I thought this comment from a reader of the NYT article about blacks in Memphis, TN (and elsewhere) are facing much dire economic loss in this Great Recession than others. Many would comment on bleeding heart stories are shout their racist rants, for the sole purpose of being assholes. But some readers actually read the articles, and pick up and share some insightful points about what they read. This is one of them.
23.
Scott Enk
Hales Corners, WI
May 31st, 2010
10:38 am
How much more economic calamity must "ordinary" middle-class and working Americans, African-American and otherwise, suffer before we stop letting those in power divide and set us against one another by race, gender, sexual orientation, and the like? If this "Great Recession" teaches us nothing else, it should teach us that we need a New New Deal where working people in America are once again on top, where real democracy prevails, and where people, not money or corporations, rule.
Remember, as if you need any more reminders in this "Great Recession," that what has been happening to so many once-prosperous African-Americans in Memphis *can* happen to you. There needs to be a *real* (yes, European-style) "safety net" for us all--as well as an economy and a government that once again works for all of us who must really work for a living. Let's not let ourselves be divided by race, religion, or otherwise in fighting our real foes and demanding a truly fair economy. If that means a Second American Revolution, so be it. Or do you really want to follow the dubious lead of the boiled frog?Even though many white Americans, for example, who thus far have escaped any major pain from this "Great Recession" might still "think" "It can't happen to me" and regard such things as unemployment and foreclosure as evils that beset only the "lazy," the "Other," and the like, what's happening in Memphis to its once-proud African-American middle class should be, not cause for avoidance, but for action.
Instead of letting the rich and powerful divide us and continue to play us against each other while the clowns on top keep laughing all the way to the bank while they continue to impoverish the rest of us, we "ordinary" Americans all need to unite and fight the *real* enemies of our prosperity, our nation, and our way of life. These enemies are not similar Americans of races and backgrounds other than our own, but, rather, are still those Theodore Roosevelt called "malefactors of great wealth": Goldman Sachs and others in "high finance," BP and others in "Big Oil" (let's not even get started *here* about the dire economic as well as environmental dangers BP's continuing disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is), and other businesses that have abused working people and their families and communities. Remember also their enablers and cheerleaders among the likes of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Republican Party, and, yes, in the Democratic Party as well. Remember that just as the dangerous "pro-business" policies of the last 30 years or so have ruined the lives and futures of millions of Americans of *all* races to enrich a greedy few, most of the rest of us--yes, dear reader, that includes *you* and those about whom you care--are just a layoff notice, a few missed paychecks, away from ending up in the very same place where the poor and welfare recipients that you and I have often been urged to fear and despise have found themselves.
"Tea Partiers" and others who still somehow think that progressive economic and social policies are a threat rather than part of a vital safety net that we need to expand, not shrink further, especially need to remember that Horatio Alger is not only dead, but also that he wrote fiction. We really *are* in increasingly dire economic and other straits together. As Benjamin Franklin observed, we can hang together or hang separately.
01 June 2010
17 May 2010
Cowboys, Cops, and Lawyers - We Love Em All!
TV will always be regarded historically for its signature contribution to 20th century life: the sitcom. But TV will hopefully be remembered for its legacy in the drama that underscores our national theme: good guys and bad guys. Whether it be Bush or Obama ranting about Iran's leader, or Teabaggers ranting about almost anything that spouts an us vs. them mindset, all of it comes from America's obsession with good guys and bad. It started for many of us with the cowboy with the white hat. The bad guy always had the black or dark hat - symbolizing and reinforcing not only racial stereotypes surrounding perceived morality, but also of racial demonizations based on good and bad. This symbol represented the basic moral values - in the form of westerns - that sprayed over the silver screen of the 1930s and 40s, and transported itself to the boob tubes of the 50s and early 60s.
But, around 1960, a new concept was forming - one of law and order. The country was facing a dangerous threat in the form of a nuclear-armed and space-bound Soviet Union. Domestically, political unrest was percolating, first with the civil rights movement, then with the anti-war and later student peace movement of the mid-60s. Television was taking it in, while at the same time proposing a defense - super-sleuth lawyers like Perry Mason, always-get-their-man cops like Steve McGarrett. To cap the Soviet threat, spy shows of all sorts from I-Spy to Get Smart to It Takes a Theif took law and order to the international stage. The name's Bond . . . James Bond.
But nowadays the name is McCoy - Jack McCoy. The evolution of crime shows, starting with the infamous Perry Mason (whose actor ironically went on the play the cop side of the story in the 70s show Ironside), evolving further with the endless list of detective shows in the 70s (we still call the cops 5-0), and maturing into the ultimate disco-era/greed is good era shows Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law and NYPD Blue of 25 years ago, they nurtured perhaps the greatest crime TV show of our time, Law & Order. Unique, and taking the best of what all these shows had to offer, we have both the accuracy and reality of a police crime-solving drama and the legal procedure of criminal prosecution and court adjudication in one bowl of soup. Add to that perhaps the best and most seasoned and professional actors on TV today, and it's no wonder that this show ran like its moral and quality equivalent of the western genre, Gunsmoke.
But new shows for this franchise will be no more. NBC, in its infinite wisdom, has cancelled the show after 20 years, tying it with Gunsmoke as the longest-running TV show ever. Both deserve it. But I think most would agree that Law & Order, the masterpiece of a lot of ingredients to an already-improving recipe, deserved the gold on this one. From here, TV goes downward to a spiral - the end of TV as we or our parents knew it. On-demand, internet, TIVO, Netflix programming will become the norm going forward. A technological advancement. But a production and content loss we will soon regret.
Rest in peace, L&O. You were the best of the best in network television.
