If you are going to comment on anything here, especially if you want to just argue without PROOF, then you will be mocked, ignored and banned, not neccessarily in that order. If you drop in on posts older than 6 months old, you will be mocked, your comment deleted and banned again not in that order. This is my little corner of the web, and if you don’t like the rules feel free to leave, just close the door on your way out.

So I saw Transformers 2 yesterday…the rest of it is under a cut to avoid spoilers

“A Message from the Average Black Person”
Via the Huffington Post (Would love to hear what you guys think – Sorry about the cut IT WONT WORK. And if you enjoy this please DIGG it - http://is.gd/1ev4T – and feel free to pass the link along!)

To Whom It May Concern:

Greetings. My name is Elon James White. I’mBlack.

I write this letter on behalf of a lot of people that fall into the category of Average Black People. (Yes, I capitalize it, as if it were a title.) I do not claim to represent them because that would be absurd. I really, truly don’t. I don’t even represent my circle of friends. At any point in time one of my Black buddies will, in fact, tell me to go to hell when speaking on concepts of race, politics, or religion.

I do, however, qualify as an Average Black Person. I am neither a part of the Black intelligentsia, nor do I fall into the category of your garden-variety street Negro. A lot of folks see Black people in one of these two categories. Normally, let’s be honest, it’s the latter.

I don’t qualify.

I do come from “the Hood.” That’s right. I am a born and bred Brooklynite raised in the middle of Bed-Stuy. If you aren’t familiar with Bed-Stuy, perhaps you have never listened to gangster rap. You’re probably also unfamiliar with Jay-Z, Biggie Smalls, or the thousands of songs that yell out “Brooklyn!” and then give a shout-out to Bed-Stuy. It’s fine. Just understand that Bed-Stuy has a primarily negative connotation and for many years was used in boasts to gain respect or fear because it’s an incredibly violent environment.

In other words, you could get shot, son.

Speaking of which, I am the son of a single mother. My father is in prison. My grandfather was a pastor and I grew up in the church. I, without shame, also enjoy fried chicken, watermelon, ribs, and orange soda. I can have an incredibly in-depth debate on the best five MCs ever. My credit isn’t great and I’ve been shot.

With facts like this I qualify as a stereotypical Black person right?

But I am also a computer programmer. I’ve been known to quote Nietzsche. I, on occasion, host dinner parties where I serve five-course meals, including a specialty of mine, White Truffle Tilapia (it’s delightful). I have the entire John Williams discography and wear a backpack that is emblazoned with the Thundercats insignia.

Those with one half of that story shake their head at the sheer mass of stereotypes I carry. Then those with the other half question if I even understand the Black experience at all. Some refer to me as someone who “made it out.” I currently live in Crown Heights. Some say “You’re not like the others.” Most people I interact with are very similar to me.

I am an Average Black Person.

So, as an ABP, I have a few requests:

Media.
Please stop referring to blacks as a monolith. I can’t possibly express to you the different types of Black people that exist. We neither move as an entity, nor do we move as three or four entities. For every Sharpton, there’s a Steele. And for every Sharpton and Steele there are a hundred folks in the middle. What we share is a past, which on occasion helps shape our view on things. Also? Obama is not a unicorn. Please stop acting like Obama and his family are magical in the Black community. Just because some of you may not have seen a Negro like this doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Lots of smart black folk living with their smart mates and their cute smart kids. So please remember. Obama? Not a unicorn. Black people? Not one voice: I don’t care what the supposed Black leaders try to claim.

Supposed Black Leaders.
Please stop speaking for us as if we were a monolith. This is not the 1960s. We don’t need a Martin Luther King, Jr. or a Malcom X. You speak for yourselves and your view on what’s happening. You also can’t police black people. There isn’t an us. Are there issues within the Black community? Absolutely, but it’s not everybody as much as it is certain groups, most time classes that are in need of help and focus. Hence you can’t speak for “Blacks.” There are people who need your help and don’t want you speaking for them. Oh, and for the love of all that is holy, could you please stop critiquing Obama simply to show you aren’t drinking the kool-aid? I get it. You’re sugar-free. Got it.

