Absolutely Brilliant

Via Crooks & Liars. Just brilliant. Just right on.

Thanks

John Edwards left the campaign for the Democratic nomination today. He did it in New Orleans, Louisiana, the city where he announced his campaign. I supported him, & will still write his name in at Wisco's primary. He was the only candidate that addressed what is truly right about America & what is truly wrong about America. He understood the unimaginable cruelty of the Bu$hCo administration's attitude towards New Orleans. & while a backward thinking commenter below somehow thinks that C-Ray had/has a lot more money & power than the federal government, Bu$hCo effectively abandoned New Orleans. The local pols aren't even important, frankly, since this was a national disaster, not some tragic local tornado destruction. It's easy to rebuild the local Log Cabin Pizza Place or Let's Kill Us Some Deer Sporting Goods & Liquor Emporium. It's harder to rebuild a distinct American culture of the kind that New Orleans developed over the centuries. & this is not to say that the culture existing in NOLA pre-Katrina didn't need some deep fixing, it certainly did, but it's hard to fix the schools, for example, when the whole community is not behind that fixing. It's easy to have good schools in Whitefish Bay, WI, where the median income for a family is $95,744. Yes, that's pretty close to a hundred thousand a year. In NOLA, by contrast, the median family income, pre-Katrina, from the 2000 census, was $27,133. The poverty stats are interesting as well. Whitefish Bay had 3.2% of its citizens living below the poverty line. NOLA had 36.38% of its citizens below the poverty line. & in that range of folks below the poverty line the highest percentage was 61.4% among families with a female as the head of the household & with children under five. Now I know that I am comparing rutabagas to eggplant here, a small, upper Midwestern suburban city with a large, multi-ethnic southern port city. But my point is that Bu$hCo deliberately ignored NOLA because it is predominately black, poor, & Democratic. It is a bright blue spot in an otherwise dismally red state. Bu$hCo's response was the response of a racist, of someone who just doesn't give a shit about poor people. Parse it anyway you want, but don't blame a ReThug turned Democrat, that would be C-Ray, for the disaster. He was a ReThug, you know, the responsible cable television exec. Anyway, back to Mr. Edwards. He went to New Orleans today & gave this speech. I hope Clinton or Obama listens not only to this speech, but to much of what Edwards had to say. He, alone among all the initial Democratic candidates, had the mettle to smack the Rethugs down, he does understand just how awful the present administration is. I can only hope that whoever wins the nomination & then the presidency would have the ovaries or balls to appoint him as Attorney General. Then we will finally make the criminals in the Bu$hCo mafia pay all their debts to society, a society they are/were hell-bent on destroying.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Go here.

BTW, the sanitation workers in Memphis, TN, won their strike. Another fitting tribute to Mr. King.

Racism, Alive & Well In America

Via Altercation, go read the whole thing, we get:

Forty-five percent of black children whose parents were solidly middle class in 1968 -- a stratum with a median income of $55,600 in inflation-adjusted dollars -- grew up to be among the lowest fifth of the nation's earners, with a median family income of $23,100. Only 16 percent of whites experienced similar downward mobility. At the same time, 48 percent of black children whose parents were in an economic bracket with a median family income of $41,700 sank into the lowest income group."
....
This is true across the board, but it is at the bottom rung where the failure of the American system is most apparent. In the Nordic nations, for instance, three-quarters of those on welfare had moved up and out of the system by the time they reached their 40s, but barely more than half of their American counterparts had. As the editors of The Economist (subscription required) put it, "In other words, Nordic countries have almost completely snapped the link between the earnings of parents and children at and near the bottom. That is not at all true of America." In Britain, too, fully 70 percent of those enmeshed in the welfare system had moved out within a single generation, again -- a higher percentage than in America. The magazine points to the generous tax and welfare provisions for families as "the obvious explanation for greater mobility in the Nordic countries ... especially when compared with America's."
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Author Andrew Hacker notes that in studies of black and white job-seekers with identical résumés who apply for publicly advertised jobs, we find incontrovertible evidence of "systemic discrimination that cannot be attributed to differences in skills between comparably educated blacks and whites."
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All of these problems contribute to the horrible situation in which we find ourselves, in which black ghettos constitute a permanent underclass and breeding ground for social pathologies that are then exploited by the likes of Murray, Peretz, Sullivan, and Podhoretz, together with the Glenn Becks, the Imuses, the Rush Limbaughs, etc., to ensure that our society remains one where the poorest are the victims of the poor and near poor -- and vice versa, while the wealthy live behind gated communities, retaining all available privileges for themselves, all the while preaching the virtues of hard work and "playing by the rules."

