history made

it finally happened :). now maybe my political fatigue will ebb away.

obama '08.

si se puede!

unhelpful= maureen dowd

not only do i really dislike her headshot, as it seems a bit pompous and smug (i'm sorry, is it sexist to comment on her headshot? i read her column at least once a week and this is the first time i'm saying it...does that make it better? probs not, eh? oh well, forgive me feminist goddess), but i also really dislike her op-ed today on hillary and barack. i just don't think passages like this are helpful at all:

Is he skittish around her because he knows that she detests him and he’s used to charming everyone? Or does he feel guilty that he cut in line ahead of her? As the husband of Michelle, does he know better than to defy the will of a strong woman? Or is he simply scared of Hillary because she’s scary?

He is frantic to get away from her because he can’t keep carbo-loading to relate to the common people.

neither is this:

But this is clearly a man who can’t wait to get back to his organic scrambled egg whites. That was made plain with his cri de coeur at the Glider Diner in Scranton when a reporter asked him about Jimmy Carter and Hamas.

“Why” he pleaded, sounding a bit, dare we say, bitter, “can’t I just eat my waffle?”

His subtext was obvious: Why can’t I just be president? Why do I have to keep eating these gooey waffles and answering these gotcha questions and debating this gonzo woman?

Before they devour themselves once more, perhaps the Democrats will take a cue from Dr. Seuss’s “Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now!” (The writer once mischievously redid it for his friend Art Buchwald as “Richard M. Nixon Will You Please Go Now!”) They could sing:

“The time has come. The time has come. The time is now. Just go. ... I don’t care how. You can go by foot. You can go by cow. Hillary R. Clinton, will you please go now! You can go on skates. You can go on skis. ... You can go in an old blue shoe.

Just go, go, GO!”

dowd-y. friend. could you be any more crass? could you be any less useful right now? he wants to go back to his "organic scrambled egg whites"? WTF? who are you helping? who are you hurting? at the very most, you're just annoying those of us that sometimes think you have something useful to say.

anyway, if you want useful analysis of the situation, check out the JJP post, and i'm sure dailyKos will have some interesting stuff. the painful journey down primary road continues...

ladies and gents, fr. michael pfleger

l'heureux did his piece with bill o'reilly, but father michael pfleger is a force to be reckoned with. the fox news reporter didn't have a fucking chance. there's definitely a reason they aren't streaming this one on the main homepage...

h/t to JJP

omg

obama's really on the daily show tonight! crazy. the day before the primary? spending his time with john stewart?

oh and edwards wasn't bad on colbert...though he's ridiculously attractive face kind of gets old as you watch him stumble over words he hasn't rehearsed quite well enough. the 1,000,000th mention balloons are pretty awesome.

my pres. candidate IAT

apparently hillary doesn't have much of a lead over mccain in my book. that's a little crazy, since mccain pro-life ideas scare the bejesus out of me. oh, those harvard scientists. always tripping us up.

he brushed his shoulders off

yes, it's everywhere already. now it's here too. as dnA said, "gullyness at 2:20":

i want to be her when i grow up

two quick things-

1) corcoran's representation of interracial bliss
this corcoran ad is interesting to me. what do y'all think? is this the new wealthy manhattanite story? black men are completely written out of the script? also interesting to me, beyond the white dude-black woman thing, is the four kids. really? and she still looks like that? i'd love to hear what y'all think on this.

