Prometheus 6

via Dallas South Blog...look for it on PBS's Independant Lens in February.

From the 1860s to the 1920s, towns across the U.S. violently expelled African American residents.

Today, these communities remain virtually all white.

As black descendants return to demand justice, BANISHED exposes the hidden history of racial cleansing in America.

Read more about the film

THE PLACES

At least 12 different counties in eight states banished their black populations. More than 4,000 black residents were expelled from their homes.

Explore the counties in the film and view a map of U.S. banishments

You got people with no knowledge of science or scientific method deciding what to teach your kids about science.

Teaching of Darwin initiates debate
State panel proposes evolution for curriculum
By Bill Cotterell
news-press.com Tallahassee bureau
Originally posted on January 10, 2008

TALLAHASSEE — The final stage in the evolution of a new public-school science curriculum began Wednesday as a panel of teachers, administrators and other experts on learning began three days of sessions on education topics.

The proposed new science standards, which would teach Charles Darwin's evolution theory as the foundation of modern biology, have been favorably received by teachers and scientists.

However, in four public hearings and thousands of postings on a Department of Education Web site dedicated to public comment, many parents and other observers have objected that the teachings should include faith-based theories of creation.

We use oil to make an astounding number of things...gasoline was a waste product that we switched to from ethanol because it was essentially free.

"Cost competitive, energy responsible cellulosic ethanol made from switchgrass or from forestry waste like sawdust and wood chips requires a more complex refining process but it's worth the investment," Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said at the Range Fuels facility groundbreaking in November. "Cellulosic ethanol contains more net energy and emits significantly fewer greenhouse gases than ethanol made from corn."

Grass Makes Better Ethanol than Corn Does
Midwestern farms prove switchgrass could be the right crop for producing ethanol to replace gasoline
By David Biello

Farmers in Nebraska and the Dakotas brought the U.S. closer to becoming a biofuel economy, planting huge tracts of land for the first time with switchgrass—a native North American perennial grass (Panicum virgatum) that often grows on the borders of cropland naturally—and proving that it can deliver more than five times more energy than it takes to grow it.

Polish teen derails tram after hacking train network
By John Leyden
Published Friday 11th January 2008 11:56 GMT

A Polish teenager allegedly turned the tram system in the city of Lodz into his own personal train set, triggering chaos and derailing four vehicles in the process. Twelve people were injured in one of the incidents.

The 14-year-old modified a TV remote control so that it could be used to change track points, The Telegraph reports. Local police said the youngster trespassed in tram depots to gather information needed to build the device. The teenager told police that he modified track setting for a prank.

"He studied the trams and the tracks for a long time and then built a device that looked like a TV remote control and used it to manoeuvre the trams and the tracks," said Miroslaw Micor, a spokesman for Lodz police.

Liza just called me the godfather of the political Blackosphere. My first thought was, "Huh? When did that happen?"

C-SPAN and the University of Denver put together a class on the impact of the presentation tactics of the presidential candidates leading up to and during the NH debates.

I don't think Hillary polls well with these students. It is striking how little attention they paid Hillary.

On December 28th, President Bush announced his plan to veto the defense authorization bill over an obscure provision regarding the new Iraqi government and the rights of prisoners of war. The White House is worried that Americans victimized by Saddam's former regime might use the legislation to secure compensation in court, jeopardizng Iraq's assets held in U.S. banks.

The veto took a lot of people by surprise, because normally the president lets Congress know in advance if legislation they are passing is likely to be vetoed. And there's controversy about the veto itself -- President Bush claims this is a pocket-veto, which the president can use when Congress is out of session, and which Congress cannot override. But Congress is not out of session, so Congressional leaders are considering efforts to override the veto.

That's right. The partisan divide is so wide now that Congress and the president can't even agree on the meaning of the word "veto."

Don't even think of overriding that "veto." Take this to the Supreme Court. Press them for immediate consideration because the troops cannot be funded until it is settled.

Fed Chief Talks of 'Decisive' Action
Addressing Slump, Bernanke Signals Another Rate Cut
By Neil Irwin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 11, 2008; A01

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke yesterday signaled that the central bank will cut interest rates aggressively to try to prevent a serious economic downturn, using unusually direct and forceful language.

