CNsaw

Comments from the Great Recession 2010

2010-06-01T05:57:00.004-04:00

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.

Marissa Miller Nude In GQ, Dave Chappelle Is Back, and more on TWIYT #54

2010-05-30T10:38:00.000-04:00

Lemonade Movie Trailer The Face of Laid-off 21st Century America

2010-05-29T20:04:00.000-04:00

Cowboys, Cops, and Lawyers - We Love Em All!

2010-05-17T17:42:00.003-04:00

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.

Philadelphia PA BEWARE: You Will Probably BE The Next Big Venue for the Tea Party Movement

2010-03-13T13:40:00.000-05:00

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.

"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?

Editorial - Why Are We Being Bitchslapped Around These Days By The Man???

2010-03-09T18:43:00.000-05:00

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??

new york city transit like it is -

2010-02-22T18:41:00.000-05:00

How we get from here to there, day or night, 24/7....

Dr. Sapna Parikh of Fox5 is the True Fox!

2010-02-22T18:19:00.000-05:00

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!

Time To Add Some Melanin To Our Skin with Julie Chang of Fox 5

2010-02-19T06:48:00.000-05:00

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!!

Cat une Haute!!

2010-02-17T03:59:00.000-05:00

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!

2010-02-12T15:03:00.000-05:00

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.”

The Everlasting Blizzzard of 2010

2010-02-10T15:06:00.000-05:00

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.....

FreedomWorks If We Try It This Year

2010-02-08T19:02:00.000-05:00

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

2010-02-08T18:33:00.000-05:00

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 :-)

welcome to 2010 - albeit a little late...

2010-02-07T13:35:00.000-05:00

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 . . . .

Where the hell is John Wayne when you need him?

2009-12-30T10:18:00.000-05:00

As we end what will probably be known to become one of the worst decades in American history, terrorism has reminded us once again of its existence and fear, witnessed by the recent Christmas bombing attempt on a Northwest/Delta flight on landing approach at Detroit International, this article may enlighten you. Note also how the rhetoric is heating up from the politicians, agency heads, and talking heads as to how to further restrict our liberties in the pursuit of protecting the public, while quietly acknowleging that, just like before, they completely missed the boat and fucked up. In short, they haven't got a clue to how to win the Global War on Terror (aka the Global War Against Western Imperialism, from the other point of view).

What a way to end a disasterous decade!

And now, our article, written in 2006 and once again relevant:

"Our Indian Wars Are Not Over Yet"
( General Analysis on Empire )

Ten Ways to Interpret the War on Terror as a Frontier Conflict
By John Brown*
TomDispatch
January 19, 2006

The Global War on Terror (GWOT) is, like all historical events, unique. But both its supporters and opponents compare it to past U.S. military conflicts. The Bush administration and the neocons have drawn parallels between GWOT and World War II as well as GWOT and the Cold War. Joshua E. London, writing in the National Review, sees the War on Terror as a modern form of the struggle against the Barbary pirates. Vietnam and the Spanish-American War have been preferred analogies for other commentators. A Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, Anne Applebaum, says that the war in Iraq might be like that in Korea, because of "the ambivalence of their conclusions." For others, the War on Terror, with its loose rhetoric, brings to mind the "war on poverty" or the "war on drugs."

I'd like to suggest another way of looking at the War on Terror: as a twenty-first century continuation of, or replication of, the American Indian wars, on a global scale. This is by no means something that has occurred to me alone, but it has received relatively little attention. Here are ten reasons why I'm making this suggestion:

1. Key supporters of the War on Terror themselves see GWOT as an Indian war. Take, for example, the right-wing intellectuals Robert Kaplan and Max Boot who, although not members of the administration, also advocate a tough military stance against terrorists. In a Wall Street Journal article, "Indian Country," Kaplan notes that "an overlooked truth about the war on terrorism" is that "the American military is back to the days of fighting the Indians." Iraq, he notes, "is but a microcosm of the earth in this regard." Kaplan has now put his thoughts into a book, Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground, which President Bush read over the holidays. Kaplan points out that "'Welcome to Injun Country' was the refrain I heard from troops from Colombia to the Philippines, including Afghanistan and Iraq.... The War on Terrorism was really about taming the frontier."

As for Max Boot, he writes, "â€˜small wars' -- fought by a small number of professional U.S. soldiers -- are much more typical of American history than are the handful of â€˜total' wars that receive most of the public attention. Between 1800 and 1934, U.S. Marines staged 180 landings abroad. And that's not even counting the Indian wars the army was fighting every year until 1890." A key GWOT battlefield, Boot suggests, is Afghanistan, noting that "[i]f the past is any indication of the future, we have a lot more savage wars ahead."

2. The essential paradigm of the War of Terror -- us (the attacked) against them (the attackers) -- was no less essential to the mindset of white settlers regarding the Indians, starting at least from the 1622 Indian massacre of 347 people at Jamestown, Virginia. With rare exceptions, newly arrived Europeans and their descendants, as well as their leaders, saw Indians as mortal enemies who started the initial fight against them, savages with whom they could not co-exist. The Declaration of Independence condemned "the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions." When governor of Virginia (1780), Thomas Jefferson stated:

"If we are to wage a campaign against these Indians the end proposed should be their extermination, or their removal beyond the lakes of the Illinois River. The same world would scarcely do for them and us."

President Andrew Jackson, whose "unapologetic flexing of military might" has been compared to George W. Bush's modus operandi, noted in his "Case for the Removal [of Indians] Act" (December 8, 1830):
"What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms, embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute, . . . and filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization, and religion?"

Us vs. them is, of course, a feature of all wars, but the starkness of this dichotomy -- seen by GWOT supporters as a struggle between the civilized world and a global jihad -- is as strikingly apparent in the War on Terror as it was in the Indian Wars.

3. GWOT is based on the principle of preventive strike, meant to put off "potential, future and, therefore, speculative attacks" -- just as U.S. Army conflicts against the Indians often were. We have to get them before they get us -- such is the assumption behind both sets of wars. As Professor Jack D. Forbes wrote in a 2003 piece, "Old Indian Wars Dominate Bush Doctrines," in the Bay Mills News:

"Bush has declared that the US will attack first before an â€˜enemy' has the ability to act. This could, of course, be called â€˜The Pearl Harbor strategy' since that is precisely what the Japanese Empire did. But it also has precedents against First American nations. For example, William Henry Harrison, under pressure from Thomas Jefferson to get the American Nations out of the Illinois-Indiana region, marched an invading army to the vicinity of a Native village at Tippecanoe precisely when he knew that [Shawnee war chief and pan-tribal political leader] Tecumseh was on a tour of the south and west."

4. While U.S. mainstream thinking about GWOT enemies is that they are total aliens -- in religion, politics, economics, and social organization -- there are Americans who believe that individuals in these "primitive" societies can eventually become assimilated and thus be rendered harmless through training, education, or democratization. This is similar to the view among American settlers that in savage Indian tribes hostile to civilization, there were some that could be evangelized and Christianized and brought over to the morally right, Godly side. Once "Americanized," former hostile groups, with the worst among them exterminated, can no longer pose any threat and indeed can assist in the prolongation of conflicts against remaining evil-doers.

5. GWOT is fought abroad, but it's also a war at home, as the creation after 9/11 of a Department of Homeland Security illustrates. The Indian wars were domestic as well, carried out by the U.S. military to protect American settlers against hostile non-U.S. citizens living on American soil. (It was not until June 2, 1924 that Congress granted citizenship to all Native Americans born in the United States.) While engaged in the Indian wars, the U.S. fought on its own, without the help of foreign governments; such has essentially been the case with GWOT, despite the support of a few countries like Israel, the creation of a weak international "coalition" in Iraq, and NATO participation in Afghanistan operations.

6. America's close partner Israel, which over the years has taken over Arab-populated lands and welcomes U.S. immigrants, can be considered as a kind of surrogate United States in this struggle. Expanding into the Middle East, the Israelis could be seen as following the example of the American pioneers who didn't let Indians stand in their way as they settled, with the support of the U.S. military, an entire continent, driven by the conviction that they were supported by God, the Bible, and Western civilization. "I shall need," wrote Thomas Jefferson, "the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our fathers, as Israel of old, from their native land and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessities and comforts of life." Less eloquently, Ariel Sharon put it this way: "Everything that's grabbed will be in our hands. Everything we don't grab will be in their hands."

7. As for the current states that are major battlefields of GWOT, Afghanistan and Iraq, it appears that the model for their future, far from being functional democracies, is that of Indian reservations. It is not unlikely that the fragile political structures of these states will sooner or later collapse, and the resulting tribal/ethnic entities will be controlled -- assuming the U.S. proves willing to engage in the long-term garrisoning in each area -- by American forces in fortified bases, as was the case with the Indian territories in the Far West. Areas under American control will provide U.S. occupiers with natural resources (e.g., oil), and American business -- if the security situation becomes manageable -- will doubtless be lured there in search of economic opportunities. Interestingly, the area outside of the Green Zone in Baghdad (where Americans have fortified themselves) is now referred to as the Red Zone -- terrorist-infested territory as dangerous to non-natives as the lands inhabited by the Redskins were to whites during the Indian wars.

8. The methods employed by the U.S. in GWOT and the Indian wars are similar in many respects: using superior technology to overwhelm the "primitive" enemy; adapting insurgency tactics, even the most brutal ones, used by the opposing side when necessary; and collaborating with "the enemy of my enemy" in certain situations (that is, setting one tribe against another). What are considered normal rules of war have frequently been irrelevant for Americans in both conflicts, given their certainty that their enemies are evil and uncivilized. The use of torture is also a feature of these two conflicts.

9. As GWOT increasingly appears to be, the Indian wars were a very long conflict, stretching from the seventeenth century to the end of the nineteenth -- the longest war in American history, starting even before the U.S. existed as a nation. There were numerous battles of varying intensity in this conflagration with no central point of confrontation -- as is the case with the War on Terror, despite its current emphasis on Iraq. And GWOT is a war being fought, like the Indian wars in the Far West, over large geographical areas -- as the Heritage Foundation's Ariel Cohen puts it, almost lyrically, "in the Greater Middle East, including the Mediterranean basin, through the Fertile Crescent, and into the remote valleys and gorges of the Caucasus and Pakistan, the deserts of Central Asia, the plateaus of Afghanistan."

10. Perhaps because they are drawn-out wars with many fronts and changing commanders, the goals of GWOT and the Indian Wars can be subject to many interpretations (indeed, even Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld at one point was eager to rename the War on Terror a "Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism"). For many abroad, GWOT is a brutal expression of a mad, cowboy-led country's plans to take over the world and its resources. In the United States, a large number of Americans still interpret these two wars as God-favored initiatives to protect His chosen people and allow them to flourish. But just as attitudes in the U.S. toward Native Americans have changed in recent years (consider, for example, the saccharine 1990 film Dances with Wolves, which is sympathetic to an Indian tribe, in contrast to John Wayne shoot-the-Injuns movies), so suspicious views among the American public toward the still-seen-as-dangerous "them" of GWOT might evolve in a different direction. Such a change in perception, however, is unlikely to occur in the near future, especially under the current bellicose Bush regime, which manipulates voters' fear of terrorists to maintain its declining domestic support.

About the Author: John Brown, a former Foreign Service officer who resigned from the State Department over the war in Iraq, compiles a near-daily "Public Diplomacy Press Review," available free upon request. The title for this paper comes from a 1692 quotation by Puritan preacher and witch-hunter Cotton Mather.

More Information on Empire? Go to http://www.globalpolicy.org

The King of Pop Goes to that Great Mega Concert Venue in the Sky

2009-06-25T22:10:00.000-04:00

HEART-BREAKING SURPRISE!

Michael Jackson dies in LA hospital

LOS ANGELES - Michael Jackson's brother says it's believed that the pop star died of cardiac arrest.

This was the statement let out by Jermaine Jackson, Michael's brother, who cautioned at a hospital press conference Thursday that the cause of his death would not be known until an autopsy was performed. He said Michael Jackson's personal doctor and paramedics tried to resuscitate him at his home in Holmby Hills. A team of doctors at UCLA Medical Center also tried for more than an hour.

Los Angeles police Lt. Gregg Strenk said at a separate news conference that police robbery-homicide detectives have been ordered to investigate, which is common in a high-profile case. Strenk says the coroner's office, which will handle inquiries into the type of death, is taking possession of the body.

BREAKING NEWS! CONNECTICUT BLOGGER IS ARRESTED FOR INCITING POLITICAL VIOLENCE

2009-06-22T21:34:00.000-04:00

This photo provided by State Capitol Police shows Harold 'Hal' Turner of North Bergen, NJ being arraigned in Hartford CT after being arrested in New Jersey and extradicted to Connecticut to face charges...

Turner of North Bergen, N.J., was charged with one count of inciting injury to persons or property for using his blog to incite readers 'to take up arms' against Connecticut lawmakers, Sen. Andrew McDonald and Rep. Michael Lawlor. He stood with his attorney Matthew Potter during arraignment this morning in Hartford Superior Court in Hartford, Conn. He could face a third-degree assault charge and possibly a hate crime, as well as crimes for inciting violence against lawmakers. He could face up to life in prison. But unlikely to get it....

To Understand AIG, You Have to know C.V. Starr

2009-06-15T18:31:00.000-04:00

AIG is currently in a legal battle with its old CEO and perhaps greatest booster and benefactor, Maurice Greenberg, who took the company from a small maritime and cargo insurer with some clients in the Pacific market to the world's largest insurance company, and no. 7 in the world.

"Mo" or "Hank" Greenberg allegedly took or mismanaged or misappropriated $4.3 billion in trust fund assets of an AIG entity Starr International, also formerly known as C.V. Starr & Company. This company Greenberg argues is a stand-alone, independent, non-affilated company in no way owned or influenced by AIG, at least on paper no doubt anyway. And probably not in the course of conduct, another legal argument which may have legs. But by no means believe that is the truth - AIG is C.V. Starr & Co. and the reverse is even more true....as noted:

Cornelius Vander Starr
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Cornelius Vander Starr (October 15, 1892 – December 20, 1968), an American businessman and Office of Strategic Services operative who founded the American International Group (AIG) insurance corporation.

(a 1910s - WWI young man, a 1920s 30-something wildcatter in China, a 1950s and 60s gray flannel suit guy. btw - did you say OSS? as in pre-CIA? probably for both wars)

Starr was born in Fort Bragg, California, where his Dutch father was a railroad engineer. He began his first business, selling ice-cream, at the age of nineteen. In 1914, he moved to San Francisco, where he sold auto insurance by day while studying for the California bar exam.

He joined the U.S. army in 1918 but was not sent overseas. Instead, he joined the Pacific Mail Steamship Company as a clerk in Yokohama, Japan. Later that year, he travelled to Shanghai where he worked for several insurance businesses.

(note the American West, the railroads, the Dutch of that time - who were racist and brutal - and his unusual but not necessarily unpredictable move to Asia. America was moving west alright, and they needed an agent on the ground there, up comes this young new recruit. what was his draw to Asia?)

In 1919 he founded AIG, then known as "American Asiatic Underwriters". AIG left China in early 1949, as Mao Zedong led the advance of the Communist People's Liberation Army on Shanghai,[1][2] and Starr moved the company headquarters to its current home in New York City.[3] AIG was once the world's largest insurance company, and the sixth-largest company in the United States according to the 2007 Forbes Global 2000 list.

(the name AAU says it all. the intent was to exploit the Asain shipping markets of that day. how was he able to start an insurance company after being there no more than a year? i dunno, but it was all good, until Mao said enuf. now i understand why...the West was destroying his country and his people, and he had had enuf.....so take the money and run. btw, they didn't even build the building. AIG was thought to be what at that time they were for sure, a 2nd rate company that couldn't even afford to build its own skyscraper palace, it had to buy one used...)

The C. V. Starr East Asian Library at Columbia University was named for Starr in recognition of an endowment gift by C. V. Starr Foundation in 1981. The C. V. Starr East Asian Library at the University of California, Berkeley was completed and dedicated in October 2007.

(guilt breeds philanthropy. think carnegie, rockefeller, gates, ford - all monopolists, all ruthless against the competition, seen as mean-spirited. these are the people that due to their cruelty to real people they have to build mounuments of stone to show they were actually good people instead)

Starr is the uncle of lawyer and former solicitor general Kenneth Starr. (sheesh - who knew? can you spell Richard Scaife?)

So what have we learned? Well, if the company can say anything, it can say the corporate culture was driven by a philosophy one should re-examine a little closer. It's the product of a person who lurked in the dark corners of the world as a spy, whose company may well have been a front company for the American intelligence community, a smuggler of information or whatever else. Someone and something that was set up to serve the purpose of America.

SO is the largest insurer in the world a hybrid hidden office of the CIA? Could that be the pose for which this lady strikes? It would be a good cover for a vast many of its executives to come to and interact and exchange. The money's close by too, so they have access when they need it. What a perfect cover ......

We have learned that Mr. Starr was if nothing else a mysterious man of modern day America. Not a Rockefeller or Gates, whose names you know. And not seasoned icons you know by name...you know you're in good hands with Allstate, or that State Farm is there, or you're under the umbrella of Travelers, or even who that duck is - AFLAC! You know Barclays sounds like the Brits, or Generali sounds like Italia (but you may not know that they sold policies to the Jews, but never paid on them for death during and after WWII)...even Tokio Marine you know is from Japan, or at least Asia, but AIG? You just never knew, never heard of them until now (unless you were born after 1990).

Own a Piece of the Rock - Like a Good Neighbor!

So now AIG is struggling with stock prices of $1.53 share as of June 15th 2009. Very bad. And 70% of it is owned by the U.S. government - oh that's right, US! So given that, it really makes sense to learn something about what you bought. Given the gas, maintenance and care you're gonna hafta give it, you might as well know the lemon you've bought into. Enjoy!!

Caribana's Coming F'Real Folks!

2009-06-13T11:33:00.001-04:00

Toronto Caribana festival at Exhibition Place
Originally uploaded by eastvillagepeeps

Toronto's Caribana Festival from late July through early August is only a month away, folks! Check it out if you can, it's the biggest baddest most exciting outdoor and city-wide festival in North America, 2nd only to Rio. This bad boy is DA BOMBBBBBE!!

As you can see, visibly millins stream onto this city and its party islands. The views - people, places & things - are simply scintillating. You will enjoy and come back for more and much more for many years to come.

