Prometheus 6

Hillary was in the hood yesterday. Apparently, she was there thowin’ gang signs, drinkin 40’s, and schmoozin’ wit her peeps at the Zion Missionary Baptist Church of Compton, California. I can officially say that her campaign of deceptive rapprochment has begun.

Surrounded by an exclusively black cast of characters not ashamed to be seen with her, they plied her with tacky trinkets like the t-shirt and cap proffered above. She returned the gesture by saying that she would focus on assisting brotha’s in finding jobs by instituting some eco-liberal “green collar” jobs program and funding a program to transition ex-cons to work. “A lot of our young people, disproportionately young people of color, are in the prison system and they don’t belong there. They are non-violent offenders.” She said to rapturous applause.

Interesting thought since it was her husband’s 1994 crime bill which locked most of em’ up in the first place. Miz Hillary left that part out. The Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice called Massa Bill the “Incarceration President.”

While letters to the paper are almost unanimously in favor of Mr. Obama, she said, the older of the state’s two black political organizations, the Alabama Democratic Conference, endorsed Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in October.

It's just not specific to Obama and Clinton, is all.

LATER: Seems it's not specific to Black folks either.

No. 3 U.S. Diplomat, Lead Negotiator on Iran, Retires
By HELENE COOPER

WASHINGTON — R. Nicholas Burns, the country’s third-ranking diplomat and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s right-hand man, is retiring for personal reasons, the State Department said Friday.

The White House said that it was nominating William J. Burns, the United States ambassador to Russia, to replace him as under secretary of state for political affairs. The two men are not related. Like R. Nicholas Burns, William Burns is a career Foreign Service official. He has served as assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs as well as ambassador to Jordan.

“This is a very bittersweet time for us because Nick Burns has decided that it is time for him to retire,” Ms. Rice said in announcing Mr. Burns’s resignation in the State Department’s ornate Treaty Room. “He has decided that it’s the right moment to go back to family concerns.”

For 10 years, Leslie P. Smith, a Virginia lawyer, reluctantly kept a secret because the authorities on legal ethics told him he had no choice, even though his information could save the life of a man on death row, one whose case had led to a landmark Supreme Court decision.

Mr. Smith believed that prosecutors had committed brazen misconduct by coaching a witness and hiding it from the defense, but the Virginia State Bar said he was bound by legal ethics rules not to bring up the matter. He shared his qualms and pangs of conscience with only one man, Timothy G. Clancy, who had worked on the case with him.

“Clancy and I, when we were alone together, would reminisce about this and more or less renew our vows of silence,” Mr. Smith told a judge last month. “We felt that there was nothing that could be done.”

The jury that included a guy who said

"If we let him free, Mr. Cicciaro [Sr.] will kill John White himself," the juror shouted, according to another juror, who asked not to be identified.

As his aghast peers fell silent, the male juror paused for 15 seconds, then said, "If it was my son, I would do the same."

...is not unique. Not even in its inclusion of a really confused negro.

The affidavits signed by Juror A, Juror B, and Juror C, Huffman, say that three other jurors made racially charged comments about McCowen and blacks in general repeatedly during deliberations.

Eugene Robinson  

If Clinton or Obama wins the nomination, I suppose some voters will pretend to agonize over whether "we are ready" to elect the first female or the first African American president. Please, spare us. Either outcome would be historic, but nobody has to puzzle through dense position papers before deciding whether to vote on the basis of race or gender. People will pull the lever or not, and then justify their decisions retroactively....

The Democratic Party, on the other hand, knows exactly what it stands for. Obama, Clinton and Edwards are hardly fire-breathing radicals. Their positions on domestic issues are all comfortably within the Democratic mainstream. Internationally, all would seek to repair the damage to America's standing that Bush has done; none is likely to look for wars to start, but none is going to take Dennis Kucinich's recommendation to renounce war-making for all time.

...is that periodically they write something that lets you know they aren't stupid,

King was fighting for black enfranchisement. Until that could be achieved, civil rights legislation could only be enacted by a white president (and a white Congress).

That does not denigrate King. It makes his achievement all the more miraculous -- winning a permanent stake in the system for a previously disenfranchised people, having begun with no political cards to play.

