Tulsa, Okla., where he lived as a child. The Franklins are not just black, however, but also Native American. Milley Franklin, Mr. Franklin's grandmother, was one-quarter Choctaw and was raised as Choctaw, attending Indian schools. Her children — including John Hope Franklin's father, the lawyer B. C. Franklin — are clearly listed on the official tribal rolls that determined who was a member of the Choctaw Nation. The rolls were important, since tribal members got land when the reservations were dissolved.
Americans are often shocked to learn that black Indians exist at all — and that Native Americans actually held slaves. Like the white slave owners they emulated, Native Americans often fathered children by enslaved women and occasionally — as in Milley Franklin's case — treated those children as family. As a result, millions of black Americans are descended from black people who were either members of the tribes during slavery or adopted into them just after Emancipation.
White families have begun to acknowledge mixed-race connections after centuries of denial. But the attitudes of some Native Americans have not evolved in the same way. Both the Seminole and the Cherokee tribes have employed discriminatory policies to prevent black members from receiving tribal benefits — and to strip them of the right to vote in tribal elections.
The Interior Department, which oversees the tribal governments through the Bureau of Indian Affairs, has historically regarded this kind of racial discrimination as a violation of 19th-century treaties that required the Indian nations to treat black members as full citizens. But the Bush administration could conceivably change course and actually validate these discriminatory policies.
I was going to something on that Malaysian/Muslim?Hip-hop convergence, but I realized tha Lynne said it all, including some stuff I didn't think of
The slug on this made me worry:
Eh yo, trip*! *Check this out!
They look like African Americans, dress like them, move like them and even use hip-hop terms like them. With rare exceptions, the hip-hop lookalikes are Malay. ARLINA ARSHAD reports on a phenomenon that is worrying some people in the Malay/Muslim community.
But after reading it I realized it wasn't that bad…
I just hate the fact that although hip-hop has arrived, it is still considered nefarious. It's also interesting that hip-hop becomes a global product that gets to represent American Black Culture Worldwide. If it ain't got to do with hip-hop, then those abroad won't believe it's authentically black. Shit, there are some white folks right here in the states who won't believe it either.
Peep this statement I wrote in an abstract for a paper I once delivered: Hip-hop is the most commercially successful black cultural product of the last twenty years. Its wide global transmission relies heavily on the networks of America�s recording industry and its distribution mechanisms. These controlled channels of distribution in turn lend to a controlled worldwide distribution of black culture.
What with shit like Fiddy using bullet scars as marketing tools, I totally understand why hip-hop is still seen as nefarious. My problem is that, as Lynne says, it is the only image of Black Americans much of the world has…including much of America.
Just ran past S-Train. Sometimes I think I need to make a special category for the brother. Check his 9/11 post:
When talking to the convicts, I found out within 20 seconds that my "keep your head up approach" wasn't going to fly. Those men looked at me like I was a piece of crap. Now I'm here to try explain to these men about the challenges of getting out in society. Ex-cons hardly get second chances, some deservedly so, others not. And they already knew that. So I changed my approach. And hit them with some bleak, nasty stuff. I remembered most of what I said, I'll give you a little taste (I caution you, I do use strong language):
Some of you might as well not leave since you don't have the balls to do what you have to do when you get out. Because you are going to have act like Mother Theresa for you to get any trust, brothers. You going to have to submit yourselves to having your soul ripped out, rearranged, and slammed back in your heart. Your going to have to quell that sick rage in you and find an positive outlet or your black, sorry ass will die. Your going to have to challenge your very existance up to now, and win the challenge. Everything you thought up to now is nothing now. You have to think new or die
But before I do, I have to say I'd have posted this in your comments, except when the page refreshes to update your iTunes play list it wipes out whatever has been entered in the comments form. Grrr.
People just do thing, events just happen, and meaning is extracted from our memories of the events. If we do stuff in order to project a meaning, that will just be another element that goes into the memory bank, another part of the pattern from which meaning will actually be extracted.
I'm not sure Black folks who blog are doing anything different than any other bloggers. Some of us do politics, some have personal blogs, whatever whatever. But writing this makes me think about exactly what is a "Black blogger." Because it's not just a Black person who has a blog. A number of Black folks what blog don't have what you'd call "Black content" (which I'm using as shorthand for "content derived from and/or targeted to participants in African American culture and their activities"). It's hard to tell some folks are Black just from the content.
So do you include a Steve Gilliard or a Jesse Taylor as Black bloggers? I don't know…I include them as Black guys, but they don't focus on Black content like any number of us do. They're not in denial or anything either, it's more like it makes no sense to say, "I'm Black and Bush sucks." I've seen both of them be very clear that they are Black when it was appropriate to the subject they were writing on. But I don't know if I'd call them "Black bloggers."
I think I have to switch up a bit and refer to "Black blogs" instead of "Black bloggers" for clarity's sake. I can skip the extra quotes that way.
So. What does it mean to run a Black blog? I think it's either an attempt to make a statement or a connection. In my case, it's the statement (though to be honest, the connections I've made incidental to the statements I've made have been rather cool. Not deep, but that may be me).
You remember that old cartoon:
Of course, nowadays we know better. We know it's more like this:
The real response to the first cartoon, though, is "What's wrong with being a dog?"
Why should someone be satisfied by acceptance that comes at the price of anonymity? Is that acceptance anyway?
All Black people view themselves from the outside as well as from the inside to a degree that mainstream folks do not understand. This is what DuBois meant by his dual soul formulation, to this day the best description of the core problem of being Black in the USofA I've ever read. And while traveling in the mainstream, Black folks tend to give primacy to the external view for practical reasons.
The connections made online, through blogs, mailing lists, discussion boards and the like, provide opportunities to express and develop that internal view in ways that are socially unprecedented. That Black topics don't have the same weight in everyone's internal view is fine. In fact, it helps shatter the stereotypes and scatter the pieces.
And we're STILL not doing anything any other blogger isn't doing.
I just crept into Large Mammal status. And I'm really not sure how that happened.
Not sure how long it'll last either.
Totally unrelated to that, I haven't read the news or even the editorial cartoons today. I'll get to it, but I doubt posting anything about it. I've been scanning my normal political blogs but reading culture via following links from blogs by Black folks. I can't comment on all of them, of course, but I have to get to several on Lynne d Johnson's diary. In particular, I'm reminded to comment on an article on a Malaysian/Muslim/Hip hop intersection and what does it mean to be a black blogger.
I can't believe someone is searching for cartoons nude and fucking.
Relations Break Down Between U.S. and Them
WASHINGTON, DC—After decades of antagonism between the two global powers, the U.S. has officially severed relations with Them, Bush administration officials announced Tuesday.
"They have refused to comply with the U.S. time and time again," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, following failed 11th-hour negotiations Monday night. "It's always unfortunate when diplomacy fails, but we could not back down. We have to be ready to fight back, in the name of freedom, against all of Them at once, if necessary."
Rumsfeld added: "If They're not with us, They're against us."
U.S.-Them relations have been strained for nearly three years, but disagreements came to a head last week, when two of Their leaders opposed a U.S.-drafted U.N. proposal seeking cooperation from Them in important peacekeeping missions.
"We've tried reasoning, but Their agendas are in direct opposition to ours," Vice-President Dick Cheney said. "They stand in stark defiance of stated U.S. policy. We cannot and will not allow Them to dictate global policy."
