Prometheus 6

And the moral is...

While a lot of people like to act like black people have some sort of corner on the self-victimhood market, after this conversation, I started paying close attention to people and realized an undeniable truth: when given sufficient opportunity, practically everybody is a victim. It seems to be as American as apple pie these days.

Kevin Drum kind of shocked me. He's a guy I have seen discuss race issues and come off pretty damn well. So when he responded to Ezra Klein thusly

I'm not sure this is really fair. First off, is there really a storybook version of civil rights that says we've overcome all our race problems in America? If there is, I haven't heard it....

Actually, if there's a real media myth about race, I'd say it's this peculiar suggestion that everyone thinks we've put race behind us. But no one thinks that. That's why we keep talking about it.

I decided I'd say something like, "My opponent has chosen to campaign in a negative fashion, and many people, even among my supporters, say I need to respond in like fashion. That I insist on talking you you all like adults is seen as a weakness. It is not. It is a choice. It is a kindness, which all too many people mistake for weakness."

"To prove it is a choice, for the next two weeks we are going to campaign against Mrs. Clinton the way she campaigns against us, just to show we can. Then we're going to return to campaigning as we should, as America needs both of us to. Hopefully when Mrs. Clinton sees the choices we've made she will join us in elevating the discussion to a true consideration of the issues that are important to America."

Some shit like that. And I'd do it just like that.

An Election Without Meaning
By Peter Phillips

Will November 2008 bring a meaningful change to America? Will getting rid of George W. Bush and Richard Cheney without impeachment or indictment really make a difference? Will a 600 billion dollar war/defense budget be cut in half and used for desperately needed domestic spending? Will the ninety-three billion dollars profits in the private health insurance companies­­—those parasitic intermediates between you and your doctor—be used instead for full health care coverage for all? Will Habeas Corpus and Posse Comitatus be restored to the people? Will torture stop and the US withdraw from Iraq immediately? Will all students in public universities be able to enroll for free? Will the US national security agencies stop mass spying on our personal communications? Will the neo-conservative agenda of total military domination of the world be reversed?

Sorry...born in America. There's no where to send me back to. And that you think there is shows the flaw in your thinking.

The Washington venture will preserve housing, but social ties have been undermined by the stretched-out construction schedule; some former tenants will wait as long as eight years to return, in the meantime using vouchers or staying in other public housing.

Martha Queen, 72, who is raising her 17-year-old great-grandson, has been lonely and depressed since she moved to a public unit in a different neighborhood, away from her friends.

“All the things you’re familiar with, they’re gone,” she said of her former home. “It’s all rubble now.”

“I just sit upstairs and look out the window,” she added. 

Washington’s Grand Experiment to Rehouse the Poor
By ERIK ECKHOLM

WASHINGTON — When District of Columbia officials tore down the decrepit housing project in southeast Washington where Samantha Jackson lived with her teenage son, they promised that they would build a more attractive, mixed-income community and that former tenants like herself could come back.

“I was very happy,” recalled Ms. Jackson, 42, a school custodian. “The area was rough and scary.”

Ms. Jackson, who has been staying with a friend since the demolition in 2004, is now in line to buy, with subsidies, a new apartment in a town house in the same neighborhood, and she can hardly wait. “It looks like Hollywood to me,” Ms. Jackson said of the onetime slum where glossy buildings and the Washington Nationals stadium are also rising.

Bucking national trends and citing what they call “a moral goal,” District of Columbia officials have pledged to preserve and even expand low-income housing, replacing dangerous projects with new communities that keep both poor and “work force” residents — firefighters, teachers and laborers — in the mix.

The redevelopment of the Arthur Capper and Carrollsburg projects, where Ms. Jackson lived, is the first in the country to promise replacement of all low-income units within the same neighborhood, said Michael Kelly, director of the city Housing Authority.

Jump in homicides not tied to racial animosity, LAPD says
No single factor can explain the increase, officials say.
By Joel Rubin
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
March 19, 2008 

Los Angeles Police Department officials, alarmed by the continued rise in the homicide rate this year, sought Tuesday to debunk the notion that racial animosity has been at the heart of many of the killings.

A detailed analysis of each of the homicides this year leaves little doubt that race is not the prime factor and that "the most likely suspect is one that looks just like their victim," Deputy Chief Charlie Beck said in a presentation to the department's civilian Police Commission.

