Month: July 2009

In 1913, Edward Eggleston, a farsighted white man of profound intellectual abilities who was dedicated to the scientific method, set out to demonstrate why America would ultimately have no racial problems in the future. He admitted that, in fact America had a racial problem, but he told his readers that in the long run the problem would literally die out. The reason was obvious as his book, The Ultimate Solution of the American Negro Problem explained. You see the beginnings of his argument on page 27 where he has this to say about the reason for racial divide in our country:

[T]he superior mental attainment of the modern European is the result of aeons of favorable environment; and by inference, that his laggard black brother is mentally thousands — if not millions– of years behind, and must need lose out in the conspicuously unequal struggle for existence.

This led Eggleston to his ultimate conclusion that in the struggle between the mentally deficient black race and the majority whites with the superior “mental attainments” sooner or later the Black American would die out, go extinct as it were, except perhaps for a few isolated fringe communities of no great significance. Thus there was no need to ship blacks off to Africa, or to take other more drastic and extra-constitutional actions to deal with the race problem, since natural selection and the inevitable force of history, would do the all work for the majority whites. In short, the black population in America was doomed to decline because of the black race’s mental inferiority, poor hygienic practices and general unfitness to compete with the superior white race.

Fast forward ninety-six years. A black man is the American President, elected by a majority of Americans of all races. In 1910, when Eggleston wrote that the Black population was already in decline there were, according to the available Census reports, 9,827,763 blacks in the United States or 10.7 % of the country’s population. In 2006, the best estimate of the US Census Bureau was that there were 37,051,483 Black only Americans or about 13% of the entire US population. So despite the best efforts of lynch mobs, higher infant mortality rates, higher incarceration rates, higher rates of murder of young African American males, much of it due to gang violence, but much of it also due to police shootings and hate crimes, less expenditures on eduction at all levels for American blacks, and lower life expectancies, Eggleston’s prediction has yet to come true. despite all the odds stacked against them, African Americans have increased their numbers both overall and as a percentage of the total US population.

Just Food for thought the next time you see Charles Murray or Pat Buchanan on Television. These racist propagandists have never got it right. Not now, not then. They do keep the white fear of the black man pot boiling though. Just ask Harvard Professor Henry Gates. Or better yet, ask Robert Tolan. (h/t to the field negro).

It used to be that having the government come to your house and order you around was the kind of thing that conservatives feared. All the worse if the Man arrests you for voicing your displeasure. That’s black helicopter talk. I mean, Skip Gates is lucky they didn’t confiscate his assault weapons.

Okay, I think this takes the cake.

Yesterday, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) took the unusual step of requesting the House clerk to read aloud a 55-page motion to recommit, a process that took over 40 minutes. The obstructionist tactic, the Politico’s Glenn Thrush reports, appears to have been orchestrated by the GOP in order to delay House proceedings so Republicans could attend the annual “Boehner Beach Party” fundraising event at the Cantina Marina, a D.C. restaurant near the waterfront.

Here’s the invite:

They delayed the working of the House of Representatives for 40-minutes so Republican members and staff could go to a Beach Party-themed fundraiser for the Minority Leader. I don’t know if you can really do anything legal that can match that in offensiveness.

This is something I never remember hearing much about 40, 30, 20 or even 10 years ago. Now it seems to be as common as the ones we have in the Western US every year:

Thousands of firefighters are battling to bring under control summer wildfires that are spreading across parts of southern Europe.

At least seven people have died in fires that have struck Spain, France, Greece and the Italian island of Sardinia in the past few days.

Spain has been the hardest hit with at least seven major fires raging in the south and east.

Strong winds have fanned the flames during the hot dry weather.

A European Union monitoring agency has warned that the risk of fire along the Mediterranean coastline remains high with soaring temperatures predicted for the coming days.

So, what’s your hypothesis for why this is happening? Take the poll:

(cont.)