Caribana - July 23 through August 2, Toronto ON Canada

A Quiet But Visually Effective Black Pioneer Robert Colescott

2009-06-09T22:31:00.000-04:00

Robert Colescott, Painter Who Toyed With Race and Sex, Dies at 83

By ROBERTA SMITH
New York Times
Published: June 9, 2009

Robert Colescott, an American figurative painter whose garishly powerful canvases lampooned racial and sexual stereotypes with rakish imagery, lurid colors and tangible glee, died Thursday at his home in Tucson . He was 83.

reviews, multimedia extravaganzas and much more. Join the discussion.
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Ode to Joy (European Anthem),1997

His death was confirmed by his wife, Jandava Cattron, who said he had suffered for several years from Parkinsonian syndrome.

Mr. Colescott represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1997, the first African-American to do so. By then he was well known for pitting the painterly against the political to create giddily joyful, destabilized compositions that satirized — and offended — to get your attention.

People of all colors haunted Mr. Colescott’s paintings, their mottled skin tones often suggested one race seeping through another. Their tumultuous interactions evoked the volatile mixture of suspicion, desire, pain and vitality that the races in America have, that no truths could be held to be self-evident. Life is mired in slippery layers of false piety, self-interest and greed; plus lust, pleasure and irreverence.

Mr. Colescott often found new uses and meanings for the landmarks of Western painting, borrowing compositions and characters from van Eyck, Goya and Manet and peppering his scenes with the Africanized faces from Picasso’s “Demoiselles d’Avignon.”

In his 1975 “George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page From an American History Textbook,” he reinterpreted Emmanuel Leutze’s famous painting of George Washington during the American Revolution with Carver at the center, accompanied by black cooks, Jemimas and banjo players. His 1975 “Eat Dem Taters” substituted laughing black people for the pious Dutch peasants of van Gogh’s “Potato Eaters” to attack, in his words, “the myth of the happy darky.” No American painter of the late 20th century made such telling use of painting’s European past to lambaste the painful contradictions of the American present.

Mr. Colescott’s work anticipated the appropriation art and Neo-Expressionist painting of the 1980s. His imagery shared aspects with Pop Art, although he disdained its coolness. His improvisational approach had precedents in jazz and Abstract Expressionism. He said he wanted his surface to “squirm.”

Born in Oakland, CA on Aug. 26, 1925; His mother, a pianist, and his father, a jazz violinist and a porter on the Southern Pacific Railroad. The family had moved to California from New Orleans in 1919 to improve their children’s chances for a good education.

He grew up playing the drums, but he drew and painted from childhood. The African-American sculptor Sargent Johnson, who worked with Mr. Colescott’s father on the Southern Pacific, was a family friend.

After serving with the Army in France and Germany during World War II, Mr. Colescott majored in art at the University of California , Berkeley , emerging in 1949 with a bachelor’s degree in painting and a geometric abstract style. During a year in Paris he studied with the painter Fernand Léger — whose emphasis on scale, color and narration made a lasting impression — and spent a lot of time in museums, looking at 19th-century painting. He returned to Berkeley for a master’s and spent the next decade teaching in the Northwest.

In 1964 a teaching residency took him to Cairo , where Egyptian art reiterated Léger’s ideas about narrative for him, but from outside the Western canon. After another stint in Paris he returned in 1967 to the United States , which he found changed by the civil rights movement, and to the Bay Area, where artists like Roy De Forest, William T. Wiley, Joan Brown, Robert Arneson and especially Peter Saul had developed extravagant, often caustic figurative styles. By the end of the 1960s he had found his mature style.

Mr. Colescott’s first four marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, Ms. Cattron; his brother, Warrington Colescott Jr., of Hollandale, Wis.; five sons from previous marriages — Alexander, of Napa, Calif.; Nicolas, of Portland, Ore.; Dennett, of San Rafael, Calif.; Daniel, of Modesto, Calif.; and Cooper, of Tucson, Az. — and one grandson.

Mr. Colescott helped set the stage for transgressive work by painters like Ellen Gallagher, Kerry James Marshall, Sue Williams and Carroll Dunham and multimedia artists like Kara Walker, William Pope.L and Kalup Linzy.

A commentator who covered his artwork noted, "When asked if he didn’t feel an obligation to serve “the black community,” Mr. Colescott replied, “The way that one serves is to serve art first,” adding that “the way you serve art is by being true to yourself.”

Chick Here to Visit Blog About a Classic...

2009-05-31T16:38:00.000-04:00

man i found this, can't believe it....a blog about grendels lair. the place in the late 70s and early-to-mid 80s (when reaganomics service economy brought the gap down on the location in the end) where music was laid, dreams were made, the ultimate new wave club outside of New York anywhere in the country then.

Grendels was where a very special thing happened to me that I'll always remember, it was where I met my ex-wife. We met, and had a helluva glam hipster time that night in 1983.

Some things happen because the Phophets must have their say in their own infinite way, i.e what is meant to be is and will be....

Life as We Don't Know It in Afghanistan

2009-05-30T10:17:00.000-04:00

Sometimes I think Bolph is on here just too much. He needs to hear more from his field correspondent like me, and spend more time in the studio on the big board playing with John King or Kirin Chetry, pretending to be the awesome journalist host he "thinks" he is.

One theing he does have, and is alsways proud of, is "the best apolitical team on the web". That would be people like me, modest and unassuming.

Hey can yo count how many typos I left for you to enjoy? Just becuase real journaist have to spell well doesn't mean I haf to. That's Bolph's job.

What I do have to do is share with you the world and what's going on in it. In a CNSaw kinda way of course, informative and a little bit racy (if the next article below this is any indication). So with that, let me share these stunning photos from the war zone in Khaf-Ejabbar in Afghanistan, taken by soldiers over there who are fighting for freedom (and Cheyney's Haliburton). By the way, KRB (a subsidiary of Haliburton) is not only the largest builder of military bases in the world, but also the biggest builder of military fast-food malls too. Most modern babes are full of Burger Kings, McDonald's, Cinnibons, and all the other mall niceties we've come to expect everywhere, from King of Prussia to Khaf-Ejabbar.

Sex in the Promotion of Eating

2009-05-22T10:30:00.000-04:00

The promotion of eats with sex is becoming more prevalent, thanks to the apparent success of Subway's "$5 foot-long" sub sandwich. Just 10 minutes before I wrote this and found this video, I saw a very provocative Dannon Yogurt commercial where a chick grabs a container of yogurt, and right there sucks the yogurt - all of it - into her mouth so hard the suction pulls and collapses the container. She ends it by licking the extra yogurt (i.e. cum) that got on her lips and cheeks. Nasty fucker, isn't she? Boy I'd love to get with her, the perfect girl to bring home to meet Mom.

As for the yogurt? I don't like yogurt. That's for her to suck up an' munch on. In the meantime, enjoy this scrumptious brand from Quizno's. Dee-light-ful!

For the Unemployed Out there

2009-05-20T16:05:00.000-04:00

Looks like I'll have to tell you about it.

Follow the exciting adventures of Rhoby who has been unemployed for over a year, as she goes through the events and twisted, detoured, and sometimes dead-end roads which more and more of us are now learning to experience: the art of navigating the art of being out of work.

Here's her website: http://theartofoutofwork.blogspot.com/

artfully done, I might add. She is also experimenting in the art of social media networking to sell herself to employers for a job. It's apparently become a passion of hers as well, as the blog demonstrated in her approachs.

She's also a perky attractive woman who knows she has to get out there to get it done. She blogs and tweets her way to success and a following: 400 followers on Twitter, 1500 visits to her blog (probably more over the life of the blog), and kudos from fellow web and blogsites and even the New York Times. That's big time!

For her, I do see potential in that, if not the job she was looking for, she will create a new career opportunity for herself, and with this blog hopefully for others.

FRom Our SISTer STATIon

2009-05-15T17:32:00.000-04:00

WAYMAN TISDALE, NBA BASKETBALL STAR AND MAJOR JAZZ GUITARIST, DIES
By Alan DukeCNN
May 15, 2009

(CNN) -- Wayman Tisdale, who became a successful jazz musician after retiring from pro basketball, died Friday morning following a two-year battle with cancer, his agent said.

Wayman Tisdale established himself as a jazz musician after his NBA career ended.

Tisdale, 44, died in a Tulsa, Oklahoma, hospital, where his wife took him when he had trouble breathing early Friday, agent Scott Pang said.

Tisdale's death was "a complete shock" and came as he prepared to return to the recording studio next week to work on a project with jazz guitarist Norman Brown, Pang said.
"He was a real testament to the power of positive thinking," said Pang. "Even after the cancer and amputating his leg above his knee, he never lost that smile on his face."

Doctors discovered Tisdale's bone cancer after he broke his leg in a fall down a flight of stairs, according to the official biography on his Web site.

"It really showed me what's important in life, man," he said in his bio. "It's not getting as many houses as I can, not driving the biggest cars. What's important is family and being healthy."

Tisdale averaged 15 points and six rebounds a game over a 12-year NBA career, during which he played with the Indiana Pacers, Sacramento Kings and Phoenix Suns, according to the NBA Web site.

His jazz recording career began in 1995 -- two years before his 1997 NBA retirement -- with a debut CD that rose to No. 4 on Billboard's Contemporary Jazz chart and crossed over onto the R&B charts, the bio said.

Subsequent songs -- including "Ain't No Stopping Us Now," "Can't Hide Love" and "Don't Take Your Love Away" -- were top radio hits.

Tisdale is survived by his wife, four children and one granddaughter.

Star Trek New Movie

2009-05-12T18:58:00.000-04:00

JJ with Chris Pine, Karl Urban, Zachary Quinto and Zoe Saldana at Academy Hanger location

One Goes Where No Man Has Gone Before!

JJ with Zoe Saldana on Kobayashi Maru simulator set

JJ with Chris Pine on Kobayashi Maru simulator set

JJ with cast on bridge set of Enterprise

JJ with Zachary Quinto in transporter room set

JJ with Simon Pegg in Scotty’s lab set (Leonard Nimoy in background)

JJ with Chris Pine in Scotty’s lab set

JJ with John Cho and Chris Pine on drilling rig

JJ with Eric Bana on Narada

This is ONE UGLY STORY!

2009-05-05T20:32:00.000-04:00

Illinois prisons: Low-level inmate is killed by cellmate with violent past when Illinois prison officials OKd housing them together

Prison-reform advocates call for an investigation after Chicago Tribune finds what prison experts call a fatal mistake

By Gary Marx | Chicago Tribune reporter
May 5, 2009

Joshua Daczewitz was a first-time inmate at a minimum-security prison when he tested positive for cocaine.

So corrections officials transferred the pudgy, bespectacled Daczewitz to one of the state's toughest prisons as punishment and put him in a cell with Corey Fox, a lifer in for murder. That turned out to be a fatal mistake.

With a history of violence even behind bars, Fox had been locked up alone for a year not long after pummeling and threatening to kill a cellmate and confessing to his desire to kill again. Yet after Fox was transferred to Menard Correctional Center in late 2003, several staffers at the maximum-security prison cleared him to share a cell with Daczewitz.

On Feb. 27, 2004, Fox says he passed a note to a corrections officer threatening to "erase" Daczewitz if he wasn't moved out. Daczewitz repeatedly kicked and beat on the cell door, begging to be removed, according to Fox.

By late morning, Fox knocked Daczewitz to the floor with a single punch, grabbed a makeshift rope hidden under his mattress and began choking him, according to the records. When the rope slipped off, he strangled Daczewitz, 22, with his hands.

Confronted by a Tribune reporter with the evidence of negligence, one top corrections official admitted that staffers erred by putting Daczewitz in the same cell with Fox.

Also, two other former high-ranking prison officials insisted a low-security inmate such as Daczewitz should never have been moved to a maximum-security prison for a drug violation in the first place.

But folks, this is THE line from the killer's mouth:
"Daczewitz was like a mouse in a maze of lions," Fox, 34, said in a chilling letter to the Tribune in February. "He should have never been in the cell to begin with. ... Daczewitz was given to me, like the blood of a lamb."

Like, Whoa!

One prison expert, after reviewing documents about the case provided by the Tribune, called for an independent probe into whether prison staffers should be disciplined for housing Fox and Daczewitz together.

Charles Fasano of the John Howard Association, a prison watchdog group in Chicago, said prison officials also should re-examine their practice of transferring inmates from minimum- to maximum-security prisons for nonviolent rules violations. "Daczewitz was a lightweight who should not have come anywhere near Menard," Fasano said. "It's overkill to send Daczewitz to a maximum-security prison. And Fox shouldn't have had a cellmate, period. The guy was a ticking time bomb."

Daczewitz's murder was not just the result of a misguided policy or the misjudgment of a few corrections staffers, Fasano said, but also a tragic consequence of an overcrowded prison system in which officials are under intense pressure to "double-cell" even the most violent offenders, sometimes leading to deadly results.

The Illinois Department of Corrections defended its safety record, saying only nine inmates have been killed in the last 12 years for a system that holds some 45,500 offenders. "These things can and will happen," said Sergio Molina, the corrections department's executive chief. "We try to work diligently to make sure that these incidents don't happen, and I think the numbers reflect that we do a very good job."

Well, that's reassuring.

In court papers, Daczewitz's aunt and adoptive mother, Sherree, said she remains devastated by his murder. She declined to talk to the Tribune because of her continuing grief. "Joshua was a gentle person, and for him to have been so violently killed makes me feel overwhelmed with a deep feeling of sadness and loss," she wrote before the state settled her wrongful-death lawsuit for $150,000 last December. - And that's all she got? Her lawyers suck - a child could have convinced a jury to award $1 million with this amount of negligence evidence.

Just three weeks after beginning a 7-year sentence for arson and robbery, Daczewitz failed a drug test at the minimum-security Vienna Correctional Center and was shipped to Menard on the same day.

Several top corrections officials said it was common to transfer low-security inmates to maximum-security prisons for drug violations, but others disputed that. Salvador Godinez, the former chief of operations for state prisons at the time of Daczewitz's murder, said it usually took an egregious offense such as an attack on an officer for that big of a jump.

Eugene McAdory Jr., then Menard's warden, said he urged a superior not to send Daczewitz to Menard because of his fears that he would be preyed on. McAdory said the official, Richard Bard, ignored his warning.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Bard, now corrections chief of operations, denied ever talking to McAdory about the matter but defended the transfer, saying smoking crack cocaine in prison constitutes a major threat to safety and security.

Fox, a reputed white supremacist gang member, has spent most of his adult life in prison for burglary, theft, armed robbery and murder. His violence continued behind bars, with numerous assaults and death threats, according to the records.

Once in 2002, he repeatedly punched his cellmate, leading him to cower under the bunk. "On my son's name, if you come out from under that bed, I will kill you," records show the cellmate quoted Fox as telling him.

In the aftermath of that assault, Fox told a prison social worker of his "urges to kill and dismember my cellmate" and told of the "rush" of being left alone with body parts, records show.

Daczewitz had difficulty adjusting to the maximum-security prison, though for a time he got along with Fox, playing cards and chess and sharing books. In writing to his mother and other relatives, Daczewitz said he cried every day and bitterly complained about some corrections officers. "A few of them saw me crying the other day and asked me if I wanted one of them to tuck me in," he wrote.

In the days before the murder, several inmates said they heard Fox bullying and threatening Daczewitz, according to prison records and the lawsuit. Fox told the Tribune that he and Daczewitz repeatedly spoke to guards and even wrote corrections officials demanding to be separated. Fox said he passed a note to Christopher Fleming, a guard, the morning of the murder telling him to "move my cellie or I'm going to erase him," according to the records.

In sworn statements in the lawsuit, several guards either couldn't recall being warned of problems between the cellmates or denied any problems existed.

Fleming said it was not his duty to protect inmates. "It's our job to see he ... doesn't escape," Fleming said in his deposition. "As long as they're in the cell ... that's our job."

On the morning of the murder, Daczewitz spent almost three hours "kicking and beating on the cell door, crying, begging, pleading to be taken out," Fox wrote the Tribune. "Each officer that passed by ignored him or walked off the gallery laughing, as if it were all a joke."

Fed up with the inaction, Fox said he jumped off the top bunk and punched Daczewitz in the mouth, knocking him to the floor, according to the records. Before Daczewitz could rise, Fox pulled Dazcewitz's head back by the hair and strangled him.

Fox is now locked up at least 23 hours a day in solitary confinement, in a cell at "super-max" Tamms Correctional Center after receiving a life sentence for Daczewitz's murder. His head shaved and goatee braided, Fox declined to give a reason for killing Daczewitz but said he felt no remorse. "If I felt like it, I'd take another life," he boasted.

Like brotha Snoop-Dogg always said, "Why ask why?"

The President in HD

2009-05-04T08:22:00.000-04:00

A weekly feed (we hope, if not we'll have to constantly upload) of the President direct from the White House online video channel. Now if that isn't direct access, what is?

Other than grouping him up under his presidential sheets! Michelle wouldn't like that, girls.

5/2/09: Your Weekly Address from White House on Vimeo.

And Now, A Non-O-Biography, whatever that is.

2009-05-04T06:22:00.001-04:00

Non-O-Biography from Boat Safety Films on Vimeo.

New Video From Nyle - "let the beat build"

2009-05-04T06:14:00.000-04:00

Nyle "Let The Beat Build" from Nyle on Vimeo.

And you wonder...whatever happened to those Hip-Hop Pioneers?

2009-05-03T18:29:00.000-04:00

Roxanne Shanté

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This biography of a living person needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references (ideally, using inline citations). Unsourced or poorly sourced contentious material must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. Find sources: "Roxanne Shanté" — news, books, scholar (June 2008)

Roxanne Shanté
Birth name	Lolita Shanté Gooden
Born	November 9, 1969 (1969-11-09) (age 39)
Origin	Queens, New York
Genre(s)	Hip hop
Occupation(s)	Emcee Psychologist
Years active	1984–1994
Label(s)	Pop Art Records 10/Virgin Records Breakout/A&M Records Cold Chillin’/Reprise/Warner Bros. Records Livin’ Large/Tommy Boy/Warner Bros. Records
Associated acts	Juice Crew Marley Marl Big Daddy Kane Biz Markie Kool G. Rap & DJ Polo M.C. Shan Craig G The Real Roxanne Steady B Sparky Dee
Website	The official MySpace page of Dr. Roxanne Shanté

Roxanne Shanté, Ph.D. (born Lolita Shanté Gooden, November 9, 1969) is an American hip-hop pioneer. Born and raised in the Queensbridge Projects, Shanté first gained attention through the Roxanne Wars and her association with the Juice Crew.