Many current U.S. policies regarding Them are outlined in a recent State Department report titled "Long Term Organizational And Regulatory Governmental Procedures: U.S. vs. Them." According to the document, the standoff is a result of Their continued economic encroachment, Their ongoing reluctance to allow U.S. military bases on Their lands, and the refusal of many of Them to speak English.
"The U.S. is surrounded on all sides by Them," Rumsfeld said. "Over 90 percent of the planet's land mass is controlled by Them, and the territories immediately south, west, east, and north of the U.S. are all occupied by Them. Until we can correct this risky state of affairs, it is vital that we maintain our military readiness to intervene whenever and wherever They oppose us."
Another key factor in the standoff is U.S. dependence on Them-controlled resources.
"The world's petrochemical supplies are nearly exhausted," National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said. "If we allow Them to control the only remaining fossil-fuel sources, how are we supposed to get our oil? By buying it from Them?"
"They only think about what's good for Them, but we're concerned with the needs of all Americans," Rice added.
Aaron at Uppity-Negro missed a dinner date declares himself the suckiest suckass in the history of sucking. Having known some suckers that truly excel in sucking, some whose suckage skill are an inspiration to the fine engineers at Hoover Vacuums and make high-class hookers green with envy, I can't say I agree.
Besides, he linked to an interesting email panel discussion on why "Black Books" (being comic books) don't sell.
Some very interesting answers. Bloggers should appreciate the snark factor in Kyle J. Baker's answer:
Doesn't the second question answer the first one?"
And I found Alan Grant's answer rather disappointing:
I've no idea why 'black books' don't sell. I've heard uncorroborated reports that DC's 'black' line of the 90s folded as much because of editorial profligacy as disappointing sales. I'm pretty sure "black books" sell okay in Africa (Brian Bolland and Dave Gibbons began their careers working on Power Man for--I think--a Nigerian publisher)."
The first paragraph is just bullshit, end of story. And as for "editorial profligacy," well, if that means folks didn't care for the most powerful team in the Milestone universe being gang-bangers I'd agree. That's the reason I guessed at myself. Grant has been around long enough to just ask the creators, or even the editorial board at DC Comics, if he were interested.
Many of the other folks referred to racism as being involved in one way or another…Craig Lemon made an excellent observation:
And as Professor William H. Foster III noted:
Back in the 1990s when Milestone and DC Comics teamed up to produce racially diverse titles, I was told by some of my friends who own comic shops that they weren't sure how to market the titles. So they do sell, it's just that, well, there are some problems to work out.
But I remember the Milestone line. Every Black kid on Staten Island was after them. I have the entire run, including the DC crossover, in storage. Truth, though, there is a problem in that the image of an extraordinarily powerful Alpha Black person is not something many non-Black folks are interested in reading about. That has to be said.
And the panel noted the lack of Black creators as well. The best example of the problem this creates is the last Power Man series I read. I'm pulling this from memory, so I don't remember the writers involved (something I tended not to pay that much attention to, actually) but I do remember the impact it had on me. I bought the first issue with low expectations. I realized the writer was Black by the dialog…Power Man was pounding on a series of flunkies and said something like, "Step on up, I got something for ya, boyee…" and that "boyee" was like, proper ebonics. They changed the writer a couple of issues in, and at one point Power Man said "All you boyees sumpinsumpinsumpin" and he referred to everyone as "boyee" like it was the only piece of Black slang the writer knew.
Aw, shit. Went straight downhill from there.
And then there was Icon, who in is secret identity was slightly to the right of Rush Limbaugh. In one issue, after finding out his sidekick (who was the person the book was really about) was pregnant, pulled baby-daddy aside for a heart to heart.
Any really righteous person of any race could have written Icon's dialog…but few non-Black people would know that.
This is the real problem with Black characters. The way the industry moves writers from book to book it's just not possible to have a consistently Black character (Christopher Priest's Black Panther being a real exception).
I don't think I'll call myself an American for the next day or so.
...I remember the day I took out the Koran from my bag in order to read it on the way to work. It was, I am ashamed to admit, my first and last day. It took only a couple of stops for someone to make a comment. "You�re making people uncomfortable". I turned to find a man scowling and a couple of people staring blankly at me. I asked the owner of the voice what exactly I was doing that was making people uncomfortable and he told me straight out that it was the Arabic "shit" I was reading and that I should put it away. Anything written in Arabic has to be a threat of course. I did not quite know how to respond to him. I looked around and saw the clutter of newspapers declaring war on innocent Iraqis (is there even such a thing?) I saw women reading their bibles in English, Spanish, Cantonese, Polish...
...I was told by friends and family not to read the Koran in public anymore. "No sense in provoking people," they said. And as I mentioned before, I am very ashamed to admit that I have not read it in the subway since that day. I have developed a certain kind of self-censorship that I am not proud of and try to fight daily. My war zone scares me because I do not know what I am fighting against. I do not having anything tangible to battle and do not even have allies. How can I protect myself against something I cannot grasp? How can I reclaim my space?...
...What one considers a simple subway ride I have begun to consider a daily struggle. I struggle to maintain my identity, struggle to find the strength to stop hiding. I do not want to live in a war zone. I do not want to feel terror. Every moment I spend on the subway I spend FIGHTING for my existence. I have not taken out my Koran; I have not been able to be quite that defiant yet...
I didn't watch any 9/11 thing. And I didn't read any 9/11 articles, including the blog entries that are sprouting mushrooms.
Okay, I caught a piece if the kids reading their relatives' names at "Ground Zero." And I heard the news anchor talking about how watching these children do this recalled the pain and anguish of 9/11 and I'm like, "Why the fuck would anyone want to recall the pain and anguish?"
Look, I'm not saying you should drop the whole issue. This ain't about forgiveness or forgetfulness.
I'm just saying I've had deaths in my life too, and I know that if you keep peeling that scab and pouring salt in that would you don't heal. I strongly suspect that's true on a national scale as well as a personal one.
Excess emotion blocks clear judgement. That's all I'm saying.
I read Atrios, and in fact all the A-list types, in waves. I go past their sites for some reason or other, read every day for a week or two, then read entirely other folks for a week or two. Lather, rinse, repeat.
When I do get to Atrios, though, he can be rather funny:
I guess you Blogger folks know this, but in case you don't:
Good news, folks! The feature wagon just arrived and dropped off a host of bloggity goodness at rock-bottom prices. And we're passing the savings on to you! That is, we're rolling in a bunch of features that will give you more powerful and flexible publishing power (for free).
These features include:
Spellchecking: Fewer typos. Look smarter.
Post-Dating: Adjust the date and time for a post, so it can show up under yesterday's heading, or save it for a later date (so you remember to post about your friend's birthday).
Drafts: Not done with that thought? Mark it a draft and complete it later. Or keep things in draft form for your own reference.
Daily Archiving: In addition to monthly and weekly options.
Post Titles: An optional field to add a title, or subject line, to each post. Handy if you format things that way in your template.
Post Template: If you routinely use the same formatting or HTML in your posts, load it in automatically.
BlogSend: Post to your blog, and it is sent via email.
Image/File Upload: Easily upload and link to photos and other files when making a post. Not available for non-Plus .blogspot.com sites!
We also released a couple other features recently, which you may have missed:
Better Internationalization: Time zones and date formatting is now supported for locales around the world. We also have better encoding for many different character sets.
