Mr. Brooks gets on TV and just can't control himself.

Edwards has a knack for creating pieces that attract publicity — his last work, unveiled at a gallery in Brooklyn, depicted Britney Spears on her knees giving birth on a bearskin rug.

Sex museum displays Hillary Rodham Clinton bust
Posted 8/11/2006 12:25 PM ET

NEW YORK (AP) — It's a bust of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton — in more ways than one.

Cast in resin and bearing ample cleavage, a sculpted bust of the New York Democrat was unveiled this week at the Museum of Sex in Manhattan.

Calling his creation "The Presidential Bust of Hillary Rodham Clinton: The First Woman President of the United States," artist Daniel Edwards said he wanted to depict the 58-year-old Clinton "with her head held high, a youthful spirit and a face matured by wisdom."

I can believe it...you live under siege conditions for 60 years, you get a little nuts.

"Fiasco" Author Says Israel Allows Missile Attacks for PR Purposes
Source: CNN Reliable Sources, August 6, 2006

On his CNN TV program, Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post interviewed Thomas Ricks, the Post's Pentagon reporter and author of the book Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq. Ricks told Kurtz, "One of the things that is going on, according to some U.S. military analysts, is that Israel purposely has left pockets of Hezbollah rockets in Lebanon, because as long as they're being rocketed, they can continue to have a sort of moral equivalency in their operations in Lebanon." Kurtz responded, "Hold on, you're suggesting that Israel has deliberately allowed Hezbollah to retain some of its fire power, essentially for PR purposes, because having Israeli civilians killed helps them in the public relations war here?" Ricks replied, "Yes, that's what military analysts have told me." Kurtz remarked "that's an extraordinary testament to the notion that having people on your own side killed actually works to your benefit in that nobody wants to see your own citizens killed but it works to your benefit in terms of the battle of perceptions here." Ricks replied "It helps you with the moral high ground problem, because you know your operations in Lebanon are going to be killing civilians as well."

Black is the new gay

Martin Peretz
The New Republic

Dear Mr. Peretz,

I was very surprised when you implied on the Hugh Hewitt show that you do not want the Democrats to retake congress because you're "appalled by some of the people who would become head of Congressional committees." Who might those Democrats be, I wondered, who would be so loathsome, that they would cause the publisher of the New Republic to root for the Republicans in November?

Then yesterday, after I read your piece attacking Ned Lamont for integrating his campaign, the answer occurred to me. You were referring to the five brown Congresspeople (Rangel, Conyers, Millender-McDonald, Thompson, and Velázquez) who are in line to become committee chairs when the Democrats take the House. The thought of brown people with that much power scares the living hell out of you.

I don't blame you. Pigmentation is scary. Who knows what those brown Congresspeople will do if they get to be committee chairs. We might even be forced to take them seriously.

Study Finds Immigrants Don't Hurt U.S. Jobs
Pew Detects No Link To Unemployment
By Kim Hart
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 11, 2006; D01

High levels of immigration in the past 15 years do not appear to have hurt employment opportunities for American workers, according to a new report.

The Pew Hispanic Center analyzed immigration state by state using U.S. Census data, evaluating it against unemployment levels. No clear correlation between the two could be found.

Other factors, such as economic growth, have likely played a larger role in influencing the American job market, said Rakesh Kochhar, principal author of the report and an economist at the Pew Hispanic Center in the District.

Israel has long told American officials that it wanted M-26 rockets for use against conventional armies in case Israel was invaded, one of the American officials said. But after being pressed in recent days on what they intended to use the weapons for, Israeli officials disclosed that they planned to use them against rocket sites in Lebanon. It was this prospect that raised the intense concerns over civilian casualties.

Weapons
Israel Asks U.S. to Ship Rockets With Wide Blast
By DAVID S. CLOUD

WASHINGTON, Aug. 10 — Israel has asked the Bush administration to speed delivery of short-range antipersonnel rockets armed with cluster munitions, which it could use to strike Hezbollah missile sites in Lebanon, two American officials said Thursday.

The request for M-26 artillery rockets, which are fired in barrages and carry hundreds of grenade-like bomblets that scatter and explode over a broad area, is likely to be approved shortly, along with other arms, a senior official said.