2) my coworker hd sent me this link to a write-up on eboo patel's memoir. if you don't eboo patel, you should google the man and find out. he's definitely up and coming. read his blog at the washington post, if nothing else.

reading the feministing post made me think, madly, this: obama-patel 2008. no, obama's not a muslim, but eboo is! that would get our republican friends' riled up, no? too bad eboo isn't crazy enough to be a politician :(.

bowling=white?

from shakesville:

Sweet Jesus, I Still Hate Chris Matthews

| posted by Melissa McEwan | Tuesday, April 01, 2008

Chris "Paleface" Matthews, on yesterday's Hardball, discussing with Howard Fineman and Michelle Bernard the very, very newsworthy and important fact that presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama isn't a fantabulous bowler (about which Spudsy posted yesterday):

FINEMAN: … He definitely needs some bowling lessons. He should do what we used to do in Pittsburgh, which is all-night bowling for a dollar, you know, really work on your game. I think he did get [former Pittsburgh Steelers football players] Franco Harris and he did get Jerome Bettis, the Bus, to endorse him. And he's traveling around on the bus with the Bus. But if you can't do something like that, you shouldn't do it. He should have stuck to shooting hoops—

MATTHEWS: Yeah, I know.

FINEMAN: —which he's very, very good at, by the way, and which translates racially, too, especially during the NCAA basketball tournament. Don't do something you've never tried before in front of a national television audience, OK?

MATTHEWS: You know, Michelle—and this gets very ethnic, but the fact that he's good at basketball doesn't surprise anybody, but the fact that he's that terrible at bowling does make you wonder—

FINEMAN: That doesn't surprise anybody either.

BERNARD: Well, it certainly doesn't surprise anybody black, I can tell you that.

…MATTHEWS: [Watching video.] This is a killer. Look at this killer. Because it isn't the most macho form there, I must say, but who knows?

But how does he smell, Chris? HOW DOES HE SMELL???!!!

to finish the posting frenzy, another women's history month poem

loving the carnival. this entry was posted over at women's space:



The Other Woman

The ancient lines
Drawn
The ancient dust
Settles the storm
Arriving

On the eve of the revolution

Blood flows red
Into the gutter.
Sites of ancient women’s power
Buried
In the dirt
In the dust

I want this more
Each day I flounder
With the words left unsaid

I am not
As white as you
I am not
As rich as you

Still I bleed red
In darkness

While you shine
With your golden hair
And your beautiful words

And I hate you

But really, deep-down
You are everything
I wish to be

With your confidence
Your grace

I know
You will be a leader
Women will love you
Women will follow you

While I lie
Here in the background
With the other
Lost and buried
Women

Because my hair
Does not shine gold
My voice
Does not sing sweetly
You are everything
That I am not

And I hate you
Even though
I know I shouldn’t
Even though
I want to love you
Even though

Everything in you screams
‘I am a fucked thing
Just like you
I hate you too
Shut the fuck up shut the fuck up shutthefuckup

SHUT THE FUCK UP’

And everything in me
Screams back
Until
We can not hear each other
We can not hear ourselves

So

I ask you
To join me here
On the eve of the revolution

Round the kitchen table
In the garden
Round the tribal fire
In those ancient sacred sites

Believe that there is a
A place
Where women are free
To love ourselves
And each other

That place
Is in my heart
When I reach out a hand
And call you sister

That place is in you
When you reach back

–by Dani/allecto, who is a 26 year old radical feminist lesbian, a descendant of a First Nations people, an activist, vegetarian, child-care worker; a creative, passionate, alive, inspired woman. She believes that Sisterhood is the most powerful force in the Universe.

i <3 color of change, so...

Dear Friends,

The so-called "war on drugs" has created a national disaster: 1 in 15 Black adults in America are now behind bars. It's not because they commit more crime but because of unfair sentencing rules that treat 5 grams of crack cocaine, the kind found in poor Black communities, the same as 500 grams of powder cocaine the kind found in White and wealthier communities.

These sentencing laws are destroying communities across the country and have done almost nothing to reduce the level of drug use and crime.