In the past two weeks, new evidence has emerged that the United States is at risk of entering a recession. Just yesterday the nation's largest retail chains reported weak December sales, and credit card companies American Express and Capital One said they are seeing more unpaid bills.

In a speech in Washington, Bernanke said fed policymakers "must remain exceptionally alert and flexible, prepared to act in a decisive and timely manner and, in particular, to counter any adverse dynamics that might threaten economic or financial stability."

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
THURSDAY, JAN. 10, 2008

Robert Bernstein
Public Information Office
301-763-3030/763-3762 (fax)
301-457-1037 (TDD)
e-mail: <pio@census.gov>

CB08-10
Broadcast release [PDF]
Detailed tables
Photos

One-Third of Young Women Have Bachelor’s Degrees

About 33 percent of young women 25 to 29 had a bachelor’s degree or more education in 2007, compared with 26 percent of their male counterparts, according to tabulations released today by the U.S. Census Bureau.

The series of tables, Educational Attainment in the United States: 2007, showed that among adults 25 and older, men remain slightly more likely than women to hold at least a bachelor’s degree (30 percent compared with 28 percent). However, as the percentage for women rose between 2006 and 2007 (from 27 percent), it remained statistically unchanged for men.

Of course we do, tons of it...

Barack Obama and the African American Community: A Debate with Michael Eric Dyson and Glen Ford

Does Barack Obama present a hope for dealing with African American issues? Or has he watered down his platform to appeal to white voters? Georgetown University Professor Michael Eric Dyson and veteran journalist Glen Ford debate. [includes rush transcript

Guests:

Michael Eric Dyson, Professor at Georgetown University, where he teaches Theology, English and African American Studies. He is the author of 14 books including “Debating Race,“ "Come Hell or High Water” and “Is Bill Cosby Right.” He has been named by “Ebony” as one of the 100 Most Influential African Americans.

Glen Ford, Veteran journalist and Executive Editor of Black Agenda Report.com, a weekly journal of African American political thought and action.

Darryl Cox , an African-American policy consultant who lives in Seattle [P6: and, coincidentally, a participant here], says, “If black folks do not believe Sen. Obama has a credible chance of winning the nomination, then it would make little sense to vote for him on the basis of race pride alone.” ...

Cox says people in the black and progressive communities will not stop addressing social justice and racial issues simply because he is president. “On the other hand, it is not realistic to expect that these issues will always be at the top of his agenda,” he says.

“He is running to be elected as president of the United States, not as president of black America, which I believe many, many moderate whites of good will and more than a few blacks need to keep in mind,” Cox says.

History in the Making?
Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton race for the White House and break ground in the process.

The U.S. Constitution is held up as a model document for the principles it enshrines – freedom, equality and justice. But for more than two centuries since its adoption in 1787, those august principles have been more promise than reality. It’s only four decades since the Voting Rights Act removed all curbs on the right to vote for blacks  and the Supreme Court ruled that anti-miscegenation laws – which banned interracial marriage – were illegal.

The lack of progress on race and gender issues is well-reflected in the highest of political institutions. Over the course of American history, less than 2 percent of U.S. senators have been women, and only five blacks have ever been elected to the Senate.

Never in the course of our history has a woman or a person of color broken through the most impenetrable of glass ceilings – the White House.

Yet 2008 promises to be a year where the concept of “We, the People” might, for the first time, actually mean all of us. With the very real possibility of a woman (Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y.) or a mixed-race African-American (Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill.) ascending to the country’s highest office, issues of race and gender are front and center this political season.

The first is the rise in wealth for a segment of the population. "For them, money is not much of an object," she said. At the same time, upper-income parents have become focused on providing optimal educational and social experiences for their children. "There has been a cultural change to what's called 'intensive mothering,'" said England.

Added Sabrina Neeley, assistant professor of marketing at Ohio's Miami University, who has studied national data about how mothers make purchasing decisions: "So many times, price is used as a proxy for quality or status. They're going to feel like this is going to give their child an advantage."

A new twist on pay to play
Ex-Chicago teacher brings pricey playpen to San Francisco
By Jane Meredith Adams, Special to the Tribune
January 11, 2008

SAN FRANCISCO

Diapers: check. Nanny: check. Membership in an exclusive playground for the infant-to-5-year-old crowd: coming this month.