Analysts and other experts say that if Mr. Bernanke is serious about his goals for controlling inflation, at least two million more workers may have to lose their jobs over the next two years.

“The economic slowdown has to be much more substantial than anybody in the Federal Reserve or on Wall Street is expecting,” said Robert J. Gordon, a professor of economics at Northwestern University, who has analyzed the trade-off between inflation and unemployment for the last several decades.

Economy Often Defies Soft Landing
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS

WASHINGTON, Aug. 10 — In the cool and quiet marble corridors of the Federal Reserve, the strategy for taming inflation sounds painless, even soothing: a “soft landing” for the economy after several years of flying high.

As the central bank contended on Tuesday, when it decided to pause in its two-year effort to raise interest rates, inflation is “elevated” right now but will begin to decline because economic growth is poised for a modest slowdown.

from James MacLean of Hobson's Choice

I cannot recall being so distressed by world events as I am now. I suppose the events of 2003, horrifying as they were, were only a lower course of cut stone in the pyramid of evil. It was a previous step, before things got really awful. . I read it before and wrote a series about it (here).

Also, recently I watched a superb German movie Downfall, about the last days of the 3rd Reich (mainly told from the point of view of Hitler's personal secretary Traudl Junge). The story takes place mostly from inside the rapidly shrinking area of Nazi control in Berlin; much of it in the claustrophobic warren of tunnels under the Chancellery. I had always regarded the Nazi Movement in Germany as a sort of cancer--an opportunistic disease that attacked Germany, rather like exotic cancers attack people suffering from AIDS. In the movie, the Nazi leaders do increasingly reveal their predatory relationship with German society:

Oh my ghod, it's Oil Executives for Socialism!

Pure market economics will never solve this problem. Markets do not account for the hidden and indirect costs of oil dependence. Businesses focused on the highest return on investment are not always in a position to implement new solutions, many of which depend on technologies and fuels that cannot currently compete with the marginal cost of producing a barrel of oil. Most important of all, the marketplace alone will not act preemptively to mitigate the enormous damage that would be inflicted by a sudden, serious and sustained price increase.

Let me add that any new technologies developed on the taxpayers' dime should belong to the taxpayers. I'm not saying pay back the money because future dollars can't really be compared to current dollars in this case (see the quoted paragraph...it's like trying to map dollars spent on education to salaries paid to specific individuals). I'm saying if you insist on this uber-Capitalist shit, We the People who pay for this research desearve a piece of the action.

Are We Ready for the Next Oil Shock?
By Frederick W. Smith and P.X. Kelley
Friday, August 11, 2006; A19

Could a mere 4 percent shortfall in daily oil supply propel the price of a barrel to more than $120 in a matter of days? That's what some oil market experts are saying, and if they're correct, we face the very real possibility of an oil shock wave that could send our economy reeling. Such a rapid rise in fuel costs would have profound effects that could severely threaten the foundation of America's economic prosperity.

Who's Guilty of 'Petty Partisanship'?
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Friday, August 11, 2006; Page A19

In a telephone call with journalists, Vice President Cheney came close to suggesting that there is a new political blog out there called "al-Qaeda for Ned." His words have not received nearly the attention they deserve.

Then give up the transcript, son. You KNOW you recorded that call, and obviously he was on the record.

The rejection of Lieberman made Cheney wonder if "the dominant view of the Democratic Party" is "the basic, fundamental notion that somehow we can retreat behind our oceans and not be actively engaged in this conflict and be safe here at home."

Wow! I bet the 145,000 free citizens of Connecticut who voted for Lamont will be shocked to learn that they were really sending signals of "retreat" to "al-Qaeda types."

Transcript! Transcript! Transcript! Transcript!

One of the major reasons Americans are so easy to stampede is our short attention span. If we had a sense of history we wouldn't get caught up in the same scams over and over again. Americans don't even need a sense of history to make good political decisions. All we need is a sense of continuity.

Case in point: Newt Gingrich's The Only Option is to Win. He makes a number of observations and speculations that, given his political bent, are reasonable. But about a third of the way in he makes this bald assertion.

It is because the Bush administration has failed to win this argument over the direct threat of Iranian and North Korean nuclear and biological weapons that Americans are divided and uncertain about our national security interests.

This is NOT Logic 101.

First, the final paragraph of the linked article .