Biography

Shanté's career began at the age of 14 when she encountered influential record producer Marley Marl, radio DJ Mr. Magic, and Tyrone Williams talking about how UTFO had canceled its appearance at a show that it was promoting. Shanté offered to record an answer to UTFO's recent hit "Roxanne, Roxanne," which was about a woman named who rejects the members of the group. The men agreed and the result was "Roxanne's Revenge," a confrontational and profane song in which Shanté assumed the role of Roxanne, dissing UTFO over a Marley Marl-produced instrumental (The official UTFO response to the its own song was “The Real Roxanne,” with artist Adelaida Martinez assuming the role of Roxanne and eventually recording under the same stage name as the song title). Shanté's version and the Real Roxanne's version sparked the Roxanne Wars and made Shanté a hip-hop star in the process. The single would go on to sell over 250,000 copies in the New York area alone. One of the founding members of the Juice Crew, most of her tracks would be produced by Marley Marl, with the exception of several songs on Shanté’s last album, 1992’s The Bitch is Back.

As an MC, Shanté had an extraordinary ability to freestyle (improvise) entire songs. "Roxanne’s Revenge" was an example, reportedly written as it was recorded—in one take.^{[citation needed]} However, the original version of the song was rerecorded after UTFO sued over the usage of its original backing track; the new version featured slightly different music with less profanity. People are most familiar with this version, which appears on the original 12-inch single released in 1984, with the original on the reverse side.

In 1988, Shanté and Rick James had a hit with "Loosey's Rap."

At the age of 25, Shanté retired from the recording industry to become a psychologist. She continues to make occasional guest appearances and live performances, as well as mentor young female hip-hop artists. She did the latter by making a cameo appearance on VH1's hip hop reality show Ms. Rap Supreme and gave rap-battle strategies to the finalists of that show. She also took part in a series of Sprite commercials during the late 1990s. She is married and has one son and one daughter, the first child of which was born when she was 14. She earned a PhD in psychology from Cornell University^[1]^[2]^[3]—paid for by her record label via an unusual contract clause—and has a practice in Queens.^[4] She is a vegan and owns Hip-Hop Ices ice cream parlor in Queens.

She will be portrayed by actress Keke Palmer in The Vapors, a film about the formation and rise of the Juice Crew.^[5]

In 2008, her song "Roxanne's Revenge" was ranked number 42 on VH1's 100 Greatest Hip Hop Songs.

Utah Slopes 2009!

2009-05-03T15:37:00.000-04:00

Finding Heaven at Solitude from Chris Clark on Vimeo.

Social Networking - Introducing Meetup.com

2009-05-03T14:45:00.000-04:00

In actuality, this isn't even a new site. Been arond since at least 2006, it's good for meeting people not only online but live in person doing things you like to do. You simply sign up, indicate your personal interests and preferences for groups you're trying to meet, and WHAM!! you have it. whether you're into archery or golf, restaurant-hopping or wine tasting, meeting local or traveling anywhere in the world, meeting fellow partiers or a book club, this group will link you up with people who share your interests.

And unlike Facebook, you actually "meet up" with these social networking friends. So no gabbing all day and night online, there's actually something for us to do! Also excellent for meeting and making new friends and network contacts. To check it out, click on the "Meetup" logo above.

Happy Meetups!!!

Family Guy Behind the Scenes

2008-12-28T11:31:00.000-05:00

A Word From Top Gunn Bartending

2008-12-07T13:21:00.000-05:00

Well we may be in one of the worse recessions we've seen in some time, but if there was anytime to have a drink and cool out for a minute it was now!! Top Gunn Bartending can tend to your needs, offering catering, bartending and live entertainment and theme party services. Top of the line and super professional servers, some world-renowned in clubs and restaurants and bars all over America. Now on the scene! Above is Starr, Shelton and Justin, from left to right.

If you wish to explore, check out their website www.topgunn.com.

The Answer Lies Within My Friends

2008-12-07T00:17:00.000-05:00

This is a question and answer session to one of the perplexing questions most Black American really have these days:

The Secret To Being Black and Succeeding in America

A Resolved Question:
Why do some successful black people get so much negative attention from the black and white community?

Sometimes when a black person gets a good education, finds a good job and success, the black community accuses them of acting white. Why is that? Take Michelle Obama for example, she's a smart, well-educated strong black woman. I've heard some black people say she acts white. Which is weird because Michelle Obama seems like she LOVES to be black, although there's nothing wrong with that. But the fact that she has so much pride in her race and doesn't forget where she comes from makes white people accuse her of being racist.

by ericktra...
Member since:
October 14, 2006
Total points:
10512 (Level 6)

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker
This is a misconception that you seem to have and that some racists want you to believe. The Obamas are very respected in the black community and very few people would call them sell outs. To understand this issue you have to go back to the root of the problem.

From the very beginning black culture was looked down upon as inferior and it was ridiculed...

This was necessary in order to justify the racism and oppression that was going on at the time!!! By dehumanizing blacks slavery became justified and racism was seen as acceptable. What did this do to black people? It created a sense of self loathing and a need to break away from one's black identity. A lot of black people felt the need to do anything possible to avoid been identified as black this meant...change speech patterns, changing clothing patterns, changing religion and sometimes even changing physical attributes.

They did everything they could to appear more acceptable to the whites even at the cost of denying their own identity as black people. This is why even today blacks are suspicious.

Been successful has nothing to do with race but in America being successful was always seen as an exclusive attribute of whites. Blacks were seldom expected to be successful and those that made it were viewed as unique exceptions.

What we as a race need to do is find pride in our identity and break away from white expectation! They are not the ones that determine our futures and we should strive to be successful while mantaning a strong cultural identity instead of trying to satisfy white expectations. Until we do that we will never really be free.

This was all discussed 3 months ago - relevant then, relevant now, relevant always.

And the answer the asker was looking for:
Asker's Comment: You're absolutely right.

Is this what you are searching for? Find your answer here, now.

Vacation In African Lands - today's feature place: Asilah, Morocco

2008-11-09T14:43:00.000-05:00

Next Stop Asilah
Shedding What’s Shabby at a Moroccan Port

Asilah had become rundown, but an annual arts festival has helped revive and clean up the town.

IT was a crisp Sunday afternoon, and the narrow terrace of Casa Garcia, a small seafood restaurant in the Moroccan port town of Asilah, exuded a rarefied air. Fashionable Moroccans in big designer sunglasses feasted on grilled fish, while a party of British women exchanged air kisses. All around, waiters in white jackets and skinny black bow ties weaved between the white-tableclothed tables, serving bottles of chilled white wine and luscious bowls of fresh cla
While such scenes of glamour have burnished Asilah’s reputation as a stylish playground for North Africa’s elite, it wasn’t long ago that this ancient fortified port, about 30 miles south of Tangier along the balmy Atlantic Ocean, suffered from obscurity.

Moroccan guidebooks written before the late 1970s only mentioned Asilah in passing, usually as a curiosity. But in the last few years, Asilah’s medina has become a clandestine getaway for Moroccan and European jet-setters who hide behind the thick carved doors of their exotic holiday homes, lounging on electric-blue roof terraces with a book in one hand and a cocktail in the other.

Much of the turnaround can be traced to 1978, when two local friends — Mohammed Benaissa, a photographer and diplomat, and Mohammed Melehi, an artist and curator — came up with the idea of inviting artists to paint murals on the town’s peeling walls. That grew into a summer-long arts festival, with flamenco concerts, design exhibitions and poetry readings, that attracts artists and fans from throughout the Middle East and the West.

The festival, the International Cultural Moussem of Asilah, is today among North Africa’s biggest cultural gatherings, drawing more than 100,000 people as diverse as Berber artists, Saudi Arabian royalty and Japanese collectors. For two months starting in July, Asilah is like Park City during the Sundance Film Festival: a small town suddenly swarming with a sophisticated mix of artists and world travelers looking to mingle and celebrate. Hotels as far as Tangier are booked solid months in advance, as are the Islamic and Andalusian courtyard homes in the medina. They came this year to hear the Syrian vocalist Waed Bouhassoun and a rare performance by female Sufi chanters from the mountainous region near Chefchaouen and to meet artists like the Moroccan painter Farid Belkahia and the Japanese painter Mizue Sawano.

Not bad for a shared dream of two childhood friends from Asilah. Before the festival, the town’s walls were crumbling and the medina was plagued by garbage and indifference. Now, Asilah is considered among the cleanest cities in Morocco.

The brilliant white medina was even honored with the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 1989. Restored gems include the Palace of Culture, a fortlike building with green windows, a dazzling performance hall and opulent suites where visiting artists are put up during the festival. And adding to the town’s new look are the colorful murals, splattered on nearly every corner and replenished each year by a new wave of festival artists.

But Asilah’s charms aren’t confined to the festival. When I arrived last May, the town felt like a sailboat calmly adrift. Battered blue-and-white fishing boats bobbed off a pier. A donkey cart clattered along a freshly swept alleys, followed by groups of Spanish tourists and Moroccan teenagers in head scarves singing a playful Arabic chant.

In the mornings, the sounds of waves drifted over the restored 15th-century ramparts, mixing with the rhythmic tones of streets being swept and the scent of freshly baked bread. By late morning, the action moved toward the wide golden beaches. On a warm Friday, a small group of boys played soccer on the packed sand. Nearby a clutch of young girls squealed as they played and threw one another into the cold water. Otherwise, the beaches were empty and seemed to stretch all the way to Tangier.

Those looking for even more solitude can travel a half-mile down the shoreline. One afternoon I asked a local guide to drive me to Paradise Beach, a cliff-lined cove about 30 minutes away along a bumpy dirt track. We arrived at sundown, just as the light became the color of honey and the sun’s fading colors bled into the horizon. My guide pointed out that during the festival, the beach is covered with tents and food shacks. Now, there were only three people.

But while Asilah is a place to ponder and read a good book in the off-season, it’s also not a bad place to shop. Unlike the souks of Marrakesh and Fez, where one goes dizzy from the sheer volume of things for sale, Asilah only has a dozen handicraft shops, but each is smartly edited and somewhat unusual.

One could spend hours alone in Alkamra, a veritable Ali Baba cave filled with treasures that its owner, Mohammed Aziz Acharoui, gathers from throughout North Africa. Recent items included fierce wooden facemasks, primitive still-life paintings on glass and a necklace with golf ball-size chunks of fire-orange coral and turquoise.

Mr. Acharoui also has two huge storerooms just outside the medina, where he keeps large objects like bronze fountains for a coterie of international designers and collectors.
Back in the medina, Bazar Atlas has an excellent selection of old Berber carpets and Tamegroute ceramics from the Atlas Mountains. One regular clients is Françoise Dorget, a designer who owns Caravane in Paris, which carries Moroccan-inspired furnishings. Ms. Dorget first came to Asilah 20 years ago and was struck by what she called the “Paul Klee-like jumble of geometric forms.”
She continues to visit often — and not just to shop. Working with local artisans, Ms. Dorget has transformed several old buildings in the medina into chic holiday homes. But despite Asilah’s rising cache, there are surprisingly no hotels within the medina. Mr. Benaissa, the mayor since 1983, has restricted development inside the ancient walls. But that is changing.

The town recently gave Tomás Alía, a Madrid designer, permission to open the first hotel inside the medina. Scheduled for December, the Dar el Amal will have seven luxury suites, a rooftop terrace with ocean views and groovy modern Moroccan interiors.

Mr. Alía said he’ll give a glamorous party to celebrate the opening, complete with an international guest list, Andalusian music and djellabas. But after that he’ll keep the vibe low-key. Like Asilah itself, he’d prefer that the Dar el Amal be kept a well-guarded secret.

GETTING OFF THE MARRAKESH EXPRESS
GETTING THERE
From the United States, fly into Tangier and then drive the 30 miles to Asilah. Royal Air Maroc flies from Kennedy Airport in New York to Tangier, with a plane change in Casablanca, for $1,700 round trip travel in mid-August, according to a recent online search.
WHERE TO STAY
Until the Dar el Amal hotel opens in December, staying inside the medina means renting a house. There are more than 30 vacation houses listed on Homelidays (http://www.homelidays.com/), an online rental agency based in Paris. Recent offerings included Dar Malak (No. 45628), a three-bedroom house that faces the sea, with housekeeper and chef, for 600 to 900 euros a week, or about $920 to $1,380 at $1.53 to the euro. A four-bedroom house (No. 74511) with sea views and large terraces was 800 to 1,600 euros a week, depending on the season.
For an affordable hotel outside the medina, try the seven-room Hotel Patio de la Luna (Plaza Zelaka 12; 212-39-416-074; http://www.patiodelaluna.com/). The backpacker-friendly spot has a tiny courtyard and simple tiled rooms starting at 450 dirhams, about $55 at 7.96 dirhams to the dollar.
WHERE TO EAT
Two of the best restaurants in Asilah are outside the medina and specialize in seafood: Casa Garcia (Rue Moulay Hassan Ben el Mehdi 51; 212-39-417-465) and Casa Pepe (Plaza Zelaka 8; 212- 39-417-395).
WHERE TO SHOP
Bazar Atlas (Rue Tijara 25; 212-39-417-864) sells old Berber carpets, textiles and ceramics from the village of Tamegroute.
Sparkly and colorful modern Moroccan slippers line the walls at Tienda de Velas Bellas (Calle Sid M Barek).
Alkamra (Rue de Commerce 10-12; 212-39-416-288) sells one-of-a-kind antiques, including coral necklaces and still-life paintings.
The Aplanos Art Gallery (Rue Tijara 89; 212-39-417-486; http://www.aplanosart.blogspot.com/) carries a mix of old maps and artwork on paper.
The Hakim gallery (Sidi Benaissa 14; 212-61-799-535) features drawings by local artists.

Decision 2008 Rocks!

2008-10-10T05:31:00.000-04:00

And of course as it is Election time, another Obama video. Talkin' 'bout Obama!!

For that matter, talk 'bout Hillary!!

Dave Chappelle's Block Party Brooklyn

2008-10-07T05:06:00.000-04:00

As is always the case, Dave Chappelle can be one funny guy.

As We Go Into The Final Stretch, A Question Remains

2008-10-07T03:40:00.000-04:00

Addressing those fissures in his speech given in Cincinnati back in July, Governor Patterson of New York said that he was not sure whether Americans would be able to put their differences and fears aside in this election and support Mr. Obama:

“Can America reject the crucible of race that has dictated and pervaded all of our history to embrace an African-American man who has the right policies?” he said. “We will find out.”

It has become the litmus test that now must be taken, or at least in 28 days.

Reheated in the Microwave: Op-ed Piece Worth Reading

2008-10-06T06:08:00.000-04:00

Aaron Sorkin Conjures a Meeting of Obama and Bartlet

By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: September 20, 2008

Now that he’s finally fired up on the soup-line economy, Barack Obama knows he can’t fade out again. He was eager to talk privately to a Democratic ex-president who could offer more fatherly wisdom — not to mention a surreptitious smoke — and less fraternal rivalry. I called the “West Wing” creator Aaron Sorkin (yes, truly) to get a read-out of the meeting. This is what he wrote:

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Maureen Dowd

Enlarge This Image

Jason Polan

BARACK OBAMA knocks on the front door of a 300-year-old New Hampshire farmhouse while his Secret Service detail waits in the driveway. The door opens and OBAMA is standing face to face with former President JED BARTLET.

BARTLET Senator.

OBAMA Mr. President.

BARTLET You seem startled.

OBAMA I didn’t expect you to answer the door yourself.

BARTLET I didn’t expect you to be getting beat by John McCain and a Lancôme rep who thinks “The Flintstones” was based on a true story, so let’s call it even.

OBAMA Yes, sir.

BARTLET Come on in.

BARTLET leads OBAMA into his study.

BARTLET That was a hell of a convention.

OBAMA Thank you, I was proud of it.

BARTLET I meant the Republicans. The Us versus Them-a-thon. As a Democrat I was surprised to learn that I don’t like small towns, God, people with jobs or America. I’ve been a little out of touch but is there a mandate that the vice president be skilled at field dressing a moose —

OBAMA Look —

BARTLET — and selling Air Force Two on eBay?

OBAMA Joke all you want, Mr. President, but it worked.

BARTLET Imagine my surprise. What can I do for you, kid?

OBAMA I’m interested in your advice.

BARTLET I can’t give it to you.

OBAMA Why not?

BARTLET I’m supporting McCain.

OBAMA Why?

BARTLET He’s promised to eradicate evil and that was always on my “to do” list.

OBAMA O.K. —

BARTLET And he’s surrounded himself, I think, with the best possible team to get us out of an economic crisis. Why, Sarah Palin just said Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had “gotten too big and too expensive to the taxpayers.” Can you spot the error in that statement?

OBAMA Yes, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac aren’t funded by taxpayers.

BARTLET Well, at least they are now. Kind of reminds you of the time Bush said that Social Security wasn’t a government program. He was only off by a little — Social Security is the largest government program.

OBAMA I appreciate your sense of humor, sir, but I really could use your advice.

BARTLET Well, it seems to me your problem is a lot like the problem I had twice.

OBAMA Which was?

BARTLET A huge number of Americans thought I thought I was superior to them.

OBAMA And?

BARTLET I was.

OBAMA I mean, how did you overcome that?

BARTLET I won’t lie to you, being fictional was a big advantage.

OBAMA What do you mean?

BARTLET I’m a fictional president. You’re dreaming right now, Senator.

OBAMA I’m asleep?

BARTLET Yes, and you’re losing a ton of white women.

OBAMA Yes, sir.

BARTLET I mean tons.

OBAMA I understand.

BARTLET I didn’t even think there were that many white women.

OBAMA I see the numbers, sir. What do they want from me?

BARTLET I’ve been married to a white woman for 40 years and I still don’t know what she wants from me.

OBAMA How did you do it?

BARTLET Well, I say I’m sorry a lot.

OBAMA I don’t mean your marriage, sir. I mean how did you get America on your side?

BARTLET There again, I didn’t have to be president of America, I just had to be president of the people who watched “The West Wing.”

OBAMA That would make it easier.

BARTLET You’d do very well on NBC. Thursday nights in the old “ER” time slot with “30 Rock” as your lead-in, you’d get seven, seven-five in the demo with a 20, 22 share — you’d be selling $450,000 minutes.

OBAMA What the hell does that mean?

BARTLET TV talk. I thought you’d be interested.

OBAMA I’m not. They pivoted off the argument that I was inexperienced to the criticism that I’m — wait for it — the Messiah, who, by the way, was a community organizer. When I speak I try to lead with inspiration and aptitude. How is that a liability?

