Focusing on the extraordinary women behind the two men who would change history, "Betty & Coretta" tells the similar true stories of Coretta Scott King (Angela Bassett), wife of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (Malik Yoba), and Dr. Betty Shabazz (Mary J. Blige), wife of Malcolm X (Lindsay Owen Pierre). When their husbands were tragically assassinated, these two women not only inherited the mantle of the civil rights movement in America, each also found herself to be a single mother who had to find a way to raise and support her children with no husband or father, resulting in a relationship like no other that spanned more than three decades.
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| Michael D'Antuono: A Tale of Two Hoodies |
Next month, the Supreme Court will take up a challenge to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the most effective law of its kind in the history of the United States. A century after the Civil War, the act, in abolishing many forms of discrimination employed by the Southern states, such as poll taxes and literacy tests, finally turned the legal right for African-Americans in those states to vote into an actual right to vote. Bipartisan congressional majorities have reauthorized the law four times, most recently in 2006. (It passed the House overwhelmingly and the Senate unanimously, and was signed into law by George W. Bush.) The question now is whether the Supreme Court will strike down the Voting Rights Act as a violation of states’ rights.
Gun violence saturates our children’s lives and relentlessly threatens them every day. It has romped through their playgrounds; invaded their birthday parties; terrorized their Head Start classrooms, child care centers, and schools; frolicked down the streets they walk to and from school; danced through their school buses; waited at the red light and bus stop; lurked behind trees; run them down on the corner; shot them through their bedroom windows, on their front porches, and in their neighborhoods.
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| Celebrating the deaths of countless humans for political gain |
People here in the Bay Area have pretty strong feelings about Occupy Oakland. Overall, people are not cool with it. There are real concerns among everyday people about the right of free speech and free assembly being trampled upon. Hundreds of cops used tear gas, rubber bullets and flash bang grenades against peaceful protesters. And it is not pretty. It looks like a war zone. Let this be a warning to mayors who want to bust up Occupy protests in the name of cleanliness or law & order.The Occupation will not be televised
During the Occupy Oakland march tonight (Tuesday), ABC News in the Bay area shut cameras off on the ground and in the sky the moment police attacked.Cheryl Contee (Jill Tubman) again;
They said the chopper needed to refuel and will be back, but we all know this was not correct. A coincidence that both CBS and ABC choppers needed to refuel at the time police started attacking?
[...]
There was a camera on the ground for a full minute showing exploding canisters, people screaming, and gas being covered everywhere and that was shut off shortly after.
This is the constitution, protests are allowed by it. For CBS and ABC to shut the cameras off during the time police violated the rights of the American people is journalism at the worst, in fact not even close to the integrity a real media outlet should bring.
A BlackMan's ViewI don’t really have more to add to that. I mean, what makes us different from places like Syria and Egypt and Libya are our freedoms — including freedom of the press. Journalists’ job is to cover events not cower under police pressure to cover their brutality.
I'm just saying it's the media we have instead of the media we wish we had. If they spent their time informing the masses and telling us what we need to know instead of what they want us to know maybe we wouldn't be in this mess.All this "occupy" bullshit needs to be redirected towards it's roots.And the roots run directly beneath Washington DC.These "occupiers" need to take their occupation (insert city here)... to the ballot boxes of that city.
Cut the head off the snake and the body will die.
I'm just saying...
"And the United States of America government, when it came to treating her citizens of Indian descent fairly, she failed. She put them on reservations. When it came to treating her citizens of Japanese descent fairly, she failed. She put them in internment prison camps. When it came to treating her citizens of African descent fairly, America failed. She put them in chains, the government put them on slave quarters, put them on auction blocks, put them in cotton field, put them in inferior schools, put them in substandard housing, put them in scientific experiments, put them in the lowest paying jobs, put them outside the equal protection of the law, kept them out of their racist bastions of higher education and locked them into positions of hopelessness and helplessness. The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, not God Bless America. God damn America — that's in the Bible — for killing innocent people. God damn America, for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America, as long as she tries to act like she is God, and she is supreme. The United States government has failed the vast majority of her citizens of African descent.."Did the "Oakland Occupy Wall Street" protesters break any windows downtown Oakland or were they looters? Did they commit any violent act? Nope! They did not. In fact, they were so peaceful you would have hardly knew they were there accept for the signs and the small corner space they occupied.