But, around 1960, a new concept was forming - one of law and order. The country was facing a dangerous threat in the form of a nuclear-armed and space-bound Soviet Union. Domestically, political unrest was percolating, first with the civil rights movement, then with the anti-war and later student peace movement of the mid-60s. Television was taking it in, while at the same time proposing a defense - super-sleuth lawyers like Perry Mason, always-get-their-man cops like Steve McGarrett. To cap the Soviet threat, spy shows of all sorts from I-Spy to Get Smart to It Takes a Theif took law and order to the international stage. The name's Bond . . . James Bond.
But nowadays the name is McCoy - Jack McCoy. The evolution of crime shows, starting with the infamous Perry Mason (whose actor ironically went on the play the cop side of the story in the 70s show Ironside), evolving further with the endless list of detective shows in the 70s (we still call the cops 5-0), and maturing into the ultimate disco-era/greed is good era shows Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law and NYPD Blue of 25 years ago, they nurtured perhaps the greatest crime TV show of our time, Law & Order. Unique, and taking the best of what all these shows had to offer, we have both the accuracy and reality of a police crime-solving drama and the legal procedure of criminal prosecution and court adjudication in one bowl of soup. Add to that perhaps the best and most seasoned and professional actors on TV today, and it's no wonder that this show ran like its moral and quality equivalent of the western genre, Gunsmoke.
But new shows for this franchise will be no more. NBC, in its infinite wisdom, has cancelled the show after 20 years, tying it with Gunsmoke as the longest-running TV show ever. Both deserve it. But I think most would agree that Law & Order, the masterpiece of a lot of ingredients to an already-improving recipe, deserved the gold on this one. From here, TV goes downward to a spiral - the end of TV as we or our parents knew it. On-demand, internet, TIVO, Netflix programming will become the norm going forward. A technological advancement. But a production and content loss we will soon regret.
Rest in peace, L&O. You were the best of the best in network television.
13 March 2010
Philadelphia PA BEWARE: You Will Probably BE The Next Big Venue for the Tea Party Movement
Don't think you aren't. Around the 5 Pennsylvania counties surrounding Philadelphia, there is a simmering and already-growing Tea Party-style political movement that will make its weight felt in 2010. Probably as early as next month, perhaps already in some specific pockets of Montgomery, Bucks and Chester counties, and definitely as soon as this November's elections, which should have some interesting showings of a similar kind nationwide.
But Philadelphia is more specific, and a bellweather for things to come, but not good things. Like many in the country's metropolitan regions, there is a fear-base self-pity allergy of psuedo-xenophobia. This virus brings on the belief, however misfigured, that government is the source of all its problems, that we need to take government back, that we need less government while we're at it, and let people have the individual, or states have the indivdual, right to live and plan their life as they please, that we should in essence let the "strong survive", while the weak try to figure out or even understand their most basic of benefits or social covenants we as a nation long before FDR or even Abraham Lincoln swore that we would to ourselves give, that we would feed the poor, take care of the sick, and provide for the elderly. That we will take care and educate our children, and give families something to live for and build upon. No, we were not promised we would be rich. A few of us were promised 40 acres and a mule that was never received. A few more of us have treaties with our government which includes social and economic covenants we owed them, that have not all been fulfilled. We've also made promises to others, like those we have defeated, like Japan. Those for which we should never have been involved, like Iraq. Like many others for which we give billions in foreign aid, for purposes not all intended as good for them or for us citizens, that take our jobs away for lower pay and corporate greed. Corporations that often are from our country, and employ and are run by people like these Tea Partiers, or others like you.
Somewhere in the escape to suburbia in the late 1960s, the suburban populace, who previously thought themselves immune to the problems of the cities they left, realized that there was no escape from social progress. They had trouble reconciling with social change - change that they knew was long overdue, and now threatened to topple their lock on world dominance. It showed its worth for the first time in the early 1970s - the emergence of an post-colonial African bloc of nations blocking legislation in the U.N., and the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973 cutting off oil to the West. It was seen again in 1979 with the rise of the Ayatollah Khomeni in Iran, which spread fear that was no doubt particularly felt in the American Jewish community.
By the time of Reagan, this particular subgroup of America, the "silent majority", started enuciating their views openly on the government giving perceived preference to people with whom these folks do not feel they share a "heritage". A problem within that thinking is what, or whom they think they are, with respect to this "heritage". It is ironic, and a smack in the face, to watch lower-class ethnic Europeans (that would be you Italians, Irish, Jews and Poles that came to America between 1860-1920s) think that their "heritage" is being threatened by those of other desents, whether that be African, Native American, Mexican, or whatever that is not them. To the extent that, in 2010, they feel even more threatened and emboldened to set up vigilante shops where they can express their unhappiness towards all the classic conservative pitches, with in addition blaming all the woes of a superpower going mad since its sole ascendency in 1990 on one black man who becomes president a year and a half ago. Too much government is taking too much from us, we need less government, less regulation, more conservatism (which will likely evolve into less tolerance), even more than their GOP can deliver.
IF we have too little government, my question is who will protect us from them?
The Contract From America, which is being created Wiki-style by Internet contributors as a The Tea Party is being very careful not to ignite these fires, at least for now. Their Contract From America, a manifesto of what “the people” want government to do, mentions little in the way of social issues, beyond a declaration that parents should be given choice in how to educate their children. By contrast, the document it aims to improve upon — the Contract With America, which Republicans used to market their successful campaign to win a majority in Congress in 1994 — was prefaced with the promise that the party would lead a Congress that “respects the values and shares the faith of the American family.”