BARTLET Because the idea of American exceptionalism doesn’t extend to Americans being exceptional. If you excelled academically and are able to casually use 690 SAT words then you might as well have the press shoot video of you giving the finger to the Statue of Liberty while the Dixie Chicks sing the University of the Taliban fight song. The people who want English to be the official language of the United States are uncomfortable with their leaders being fluent in it.

OBAMA You’re saying race doesn’t have anything to do with it?

BARTLET I wouldn’t go that far. Brains made me look arrogant but they make you look uppity. Plus, if you had a black daughter —

OBAMA I have two.

BARTLET — who was 17 and pregnant and unmarried and the father was a teenager hoping to launch a rap career with “Thug Life” inked across his chest, you’d come in fifth behind Bob Barr, Ralph Nader and a ficus.

OBAMA You’re not cheering me up.

BARTLET Is that what you came here for?

OBAMA No, but it wouldn’t kill you.

BARTLET Have you tried doing a two-hour special or a really good Christmas show?

OBAMA Sir —

BARTLET Hang on. Home run. Right here. Is there any chance you could get Michelle pregnant before the fall sweeps?

OBAMA The problem is we can’t appear angry. Bush called us the angry left. Did you see anyone in Denver who was angry?

BARTLET Well ... let me think. ...We went to war against the wrong country, Osama bin Laden just celebrated his seventh anniversary of not being caught either dead or alive, my family’s less safe than it was eight years ago, we’ve lost trillions of dollars, millions of jobs, thousands of lives and we lost an entire city due to bad weather. So, you know ... I’m a little angry.

OBAMA What would you do?

BARTLET GET ANGRIER! Call them liars, because that’s what they are. Sarah Palin didn’t say “thanks but no thanks” to the Bridge to Nowhere. She just said “Thanks.” You were raised by a single mother on food stamps — where does a guy with eight houses who was legacied into Annapolis get off calling you an elitist? And by the way, if you do nothing else, take that word back. Elite is a good word, it means well above average. I’d ask them what their problem is with excellence. While you’re at it, I want the word “patriot” back. McCain can say that the transcendent issue of our time is the spread of Islamic fanaticism or he can choose a running mate who doesn’t know the Bush doctrine from the Monroe Doctrine, but he can’t do both at the same time and call it patriotic. They have to lie — the truth isn’t their friend right now. Get angry. Mock them mercilessly; they’ve earned it. McCain decried agents of intolerance, then chose a running mate who had to ask if she was allowed to ban books from a public library. It’s not bad enough she thinks the planet Earth was created in six days 6,000 years ago complete with a man, a woman and a talking snake, she wants schools to teach the rest of our kids to deny geology, anthropology, archaeology and common sense too? It’s not bad enough she’s forcing her own daughter into a loveless marriage to a teenage hood, she wants the rest of us to guide our daughters in that direction too? It’s not enough that a woman shouldn’t have the right to choose, it should be the law of the land that she has to carry and deliver her rapist’s baby too? I don’t know whether or not Governor Palin has the tenacity of a pit bull, but I know for sure she’s got the qualifications of one. And you’re worried about seeming angry? You could eat their lunch, make them cry and tell their mamas about it and God himself would call it restrained. There are times when you are simply required to be impolite. There are times when condescension is called for!

OBAMA Good to get that off your chest?

BARTLET Am I keeping you from something?

OBAMA Well, it’s not as if I didn’t know all of that and it took you like 20 minutes to say.

BARTLET I know, I have a problem, but admitting it is the first step.

OBAMA What’s the second step?

BARTLET I don’t care.

OBAMA So what about hope? Chuck it for outrage and put-downs?

BARTLET No. You’re elite, you can do both. Four weeks ago you had the best week of your campaign, followed — granted, inexplicably — by the worst week of your campaign. And you’re still in a statistical dead heat. You’re a 47-year-old black man with a foreign-sounding name who went to Harvard and thinks devotion to your country and lapel pins aren’t the same thing and you’re in a statistical tie with a war hero and a Cinemax heroine. To these aged eyes, Senator, that’s what progress looks like. You guys got four debates. Get out of my house and go back to work.

OBAMA Wait, what is it you always used to say? When you hit a bump on the show and your people were down and frustrated? You’d give them a pep talk and then you’d always end it with something. What was it ...?

BARTLET “Break’s over.”

This Story So Proves The Deviant Nature, Doesn't it?

2008-08-05T18:37:00.000-04:00

Posted on Tue, Aug. 5, 2008

Police: Pa. man kidnaps, rapes teen; shots fired

MICHAEL RUBINKAM

The Associated Press

ALLENTOWN, Pa. - A man who once described his interests as serial murder and rape took a 14-year-old girl from her home at gunpoint early Tuesday, raped her at a motel in the Poconos, then opened fire on police as they tried to arrest him, authorities said.

Derek Bengtsson, 27, of East Stroudsburg, was charged with attempted homicide, rape, kidnapping and other counts after surrendering to authorities at the Budget Host Inn shortly after 9 a.m.

Bengtsson kidnapped the girl around 1:20 a.m. and drove her to the 54-room motel in Stroudsburg, where he shackled and raped her, police said. Bengtsson eventually fell asleep and the victim managed to escape and call police.

State police said the tall, burly, bearded suspect fired at least four shots at officers from Stroud Area Regional Police Department as they broke down the door to his motel room, and that one officer became pinned down in a bathroom. No one was hit.

"The fact that he fired, it was pretty unbelievable that no one was hurt," said state police Trooper Robert Sebastianelli.

Police said the victim knew her attacker but declined to provide more detail about their relationship.

A MySpace page evidently belonging to Bengtsson lists his interests as "Poker, serial murder, rape, torture, etc." Among his heroes, according to the site: "child molesters" and serial killer Ted Bundy. Sebastianelli said police were examining the page.

After his arraignment, Bengtsson was sent to the Monroe County Correctional Facility on $500,000 bail. It wasn't clear if he had an attorney.

The girl told police that Bengtsson had gone into her bedroom, showed her a handgun and said, "If you don't come with me, bad things are going to happen." She said he threatened to kill everyone in the house if she didn't follow his instructions, according to a police affidavit.

Bengtsson drove her in her mother's car about 10 miles to the motel, where he took her into a room, locked the door behind them and barricaded it with chairs, police said. Then he gave her two options: She could kill him or have sex with him, police said. She refused and he raped her, documents said.

Bengtsson also showed her a note that she later took with her and gave to police.

The note said, in part: "Yes, I took her. And as long as you play by my rules, She will come back unharmed and breathing. However, Failure to abide by the rules will result in a bullet put in her head. My Rules: Do NOTHING! Sit there in silence and SUFFER."

It wasn't clear to whom the note was addressed.

David Paterson Speaks Out On Today's Racism

2008-07-19T16:47:00.000-04:00

Paterson, at N.A.A.C.P., Warns of Racism’s Power

By JEREMY W. PETERS
Published: July 18, 2008

CINCINNATI — David A. Paterson, in his first major speech to a national
audience since becoming governor of New York, said on Thursday that even as
black Americans rejoice about the possibility that Senator Barack Obama
could become president, they cannot lose sight of the serious social and
economic ills that plague their community and should remain mindful of the
racism that still exists.

“The gap between the haves and have-nots right in our own community is
wider than it has ever been before,” Mr. Paterson told a crowd of thousands
at the N.A.A.C.P.’s annual convention here.

“No matter how prosperous we are, no matter how well heeled we may be, no
matter how ambitious and successful we have been, we still can be cast
under the same net regardless of our circumstances.”

Mr. Paterson, who is New York’s first black governor and only the third
black man since Reconstruction to lead a state, addressed the convention as
the intersection between race and politics in the United States appears
especially fraught. Recent polls have shown that whites and blacks hold
very different views of Mr. Obama, and that despite the senator’s
candidacy, blacks do not believe that race relations have significantly
improved.

Addressing those fissures in his speech, the governor said that he was not
sure whether Americans would be able to put their differences aside in this
election and support Mr. Obama.

“Can America reject the crucible of race that has dictated and pervaded all
of our history to embrace an African-American man who has the right
policies?” he said. “We will find out.”

The speech demonstrated how Mr. Paterson, a 54-year-old Harlem Democrat who
never experienced the days of segregated lunch counters but still felt the
sting of discrimination during his Long Island boyhood, has taken lessons
from the civil rights struggle of his parents’ generation and melded them
with the experiences of his and younger generations of blacks, who he said
too often play down racism’s lingering taint.

“This is why the Jewish community has the motto, ‘Never again,’ ” Mr.
Paterson said in an interview after his speech, as he rode in a car through
downtown Cincinnati. “There are those who, if they had their way, would
return us to an era of separate but equal.”

Mr. Paterson’s speech was interrupted repeatedly by applause and
enthusiastic cries of “Yes we can!” the common refrain of Mr. Obama’s
supporters. His trip to Cincinnati was part of an effort by his advisers to
raise his profile, and after he spoke at the convention he gave interviews
to National Public Radio and MSNBC, among other media.

Mr. Paterson said he often felt pulled between two generations of black
Americans: those who grew up fighting for civil rights and those who grew
up benefiting from their parents’ victories. He said that he understood
where the complacency that some younger blacks feel about civil rights
comes from, but that he thinks it borders on ignorance.

“The struggle was clear in that generation,” he said. “If you sit in the
back of the bus, you know you’re in the back of the bus. If there’s a
‘whites only’ sign, you know you can’t go in.” But coming of age in the
1970s, as he did, when racism was less pervasive than in the first half of
the 20th century, some of his peers lost perspective, Mr. Paterson said.

“What you had were a number of people who thought this struggle didn’t
affect them,” he said. “They were the beneficiaries of it. And the fact
that they could be comfortable saying such ignorant things is a testament
to how far we’ve actually come.”

As easy as he had it compared with his parents, Mr. Paterson said he still
encountered some painful instances of discrimination as a boy, which serve
as a reminder to him that bias will never truly fade away. He attended
grade school on Long Island because the New York City schools did not teach
blind students outside of special education. He was one of the first black
students to enroll at his elementary school in Hempstead.

One afternoon when a white friend invited him over to play, a neighbor
unaccustomed to seeing black children in the neighborhood accused him of
destroying her flower pots, he said. Mr. Paterson said his friend’s mother
rose to his defense, saying that he had been in the house the entire time.
The neighbor responded, according to Mr. Paterson, “You bring them in this
neighborhood, and then you don’t want to take responsibility for them.”

Mr. Paterson’s views on discrimination have been shaped by the fact that he
is both black and legally blind. He said one of the most painful
experiences he had with discrimination came from a black businessman who
refused to hire him because of his blindness.

“That’s when I realized this is kind of a universal problem that exists,
this fear of the unknown, fear of others displaying difference,” he said.

That experience persuaded him to start imploring fellow blacks to examine
their own attitudes about prejudice, he said. “What I could try to be was a
symbol of the resistance,” he said, “but also one who would point this out
internally in our own community.”

And on Thursday, he seemed to draw on that lesson as he asked black
Americans to remember the gulf between prosperous and poor: “How are some
of us, who have many times been luckier than we have been good, going to
help those who unfortunately haven’t been able to receive prosperity as we
have?”

Ungawa, Black Powah - Now On Newsstands Near You!

2008-07-14T21:42:00.000-04:00

aaaahhhhhh . . . now we know! Obama is a Muslim, Michelle is Angela Davis' long-lost daughter (unfortunate so many of you probably don't even know who Angela Davis is), and the United States (spelled and pronounced "White America") is in trouble. With Obama in the White House, the world is coming to an end!!

As he flies around the country, Senator Barack Obama has a fondness for magazines. The New Yorker is often among the titles at the front of his campaign plane.

The July 21 issue of The New Yorker, though, is not likely to make it on board.

The cover of the magazine depicts Mr. Obama wearing a turban, while he offers a fist bump to his gun-toting wife. An American flag singes behind them in the fireplace, Osama bin Laden sits prominently on the mantle wall.

Asked about the drawing at a news conference here Sunday, Mr. Obama held his tongue, saying: “I have no response to that.” A campaign spokesman, though, was not so measured at a sketch that the magazine calls satirical: “The New Yorker may think, as one of their staff explained to us, that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Senator Obama’s right-wing critics have tried to create,” the spokesman, Bill Burton, said in a statement. “But most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive –- and we agree.”

The issue is common sense - we don't dispute the historical use of satire on the cover of the New Yorker, and in fact as satire I know, understand and appreciate what they were trying to say and what and how they were trying to say it. I don't think people think the New Yorker was being racist. It's just common sense to expect these intellectuals to use common sense and not run tasteless satire, no less than a comedian should be telling tasteless jokes, especially in the wrong forum. This was just such a forum. Too sensitive an issue, although sometimes it's better to get up in your face and speak the truth. I just don't think this was the place.

In closing, however, I like the picture. The thought of Black Powah finally redecorating the White House is scintillating!

Vertical Farms - An Urban Answer to the Food Crisis

2008-07-14T21:23:00.000-04:00


	Gordon Graff COWS AND PLOWS? Prototype designs for vertical farms, a concept created in 1999 by Dickson Despommier of Columbia and his graduate students.

Smackdown - Camelot 2008 v. Camelot 1960

2008-07-08T23:48:00.000-04:00

Presenting the President of the United States and the First Family - for your pleasure in advance!

In 1960, America was coming through a new era, with new challenges as the Cold War accelerated past the old threats of fascism and the Nazis, and eventual Nuclear War with the Soviet Union or China seemed imminent. But it was also all about the new age, a new look for America, and a beautiful First Family that spawned a new American empire. As that era of our history comes to a close, a new post-9/11 era ushers in a new look again for America, with newer threats like the War on Terror which now eclispes the old Cold War threats. And it too is also about the new age, a new look for America, and a beautiful First Family that hopefully will spawn a new American global community of peace. Above is the look of that family.

And here's a look at that new family that ushered in the previous modern era:

Note the similarities, almost as if they were reincarnated. Also note little Carolyn in this picture. She's now a kingmaker for Barack. Hey, who knew?

What irony. What destiny. Carolyn truly gets it. I think it's safe to say this is what mom and dad would have wanted.

Cultural comparisons of the two Camelots:

1960 - Chubby Checker, Elvis (let's do the twist)
2008 - Radiohead, Lil Wayne (lollipop girl)

1960 - meatloaf, cabbage, Uncle Ben's rice, green beans - courtesy A&P
2008 - free range chicken, arugula salad, hummus w/garlic - courtesy Whole Foods

1960 - Ford, Oldsmobile, Cadillac, Studebaker
2008 - Toyota, Mercedes, BMW, Lexus

1960 - Waldorf Astoria
2008 - The W

1960 - 25" Color console TV in a prominent corner of the living room
2008 - 42" HDTV flatscreen on the wall

1960 - Hi-test premium 98 octane for the V8
2008 - Ethanol biofuels for the hybrid

1960 - reefers
2008 - estacy

1960 - Greyhound
2008 - JetBlue

1960 - Marilyn Monroe (now dead)
2008 - Scarlett Johanssen (now off the market)

1960 - Canadian Club, Manechewitz Cream White Concord
2008 - Grey Goose, Frances Ford Coppola Malbec

Y'know what they say - some things change. What they forgot to say is, some things will never stay the same. But what we now know is, some things just get reincarnated. Or as we say in 2008, recycled, and go green.

All The President's Kids

2008-07-08T00:11:00.000-04:00

the young Obamas - Sasha and Malia (left, right below) will be 7 and 10 respectively when their dad moves the family on up to the East Side. in this case, the "East Side" is actually the biggest crib in the joint - 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

wonder how they'll like living and playing there? will it be interesting to see a house where almost all the pictures are of old white folks who were in the positions of their mom and dad now? are there any pictures of Martin or Malcolm or Harriet or Mary McCloud Bethune there? or Angela Davis or Shirley Chisholm? aren't these the building blocks of people to which mom and dad owe their rise to supremacy? perhaps a picture of former Illinois Senator Carolyn Mosley Braun, dad's predecessor, would be an appropriate decorative upgrade to the house. hopefully Condi and Colin have portraits there already.

in any event, they'll be the pinnacle of 400 years of progress for a people kidnapped from their homes, enslaved for centuries, denied their freedom both before and after emancipation, and still struggling to get there. they'll be the pinnacle of all that black people have overcome.

Virginia-Class Submarine is the New Y2K Threat

2008-07-07T22:24:00.000-04:00

I kinda like this new submarine. The right sub for the right times:

This sub can start its own war, whether it be a cold one or a terror one. It can hear, see and touch its opponent in so many ways: multiple high-range sonar arrays, plastic-celluouse-metal sensor skin, pivot-coil nuclear turbines with sound deflector sonar, a mini-sub, a pressure hatch designed for special forces missions, and the HD masts that replace periscopes.

Michelle loves the new sub. She says it's OK to use it to "blow all them crazy mutha-fuckas away if necessary", but "does not endorse this message". [this is a satirical quote by Michelle Obama, not an actual quote] She definitively supports the use of the sub to increase national security, and also endorses its use as a great concert platform for the world's first underwater concert in a sub since Yellow Submarine, with the concert featuring tastefully classic acts like Amy Winehouse, Pete Simmons, Jay-Z, Li'l Wayne (that Lollipop buzz sound should drive the sonars crazy), Rihanna, John Mayer, Snoop Dogg, Coldplay and Radiohead, with worldwide simulcasts using the new high-tech masts in HD. As she eloquently notes, "This concert'll be on! It'll be F--ing mod, baby"!

Michelle's sooo cool, sorta like Jackie Kennedy resurrected, but with a black woman's ass. I like that - the real deal. I wonder if that's an Oleg Cassini or Oscar de la Renta she's wearing. Ahh but this is 2008, not 1960. More likely a Versace or Anne Klein. Or maybe Baby Phat. Definitely she would be the most elegant First Lady we've had since Jackie (sorry Hillary & Laura, you dress OK but not this good). And probably the most saucy, too.

A nubian Jackie O - an American Nefertiti - imagine that. An excellent close to the old millenium of colonialism and the dawn of the new millenium of equality.

