Prometheus 6

Newsweek's Christopher Dickey had an interesting interview going on...until he exposed the Internet Trolls!

The Huffington Post reports the Justice Department is issuing subpoena to former employees to compel testimony, or at least a Fifth Amendment assertion, of the politization of its Civil Rights division by Bradley Schlozman.

They're going after Hans von Spakovsky, famous for forgetting WHY he was working to restrict minority voting rights (with a special emphasis on Native Americans), and Jason Torchinsky, who held a similar position to von Spakovsky...both the employment position and the refusal to testify position.

You have the proverbial snowball's chance in Gehenna of getting the truth out of those two. I suggest contacting Carl Goldman, executive director of AFSCME's Council 26, the union that represents non-attorney staff in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division.

Black Politics: No girls allowed?

I just took this screenshot from The New York Times website; it leads to this story from the upcoming magazine about black politics and Obama. Noticeably absent from the picture is anyone with a vagina are any women. Lovely.

(The article isn't much better, save for one quote from Cheryl Contee of Jack and Jill Politics and a quick mention of Valerie Jarrett.)

Talking about Is Obama the End of Black Politics? This is what troubles me.

I understand as long as you really believe you're kosher you're not responsible for the lapses of the one who prepared the food. But now you know...and it's the source of the vast majority of kosher meat in the country.

You see, there is precedent for declaring something nonkosher on the basis of how employees are treated. Yisroel Salanter, the great 19th-century rabbi, is famously believed to have refused to certify a matzo factory as kosher on the grounds that the workers were being treated unfairly. In addition to the hypocrisy of calling something kosher when it is being sold and produced in an unethical manner, we have to take into account disturbing information about the plant that has come to light.

Dark Meat
By SHMUEL HERZFELD

Washington

ACCORDING to the Jewish calendar we are now in the month of Av, a period of increasingly intense mourning that culminates with a total fast on the Ninth of Av, which this year coincides with Sunday, Aug. 10.

One of the customary practices in these nine days is the avoidance of meat: it’s the way we commemorate the destruction of the Temple, where daily animal sacrifices were once brought.

Refraining from food is symbolic, of course. The idea is not just to avoid meat but to limit ourselves so that we can better focus on the spiritual.

Is Obama the End of Black Politics?
By MATT BAI

This article will appear in this Sunday's Times Magazine.

Nine pages...I haven't read it yet but I will.

Black folks, historians and people working in Black and/or Confederate History have lost a great supporter. Except those who don't like truth...

Dear Friend,

It is with great sadness that we mourn the loss of our Executive Council member, the historian and archivist  Dr. Walter B. Hill, Jr.  Walter was a tireless advocate for ASALH since joining in 1970. He served as Vice President from 1996-1998 and was a member of the Executive Council from 1995 until his passing. He carried out his work  with honor and integrity as he supported the mission and vision of the Association. He was beloved by all of the members of the Council, the Advisory Board, and the entire ASALH community. Walter developed partnerships between ASALH and similar organizations such as The HistoryMakers and The African American Civil War Museum.

Walter Bowers Hill, Jr., was born in St. Louis, Missouri on May 22, 1949. After finishing high school, Hill enrolled in the College of Wooster, earning a B.A. degree in history in 1971. From there, he attended Northern Illinois University, studying American history. Earning an M.A. degree in 1973, he returned to school to earn a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland in 1988.

After completing his master's degree, Hill taught at St. Louis University from 1974 to 1977. He returned to school in the fall of 1977 to work towards the Ph.D. in U.S. History at the University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland. He worked as a graduate teaching assistant and later as an instructor in the Afro-American Studies Program between 1982 and 1983. While working towards the Ph.D., he also worked at the National Archives and Records Administration as a Graduate Intermittent Research Student until 1983 in the Office of the Archivist and Office of Federal Records. From 1983 to 1984, he held a Pre-Doctoral Fellowship at the Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.

Upon completing the Pre-Doctoral Fellowship in 1984, he returned to the National Archives and Records Administration as an Archivist with the Office of the National Archives where he remained for seven years. In 1990, he left to work in the Office of Public Program, assuming the Director of the Modern Archives Institute and Subject Specialist for Afro-American History. He remained with the Office until 1995 when he departed for the new facility in College Park, Maryland and assumed the position of Senior Archivist and Subject Area Specialist for Afro-American History and Federal Records. In 1984, Hill became an Adjunct Professor of Afro-American History in the Afro-American Studies Department, Howard University, Washington, D.C. and taught courses in Afro-American history for the next two decades.

As a noted historian, Hill appeared in several documentaries, as well as on Good Morning America, Washington Journal and Fox TV. He served on the editorial board of the African American History Bulletin, the Executive Council of the Association for the Study of Afro-American History and on the advisory board of The HistoryMakers, among others. He has also written extensively, his work appearing in such journals as the Newsletter of the American Historical Association and the Journal of Minority Issues.