Welcome to Friday Foto Flogging, a place to share your photos and photography news. We were inspired by the folks at European Tribune who post a regular Friday Photoblog series to try the same on this side of the virtual Atlantic. We also thought foto folks would enjoy seeing some other websites so each week we’ll introduce a different photo website.

Website of the Week: Digital Camera Photographer of the Year: Entries in the (UK) Telegraph’s photo competition.

This Week’s Theme: Disrepair. Dilapidation, decrepitude, shabbiness, collapse, ruin; abandonment, neglect, disuse.

AndiF: The Disrepair Equations

	prey + predator = ruin Click image for larger version
	lightning + steel cables = collapse Click image for larger version
	kids + short attention spans = abandonment Click image for larger version

olivia’s disrepair etc.

	Click image for larger version
	Click image for larger version
	Click image for larger version

Next Week’s Theme: Random. Show us whatever you want to show us.

Info on Posting Photos

When you post your photos, please keep the width at 500 or less for the sake of our Bootribers who are on dial-up. If you want to post clickable thumbnails but aren’t sure how, check out this diary:
Clickable Thumbnails. If you haven’t yet joined a photo-hosting site, here are some to consider: Photobucket, Flickr, ImageShack, and Picasa.

Previous Friday Foto Flogs

FFFs 1-36	Random	Skies	School’s Out
Flowers	Random	Weather	Green

I can’t say that I see the Senate’s inability to get a health care bill to the floor before the August recess as a positive sign. But I don’t think it is necessarily a big problem, either. I have known for two years that the biggest obstacle to passing a health care reform bill was going to be Max Baucus and his Senate Finance Committee.

On June 17, 2008, I wrote this:

The key to any medical reform in this country runs right through Max Baucus’s Finance Committee and the Senate Republican’s filibuster. The Finance Committee is one of the elite committees in the Senate. No one from the Class of ’06 has yet earned a seat on the committee. The most junior member is Ken Salazar of Colorado, who is hardly a liberal. I’ve long despaired at the makeup of the Finance Committee because it is so conservative that I assume it will never consider a truly universal system of health care. Even if we elect 10 or more new senators this fall, it’s unlikely that any of them will win a seat on Finance until at least two years later.

And what I foresaw is exactly what has come to pass. The Senate health care bill is going to be written by the Finance Committee and the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, which is better known as the HELP committee. Out of the thirteen Democrats on the HELP committee, six (Sanders, Brown, Casey, Hagan, Merkley, and
Franken) have been elected in the last two cycles. The Finance Committee accepted two new members for this Congress (Tom Carper of Delaware and DSCC Chairman Bob Menendez) both of whom came into the Senate prior to the anti-Bush backlash of 2006.

It’s not too surprising, then, that the HELP committee felt they had a mandate from the voters who put both them and Obama in power. They passed a bill through their committee on a strict party-line vote and they didn’t waste a lot of time trying to attract Republican support. The Finance Committee, on the other hand, is made up of a lot of old bulls who fancy themselves moneyboys. You’ve got Standard Oil scion Jay Rockefeller and Heinz ketchup heir-toy John Kerry, and Blanche Wal*Mart Lincoln sitting on that committee, and they think it’s their job to keep taxes low on multibillionaires. So, the Finance Committee can’t agree on how to finance the Health Care bill and they’re holding everything up. But, you know what? It’s okay. We’ve got a similar problem with the Energy and Commerce Committee in the House. There are enough Blue Dog Democrats on that committee to hold up chairman Waxman’s bill.

Let these clowns have the month of August to get a little schooling in the New Media. I welcome their efforts to wring more cost savings out of the plan. Let them work on that. But I don’t think that Obama is going to lose this battle. I have one piece of advice though. Do not ask the House to vote on a bill that raises taxes before the recess when the Senate is taking a pass. It is stupid to ask vulnerable House members to cast painful votes that might not mean anything because the Senate refuses to vote the same way. It’s not stupid because there is something wrong with being principled. It’s stupid because you’ll get the bare minimum of votes, and that will make the job of selling the Senate version much harder.

