american black

Conservatives Continue To Ignore Constitution

The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights plans to air a commercial attacking Janice Rogers Brown as a "radical judge" unworthy of confirmation to the appeals court. For some reason, cheap labor conservatives see this as racism. How nutty is that?

Are they saying that Blacks should agree with every other Black? Isn't that the kind of thinking they claimed to be against?

Of Course this is not an isolated incident. The usual suspects are in a tizzy over a Facebook group entitled "Every Time I See a Black Republican, a Piece of Me Dies a Little." 

My ex-wife (the smart one) got her Masters from Tulane (the school in question). To think it is some liberal oasis is a joke.

Haven't these people learned anything from the Dixie Chicks fiasco. They looked like idiots because they forgot that America is about letting people say what they want even if you don't agree with it.

Will someone please give these people a copy of the Constitution.

 

One Liners (Sleep, Soft Porn and Baldilocks Edition)

• One Day Left to help Ian win a new pair of kicks.
• Never sleep again...really.
• Watch the 49er's Training Video.
• We almost got rid of one...

What Sharpton and Madonna Know That You Don't (Or How To Be As Popular As Angelina Jolie)

Is Rush Limbaugh back on the "pain medication"?

After delivering on-air remarks that he was considering allowing Rev. Al Sharpton to host his syndicated radio program for 30 minutes a day to "teach" Sharpton the ins and outs of the medium, Rush Limbaugh now seems to be backing off in the wake of Sharpton's quick acceptance.

I know we live in a virtual world but lets get real for a second. The best speaker on the National stage is Al Sharpton. If you heard his speech at the Democratic convention in 2000 you could not be anything but moved.(watch it here) I realize most white people hate his guts. That people see him as divisive. But if you have been listening to him for the past 3 years (when he finally understood he had a national audience) he has been making sense.

Here's my take on Al. Few people understand the power of a good soundbite like Sharpton. Few people know how to exploit the media's thirst for sensationalism like Al. He caught on to the same thing Madonna did. You polarize first. Get your core audience. Bring your message mainstream. And most important: Be entertaining.

Of course you'll be hated for a while (maybe forever to some unforgiving folks) but in the end you'll end up with everyone on your side.

This formula always works.

Look at Eminem. Or Public Enemy. Angelina Jolie. Or Madonna's first husband. Most politicians also live by the rules. Pick your enemies well. But they drop the ball with the entertainment factor. George Bush is President today because he was more entertaining than the other guy (Diebold was just backup).

I say all that to say this. Sharpton on the radio would literally kick-ass.  He'll change minds. And having Limbaugh's audience to kickstart his radio career would probably be the dumbest move a Republican ever made since invading Iraq.

Mark my words. It will not happen.

Abortion, Genocide and Garbage Can Lids

Life, in general, is a minefield. You take one step in the wrong direction and find your legs staring you in the back.

I'm a pro-abortion guy. Not just because I'm a guy but because I truly believe in my heart that grown folks should be able to do to what they want with their bodies. No one should suffer for the rest of their lives because of a one-night stand. We don't give most murderers life sentences but the fact that some of us want to do it to women is ludicrous. America is the land of second chances, ask Donald Trump, Martha Stuart and your next door neighbor. Mistakes happen.

But like I said, life is a minefield. And you never know who to trust.

Planned Parenthood is the largest abortion provider in America. 78% of their clinics are in minority communities. Blacks make up 12% of the population, but 35% of the abortions in America. Are we being targeted? Isn't that genocide? We are the only minority in America that is on the decline in population. If the current trend continues, by 2038 the black vote will be insignificant. Did you know that the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, was a devout racist who created the Negro Project designed to sterilize unknowing black women and others she deemed as undesirables of society? The founder of Planned Parenthood said, "Colored people are like human weeds and are to be exterminated." Is her vision being fulfilled today?

Tough questions. And I am not the only one twisting the abortion/genocide question in their mind.My take is a little different, though. It makes me wonder how important is history?

My favorite poet as a kid was e.e. Cummings. The verbal and visual inventiveness of his work fascinated me. But then as I got older I found his depictions of society's hypocrisy and monotony elitist and self-indulgent. Then one of my teachers claimed that some of his work features racist and anti-Semitic overtones. No matter what the truth is, I never looked at his poetry the same. It's like steak served on a garbage can lid.