Senator Joe Biden is one of the original creators of these laws and is now trying to fix the problem. But some of his colleagues on the Senate Judiciary Committee are standing in the way. I've signed on with ColorOfChange.org to tell them to stand with Joe Biden and undo this disaster once and for all. Will you join me? It just takes a moment and you can start by clicking on the link below:

http://www.colorofchange.org/crackpowder/?id=1903-451771

Thanks.

some quotes from my ladies

lucille clifton and grace lee boggs on 9.11. these two quotes- one a poem, another an excerpt from a recent speech, stuck out to me in the midst of all the strife around jeremiah wright this week (and last week). as i watch clips on fox and read blog posts around the net, i remember that, in my mind, the most important part of loving someone, or something, i.e. a country, is being willing to take a risk and see their wrongs. there is nothing more painful than recognizing flaws in those you love. that is the state people of color, queer people, differently abled people, poor people and their allies feel every day. we see what's wrong with our country, and many of us love it, the united states of america, enough to struggle to make it better. and that makes us, if anything, more patriotic than those that follow the tide. but that's enough from my humble mouth. read lucille and grace.

4 9/14/01
some of us know
we have never felt safe

all of us americans
weeping

as some of us have wept
before

is it treason to remember

what have we done
to deserve such villainy

nothing we reassure ourselves
nothing

~lucille clifton, from september song, a poem in seven days


"'The revolution to be made in the United States,' Jimmy wrote, nearly 30 years before 9/11, 'will be the first revolution in history to require the masses to make material sacrifices rather than to acquire more material things. We must give up many of the things which this country has enjoyed at the expense of damning over one third of the world into a state of underdevelopment, ignorance, disease and early death...It is obviously going to take a tremendous transformation to prepare the poeple of the United States for these new social goals. But potential revolutionaries can only become true revolutionaries if they take the side of those who believe that humanity can be transformed...'
This means that it is not enough to organize mobilizations calling on Congress and the President to end the war in Iraq. We must also challenge the American people to examine why 9/11 happened and why so many people around the world who, while not supporting the terrorists, understand that they were driven to these acts of anger at the US role in the world, e.g. supporting the Israeli occupation of Palestine, overthrowing or seeking to overthrow democratically-elected governments, and treating whole countries, the world's peoples and Nature only as a resource enabling us to maintain our middle class way of life."

- grace lee boggs, closing plenary for the left forum 2008, full text here


last bit- if you haven't read grace's autobiography, um, what the hell are you waiting for?

the women's history month blog carnival has got me going

it's happening (at least partly) over at what tami said. today's carnival post got me, so i thought i'd share it here. it's by christina springer:

rambles on rage

1.

i hope
the rage turns

into a cherry blossom, so
I can brew

wine from sunset ripened fruit

2.

obama, with great delicacy and care
i put my white liberal friends in the dark

drawer of hurt where i won' t see them
again for 15 years. maybe when you have

more than 152 pieces of passed legislation
to her 20, or mice nibble the experience

of your fluffy words
into a victory confetti.

i'll feel safe. see desperate
lives bouncing "Yes, we can!"

3.

little girl inside
screams
"fair! just

want every
simple thing
fair!" just

hear.

4.

why do faces that I love
hate my salvation?

doves of broken handlers
crack aspiration.

sugar smart smile, divine be
gentle and calm all of me.

rage and rage and rage
'til loved ones can not see

how oozing hapless happy
froth consumes identity.

5.

the equation for soul height +
vision size divided by spin control

seems weighted, specialized.
give me your equation for my destiny?

i know we all know, but still

derrick ashong knows what's up, and deserves a read. i, for one, started crying as i finished reading obama's speech on the train today. the man understands. some things. he doesn't seem to agree with me on the majority of foreign policy, but. but. the man can speak on what is, at the very least, some of my truth.

i never dared hope that i would hear a major politician understand my truth, much less speak it aloud for all to hear. much less to have it published in the new york times and almost every other major US news source. i didn't dare hope. as jeremiah and barack would both say, i didn't have the audacity. he does.

i can't wait to teach this speech next year. it's already on the curriculum map.

derrick's comments: Courageous Obama poses challenge to America
full text after the jump...