Obama the New Harold Ford Jr - Fear of a Revolutionary Interracial Planet

2008-06-29T22:05:00.000-04:00

checked this out from Talking Points.com, which was also noted on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times today. If anything signifies where white fear and hatred will be vented, this may be the political key to where it's going:

TPM Reader HW peels back the layers on Rove's comment about Obama being "the guy at the country club with the beautiful date":

I was watching Olbermann's coverage of the Karl Rove comments the other night, and I've read other accounts, and I have this sense that too many in the media and the blogging left have missed Rove's point. You touched on it "Uppity Watch," but I'm not sure you unpacked it the way it needs to be.
The key to Rove's exposition about Obama at the country club isn't the silliness of placing an African-American at a country club because of the fact that so many country clubs largely or completely or just historically exclude African-Americans. That's the way its been picked up by most bloggers and the media, and its obvious, but its not the importance of the comment, and I don't believe Rove's juxtaposition of the African-American Obama at a country club was just a clumsy attempt to paint Obama as a type of elitist contrary to his background.
The key to the statement is that in the image he is with "a beautiful date." Not Michelle Obama or, in the abstract, his wife, i.e. a wife like Michelle Obama. When you think of a "beautiful date" specifically at a country club, do you picture an African-American woman? Would Rove's target audience? Or do you picture him there, a black man, smoking a cigarette indoors at a country club, with a white woman on his arm?
When I thought of this, I got a chill. When you think of Obama's vulnerability, I think the primaries showed that race remains a real and very serious obstacle, particularly with white Americans over 50. When you think of where we are with racism in this country, I think its a pretty safe bet that the final freak-out factor to overcome may be black men dating white women, in particular, one's daughter. If I were a completely amoral Republican operative, I'd try to find some white women that Obama dated before Michelle and get them into the public's stream of consciousness anyway I could. Its a tactic so vile I don't even like speculating about it, but if you want to be ready for the worst, I think Rove just tipped his hand at where they plan to go.

Power To The People!!!

Not Guilty - For No Reason At All

2008-05-17T09:20:00.000-04:00

Wanna Do Something About Urban Crime? Change The System!!!

In Philadelphia yesterday, a judge praised 2 robbery suspects for NOT using a gun while attempting to rob a convenience store. In a city where the last 3 police officers killed in cold blood were all during robberies, this supposed jurist praises robbers because they didn't use guns? Whoa!

I'm not always in agreement with the Gestapo-like big-city police forces of our great country, but in this case the Philadelphia Fraternal Order of Police, as well as the Department, were right-on in their repudiation of such actions by this judge. Philadelphia's crime rate, the danger of its streets these days, is not just because of the knuckleheads running amok with guns. It's to an equal degree the fault of judges who fail to administer punishment for crimes (albeit at a staggering penal system cost nationwide) that should be prosecuted. Too many of these criminals are being let back on the street waaaay too easy by lenient judges. Not that hard-nose judges help either - they are heavily responsible for the repeat offenders out there too - but just giving a pass to robbers is not the way to go just because they didn't use a piece.

We have a system that has strains at many ends. Not enough jails, but too many jails with people incarcerated within without rehabilitation for better citizenship when released. Not enough police, but too many Nazis on our police force using excessive force where it is not needed. A court system that is backlogged with cases, but judges who are assholes and too high on their own almighty sense of power, often as politically motivated as personally gratified, to do what is really right instead of what they feel like doing on any given day. That is, when they are not taking bribes and fixing cases. And of course in between their 3-hour lunches and their shopping sprees (I know - I used to clerk for one).

Sure the criminals are bad. But only as bad as the system lets them be.

Don't Get Mad Masta Whitey - We's Good Niggas!

2008-04-30T07:57:00.000-04:00

As I sit here and barf while listening to this sermon-pusher, the Reverend Eugene Rivers is on Morning Joe on MSNBC spittin' his schickt to Mika and Joe on how African-Americans are God-fearing, patriotic Americans who would tell some radical black man or woman in a minute to go back to Africa if you don't like this country. How Rev. Wright doesn't speak for them; he's a madman, an abomination, and all about himself, threatening to bring down the best thing that's ever happened to black people in America by claiming to represent the black church. Rev. Rivers was even courteous enough to point out that Rev. Wright doesn't even work for a black denomination but a white one instead. He was even nice enough to hold out Mika's chair while she sat back down (after a verrrry warm reception of him by Mika and Joe), what a nice guy.

Like I said, I barfed. I like Mika and Joe, watch them all the time. Joe is probably one of the most likable Repubs I know, a once prodigy of the Newt Gingrich cultural revolution legislature of the late 1990s. And Mika, daugher of Zbrignev Brizinski, Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor, is just sweet, cute and very open-minded about things. And the Reverend sounds like he's probably a hip dad from listening to him.

But, it all sounds soooo familiar, like in early 1960s familiar, when other respectable members of the black community, the black elite of that time, also were sought out by journalists and news media to denounce the rants and raves of another Reverend, as well as a couple of other religious figures of the time, saying they were madmen, abominations, and threatening the well-being in this country of good, God-fearing, love-America Negroes. They too were castigated, thrown under the bus, by these respectable men and women.

As we all know by now, with respect to those leaders, namely Dr. Martin Luther King, Malik el-Haaj Al Shabazz (you white boys, or in his case you devils, know him as Malcolm X), Adam Clayton Powell (whitey did their best to throw him under the bus of Congress by not seating him after winning re-election in 1967; it didn't work) and others, THEY WERE DEAD WRONG. Those leaders, and their then-controversial views, are the standard by which most if not all of Americans live by today. When Malcolm X noted that the violence that America perpetrates around the world would come back and hit us (i.e. "chickens coming home to roost") we found out in spades (no pun intended) on September 11, 2oo1. Americans of all races claim to revere the courage, strength and words of Dr. King in so many ways and examples. Adam Clayton Powell paved the way for the powerful Charlie Rangels, David Pattersons, and possibly the Barack Obamas.

To now hold that a Reverend Wright, as controversial as he may be and damaging to Barack's campaign, does not enunciate the frustrations Black America still feels, as they sit and watch today's news, about how 3 cops were aquitted for shooting 50 bullets at an unarmed Sean Bell in New York, about how black defendants in Texas, the most incarcerated state in America and most of the world, get the death penalty 30% more likely than whites, to hear that Katrina victims, most of whom are black, after getting the shaft on federal relief for 3 years, may owe money back because of some private contractor, to continue to earn 58 cents to a white man's dollar, is hypocritical BULLSHIT, ma'brotha. It smacks of a time when you were cowering to white power, instead of speaking truth to power. Martin understood that. Malcolm understood that. They had the courage so many of us all lack, to speak out. That's why they're dead.

Fearful blacks will live long, but will not prosper. A Profile in Courage to stand tall and face the truth may die in body, but never in spirit.

Rove's Up To Mischeif - AGAIN!

2008-04-29T03:36:00.000-04:00

He just can't help himself, it's his game. And obviously fascinated in the project like his own chess board, Rove is trying to steer his train through the wreck again by giving some free advice to Barack Obama. In his latest Newsweek column, he tells the Illinois senator that his once-strong candidacy has gotten weaker, commenting "you're making mistakes and making people worry."

Rove has previously used his column space in Newsweek and the Wall Street Journal to dole out advice to the candidates. He is now arguing the salient point for most whites, specifically that the uproar over his former pastor's remarks and Obama's comments about some small town Americans has "reinforced the growing sense you don't share Middle America's values. He also cites Obama's comments about flag pins and his relationship with 1960's radical Bill Ayers as evidence Obama is out of touch with ordinary Americans.

But the longtime Republican political strategist offers Obama six suggestions for how he can reignite his presidential campaign, starting with shaking up his stump speech, which he says sounds "old and out of touch."

Personally, on this I agree with Rove. The 'yes we can' speech needs more nourishment. I finished the appetizer and the table has been cleared. Where's the beef? I need it now.

Rove also suggests Obama sharpen his repudiation of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's controversial sermons, pledge to name specific Republicans to his administration, and spend more time back in the Senate to burnish his chops as legislator. Obama, Rove says, also needs to stop responding to Clinton's attacks and offer more concrete policy proposals.

On these points, Obama should follow suit in this order: (1) stop responding to Clinton's attacks (2) get into participation in some bipartisian legislation that will show his responsiveness to Republicans as soon as possible. He should ignore the Rev. Wright thing with a forceful "No comment", or "he does not speak for me or my campaign" and stick the middle finger at the press, and do this NOW.

"You have talent, intelligence and tapped into something powerful early in your campaign. But running for president is unlike anything you've ever done," Rove writes. "While you'll almost certainly win the nomination, Democrats are nervous about the fall. You've given them reasons to be.”

That depends on which 'Democrats' you're talking about, Rovie. Of course you know, the older white folks. This is another distraction. White people who are looking for any excuse not to vote for a black man (experience, his gaffs, etc.) WILL FIND ONE!! So it doesn't matter what you name the reason, it will be sufficient pretext to have an out when you are accused of being a racist. What we have learned from this primary is that Democrats are a diverse group of people who are not always on the same side, not unlike the Republicans this year.

But in the case of the Dems, their high-falluting song of liberalism, which suggests tolerance, is not so tolerant as it appears.

Many of these Dems are suburban and urban working and middle-class whites (that would be everyone from the poor white trash mechanic of Bridesburg or Dix Hills to the jewish 2nd or 3rd generation lawyer or accountant who lives in White Plains or Dresher) who do not vote with black Dems in local races, especially if the candidates are classic Breyer's Vanilla & Chocolate Ice Cream flavors.

The resistance to Obama is not just small town America. Some of these suburbanites live in diverse towns and know black people, but are nevertheless closet racists who purport to be 'liberal', as if they love black people, when in fact they can't see past the color from the trees when dealing with the concept of being led by a black person.

Below are just some of the interesting comments and thoughts I found on a blog on CNN. ~

April 28th, 2008 6:10 pm ET

Why does Rove want Obama to win?

Because Obama's the only Democrat who can lose to Cain.

All the nonsense stops when the two final candidates debate side-by-side.

That's where people see Obama at his worst - as a kid with three weeks of U.S. Senate experience who doesn't understand the basics of foreign policy, education, economics, the environment, etc.

That's why he won't debate Hillary one-on-one . . . he'll look like an idiot.

April 28th, 2008 6:15 pm ET

That's it CNN, let's keep on building a false sense of momentum for Hillary Clinton while you continue to paint Obama with as much negative press as you can manage. How much is Hillary paying you guys to ignore her comment about 'obliterating' Iran's 65 million person population, or the fact that she used Bin Laden in a television ad to attack a member of her own party, or that she lied not once, but at least two times about coming under sniper fire in Bosnia, or that her story about the woman dying because she couldn't afford healthcare was not factual or all the way true, or that she tried to tie Obama with a former member of Weather Underground negatively but her husband pardoned two of them controversially upon exiting his presidency. You guys at CNN are despicable! Free press? What's that???

April 28th, 2008 6:14 pm ET

These pundits are idiots. HILLARY CAN"T WIN w/o the majority of black votes in the general election. Swing states are considered swing b/c whites are split and usually it's the black turnout that can make the difference. She sold herself to the devil so she is finished. She pissed off the most dedicated base of the party. She can't win the South and Penn and Ohio will swing to the moderate Republican McCain. Even blacks will vote for him. He kinda remind us blacks of an Eisenhower type. Eisenhower was a republican but received a substantial amount of black votes in 1956 b/c of his supportive stance of sending federal troops to protect the Little Rock 9. All the conspiracy theorists are saying she really wants it 2012. So her plan is to destroy Barack and let McCain get 1 term. Funny thing is the lady is awful when she plans. Hey whatever happen to the "Inevitable Candidate"? Remember that!!!!

Seven comments from a neighbour:

* 'the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing'.stay focused.
* do not fall into any of the traps that the bad guys are throwing along your trail.
* challenge any attacks coming your way. the clinton's are vulnerable.remember that in this country ,civility and kindness are also percieved as a sign of weakness.
* bring back some of the enthusiasm you showed us until not too long ago. positive vibes are contagious.
* exploit connections from the clinton's team with jeremiah wright and/or farrakhan (also ed rendell, rev marcia dyson, shiela jackson lee, didn't the clintons invited jeremiah right to the white house during the impeachment procedures?)
* you are the front runner,close this deal. do not try to keep everybody happy…if you do this, nobody will be happy.
*you have what it takes, lead us to the place where changes will take place.

April 28th, 2008 6:51 pm ET

I agree with one thing Rove suggests. An Obama Chuck Hagel ticket is unbeatable in Nov. An absolute indication of reaching across the isle.

...this one is wacked but brutal:

who asked you, you miserable, bloated criminal?

obama shoud be giving YOU advice on what it takes to get your soul back from beelzebub and become HUMAN again!!!

if we want advice from an immoral, win-at-no-costs-US-citizens-and-constitution-be-dammed creep, we'd ask rush or cheney or penn or hagge… see, there's this way of living your life where you do things with INTEGRITY and WITHOUT CHEATING, you repubs should look into it, it's really a much more fulfilling and happy existence!!!

stick a fork in you, YOU SOUL-LESS REPUBS ARE DONE, BABY!!!!!! BUH-BYE repubs, dont let the door hit ya, where beelzebub split ya!!!!!

...and this one is brutally true:

April 28th, 2008 5:28 pm ET

mmmm and we should listen to him why????
because he tells clinton how to run her dirty campaing? all one has to do is listen to Limbaugh and his followers for 10 minutes and one can tell who is clinton working with and for…………..

hillary grew up republican she is a republican, but none will say it………..
the hunger for power has no end no name and no limits………..

No more billarys.

2008-04-13T22:53:00.000-04:00

Chicago Tribune - "Factor military duty into criticism"

By Lawrence Korb and Ian Moss
April 3, 2008

In 1961, a young African-American man, after hearing President John F.
Kennedy's challenge to, 'Ask not what your country can do for you, but
what you can do for your country,' gave up his student deferment, left
college in Virginia and voluntarily joined the Marines.

In 1963, this man, having completed his two years of service in the
Marines, volunteered again to become a Navy corpsman. (They provide
medical assistance to the Marines as well as to Navy personnel.)
The man did so well in corpsman school that he was the valedictorian
and became a cardiopulmonary technician. Not surprisingly, he was
assigned to the Navy's premier medical facility, Bethesda Naval
Hospital, as a member of the commander in chief's medical team, and
helped care for President Lyndon B. Johnson after his 1966 surgery. For
his service on the team, which he left in 1967, the White House awarded
him three letters of commendation. What is even more remarkable is that
this man entered the Marines and Navy not many years after the two
branches began to become integrated.

While this young man was serving six years on active duty, Vice
President Dick Cheney, who was born the same year as the Marine/sailor,
received five deferments, four for being an undergraduate and graduate
student and one for being a prospective father.

Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, both five years younger
than the African-American youth, used their student deferments to stay
in college until 1968. Both then avoided going on active duty through
family connections.

Who is the real patriot? The young man who interrupted his studies to
serve his country for six years or our three political leaders who beat
the system? Are the patriots the people who actually sacrifice
something or those who merely talk about their love of the country?
After leaving the service of his country, the young African-American
finished his final year of college, entered the seminary, was ordained
as a minister, and eventually became pastor of a large church in one of
America's biggest cities.

This man is Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the retiring pastor of Trinity United
Church of Christ, who has been in the news for comments he made over
the last three decades. Since these comments became public we have
heard criticisms, condemnations, denouncements and rejections of his
comments and him. We've seen on television, in a seemingly endless
loop, sound bites of a select few of Rev. Wright's many sermons.

Some of the Wright's comments are inexcusable and inappropriate and
should be condemned, but in calling him 'unpatriotic,' let us not
forget that this is a man who gave up six of the most productive years
of his life to serve his country. How many of Wright's detractors, Rush
Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly to name but a few, volunteered for service,
and did so under the often tumultuous circumstances of a newly
integrated armed forces and a society in the midst of a civil rights
struggle? Not many.

While words do count, so do actions. Let us not forget that, for
whatever Rev. Wright may have said over the last 30 years, he has
demonstrated his patriotism.

Lawrence Korb and Ian Moss are, respectively, Navy and Marine Corps
veterans. They work at The Center For American Progress. Korb served as
assistant secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration.

2008-04-12T16:43:00.000-04:00

Obama Dug A Hole, But Clinton and McCain May Fall In It

Senator Obama made as usual a phopah on his way to the eve of the Pennsylvania election, saying to a chic crowd in San Francisco, in explaining his still slightly lagging lead behind Senator Clinton, that Pennsylvania voters in small towns may be bitter, and resentful of those not like themselves in look or feel, turn to gun or religious rights for soul food. As has been the case this eventful but actually short primary season, Clinton stands a chance to live another day by tearing into these remarks and branding Obama unelectable because the GOP will barbeque him. Hey, he's already braised medium already on the grill. I think he's ready.

The Republicans of course seized on this, and branded his remarks as elitist and not mindful of the lives of middle America, as they struggle with job loss and cultural encroachment. They did the same with John Kerry in 2004, and it worked on his Massachusetts narrow assz. It may work on Obama's, as his world traveler, Harvard-educated and sinceforth upper middle class African American urbane persona is the anthesesis of their lives. In tune, the Clinton campaign, expecting this GOP response, rolled up alongside and made a sweep with its surrogates like Evan Bayh, who in Indiana sent a message to the superdelegates that they should be careful who they choose to run in November against McCain. We even heard from our favorite east coast pot-belly, Fast Eddie Rendell, former mayor and DA of Philadelphia, former DNC chairman (who made a couple of verbal gaffs that embarrased the Dems in 2000) and current governor/Clinton supporter/hoping to get his judge wife a Supreme Court appointment-or-himself a job in the Clinton administration, who had his two cents to say:

“People in rural Pennsylvania don’t turn to guns and religion as an escape,” Mr. Rendell said. “Hunting and sportsmanship are long-established traditions here, and people of faith founded the commonwealth and continue to live here. What the senator has done is essentially misread what is actually happening in Pennsylvania.”

But in response, J. Richard Gray, the mayor of Lancaster PA and an Obama supporter, said that this is not what Mr. Obama meant. In his view, Mr. Obama was trying to say that Republicans take emotional matters like guns and religion and try to use them to divide people. “He’s saying the use of those issues as wedge issues plays on the bitterness that people have and diverts attention from the real economic issues, like the disparity between the wage earner and the rich.”

And that, my friends, is the bottom line issue: whether or not to allow the political extremists, who are more interested in holding onto power than they are about you and me, to control the electorate with fears of differences that has been the road to the White House for so long.

Mr. Gray also said Mr. Obama was right that voters are bitter. He pointed to a recent poll that found 81 percent of voters believe the country is on the wrong track, and said that Mrs. Clinton sounded like “a Pollyanna” in saying that workers were optimistic. “I don’t know who she’s been talking to,” Mr. Gray said.