Secure Publishing: If you're publishing to an outside host (instead of blogspot.com), you can now use SFTP instead of FTP. (It's more secure — ask your web host if they support it.)
For more information on how to use these features, check the (also new) Blogger Knowledge Base.
Though I need to tell you, they should have made sure the editor was correct before posting that notice.
They got stuff for ya if you're a Blogger Pro person too. A sweatshirt or partial refund, because the only things that distinguish a Pro account from a free account is stuff you may well not be using. It's good that they remembered, I give 'em props for that.
Now if their archives would only work…
via Hesiod
Man Buys Groceries With Fake $200 Bill
Bill Bears President Bush's Image On Front
ROANOKE RAPIDS, N.C. - Police are searching for a man who paid for $150 in groceries at a Food Lion grocery store with a $200 bill.
The man walked out of the store with his groceries and $50 in change before the fake bill was discovered Sept. 6.
The bogus bill - the U.S. Mint does not print a $200 bill - bore the image of President George W. Bush on the front and had the White House on the back. It also included signs on the front lawn of the front lawn of the White House with slogans such as "We like broccoli" and "USA deserves a tax cut," Roanoke Rapids police said.
Instead of being labeled a Federal Reserve note, the fake bill was marked as a "Moral Reserve Note." The bill bore the signatures of Ronald Reagan, political mentor, and George H.W. Bush, campaign adviser and mentor.
Officials at the local Food Lion had no comment.
I was just think that if blogs had existed before I became old and bitter, this thing might have been more like Glenn's Hi. I'm Black!.
Then I realized I've ALWAYS been old and bitter.
Hi. I'm...Gray? Striped? Layered? Whatever, this could be amusing.
Though I'll always disagree with The Black Republican, I think I will be grateful for finding out about The Fourth Turning and may have to buy the book and its sequel, Millennials Rising.
via MaxSpeak
http://www.distributive-justice.com/mainpage_frame-e-n.htm
Very graphical, very interactive, very interesting sets of data and very, very cool.
Having found Julian Sanchez views the multi dimensionality of political thought much as I do was interesting, as it's likely he is unfamiliar with me as I am with him. Al-Muhajabah says he's a thoughtful libertarian and as I've found her judgment trustworthy I decided this morning to look around his site. I found his review of Thomas Sowell's "The Quest for Cosmic Justice" an interesting read.
People who've read more than two days worth of posts here will accurately assume I have little truck with Sowell's political positions, so I have not read the book myself. I will say Mr. Sowell would make an intellectually challenging adversary. He tends to make fairly sound, detailed analyses that are difficult to refute. One can, however, understand his analyses and turn them on the positions he himself holds, while insuring ones own positions are sound enough not to be vulnerable to the same tactics. Anyway, because I haven't read it I can't really say I'm taking issue with Sowell, and because I've commenting on Mr. Sanchez' review I have to assume his take on the book is correct. And though I believe Mr. Sanchez finds himself in accord with the meaning he finds in Mr. Sowell's book, because he is presenting his view of Sowell's ideas rather than his own, I can't take issue with Mr. Sanchez' views either. An interesting balancing act.
From the review:
That "[t]oday�s desirable outcome is often tomorrow�s perverse incentive" is indisputable, though. It's a parallel to the social truism "there are only permanent interests." Laws and rules are not internal to us, they are a part of the environment we respond to. So changing the rules doesn't change our motivation, it merely changes what we must to to achieve our goals. The results of our actions further modify the environment, which change we respond to, et cetera until, like all self modifying structures, the process generates something that was both unpredictable and inevitable.
That "individual differences in economic status, talent, or character…result from the position one is arbitrarily born into" I take strong exception to as regards talent and character. I don't know whether to direct my ire toward Sowell or Sanchez, so I'll leave it at that for the moment.
Onward…
Further points I'd like to make can, I think, be done by quoting the review and asking that you apply the principle expounded in the quote to the Conservative position. I invite you to read the review and judge for yourself if my quotes are taken unfairly out of context.
Divested of the partisan examples and rendered as skeletal principle, Sowell's book would appear to be as great an indictment of the current direction of Conservative action as part Liberal thought.
You can keep up with Ghod knows how many blogs with an RSS reader.
The thing is, I'm not sure I want to. The amount of ignorance, willful blindness or just toadying and toeing the party line—and yes, I'm talking about the conservatives out there—is unbelievable. Add to that the denial about racial realities and I become seriously concerned.
Take for instance the post immediately below this one. It's about Tapped's great moral concern over "identity politics." Given the reality of the situation, what's the alternative? None, Atrios was right and anyone with even a single eye can see that. But did you read the comments to my post? Brad DeLong (whose name I will capitalize correctly from now on) said:
What is driving TAPPED is the fact that Richard Nixon's decision in the 1960s to turn the Republican Party into the Party That Doesn't Like Black People has been a tremendous electoral success for Republicans, and that TAPPED is desperate to find a way to somehow minimize this factor in American elections.
If true, and Brad has shown himself to be perceptive so his opinion has weight with me, the folks at Tapped are more concerned that people they have influence with return to power than morality…and they seem willing to sell out minorities to make that happen. At minimum they are trying to convince minorities to set aside our interests for the benefit of others. Again. And if we do, what happens when "liberals" take control again? Do we get to be heard then?
No!
Because it will just have been proven that the way to gain and keep power is to ignore minorities!
There's a lot of people out there in the mainstream that, whether they understand my issues or not (many don't) do not accept this. I know that. But it feels to me like the DLC and its ilk are a fifth column in progressive ranks.
I also know there's a number of white folks that understand, if not feel, the issues. Frankly, this nation's only hope it that those white folks speak up and more…that the truth they speak is accepted. That people recognize that we can do more than one thing at a time, that white people, Black people, Mexican people Amerind people, European, Asian and African immigrant people have issue that can all be addressed if the greed and power hunger of a few are not permitted to run roughshod over the morals and ethics this nation professes.
I know the USofA did NOT become the power it is today through the neat power sharing methods it promotes for the use of other nations. But I know that as a nation we are wealthy and powerful enough to do what we demand of other.
I just hope the nation decides to do it, at least within our national territory.
The identity politics discussion between Tapped and Atrios has been interesting.
I have no issues with Atrios' position (while recognizing that he could conceivably have issues with mine). And I actually understand what Tapped is saying, but I have some questions for the crew at The American Prospect that will unfortunately never be asked of them. Not snarky questions like my last set…I was annoyed and that was my gut response. But I have thought through my position. I do have reasons for being so intently partisan.
If I say "Black people" each and every American knows exactly who I'm talking about…a socially defined, rather arbitrary group of such varied appearance it makes no sense to say we're grouped by skin color. My sister Natalie prefers "melanin challenged." A brother I know talks about "the New Afrikan Nation." I myself when being precise say "people whose African ancestry is the visually and/or culturally dominant feature to the perceiver." And all the alternatives somehow coincide. The same group of people are under discussion.
We generalize by talking about culture as the defining trait, or we discuss "people of color" to dilute the differences. We suggest EA (Economic Assistance) replace AA (Affirmative Action) and insist on race neutrality. All noble intellectual positions. And we know race is as much a social construct as the Oakland Raiders. But just as the Raiders have the same interests as the Tennessee Titans yet must approach them differently because of the specific composition of the team, the different "identity interest" groups, due to the specific composition and experiences of the individuals that compose them, have different needs and require different approaches to pursue those goals.