Tea Party leaders argue that the country can ill afford the discussion about social issues when it is passing on enormous debts to future generations. But the focus is also strategic: leaders think they can attract independent voters if they stay away from divisive issues.
“We should be creating the biggest tent possible around the economic conservative issue,” said Ryan Hecker, the organizer behind the Contract From America. “I think social issues may matter to particular individuals, but at the end of the day, the movement should be agnostic about it. This movement rose largely because the GOP failed to deliver on the party's core economic conservative ideology. To include social issues would be beside the point.”
As the Tea Party pushes to change the Republican Party, the purity they demand of candidates may have more to do with economic conservatism than social conservatism. Some Tea Party groups, for instance, have declined to endorse J. D. Hayworth, who has claimed the mantle of a fiscal conservative, in the Republican Senate primary in Arizona. But these groups find his record in Congress no more fiscally responsible than the man he seeks to oust, John McCain.
The Tea Party defines economic conservatism more strictly than most Republicans in Congress would. The Tea Party wants to do away with earmarks. The Contract, for example, includes a proposal to scrap the tax code and limit it to 4,543 words (same as the number in the original Constitution). It proposes capping growth in federal spending to inflation plus the percentage of population growth, and require a two-thirds majority for any tax increase.
Social issues still pack a wallop: a group of Democrats opposed to abortion rights could determine the fate of health care legislation in the House.
Experts like Lisa McGirr, a professor of history at Harvard and author of “Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right,” say that the Tea Party uses a kind of code to talk about social values. For instance, to emphasize a return to the strict meaning of the Constitution, they interpret that as a return to a Christian foundation. “When they talk about returning to the values of the Founding Fathers" she says, "they are talking about life as a social issue.”
Tea Party leaders champion states’ rights, holding dear the Tenth Amendment, which restricts the role of the federal government. An Independence Caucus questionnaire asks candidates for their views on Wickard v. Filburn, a SCOTUS decision that Tea Party groups say has been used to vastly expand federal powers. Interesting, Roe v. Wade, which superceded federal power over what had been up to the states to decide as a health and welfare issue within their own state and totally within the purview and intent of the Constitution for the states to regulate, does not come up. So while some may oppose gay marriage or abortion, the Tea Party realizes that these issues can be assumed desirable to their target market than enunciated as the party's policy (via code as noted) and avoid social divisiveness which could break ranks. Surveys have shown, such as the one conducted by the Sam Adams Alliance, a Chicago-based Tea Party-friendly conservative organization, that the most important issues are the budget, the economy, and jobs. The Tea Party has learned from MoveOn.org and built its numbers online, focusing on economic conservatism issues which are core to its base and appealing to newcomers.
With an African-American President in office, they're careful not to infuse race. But with time they will have to weigh in somehow on social issues like racial justice, especially in areas of economics, housing and employment. Money for housing will likely be a thorny issue, with the recent sub-prime mess receiving a lot of mis-coding for who is the bad guy. Some blamed it on people who couldn't afford the houses taking on more debt than they were 'entitled' to. This almost surely suggests minorities, illegal aliens, and people from other parts of the world who immigrated here (but are not European) who are sapping up our limited resources. In fact, too much of the sub-prime debt can be blamed on the finance industry itself, who gave money away, and those in higher income brakets who were buying million-dollar-plus homes in florida, las vegas, and california, and even new york city and DC, who then defaulted. This is in no small part the culprit in its hardest-hit places (Vegas, Miami/South Florida, Phoenix AZ), yet minorities in Detroit and North Philadelphia, who were not as easily able to capitalize on all this sub-prime money as their wealthier suburban neighbors, did not get the benefit. But, they are still blamed.
Unexpected support for gay marriage, and likely the growing acceptance of medical marijuana laws being passed in state after state, show the American public is most comfortable with a live and let-live social policy for coexisting with its neighbors. That still leaves a lot of problems undealt with, but at least our right to live pretty much in the level that we've become accostomed to, while eroding somewhat, is not denied to us. It seems cruel that so many Americans, after all we've been through to get to this point, and after all the failures of not just the last but preceding Republican Presidents to convince the populace that less government is better - it is NOT. People in a large, advanced and complex Earth society like ours needs some level of responsible and working government. It needs laws that protects its people, all of them, on a national, not state, level. The founding fathers formed this nation in an era of colonies and horse-drawn carriages, with mail carriers on horseback bringing the news and communication at its advanced level of the day. Their perception, and I give credit to our lawmakers for still sticking with successfully, could not have contemplated all that we now know as normal. They didn't have to - they knew that too. They intentionally created a flexible, a "living document". We should honor their intent by moving the original contract with America the way they intended: rationally, flexibly and forward.
Avoiding or trying to avoid voicing opinion on social subjects of interest so as not to take an opposing position that will likely alienate supporters is a highwire act of political proportions. The time will eventually arrive when one of them, perhaps an elected official of a township or city or state lesgislator, is asked to weigh in on a vote in their jurisdiction. By then, they will have to calibrate their message so as to rally their base but the message will be so narrow that they will not be able to avert the possibly of alienating their larger audience. Taking the highwire to balance is still yet to be one of their tricker moves yet.
Avoiding social issues can get Democrats over. People who are registered Democrats because of abortion are also totally freaking out about the debt. The strategy is not to appear too rigid, but more fiscally-conservative, but the hidden agendas on social issues are still there. The question for you voters is simple: Can you trust them?