Given the current trajectory of the threat posed by radical Islamist terrorism in the form of homegrown cells or possibly individuals plotting and acting independently of organizations such as al-Qaeda, security officials need to be alert to emerging radical trends within U.S. borders. This includes extremist tendencies in the African-American Muslim community. Based on al-Qaeda's success in inspiring others to act on behalf of its radical agenda, however, this threat does not differ from the larger issue at hand and should instead be considered in the larger context of homegrown terrorist threats.

This, in compact form, is the pattern I saw in the full article. Differentiate Black folks in order to say there's no need to differentiate them. Was this trip really necessary?

I just made the hotel reservations.

ASALH's 91st Annual Convention
Atlanta, GA USA
September 27 - October 1, 2006
Celebrating Community: A Tribute to Black Fraternal, Social, and Civic Institutions

ASALH's Annual Convention in Atlanta will be special. We will celebrate black institutional life in a city rich with black institutions. As has become the custom, the convention will be both an academic conference and a celebration of black life and history. Events such as our new Institution Builders Reception, Youth Day, the ASALH Film Festival, the Black History Tours, and the Friday Unveiling of the Carter G. Woodson Library Collection at Emory University, will bring together the Atlanta community and our conventioneers.

Said reservations were made because Professor Kim and I are going to do a panel discussion inspired by this here study.

2006 Fort Greene Park Summer Literary Festival
Saturday, August 19th, 4:30 PM
Fort Greene Park, Brooklyn

Click here for directions!

Drawing upon the rich and diverse literary history of Fort Greene Park and its surrounding neighborhoods, The Fort Greene Park Summer Literary Festival provides a means for self-expression and creativity for area young people, and builds community through arts and literature. The Lit Fest consists of a six-week series of free Saturday creative writing workshops for young people and an end-of-summer reading featuring literary icons reading alongside our young writers. The Lit Fest honors the power of the written word to build inclusiveness and give voice to the thoughts and experiences of everyone, not just the privileged and powerful.

The Lit Fest is a project of NY Writers Coalition, the Fort Greene Park Conservancy, Akashic Books and Griot Reading Programs, with additional support from The Walt Whitman Project and BOMB Magazine.

Sponsors include NYC Council Member Letitia James, Con Edison, Time Warner, Emmanuel Baptist Church, Independence Community Foundation, the Brooklyn Arts Council through a grant received from the NY State Council For The Arts, Poets & Writers, Inc. through public funds from the NYC Dept. of Cultural Affairs, and the NYC Department of Parks & Recreation.

Who's polarizing now?
August 10, 2006

Lieberman says he will continue to seek reelection, running in November as an independent.

This is a questionable decision.

There is a place for independent candidacies, for genuinely unaligned candidates, or in situations where the parties resist challengers.

Boston's own John Joseph Moakley became a Democratic power in Congress after first being elected as an independent. But Moakley did not lose a primary; he ran as an independent from the start, knowing incumbent Louise Day Hicks would be hard to beat in a primary.

Lieberman is right that all Connecticut voters make the final choice, and he might have a decent chance of winning if he does run. But it would make sense, before challenging his party's nominee, for Lieberman to take a break after a grueling campaign and think long and hard about who is really polarizing the nation.

There's a lot of hyperventilating over The Lieberman Loss. The substance of ALL of it is summed up quite nicely by this Washington Post headline.

Jury Out on Lieberman Effect
Independent Run Could Hurt, Help Democrats Seeking House

Lieberman looked a lot more important than he was for the last six years. The DLC constructed a profile of The Perfect Veep, custom designed to win elections . Lieberman fit the profile.

Progressives see this. Democrats are starting to. It is well past time for Mr. Lieberman to revert to his natural status level.

But in [TS] Party No. 3, David Brooks sees Mr. Lieberman as the harbinger of the restoration of American Politics, God help us.

Fat Factors
By ROBIN MARANTZ HENIG

In the 30-plus years that Richard Atkinson has been studying obesity, he has always maintained that overeating doesn’t really explain it all. His epiphany came early in his career, when he was a medical fellow at U.C.L.A. engaged in a study of people who weighed more than 300 pounds and had come in for obesity surgery. “The general thought at the time was that fat people ate too much,” Atkinson, now at Virginia Commonwealth University, told me recently. “And we documented that fat people do eat too much — our subjects ate an average of 6,700 calories a day. But what was so impressive to me was the fact that not all fat people eat too much.”...