Does this make sense?
My question for Tapped is, how do they suggest we proceed? Do they suggest that we simply deny our specific needs?
I've referred to this in the past as The Procrustean Problem. It comes down to this: there are aspects of, say, the Latino experience that simply doesn't fit into the box defined by the mainstream, or by the Black experience, or the European immigrant experience. If, for instance, Black people choose their responses solely from the options provided by the mainstream experience, aspects of ourselves will be unserved and others will be amputated.
Is this truly what they suggest? I think not. I hope not. I'd like to think their concern is over not exceeding the point where a difference in degree becomes a difference in kind, and the point where excessive rhetoric becomes a goad. But in truth, when we whose issues do not match the mainstream's precisely read suggestions that we abandon the pursuit of those issues from putative allies, it sounds a lot like that point has been reached by the mainstream.
via Move The Crowd
WHOSE GOT THE (PIMP) JUICE? Better not answer that unless you wanna get boycotted.
"Nelly is selling out because he only cares about making money, just like pimps and drug pushers. We intend to chase Nelly's Pimp Juice out the black community," stated Ali, National director of Project Islamic Hope.
Jes' funnin'…
In keeping with a promise I made myself I added dcthornton.com to the RSS reader. Today he pointed approvingly to a post by Dean Esmay, with whom I am unfamiliar, about why he's no longer a Democrat though he calls himself a Liberal. Fair enough…as I said when I first started blogging:
This is a major reason I'd align myself with the left. The right isn't considering the issues of importance to the Black folks that need to be drawn into the political process at all. They are considering the issues they think will resolve the problems they see � to the right, "minority issues" means "issues I have with minorities." A large component of the Black community feels the left, or more particularly the Democratic party, deals with us the same way. I've had that thought as well, but the fact is there is significant agreement on the questions between the political left and the Black community. At least the questions get some light.
Anyway, Mr. Esmay's points seem to be:
I think the big change for me came when I became a believer in School Choice. In reading about it, it seemed so logical, so fair, and so right.
Personally, I'm more concerned that students universally have the opportunity for a quality education. The No Child Left Behind bill has all the right rhetoric, which is why there was bipartisan support for it. It hasn't been funded as authorized, the teacher enrichment portions has lain fallow and the funds for the tutorial and student after-school programs have come up short. According to The Education Trust, which is a big supporter of NCLB, Congress and the administration has focused so much on accountability and testing that the rest of it has fallen all to hell. Democrats who supported the bill admit this; Republicans don't. This leads me to believe Democrats are more serious about education than Republicans.
Now, that doesn't speak specifically to school choice, but school choice isn't my issue…education is. If school choice can be shown to improve universal access to quality education, I'd support it. But that would mean there'd have to be enough quality schools (equipment, teachers, class size, we know how to make schools work…search around The Education Trust's web site and see) for all kids, which means we'd have to fix the public schools anyway. So why don't we just stop fuggin around and do it?
Because school choice isn't what parents want. Quality schools is what they want and if you give it to them around the corner from their house or in a magnet school, it's all good either way. In other words, school choice in an insufficient criterion on which to judge an education policy.
Mr Esmay also says:
I also never understood--still don't--the Democratic Party's visceral loathing for the idea of a missile defense system.
Well, for my self, the problem is THEY DON'T WORK. And you can't find a competent technologist who's not on the payroll to develop them who'll say it's even close. Budget for research, fine. But budgeting for a full blown system is stupid.
There's also a complaint about "all that anti-business rhetoric out of Democrats" and I'm not sure what rhetoric that is. Is taxation is inherently anti-business? I don't think so.
Then, Mr Esmay goes into the Social Security thing:
I'm also a Gen-X'er who has come to believe that the current Social Security System is broken, and needs fixing. Band-aids and lock-boxes won't do it.
Well, this post points to a Wall St. Journal article I can't read because I never paid the gatekeeper. But the part that's quoted says:
…not to mention pointing at a 131-page NBER working paper on the topic that, as suggested, should be taken…with a grain of salt…into account.
The last problem Mr. Esmay has, other than Democrats constantly complaining about Bush (a trait I share with them) is their complaints about cutting taxes on rich guys. Being great of spirit, he says he's realized that someone else getting a bag of money is no skin off his nose:
I'll be blunt: I've come to believe it's very selfish, very mean-spirited, to rail about "tax cuts for the rich." It's also counterproductive.
I just feel people ought to pay in proportion to the benefit they receive. Which could start a loooooooong rant about the value rich folks receive vs. that the middle class and those below the poverty level receive from the government.
My problem I guess, is that after I react, I check stuff out, think about it and make up my mind based on the results of my inquiries. It's not often my first reaction survives such an examination.
His post has several comments and trackbacks from other ex-Liberals. I may read them as well.
And why is he stealing my Political Metadimensions concept???
Seriously, I don't know who he is, but I like the way he thinks.
"Whoopi" is a daring impostor: a revival of Norman Lear-style social commentary dressed up as the kind of frisky, postfeminist sitcom so favored by NBC.
As Mavis Rae, a tart-tongued owner of a small, third-rate hotel in New York, Whoopi Goldberg uses post-Sept. 11 wisecracks and a multicultural cast to inform viewers about ethnic bias, racial profiling, the Bill of Rights and black men who date only white women.
Thanks in large part to Rita, a suburban white girl who talks, dresses and acts like a homegirl ("I mean, straight up, props to you," she coos into her cellphone), this show is more inventive than tonight's other new NBC sitcom, "Happy Family." "Whoopi" is certainly wittier than next week's pilot, "Coupling," a sexed-up "Friends."
But "Whoopi" is not what it most wants to be: an avatar of popular culture that could incite a conservative politician to deplore it, as Dan Quayle did to "Murphy Brown" in 1992, was he was vice president.
There are at least two reasons "Whoopi" is unlikely to meet its highest expectations (three, if one counts the likelihood that Vice President Dick Cheney has more on his to-do list).
Ms. Goldberg and her executive producers, a brain trust that includes the makers of "The Cosby Show" and "Roseanne," want to restore the moral authority of the sitcom when the Bunkers and the Huxtables were at their height, in those halcyon days before reality shows kidnapped the public's attention.
But reality TV alone didn't emasculate the sitcom. There is clever social satire elsewhere, from Comedy Central's "Daily Show With Jon Stewart" to youth-oriented sitcoms on UPN and WB. Even MTV's latest reality show, "Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica," which tracks the Beverly Hillbilly domesticity of Jessica Simpson and her bridegroom, Nick Lachey, can be viewed as an edifying video homily: no matter how rich and famous, pop stars at home are boring and irresolute about laundry.
File trading will undeniably have some effect on CD purchasing. Some folks will just get their music for free, some will get the one or two tracks they like. But the RIAA has been making certifiably insane claims that cause the average person to discount every complaint the industry has. Less denial from the industry is long overdue.
…But interviews with executives at record labels, Internet companies and research companies revealed a much more complex array of problems facing the music business than just digital piracy.
"It's not all file-sharing," said Andy Gershon, the president of V2 Records, home to the recording artists Moby and the White Stripes. "I do think that right now, the business is sick but music is great."
Other record label executives agreed. Among the problems they cited were the consolidation of radio stations, making it harder to expose new bands and records, and the lack of a widely popular musical trend like teen-pop, which relied on stars like Britney Spears and 'N Sync to drive young people to record stores.