Critics Of Obama.
Hey, um…guess what Black people are not? A monolith. We are not holding Obama on a pedestal. Some critique him harshly (and personally I feel unjustly) and others love him. This is the case with every president. Obama is not the spokesperson for Black people. He is a symbol of hope. He is a symbol of opportunity in a land where opportunity for us seemed nonexistent. He’s a symbol of a fight where people cried and died and sacrificed in order for the opportunity for him to exist. But his actions are his actions and have to be judged. Just not four months after he walked in the door with one of the worst clean up jobs in the countries history. You may critique him without critiquing Blacks’ ability to critique him.

The hypocrisy of saying we are not One, and yet speaking for the exact group for which I justemphatically denied exists, is not lost on me. Perhaps there are Black people who absolutely want to be spoken for and referred to as if we were one big team. I acknowledge the possibility, but if this was the majority people like Dyson and Smiley would be way more important, and let’s be honest: they aren’t. I hope that my message is clear. After reading this, the next time you talk to a Black person you can feel comfortable in now knowing with every fiber of your being that you have no clue what they think or feel based on their skin color.

But if they’re wearing a Soulja Boy shirt you may disregard this essay and judge them immediately

*Note:Links auto play obnoxious music*

Can someone translate this page or get an email address to send a note to them? They are the dipshits behind the Bacardi Get an Ugly Girlfriend ad campaign. I found this via ShapelyProse…

I got no words for this… I’m hoping it’s a poor attempt at satire, or something not sanctioned by Bacardi since the site isn’t even in English but damn am I seeing red over it. Here’s an excerpt from Kate Harding’s post..

“This is how the patriarchy and the beauty ideal collude: we are supposed to see these women and be so stunned that they aren’t thin, white, blonde, able-bodied, and perfectly symmetrical that we can only call them ugly. We’re supposed to look at these pictures and say “At least I’m prettier than her.” We’re supposed to view our female friends as accessories in our true life goal, which is to look hot for men. There are hot women, and there are ugly women, and if you’re not the hottest woman in the room, you’re automatically the ugliest.

The appalling part of these ads is not the women; it’s the blatant misogyny. Once you take off your Patriarchy Blinders (patent pending), the charge of “ugly” doesn’t even begin to make sense. If you saw these picutres without any text surrounding them, what would you think of these women? Even with the pernicious text framing them as objects of derision, this ad doesn’t work on me: these women are straight-up pretty. Pretty, stylish, and flirty even. I guess they have some of that self-esteem that’s been going around lately.”

Roger Ebert is my new hero

Roger Ebert discusses the danger of people like Bill O’Reilly and his influence over people and media.

I think its a good exercise in critical thinking and people should actually read what he’s written rather than reacting with histrionics about look, another liberal is picking on O’Reilly and Fox news.

*snagged from liberal_talk

Bill O’Reilly has been brought low by the same process that afflicted Jerry Springer. Once respected journalists, they sold their souls for higher ratings, and follow their siren song. Springer is honest about it: “I’m going to Hell for what I do, and I know it,” he’s likes to say. O’Reilly insists he is dealing only with the truth. When his guests disagree with him, he shouts at them, calls them liars, talks over them, and behaves like a schoolyard bully.

I am not interested in discussing O’Reilly’s politics here. That would open a hornet’s nest. I am more concerned about the danger he and others like him represent to a civil and peaceful society. He sets a harmful example of acceptable public behavior. He has been an influence on the most worrying trend in the field of news: The polarization of opinion, the elevation of emotional temperature, the predictability of two of the leading cable news channels. A majority of cable news viewers now get their news slanted one way or the other.

Much has been said recently about the possible influence of O’Reilly on the murder of Dr. George Tiller by Scott Roeder. Such a connection is impossible to prove. Yet studies of bullies and their victims suggest a general way such an influence might take place. Bullies like to force others to do their will, while they can stand back and protest their innocence: “I was nowhere near the gymnasium, Sister!” A recent study of school shootings found that two-thirds of all the shooters were victims of bullying, and perceived themselves as members of persecuted minorities.

What are TV shouters telling their viewers? They use such anger in expressing their opinions. Who are they trying to convince? They’re preaching to the choir. Their viewers already agree with them. No minds are going to be changed. Why are they so mad? In a sense they’re saying: You’re right, but you’re not right ENOUGH! I’m angrier about this than you are! Viewers may get the notion that there’s unfinished business to be done, and it’s up to them to do it.

How can one effect change? By sincere debate and friendly persuasion? O’Reilly sets the opposite example. He brings on guests who represent the “enemy,” doesn’t seriously engage their beliefs, and shouts: Be quiet! I’m right and you’re wrong! I stand for good and you stand for evil! I’m not exaggerating. Sometimes those are the very words he uses.