I have never believed that racism is simply a way to excuse bad behavior, racism is a real thing, a real existential problem for the U.S. & we continue to ignore it at our peril. My emphasis.

Jena 6

No this isn't a Cinemax soft-core movie, but I implore, I urge, I demand that my loyal four readers go sign this petition. What happened/happens in Jena, LA, needs to stop & people need to be held accountable. For those among us who are too young to remember the hoses, the billy clubs, the dogs, the angry white people on the teevee back in the day, this struggle didn't end. Racism is deep, & with a soft apology to the great Buffalo Springfield, & into your heart it will creep. We need to keep fighting this conservative sewer-mentality. We don't have to like a kid, but we cannot, cannot, put a noose in a tree. That sort of statement only hurts America.

Strange Fruit, Indeed

Hell of a post, here. This is so true. Even in the woods in northern Wisco, we watch how the Anishnaabeg are treated, talked about, educated. We watch the Guatemalans who have been brought in by a local ReThug to work for next to nothing being housed in substandard rentals. We watch & do what we can, whether it's Spanish signs in the window of the local co-op, (but no signs in the language of the local indigenous people!), a church opening its doors for the immigrants, (I thought all church doors were always open. My bad.) or learning how to cook with curry.

We walk on eggshells still, many of us—gauging our effect on the surrounding environment, even the most bodacious of us, internally faltering for a moment when we enter certain surroundings. Letting that painful question be heard for the briefest second—“Is it okay for me to be here?”—before plodding forward defiantly...and sometimes with great trepidation.

That is the damage of institutionalized racism. Its “mark”, if you will. That hesitation. How does the old saying go?

“He who hesitates is lost.”

And sooooooooo many Black folks have hesitated over the years, decades and soon it will be centuries, that they—we—have become lost.

Understand something. It is the year 2007. Where we joke about, “Where is my flying car? My monorail? The 3.5 jet-packs per family we were promised?”, mocking the progress we were supposed to have made, based on futurists predictions.

It is the year 2007. And as much as we may try to think otherwise, we live in a country where White teenagers will still fight over who can, and who can not sit under a fucking tree during recess at school, based on the color of their skin. For all the crowing about the “browning of America”, and how the kids are un-learning the racism inculcated in the American fabric, this incident should give every one of us pause.
....

We can sing “kum-ba-ya” til our throats sound like Miles Davis after a bender of Sloe Drano Fizzes, but at the sick core of America, racism still infirms this country's aspiration to greatness.

I use the word “infirms”, loosely. Because the pat analogies about America's racial “sickness” are so very, very flawed. Racism in America isn't a wound,—as so many describe it. No. Wounds heal. And it isn't a cancer—because you can remove a cancer, should you catch it early enough, or if not—at least bomb it with enough countering toxicity where you can seriously impede its progress.

Racism in America is neither of these things—a wound, or a cancer.

It is quite simply...akin to a living, festering parasite that feasts on the very soul of the country, and what makes it work. It's a vicious tapeworm. Picked up long ago, and living there, deep in the American belly...it's very guts, in fact. Not killing, mind you...but in there nonetheless, all slimy and sickening, so intwined with what makes this place simply exist, that it's supremely difficult to remove.