For a family fee of $2,000 a year, a baby in this terrifically expensive city soon will be able to skip the neighborhood sandbox, crawl right past the YMCA and join a posh 10,000-square-foot indoor kids' club that is designed to offer a premium experience of early childhood.

Todd Davis is the CEO of LifeLock, a company that offers a mostly useless $10 per month identity theft protection service. In an effort to eat his own dogfood, and promote his company's service, Mr. Davis includes his social security number in all of the company's advertisements--see here. A full page ad in this week's USA Today had his SSN listed in big letters.

Making a mockery of LifeLock's identity theft protections, a Texas man in 2006 was able to secure a $500 payday loan with Mr. Davis' social security number....

Thus, I now introduce Soghoian's Law of Identity Theft Stupidity: Anyone who publishes their own private financial details in a public discussion of identity theft will eventually find that information used for fraud.

Twice bitten: Acts of stupidity can lead to identity theft
Posted by Chris Soghoian

A British TV presenter has learned the hard way that identity theft is serious, and in the process, become the joke of the moment for privacy bloggers. More importantly, this is the second time in just one year that such a thing has happened. This blog post explores the latest incident, looks back to the past, and then concludes with a more broad analysis.

"Hey Earl, where's the $20 you owe me?"

"That was Earl that borrowed the money. I'm Steven, now..." 

By buying Countrywide, he's keeping the industry and regulators from the messy task of figuring out who would take on the responsibility of collecting payments for the millions of U.S. home loans serviced by the Calabasas, Calif.-based lender.

BofA to Buy Countrywide for $4B in Stock
By IEVA M. AUGSTUMS
AP Business Writer
6:53 AM CST, January 11, 2008

CHARLOTTE, N.C.

Bank of America Corp. said Friday it has agreed to buy Countrywide Financial for $4 billion in stock, a deal that both rescues the country's biggest mortgage lender and expands the financial services empire of the nation's largest consumer bank.

The acquisition will make Charlotte-based Bank of America the nation's biggest mortgage lender and loan servicer.

"Countrywide presents a rare opportunity for Bank of America to add what we believe is the best domestic mortgage platform at an attractive price and to affirm our position as the nation's premier lender to consumers," Bank of America chief executive Ken Lewis said in a statement.

Edelman's method is instead designed to minimize the difference between the most over-represented state and the most under-represented one, in terms of the difference between the actual number of people per representative and the ideal number. This is done through an iterative process that evaluates 385 scenarios to find this minimum total deviation. He argues that this comes closest to matching the ideal of “one person, one vote”.

Using his method for populations in 2000, Montana, Delaware, South Dakota, Utah and Mississippi would each gain one seat; Texas, New York, Florida, Ohio and North Carolina would lose one; and California would lose three. “That could very well freak people out,” says Edelman.

Mathematician proposes another way of divvying up the US House
As the US campaign revs up, mathematicians debate how states should be represented.
Eric Hand

With 53 seats in the US House of Representatives, California has long dominated congressional and electoral politics. Now mathematician Paul Edelman says that a much-needed rehaul of the way these seats are assigned would knock them down three notches.

Edelman, who is also a law professor at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, is proposing a different method for apportionment, the process that divvies up the 435 congressional representatives based on state populations. He claims his method is fairer than the existing one because it comes closest to the "one person, one vote" ideal set forth by the US Supreme Court. The current method "takes no account of what the law has to say", argues Edelman, who outlined his method in a talk on 6 January at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Diego, California.

I tried watching the Republican debate. The tax cut rhetoric was too much for me. They're still claiming tax cuts alone raise revenue, and that's simply not true.

Let me begin by pointing to the question of ethnicity and say this: In the same way you ought to be surprised to meet a white American denying the existence of racism in American politics, so should you be when you meet an African denying that ethnocentrism is deeply entrenched in African politics. Racism is a historical creation that serves a function – so is ‘tribalism.’ In the same way that leaders in the West manipulate race and fear for political goals, so do African leaders. Ethnocentrism can be benign or extremely vicious depending on its conductor. Ethnocracy, like a racist power structure, exists to the extent it is able to obscure for the victim and the activist the root causes of economic, political and social exploitation. It misdirects.