But Philadelphia is more specific, and a bellweather for things to come, but not good things. Like many in the country's metropolitan regions, there is a fear-base self-pity allergy of psuedo-xenophobia. This virus brings on the belief, however misfigured, that government is the source of all its problems, that we need to take government back, that we need less government while we're at it, and let people have the individual, or states have the indivdual, right to live and plan their life as they please, that we should in essence let the "strong survive", while the weak try to figure out or even understand their most basic of benefits or social covenants we as a nation long before FDR or even Abraham Lincoln swore that we would to ourselves give, that we would feed the poor, take care of the sick, and provide for the elderly. That we will take care and educate our children, and give families something to live for and build upon. No, we were not promised we would be rich. A few of us were promised 40 acres and a mule that was never received. A few more of us have treaties with our government which includes social and economic covenants we owed them, that have not all been fulfilled. We've also made promises to others, like those we have defeated, like Japan. Those for which we should never have been involved, like Iraq. Like many others for which we give billions in foreign aid, for purposes not all intended as good for them or for us citizens, that take our jobs away for lower pay and corporate greed. Corporations that often are from our country, and employ and are run by people like these Tea Partiers, or others like you.
Somewhere in the escape to suburbia in the late 1960s, the suburban populace, who previously thought themselves immune to the problems of the cities they left, realized that there was no escape from social progress. They had trouble reconciling with social change - change that they knew was long overdue, and now threatened to topple their lock on world dominance. It showed its worth for the first time in the early 1970s - the emergence of an post-colonial African bloc of nations blocking legislation in the U.N., and the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973 cutting off oil to the West. It was seen again in 1979 with the rise of the Ayatollah Khomeni in Iran, which spread fear that was no doubt particularly felt in the American Jewish community.
By the time of Reagan, this particular subgroup of America, the "silent majority", started enuciating their views openly on the government giving perceived preference to people with whom these folks do not feel they share a "heritage". A problem within that thinking is what, or whom they think they are, with respect to this "heritage". It is ironic, and a smack in the face, to watch lower-class ethnic Europeans (that would be you Italians, Irish, Jews and Poles that came to America between 1860-1920s) think that their "heritage" is being threatened by those of other desents, whether that be African, Native American, Mexican, or whatever that is not them. To the extent that, in 2010, they feel even more threatened and emboldened to set up vigilante shops where they can express their unhappiness towards all the classic conservative pitches, with in addition blaming all the woes of a superpower going mad since its sole ascendency in 1990 on one black man who becomes president a year and a half ago. Too much government is taking too much from us, we need less government, less regulation, more conservatism (which will likely evolve into less tolerance), even more than their GOP can deliver.
IF we have too little government, my question is who will protect us from them?
The Contract From America, which is being created Wiki-style by Internet contributors as a The Tea Party is being very careful not to ignite these fires, at least for now. Their Contract From America, a manifesto of what “the people” want government to do, mentions little in the way of social issues, beyond a declaration that parents should be given choice in how to educate their children. By contrast, the document it aims to improve upon — the Contract With America, which Republicans used to market their successful campaign to win a majority in Congress in 1994 — was prefaced with the promise that the party would lead a Congress that “respects the values and shares the faith of the American family.”
Tea Party leaders argue that the country can ill afford the discussion about social issues when it is passing on enormous debts to future generations. But the focus is also strategic: leaders think they can attract independent voters if they stay away from divisive issues.
“We should be creating the biggest tent possible around the economic conservative issue,” said Ryan Hecker, the organizer behind the Contract From America. “I think social issues may matter to particular individuals, but at the end of the day, the movement should be agnostic about it. This movement rose largely because the GOP failed to deliver on the party's core economic conservative ideology. To include social issues would be beside the point.”
As the Tea Party pushes to change the Republican Party, the purity they demand of candidates may have more to do with economic conservatism than social conservatism. Some Tea Party groups, for instance, have declined to endorse J. D. Hayworth, who has claimed the mantle of a fiscal conservative, in the Republican Senate primary in Arizona. But these groups find his record in Congress no more fiscally responsible than the man he seeks to oust, John McCain.
The Tea Party defines economic conservatism more strictly than most Republicans in Congress would. The Tea Party wants to do away with earmarks. The Contract, for example, includes a proposal to scrap the tax code and limit it to 4,543 words (same as the number in the original Constitution). It proposes capping growth in federal spending to inflation plus the percentage of population growth, and require a two-thirds majority for any tax increase.
Social issues still pack a wallop: a group of Democrats opposed to abortion rights could determine the fate of health care legislation in the House.
Experts like Lisa McGirr, a professor of history at Harvard and author of “Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right,” say that the Tea Party uses a kind of code to talk about social values. For instance, to emphasize a return to the strict meaning of the Constitution, they interpret that as a return to a Christian foundation. “When they talk about returning to the values of the Founding Fathers" she says, "they are talking about life as a social issue.”
Tea Party leaders champion states’ rights, holding dear the Tenth Amendment, which restricts the role of the federal government. An Independence Caucus questionnaire asks candidates for their views on Wickard v. Filburn, a SCOTUS decision that Tea Party groups say has been used to vastly expand federal powers. Interesting, Roe v. Wade, which superceded federal power over what had been up to the states to decide as a health and welfare issue within their own state and totally within the purview and intent of the Constitution for the states to regulate, does not come up. So while some may oppose gay marriage or abortion, the Tea Party realizes that these issues can be assumed desirable to their target market than enunciated as the party's policy (via code as noted) and avoid social divisiveness which could break ranks. Surveys have shown, such as the one conducted by the Sam Adams Alliance, a Chicago-based Tea Party-friendly conservative organization, that the most important issues are the budget, the economy, and jobs. The Tea Party has learned from MoveOn.org and built its numbers online, focusing on economic conservatism issues which are core to its base and appealing to newcomers.