In my view, the real problem with Clinton's statement was the implied historical analogy -- that the subordinate position King held in relation to Johnson, a function of the discrimination and disenfranchisement of the time, somehow needs recapitulation today when none of those conditions apply.

then turn around and be so damn wrong.

A Demographic the Democrats Can't Forget
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Friday, January 18, 2008; A19

This is a good time to put in a word for the white working class....

"Working class" seems an antique term, but the people it describes still exist, more now in the service industries than in manufacturing. Demographers often use education levels as a surrogate for class position, and the past three decades have not been kind to Americans who are not college graduates.

There's real (as in, they actually feel it, not that there's a substantial reality to it) concern among the white working class about how their personal interests will fare as compared to other in-groups. So let me talk to them for a minute.

First of all, you guys are right to worry about threats to your well-being. But so are we. Where you're wrong is thinking Black and Latino interests run counter to yours. Look at that definition Mr. Dionne used. You think it would include any Black folks?

Am I wrong or is the Republican National Committee congratulating Rep. Boehner for successfully obstructing progress in Congress?

American Black Journal

American Black Journal, originally titled Colored People’s Time, went on the air in 1969 during a time of social and racial turmoil. The original mission was to increase the availability and accessibility of media relating to African-American experiences in order to encourage greater involvement from Detroit citizens in working to resolve community problems. The show has continued on the air consistently since then, documenting over thirty years of Detroit history from African American perspectives. The collection includes interviews, round-table discussions, field-produced features and artistic performances featuring African Americans, many of who are among the nation's most recognized and controversial figures, and provides the visual and audio context of key debates and discussions surrounding African American history, culture, and politics.

First of all, I think we should mount a letter writing campaign to implore Comedy Central to post the whole 18 minutes of the interview with Goldberg on their site. Embed two commercial breaks if you want, I don't care.

Second, I found a friendly review of his book, "Liberal Fascism," through the efforts of OurFuture.org which is amazing. Remember, this is a friendly review.

Fascism, Liberal and Otherwise

I laughed until my sides hurt!

Yesterday I got email from a couple of folks that suggested I should say something about Obama and Black folks vs other minorities. Seems someone wrote something about a Black/brown divide and such.

I spent a bit of time thinking about what to write and you know what? I got nothing.

Really. I thought about my own neighborhood, my own experiences. We have a large Mexican contingent here. I suppose it's possible I'm atypical but I'm really not seeing stress on a personal level. There used to be some competition on an economic level but that's not so much because Mexicans took "our" jobs (Black folks generlly lack the sense of entitlement that makes it possible to claim a job you weren't actually hired to do) but because Black folks barely get hired in New York City...a problem that predates their arrival.

Besides, media discussions tend to collapse all the different Spanish speaking folks into a kind of ethnic fruit punch where the different flavors that form this taste that can be found nowhere in nature, and the component tastes can no longer be distinguished.

Um...

Remember the post titled Print this and hang it by your TiVo that listed PBS' Black History Month lineup? Well, it was last year's listing. I'm prett sure I was the only one that missed the year soI'm pretty sure you didn't hang it by your TiVo. But you should hang this one.

PBS CELEBRATES BLACK HISTORY MONTH WITH AN EXTENSIVE LINEUP OF SPECIAL PROGRAMMING

Arlington, VA — January 10, 2008 — PBS broadcasts programming created by and about African Americans year-round, from public affairs to history to independent film to kids programming. In celebration of Black History Month, February 2008, PBS will broadcast a lineup of new and encore presentations honoring and exploring African-American history.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. is joined by Maya Angelou, Morgan Freeman, Tina Turner and other prominent African Americans in AFRICAN AMERICAN LIVES 2, a sequel to the series The New York Times called “the most exciting and stirring documentary on any subject to appear on television in a long time.” Other program highlights include PRINCE AMONG SLAVES, a documentary about an African prince who was enslaved in Mississippi for 40 years before finally achieving freedom; and INDEPENDENT LENS “Banished,” the story of three counties that forcefully banished African-American families from their towns 100 years ago. 

Also new in February: an examination of the Tuskegee Airmen in RED TAIL REBORN; LEGACY: BEING BLACK IN AMERICA, which features an intriguing discussion of race consciousness, integration and equity in the U.S. today; and AN EVENING WITH QUINCY JONES, a rare look into the life of the music mogul.