And the host knows it's there. Knows it slows and sickens it with every step forward. But in the end...does nothing about it...because the effort to remove the parasite is “just too great”.

Too costly.

Via Susie Madrak.

Texas Justice

Stinks.

Happy MLK Day

I took the day off, went to town to buy some dog food, borrowed a router, came home & did a little woodworking in the basement, after, of course, herding the three horses back into their paddock. The fourth horse, Gabriel, has to good sense to stay inside, where there is easy water. I actually finished the work that I borrowed the router for, & it looks good. My router, by the way, is in the shop, so I must thank The SideKick for lending me one of his tools. Digby has a good piece on conservatives & how they have dealt with Martin Luther King, Jr., over the years. Note what that old, dead man of conservatism, Ronald Reagan, Alzheimer's President, had to say:

Another, even more prominent conservative said it was just the sort of "great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order, and people started choosing which laws they'd break."

That was Ronald Reagan, the governor of California, arguing that King had it coming. King was the man who taught people they could choose which laws they'd break--in his soaring exegesis on St. Thomas Aquinas from that Birmingham jail in 1963: "Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. ... Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong."

In the same post, Digby quotes Rick Perlstein & it's a good piece of thinking.

I have come to realize that conservatism's single most identifiable characteristic is its fear (of progress, the other --- everything.) And nothing scared conservatives more than the great progressive Martin Luther King, who faced them down peacefully with grim determination and awesome courage. Why, if African Americans could overcome, then what was to stop anybody from believing that "liberty and justice for all" applied to them too. Thanks, Reverend King for making it so.

Virgina Is For Haters

Thanks to The Kid & The Babies (they must have let her have a tiny bit of time for herself) we get the moron from VA continuing to make an ass of himself. Via TPM Muckraker we get the story & the video.

Racist ReThugs

& I don't care how many black grandchildren a person has. Again, via TPM.

Again, let's be honest with ourselves. Racism is one of the key building blocks of Republican politics in the United States. Don't look at me with a straight face and tell me you don't realize that's true. That doesn't mean that all Republicans are racists. Far from it. It doesn't mean that a lot of Republicans don't wish the stain wasn't part of their party's recent political heritage. They do. But racism and race-baiting is the hold card Republicans take into every election. When times are good, guys like Mehlman 'reach out' to blacks and Latinos to try to take the edge off their opposition to the Republican officeholders. But when things get rough the card gets played. And pretty much every time.
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The point is that as vile as this race-hucksterism is, for my part I welcome the opportunity that Republican desperation provides, to show these guys for who they really are. Scratch the surface of 'outreach' Mehlman and he's a Southern strategy man after all. So, fine, bring it on. Cut away the veil and the mask. Let everyone come out from under their rock and be who they really are.

Let them lose their majorities and their souls.

Help Needed

The SideKick, aka Shutterwi, sent along this link. It pays to have friends who are fellow bloggers & good thinkers. Senselessebrenner has been a major embarrassment to my fine state. As my loyal four readers will recall, he represents the hometown of Mrs. coldH2O, that's almost as tough to live down as, ...., well, we won't go there right now. Back to getting rid of a racist s.o.b. - go to Mr. Kennedy's campaign website & donate $10 or$20 dollars or a whole lot more if you're so inclined. We need to rid the great state of Wisco, as well as the nation, of this poisonous piece of human detritus. $10 or $20 dollars is less than you'll spend in the food coop. Or, let's face it, it's Wisco, a couple of hours in the bar.

Another Wisco Idiot

This is the direct result of the racist ReThug, that would be Wisconsin Republican, control of the political discourse for the last 20 or so years. I hope the people of this small town put the mayor in his place, which is somewhere where the sun doesn't shine.

In a letter in the local newspaper this month, John Kimmel, who runs the Detox Bar and Grill, said he would create an "illegal alien task force" to forward complaints to federal authorities, hold property owners accountable for renting to or allowing someone to live in the city illegally, make English the official language of Arcadia and regulate the flying of foreign flags.