By Derrick Ashong

Editor's Note: Derrick Ashong is a musician, activist and entrepreneur. He recently became a You Tube "phenom" after posting a passionate defense of Barack Obama. Ashong identifies himself as an independent.


Derrick Ashong says Barack Obama spoke with "candor and compassion" about race relations in America.

Like many Americans I watched Sen. Barack Obama deliver his speech titled "A More Perfect Union."

I watched in a state of minor shock, not so much at the deftness with which he defused the sophomoric conflation of his call for national unity with the inflammatory rhetoric of the retired head pastor of his church -- a conflation that would imply that we must each swallow whole the entirety of views expressed by our friends and associates.

It was not his repudiation of small thinking that struck me. It was the fact that here we had an American politician speaking with both candor and compassion about the proverbial elephant in our national living room.

Race is an issue that continues to confound this country. It is an undercurrent that paints our description, understanding and valuation of people in American society whether spoken or not. It is the subtext that places NBA star LeBron James and Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bundchen on the cover of Vogue, in uncomfortable caricature of brute and ingénue.

It is in the minds of some the very reason a person of color would even be considered a serious candidate for the presidency of the nation -- never mind that three centuries into the American experiment there has been to date, only one such person.

I watched Obama's speech with a measure of disbelief that he had the gumption to come out and say what we all know -- that the problem of race remains one that we as a nation have yet to conquer. To be sure we have made strides towards reconciliation. But the hard conversations continue to be harder than most are willing to deal with.

Black America has yet to come to grips with its responsibility to tackle head on the problems that plague our communities. White America has yet to acknowledge the fact that here in the "home of the free," true liberty has evaded many for far too long.

Too often these conversations are ended before they've truly begun, due to the ignorance, intransigence or simple unwillingness of people to acknowledge the validity of what the other side has to say.

Who can honestly argue that black America is not today contributing mightily to its own social, cultural and economic decline?

Who can honestly argue that white America has not been willfully blind and too often complicit in the injustices that continue to be visited upon people born with darker hue or stranger accent?

Who will have both the courage and the commitment to the promise of universal justice and equity that undergirds our country, to call upon the nation to move beyond the divisive rhetoric of racial "one-upmanship" and to embrace the challenge of fulfilling that promise?

Apparently a junior senator from Illinois by the name of Barack Obama.

For days pundits have pondered whether Sen. Obama could weather the controversy over Rev. Jeremiah Wright's racially polarizing comments. The question at this juncture is not whether the candidate will rise to the occasion, but rather, whether America will.

a damn shame

have you heard about this? an entire school district is on the verge of losing its accreditation? is anyone surprised that the district is "predominantly black"?

choice quotes-

"For the county's nearly 53,000 public school students, loss of accreditation would mean they would not be eligible for state scholarships or be accepted at many universities. They also would have difficulty transferring to other high schools."

"According to the report, Clayton County Public Schools' nine-member school board is so "dysfunctional" that it has had difficulty recruiting a superintendent, teachers and bus drivers. It accuses board members of nepotism, conflicts of interest, micromanagement, lax fiscal responsibility and failure to audit school attendance."

so nine people can take away 53,000 black students' chances at higher education, but we don't hear about it in the nightly news. we don't read about it on blogs. it's tucked away in the LA Times Education section and swept away in the midst of election frenzy. if this country were to do right, these would be front-page stories.

and geraldine ferraro refuses to be sorry for suggesting that barack obama is lucky to be a black man.

does anyone want to go start a quilombo with me? anyone?

the ferraro controversy

h/t to too sense on this clip.

if you jump ahead to 4:02, you'll see barack's response to the silliness that is geraldine ferraro, and then, soon after you'll get a taste of eugene robinson's genius.

one note to msnbc: throughout the second half of the clip y'all have ferraro's name egregiously misspelled. egregiously. i mean, come on now.

someone is trying to bamboozle you

oh, barack. "we're being bamboozled and hoodwinked." you are sooooo smart. and lord knows i have a thing for smart men. thank god you're running for president.



h/t to what tami said on this one.

ay yi yi

this article on the hutto family detention center and others like it hurts my heart. why do we jail people who have committed no crime other than seeking safety?

grrrr. beginning of article after the jump, complete text found here.