Hill passed away on July 29, 2008 at the age of 59.

Hill was interviewed by The HistoryMakers on September 11, 2003.

Kosher meats firm cited for child labor violations
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 5:14 p.m. ET

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) -- Iowa labor officials said Tuesday that they had uncovered dozens of child labor violations at the nation's biggest supplier of kosher meat.

Officials from the state's Labor Commissioner's Office said their investigation, which spanned several months, uncovered 57 cases of child labor law violations at the Agriprocessors kosher meatpacking plant in Postville, where nearly 400 workers were arrested this spring in the largest immigration enforcement operation in U.S. history.

The types of violations included minors working in prohibited occupations, exceeding allowable hours for youth to work, failure to obtain work permits, exposure to hazardous chemicals and working with prohibited tools.

Well, isn't this special?

Tallahassee Democrat senior writer Stephen Price was singled out and asked to leave the area reserved for media at a rally for John McCain in Panama City, Florida, on Friday. He had showed his media credentials and employee i.d. in order to enter the area when a member of McCain's security detail asked him to leave. "I explained I was with the state press, but the Secret Service man said that didn't matter and that I would have to go," Price said. When another reporter asked why Price was being removed, she too was led out of the area.

Other state reporters remained. Price was the only black reporter among those surrounding McCain's bus ... was he being "profiled"?

You know Price's editor had to step up.

Jonathan Block of the McCain campaign, who was not there at the time of the incident, expressed regret, but stated, "I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt that race had nothing to do with it."

Change is inevitable; you adapt or die. So ultimately the Conservative goal of staying always the same is a cutural suicide pact. Conservatives will yield to the march of time.

But Liberals want to adjust as soon as a change becomes evident. Conservatives want to wait until it is unavoidable.

The Unavoidable Issue
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Tuesday, August 5, 2008; A19

Last week's dust-up over race between John McCain and Barack Obama was entirely disappointing. Obama spoke first about how his opponents would try to "make you scared of me," noting that he "doesn't look like all those other presidents" on our currency. What Obama said was true, but he made the tactical mistake of suggesting that McCain was complicit in overtly racial politics.

That gave Rick Davis, McCain's campaign manager, the excuse to offer the preposterous charge that Obama had "played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck."

But they won't.

Who's Raising Race?
The Messages Loaded Into a McCain Surrogate's Words
By Eugene Robinson
Tuesday, August 5, 2008; A19

I'm confident that Sen. Lindsey Graham and the rest of John McCain's front-line surrogates know full well what messages they're sending about Barack Obama and race. On the off chance that they -- or, more likely, some of the white voters they're trying to reach -- don't know text from subtext from context, here's a deconstruction.

On Sunday, the exceedingly thin-skinned Graham was still shocked, saddened and outraged over Obama's throwaway line, spoken days earlier, about not looking like previous presidents.

Graham said on "Fox News Sunday" that "there's no doubt in my mind that what Senator Obama is trying to suggest -- that he's a victim of something." Graham later added: "We're not going to run a campaign like he did in the primary. Every time somebody brings up a challenge to who you are and what you believe, 'You're a racist.' That's not going to happen in this campaign."

The key words are "victim" and "racist" -- which Obama did not say. Graham puts them in Obama's mouth because of their power to alienate.

Every time I see Pat Buchanan on TV, I wonder why Minister Farrakhan never got a pundit slot.

On the August 4 edition of MSNBC's Morning Joe, MSNBC political analyst Pat Buchanan praised an attack ad by Sen. John McCain's campaign that refers to Sen. Barack Obama as "The One" and claims "he has anointed himself." Buchanan said that the ad "goes right to an enormous vulnerability that Barack has created for himself with his grandiosity. I mean, his sense that 'I am the Messiah. I am the one the world has been waiting for.' " Echoing a comment he made last week, Buchanan referred to "that real question ... to be resolved -- because the issue in this campaign is Barack Obama" and said of Obama: "If he persuades Middle America he's the guy, he wins. So the real question has been, 'Who is this guy?' The question's now becoming, 'Who does this guy think he is?' ... I think that is the real question."

The part of McCain's commercial that holds the deeply coded racism is the Moses iconography. Just think about what Moses is credited with. He freed a nation that was unjustly enslaved.

The problem in the Bible Belt is they not only know Go Down Moses, but as Old Testament Christians, they believe it. They know the wages their own God serves to slavers. You may rule as long as Egypt did, but when God calls an end to it,

No more shall they in bondage toil,
Let my people go,
Let them come out with Egypt's spoil,
Let my people go.