If the Senate waits, the House should wait, too.

Let me first say, that no one knows for sure if race was a factor in the arrest of Henry “Skip” Gates Jr.  Personally, I think it was a small part, but not all. What I do know though, is that this whole discussion and the ensuing “media fire-storm” that’s been happening, is just making me angry.

Warning, this is just a serious rant, it’s probably pretty inchohernt, so read it at your own peril.
As an African American, you just write off many of these occurences and just being apart of the African American experience in America.  You know that no matter what you do, or what activity you are involved in, the phrase “while black” can be added to all of them, and somehow makes otherwise completely normal things for white people seems somehow “foreign” for black people (i.e. “driving while black”, “shopping while black”, etc).

You talk and joke about it with your family and your friends, but inside you know it’s pisses you off.  It may not have personally happened to you, but you know at least 1 personal acquaintance or relative who has had the “…while black” experience.  You don’t expect anyone white to discuss it, and if they do, you expect that they will probably just try to give you a “there, there” pat on the back, while secretly thinking WTF is she talking about.

If it does happen that it somehow makes the local news.  It’s usually does so because something more fatal has occurred or someone has decided to speak up, and 9 times outa 10, the news will just report it from the PD side anyway, usually with the usual buzz words: belligerent, disorderdly, disruptive, suspect seemed to threaten PD…etc.

So we finally get someone in the WH who speaks honestly about the feelings of a whole group of Americans (black males) who have these shared life experiences simply by virtue of their skin tone, and damn it we are happy that finally someone knows our experiences, and what happens, the national media just follows the same pattern as the local media.  Instead of some real reporting about racial profiling or at the very least some real reporting about the increasing trend of the use excessive force, or abuse of power by some (not all) policeman, instead it’s “Obama calls policeman stupid”, or “Heroic policemen smeared as racist by President Obama” (never mind that Obama never said the policeman was stupid or racist).

I’m finding a lot of comments on some of  “liberal” blogosphere that sayt that Dr Gates “over-reacted”.  That’s one reason why I wrote this diary.

The problem I have with this whole thing is because of some of the blatantly biased stories and comments on what I used to consider “friendly” & reputable news programs and news site. Maybe it’s my naivete, but I expect such completely biased coverage on FOX news, and the RW radio bigots.

But I was watching CNN, and had to hear that prick Rick Sanchez, quoting verbatim from the report the police officer did as “the definitive record” on what happened even though Gates had given an interview to Soledad O’Brien telling his side. Didn’t matter to Rick, because what the police officer wrote was “on the record” therefore it just HAD to be the TRUE story, thank goodness that Roland Martin was on the show and called Rick on his b.s.

Between this bullcrap, the birther nonsense, the Malia Obama peace shirt brouhaha, the racist emails, the racist twitters, and whatever else…IT’S PATHETIC, and it’s not even 1 year into the Obama Presidency.  I don’t know how I’m gonna get through the whole 4 years without wanting to pull my hair out (or somebody else’s)

Cross-posted at Project Vote’s Voting Matters Blog

This week Project Vote and the ACLU of Pennsylvania filed a lawsuit, on behalf of ACORN, against Pennsylvania Attorney General Tom Corbett and Allegheny County District Attorney Stephen Zappala, Jr. The purpose of the suit is to  keep the district attorney from filing a frivolous complaint alleging that ACORN’s method of retaining – not paying – canvassers was a violation of state law.
There have been a lot of fireworks surrounding Project Vote and ACORN’s highly successful voter registration efforts that helped enfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters in 2008. First were the criminal complaints filed against ACORN and two workers in Nevada, and now the impending threats to prosecute ACORN in Pennsylvania raise more hysteria. However, one look beyond the media cries reveals that these cases have nothing to do with so called “voter registration fraud.” These cases are based not on charges of submitting fraudulent registrations, but rather on the bogus charge that ACORN violated statutes forbidding compensation to canvassers based on the number of applications they collected.