By Monday, 93 people had been killed in Los Angeles this year, compared with 69 during the same period last year -- a nearly 35% increase. As the weeks pass, the bloodshed in 2008 grows worse than the previous year. Two weeks ago, for example, the increase in the homicide rate over last year stood at 27%. The rise is also outpacing those in New York City and Chicago -- cities that have seen significant, but less dramatic, increases this year, according to Det. Jeff Godown, who oversees the LAPD's extensive effort to analyze crime statistics.

In addressing the commission, however, Beck and Godown hammered on a message that top police officials have been sounding for weeks: that neither race nor any other single factor can explain the increase in homicides.

Mamie Clinton...hah!

Yeah, that's kinda blatant

Ta-Nehisi Coates has a blog. Since January.

Virtually every pundit who's spent the last week commenting on Rev. Wright has taken the position that Wright's views are likely not Barack Obama's. And yet many of them still believe that it is--and evidently should be--a tremendous hurdle for him to the presidency. This, to me, is the equivalent of standing in the middle of the street while a tractor trailer is barreling down on you, and getting pissed because the people telling you to get out the way happen to be yelling.

Your candidate is a cartoon, guys.

No joke. 

Strange, when you consider that we live in a culture that thrives on vituperation institutionalized by conservative talk radio - guys such as Rush Limbaugh are paid to be mad. But, of course, white anger is seen as fundamentally reasoned and righteous, and Americans have an almost limitless capacity to forgive it when it isn't. Talk-show host Don Imus was kicked off the airwaves for a racial insult he made against black women last May, but he was back at the microphone in six months' time. Mr. Limbaugh's many transgressions hardly raise an eyebrow, including taunting Mr. Obama as "Barack, the Magic Negro," a parody of "Puff, the Magic Dragon." William F. Buckley Jr. was eulogized as a genteel genius recently, his sanctioning of Jim Crow laws in the South in the 1950s written off as a forgettable faux pas. Mr. Buckley's real genius was dressing up white anger in the guise of intellect.

Black anger is never seen as intellectual in nature, merely primal, and black public figures therefore have no such latitude (unless, of course, they're in the conservative camp already, in which case they can rail to their hearts' content).

Hillary's Nasty Pastorate
Barbara Ehrenreich

There's a reason Hillary Clinton has remained relatively silent during the flap over intemperate remarks by Barack Obama's former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. When it comes to unsavory religious affiliations, she's a lot more vulnerable than Obama.

You can find all about it in a widely under-read article in the September 2007 issue of Mother Jones, in which Kathryn Joyce and Jeff Sharlet reported that "through all of her years in Washington, Clinton has been an active participant in conservative Bible study and prayer circles that are part of a secretive Capitol Hill group known as "The "Fellowship," also known as The Family. But it won't be a secret much longer. Jeff Sharlet's shocking exposé The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power will be published in May.

Evidence of New Jersey Election Discrepancies
March 19th, 2008 by Ed Felten

Press reports on the recent New Jersey voting discrepancies have been a bit vague about the exact nature of the evidence that showed up on election day. What has the county clerks, and many citizens, so concerned? Today I want to show you some of the evidence.

The evidence is a “summary tape” printed by a Sequoia AVC Advantage voting machine in Hillside, New Jersey when the polls closed at the end of the presidential primary election. The tape is timestamped 8:02 PM, February 5, 2008....

Democratic politicians in Florida and Michigan flouted party rules consciously and willfully. And the hilarious thing is, had they not they done so they would have been in precisely the definitive position they were seeking. 

So the rules only hold when you like the result?  Changing the rules now would be exactly like bailing out the mortgage banking industry.

Democrats in Stalemate
Voters in Florida and Michigan should not be excluded from the presidential primary.
Friday, March 21, 2008; A16 

THE COLLAPSE of efforts to conduct new primaries in Michigan and Florida leaves the Democratic Party in a pickle partly of its own making. That's not our concern. Our worry is about voters in Florida and Michigan. They shouldn't be punished because lawmakers and state party officials scheduled unauthorized early primaries or because national Democrats failed to anticipate the high cost of making good on their threat to ignore results from states that jumped the starting gun. The best solution -- one that seems all but impossible at the moment -- would be to hold new votes in both states, perhaps reducing their delegate allocation as a price for having tried to game the system. While it's unlikely that these do-overs would be enough to tip the nomination to either Sen. Barack Obama or Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, the more voters who participated, the more legitimacy would be accorded the ultimate outcome. Without a new vote, however, it's incumbent on the party and the candidates to come up with a fair way to dig themselves out of this mess.