"Raising social issues risks fracturing the strength it has built. “Every social issue you bring in, you’re adding planks to your mission, and planks become splinters” ~ Frank Anderson, Independence Caucus of Utah.
With an African-American President in office, they're careful not to infuse race. But with time they will have to weigh in somehow on social issues like racial justice, especially in areas of economics, housing and employment. Money for housing will likely be a thorny issue, with the recent sub-prime mess receiving a lot of mis-coding for who is the bad guy. Some blamed it on people who couldn't afford the houses taking on more debt than they were 'entitled' to. This almost surely suggests minorities, illegal aliens, and people from other parts of the world who immigrated here (but are not European) who are sapping up our limited resources. In fact, too much of the sub-prime debt can be blamed on the finance industry itself, who gave money away, and those in higher income brakets who were buying million-dollar-plus homes in florida, las vegas, and california, and even new york city and DC, who then defaulted. This is in no small part the culprit in its hardest-hit places (Vegas, Miami/South Florida, Phoenix AZ), yet minorities in Detroit and North Philadelphia, who were not as easily able to capitalize on all this sub-prime money as their wealthier suburban neighbors, did not get the benefit. But, they are still blamed.
Unexpected support for gay marriage, and likely the growing acceptance of medical marijuana laws being passed in state after state, show the American public is most comfortable with a live and let-live social policy for coexisting with its neighbors. That still leaves a lot of problems undealt with, but at least our right to live pretty much in the level that we've become accostomed to, while eroding somewhat, is not denied to us. It seems cruel that so many Americans, after all we've been through to get to this point, and after all the failures of not just the last but preceding Republican Presidents to convince the populace that less government is better - it is NOT. People in a large, advanced and complex Earth society like ours needs some level of responsible and working government. It needs laws that protects its people, all of them, on a national, not state, level. The founding fathers formed this nation in an era of colonies and horse-drawn carriages, with mail carriers on horseback bringing the news and communication at its advanced level of the day. Their perception, and I give credit to our lawmakers for still sticking with successfully, could not have contemplated all that we now know as normal. They didn't have to - they knew that too. They intentionally created a flexible, a "living document". We should honor their intent by moving the original contract with America the way they intended: rationally, flexibly and forward.
Avoiding or trying to avoid voicing opinion on social subjects of interest so as not to take an opposing position that will likely alienate supporters is a highwire act of political proportions. The time will eventually arrive when one of them, perhaps an elected official of a township or city or state lesgislator, is asked to weigh in on a vote in their jurisdiction. By then, they will have to calibrate their message so as to rally their base but the message will be so narrow that they will not be able to avert the possibly of alienating their larger audience. Taking the highwire to balance is still yet to be one of their tricker moves yet.
Avoiding social issues can get Democrats over. People who are registered Democrats because of abortion are also totally freaking out about the debt. The strategy is not to appear too rigid, but more fiscally-conservative, but the hidden agendas on social issues are still there. The question for you voters is simple: Can you trust them?
09 March 2010
Editorial - Why Are We Being Bitchslapped Around These Days By The Man???
Yes we've been reluctant to admit it for some time, listening to talk about ignoring consipracy theories. Yet, more and more of us are realizing something's happening out there, somebody is controlling us and our welfare on Earth, beyond divine intervention and not by race or creed. It is economic-stratum-based at least, and a secret order over and above us at worse. But whatever it is, it is controlling world events, world prosperity, and directing traffic for the world all at the same time and to its benefit, but likely many of our perils.
There seems to be powers out there that are no longer complacent with being silently in the background. Realizing their real capital is at risk, they are no longer in the shadows; in fact they are very much out there, whether it be forcing politicians out of office, whether it be laying off millions of high-paid citizens here in favor of much lower-paid citizens of somewhere else, and doing the same thing or more. There is a shift in currency from the world economic power centers of just 20 years ago to other areas of the globe, but no booms at the moment to speak of. So where is the hotspot of money, jobs, power, economic prosperity these days? You can head to Asia, or as quiet as it's kept Africa, The Middle East, Australia, even some parts of Europe. One thing for sure, it's not North America, it may be Brazil in the South though. It is not published, it is hard to know the center. And how to get there.
But we should be concerned. Not for what appears is being done now, but the impact - for decades, perhaps centuries to come - it will have on the future of our children and grandchilden. Our media is becoming the ultimate anchorman of our lives. The government is running the show like a giant computer, calibrating the message. Business in the private sector is nothing less than ocean piracy. And they criticize the Somalian prirates!! At least they're honest and open about their piracy, while the real pirates break all the rules under the cover of law and until recently openess. Nowadays they're so desparate to get as much as they can, they have no problem demanding that we make them a loan, while they steal what little we have from them from our pockets. I wonder when we'll get our money back??
There seems to be powers out there that are no longer complacent with being silently in the background. Realizing their real capital is at risk, they are no longer in the shadows; in fact they are very much out there, whether it be forcing politicians out of office, whether it be laying off millions of high-paid citizens here in favor of much lower-paid citizens of somewhere else, and doing the same thing or more. There is a shift in currency from the world economic power centers of just 20 years ago to other areas of the globe, but no booms at the moment to speak of. So where is the hotspot of money, jobs, power, economic prosperity these days? You can head to Asia, or as quiet as it's kept Africa, The Middle East, Australia, even some parts of Europe. One thing for sure, it's not North America, it may be Brazil in the South though. It is not published, it is hard to know the center. And how to get there.