Did they chant too loud or throw bricks at the police? What exactly did they do to deserve an Iraq war veteran winding up in critical condition?
MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — Alabama's agriculture commissioner, John McMillan, is suggesting farmers look at work-release inmates if they are experiencing labor shortages due to Alabama's new immigration law.
Some farmers have complained that Hispanic workers who traditionally harvested their crops have left and they can't find replacement workers.
A spokesman for the Department of Corrections says there are 2,300 inmates in the work-release program and they are available for all types of jobs, including farming. But spokesman Brian Corbett says the department can't attribute any increase in work-release jobs to the immigration law so far.
I'm not saying that I don't believe our government's story. I neither believe it nor disbelieve it. I know too well that the intelligence game is played above my level. It could be true. It might not be. I'm more interested in why no one asks the obvious questions. I mean, what's the motivation?
How did you like that crackpot anti-Choice bill Boehner and Cantor-- who claim they're too busy to even allow a vote on the president's proposed jobs legislation-- passed yesterday? They're calling it the Protect Life Act and it passed the misogynistic-dominated House 251-172. If Mitt Romney or any of the other right-wingers running for the GOP presidential nomination were in power to sign this dreck, here's some of the damage it would do:
• Allow hospitals receiving federal funds to deny emergency abortions to women whose lives are in danger due to a pregnancy gone horribly wrong.
How important is Parnell’s campaign to the Alabama Democratic Party? Right now, the Alabama House has a 64-40 GOP majority. A Parnell win makes that 64-41. That brings Democrats within a couple of seats of being able to block a cloture vote - in other words, to being able to mount an effective filibuster against further Republican efforts to attack both the Democratic Party, and the workers, teachers, police and fire personnel, and other vulnerable constituents we represent.
Howard Dean was just being interviewed on MSNBC about the tax cut package and long term deficits. He was making the basic point that upper income tax cuts do little to stimulate the economy and do add to the deficit and long term national debt. He was knocking it around with MSNBC's Chris Jansing when all of a sudden, Jansing exclaimed: Wait, since when are progressives the ones who believe in fiscal discipline and deficits?
It's a shame CBS didn't show the famous video of Boehner tap-dancing around the time he was caught handing out tobacco bribes on the House floor. He may not have been compromising his principles, but what he did was far more egregious than what they're lynching Charlie Rangel for... FAR MORE EGREGIOUS. Even if it is the ultimate in DC common ground.
People on Madison Avenue make a boatload of money figuring out how to sell crap to a bunch of people who don’t need it. I mean really do you need a 500.00 cell phone? The wing-nuts have brought those same tactics to politics and the media. They have used branding to not make the country completely conservative, just more conservative than it was 30 years ago. So now the center is no longer the center. You now have Dems espousing former wing-nut positions as if they were now mainstream and rational.
I think this White House has underestimated the wrath of a scorned base. I think what this White House and President failed to realize is that while he is the President of those who didn’t vote for him, he owed it to those who did vote for him to stand up for the issues they elected him to stand up for. Those who did not vote for him will never vote for him. Does he think that if he passed all of the Republican agenda that they would not run a challenger against him in 2012? The progressives have for the last two years been waiting for this White House to fight for something. It began with the stimulus package that was too small and loaded with concessions to the wing-nuts and still did not get a single wing-nut vote. Then we had health-care reform where everything was bargained away before the negotiations even begun and progressives thought at least they would fight for the public option which didn’t happen. And of course we had financial reform and again no fight.
Is President Obama afraid the media will portray him as an angry black man like they did Rev. Jeremiah Wright and scare the Bejeezus out of white folks? You know, I could understand white folks being scared of black folks if black folks had enslaved white folks for hundreds of years and had a documented history of violence towards white folks, but the truth of the matter, it's the other way around, so what are white folks scared of? They have all the privilege and the power.
Where is the diversity in the mainstream media? And NO, so called black conservatives don't count because all they do is say publicly what whites say privately. Rush, Beck and the other right wing Lords of Loud flood the public airways with misinformation.
The past is prologue.The infamous White House/GOP tax cut deal will likely pass both the Senate and House next week and then become law. But Bernie Sanders has opened a Pandora's box of illumination that will vex the feckless, ever-retreating White House and the grossly hypocritical Republicans for some time to come.