Wall Street chafed at regulations that limited risk, but also limited potential profits. And little by little it wriggled free — partly by persuading politicians to relax the rules, but mainly by creating a “shadow banking system” that relied on complex financial arrangements to bypass regulations designed to ensure that banking was safe....

As the years went by, the shadow banking system took over more and more of the banking business, because the unregulated players in this system seemed to offer better deals than conventional banks. Meanwhile, those who worried about the fact that this brave new world of finance lacked a safety net were dismissed as hopelessly old-fashioned.

In fact, however, we were partying like it was 1929 — and now it’s 1930.

Partying Like It’s 1929
By PAUL KRUGMAN

If Ben Bernanke manages to save the financial system from collapse, he will — rightly — be praised for his heroic efforts.

But what we should be asking is: How did we get here?

Why does the financial system need salvation?

Why do mild-mannered economists have to become superheroes?

The answer, at a fundamental level, is that we’re paying the price for willful amnesia. We chose to forget what happened in the 1930s — and having refused to learn from history, we’re repeating it.

...if the objective is to encourage prudent banking and keep Wall Street’s wizards from periodically driving financial markets over the cliff, it is imperative to devise a remuneration system for bankers that puts more of their skin in the game.

...Better regulation of mortgage markets would help avoid repeating current excesses. But more fundamental correctives are needed to curb financiers’ appetite for walking a tightrope. Some economists have suggested making their remuneration contingent on the performance of their investments over several years — releasing their compensation gradually.

DISCLAIMER: The closest I get to Fox News is Newshounds.

It seems the New Black Panther Party is frequently called on by Fox News, which frankly isn't a good sign. And their leader, Malik Shabazz, was on Hannity and Colmes yesterday discussing the NBPP endorsement that was rejected. It seems Mr. Shabazz was ready for Mr. Hannity.

“Why won’t you acknowledge the brilliance of Barack Obama’s speech? Why won’t you accept his call to come out of the divisive throngs of racism?” Shabazz asked.

Hannity praised Obama as a very effective politician. Then Hannity added, “What I don’t think you’re understanding here, Malik, is that when you hear the minister of him for 20 years, when you hear the associations with Louis Farrakhan, one of the biggest racists and anti-Semites in the country, what you’re not understanding is, America hears extremism at its worst.”

Any interesting posts, articles, blogs I ought to know about? Speak now or hold your peace until I find you..

(I'm serious, so I'm sticking this to the top of the page for a day)

(Later: Still at the top...it's gonna be a slow day...)

But fair is fair. So where are the clips of me in Falwell's pulpit (back in the early 1980s before I dropped out of the evangelical movement) preaching to five thousand cheering white fundamentalists while I shouted; "God hates America for the murder of the unborn! We should be destroyed!"...

Fair is fair. So where are the clips -- playing incessantly next to Hillary Clinton's picture -- of her antiwar friends and Bill Clinton's fellow draft dodger members of the New Left, cursing and damning America during Vietnam War protests and since? The company that Bill and Hillary kept in the late 1960s through the 1970s was defined by damning America and sometimes by rooting for the North Vietnamese. Anti-American spewing also came from left wing white preachers. Read the fiery sermons of the late Episcopal bishop of New York Paul Moore, Jr. who raged against America....

Okay, while McCain was a prisoner of war his bishop Moore was rooting for McCain's torturers. How can McCain be a member of that denomination and be a real American, let alone commander in chief? Isn't it time he explains his anti-American white associations? Isn't it time McCain gives a speech to explain what it means to be a white in bed with hate-America white liberals..?

McCain's Church Hates America, Clinton's Friends Do Too -- But Let's Get the Black Guy (Or Not?)
Posted March 18, 2008 | 02:06 PM (EST)

Obama called us to our better selves today. Never mind that! Here's the latest new outrage from Obama's pastor! FOX News, CNN, MSNBC are all about to start playing new secret footage of Rev. Wright screaming:

If you lust after any woman grab a knife and gouge out your right eye and throw it in the trash. And if you're going to use your hand for masturbation cut it off or you're going to hell. I haven't come here to make peace but to bring war. I'm here to set a man against and his father and a daughter against her mother and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me and who doesn't want to get killed for me is damned. You mess with my people and you'll wish you'd hanged a stone around your neck and drowned yourself before I'm done with you!