The Lost Children
What do tougher detention policies mean for illegal immigrant families?
by Margaret Talbot March 3, 2008

In the summer of 1995, an Iranian man named Majid Yourdkhani allowed a friend to photocopy pages from “The Satanic Verses,” the Salman Rushdie novel, at the small print shop that he owned in Tehran. Government agents arrested the friend and came looking for Majid, who secretly crossed the border to Turkey and then flew to Canada. In his haste, Majid was forced to leave behind his wife, Masomeh; for months afterward, Iranian government agents phoned her and said things like “If you aren’t divorcing him, then you are supporting him, and we will therefore arrest you and torture you.” That October, Masomeh also escaped from Iran and joined Majid in Toronto, where they lived for ten years. Majid worked in a pizza place, Masomeh in a coffee shop. She dressed and acted the way she liked—she is blond and pretty and partial to bright clothes and makeup, which she could never wear in public in Iran—and for a long time the Yourdkhanis felt they were safe from politics and the past. Their son, Kevin, was born in Toronto, in 1997, a Canadian citizen. He grew into a happy, affectionate kid, tall and sturdy with a shock of dark hair. He liked math and social studies, developed asthma but dealt with it, and shared with his mom a taste for goofy comedies, such as the “Mr. Bean” movies. In December, 2005, however, the Yourdkhanis learned that the Canadian government had denied their application for political asylum, and Majid, Masomeh, and Kevin were deported to Iran.

Upon their return, the Yourdkhanis say, Masomeh was imprisoned for a month, and Majid for six, and during that time he was beaten and tortured. After Majid was released, the family paid a smuggler twenty thousand dollars to procure false documents and arrange a series of flights that would return them to Canada.

Then, on the last leg of the journey, the family ran into someone else’s bad luck. On February 4, 2007, during a flight from Georgetown, Guyana, to Toronto, a passenger had a heart attack and died, and the plane was forced to make an unscheduled stop in Puerto Rico. American immigration officials there ascertained that the Yourdkhanis’ travel documents were fake. The Yourdkhanis begged to be allowed to continue on to Canada, but they were told that if they wanted asylum they would have to apply for it in the United States. They did so, and, five days later, became part of one of the more peculiar, and contested, recent experiments in American immigration policy. They were locked inside a former medium-security prison in a desolate patch of rural Texas: the T. Don Hutto Residential Center.

Hutto is one of two immigrant-detention facilities in America that house families—the other is in Berks County, Pennsylvania—and is the only one owned and run by a private prison company. The detention of immigrants is the fastest-growing form of incarceration in this country, and, with the support of the Bush Administration, it is becoming a lucrative business. At the end of 2006, some fourteen thousand people were in government custody for immigration-law violations, in a patchwork of detention arrangements, including space rented out by hundreds of local and state jails, and seven freestanding facilities run by private contractors. This number was up by seventy-nine per cent from the previous year, an increase that can be attributed, in large part, to the actions of Michael Chertoff, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, which runs the Immigration and Customs Enforcement division. In 2005, Chertoff announced the end of “catch-and-release”—the long-standing practice of allowing immigrants caught without legal documents to remain free inside the country while they waited for an appearance in court. Since these illegal immigrants weren’t monitored in any way, the rate of no-shows was predictably high, and the practice inflamed anti-immigrant sentiment.