They also blamed a poor economy and competition for the limited time and money of teenagers and young adults, their main customers, who often find that they prefer buying DVD's, video games, sneakers and more.
Indeed, thousands of music retail stores have closed recently, and the ones that are still open have given shelf space to competing products, like DVD's and video games.
In addition, the introduction of CD's in the early 1980's encouraged consumers to replace their vinyl records with copies in the new format, but that sales spike has since abated.
And as major record labels have become part of large international corporations, industry insiders say, less attention is being paid to discovering and marketing music properly.
"So many labels are in play — they're trying to be acquired or acquire another company or merge — so anything that affects their immediate balance sheet is slashed," one record-label executive said. "Money is not being put into marketing and A.& R. because people don't want to spend the money because it looks bad on the balance sheet."
Ghod, it's like looking into a parallel universe. Who tells these people these things, and why do they still believe it?
ATLANTA, Sept. 8 — Dan Conaway is a trial lawyer, a Democrat and no supporter of President Bush. But when it comes to foreign policy, he places himself "somewhere between Bismarck and Winston Churchill." So he was cheered, he says, by the president's speech on Sunday night, especially when Mr. Bush made clear that the time had come to gain the help of other nations in bringing order to postwar Iraq.
"If we can stabilize Iraq," the 41-year-old Mr. Conaway said today at the Perimeter Mall, north of the city, "it means we'll have more influence over Iran, and less dependence on Saudi oil, which means we can deal harder with the Saudis, which 9/11 made clear we need to do."
By contrast, Jill Massa, 25, a headhunter and a Republican who likes the president, said that when it came to his handling of Iraq, she was becoming increasingly uncomfortable about the price tag. And, she said, his speech only made her more concerned.
"My question is, I understand we had to go get Saddam Hussein out," she said while eating lunch in Centennial Olympic Park, "but why is it our responsibility to spend $87 billion establishing their country? They need to do that on their own."
In their willingness to think across party lines, Mr. Conaway and Ms. Massa seemed the exceptions today. In and around Atlanta, the Democratic heart of the conservative South, a series of quick conversations with those people who said they had watched the president's speech suggested that he had changed few minds. Democrats by and large said they remained impatient to see the effort in Iraq come to an end, while Republicans generally said they remained foursquare behind the administration.
"Like he said, if we're not taking it to their front, they'd be taking it to ours," said James Tegl, 62, strolling across the town square in the solidly Republican suburb of Marietta with his wife and their 2-year-old grandson.
"I back him," Mr. Tegl said. "If he feels this is it, I'm with him. He's been a lot more up front about things than other presidents. And somebody said it'd cost a lot more to contain Saddam than it did to take him out now and rebuild Iraq. It's short money compared to what it would've cost otherwise, down the road."
In Marietta, the prevailing sentiment was that Mr. Bush's speech was an update on a war against terrorists that has made remarkable progress in just two years.
Look at the position SCO is in.
Linux luminary Eric S. Raymond is taking the fight with The SCO Group right back to the basics: he has developed a utility known as a comparator that looks for common code segments in large source trees and which, on an Athlon 1.8 GHz box, has an effective comparison rate of over 55,000 lines per second.
…His comparator, the code for which can be downloaded here, uses a variant of an algorithm called "shred," which bears a resemblance to some techniques used for DNA sequencing.
The source trees get sliced into overlapping three-line shreds. The shreds then get turned into a list of 32-byte signatures by a process called MD5 hashing; each signature keeps information about its file and line number range.
"If the MD5 signatures are different, then the shreds that they were made from are different. When they match, it is almost certain than the two shreds they were made from are the same, to within odds of eighteen quadrillion to one. MD5 is normally used for making unforgeable digital signatures, but the side effect I'm exploiting is that it gives you a fast way to compare texts for equality," Raymond told eWEEK on Monday.
So, once all the signatures from all the code trees have been included in the comparator, all the "unique" signatures are then thrown out, leaving a list of shreds with duplicate signatures or common code segments. From there it is just report generation, he said.
The rare totally quoted article. This is from TomPaine.com, and they have a newsletter if you'd rather have some stuff come to you. I know that's oh-so-passé, but I find it convenient at times.
The success of welfare reform is a faith-based proposition in Washington, D.C. This month, as lawmakers debate the reauthorization of welfare legislation, the conservatives on Capitol Hill will offer their regular sermon on the virtues of "personal responsibility," ignoring the steady hemorrhage of jobs from the economy. And since welfare reform was a major legislative focus of President Clinton's "New Democrats," the other side of the aisle is unlikely to question the underlying belief that "ending welfare as we knew it" represented a triumph in social policy.
Out in the real world, however, the jobless recovery and enfeebled social protections are increasingly set on a collision course. Local legislators must confront an ugly truth about their "reformed" welfare systems: If critics charged that cutting welfare rolls had harmful impacts during the prosperous 1990s, the true extent of the damage is only emerging in the wake of the Bush recession.
"Yeah, there are lots of jobs available," went a joke about the workforce in the Clinton era: "I've got three of them." Since then, real wages haven't improved noticeably and extra work is harder to come by. Nonfarm payroll employment has dropped steadily since November 2001, shedding 579,000 jobs so far this year.
Clinton's 1996 welfare reform replaced the cash entitlement-based Aid for Families with Dependent Children with the new Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF). Research suggests that in the context of the faltering economy, people who might have once received AFDC are far more likely to find entrenched poverty than living-wage work. Single mothers are in truly desperate straits, according to a new report released by the Children's Defense Fund. "The number of jobless women with children not receiving welfare rose by 188,000 in one year, leaving a record three quarters of all single mothers without public assistance and causing a sudden surge in extreme child poverty," the report states. "Single parents entered the 2001 recession with less protection from a failing economy than in any recession in the last 20 years."
The details of this debacle get complicated. Under TANF, individual states receive block grants that allow them to customize their welfare systems. (As the late social theorist Teresa Brennan put it, there are now "50 Ways to Leave Your Welfare Benefits.") But Wisconsin's flagship W-2 program provides a revealing example. The program, which helped former Governor Tommy Thompson land a job as Bush's Secretary of Health and Human Services, is generally lauded as a success for cutting the number of families receiving cash assistance in half. The real results have been mixed at best.
A largely unnoticed AP story in May showed that W-2 was considerably more expensive for Wisconsin than the old welfare program. Although the state served fewer people, the welfare system cost $276.9 million more in the most recent budget period than during the last year of AFDC.
So what ever happened to "the end of big government"? Wisconsin realized that if you're going to force mothers to enter the job market rather than stay home to take care of their kids, you have to make provisions for child care. Under TANF in Wisconsin, the demand for child care has grown by 160 percent. (Ironically, many women entering the low-wage workforce end up stuck in jobs taking care of other peoples' kids, which, at hourly pay rates that make McDonald's look generous, isn't lifting anyone up by their boot straps.) Nor does job training come cheap. As Tommy Thompson himself has noted, if you want to create a "welfare-to-work" program that amounts to more than rhetoric, you have to be willing to pay for it.
Even with the extra expenditures, Thompson's brainchild is nothing to cheer about. Food pantries, emergency homeless shelters, and charitable hospitals all saw demand for their services shoot skyward between 1997 and 2000, according to groups like the Interfaith Conference of Greater Milwaukee, the Center for Economic Development at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and the Institute for Wisconsin's Future. In the same period, forcible evictions in Milwaukee increased by more than 200 percent. And when the state's Department of Workforce Development surveyed former AFDC recipients, they found 68 percent of those who had "successfully" found work said they were "just barely getting by day to day."