As we pass the 10th anniversary of the Bush v. Gore decision—technically yesterday, December 12—it is interesting to note how much of our current political predicament can be discerned in the events of those days. The Bush-Gore election illustrates three key points about today’s political and media environment:
* Conservatives fight harder and dirtier for what they want than progressives.
* The mainstream media gives conservatives a pass for acting and speaking in their own political interest while criticizing progressives for the same thing.
* Conservative commentators recognize few if any boundaries in their willingness to demonize progressives, with virtually no corollary of any kind among progressives.
We see things and think they are unfair. We think they are easy to correct. We try to correct the injustice but one thing leads to another and another. Sometimes other injustices occur in the process. If it’s not one thing, it’s another.
Tucked away in the massive tax bill Obama is trying to pass in the last days of the current session of Congress -- before a new Republican majority takes over the U.S. House of Representatives -- are several affordable-housing incentives critical to the Gulf Coast and in particular New Orleans. But while Obama has conceded to Republicans by agreeing to extend tax cuts for the wealthy if they agree to, among other things, extend emergency unemployment benefits, there is no word on whether the final bill will include the critical affordable housing incentives written into earlier versions.The President didn't cave or capitulate, he did what he had to do in order to free the hostages. The question I have is how and why did the Democrats allow the GOP to take us hostage? Democrats had control of the government for 2 years and didn't do a damn thing. President Obama has not only had to fight the GOP and the white wing media, but he's also had to fight members of his own damn party time and time again.
Among its myriad tax code provisions, the bill under debate, S. 3793, proposes to extend a low-income housing tax credit exchange program for a year, reauthorize a New Markets Tax Credit program and fund a National Housing Trust Fund meant to pay for affordable rental housing in all states with a shortage, including Louisiana. Introduced by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) in September, the bill has fallen victim to partisan haggling. It still must be passed by the House and the Senate.
Most critically to New Orleans, the bill includes a two-year extension of the placed-in-service date for projects being financed with Gulf Opportunity Zone tax credits created after Hurricane Katrina. Without the extension of the current placed-in-service deadline of Dec. 31, Louisiana stands to lose at least 1,770 units and $398 million in total investment dollars for projects that will not forward without more time, according to Louisiana Housing Finance Agency documents. Another 3,230 units across 66 complexes are in jeopardy across the other Gulf Coast states.
Among the developers relying on the credits to finance post-Katrina housing projects are those building mixed-income communities on the site of the former B.W. Cooper and Lafitte public housing developments. At Lafitte, where 220 units are nearly complete, the failure to pass an extension could cost 430 still-unbuilt units financed through deals that rely on the tax credits and have not yet closed, according to the finance authority. For B.W. Cooper, the end of the tax credit program could kill the 410-unit project completely because none of its financing has closed and construction hasn't started. Project developer KBK Enterprises did not return several calls made over the past week requesting comment. In September, company Chief Financial Officer Mike McCroskey told The Times-Picayune that the company was "at the mercy of the federal government."
Without the extension, Lafitte developers Providence Community Housing and Enterprise Community Partners, will have to come up with a way to replace the revenue projected to come from the GO Zone tax credits. Reached Tuesday, a spokeswoman for Providence reaffirmed the company's commitment to completing the 650-unit project, with or without the credits.
After a two-hour floor debate, the House passed the DREAM Act along mostly partisan lines, 216 to 198, with 38 Democrats voting against the bill and 8 Republicans supporting it.
The press secretary dismissed the “professional left” in terms very similar to those used by their opponents on the ideological right, saying, “They will be satisfied when we have Canadian health care and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon. That’s not reality.”I want a President who takes a strong stand and fights for it, not one who is a mediator with hostage-takers. I had a feeling we were heading down this road when the media made candidate Obama renounce, repudiate and reject his pastor Reverend Jeremiah Wright. IMHO that was his first mistake because it set the tone for Eric Holder's Americans are cowards walk back, Henry Louis Gates the police acted stupidly beer summit, and the Shirley Sherrod firing.
Of those who complain that Obama caved to centrists on issues such as health care reform, Gibbs said: “They wouldn’t be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president.”
The White House, constantly under fire from expected enemies on the right, has been frustrated by nightly attacks on cable news shows catering to the left, where Obama and top lieutenants like Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel have been excoriated for abandoning the public option in health care reform; for not moving faster to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay; and for failing, so far, to end the ban on gays serving openly in the military.