Pharaoh said he'd go across,
Let my people go,
But Pharaoh and his host were lost,
Let my people go.

Jordan shall stand up like a wall,
Let my people go,
And the walls of Jericho shall fall,
Let my people go. 

This is where their concern about an era coming to an end is rooted. It's why the fear of reparations. It's because they believe in divinely dispensed justice, and they know this time they are Pharaoh.

This is not the sort of thing designed to endear these folk to my heart.

At the end of June, as the subprime mortgage crisis was driving the economy into a tailspin, Charles Steele Jr., the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), took to the op-ed page of the Washington Post to decry the devastating effect the meltdown was having on minority homeowners. But rather than support currently pending measures to better regulate the credit markets, the leader of one of the nation's oldest civil rights groups instead attacked them. Steele was particularly upset about a Federal Reserve proposal that would crack down on subprime credit cards—high-interest cards marketed to people with bad credit.

Of course I disagree with Juan Williams' conclusion that Obama must push Conservative ideas, but he actually said this in the Wall Street Journal today.

The race issue is clearly not going away. And the key reason -- to be blunt -- is because there is no telling how many white voters are lying to pollsters when they say they plan to vote for a black man to be president.

That is SO TRUE that I'm just going to give it up and not bitch about the rest of the article. I just can't help but wonder if he'll regret it the way Thomas Sowell caught heat over "Black Rednecks and White Liberals."

It could still be a borg...it's definitely an artificial, constructed entity.

It's on Washington Journal, talking about how race has been politicied for the last 40 years in the USofA...as though it wasn't politicized since the first Africans arrived in Jamestown. She is singularly ignorant of history and the free market.

The creature presents as well as a Black Conservative can. And I understand her issues...people who start as broke then a mug will psychically bond to whatever happened to break them out of it.

But when white folks talk race, and when creatures like Parker talk race, they start talking as though their aspirations are actually the case. Then they carry on their lives responding reflexively, biting their tongues, whispering behind people's backs.

As I said, after several months of race-based appeals you can't expect it to just stop. Plus, it was destined to come into play, but surreptiously. Pay particular attention to David Gergen.

It occurs to me that this may not be a matter of code words so much as language. I think Confederate English may be a different language than the consensus English we all think we speak.

Today the troubling inheritance of the Civil War has been turned into family entertainment. At The Point on Lookout Mountain above Chattanooga, I came across a small group of men who spend much of their spare time and disposable income re-enacting battles and reproducing camp life as it was in the 1860s. ("Civil Wargasms," one of the weekend Confederates at Lookout Point called them.) For many of the hobbyists the delight is in the details, right down to the paper cartridges in their muzzle-loading rifles and handmade buttons on their hot woolen uniforms. "We all know slavery was wrong," says Donald Davidson, whose day job is with the water department in Nashville. "War is not a nice thing. Hopefully we can show we can live together by reliving history like this."

But the subtext of old prejudices keeps creeping in even among the very young. Walking down to The Point one morning, a 12-year-old "private" in this particular Confederate unit told me what he'd heard tell in school about the elections. Next to nothing about McCain. But Obama? "There are too many chances we would take if he became president, you know what I mean?" I said I wasn't sure I did. "I don't know if it's a myth or it's true," said the boy, "but they say that they caught him trying to sneak Iraqi soldiers into the United States."

A journey through a troubled region.
Christopher Dickey
NEWSWEEK
Updated: 2:38 PM ET Aug 2, 2008

For as long as I've been alive the old Confederacy has been a land without closure, where history keeps coming at you day after day, year after year, decade after decade, as if the past were the present, too, and the future forever. Cities grew and populations changed in the South, but the Civil War lurked somehow in the shadow of mirror-sided skyscrapers; the holocaust of slavery and the sweet-bitter victories of the civil-rights movement lingered deep in the minds of people on both sides of the color line. Yes there was change, progress, prosperity, and a lot of it. Southerners put their faith in money and jobs and God Almighty to get them to a better place and better times—and for a lot of them, white and black, those times came. The South got to be a more complicated place, where rich and poor—which is pretty much all there was before World War II—gave way to a broad-spectrum bourgeoisie with big-time aspirations. But as air conditioning conquered the lethargy-inducing climate and Northerners by the millions abandoned the rust belt for the sun belt, the past wasn't forgotten or forgiven so much as put aside while people got on with their lives and their business.

Now this part of the country, where I have my deepest roots, feels raw again, its political emotions more exposed than they've been in decades. George W. Bush and Barack Hussein Obama have unsettled the South: the first with a reckless war and a weakened economy, the second with the color of his skin, the foreignness of his name, the lofty liberalism of his language. Suddenly the palliative prosperity that salved old, deep wounds no longer seems adequate to the task.