So much for the boom years of the Clinton administration.
The real problem is that most states are not even doing as well as Wisconsin, having failed to make the same investments. Instead of receiving cash assistance, many families are simply getting no help at all. In fact, the percentage of eligible families who actually receive welfare benefits plunged from 84 percent in 1995 to 52 percent in 1999, according to the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund.
Michael New at the Cato Institute writes that "states with the strongest sanctions and the lowest benefit levels had the most success in reducing their caseloads." He's right. But slashing welfare rolls and reducing poverty are not the same thing. The current system is all too ready to reward states for the former.
Welfare reform in practice means that in tough economic times -- the very times welfare is needed most -- the government has little to offer the poor and the jobless. Those wealthy enough to walk away with one of President Bush's huge tax cuts aren't complaining. Nor are corporations who can hire from an expanding pool of low-wage workers. But the rest of us, who find our jobs ever less secure and our community resources strained, are left to pay for poverty.
This is the beginning of clarity, for the illusion of life is not that things aren't what they seem but that you must be the person to whom it seems that way.
Why America Needs Us To Be Black
by Earl Dunovant
copyright © 1994
July 4th is celebrated as the birthday of the United States of America. Though it is the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, it is not the day America was born. America was born August 20, 1619. That's the day British pirates landed a Dutch ship on the shores near Jamestown, Virginia. That's the day pirates sold the first 20 Africans to British colonists, setting the North American continent on a course that has since shaped the world.
One hundred fifty seven years later, after considerable wrangling to make slavery legally, religiously. . . automatically. . . acceptable, after artisans, metal workers, laborers, cooks, and servants built the landscape and economy of this nation, after the well-being of the majority was insured by labor of the last tribe of Africa, a nation was declared to be born based on the words of Thomas Jefferson - "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"
Noble words from a slaveowner, a man whose livelihood depended on depriving the Children of Africa of those rights.
America has never lived up to that statement. The nature of America, of Americans, a mere generation ago was much the same as it was in 1776 - a place and a people that allowed you to go as far as your abilities would take you, as long as you weren't an Amerind or African. And it's not very different now. It can't be. Less than 40 years have passed since Freedom Summer, when civil rights activists tried to influence America. The summer that saw the Federal government mobilize to find two missing white civil rights workers (that a Black one was missing was, I'm convinced, incidental. No ever one searched for the many, many Blacks that vanished before that day. . .). They dragged a lake in search of their bodies, and found instead nine Children of Africa that had been lynched and disposed of. Ultimately, two of the co-conspirators turned in the others. Ultimately, 19 men were implicated, including the locals in charge of law enforcement. Ultimately, the sovereign state of Mississippi refused to press charges for murder.
Many of these men are still alive, as are many of those who plotted with them. The college students and workers in their mid- to late-twenties who rioted and were willing to kill to maintain segregation, the government officials assigned to track and report the location of civil rights workers to local officials who were known Klan members, the FBI agents who stood and watched as Blacks were mercilessly brutalized. . . almost all these people are still alive.
Their children, who likely share the same values, will be alive even longer.
America treats us as outcasts, seems to see us as unfit to share in the wealth we helped create. Yet we were here as long as you were, America. We worked as hard as . . . no, harder than . . . any other to make this nation what it is. We were abused and denied, but we were never destroyed.
America asked the world for its tired, its poor, its wretched of spirit. . . and turned its back on its own. Yet there has been some improvement because we would not relent. We will never give up on our rightful claim. We have been good for America, and not merely by giving our labor to her. Every moral improvement America has made has been in response to the efforts of the Children of Africa. Every truly new cultural movement in America has its roots in the activities of the Children of Africa. Every group that seeks to end its unequal treatment under the present system compares it's movement to, and models its movement after, the Civil Rights movement of the Children of Africa.
I say to you America, if you wish to continue to grow wiser and stronger, you need us. We are the measure of your honor. If you are ever to live up to your credo, if America is ever to be what it claims to be, white America must move beyond its attitude toward the Children of Africa. All the efforts to make us merely black white people reflect a fear of advancement to morality. And without morality, your power bids fair to destroy the world. Like it or not, you need us proud, you need us strong. America must learn to accept the diversity in its midst before it finds itself unable to deal with the diverse world it lives in. Immigrants seek to become a part of America - they can't help it in this effort. No, the only people in America that can goad her to greater openness are the Children of Africa.
Black Residents Outraged Against Police Brutality
SAN FRANCISCO (NCM) - On Aug. 25, two White San Francisco police officers drove up Middlepoint and West Point Road in the neighborhood of Hunters Point between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. Lee Collins, a 23-year-old resident of the area, who many may know as Baby Finsta, and was featured in Kevin Epps' award-winning independent film "Straight Outta Hunter's Point," was called out by the officers.
As they approached him, he put his hands up, and the officers commenced hitting him with their billy clubs, punching and kicking him until he was unconscious.
At the same time, they were uttering derogatory remarks to his relatives. The officers who made the initial stop called in for their backup to detain everybody in white t-shirts in the area.
When backup arrived, approximately 30 officers showed up, pointing guns at children, who were as young as 8 years old, as well as other residents who had witnessed the act of police brutality.
Fourteen-year-old Marcus Law, an honor roll student who has never been in trouble with the law, was approached and immediately hit with a police billy club, causing him to go to the hospital.
At least two other adults were brutalized in the incident, and a number of children and other spectators were traumatized by what they saw.
The police said that Collins started the trouble by fleeing and resisting arrest, according to a report in the San Francisco Chronicle.
Atrios pretty much said what needed to be said about TAPPED's suggestion that minorities shouldn't pursue their own interests.
Wait a minute. That's not what they said!
Yes, it is.
I fully recognize that my interests overlap those of white folks, Mexican folks, Japanese folks, et al. But overlap isn't the same as coincide. If TAPPED can honestly say they have to deal with all the same issues that I do…if the neo-Confederates have the same reaction when looking at Robert Kuttner as when looking at me…if Harold Meyerson gets stopped for Driving-While-Black…if white folks start moving out of neighborhoods when too many people who look like Paul Starr move in…in short, when following up totally and exclusively on their concerned will leave no concern of mine unresolved, I'll consider letting them define what I should and shouldn't pursue.#
Patrick Nielsen Hayden at Electrolite reviewed a bunch of the new group blogs and Open Source Politics came up, in his opinion, as the worst design-wise though he says the content is pretty good.
Some of my co-authors responded in his comments. Being lazy (and frankly, more concerned for my readers than anyone else's) I figure the trackback will let him respond or not to my opinion here.
It's pretty obvious, though the writers are bloggers and we've hooked into the blogging infrastructure, that OSP isn't your father's blog.
I'll let you in on a secret. I think there's too much bullshit in the political air. I think the warbloggers and LGFers and fill-in-the-blank-pundits have established the default values for the debate and we wind up proving and re-proving the same points over and over again. OSP is intended, in part, to establish a critical mass of progressive information, something easy to find that's weighty enough that it can't be dismissed with an "Indeed."