So am I aiding my race's destruction by supporting abortions?  I really don't think so. It is a woman's right to her life that gives her the right to terminate her pregnancy. There are many legitimate reasons why a rational woman might have an abortion--accidental pregnancy, rape, birth defects, danger to her health. The issue here is the proper role for government. If a pregnant woman acts whoreish, then she should be condemned morally--but not treated as a murderer.

The anti-abortionists' claim to being "pro-life" is a classic Big Lie. You cannot be in favor of life and yet demand the sacrifice of an actual, living individual to a clump of tissue. It is serving women life on a garbage can lid.

 

George Bush's Africa Policy and Who's Not Paying Attention

I've been cruising the Black Republican websites and I see very few of them are talking about the meeting between Condoleezza Rice, "senior" White House officials and members of the black clergy on developing U.S policy in Africa.

Could it be they saw it for the sham it was?

The high-level session occurred the same day that the all-Democratic Congressional Black Caucus conducted a long-planned outreach meeting with 200 Black pastors from across the country seeking to solidify bonds between the Democrats and religious leaders. Could it be the State Department meeting was an effort to upstage the Black caucus?

Instead of dealing with the real problems facing Africa, like the genocidal wars and the AIDS epidemic, all they really focused on was care for orphans with AIDS. Noble but c'mon, it smells of an attempt to use the Black Churches to get more Black support but to really do nothing to help the continent long-term.

DuaneSmith says all this and more but better than I did here. And check out the LA Times article for more info. Just don't look at the Black Republican sites 'cuz, as usual, most of them aren't paying attention to what's happening to Black folks anyway...

War: What Is It Good For? (Republicans Can't Make Up Their Minds)

Cheap labor republican Micheal King continues to be confused.

He seems to think that Senator Rangel's a hypocrite because he was against the war and now calls for a draft.

Here we have a great disconnect which Republicans can't seem to grasp. If we are really at war then we should be doing everything we can to win. That means a draft. It means the public making sacrifices.

If what we are facing is not a "threat against Democracy and Our Way Of Life", then not only should we not have a draft, we don't need a soldier in Iraq. It's not Rangel who is confused. It's the Republican party who are using our soldiers to benefit multinational corporations under the cover of "the fight against terror" that's the problem.

The End Of Civil Rights?

U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is closing offices around the country.

The commission will shutter the Denver office and another in Kansas City, Kan., in October, laying off six people.

The move will force anyone with a federal civil rights complaint in those districts to seek help in the commission's Chicago office. The Denver office covers Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Utah and Colorado, while the Kansas City office oversees complaints in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Iowa, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Missouri.

Some say the office closings are a harbinger of the slow death of the civil rights agency, which, riven by partisan politics, long ago strayed from being the "conscience of the federal government," as President Dwight D. Eisenhower intended when he created it as part of the 1957 Civil Rights Act.

The commission has been plagued by political power struggles and by fighting among its Republican and Democratic members.

Cheap labor conservatives in Congress kept its budget at $9 million for most of the 12-year term of

liberal Chairwoman Mary Frances Berry, who left the commission in December. That is $3 million less than its budget during the Reagan administration. The new Staff director is Kenneth Marcus.

Some members of Congress start to get it...

Even members of Congress have started noticing it...

The American media has drifted toward tabloid journalism and has been cowtailed by the Bush administration over its coverage of events such as the war in Iraq, a congressional panel organized by Michigan Rep. John Conyers said Tuesday.
 
"The vast majority of the mainstream media is not only unwilling to accurately report on the failings of the administration, but the few who do have fallen victim to scapegoating and retribution," said Conyers, a Democrat. "We have turned from breaking stories like Watergate and the Iran-Contra scandal to celebrity journalism."
 

But they are noticing more than the media problem. Remember Walter Jones, the Republican congressman for North Carolina who was  the brains behind french fries becoming freedom fries in Capitol Hill restaurants? Now he's against the war:

Although he voted for the war, he has since become one of its most vociferous opponents on Capitol Hill, where the hallway outside his office is lined with photographs of the "faces of the fallen".