Kennedy said he is talking with party members about possibly succeeding Chairman Joe Turnham if he goes through with plans to step down in the new year.
"I'm encouraged by their interest in supporting me as chairman," he said in an interview.
I don't think Kennedy would be any sort of a reform leader for the party. At best, he might be a competent transition leader to the more youthful, more urban and suburban, more organized party we'd like to see. And get ready for some difficult PR because the national headlines are sure to be, "Alabama Democrats elect George Wallace's son-in-law to head party."
I've tried to give Congressman Artur Davis the benefit of the doubt. Really I have. I let it go when he defended The Azalea Trail Maids being the only representative in Inaugural Parade. I let it go when he said he was resigning as a member of the House Judiciary Committee so he would have more time to run for Governor. But THIS time he has ripped his drawers and shown me his natural born ebony donkey.
Alabama Congressman Blast Wright Invite to Selma Memorial
WASHINGTON (AP) - Alabama Democratic Rep. Artur Davis today criticized organizers of a planned commemoration of the Selma civil rights march for inviting former Chicago pastor the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
Davis said in a letter to organizers that the pastor's divisive rhetoric is inconsistent with the theme of the event and President Obama's message of unity. Obama left Wright's Chicago church last year.
The National Voting Rights Museum and Institute hosts the memorial march each year.
Officials with the museum did not immediately return phone messages Friday afternoon.
Davis also argued that Wright's presence - particularly any speaking role - could drive away other prominent invitees.
What divisive rhetoric Artur? What prominent invitees will Wright drive away? Who are you to criticize the organizers of the event? Who are you speaking for?
Organizers, please tell Artur where to go and how to get there. Please.
Why, indeed, "is Artur Davis even involved in this" unless it is another "windsock" political issue he is using to get right wing, conservative votes in Alabama? I see nothing at all Progressive about that sort of thing and I deplore "Windsock Politicians." Davis, is now lining up with the kind of "swift boating" Republicans and faux "patriots", who raised such a hue and cry over their SELECTED comments by Wright (and not the full text of his sermon) during the Presidential campaign. That does NOT sit well with me. It is now my opinion that Davis used his position on the House Judiciary Committee, and his seeming defense of our former Governor, Don Siegelman, simply as a means of getting the attention of a large bloc of Alabama voters, a.k.a "Siegelman Supporters". He initially got my attention that way. Sorry, Davis Supporters, but I can't go along with you on this one.
He said Wednesday the national Democratic Party did a poor job communicating with voters about what was happening in Washington, particularly with a health care plan that even Kennedy said he had trouble understanding. That made Alabama voters fearful and angry, and they took it out on Alabama Democrats, he said.
To rebuild, he said the Alabama Democratic Party must do a better job of communicating with voters, must connect more with young people by developing college Democratic clubs, and must embrace higher ethical standards in government.
“The most important thing is not where we are today. It’s where we are going tomorrow,” he said.
Alabama Democratic losses were among the worst in the nation. There was no coherent message other than the need to preserve their own power -- witness all the arguments we saw here about the need to hold the Legislature because (cue the scary music) "you don't want Republicans to control the reapportionment process." That may be a compelling argument to a political insider, but the average voter cares a lot more about what you're doing with your political power and the Democratic message there was essentially *crickets*. There was not even a token response to the Republicans "they've been in charge for 136 years and what have they done?" argument -- it seemed like the Dems in charge totally forgot that voters do care about what you're doing, especially after 8 years of gridlock in a Democratic controlled Legislature.
I had a tinfoil moment this morning, thinking about this
After the next Census in 2010, the Legislature will have to redraw Congressional districts to reflect changes in population.
I could see this being the early start of a long term effort to influence the makeup of Congress by controlling how the districts are drawn. The GOP did this in Texas but couldn't wait till the 2010 census.
Is this going on in other states - political prosecutions to systematically purge Democrats from statehouses, so that the district maps look very different in 2012?
Just sayin
Democrats must be unapologetic and, indeed, fiercely combative in their pursuit of what is right for the American people. Anything less, particularly in light of the undeniable history of scorn demonstrated by Republic officeholders toward the interests of individual Americans over the past seven years, is pathetic and inexcusable.