But we're not Slate or Salon either because we're doing this more for reasons of passion than profit (which I personally would not turn away but hasn't even been raised…and wouldn't be here but that I felt the need for an alliteration). Truthfully, one of the reasons I think we have a shot at injecting some liberality into the debate is that we are all bloggers, talking to other bloggers through the mechanisms and linkages of the blogosphere. We want to take advantage of the relationships our blogs have developed (this is strictly my interpretation, but it is as much our blogs as our human selves that have the relationships).
Anyway, all this is reflected in the design, and is part of the reason Mr. Hayden is less than pleased with it. The design elements aren't a problem. Okay, I was never thrilled with it myself—I don't like all the curlicues and such, plus you'll note I'm an achromatic kind of guy—but I can overlook it. The problem is, it's just not bloggy. More accurately, it's bloggy enough to make you expect further blogness that's not really forthcoming. It's kind of like smelling barbecued ribs, walking up your driveway and finding they just used the same sauce on the steak. You're not going to go hungry…you'll probably enjoy the hell out of it. But when you got your mouth set for ribs, you can't help feeling a little disappointed.
I understand, yea verily I feel your pain. But we're not letting folks go hungry.
Black Americans gather for day of solidarity
Dubbed the Million Youth March, the theme of this year's rally was opposition to the war in Iraq and an appeal to young black Americans to stop gun violence and pursue education
NEW YORK - Several thousand black Americans came together in Brooklyn for a day of solidarity, expressing dissatisfaction with U.S. President George W. Bush's war in Iraq, an uncertain economy and police brutality.
Dubbed the Million Youth March, the theme of this year's rally was opposition to the war in Iraq and an appeal to young black Americans to stop gun violence and pursue education.
"I say to you, black youth, come out of Bush's military. There is nobody more violent than George Bush," said Malik Shabazz, national chairman of the New Black Panthers, a successor to the militant black power group of the 1960s.
"We have got a criminal in the White House. We have got a gangster in the White House," he said.
Speaking of police brutality, a rallying cry in recent rallies, Shabazz voiced frustration with going to funerals of young black men killed by police violence. "We're going to have to get to the day when we get some police funerals," he said. [p6: then again, maybe not]
The march, organized by the New Black Panthers, was peaceful. Marred by violence in recent years, police said they had made no arrests around the march as of early afternoon.
The crowd was a mix of young and old, men and women. The rally featured poetry readings and rap performances. Red, black and green flags -- the flag of black nationalism in the United States -- waved over the crowd as fists were raised with chants and cries of "black power."
"Everybody that is out here right now is here to support the black baby," said a New Black Panthers member from Philadelphia who called himself King Samir.
Within the audience, people voiced frustration with the economy, police brutality, U.S. foreign policy and the disenfranchisement of many black Americans.
"There are a number of things that we have to deal with. Young people are ... an energetic vehicle, that can help us deal with it -- such as crime, such as us injuring one another, such as business development, such as the empowerment of our community," said Job Mashariki, a Brooklyn resident.
"We have to have economic and political security for the youth," said one man who called himself Bible Souljah.
"When you have more black men and women on the unemployment list than you have working, then that's a problem," said another man from Philadelphia calling himself Divine Savior.
According to the U.S. Labor Department, the jobless rate for black Americans in August was 10.9 percent, while the rate for white Americans was 5.4 percent.
The President's Speech
While President Bush finally set a price tag on the cost of the Iraqi effort, he still has not done nearly enough to level with the American people.
The Failuremongers
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
How best to answer the merchants of dismay who are against our occupation in Iraq? By staying the course and reporting our accomplishments.
[p6: The upshot-"Neener-neener, I can't hear you…"
NOBODY LIKES paying taxes but it's an indispensable duty in a society that hopes to maintain firefighters, police and other emergency services, and to keep roads passable, children educated, hospitals open, streets lighted and more.
So it's unsettling and unacceptable that some corporations are dodging taxes by artificially relocating offshore.
These "inversions" occur when a company moves -- on paper only -- to a place like Bermuda to evade taxes. Having a mail drop beyond the "water's edge" makes a company tax-exempt -- though their plants, workforce and markets are still on U.S. soil.
Though legal, it's an accounting sham, a shell game that brings to mind Enron and other corporate scoundrels.
Difficult to Draw a Bead on Issue of Targeted Killings
By Michael Walzer
No one can be happy about the targeted killings that are now official policy in the war against terrorism. Israel has made the practice notorious, but the United States, after criticizing Israeli policy, has also adopted it. And I suspect that other countries have done so as well, or will, under terrorist threat.
Cartoons
Click the image, follow the link to the whole cartoon. Trust me.
Plus:
Tom Toles on the perils of identity theft.
Pat Oliphant sums up yesterday's Bushit.
Tony Auth sums up the REASON for yesterday's Bushit.
Since I've already shown myself to be tacky in the commentary to the piece about that report on NY's economic development plans, I thought I'd include the thumbnail of the columnist because she's kinda fine.
Dawn Turner Trice
Two weeks ago, my friend Paul Miller began his new job as an 8th-grade algebra teacher at a south suburban middle school.
Last year, Paul, 44, who has a wife and three children, left a corporate job making a six-figure salary and decided to pursue a teaching career. For several years he had been contemplating changing professions.
I thought about him when I read a recently released study from the National Education Association that said only 2 in 10 teachers in America's classrooms are men. That's the lowest ratio in 40 years. The study also said that just 1 in 10 teachers is from a minority group.
According to the Illinois State Board of Education's 2002 teachers service record data, 77 percent of Illinois teachers are women and 23 percent are men. In terms of diversity, only 15 percent are minorities, including African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians and American Indians.
Paul, an African-American man, is a rarity in his field
I get cranky about the use of labels myself, sometimes.
Who should wear the 'terrorist' label?
By Christine Chinlund, 9/8/2003
WITH THIS WEEK'S 9/11 anniversary comes reflection on all that has changed these past two years. Even our language has shifted; the word terrorism itself casts a different shadow. It has always, of course, been a powerfully negative label. But post-9/11 the word's potency has multiplied. In the current climate, the terrorist tag effectively banishes its holder from the political arena. More than ever, it condemns rather than describes.
Indeed, newspapers must be doubly careful about how they apply the word. Sparing use is the norm. For example, the Palestinian organization Hamas, whose suicide bombers maim and kill Israeli citizens, is routinely described in the Globe and other papers as a "militant," not terrorist, group.
Such restraint infuriates some Middle East partisans (most often, but not exclusively, supporters of Israel) who say it sugarcoats reality and that any group targeting civilians is terrorist. I receive regular demands to, as a Chelmsford reader put it, "stop misleading readers with terminology that affords terrorists a false degree of legitimacy."
What possible reason is there for not unflinchingly applying the word terrorist to any organization or person who targets civilians? It may seem like hair-splitting, but there's a reason to reserve the terrorist label for specific acts of violence, and not apply it broadly to groups.
To tag Hamas, for example, as a terrorist organization is to ignore its far more complex role in the Middle East drama. The word reflects not only a simplification, but a bias that runs counter to good journalism. To label any group in the Middle East as terrorist is to take sides, or at least appear to, and that is not acceptable. The same holds true in covering other far-flung conflicts. One person's terrorist is another's freedom fighter; it's not for journalists to judge.
That said, journalists can not, and should not, be blind to reality. When we see terrorism, we should say so. A suicide bombing on a crowded bus is clearly an act of terrorism and should be so labeled. And it should also be described in all its painful detail. Such reporting is more powerful in its specificity than any broad label.