Gray may have taken the lead in redirecting the energy of an Obama gaff, like he himself did with the Rev. Wright scandal, into another opportunity to talk real straight talk about what is going wrong in this country. The wrong track we're on is one of fear, not hatred, one of ever-significant economic disparity and fraud by our leaders both in business and government, not fear of the economic engine of China which our leaders are feeding everyday.

It's time for Straight Talk, Folks; Straight Truth.

BREAKING F@*&N NEWS!!!

2008-04-11T18:33:00.000-04:00

Now this is some news! There is a video out NOW about Hillary Clinton's (the Clinton family, for that matter) about some illicit campaign contributions and perhaps other matters which links The Clintons to the dubious spiral into bankruptcy of Stan Lee Media, the Marvel Comics-inspired comib book multimedia company started by Marvel Comics (and Spider-Man creator) Stan Lee and a gentleman named Peter Paul. Lee was not involved, but Paul, a significant Clinton contributor during her 2000 U.S. Senate run in New York and who absconded funds and stock options derived from alleged insider-trading when Stan Lee Media went into bankruptcy in California, was a felon who fled to Brazil to escape incarceration, and who now tells the story in a 1-hour online documentary on how corrupt the Clintons may be. Check it out:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7007109937779036019

Double Standard? Law designed to stop drug dealers applied diiferently here

2008-04-10T08:49:00.000-04:00

5 Pot plants but they keep the house

By Peter Mucha

Inquirer Staff Writer

Why the burglar alarm went off, Steve Haver still doesn't know. But while Haver and his wife, Karen, were away in the Poconos on the morning of July 8, 2006, Reading police searched the couple's semidetached three-story home and found five pot plants growing under lights.

Because of that discovery, the Havers were soon caught in a swirl of legal decisions that overturned their lives, prompted questions about the enforcement of marijuana laws, and served as a lesson to homeowners with burglar alarms.

Steve Haver spent a weekend in jail on $1 million bail, wound up with a felony conviction for drug manufacturing, lost his driver's license for six months, and expects to lose his job as general manager of the performing arts center at Penn State's York campus. His wife Karen, who was also arrested lost her job as manager of the Sovereign Performing Arts Center in Reading. But, authorities won't seize their house - just the growing equipment.

Under Pennsylvania law, property can be seized by police in connection with a felony drug arrest, and police not only seized the growing apparatus but former Berks County District Attorney Mark Baldwin filed for forfeiture of the house. Steve Haver described it as an "1895 Romanesque revival semidetached rowhome," last appraised at $137,000. Oh joy, how Norman Rockwellesque; whitey puleeze!

Police routinely, especially where the amount of drugs is above the legal threshold or there is evidence of intent to distribute, go after the house and take it. There are also similar federal laws, although a conviction is warranted under federal law for a forfeiture sale of such house; unknown if PA law has the same requirements. Law enforcement in Philadelphia and Chester, like this approach as a way to take the homes, sell for cash to use in future drug stings, and send a strong deterrent. But they also evict innocent people from the home, like children and parents or disabled persons, who may not have been aware of be able to control such activities at their home, with little regard for their future welfare.

But this was the exception. As part of a settlement approved Monday by Berks County Judge Jeffrey K. Sprecher, prosecutors withdrew that request while the Havers, through their attorney, agreed to forfeit the seized equipment. Explanation for this discretionary ignorance of the law? "It was a rather sophisticated growing operation," Shchuka said. "... It wasn't like somebody went to Home Depot and bought some peat moss." Besides five three-foot-high plants, police found a high-powered lighting system, a self-contained water system, a fan with a dehumidifier, and devices for measuring temperature and testing soil, Shchuka said.

On Feb. 29, Haver, now 47, pleaded guilty "to put an end to this thing," he said yesterday. The same day, his wife, 38, began a 30-day probationary period in a program under which charges have already been dismissed. So in this case, unlike the urban experience in such cases, the homeowners gets to keep their house through a plea bargain, move back in, and the wife gets charges dropped and a month's probation. Sweeeet.

"I anticipate losing my employment, losing my health insurance, losing my educational benefits, nine credits away from getting an MBA," Steve Haver said. Awwww - such tears. Gimme a break. This drug-dealing bitch is currently on administrative leave from the the university, who is of course tight-lipped about the outcome or details. His contract likely won't be renewed at the end of June, Haver said.

But check out the community reaction:

Haver is rankled by Pennsylvania marijuana laws and how they are sometimes enforced, noting "I don't think your average citizen has any idea how destructive and draconion our justice system has become". How so? It worked for him; he gets his house back after a plea-bargained lawyer-brokered conviction for a felony drug offense, while others go homeless.

Another interesting reaction is the community, who has been sympathetic, sending emails and postcards from across the country, sticking kind notes in the door. A neighbor even donated to his legal defense. Can't get that kinda love in the ghetto.

"People in the community have generally been supportive and have been appalled at the direction this has taken," Haver said. As Chris Matthews would say: HA! I'm sure these same law-n-order folks would not have any sympathy for similar violators in North Philly.

Ironically, buying marijuana from a dealer can be a misdemeanor, while growing some at home leaves a person open to felony manufacturing charges. A judge ruled over a year ago that the search was valid, he added.

After their arrest, the couple spent three days in jail because a magistrate, stepping in on a Saturday, set enormous bail, $1 million for him, half as much for her, he said. The following Monday, Judge Sprecher, seeing no great threat, lifted the bail entirely and the couple were released, he said. Was there really at that time enough information available to warrant such discretion? No, but unfortunately bail is all too often loosely prescribed both in city and rural jurisdictions in Pennsylvania.

The former prosecutor didn't have to attempt to seize the house, defense attorneys for the Havers said. Laws were broken, but "there should be penalties and they should be appropriate, but they weren't". Shchuka disagreed. "I don't have a problem with that charge at all," he said. Filing for forfeiture of the house was also justified, in case investigators found evidence of drug dealing, he said. "The house was properly frozen while the criminal case was pending, but without more evidence of drug dealing forfeiture wasn't warranted," he said.

Steve Haver said he's uncertain what he'll be doing next. Maybe he'll write a book about his case, he said. The Caucasian end game is always the same: book deals and the Today show. For people of color, the game ends in jail and broke. Go figure...

UHHHH....this shit is DEEP!!!!!!

2008-04-04T20:11:00.000-04:00

No i just can't think of it fast enuf! yes yes yes the freaks were deep in the streets last night. here are some highlights from the NYPD Daily Blotter, as published in the New York Post on Friday, April 4 2008:

Manhattan
a homeless man was arrested for slapping and robbing his ex-girlfriend on the Upper East Side, auhorities said yesterday.

Victor Rodriguez, 59, old, and major deep, was living "in or behind a Dumpster" near the apartment building - and get this - of his ex's on 94th and 1st.

apparently dude was mad. he bitch-slapped her in front of the building, took her purse and lifted $40 and rolled. like as if he just don't get no respect, an 'anonymous caller' (guess who most likely?) called the cops and told them they could find asshole sleeping in the Dumpster (as in trash dumpster) which he was. charged with assault & robbery, he was arraigned Monday per the Manhattan D.A.'s office.

think that's hot? click on the title of this article to get the next Amazing Story......

2008-04-02T20:15:00.000-04:00

Mugabe Loses Parliament in Zimbabwe

A man repairing a bicycle tire sat next to torn posters of President Robert G. Mugabe in Harare, Zimbabwe on Wednesday (thanks Desmond of AFP).

Emmanuel Chitate/Reuters - Zimbabweans in Umguza listened Tuesday for news. After three days, no results had been announced in the presidential election.

Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi/AP = Morgan Tsvangirai, who appears to be leading in Zimbabwe’s presidential election, speaking to reporters in Harare on Tuesday.

Philimon Bulawayo/Reuters - President Robert G. Mugabe of Zimbabwe in March.

HARARE, Zimbabwe — President Robert G. Mugabe and his ruling party have lost control of the nation’s Parliament, election returns showed on Wednesday, giving new impetus to the bigger question: Does that foretell a loss of the presidency itself, the job he has held tightly for the past 28 years?

As this nation waited in frustration a fourth day without official results in its presidential race, the main opposition party of Morgan Tsvangirai announced its own final tally, proclaiming victory with 50.3 percent of the vote to Mr. Mugabe’s 43.8 percent — just barely enough to avoid a runoff. Zimbabwe now waits to see if the official count matches the opposition’s, knowing it would not require a very heavy thumb on the scale to force another round of voting three weeks from now.

There were signs that Mr. Mugabe has endorsed a second vote, which, while not as humiliating as an outright defeat, would still seem a difficult pill for a man who has held power for 28 years and considers himself the father of the nation. Wednesday morning’s edition of The Herald, the state-run newspaper, reported that “the pattern of results” shows that no candidates “will garner more than 50 percent of the vote, forcing a re-run.”

The newspaper, considered a mouthpiece for Mr. Mugabe, published no actual election totals from Saturday’s vote and attributed its conclusion to analysts. But it likely means that ruling party insiders have urged the president not to give up his — and their — power, either convincing Mr. Mugabe to keep on fighting or at least to maintain the option.

Even so, the election commission confirmed Wednesday that the balance of power had fatefully shifted in Parliament, long a bastion of support for Mr. Mugabe. With only 11 races to be declared, the Movement for Democratic Change, the opposition party, had 106 seats in all, including one for an allied independent, in the 210-seat assembly. Mr. Mugabe’s party — known as ZANU-PF — had only 93 seats and among its losing candidates were seven of the president’s cabinet ministers.

But the presidency remains another matter. A businessman with close connections to the party hierarchy, speaking only on condition of anonymity, said the president had met Tuesday evening first with the chiefs of military and intelligence and then with key members of his cabinet and the party presidium. “They urged him to go to the bush,” the businessman said, meaning that in a runoff the party would employ tactics of intimidation and bloodshed that had worked well in earlier campaigns, especially in rural areas that can be closed off to opposition candidates.

And You thought you were having a BAD DAY BREAKIN' BAD

2008-04-02T17:16:00.000-04:00

Man Who Allegedly Threw Molotov Cocktails At Police To Be Arraigned

A Queens man who police say later told them he was having a bad day is scheduled to be arraigned today on charges he attacked a man with a machete and then threw Molotov cocktails at police.

Felipe Velasquez, 21, faces a number of charges, including attempted murder, assault, and arson.

Police say it all started when a 45-year-old man was attacked with a machete on 123rd Street near Hillside Avenue yesterday evening. He fought off Vasquez, his alleged attacker, with an umbrella.

Police say Velasquez then retreated to a nearby roof where he began throwing Molotov cocktails -- one of which hit an unmarked police car.

Officers were eventually able to subdue the man and bring him into custody.

The Star Trek Times

2008-04-02T17:05:00.000-04:00

NASA, via Associated Press - The Jules Verne Automated Transfer Vehicle approached the International Space Station on Monday in a rehearsal for a docking scheduled for Thursday.

Managers of the International Space Station on Wednesday cleared Europe’s new Jules Verne cargo ship for its first docking with the orbiting research outpost.

A New Supply Ship for the Space Station

After assessing results of two days of trial maneuvers around the station, including having the two craft close to within 36 feet of one another, the Mission Management Team of international partners in the project gave approval for an attempt on Thursday to link the ships.

The Jules Verne, named for the visionary French author, is the first of a new class of robot station supply ships called Automatic Transfer Vehicles or A.T.V.’s. The robot ship was built by the member nations of the European Space Agency as one of Europe’s major contributions to the international station.

“We have proven that Jules Verne’s systems are safe, reliable and ready to dock to the station,” John Ellwood, the A.T.V. Project Manager for Europe said after getting approval to proceed. “Everyone has worked very hard to get to this point.”

The Jules Verne is scheduled to dock with the station’s Russian-built Zvezda service module on Thursday at 10:41 a.m. Eastern time, and then firmly lock in place about a half-hour later. If for some reason the linkup does not occur as planned, the next attempt will be made on Saturday, Mr. Ellwood said.

The ship maneuvers and dock itself automatically using GPS and optical guidance systems for close approach to the station. A twin laser system fires pulses of light at reflectors positioned on the end of Zvezda to aim the craft towards the space station. The rendezvous and docking are monitored from a control center in Toulouse, France, in cooperation with the Russian space station control center near Moscow and the NASA center in Houston.

Extra precautions are necessary because the robot ship, which weighs 21 tons on Earth, could do substantial damage to the station in a collision or other mishap.

The Jules Verne, launched on March 9, is 32 feet long and 14.6 feet wide at its largest diameter, is equipped with four solar arrays arranged in an X shape spanning 73 feet. It has four large aft engines and a series of smaller thrusters for maneuvering and fine control. It is the first of at least five robot cargo craft that the Europeans will dispatch to the station, carrying 7.5 tons of fuel, oxygen, food, clothing, equipment and other essentials.

And The War Goes ON

2008-03-19T23:03:00.000-04:00

- the masks of 3,988 American soldier deaths in Iraq since 2003.

March 19 (5-year Annivarsary of the War in Iraq):

so much for "Mission Accomplished".

can we? are we...ready to?

2008-03-19T11:04:00.000-04:00

Great Article, Jill. Hit the title above and link up with JIll, or e-mail her below. And wonder. My question: Is it about Me being ready, or You? Black People have been ready to talk and cross that bridge for 400 years. What are white folks waiting for? As a white man, I'm ready.

Jill Porter: Are we ready to cross Obama's bridge?

Philadelphia Daily News Columnist

BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA was hardly gone from the stage yesterday - pausing on his way to give a kiss to a local superdelegate - when the murmurs rose from the crowd: 'Historic. Unprecedented. Extraordinary.'

In confronting the explosive topic of race, Obama dared to empathize with the anger and bitterness some blacks and whites feel towards each other but rarely express in "polite company. He dared to acknowledge our country's "racial stalemate" and the way it distracts us from the real "culprits": vanishing jobs, poor education, war. Obama voiced a reality most politicians want to exploit or avoid. Afterwards, I wondered:

* Are we ready for this? Are whites and blacks ready to acknowledge our bias and the legitimacy of laments on the other side?

* Are we ready to talk? To listen?

* Are we ready to abandon the safety of political correctness and air our grievances rather than let them continue to corrode our souls?

(these are great questions, Jill)

If so, in the speech that marked the magnificent measure of the man, Obama paved the way. "I really think it was historic," said Jay Leberman, head of the Perelman Jewish Day School. "His honest explanation about the realities of our society" was remarkable, he said.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoQllyE9Cu0&feature=related

Obama's campaign has been mired in racial quicksand over the incendiary rants of his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, against whites and America. Yesterday, Obama condemned Wright's comments as "distorted," "wrong" and "divisive." But rather than dismiss him as a "crank or a demagogue," Obama attributed the comments to "a legacy of discrimination."

"For the men and women of Reverend Wright's generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away, nor has the anger and bitterness of those years," Obama said in startling candor.

It may not be expressed in front of white people, he said, "but it does find voice in the barbershop or the beauty shop or around the kitchen table. "And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews," he said.

There's a "similar anger" felt by segments of the white community, he said, who've worked hard and still lost their jobs, their pensions and their dreams. White resentments over welfare and affirmative action, while also unspoken in public, "have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation," Obama said. But "we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds" by "working together," he said.

Ray Jones found Obama's words "poignant" and personal.

"It made it all right to rethink our positions about race," said Jones, co-founder of Men United for a Better Philadelphia. "You didn't feel guilty about having an opinion you couldn't talk about in the open. It gave you a bridge. No politician has ever done that."

I don't know how much of Obama's message of unity will survive the sound bites and the partisan assassins in the media. I can imagine parts of his speech being excised and repackaged to inflame racial passions.

What a terrible shame that would be.

And this isn't even about the political campaign.

I'm still not sure Obama is my candidate; my feminist allegiances and concern about his inexperience still tilt me towards Hillary Clinton. But no one could witness a speech like Obama's without recognizing his power to inspire, to appeal to our better natures. And no one who's ever harbored a silent racial grudge could miss the liberating opportunity he gave us to admit it and move on.

But are we ready?

After the speech yesterday, I saw a black man and a white man, both guests at the invitation-only event, embrace in affirmation of Obama's message. A third man came over and put his arms around both of them. I honestly, happily, can't remember if he was black or white.

Maybe that's the answer to my question.

If we're ready to run a black man and a white woman for president, maybe we're ready for racial candor and reconciliation. Maybe we can meet halfway on the bridge Obama built. *

I would proffer we both strive to cross the bridge each other built in its entirety to rid ourselves of the disease. However, Jill Porter got from Obama's speech inspiration that can open us to a new paradigm of thought. If you want to tell her so, E-mail her at porterj@phillynews.com

The Audacity of Help: How The Rich Help The Rich Get Richer

2008-03-18T20:32:00.000-04:00

Bear Sterns, the epiphony of 'Bull Market' on Wall Street for so many years, a steamroller of the financial community, the laizzes faire free market capitalist of capitalists who say NO to government intervening in the marketplace at our peril, was in the Welfare Office last week looking for a handout. The Corporate Welfare Office, that is. Once again, the government, led handily by the Republicans when it's convenient to do so, has bailed out corporate America. What the hell are they doing for YOU, while the right-wing zealots (some of whom are YOU) say NO to government handouts for regular people?

And who takes care of these recipients? Why the Prez of course; his surrogates are of the same blueblood breed. As in Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, pour example:

Henry Merritt "Hank" Paulson Jr. (born March 28, 1946) is . . .

the U.S. Treasury Secretary and member of the International Monetary Fund
(IMF) Board of Governors. He previously served as the Chairman and Chief
Executive Officer of Goldman Sachs, one of the world's largest and most
successful investment banks.

Born in Palm Beach, Florida, to Marianna Gallaeur and Henry Merritt
Paulson, a wholesale jeweler, he was raised in Barrington Hills,
Illinois. Paulson attained the rank of Eagle Scout in the Boy Scouts of
America. Paulson received his Bachelor of Arts in English literature
from Dartmouth College in 1968; at Dartmouth he was a member of Phi Beta
Kappa and was an All Ivy, All East, and honorable mention All American as
an offensive lineman. He was also a member of Sigma Alpha Epsilon
fraternity, played intramural sports and lacrosse, and president of the
Christian Science Organization.

He met his wife Wendy during his senior year. The couple have two adult
children, Henry Merritt III and Amanda Clark, and became grandparents in
June of 2007. They maintain homes in Washington, DC and Barrington Hills,
Illinois.