But we should be concerned. Not for what appears is being done now, but the impact - for decades, perhaps centuries to come - it will have on the future of our children and grandchilden. Our media is becoming the ultimate anchorman of our lives. The government is running the show like a giant computer, calibrating the message. Business in the private sector is nothing less than ocean piracy. And they criticize the Somalian prirates!! At least they're honest and open about their piracy, while the real pirates break all the rules under the cover of law and until recently openess. Nowadays they're so desparate to get as much as they can, they have no problem demanding that we make them a loan, while they steal what little we have from them from our pockets. I wonder when we'll get our money back??
22 February 2010
Dr. Sapna Parikh of Fox5 is the True Fox!
Oh I say ~ yes indeed!
yes...O yes, this gorgeous beauty (I have to ask her when i see her which of the lovely Southeast Asian countries she is from? she looks more southern/eastern Indian, which makes me think Bangladesh is her origin, but I'll ask her when I see her LOL) just graces the TV screen every morning and some evenings with her medical words of wisdom, keeping a teeming population like New York in good health.In the meantime, may we enjoy this luscious lemon chocolate mint cupcake that we are blessed to have HDTV to see. Absolutely one of the best additions to an otherwise ho-hum ideology network as Fox. Hello Sapna ~ CALL ME!
19 February 2010
Time To Add Some Melanin To Our Skin with Julie Chang of Fox 5
Julie Chang is looking great! A fantastic addition to the Fox5 news team, she reports on entertainment and Hollywood, Broadway and the hip hop scene. Whether it's interviewing Keke Palmer or Anna Kournikova like in the pics here, we love her reporting, and we really love her sexy looks, perky charm, and just fantabulous being! Hey Julie, call me! She is SIZZLING HOTT!!
17 February 2010
Cat une Haute!!
Cat Deeley - one hot model! Currently the host of "So You Think You Can Dance?" and more recently I noticed also the host of "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire", this British hotstitch is popping up on my screen more and more. And we're happy to have more of her here at CNsaw.So that's how it's done!
12 February 2010
In Honoring Coach, Museum Confronts Segregation
(FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES - A STORY FOR THE AGES)
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
Published: February 12, 2010
BATON ROUGE, La. — When Eddie Robinson was growing up here in Louisiana’s capital city about 80 years ago, he discovered the only way a black person infatuated with football could attend a game at the state university: He showed up at 5 a.m. on Saturdays to clean the stadium.
In 55 years of coaching the Grambling Tigers, Eddie Robinson sent more than 200 players to the pros. Some of Grambling State University’s greatest players will be honored in the new museum.
To take his first job as a football coach, in 1941, Mr. Robinson had to travel several hundred miles north, to a segregated teachers’ college in an unincorporated hamlet called Grambling. Mail arrived by train, and students helped harvest peaches and sweet potatoes from the college farm.
As for the white world, it was if anything more hostile than Baton Rouge’s. Just three years before Mr. Robinson’s arrival, a black man had been raped with a hot poker, then lynched in the neighboring town of Ruston.
Yet Mr. Robinson worked and lived nowhere else for the rest of his life. In 55 years of coaching the Grambling Tigers, he amassed 408 victories and an .844 winning percentage and sent more than 200 players to the pros. He also personally oversaw their regular attendance at class and church.
And now, three years since Mr. Robinson died at age 88, the state that once subjugated him has put its money and imprimatur on a museum devoted to his life and legacy. Some 900 coaches, admirers, and former players, including the head coaches of the Pittsburgh Steelers and Notre Dame, are streaming into Grambling on for the official opening of the Eddie G. Robinson Museum on Saturday.
Should anyone get lost, billboards along Interstate 20 direct drivers toward the museum on the campus of Grambling State University. A sign being hoisted into place this week at the Grambling exit promotes the museum as part of the state’s African-American Heritage Trail.
“This would be the answer to his prayers,” Doris Robinson, the coach’s widow, said in an interview this week. “He was doing things that were lasting and he wanted the world to know.”
The impact of the museum, though, far surpasses the familial. “There has been a real effort on the part of the state to expand the history, to be more inclusive, to finally catch up,” said Petra Munro Hendry, a professor of educational history at Louisiana State University and the author of a history of black Baton Rouge (“Old South Baton Rouge: The Roots of Hope”).
While that effort ultimately involved a number of elected officials from both parties and both races, it began with one of Eddie Robinson’s coaching comrades, Wilbert Ellis. In the late 1990s, toward the end of his 43-year career leading the Grambling baseball team, Mr. Ellis paid a visit to the museum in Alabama honoring its legendary football coach, Paul W. (Bear) Bryant.
“I looked at it,” Mr. Ellis recalled the other day, “and I said to myself, ‘This is the way Eddie should be honored.’ ”
The inspiration was both appropriate and paradoxical. On the one hand, Mr. Robinson and Mr. Bryant had maintained a personal friendship and a professional respect for decades. On the other, while Mr. Robinson was confined to a black college by Jim Crow, Mr. Bryant willingly obliged segregation to field all-white football teams whose triumphs were upheld by bigots as proof of racial superiority.
The Bryant museum, which opened in 1981, also had benefited from the financial support of the state’s university system. Mr. Ellis, in contrast, started fund-raising with about a dozen longtime friends of Mr. Robinson’s. Over several years, they managed to collect $300,000 — a substantial sum for amateurs but far short of the amount needed to build, stock and staff even a modest museum.
Two state legislators from the northern Louisiana area helped by pushing through a bill to formally designate the nascent museum as a state project. They could not, however, loosen purse-strings. And meanwhile, Mr. Robinson’s Alzheimer’s disease worsened during several years before his death.
His papers and memorabilia, the future collection, landed everywhere from a storage locker outside Atlanta to the state archives in Baton Rouge. One former player rescued a batch of game films that were being tossed into the trash outside the Grambling football office.