One year ago, the idea that microbes might cause obesity gained a foothold when the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Louisiana created the nation’s first department of viruses and obesity. It is headed by Nikhil Dhurandhar, a physician who invented the term “infectobesity” to describe the emerging field. Dhurandhar’s particular interest is in the relationship between obesity and a common virus, the adenovirus. Other scientists, led by a group of microbiologists at Washington University in St. Louis, are looking at the actions of the trillions of microbes that live in everyone’s gut, to see whether certain intestinal microbes may be making their hosts fat.

Building Houses out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power author: Psyche A. Williams-Forson asin: 080785686X binding: Paperback list price: $19.95 USD amazon price: $13.57 USD

This is so typical of the problems Black males have had to deal with.

One of the book’s more generous sources is Roy Hawkins, a former head waiter at the Coon Chicken Inn, who offers a rare look inside the workings of the restaurant and in the process exposes some of the complexities and paradoxes associated with this cultural territory. We learn that though the insult of the place and its customers hurt Hawkins, the money, $100 to $200 a night in tips, was irresistible.

The Gospel Bird
Review by MATT LEE and TED LEE

IN the misty, coffee-table histories of the American roadside dining experience, the Coon Chicken Inn restaurant chain, founded in Salt Lake City in 1925, rarely makes an appearance, though it flourished for almost 20 years. It merits a look, if you can bear to: the restaurant’s formula was unequivocally racist. A staff of black waiters served fried chicken to a predominantly white clientele in a room filled with the restaurant’s hallmark logo, a grotesque cartoon of a smiling black man wearing a bellhop’s hat. Menus, toothpicks and napkins all bore the caricature, and customers entered by walking through the red lips of a gigantic plaster version of the Sambo-like logo.

It's like the official racial categories will be "Hispanic" and "Non-Hispanic."

Proposal Adds Options for Students to Specify Race
By ELISSA GOOTMAN

Under the proposed regulations, which were issued Monday and first reported by the Web publication Inside Higher Ed, there would be two questions. The first would ask whether a student is Hispanic. The second would ask students to select one or more descriptions from the following groups: American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, black, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, and white.

But students who identify themselves as Hispanic would be counted only as Hispanics, even if they also check off other categories. If non-Hispanic students check off more than one racial category in response to the second question, they will be listed under “two or more races,” but those races will not be specified.

The new reporting system would not directly affect the way kindergarten through 12th-grade schools are required to break down achievement data by race and ethnicity under the No Child Left Behind law, which sanctions schools that fail to bring all groups to proficiency. The rules are now subject to a 45-day comment period and, if approved by the department, will go into effect in 2009.

It's unfortunate, but there's always a way around the rules.

Even before Missouri passed its new law, it had tougher ID requirements than many states. Voters were required, with limited exceptions, to bring ID with them to the polls, but university ID cards, bank statements mailed to a voter’s address, and similar documents were acceptable. The new law requires a government-issued photo ID, which as many as 200,000 Missourians do not have.

Missourians who have driver’s licenses will have little trouble voting, but many who do not will have to go to considerable trouble to get special ID’s. The supporting documents needed to get these, like birth certificates, often have fees attached, so some Missourians will have to pay to keep voting. It is likely that many people will not jump all of the bureaucratic hurdles to get the special ID, and will become ineligible to vote.

Big Katrina Contractors Win More FEMA Work
By Griff Witte and Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, August 10, 2006; D01

The four giant construction firms that received controversial no-bid contracts to house Hurricane Katrina evacuees last September will be earning up to $250 million apiece to do similar work after future disasters, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said yesterday.

Unlike the Katrina deals, the contracts announced yesterday were awarded after a bidding process. But most of them went to the same four firms: Bechtel Corp., CH2M Hill Cos., Fluor Corp. and Shaw Group Inc. Two new consortia of companies were also chosen for a share of the work. Together, the six winners will receive up to $1.5 billion for hauling and installing temporary trailers to house evacuees during future emergencies.

The next time you interview Mr. Rumsfeld, you should base at least a few of your questions on this video.