Let us also consider Kwame Ture’s (Stokely Carmichael) reminder that we should not mistake individual success for collective success. The majority of Kenyans -- Luos, Kikuyus, Luhyas etc -- are poor. The 60 percent of Kenyans living under two dollars a day cut across all ethnicities. The Kikuyu elite live at the expense of the Kikuyu poor; it is the same for other ethnicities. There is much more in common between the poor across ethnicities, than between the elite and the poor of each ethnicity. Racism, nationalism, and ethnocracy all ask that the poor die in the defense of economic and social structures that keep them poor. It is no surprise that those who have been both dying and doing the killing in Kenya in the past week are the poor. Yet they are killing along ethnic, not class, lines.

Let us not find revolutionaries where there are none
A look at the Kenyan opposition party
Mukoma wa Ngugi (2008-01-10)
Mukoma Wa Ngugi argues that rather than being a people power movement, Kenya’s Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) is modeled after political parties that consolidate democracy for International capital and US Foreign Policy. He discusses the differences between a people powered movement and one such as ODM that employs techniques modeled after the Ukrainian orange revolution and the ouster of Aristide in Haiti

One cannot fully grasp what is happening in Kenya and Africa without considering the changing nature of opposition movements and the differences between a people powered movement, or a democratic revolution, and a plethora of movements that consolidate democratic institutions for international capital while flying under the radar of democracy.

And I don't want to hear shit about patriotic corporations acting to help safeguard us blah blah blah.

The earliest critiques of digital voting booths came from the fringe — disgruntled citizens and scared-senseless computer geeks — but the fears have now risen to the highest levels of government. One by one, states are renouncing the use of touch-screen voting machines. California and Florida decided to get rid of their electronic voting machines last spring, and last month, Colorado decertified about half of its touch-screen devices. Also last month, Jennifer Brunner, the Ohio secretary of state, released a report in the wake of the Cuyahoga crashes arguing that touch-screens “may jeopardize the integrity of the voting process.” She was so worried she is now forcing Cuyahoga to scrap its touch-screen machines and go back to paper-based voting — before the Ohio primary, scheduled for March 4. Senator Bill Nelson, a Democrat of Florida, and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, have even sponsored a bill that would ban the use of touch-screen machines across the country by 2012.

Can You Count on Voting Machines?
By CLIVE THOMPSON

Jane Platten gestured, bleary-eyed, into the secure room filled with voting machines. It was 3 a.m. on Nov. 7, and she had been working for 22 hours straight. “I guess we’ve seen how technology can affect an election,” she said. The electronic voting machines in Cleveland were causing trouble again.

For a while, it had looked as if things would go smoothly for the Board of Elections office in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. About 200,000 voters had trooped out on the first Tuesday in November for the lightly attended local elections, tapping their choices onto the county’s 5,729 touch-screen voting machines. The elections staff had collected electronic copies of the votes on memory cards and taken them to the main office, where dozens of workers inside a secure, glass-encased room fed them into the “GEMS server,” a gleaming silver Dell desktop computer that tallies the votes.

Then at 10 p.m., the server suddenly froze up and stopped counting votes. Cuyahoga County technicians clustered around the computer, debating what to do. A young, business-suited employee from Diebold — the company that makes the voting machines used in Cuyahoga — peered into the screen and pecked at the keyboard. No one could figure out what was wrong. So, like anyone faced with a misbehaving computer, they simply turned it off and on again. Voilà: It started working — until an hour later, when it crashed a second time. Again, they rebooted. By the wee hours, the server mystery still hadn’t been solved.

from MoveOn.org, by email, because you need to know if you're actually registered to vote.

Working with the folks at Catalist, we've built VotePoke, a new website that for the first time lets you quickly and easily check to see whether you are registered to vote, and then invite your friends to do the same. Click here to get started:

http://votepoke.org

If you aren't registered, you can use VotePoke to register online in just minutes. VotePoke also lets you invite friends—and if your friends aren't registered, you can gently "poke" them until they do, using our handy online tool.

Voter registration is public information, but states don't make it easy to access. So until now, this data has mostly been available to the political consultants, but not to real people. Now, with VotePoke, all that's changing—anyone can make sure their friends are signed up and registered.

‘American Gladiators:’ A Breakout Hit?
By Brian Stelter

Is “American Gladiators” the unexpected hit of the 2007-08 television season?