This approach -- call the act terrorist, but not the organization -- is used in many newsrooms, including the Globe's. It allows for variations: The terrorist label can appear in a quote or when detailing Washington's official list of terrorist groups. But not in the reporter's own voice.
WASHINGTON, Sept. 5 � In his final years in prison, Kirk Bloodsworth had a passing acquaintance with a fellow inmate, Kimberly Shay Ruffner. Mr. Bloodsworth, a prison librarian, delivered books to Mr. Ruffner. Sometimes they lifted weights together. But Mr. Bloodsworth said Mr. Ruffner seemed to behave "kind of peculiar" when they were together.
Mr. Bloodsworth may now know the reason why. This morning, the police in Baltimore County charged Mr. Ruffner in the murder and rape of a 9-year-old in 1984, Dawn Hamilton, the very crime that Mr. Bloodsworth was serving time for when he met Mr. Ruffner.
"I'm so happy," said Mr. Bloodsworth, 43, a fisherman from Cambridge, Md. "This tells the world that I'm innocent."
The charges against Mr. Ruffner open a new chapter in a case that has become a prime example of the two-edged nature of DNA testing: not only as a means of clearing the wrongly accused, but also of identifying new suspects in cold cases.
In 1993, Mr. Bloodsworth became the first person in the nation convicted in a death penalty case to be exonerated through DNA testing, which eliminated him as a source of semen stains on the girl's underpants. He had served nine years in prison, including two on death row, when he was released by a judge and pardoned by the governor.
…Defense lawyers say they hope the dual use of DNA evidence in the case will reduce resistance among prosecutors to allow prisoners to challenge convictions with DNA tests. They say the case demonstrates that DNA can not only prove innocence, but also pinpoint culprits.
…The new charges were filed at a crucial time in a debate in Florida over a law from 2001 that will soon bar prisoners from seeking DNA testing for old cases. The law set Oct. 1 as the deadline for such requests. It also allows the destruction of DNA evidence, except in death penalty cases.
Reading this NY Times piece from the erspective of a ling-time New Yorker, I appreciate the conclusions made in this report. Improving the operating environment for research and educational institutions in particular is promising. New York City has the infrastructure they need…buildings that were banks wired for T1 connectivity were being converted to apartments pre-9/11. As a communications hub, a transportation hub and a cultural hub, this could be the ultimate college town. With all the plusses and minuses that entails, of course. (hint: I'm thinkin' hot college students. 
)
Anyway, New Yorks City's" plans have been entirely reflexive, which is why corporations regularly get tax breaks for providing public park space by having an area covered with concrete with a few scrawny trees and maybe a statue of some sort adjacent to their building. Not to mention the property tax breaks that tend to approach the amount of payroll taxes paid by the employees…the very definition of corporate welfare.
Arguing that the industries upon which New York City has depended for its economic well-being have been losing ground and are unlikely to generate many new jobs in future, a new study suggests that New York's longtime approach to economic development is obsolete and must be reconceived.
The study, financed by the Rockefeller Foundation and written by a nonprofit group called the Center for an Urban Future, says the city should abandon the "doomed strategy" of favoring a few industries like finance � an approach the study says has left the city increasingly vulnerable to economic shifts.
City resources should go instead to improving the climate for small businesses and entrepreneurs, tapping the immigrant population as well as academic and research institutions, and improving basic services so the middle class will not leave the city, according to the study, to be released today.
"Start small," the report urges. Large firms are decentralizing operations and adding new jobs elsewhere, and New York's future growth will depend on "whether it can restore its entrepreneurial vitality and create a better environment for smaller firms to grow and prosper."
The recommendations run counter to the city's practice of using tax abatements and real estate development subsidies to keep big companies in New York. That tactic became common in the 1990's as competition among the city, its suburbs and other places intensified.
Several economists and others who have seen the report said the recommendations were sound. Some said they also seemed consistent with some recent moves by the administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg toward delineating a clear strategy and diversifying the economy.
"The city has never had a clear economic development strategy," said Kathryn S. Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City, a business group. "The city's strategy has been real-estate-driven and has been reactive to the threat of corporate move-outs and job losses rather than job creation."
Alternate post title: Bush is a copycat, repeats warnings made by progressives long before the invasion of Iraq
Bush Warns America of a Heavy Burden
By DAVID E. SANGER
In a sobering speech on Sunday[p6: I knew he was high when he was making these decisions!], President Bush set out to convince the country that the terrible toll in Iraq is a necessary price to pay in a struggle against terrorism.
via Slashdot
DARPA intends to conduct a challenge of autonomous ground vehicles between Los Angeles and Las Vegas in March of 2004. A cash award of $1 million will be granted to the team that fields the first vehicle to complete the designated route within a specified time limit. The purpose of the challenge is to leverage American ingenuity to accelerate the development of autonomous vehicle technologies that can be applied to military requirements. Many of the details of the event are being developed, and new information will be posted to this web site as soon as possible.
On January 8, 2002, President George W. Bush signed into law H.R. 1, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). Promising to provide the same educational benefits to all children irrespective of race class or location, NCLB was nearly universally applauded for its lofty goals: high standards, accountability for results, local control, and parental choice were the stated benefits of the bill.
As always seems to be the case, however, the devil is in the details. Acting on the well-intentioned bill requires far more than simply setting forth a goal. It requires an accurate assessment of what needs to be adjusted to reach the goal, and truly empowering people to take those steps. And it appears NCLB has fallen victim to realpolitik by way of the difference between authorized funding and the funds actually appropriated.
Also:
Politicized 9/11 or Trivialized 9/11 Not a damn thing is better
Jo Fish (of Democratic Veteran) gives us a military veteran's take on Bush's belief that invoking 9/11 justified a pre-emptive war - and warns us that it's "time to wake up and begin to put the lie to that belief."
It's September 2003. Do You Know Where Your BioTerrorism Preparedness Is? (Part I) (Part II) by P.G. Gandy of Half the Sins of Mankind and this comment thread (wherein an explanation of the presumption pointed to below is given)
A Variation on a Theme by Fred Henning of Rantavation gives up one of the "funny if it weren't so true" thangs.
There's a couple of comment threads that would have been very useful to me personally had the not ended with my last question(s). Maybe I'm premature in assuming they've died.
I love it. I really do. Read the rest at CommonDreams.org.
I couldn't make this up. This morning, the US Department of the Interior is turning over the Mall in front of the Washington Monument to Pepsi-Cola Corporation to promote their new "Pepsi Vanilla."
This has gotten the Washington Post's liberal columnists' knickers in a twist. But they don't know the half of it.
Beyond renting the Monument grounds to Pepsi, President Bush has agreed to re-name the looming recession, "The Pause That Refreshes."
Furthermore, as part of a larger "re-brand America" campaign, the National Institute for Health has announced that the fourth new food group in the 'nutrition pyramid' after dairy foods, meat and fiber will be, Fizzy Brown Stuff.
The Bush Administration has moved swiftly to respond to objections to the commercialization of the nation's heritage sites. The complaints, from Pepsi rival Coca Cola, will be addressed by re-naming the Bill of Rights. Attorney General John Ashcroft is expected to announce today that, "those ten outdated amendments will be called 'Bill of Rights Classic,' while the post-PATRIOT Act version will henceforth be called, 'New Rights Lite.'" A spokesman for Mr. Ashcroft added that Anne Coulter will be renamed, simply, "Lite."