"If we were given misinformation intentionally by people in this administration, to commit the authority to send boys, and in some instances girls, to go into Iraq, that is wrong," he told the newspaper. "Congress must be told the truth."

It took long enough, for Congress to get over their war euphoria,  hopefully it's not too late.

The Terrifying Spectre of Revenge

The Huffington Post has a post by  Randall Robinson author of The Debt – What America Owes to Blacks

The question never posed by Americans, perhaps not even to themselves, is the question that obsesses the most resilient of the world’s cultural, political, and economic victims – Do we Americans see ourselves as we are seen by the eyes of the world?

My fear is that the Iraq war, which American leaders tragically misunderstood from the very beginning, may mark the opening of a horrific chapter in human history with painful implications for the entire planet.

Terrorism, put simply, is war, privatized. It is vastly more mobile, and easier to mount and prosecute successfully, than state-mounted war.

We must face the fact that our country has done hurtful things in the world that the vast majority of Americans know little to nothing about. The victims remember, however, even if we cannot.

We are now entering, I fear, Einstein’s doomsday nightmare.

In the beginning, only America had nuclear weapons. Then, Britain. Now North Korea, India, and Pakistan. Soon, if not already, (according to the writer Arundhati Roy), Israel, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, South Korea, Cuba, Nepal, Germany, Bhutan, Mexico, Denmark, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Bosnia, Singapore, Burma, Uzbekistan. Even Afghanistan, and then, sooner or later, and probably sooner, much sooner, private religious, ethnic, and racial armies, where all wounds are fresh and well-remembered.

A little humility and a measure of foresight might have spared us all the monstrous forthcoming grief.

"I haven't been f*cked like that since grade school" (Tyler Durden, Danielle Gray and the Supreme Court)

I always get kinda Tyler Durden-ish  whenever I think about the Supreme Court. Ever since the 2000 debacle trust in the judiciary  has skewed downward. The power they abused in that Presidential election has now come to bite them in the proverbial ass and all of us will suffer for it for years to come.

That's why I was kinda surprised to read an admitted  federal judicial starf***er's post about incoming law clerk for Justice Stephen G. Breyer, Danielle Gray. She seems like the kind of person the Justices and other young people need to be hanging around. Maybe the new over-achieving Black chick will be able to knock to sense into the heads of her soon to be power-broker colleagues. (And please do not confuse her with  Chantel Febus , a Janice Rogers Brown in training, clerking and trading lynch mob stories with Justice Clarence Thomas).
 

1. Danielle Gray (Harvard '03/Garland '03-'04)

Tidbits:

(a) after clerking for Big Pimpin' Feeder Judge Merrick Garland, Danielle Gray worked on the policy staff of Barack Obama's Senate campaign, then joined the Washington office of O'Melveny & Myers (her current place of employment);
(b) originally from Long Island, she went down south to Duke for college;
(c) not surprisingly, she is "an ardent Blue Devils fan," who "adores J.J. Redick and most of all Coach K";
(d) "she performed superbly in a 1L Ames [moot court] competition against two current members of the Elect, Michael Gottlieb and [Dorothy] Hien Tran (who were also outstanding, and who are now Danielle's good friends)";
(e) Danielle "came up with an incisive interpretation of Shaw v. Reno during a Law of Democracy class at Harvard Law School that was thereafter known as the 'Gray Thesis' (I'm not positive, but the Gray Thesis may have shown up on the exam)";
(f) she was one of the three primary authors of the Harvard BLSA (Black Law Students Association) amicus brief in Grutter v. Bollinger;
(g) she was voted "most likely to be a Supreme Court justice" by the HLS class of 2003 (the honor won by future Stevens clerk Sam Spital in 2004);
(h) she has "a keen sense of humor"; and
(i) she is "an all-around delightful person," "one of the most charming people you'll ever meet" -- "[i]f you don't like Danielle, you are per se a bad person!"

It's nice to see people like Ms. Gray having a chance to clerk despite the cheap-labor conservatives who have taken over the courts.

Underneath Their Robes has profiles of all the the folks who will be clerking at the Supreme Court, organized by justice: WHR, JPS, SOC, AS, AMK, DHS, CT, RBG, SGB. Very interesting reading.