The groundbreaking second season of EYES ON THE PRIZE also airs during Black History Month on PBS. EYES ON THE PRIZE II returns to TV for the first time since the mid-1990s. Other encore presentations include the first season of EYES ON THE PRIZE; SLAVERY AND THE MAKING OF AMERICA; season one of AFRICAN AMERICAN LIVES; and INDEPENDENT LENS “Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes.”

PBS KIDS GO!sm will feature “GO! Figure” facts on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, as well as throughout the month of February. These fun and educational facts will pop up during favorite PBS KIDS GO! programs CYBERCHASE, ARTHUR, MAYA & MIGUEL and FETCH! WITH RUFF RUFFMAN. Online, pbskidsgo.org will feature games and e-cards related to African-American history and the contributions of famous African Americans.

First-rate programming with a depth and breadth that can only be found on PBS, these programs document and examine the rich heritage and cultural contributions of African Americans.

The prototype device contains an electric circuit as well as red light-emitting diodes for a display, though it does not yet light up. The lenses were tested on rabbits for up to 20 minutes and the animals showed no adverse effects.

Ideally, installing or removing the bionic eye would be as easy as popping a contact lens in or out, and once installed the wearer would barely know the gadget was there, Parviz said. 

Contact Lenses With Circuits, Lights A Possible Platform For Superhuman Vision 

ScienceDaily (Jan. 17, 2008) — Movie characters from the Terminator to the Bionic Woman use bionic eyes to zoom in on far-off scenes, have useful facts pop into their field of view, or create virtual crosshairs. Off the screen, virtual displays have been proposed for more practical purposes -- visual aids to help vision-impaired people, holographic driving control panels and even as a way to surf the Web on the go.

The device to make this happen may be familiar. Engineers at the University of Washington have for the first time used manufacturing techniques at microscopic scales to combine a flexible, biologically safe contact lens with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights.

Pioneering research shows ‘Google Generation’ is a myth
16 January 2008

I'm not stressing Golfweek for their noose cover. The editor's shock at the reaction to is seems real, to the degree one can intuit someone's emotions via print, anyway. 

"We knew that image would grab attention, but I didn't anticipate the enormity of it," Dave Seanor, vice president and editor of the weekly magazine, said from the PGA Merchandise Show in Orlando, Fla.

"There's been a huge, negative reaction," he said. "I've gotten so many e-mails. It's a little overwhelming."

I say that because he came pretty real his the discussion of WHY it was shocking...basically, the sport has just reached the "Jackie Robinson" phase of its existence.

via Villager at Electronic Village

Three Largest Black-Owned Bookstores Join Forces

Via Professor Kim we find Bob Johnson apologizing to Sen. Obama for smearing him at the Clintons' request.

Johnson's letter states:

"Dear Barack,

I'm writing to apologize to you and your family personally for the un-called-for comments I made at a recent Clinton event. In my zeal to support Senator Clinton, I made some very inappropriate remarks for which I am truly sorry. I hope that you will accept this apology. Good luck on the campaign trail.

Warm regards,

Bob Johnson"

In the comments of the post immediately preceding this one my friend Quaker said

Mr. Egan seems to have figured out exactly what Mr. Obama can and can't do if he's going to be successful in his campaign. That's awfully generous of him.

Great ghost of Jehosephat! That was an awful column.

Awful. But was it wrong?

I am far from the only Black person that called it as it was developing. And though the Clintons started the problem, stank things up to the point that no mainstream media outlet can bring itself to list all the things they've done, you almost can't blame them. It was inevitable no matter who ran against The First Viable Black Presidential Candidate.

And you know what the funny thing is? It's that The First Viable Black Presidential Candidate is the perfect person to lead the nation.

You know what's wrong with this, and ALL the media coverage I've seen today?

For a while, it looked like Obama could be the rare African-American leader whose race was nearly invisible – and he may still be. He’s post-Civil Rights, Oprah-branded, with that classically American blend of a mother from the heartland and a father from a distant shore. And after that Iowa victory speech, people felt something had passed into our collective rear-view mirror, without actually saying what that something was.

Now it looks like every mention of race – from the overblown dust-up with Senator Hillary Clinton this week to the calculated comments comparing him to Sidney Poitier – is bad for Obama. A victory in South Carolina, with its heavy black vote, will be seen as one-dimensional.