No Leads Sought In Asshole's Murder
August 9, 2006 | Issue 42•32

BROOKLYN, NY—The New York Police Department released a statement today confirming its intention to ignore the brutal slaying of local asshole Don Hewson, 34, and to avoid pursuing leads as long as possible. "Mr. Hewson was found with multiple stab and gunshot wounds in his smug fucking face and puffed-up chest, and while we recovered a number of weapons, we are neither testing them for prints nor tracing any serial numbers," Detective Travis Calloway said. "Nor will we follow up on the explicit eye-witness descriptions of the car seen leaving the scene, the calls to Hewson's phone, or interview the scores of people who had good reason to want this guy dead. There may have been a murder here, but we're having a hard time identifying any actual crime." Calloway said anyone calling NYPD's crime hotline with information on the murder would be eligible for fines of up to $10,000.

Another "I told you so."

I predict an increase in irrational deaths

Maybe that should be a new category.

Neighborhood shootout leads to eight arrests
BY IDY FERNANDEZ

Eight Leisure City residents are in custody this morning after a neighborhood argument led to a shootout late Tuesday night, Herald news partner WFOR-CBS4 reported.

Miami-Dade Police were summoned after a caller reported that someone was barricaded in a home on Southwest 144th Avenue and 290th Street, CBS4 said.

However, when officers arrived, they found themselves in the middle of gunfire.

when people ask me what i study in school, i tell them african american studies and wait for the usual “oh? response.” the “oh? response” is a popular one, since many people inside and outside of academia, see fields such as comparative ethnic studies, black studies, latino studies, asian studies, and so on, as less academically challenging, than a “traditional” field such as english, history, sociology or anthropology. the dominant myth of such programs is that, since we scholars of color dominate the ethnic studies fields and focus our work on other folks of color, our skin color produces a handicap on our intellectual capability. therefore, placing us as inherently less intelligent than our white counterparts studying, say, 18th century british literature, 2nd wave feminism, or the new “undiscovered” tribe of south america.

I will likely bitch about that dominant myth later. Meanwhile, check nubian's description of her field of study.

I'm going to get some comic books. I'm still really feeling Planet Hulk and the next issue is due.

Arcanity of Humanity

In the meantime, the Field Negro hit me a bit blindsided in reviewing his theory of fieldedness vs housedness. He's right on target, of course, he's no dummy and I am hesitant to excoriate him from my position. But what is my position? Odd that. At the moment I feel particularly like a very underutilized black man, which is a sentiment I am confident many black men feel. I feel like I have all kinds of extra energy and juice that I am spending on things that gain me goodies that cannot be spent. In otherwords I'm asking myself the age-old question: If you're so smart, how come you're not rich. I'm missing my old business. I think of this in light of the FN's question because in my professional career, I got out into the field as soon as I realized the shakiness of the house. But these days I covet the security of the house.

Cinqué Hicks also blogs at Bare and Bitter Sleep.

Code Z is more than just a lively art news source. With community forums, feedback opportunities, and artists' works, Code Z is an unparalleled network of black visual creators at the forefront of shaping our culture and our world.

There are enough of us now; a critical mass of rebels and back-talkers, soul sisters and sci-fi brothers, iconoclasts and visionaries. Our movements have been growing steadily for decades, a little here, a little there. We are the square pegs. Now is the time to come forward in full force to shape who we are and how we see the world, to birth new visions of culture, of art, of life.

Time is now. Now is the time.

As black artists, many of us have been pushing up against the boundaries of art for many years. We have felt the yawning absence of a forum such as this.

We know you've been pushing, too. Let's push together.

Code Z has a dedicated team of editors (see below) expert in various areas of fine art, design, fashion, film, architecture, publishing, and digital media. But our success depends on our readers and our members, on you. You will make Code Z work, not us.

So come aboard. Go out and tell others: your friends, your collaborators, your co-conspirators. We're ready. We know that together we can change the shape of the world.

Thank you and peace,

Cinqué Hicks and The Code Z Team
Atlanta, USA, 2006

NOW I see Sen. Lieberman is still running as an independant. Duh (him AND me...). Obviously I'm gonna have to comment as the campaign progresses.

I'll say this right now...This sign has GOT to go.

This is what happens when you let white folks make up their own slang.