In 1970 Paulson received a Master of Business Administration degree from
Harvard Business School. Paulson was Staff Assistant to the Assistant 
Secretary of Defense at The Pentagon from 1970 to 1972.[7] He then worked 
for the administration of U.S. President Richard Nixon, serving as assistant
to John Ehrlichman from 1972 to 1973.

He joined Goldman Sachs in 1974, working in the firm's Chicago office. He
became a partner in 1982. From 1983 until 1988, Paulson led the Investment
Banking group for the Midwest Region, and became managing partner of the
Chicago office in 1988. From 1990 to November 1994, he was co-head of
Investment Banking, then, Chief Operating Officer from December 1994 to
June 1998; eventually succeeding Jon Corzine (now Governor of New Jersey)
as its chief executive. His compensation package, according to reports,
was US$37 million in 2005, and US$16.4 million for 2006. His net worth has
been estimated at over $700 million.

so there you have it!
another rich x@%! one of them...
a soldier of John Erlichman from Nixon/
Watergate fame...a true Hitler Youth.
aahhhhggghghhhghghg!!!!

Well Well Mr. & Mrs. Smith! (Stuff Bisexual Govvies Like)

2008-03-18T04:25:00.000-04:00

this is what I call breaking fuckin' news! Is there no end to this shit? Looks like someone's state's in need of attention:

Ex-aide claims 3-way sex with the McGreeveys
3/17/08 ASSOCIATED PRESS

Is he a candy boy or what!?

TRENTON, N.J. - A former aide to already-disgraced New Jersey ex-Gov. Jim McGreevey claims he had sexual trysts with McGreevey and his estranged wife before the governor took office.

Theodore Pedersen, the man in the middle, who was McGreevey's former driver and traveling aide, detailed multiple trysts in interviews yesterday with The Star-Ledger of Newark and New York Post. He disputes claims by Dina Matos McGreevey that she did not know about her husband's homosexuality when she married him in October 2000. In her book, "Silent Partner," Matos McGreevey says she missed the signs that her husband preferred men. She says she didn't learn of his homosexuality until shortly before he announced to the nation that he was "a gay American" and would resign.

Pedersen, a 29-year-old real estate developer, told the newspapers that the threesomes started in 1999 while McGreevey was mayor of Woodbridge and McGreevey and Dina were dating. He said they stopped when McGreevey was elected governor in 2001.

He said he only had contact with Matos McGreevey during the trysts, and wasn't sure whether McGreevey was gay. "In hindsight, there might have been light interest (in me)," Pedersen told The Ledger, "but it didn't seem like he was gay. It did enhance their sexual relationship having me be a part of it."

Pedersen's name surfaced recently as part of the McGreeveys' contentious divorce proceedings, with Matos McGreevey asking whether Pedersen's trip to China last summer, in which he accompanied McGreevey and his boyfriend, Mark O'Donnell, was paid for out of a bank account the former governor and his partner share.

Pedersen told the newspapers he gave a worn deposition about the sexual liaisons and expects to be called as a witness in the divorce trial. In her book, Matos McGreevey refers to Pedersen as a close acquaintance but someone she didn't always want around. On a trip to Canada during which she expected McGreevey to pop the marriage question, she insisted that Pedersen stay behind. Matos McGreevey further claims in her divorce suit that her husband defrauded her by hiding his sexuality before and during their marriage. She is seeking $600,000 in damages.

Matos McGreevey and her lawyer, John Post, did not respond to messages and calls from The Associated Press seeking comment. McGreevey didn't return calls or messages. His lawyer, Stephen Haller, declined to comment last night. Pedersen also could not be reached for comment. (like, what more is there to say? however, matos' avoidance may cause people to believe this is true. oh, no, you don't mean that...? yeah, like c'mon girl yes u know its true! - ooh ooh ooooohh)

I smell a book deal here. Don't you?

Like, is there a sequel to this?

* answer: yes indeedie! breaking news: mcgreevey confirms pedersen's story that he and his wife had trysts with this man-boy. now we know who where and why in the middle. who was on top? the ex-wife is denying, of course. but maybe your baby done made some other plans...

Stuff Educated Black People Like

2008-03-18T03:46:00.000-04:00

Yes these are a few of my favorite things . . . . .

#12 Barack Obama
March 5, 2008 Â· No Comments
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Educated Black People Like Barack Obama, but it's not for the reasons you think. Yes, Obama is an Educated Black Person, so of course we LOVE him. However, there are other reasons educated blacks like the Senator from Illinois. Another reason is that he's the first Black person to run for public office without going all Al Sharpton and Jessie Jackson on America. Obama has not once gotten the NAACP or Black Panthers involved in his campaign. We also like him because he has not solicited their help in his campaign for the Presidency; because educated blacks know that these two men would hurt rather than help Obama's campaign. Al and Jessie are educated black people, so we like them; but educated blacks can only stand these two in moderation. All the yelling and rhyming annoys educated black people. When discussing politics with an educated black person, do not automatically assume they are a supporter of Senator Obama. This is almost insulting because you are basically saying that because Obama is black and they are black, the two must go together. Allow your educated black friend to discuss the issues that concern them and they will usually tell you that they support Obama because of how he stands on national issues. It is important for an educated black person to explain why they like Obama, so that they can separate themselves from the uneducated or other blacks who like Obama just because he's black.

#11 Turkey Bacon/Sausage
March 5, 2008 Â· 1 Comment
Educated Black people like turkey bacon and turkey sausage. At some point in almost every educated Black person's life, they want to stop eating pork. Maybe they ran across some article describing how bad pork may be for you. Perhaps it's because they had a riveting conversation with some militant or Muslim brotha or sista that rattled off a litany of reasons why it's a sin to eat "the other white meat." Some educated Black people quote specific Bible passages that dictate why people shouldn't eat pork. Whatever the case may be, they want to give up porkâ€¦. but not really.

Turkey bacon and turkey sausage allows the educated Blacks to have a happy medium. They get to enjoy all the aroma and (some) flavor of their traditional pork based breakfast sides while showing everyone that they are disciplined enough to kick out the swine. Educated Black people love when they go out to eat with friends and can order turkey sausage from the menu. They enjoy the looks and questions they receive about their selection. This gives them an opportunity to pass on their wisdom about turkey sausage being more healthy than the slab of bacon their friend just orderedâ€¦ and everyone knows educated Black people like to pass on their wisdom!

#10 CNN
March 4, 2008 Â· 12 Comments
Educated Black people like CNN.
With the state of the affairs these days, educated Black people love to stay abreast of current events by watching CNN. Of course, educated Blacks have to stay on top of their current events. They never know when they will have to school someone on the state of the union. Above all, they tire of watching the local news because they are sick of hearing repeated stories about all the uneducated Black people that murder, rape, and rob members of the community. Educated Black people can always count on CNN to put world issues into perspective. CNN features stories, shows, and commentary that quinches their thirst for knowledge.

Educated Black people have the opportunity to catch breaking news and other stories all day, every day. That's a plus because, at the top of each hour, they can always learn something new. That sure beats watching rebroadcasts of the local news from 5 a.m. Another plus for educated Black people is CNN.com. They can get live news updates and breaking news even when they are away from the television. In fact, they probably get news feeds sent directly to their phones. Being able to quote news at the same time that it's happening will make them look especially smart and the envy of their friends and co-workers! That always makes an educated Black person happy!

#9 Town Homes
March 4, 2008 Â· 5 Comments
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Educated Black people Like town homes.
When an educated Black person gets a new job upon graduation, they usually purchase a town home. This is a symbol of status. It's the convenience of a starter home without the burden of doing yard work. In places like New York, most educated Blacks will purchase a brownstone.
A town home is a symbol of status because it shows the world that they have "made it." Their education has paid offâ€“they are living the American Dream. Once the educated Blacks move into the town home, they will have what is called a "house warming party." Usually other educated Blacks and a few of the acceptable white friends from work will be invited. However, there may be a separate party for the new homeowner's family. This is usually because the educated Blacks do not want their family mixing with their friends from work because this typically produces some type of embarrassing situationâ€“probably resulting in Uncle Joe getting drunk and hitting on a friend of the homeowner.

If you are invited to a house warming party for an educated Black person, you are required to bring a gift for the home. One of the safest gifts is a house plant; perhaps an ivy. If you are a non-Black, never EVER bring Black artâ€“you are stereotyping your educated Black friend and will probably lose them as a friend. It is a must to compliment the size of the home, even if your bathroom is bigger than the entire house. This will make the homeowner feel proud of their purchase and ease the anxiety that they are having knowing it will take them 30 years to pay for it!

#8 Business Cards
March 3, 2008 Â· 6 Comments
Educated Black people like to show off their credentials and one of the best ways to do it without saying a word is through a business card. Educated Blacks like business cards because they can pack a BIG punch on just a 3.5â€³ x 2â€³ piece of card stock! After having a conversation with an educated Black, they love to direct you to keep in touch or "call if you need anything." But gone are the days where they tear off a corner of a napkin or sheet of paper. They whip out custom card cases and slide you their business card. These cards usually contain a seal or logo to let you know what school or company they work for. Their position is also listed so that you can know they have good amount of power within the workplace. We all know that only persons in positions of power get company cards!

Business cards are also a clever way for educated Blacks to let you know just how educated they are. Some business cards are abbreviated versions of their resume, listing damn near ever credential that they have. For instance, the cards will say something like,
Educated Black Person, Esq., A.A., B.A., MBA, Ph.D., RN, NAACP, AAA so that they can let you know they are educated. An educated Black person couldn't possibly let you know ALL of his/her credentials in a short conversation without seeming pretentious. However, the business card should leave no doubt that this person has been on an education grind!

#7 Advanced Degrees
March 3, 2008 Â· 5 Comments
Educated Black people like advanced degrees. What better way to show that you are educated than to get a slew of degrees to prove it! Educated Black people typically like to obtain their advanced degrees from universities that they find to be reputable. They have nothing against University of Phoenix, but something just doesn't seem quite right about that place. It reminds them of those "degree mills" that you hear about. And educated black people must separate themselves from all the pseudo-educated people, so they need advanced degrees from bigger and better universities. Typically educated Black people obtain undergraduate degrees from HBCU's (look it up if you don't know), then go on to pursue Master or Doctoral degrees at universities where they are in the minority. This is because, by this time, educated Blacks have pledged their beloved fraternities or sororities, so there's nothing else to do except concentrate on that advanced degree.

Educated Black People also enjoy mentioning to others that they are getting an advanced degree. Most educated Black males use this as a pick-up line for undergraduate females. The conversation generally goes something like this: The guy will go to the student union where the undergrads hang out. He will approach a female he likes and say, "Hi, I've never seen you around here." The clueless undergrad will respond, "I haven't seen you before either." BINGO! This excites the male because he knows he has the perfect response, "Oh, that's because I'm in the Law School/Business School." The clueless female will probably fall for the line and end up listening to this educated Black male talk about his advanced degree for an extended amount of time. He may even get lucky and get a date out of it. JACKPOT!

#6 Conferences
February 29, 2008 Â· 11 Comments
One thing educated Black people like is a conference! The rush begins when they come across the registration form. They like to attend conferences that will enable them to be around other people that are just as educated as they are. It is always a special perk when the conference is held in a city that they have never visited before. It's like a two-for-one bonus!
The rush continues as they travel to the conference. Sometimes they run across other educated Blacks at the airport who are leaving for the conference on the same flight. This enables them to exchange intelligent dialogue on the plane about all the other educated Black people they are about to meet or how much smarter they'll be at the end of the weekend. It's OK, however, if they don't find anyone on their flight because they know that once they land in the host city, they're sure to come across other educated Blacks arriving in town for the conference. They can share cabs or hotel shuttles and make up for all the witty banter they missed while on the plane.

The CLIMAX occurs when they check-in for the conference. The bright lights, the long tables covered with white tablecloths, the signs that let them know which line to stand in [A-H, I-P, Q-Z]â€¦. And let's not forget those educated Black people that are behind the table telling them to stay in a straight line. They take a deep breath in order to take it all in. AHHHH! Their hearts begin to race when they get to the front of the line and their name is checked off from the list of other educated Black people who are sharing this experience with them. And then they receive the holy grail of conference souvenirs: THE CONFERENCE BAG!

Most of the educated Black people that attend conferences do so in order to get a bag. They LOVE to go back to their respective jobs or schools with their new bags. They even begin to use them as book bags, purses, or briefcases just so that people can know that they just came back from a conference. They love it most when their bag has an acronym for the conference printed on it so that people will have to ask them what it stands for. When (or IF) they tell them, and they catch the educated Black person smiling, it's not because they are remembering the fond memories of the conference or because they are having a good day. It's because they are revelling in the fact that the person is not educated enough to have known what it stands for and needed it explained!

#5 Poetry Slams
February 29, 2008 Â· 13 Comments
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Educated Black People LOVE poetry slams. Poetry slams are events where either professional poets or audience members get up and recite original poems, songs and speeches. Educated black people are large attendees of these "slams" because we believe that this form of entertainment is much better then going to a bar, listening to music, enjoying a long walk, or anything else that uncultured people enjoy. It also allows us to show off our verbal rhythm, because true slam poetsâ€¦â€¦..alwaysâ€¦â€¦.talklikethis â€¦â€¦because if you don'tâ€¦..thenyouareâ€¦..aâ€¦..FAKEâ€¦..poet *thoughtful look*.

The best thing about slam poetry is anybody can participate, no matter the race! If you watch the Educated black people-approved "Def Poetry Jam", you will see all sorts of races participating on the show. Non-black people have to remember that if you sit on the front row, the poet will pick that opportunity to say the one poem that will make you feel bad about all the things you've said about we educated black people, so BEWARE!

Another good thing about poetry slams could be the showcase they provide for the numerous things we like: natural hair, Afrocentric wear, tattoos with African symbolism, special teas, the black power sign, etc. If a non-white person wants to bask in the glory that comes from educated black people, attending a poetry slam is the way to go.

#4 Natural Hair
February 28, 2008 Â· 18 Comments
Educated Black people like natural hair. They love to show their pride for their race and culture by wearing their hair in its unrelaxed and natural state. This may include a range a styles, such as braids, twists, locs, or freestyle kinky/curly/coily tresses. Since natural hair is so versatile, they can rock any number of styles. While educated Blacks love for people to admire their hair, they hate it when someone touches it without invitation or permission. And if you do touch it, they HATE stupid comments like, "Wow! I had no idea it was so soft!" That's a surefire way to get told off. Educated Blacks also love for both Blacks and non-Blacks to comment on how much they love their hair. The standard comments are typically, "I love your hair!" or "I wish my hair could do that!" Educated Blacks love to encourage other Blacks to allow their hair to grow out in its natural state. However, what they love most is to give Blacks that wear relaxers guilt trips about how they are conforming to the European standard of beauty. It makes them feel so much better than you to know that they are educated and liberated enough to not have to be a conformist.

If you are a non-white, don't ever think that you are being complimentary if you ever wear an afro wig or attempt to wear your hair in dreadlocks. And be sure to never refer to your otherwise frizzy hair as feeling "nappy." Aside from the fact that it's offensive, it also makes you sound AND look ridiculous.

#3 Baked Chicken
February 28, 2008 Â· 24 Comments
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We've all heard the joke that all black people love fried chicken. That's not true. EVERYBODY loves fried chicken - white or black. It's even on the buffet at Chinese restaurants! So let's just scratch that idea right now. Educated Black People have a more sophisticated taste. We like BAKED CHICKEN. Some even go so far as to use lemon pepper seasonings, but this is only for the upper echelon blacks with advanced degrees, so don't try this at home if you only have an undergraduate degree. Now if you want to really show off your education, bake chicken breasts only! Most educated blacks prefer their chicken breasts with a side of rice and a vegetable.

By eating baked chicken, we educated Blacks feel as though we are beyond the stigma of eating common fried chicken. If you are a white person and are having your educated Black friends over, bake some chicken. But be careful because we cannot stand dry baked chicken. Baked chicken should be moist, so cover it with foil paper as you cook it. Also white people, never offer a black person fried chicken, you will probably get cursed out.

It must also be pointed out that baking chicken is much healthier than frying it. That's something you should already know. This means that by eating baked chicken instead of fried, educated Blacks are ensuring that they will live longer than those without any type of higher educational learning. It also shows that we are more sophisticated and can use the oven for things other than baking those pies that white people love.

#2 Neo Soul
February 28, 2008 Â· 13 Comments
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Educated Black people like Neo Soul.
For those of you who don't know what this genre of music is about, I have included a short description. Neo soul (also known as nu soul) is a music genre and an umbrella term for current soul music. The music is usually a hybrid of 1970s-influenced soul music with influences from jazz, funk, hip hop house music. The term neo soul was originated by Kedar Massenburg of Motown Records in the late 1990s. Neo soul's audience tends to be underground, preferring that the music favor underground credibility and soulfulness over mainstream popularity. Some musicians who create what is described as neo-soul prefer to disassociate themselves from the tag, due to the term's buzzword-like usage. Some of these artists simply refer to themselves as soul artists.

Neo Soul music makes educated black people feel like they are getting in on music that regular blacks don't know about. The most popular neo soul artist is Erykah Baduâ€¦.even though some of us may feel she's a little bit crazy. Some educated Blacks have distanced themselves from Ms. Badu because too many people know about her. Neo Soul allows these educated blacks to feel they are the only people who know about these artists and are the only ones educated enough to understand this music. Once an artist "catches on," it's time to move on to the next undiscovered talent.

Other popular neo soul artists are: Angie Stone, Musiq Soulchild, Jill Scott, Macy Gray, Alice Smith, Goapele, India.Arie, Davina, Pru, Raphael Saadiq, Alice Smith, Jazzyfatnastees, Adriana Evans, Ursula Rucker, Rhian Benson and Martha Redbone. If you want to take an educated black friend to a concert, pick one of these artists. You will definitely be loved by them automatically. You should even comment on the release of a new CD by one of these artists. It'll show how well you understand educated Black culture. You may even get invited to a listening party. Then, you'll really be down with the educated Black crowd!

#1 Fraternities and Sororities
February 28, 2008 Â· 20 Comments
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Educated Black people like to talk about which fraternity (also called a "frat") or sorority they pledged in college. Some of them even go to college with the intent to pledge a Greek lettered organization, then drop out of school. Unlike predominately white fraternities or sororities, these Black Greek letter organizations (or "BGLOs") are for life. Many members wear Greek paraphernalia well into old age. They even continue to attend their organization's regional and national conferences. All members of these Greek organizations love to talk about how hard they pledged and continually state how much they dislike other members who did not pledge as hard as they did. There have also been a few whites people who have crossed racial lines and joined a BGLO. Of course, this person was pledged harder than any other person because they have to pay for all injustices whites have committed against blacks!