Except, Obama's pastor didn't say any of that -- Jesus did.

So I guess all Christians must be disqualified from running for president. How can we trust any candidate that follows a violent Jewish-supremacist like Jesus? He called a woman of another race a dog just for talking to him! He said his enemies would all burn in a lake of fire...

Point of clarity:

The New Black Panthers, who inherited their name from the Black Panther Party of the 1960s,

They assumed the name, they didn't inherit it. And "to be fair":

He disputed the charge that his group advocates violence.

“That’s false. … And only constitutional self-defense will I stand by,” Shabazz said.

This is their response to accusations that they advocate violence.

“The fact that you guys decided to highlight one of million user-generated (pages) the day after (Senator) Obama gave a thoughtful speech … speaks more about the controversy you’re trying to create than the campaign,” he said before the campaign’s decision to remove the page.

Hey, It's Fox News. We expect no less.

Obama Camp Rejects New Black Panther Party Endorsement After Removing Web Posting
by FOXNews.com
Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Barack Obama’s campaign has rejected the support of the New Black Panther Party, after removing an endorsement by the group from its Web site Wednesday.

Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor issued a statement rejecting the Panther backing, and told FOXNews.com: “The page in question has been removed from our campaign Web site. It’s our policy with any content generated by a group that advocates violence.”

Clinton a long way from the White House at key foreign policy moments
Daniel Nasaw in Washington
guardian.co.uk,
Wednesday March 19 2008

On the day that dozens of US cruise missiles rained down on Serbia in an attempt to punish Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic for the country's onslaught against ethnic Albanian separatists in Kosovo, first lady Hillary Clinton was far from the White House war room: instead she was touring ancient Egyptian ruins, including King Tut's tomb and the temple of Hatshepsut. And on the day before the signing of the Good Friday agreement in Belfast she was at an event called "Hats on for Bella" in Washington.

In her bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton has touted her experience in the Clinton White House as preparation to lead the nation in a time of crisis. "Ready on day one" has been her slogan.

There are no studies showing that teaching chess has benefits for children, but there is anecdotal evidence, Mr. Luna said.

“One of the things that we hear is that too much of what we do is based on rote memorization,” Mr. Luna said. “The part I really like about this program is that kids are thinking ahead.”

Idaho Turns to Chess as Education Strategy
By DYLAN LOEB McCLAIN

Once a week, Deborah McCoy, a third-grade teacher in Donnelly, Idaho, unpacks chessboards and pieces and spends an hour teaching her 20 students how to play the game.

Mrs. McCoy does not do this because she is passionate about chess; she barely knew how to play before this school year. But she began teaching it as part of an unusual pilot program under way in more than 100 second- and third-grade classrooms across Idaho.

On Thursday, state officials will announce in Boise that the program will be extended in the fall to all second and third graders — making Idaho the first state to offer a statewide chess curriculum.

On the Internet and in many areas of the traditional news media, such a discussion was already taking shape. Some four million people watched Mr. Obama’s speech live, and it is now the top YouTube video.

The speech has stimulated passionate discussion on scores of blogs of varying ideological tendencies, and an article about the speech in The New York Times has provoked more than 2,250 comments.

Groups Respond to Obama’s Call for National Discussion About Race
By LARRY ROHTER and MICHAEL LUO

The speech Senator Barack Obama delivered Tuesday morning has been viewed more than 1.6 million times on YouTube and is being widely e-mailed. While commentators and politicians debated its political success Wednesday, some around the country were responding to Mr. Obama’s call for a national conversation about race.

Religious groups and academic bodies, already receptive to Mr. Obama’s plea for such a dialogue, seemed especially enthusiastic. Universities were moving to incorporate the issues Mr. Obama raised into classroom discussions and course work, and churches were trying to find ways to do the same in sermons and Bible studies.

The Rev. Joel Hunter, senior pastor of a mostly white evangelical church of about 12,000 in Central Florida, described Mr. Obama’s speech, in which the Democratic presidential candidate discussed his relationship with the former pastor of his home church in Chicago, as a kind of “Rorschach inkblot test” for the nation.

“It calls out of you what is already in you,” Dr. Hunter said, predicting that those desiring to address the topic would regard the speech as a spur, while those indifferent to issues of race might pay it little heed.