I do wonder if some folk's reactions are less helpful than they think.

Delicate Obama Path on Class and Race Preferences
By RACHEL L. SWARNS

In 1990, as his fellow students rallied to protest the dearth of black professors at Harvard Law School, Barack Obama wrote a vigorous defense of affirmative action. The campus was in an uproar over questions of race, and Mr. Obama, then the first black president of The Harvard Law Review, decided to take a stand.

Mr. Obama said he had “undoubtedly benefited from affirmative action” in his own academic career, and he praised the intellectual heft and wide-ranging views of his diverse staff.

“The success of the program speaks for itself,” he said of the law review’s affirmative action policy in a letter published in the school’s student newspaper.

First of all, having nothing to do with the next reviews, I actually meant to weave a reference or two from Trading Places into White History, Part II.

Thirty years ago, the mayor of Chicago was unseated by a snowstorm. A blizzard in January of 1979 dumped some 20 inches on the ground, causing, among other problems, a curtailment of transit service. The few available trains coming downtown from the northwest side filled up with middle-class white riders near the far end of the line, leaving no room for poorer people trying to board on inner-city platforms. African Americans and Hispanics blamed this on Mayor Michael Bilandic, and he lost the Democratic primary to Jane Byrne a few weeks later.

title:  White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Politics and Society in Twentieth Century America)
Kevin M. Kruse
asin:  0691133867
Binding: Paperback
List price: $18.95 USD

White Flight, Atlanta and The Making of Modern Conservatism by Kevin M. Kruse reports the reaction of mainstream white southerners to the events of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and onward. It focuses on Atlanta, GA because there were certain unique aspects to its development, but the same themes run through Atlanta's social history as though the rest of the ex-Confederacy's social history.

 from Camp Codependence by Judith Warner

In our society, you don’t have to be wealthy to suffer from affluenza. Its symptoms — “debt, overwork, waste, and harm to the environment, leading to psychological disorders, alienation, and distress,” in adults; “lack of motivation … apathy, laziness, or failure to commit to and achieve goals … overindulgence and attitudes of entitlement” in children, according to the New York University Child Study Center (pdf), are pervasive — and no one is immune.

For affluenza is not just a constellation of symptoms. It is an ethic, a play-the-system, lie-and-cheat-your-way-to-what-you-want, don’t-let-the-peons-stand-in-your-way ethic of amorality. You rock, kid, parents teach. And you — alone — rule.

The racial fantasy factor in this presidential campaign is out of control. It was at work in that New Yorker cover that caused such a stir. (Mr. Obama in Muslim garb with the American flag burning in the fireplace.) It’s driving the idea that Barack Obama is somehow presumptuous, too arrogant, too big for his britches — a man who obviously does not know his place.

Running While Black
By BOB HERBERT

Gee, I wonder why, if you have a black man running for high public office — say, Barack Obama or Harold Ford — the opposition feels compelled to run low-life political ads featuring tacky, sexually provocative white women who have no connection whatsoever to the black male candidates.

Spare me any more drivel about the high-mindedness of John McCain. You knew something was up back in March when, in his first ad of the general campaign, Mr. McCain had himself touted as “the American president Americans have been waiting for.”

“Ideally, you want to punch back right to the solar plexus,” said Chris Lehane, a Democratic strategist. “But when race gets injected, given the 200-year history of this country, it is really fraught with peril.” 

Injection implies that, after a pure start, race was found deep beneath the surface of things like some sort of abscess. But let's be real.

Not to reignite any smoldering embers but we just went through several months of explicitly race-based appeals to ethnic whites in the Democratic primaries. And don't play like Hillary was the only one making them, either. She was just the one using Southern Strategy tactics.

That sort of stuff is like farting in an elevator. You can't take it back.

More fundamentally, we ARE talking about a society in which race was a central organizing factor, economically and socially and therefore politically, since literally before day one. If you have a national scale discussion with no reference to race, it's because you've screened it out.

Race Proves to Be Unwelcome but Persistent Issue
By Juliet Eilperin and Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, August 2, 2008; A04

PANAMA CITY, Fla., Aug. 1 -- Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama tried yesterday to step back from a divisive debate over race, with each candidate denying that he was the first to inject the issue into the campaign.

Nonetheless, the candidates and campaigns battled throughout the day over the issue and over which side was engaged in "low road" politics, an indication that race is likely to remain a major point of contention in what is becoming an increasingly bitter contest.

For Obama, the argument was an unwelcome distraction that could complicate his efforts to win over voters who may be skeptical of a relative newcomer with an atypical background. It also pulled the focus away from his efforts to stress bread-and-butter economic issues. For McCain, any hint of racist tactics would hurt his efforts with the moderates and independents he needs to win in November.