The coach’s death did succeed in infusing the museum’s cause with a sense of urgency. The State Legislature appropriated $3.3 million for it in June 2008, and early in 2009 construction began in the original women’s gym on the Grambling campus, which by this time was being used mostly for dances and intramural activities.
“Eddie Robinson always said he only had two things,” Mr. Ellis recalled. “He had one wife and he had one job. So where else but Grambling would you want to have the museum?”
As final work proceeded at a frenetic pace before this weekend’s opening, exhibits took their places within the 18,000-square-foot building. Over the entrance to a small theater that will show a brief documentary about Mr. Robinson hung a replica of the Temple theater’s marquee.
At that black landmark in Baton Rouge, a young Mr. Robinson played basketball, boxed and watched Tom Mix westerns.
Two facing walls display photos of every Grambling player who went pro, from Glenn Alexander to Coleman Zeno. A scale model of the Cotton Bowl scoreboard captures the final score of Grambling’s victory over Alcorn State in 1985 that give Mr. Robinson his 324th victory, putting him ahead of Mr. Bryant on the career list.
Less visibly, but perhaps more important, the museum will also hold the primary-source materials of interest to scholars: oral histories, playbooks and game plans, handwritten letters from teenagers pleading for the chance to play at Grambling.
“We’re not going to see anybody else like Eddie Robinson again,” said Michael Hurd, the author “Black College Football, 1892-1992,” an authoritative history. “Not so much because of the number of wins but for where he started and for what he went through. He never made racism an issue, but it was a hurdle he had to clear. So for him to recognized is a recognition of black college football.”
(FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES - A STORY FOR THE AGES)
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
Published: February 12, 2010
BATON ROUGE, La. — When Eddie Robinson was growing up here in Louisiana’s capital city about 80 years ago, he discovered the only way a black person infatuated with football could attend a game at the state university: He showed up at 5 a.m. on Saturdays to clean the stadium.
In 55 years of coaching the Grambling Tigers, Eddie Robinson sent more than 200 players to the pros. Some of Grambling State University’s greatest players will be honored in the new museum.
To take his first job as a football coach, in 1941, Mr. Robinson had to travel several hundred miles north, to a segregated teachers’ college in an unincorporated hamlet called Grambling. Mail arrived by train, and students helped harvest peaches and sweet potatoes from the college farm.
As for the white world, it was if anything more hostile than Baton Rouge’s. Just three years before Mr. Robinson’s arrival, a black man had been raped with a hot poker, then lynched in the neighboring town of Ruston.
Yet Mr. Robinson worked and lived nowhere else for the rest of his life. In 55 years of coaching the Grambling Tigers, he amassed 408 victories and an .844 winning percentage and sent more than 200 players to the pros. He also personally oversaw their regular attendance at class and church.
And now, three years since Mr. Robinson died at age 88, the state that once subjugated him has put its money and imprimatur on a museum devoted to his life and legacy. Some 900 coaches, admirers, and former players, including the head coaches of the Pittsburgh Steelers and Notre Dame, are streaming into Grambling on for the official opening of the Eddie G. Robinson Museum on Saturday.
Should anyone get lost, billboards along Interstate 20 direct drivers toward the museum on the campus of Grambling State University. A sign being hoisted into place this week at the Grambling exit promotes the museum as part of the state’s African-American Heritage Trail.
“This would be the answer to his prayers,” Doris Robinson, the coach’s widow, said in an interview this week. “He was doing things that were lasting and he wanted the world to know.”
The impact of the museum, though, far surpasses the familial. “There has been a real effort on the part of the state to expand the history, to be more inclusive, to finally catch up,” said Petra Munro Hendry, a professor of educational history at Louisiana State University and the author of a history of black Baton Rouge (“Old South Baton Rouge: The Roots of Hope”).
While that effort ultimately involved a number of elected officials from both parties and both races, it began with one of Eddie Robinson’s coaching comrades, Wilbert Ellis. In the late 1990s, toward the end of his 43-year career leading the Grambling baseball team, Mr. Ellis paid a visit to the museum in Alabama honoring its legendary football coach, Paul W. (Bear) Bryant.
“I looked at it,” Mr. Ellis recalled the other day, “and I said to myself, ‘This is the way Eddie should be honored.’ ”
The inspiration was both appropriate and paradoxical. On the one hand, Mr. Robinson and Mr. Bryant had maintained a personal friendship and a professional respect for decades. On the other, while Mr. Robinson was confined to a black college by Jim Crow, Mr. Bryant willingly obliged segregation to field all-white football teams whose triumphs were upheld by bigots as proof of racial superiority.
The Bryant museum, which opened in 1981, also had benefited from the financial support of the state’s university system. Mr. Ellis, in contrast, started fund-raising with about a dozen longtime friends of Mr. Robinson’s. Over several years, they managed to collect $300,000 — a substantial sum for amateurs but far short of the amount needed to build, stock and staff even a modest museum.
Two state legislators from the northern Louisiana area helped by pushing through a bill to formally designate the nascent museum as a state project. They could not, however, loosen purse-strings. And meanwhile, Mr. Robinson’s Alzheimer’s disease worsened during several years before his death.
His papers and memorabilia, the future collection, landed everywhere from a storage locker outside Atlanta to the state archives in Baton Rouge. One former player rescued a batch of game films that were being tossed into the trash outside the Grambling football office.
The coach’s death did succeed in infusing the museum’s cause with a sense of urgency. The State Legislature appropriated $3.3 million for it in June 2008, and early in 2009 construction began in the original women’s gym on the Grambling campus, which by this time was being used mostly for dances and intramural activities.
“Eddie Robinson always said he only had two things,” Mr. Ellis recalled. “He had one wife and he had one job. So where else but Grambling would you want to have the museum?”