* from the issue
* cartoon bank
* e-mail this

Private companies began making inroads into the detention business in the nineteen-eighties, when the idea was in vogue that almost any private operation was inherently more efficient than a government one. The largest firm, Corrections Corporation of America, or C.C.A., was founded in 1983. But poor management and a series of well-publicized troubles—including riots at and escapes from prisons run by C.C.A.—dampened the initial excitement. In the nineties, C.C.A.’s bid to take over the entire prison system of Tennessee, where the company is based, failed; state legislators had grown skeptical. By the end of 2000, C.C.A.’s stock had hit an all-time low. When immigration detention started its precipitate climb following 9/11, private prison companies eagerly offered their empty beds, and the industry was revitalized.

One complication was that hundreds of children were among the immigrant detainees. Typically, kids had been sent to shelters, which allowed them to attend school, while parents were held at closed facilities. Nobody thought that it was good policy to separate parents from children—not immigration officials, not immigrant advocates, not Congress. In 2005, a report by the House Appropriations Committee expressed concern about “reports that children apprehended by D.H.S.”—the Department of Homeland Security—“even as young as nursing infants, are being separated from their parents and placed in shelters.” The committee also declared that children should not be placed in government custody unless their welfare was in question, and added that the Department of Homeland Security should “release families or use alternatives to detention” whenever possible. The report recommended a new alternative to detention known as the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program—which allows people awaiting disposition of their immigration cases to be released into the community, provided that they are closely tracked by means such as electronic monitoring bracelets, curfews, and regular contact with a caseworker. The government has since established pilot programs in twelve cities, and reports that more than ninety per cent of the people enrolled in them show up for their court dates. The immigration agency could have made a priority of putting families, especially asylum seekers, into such programs. Instead, it chose to house families in Hutto, which is owned and run by C.C.A. Families would be kept together, but it would mean they were incarcerated together.

amazing woman

okay, first of all, i'm not sure what's going on with my template. i'm going to work on that.

also, went to this conference on black feminism yesterday. i'm feeling rejuvenated and refocused; i've relocated those goalposts and re-oriented myself. i wrote this yesterday during a presentation on lucille clifton and sonia sanchez, and just the sight of all of these amazing women's names in one place still puts a smile on my face and a lift in my heart. i am so thankful to have had the opportunity.

amazing women
nzadi keita
nicole watson
sherie randolph
rose afriyie
sala cyril
ashley lewis
toccara
robyn spencer
adrienne kennedy
lucille clifton
safiya bandele
assata
barbara omolade
nadine
sonia sanchez
women panthers

u.s.-cuba relations- a short intro

if you care about cuba like i do, the information compiled by the council on foreign policy on some of the basic facts of our doings with cuba will probably be deeply disturbing.

some of these things i knew tangentially, without specifics, but now that i've learned the specifics i'm pissed. ignorance is bliss, after all. excerpts of some of the most disturbing stuff below, and the full article can be found here.

What is the status of U.S.-Cuba relations?

-U.S.-Cuban relations are virtually nonexistent. There is a U.S. mission in Havana, Cuba's capital, but it has minimal communication with the Cuban government. Since 1961, the official U.S. policy towards Cuba has been two-pronged: economic embargo and diplomatic isolation. The Bush administration has strongly enforced the embargo and strengthened travel restrictions. Americans with immediate family may visit once every three years for a maximum of two weeks, while the total amount of family remittances an authorized traveler may carry to Cuba is $300, reduced from $3,000 in 2004.

-A small but vocal contingent of hard-line Cuban exiles, many of them based in Florida, do not want to resume relations with Cuba until Castro and his sympathizers are gone, says Julia E. Sweig, CFR senior fellow for Latin American Studies. (havestrength note: i know these people's children, and most of them suck.)

-Why is Cuba on the State Sponsors of Terrorism list?

According to the State Department, Cuba remains on the list because it opposes the global war on terrorism, supports members of two Colombia insurgent groups, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN), and provides safe haven to several Basque ETA members from Spain. But some experts say there is little evidence to support the State Department's allegations.