It’s far too early to say anything definitive, but Sunday’s two-hour premiere of the NBC reality competition “delivered the highest ratings among adults 18 to 49 of any new show this season on any network,” Benjamin Toff noted earlier this week.

The program drew an average of 12 million viewers on Sunday, gaining viewers during each half hour, and another 11 million when a second episode was shown in what will become its normal time slot on Monday night. This week a repeat will be shown on Sunday at 10 p.m., in a time slot originally filled by the Golden Globes.

Let's be clear: there is no explanation for your staff passing on the terrorist smear, or raising questions about drug dealing as they have, that will satisfy me.

That said, I understand your efforts to be relevant but the fact is you have no experience using Black cultural expressions. So tell your people to stop trying. Black folks have a lifetime of experience understanding standard English.

The method they used was simple. They talked with people and got to know them by listening patiently, in conversations at the postoffice, the market, at meetings and church services. At the same time they gave people in the community daily opportunities to get to know them as individuals who were respectful to women and the elderly, who kept their word and lived up to values respected in the community.

It was only after the legitimacy of the “movement” had been established by this kind of “slow and respectful” organizing in the community that they began to mobilize large numbers in marches and demonstrations.

Organizing comes before mobilizing
By Grace Lee Boggs
Special to The Michigan Citizen

Last week veteran Detroit activist and TV producer Ron Scott shared his thoughts on the recent massive demonstrations in support of the Jena 6. Emphasizing the distinction between organizing and mobilizing, he reminded us that the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which began fifty-two years ago on December 1, 1955 and lasted more than a year, was the culmination of years of organizing by local activists like NAACP stalwarts E.D.Nixon and Rosa Parks.

“Had the people of Montgomery merely come out for one day and gone home, we would have nothing to write about today.”

This distinction between organizing and mobilizing is especially important in this period when in Detroit and other parts of the country and the world, we are in the very early stages of building a 21st century movement to rebuild our communities and our cities, while also addressing the interconnected issues of planetary emergency, the imperial presidency and the calamity of the invasion of Iraq.

Obama’s Ads Too ‘Black’
by Lerone D. Wilson

The Obama campaign began amidst a flurry of doubt from African Americans, the biggest question allegedly being “is he ‘black’ enough?” Most dismissed the question as offensive, citing the fact that a group of people shouldn’t be expected to adhere to a particular set of behaviors, especially if those behaviors are stereotypes.

But is stereotyping black people OK if Obama does it?

After the Racism is 'Over' post, I expected better.

What he's talking about is a commercial running in South Carolina, where the theme music is a variant of that which the campaign used in Iowa and New Hampshire. The music in S.C. has a slightly more jazzy feel to it, as opposed to

the type of music you’d expect to hear in a film about a rag tag group of disabled war veterans taking on the New York Yankees in a baseball game that could win them enough money to pay for the mayor’s wife’s heart operation she will die without having.

With all the commercials in the world having R & B background music I have to ask just what the beef is here.

For some observers, the approach indicates a new realism in Washington, a recognition that long years of grandiose plans drawn from U.S. templates have not worked in Iraq. But others charge that the phrase "Iraqi solutions" implies a cynical U.S. willingness to turn a blind eye to sectarianism, political violence and a wealth of papered-over problems -- if that is the price of getting the United States out of Iraq.

"The new phrasing is both the dawning of reality, and the cynical use of language and common sense to camouflage past errors, hoping to avoid the audit of flawed logic that got us to this point," said a retired British general familiar with the U.S. experience in Iraq, and who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of his current position.

For U.S., The Goal Is Now 'Iraqi Solutions'
Approach Acknowledges Benchmarks Aren't Met
By Thomas E. Ricks and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, January 10, 2008; A01

In the year since President Bush announced he was changing course in Iraq with a troop "surge" and a new strategy, U.S. military and diplomatic officials have begun their own quiet policy shift. After countless unsuccessful efforts to push Iraqis toward various political, economic and security goals, they have decided to let the Iraqis figure some things out themselves.

From Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker to Army privates and aid workers, officials are expressing their willingness to stand back and help Iraqis develop their own answers. "We try to come up with Iraqi solutions for Iraqi problems," said Stephen Fakan, the leader of a provincial reconstruction team with U.S. troops in Fallujah.