As final work proceeded at a frenetic pace before this weekend’s opening, exhibits took their places within the 18,000-square-foot building. Over the entrance to a small theater that will show a brief documentary about Mr. Robinson hung a replica of the Temple theater’s marquee.
At that black landmark in Baton Rouge, a young Mr. Robinson played basketball, boxed and watched Tom Mix westerns.
Two facing walls display photos of every Grambling player who went pro, from Glenn Alexander to Coleman Zeno. A scale model of the Cotton Bowl scoreboard captures the final score of Grambling’s victory over Alcorn State in 1985 that give Mr. Robinson his 324th victory, putting him ahead of Mr. Bryant on the career list.
Less visibly, but perhaps more important, the museum will also hold the primary-source materials of interest to scholars: oral histories, playbooks and game plans, handwritten letters from teenagers pleading for the chance to play at Grambling.
“We’re not going to see anybody else like Eddie Robinson again,” said Michael Hurd, the author “Black College Football, 1892-1992,” an authoritative history. “Not so much because of the number of wins but for where he started and for what he went through. He never made racism an issue, but it was a hurdle he had to clear. So for him to recognized is a recognition of black college football.”
10 February 2010
The Everlasting Blizzzard of 2010
Since late January, and actually since Christmas Eve, there have been brutal nor'easters hitting the mid-Atlantic and Southern Atlantic states and mid-section parts of the nation much harder than in past years. Chicago winter-like weather has become the norm this season for places like Atlanta, Charlotte, Washington DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and somewhat sparing New York at times and even missing Boston completely!
Yes, things have been worse, like in the 1880s or something like that they all say. But overall the U.S. and Canada have received inordinate amounts of arctic weather already this season, and that's only the past 1 1/2 months! Maybe it's bad karma.....
08 February 2010
FreedomWorks If We Try It This Year
I saw an interesting article about Dr. Jamie Walker, a prominent and exciting author/professor/actor/poet and master of the spoken word and progressive thought, as she chronicled an article about a decade ago about another writing and visionary like herself.
By the way, Jamie has been in several plays and movies, working mostly in California, with a bevy of awards for her stage performances in plays by August Wilson.
An HBO movie made in the early 2000s featured Walker performing one of many other documentaries she performed of historic "visionary" elders over the age of 70. Walker’s chosen "visionary" elder in this production was Esther Cooper Jackson," co-founder of Freedomways magazine in 1961 with W.E.B. and Shirley Graham Du Bois.
Freedomways magazine chronicled the Civil Rights-Black Arts Movement and featured several well-known Black writers, poets, and artists, including Elizabeth Catlett, Paul Robeson, Angela Davis, Mari Evans, Ntozake Shangé, and as seen on the above magazine cover, the lovely Lorraine Hansberry. Oh yeah, that literary icon herself, that lovely raisin in the sun.
It was ahead of its time. It opened our time. It opened our eyes to how the world could be defined by those who made that world and created a world out of great adversity and against great power. Will people be called upon to make that choice again soon? Many ask that question in 2010. It just may define the New Year.FreedomWays is out of print thus no website unfortunately. But, you can buy back copies and artful mag covers (like the ones shown here) at Amazon.com, and you can visit Jamie and learn and see more about her at her site www.jamiewalker.org/author.html.
A Quick Snipet of News
Obama hasn't passed health care bill - yet.
Palin is rallying up the Tea Party troops.
Congress lost its 60th Democratic Senator for a Republican 41st. A filibuster in the making!
Patterson shores up his still-weak poll numbers and gets fundraising on for his run, but it looks like Cuomo is brewing dirty tricks up for fodder in the Gov's way.
The World is in The Great Recession, which is actually the banks holding the world literally hostage, and if we don't do what they say or what they do, they will starve all of us. Imagine the United States in 2011, a wasteland of 300 million starving people calling for a revolution. Timothy Geitner trying to find a faraway Pacific or Indian Ocean island to escape to before they come after him. Run Timmy, run...
Larry Summers and Dick Cheney reveal their gay marriage plans for this spring. I guess Cheney's divorcing Lynn - nah, Larry's moving in. It's a three-way.
The Dow just dipped below 10,000 1st time since last year, and Michael Jackson's doctor is charged wif manslaughter. Yes that story is still going on (you knew it would).
The rest of the mess? Still going on, business as usual. Thanx 4 asking :-)
Palin is rallying up the Tea Party troops.
Congress lost its 60th Democratic Senator for a Republican 41st. A filibuster in the making!
Patterson shores up his still-weak poll numbers and gets fundraising on for his run, but it looks like Cuomo is brewing dirty tricks up for fodder in the Gov's way.
The World is in The Great Recession, which is actually the banks holding the world literally hostage, and if we don't do what they say or what they do, they will starve all of us. Imagine the United States in 2011, a wasteland of 300 million starving people calling for a revolution. Timothy Geitner trying to find a faraway Pacific or Indian Ocean island to escape to before they come after him. Run Timmy, run...
Larry Summers and Dick Cheney reveal their gay marriage plans for this spring. I guess Cheney's divorcing Lynn - nah, Larry's moving in. It's a three-way.
The Dow just dipped below 10,000 1st time since last year, and Michael Jackson's doctor is charged wif manslaughter. Yes that story is still going on (you knew it would).
The rest of the mess? Still going on, business as usual. Thanx 4 asking :-)
07 February 2010
welcome to 2010 - albeit a little late...
well i figured it was better to say somethn that nothn . . . happy and to the best u can a somewhat survivable & sustainable (make that maintainable) 2010 to you all . . . .
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