He needs people to look at him and see John Kennedy, or The Beatles, or Tiger Woods in his first Master’s tournament. He needs people to see youth, a break with the past, style under pressure.

A cease-fire initiated by Obama was formalized into a peace agreement during a love fest at the debate. And why not? For Clinton's campaign, it was Mission Accomplished, intentional or not. Obama was now the black candidate. There had been minimal blowback and only a minor casualty (Shaheen resigned).

For Obama, he lost the essence of his candidacy as the first black man to run as himself. Once the race card is on the table, no matter who puts it there, it's impossible to put it back up anyone's sleeve. Obama may look back on the first two weeks of 2008 as the time when he lost the nomination to Clinton.

Hillary Pulls Race Card and Obama May Fold: Margaret Carlson
By Margaret Carlson

You still have to blame the attackee for being attacked.

It's not that unusual, frankly.  

In the 1970s and '80s, many working- and middle-class white Democrats voted for Republicans, in part because of racial politics, but also because they resented their own party's drift toward what they perceived as domination by a white elite. To put it crudely, the beer drinkers distrusted the wine drinkers as people who, at best, didn't understand their everyday concerns or, at worst, looked down on them as racist. Clinton's presidency for a time seemed to heal the rift. Yet even after President Bush had lost favor among many middle- and working-class voters, Republicans were able to tap this vein with attacks on 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry as a windsurfer who "looks French."

You think it's a coincidence that prices increased at a rate far exceeding the inflation rate on exactly those items? You think the "economic growth" Bush claims credit for would look the same if they included food and fuel in their calculations?

Digging deeper into the data reveals, for example, that the price of bread rose 7.4 percent last year, almost twice the rate of inflation.

The price of eggs rose 29.2 percent in 2007, while the price of fresh whole milk was up 13.1 percent. Since July, when milk prices first soared, the price of fresh whole milk has risen by almost 23 percent.

"The kinds of things you purchase every day are going up (in price)," said Gus Faucher, the director of macroeconomics at forecaster Moody's Economy.com in West Chester, Pa. "People who are at the lower end of the income scale are going to feel that more."

New inflation data explain middle-class squeeze
Kevin G. Hall | McClatchy Newspapers
last updated: January 16, 2008 07:34:57 PM

WASHINGTON — New data from the Labor Department confirm what most middle-class Americans already know: Inflation is squeezing them.

As consumer prices rose by 4.1 percent last year, the highest rate since 1990, the prices of basic essentials such as food, gasoline and health insurance climbed far more steeply, explaining why so many Americans are telling pollsters that the economy is their chief concern. 

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Wednesday that the price of food and beverages rose 4.8 percent. At the same time, real weekly earnings failed to keep pace, rising 0.9 percent for the year. In the simplest of terms, a dollar earned bought less.

PBS CELEBRATES BLACK HISTORY MONTH WITH A SLATE OF SPECIAL PROGRAMMING February 1-28, 2007

Arlington, VA — January 8, 2007 — PBS broadcasts programming created by and about African Americans year-round, from drama to public affairs to history to independent film. In celebration of Black History Month, February 2007, PBS will broadcast a lineup of new and encore presentations honoring and exploring African-American history.

NOVA “Forgotten Genius” tells the story of one of the great African-American scientists of the 20th century – Percy Julian. INDEPENDENT LENS “Billy Strayhorn: Lush Life” profiles Duke Ellington’s co-composer, arranger and right-hand man. “Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes” is an in-depth look, through the lens of former college star athlete Byron Hurt, at the sexism, violence and homophobia in rap music and hip-hop culture. Also new in February is an examination of the role that Catholic nuns played in the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights marches of 1965 in SISTERS OF SELMA: BEARING WITNESS FOR CHANGE. THE STORY OF OSCAR BROWN JR., a new profile of the legendary performer and producer of the landmark musical Opportunity Please Knock, will also air. Encore presentations include DEFORD BAILEY: A LEGEND LOST, AFRICAN AMERICAN LIVES and AMERICAN EXPERIENCE “Eyes on the Prize.”

First-rate programming with a depth and breadth that can only be found on PBS, these programs document and examine the rich heritage and cultural contributions of African Americans.

Broadcast Premieres