If you are non-Black and encounter a Black person wearing a shirt or something that reflects their Greek organization, tell them how much you love their organization and the community service it does. Never say, "I love those dances you guys do!" It's like saying, "I love to watch you black people dance because all black people have such good rhythm and know how to dance." You will appear racist and never have that person as a friend. Also as a non-Greek, Black or not, you are NOT allowed to wear Greek paraphernalia. Greek organizations are not sports teams; therefore, you shouldn't wear the organization's colors to show your support.
Educated Black Greeks often look at pledging as a right of passageâ€“their educational experience was enhanced because they "went Greek." When someone talks about their experience, always look as though you are interested and truly care because this is very important to them.

are we stereotypical of whaaaatt??

are we fooling ourselves or whaaaatt????

"Everything Changes on Day One" - So What happens on Day Two oh Two?

2008-03-10T20:52:00.000-04:00

Learn more about Kristen, or Ashley, or Victoria, too? whatever, the ho that Eliot Spitzer found. Click on the title to check out f21village. u gonna luvit!

It's getting to the point we're running out of stories - even reality ones. But as usual, just when you think you've heard it all, here we go again:

Even at this late date in the Presidential campaign, as I promised, Larry Craig-gaters are getting center stage. Who knew it would be sponsored by the Democrats this time?

Yes, the man with the golden gun, the man in the white hat, who brought down corruption on Wall Street, upheaved both corporate titans, heavyweight politicians and Mafia leaders alike, has finally been brought down by his own almighty view of himself, that he was untouchable.

Giving himself a Valentine's Day box of candy, "Client #9" forked over $4,300 (wow, that's some expensive pussy) for a New York City whore named Kristen to meet him at a swanky DC hotel for a yummy tryst, courtesy of the Emperor's Club VIP. His wife, understandibly, has that Mrs. McGreevy look on her face, undeniably pissed off. Expect divorce papers soon, Eliot. And in New York, baby, that means HALF!

Once again, arrogance leads to disgrace which befalls yet another politician. But rarely has it been a governor, and surely not one with a profile like Spitzer. And for this former attorney general, this was about as stupid a move as one could make. He took a big gamble, obviously figuring he would get away with it. And, as these things always end, this was a fall from grace as hard as it gets.

It means resignation. Maybe jail time for violating the Mann Act (a federal law) for transporting prostitutes or worse for money-laudering (5 years) exchanging money for them? Will this have fallout for Hillary, the senator from New York, in her presidential bid, a reminder of Bill Clinton's dalliances? Not sure just yet, but one thing for sure - the Larry Craig train rolls on. But this time, it ran on the Democratic track. Which just proves one thing: there's a lot of corruption and graft in our political world that needs to be rooted out - NOW!!

P.S.: A silver lining - New York gets its first black governor. And since he (David Patterson) is legally blind, if he does decide to indulge in play, he'll have the perfect excuse by saying "I didn't see it coming..."

Change is Always Changing

2008-03-04T21:48:00.000-05:00

The country is at war, the economy is going down the tubes, will there be a tomorrow?

No, not questions just for 2008, but questions that were out there in 1968.

In the spirit of sharing with my children and grandchildren and all of my descendants to follow, as they burn music or whatever or however they'll be doing it when they read this, let me share what music looked like to a 10-year old in 1968:

This is a 45 rpm record. This particular one was recorded by a R&B group called Curtis Mayfield and The Impressions, and the song is called "We're a Winner", a rallying cry of the civil rights, peace, women's and black power movement. As you fall asleep watching some 'new' technology with some news or political program talking about Ms. President (who may be black, or latina, or korean by the time you read this), as I watch old-fashioned cable TV network MSNBC blah blah blah about Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama (who will just be another Prez in your history site), before history is made in 2008, just remember that the path to freedom and your future started in 1968.

By the way, that disc above is made of vinyl, they used sonic groove cutters to make the impressions of the music for playback, we used a device known as a record player (actually by 1968 we were just starting to call it a turntable), and it was connected to a stereo receiver and speakers that were powered by transistors (the forerunner to the microchip). My dad had both a stereo that had transistors and an older one from the 1960s which had cathode ray tubes. The tube stereo had better sound in my opinion.

When I let my dad listen to my Ipod in 2007, it reminded me how far we had come since I listened to his 1960s stereo in 1968. God only knows what you're listening to now. But whatever it is, check out a little of your history and find and listen to this song.

We're Not The Only Ones Out There

2008-02-23T16:30:00.001-05:00

As scientists from NASA reported this week, there's a strange gaseous phenomenon occuring on Venus, with a strange bright cloud formation moving from Venus' south pole to its equator, and then back again, over a period of weeks.

As we keep bullshitting ourselves with self-righteousness, the reality can only be that we are not the only ones in the galaxy. The fact that no one has stopped by to visit from any of the planets in our known history doesn't mean they aren't; they're probably trying to reach us too. But like us, they don't have a clue that they're not the only ones out here either. But life and the universe keep on going and growing. As evidence, I post this beautiful picture of new stars, and thus new life, forming in the heavens:

Pour Vous Les Blagues Cochonne (Dirty Jokes 4 U)

2008-02-23T14:45:00.000-05:00

Here's some funnies a friend passed on to my cell the other day:

A vampire goes into a bar and asks for boiling water. The bartender says 'I thought you guys only drank blood'. The vampire pulls out a used tampon and says 'I'm making tea'.

And here's a brain-twista fo' ya:

Q of the Day: If you have sex with a hooker against her will, is it rape or is it shoplifting?
A: Shoplifitng. You were in the store, right?

new zeland - a nice place to visit

2008-02-22T22:11:00.001-05:00

here are some hot hotties from new zealand's formula one competitions:

she is sooooo cute!

outstandingly delicious

yummy...congratulations are in order.....

the winner's circle is where the action is....

i see they have some chocolate mixed in with their vanilla down there...

a sexy asian mix with vanilla here...

she's got legs...and assz for dayz...

and if this ass doesn't make you want to visit new zealand....

this should do it all.

lock 'n load, babay...

Guest Editorial: Frank Rich Discusses The Evolving New Century

2008-02-18T18:23:00.000-05:00

Op-Ed Columnist

The Grand Old White Party Confronts Obama

By FRANK RICH

Published: February 17, 2008

Enlarge This Image

Barry Blitt

THE curse continues. Regardless of party, it’s hara-kiri for a politician to step into the shadow of even a mediocre speech by Barack Obama.

Senator Obama’s televised victory oration celebrating his Chesapeake primary trifecta on Tuesday night was a mechanical rehash. No matter. When the networks cut from the 17,000-plus Obama fans cheering at a Wisconsin arena to John McCain’s victory tableaubefore a few hundred spectators in the Old Town district of Alexandria, Va., it was a rerun of what happened to Hillary Clinton the night she lost Iowa. Senator McCain, backed by a collection of sallow-faced old Beltway pols, played the past to Mr. Obama’s here and now. Mr. McCain looked like a loser even though he, unlike Senator Clinton, had actually won.

But he has it even worse than Mrs. Clinton. What distinguished his posse from Mr. Obama’s throng was not just its age but its demographic monotony: all white and nearly all male. Such has been the inescapable Republican brand throughout this campaign, ever since David Letterman memorably pegged its lineup of presidential contenders last spring as “guys waiting to tee off at a restricted country club.”

For Mr. McCain, this albatross may be harder to shake than George W. Bush and Iraq, particularly in a faceoff with Mr. Obama. When Mr. McCain jokingly invoked the Obama slogan “I am fired up and ready to go” in his speech Tuesday night, it was as cringe-inducing as the white covers of R & B songs in the 1950s — or Mitt Romney’s stab at communing with his inner hip-hop on Martin Luther King’s birthday. Trapped in an archaic black-and-white newsreel, the G.O.P. looks more like a nostalgic relic than a national political party in contemporary America. A cultural sea change has passed it by.

The 2008 primary campaign has been so fast and furious that we haven’t paused to register just how spectacular that change is. All the fretful debate about whether voters would turn out for a candidate who is a black or a woman seems a century ago. Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama vanquished the Democratic field, including a presidential-looking Southern white man with an enthusiastic following, John Edwards. What was only months ago an exotic political experiment is now almost ho-hum.

Given that the American story has been so inextricable from the struggle over race, the Obama triumph has been the bigger surprise to many. Perhaps because I came of age in the racially divided Washington public schools of the 1960s and had one of my first newspaper jobs in Richmond in the early 1970s, I almost had to pinch myself when Mr. Obama took 52 percent of Virginia’s white vote last week. The Old Dominion continues to astonish those who remember it when.

Here’s one of my memories. In 1970, Linwood Holton, the state’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction and a Richard Nixon supporter, responded to court-ordered busing by voluntarily placing his own children in largely black Richmond public schools. For this symbolic gesture, he was marginalized by his own party, which was hellbent on pursuing the emergent Strom Thurmond-patented Southern strategy of exploiting white racism for political gain. After Mr. Holton, Virginia restored to office the previous governor, Mills Godwin, a champion of the state’s “massive resistance” to desegregation.

Today Anne Holton, the young daughter sent by her father to a black school in Richmond, is the first lady of Virginia, the wife of the Democratic governor, Tim Kaine. Mr. Kaine’s early endorsement of Mr. Obama was a potent factor in his remarkable 28-point landslide on Tuesday.

For all the changes in Virginia and elsewhere, vestiges of the Southern strategy persist in some Republican quarters. Mr. McCain, however, has been a victim, rather than a practitioner, of the old racial gamesmanship. In his brutal 2000 South Carolina primary battle against Mr. Bush and Karl Rove, Mr. McCain’s adopted Bangladeshi daughter was the target of a smear campaign. He was also pilloried for accurately describing the Confederate flag as a “symbol of racism and slavery.” (Sadly, he started to bend this straight talk the very next day.) He is still paying for correctly describing Jerry Falwell, once an ardent segregationist, and Pat Robertson, a longtime defender of South African apartheid, as “agents of intolerance.” And of course Mr. McCain remains public enemy No. 1 to some in his party for resisting nativist overkill on illegal immigration.

Though Mr. Bush ran for president on “compassionate conservatism,” he diversified only his party’s window dressing: a 2000 Republican National Convention that had more African-Americans onstage than on the floor and the incessant photo-ops with black schoolchildren to sell No Child Left Behind. There are no black Republicans in the House or the Senate to stand with the party’s 2008 nominee. Exit polls tell us that African-Americans voting in this year’s G.O.P. primaries account for at most 2 to 4 percent of its electorate even in states with large black populations.

Mr. Obama’s ascension hardly means that racism is kaput in America, or that the country is “postracial” or “transcending race.” But it’s impossible to deny that another barrier has been surmounted. Bill Clinton’s attempt to minimize Mr. Obama as a niche candidate in South Carolina by comparing him to Jesse Jackson looks more ludicrous by the day. Even when winning five Southern states (Virginia included) on Super Tuesday in 1988, Mr. Jackson received only 7 to 10 percent of white votes, depending on the exit poll.

Whatever the potency of his political skills and message, Mr. Obama is also riding a demographic wave. The authors of the new book “Millennial Makeover,” Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais, point out that the so-called millennial generation (dating from 1982) is the largest in American history, boomers included, and that roughly 40 percent of it is African-American, Latino, Asian or racially mixed. One in five millennials has an immigrant parent. It’s this generation that is fueling the excitement and some of the record turnout of the Democratic primary campaign, and not just for Mr. Obama.

Even by the low standards of his party, Mr. McCain has underperformed at reaching millennials in the thriving culture where they live. His campaign’s effort to create a MySpace-like Web site flopped. His most-viewed appearances on YouTube are not viral videos extolling him or replaying his best speeches but are instead sendups of his most reckless foreign-policy improvisations — his threat to stay in Iraq for 100 years and his jokey warning (sung to the tune of the Beach Boys’ version of “Barbara Ann”) that he will bomb Iran. In the vast arena of the Internet he has been shrunk to Grumpy Old White Guy, the G.O.P. brand incarnate.

The theory of the McCain candidacy is that his “maverick” image will bring independents (approaching a third of all voters) to the rescue. But a New York Times-CBS News poll last month found that independents have even a lower opinion of Mr. Bush, the war, the surge and the economy than the total electorate and skew slightly younger. Though the independents in this survey went 44 percent to 32 percent for Mr. Bush over John Kerry in 2004, they now prefer a Democratic presidential candidate over a Republican by 44 percent to 27 percent.

Mr. McCain could get lucky, especially if Mrs. Clinton gets the Democratic nomination and unites the G.O.P., and definitely if she tosses her party into civil war by grabbing ghost delegates from Michigan and Florida. But those odds are dwindling. More likely, the Republican Party will face Mr. Obama with a candidate who reeks even more of the past and less of change than Mrs. Clinton does. I was startled to hear last week from a friend in California, a staunch anti-Clinton Republican businessman, that he was wavering. Though he regards Mr. McCain as a hero, he wrote me: “I am tired of fighting the Vietnam war. I have drifted toward Obama.”

Similarly, Mark McKinnon, the Bush media maven who has played a comparable role for Mr. McCain in this campaign, reaffirmed to Evan Smith of Texas Monthly weeks ago that he would not work for his own candidate in a race with Mr. Obama. Elaborating to NPR last week, Mr. McKinnon said that while he is “100 percent” for Mr. McCain and disagrees with Mr. Obama “on very fundamental issues,” he likes Mr. Obama and what he’s doing for the country enough to stay on the sidelines rather than fire off attack ads.

As some Republicans drift away in a McCain-Obama race, who fills the vacuum? Among the white guys flanking Mr. McCain at his victory celebration on Tuesday, revealingly enough, was the once-golden George Allen, the Virginia Republican who lost his Senate seat and presidential hopes in 2006 after being caught on YouTube calling a young Indian-American Democratic campaign worker “macaca.”

In that incident, Mr. Allen added insult to injury by also telling the young man, “Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia.” As election results confirmed both in 2006 and last week, it is Mr. Allen who is the foreigner in 21st century America, Mr. Allen who is in the minority in the real world of Virginia. A national rout in 2008 just may be that Republican Party’s last stand.

Egg on my Face - The Giants Won!

2008-02-05T10:41:00.000-05:00

Super Bowl XLIII Champion is - WHO???? Yes the Giants won an upset, a surprising one, with one of the best catches in football history from a 20-yard pass play from Eli Manning to Tyree, in what will be one to talk about for awhile. The parade is going right past my office building in Lower Manhattan now. Just can't believe it, but what can I say?

I predicted the Patriots all the way, instead I got a lethargic Tom Brady & Co. The Giants, who didn't necessarily play their best game, played a great playoffs series and frankly have been on a roll since December, when they almost beat the Pats in the last game of regular season play. All hats off to the Giants, their coaching staff and the city that never sleeps. They deserved it earned it and were without a doubt the better team. Bravo!

The Lombardi Trophy is yours, brothas!

2008-02-05T10:35:00.000-05:00

Get Out and Vote Today! It's Super Duper Tuesday!

I doubt you'd read this unless it caught your eye. Perhaps this will catch your eye and motivate you. If you go out and vote, you'll get to see these Danish cyclers at the polls:

your vote is you and so revealing of who you are. . . .

and voting does much much more....

vote for who your heart and mind tells you to....

Vote for a leader that matters.

This election is so important, I ASK YOU TO VOTE LIKE IT'S YOUR LAST DAY TO GO TO A Tuborg Mongolian Barbecue. Hurry!!

2050: when we're there please let me know...

2008-02-04T20:38:00.000-05:00

I'm listening to this Professor Swain on Lou Dobbs tonight, talking about the (i think) now-worn logo about "by 2050, the United States will be a predominantly minority population", as if when that happens, blacks and whites will live together in harmony like ebony and ivory. Not tryin' to diss the sista (she is more knowledgable than me) but I ask: So What?? What does that mean for the sons and daughters of Africa in America? Nothing good, I say. Why??

Because the way minorities will take over the United States (and more on why it may not mean much later) is through the Hispanic American population. Already, they are having children at 110% times the rate of white and black American families, even higher than that against Asian Americans. There will also be an explosion of the Hindu-Indian American population, which is already showing itself especially in its infusion into our financial, service and government industries, both through marriage and family building, and immigration. These 2 populations in particular will transform the way America looks and acts. This should concern us. It will likely affect the attitudes towards black Americans adversely, because there is already some dissent, prejudice and indifference towards African Americans by these groups. Will their children bring about negative or positive change in the future? A question with no clear answer; time will tell.

What is true is that the black population, barely growing 2-5% a year, and low birth rates rivaling whites and asians, will not be the new population with influence on future events. Their population will be about 8% of the population by 2050, down from 11% today. Therefore, Hispanics will have a much stronger say on events, especially as they will inherit the native son argument over anyone from India or Pakistan. But the Hindu-Indians will be more respected in the business community, which will propel this group to a high status and visibility.

What world will they inherit? Probably a nation with more vigourous intents to protect civil rights, but also one with both whites and blacks feeling weakened in power and living with more anxiety about their future. As whites will undoubtedly still have more money than blacks at that time, they may be able to weather and adapt to survive, while being in a position to protect their culture and wealth to some extent. Blacks, with less of both, will probably lose more of what they had, but may be more adaptable to the changing landscape.

It's likely not a cherries-and-cream future for us all. Black folks, take note, and get ready.

Hillary's Bio In Short From An Old Friend

2008-02-02T07:27:00.000-05:00

i thought this was interesting, coming from someone we haven't heard from in awhile.....

like, this is so mid-1960s. the mod look. the afro look. i'd say this is 1969 .... Hillary was at Wellesley College from 1965 thru 69.

Professor Lani Guinier of Harvard Law School, who is supporting Mr. Obama, said the key distinction between Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton lies in how they view their relationship to power. In doing so, Ms. Guinier, whose nomination as assistant attorney general for civil rights in 1993 was pummeled by conservative groups and aborted by the White House, referred to their respective biographies:

"Mrs. Clinton is the talented lawyer serving her clients,” Ms. Guinier said. Mr. Obama is the organizer, she said, “who sees the source of his power as the ability to inspire people to mobilize.”

Referring to the possibility of the nation’s election of a historic first, a black or a woman, Mrs. Clinton said last week, “In a way, it’s a good problem to have. But it is a problem.”

just goes to show - you never know when or where those old college friends might pop up.