According to the Pennsylvania statute in question, “a person may not give, solicit or accept payment or financial incentive to obtain a voter registration if the payment or incentive is based upon the number of registrations or applications obtained.”  The Nevada case involves a similar statute. As investigations against ACORN found no direct violations of existing law, officials in these states have attempted to overreach by narrowly interpreting state statutes to charge that ACORN violated the law for implementing performance standards to determine whether to retain an employee.   In reality, ACORN does not, and did not, pay its canvassers based on the number of applications they collected, but does expect individuals it hires to actually collect voter registration applications.   By Pennsylvania and Nevada’s interpretation of their statutes, however, setting any performance standards–no matter how flexible or reasonable–is a violation of the law, an interpretation that would make it nearly impossible for anyone to conduct a paid voter registration drive in these states.

For such a tortuous stretching of the common sense meaning of a statute, one might look back to  tactics last employed in South Carolina in the 1950’s to prosecute black demonstrators at lunch counter sit-ins. South Carolina’s  trespassing statute criminalized “entry” upon any establishment after notice from an owner or tenant prohibiting such entry. This law was used to prosecute two African-American men who had taken seats in a restaurant booth without having received any notice that they were not permitted to do so; after they sat down, employees put up a “No Trespassing” sign and asked the two men to leave. The two men were arrested and convicted by the state, which stretched the word “entry” to include “already sitting in a booth.” The convictions were upheld by the state Supreme Court.

In 1964 the case, Bouie v. City of Columbia, reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which found that, not only was the conflation of “trespass” with “entry” legally faulty, but South Carolina had never asserted this argument before.  Therefore, the Supreme Court found “the crime for which these petitioners stand convicted was `not enumerated in the statute’ at the time of their conduct. It follows that they have been deprived of liberty and property without due process of law in contravention of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

Similar retroactive law-bending tactics are being seen today in Pennsylvania and Nevada.  State officials are stretching the statute that prohibits paying canvassers per card (a practice neither ACORN nor Project Vote employs) to claim it applies to any performance standards. In other words, requiring an employee to collect even one voter registration application in order to keep receiving a regular paycheck would be, in the states’ view, a violation of state law. Not only does this definition–which has never before been applied in this way–stretch common sense, it would effectively put an end to paid voter registration drives, which appears to be the underlying goals of these tactics.

With five ex-canvassers having already been charged with accepting money under the policy, ACORN–represented by the ACLU and Project Vote–has filed a complaint against the district attorney to enjoin him from criminally charging ACORN for its employee retention policy.  They argue that retroactively stretching the statute in the manner proposed by Pennsylvania violates ACORN’s right to know that its actions violate the law, and also violate ACORN’s free speech rights.

Paid voter registration drives are the most effective way to help give underrepresented communities a voice. Officials who succeeded in applying such twisted interpretations of state laws would make it impossible to run a paid registration campaign, to the disservice of the democratic process and of the communities they serve.

Via Political Carnival:

“I have to say I am surprised by the controversy surrounding my statement because I think it was a pretty straight forward commentary that you probably don’t need to handcuff a guy, a middle-aged man who uses a cane, who’s in his own home,” Obama said. […]

“I think that I have extraordinary respect for the difficulties of the job that police officers do,” the president told Moran. “And my suspicion is that words were exchanged between the police officer and Mr. Gates and that everybody should have just settled down and cooler heads should have prevailed. That’s my suspicion.”

The president said he understands the sergeant who arrested Gates is an “outstanding police officer.” But he added that with all that’s going on in the country with health care and the economy and the wars abroad, “it doesn’t make sense to arrest a guy in his own home if he’s not causing a serious disturbance.”