O’Reilly shouts at Barney Frank

O’Reilly represents a worrisome attention shift in the minds of Americans. More and more of us are not interested in substance. The nation has cut back on reading. Most eighth graders can’t read a newspaper. A sizable percentage of the population doesn’t watch television news at all. They want entertainment, or “news” that is entertainment. Many of us grew up in the world where most people read a daily paper and watched network and local newscasts. “All news” radio stations and TV channels were undreamed-of. News was a destination, not a generic commodity. Journalists, the good ones anyway, had ethical standards.

In those days, if you quoted The New York Times, you were bringing an authority to the table. Now O’Reilly–O’Reilly!–advises viewers to cancel their subscriptions to a paper most of them may not have ever seen. In those days, if the wire services reported something, it probably happened. Today the wire services remain indispensable, but waste resources in producing celebrity info-nuggets that belong in trash magazines. Advertisers now seek readers they once thought of as shoplifters. If nuclear war breaks out, the average citizen of a Western democracy will be better informed about Brittny Spears than the causes of their death.

O’Reilly shouts at Phil Donahue

I remember radio stations that provided variety during the day. News, music, variety shows, soap operas, nighttime comedy and drama, sports. All mixed up together. At night, a sleepy-voiced announcer presided over classical music, jazz, or torch songs. On Sunday mornings, WGN in Chicago had a guy who played pop tunes on a Mighty Wurlitzer. They weren’t concerned about a tune-out factor. Millions of Americans watching Ed Sullivan saw opera singers as well as Elvis and the Beatles. Orson Welles might come out and perform a little Shakespeare before the trained dogs and the acrobats. Ed introduced every act in the same tone of voice–his only tone of voice, possibly. He wasn’t trying to sell us on anything. He didn’t talk like it was supposed to be good for us.

Now it’s “more music and less talk.” Or no music and all talk. Or all news and nothing else. Or all sports talk People aren’t in the habit of searching the dial. Talk radio used to feature talkers who discussed things in general. Now most of them are political. Howard Stern is one of the few smart enough to win listeners who are actually interested in whatever he happens to say. It is hard to conceive of the 38 years during which millions of people “from coast to coast” woke up and tuned in NBC for Don McNeil’s Breakfast Club, “coming to you live from the Tip-Top Tap in the Allerton Hotel, high above Chicago’s Magnificent Mile.” They went to sleep listening to, “From the Cinegrill Lounge of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel on beautiful Hollywood Boulevard, swing and sway with Sammy Kaye!” When I got to those cities, I made it my business to visit the Tip-Top Tap and the Cinegrill Lounge. Don McNeil was still in business, still issuing his “last call for breakfast.”

O’Reilly shouts at Geraldo Rivera

Gone. All gone and almost forgotten. And the audiences gone too, those who sought companionship rather than goading. There is little comfort to be had from today’s polarized shouters. They are discontented, and they think you should be, too. They inspire fear and suspicion. There is a conspiracy, and you are the target. Dark forces are at work. There was a time when ordinary Americans would have been deeply offended by the way O’Reilly speaks about their President–any President.

Sometimes O’Reilly is compared with Father Coughlin, a popular far-right radio commentator in the 1930s who fanned the flames against Roosevelt and warned about immigration and “foreigners,” by which it was understood he meant primarily Jews. O’Reilly objects to such a comparison, and certainly there is no reason to consider him anti-Semitic.

But a team of media researchers at Indiana University studied every editorial broadcast by O’Reilly during a six-month period and found a similar nativist cast. Among the findings of their paper published in the Journal Journalism Studies was this one:

According to O’Reilly, victims are those who were unfairly judged (40.5 percent), hurt physically (25.3 percent), undermined when they should be supported (20.3 percent) and hurt by moral violations of others (10.1 percent). Americans, the U.S. military and the Bush administration were the top victims in the data set, accounting for 68.3 percent of all victims.

In their analysis, the researchers concluded:

The same techniques were used during the late 1930s to study another prominent voice in a war-era, Father Charles Coughlin. His sermons evolved into a darker message of anti-Semitism and fascism, and he became a defender of Hitler and Mussolini. In this study, O’Reilly is a heavier and less-nuanced user of the propaganda devices than Coughlin.

What were those “same techniques?” The Indiana team quoted an earlier study:

The seven propaganda devices include:
* Name calling — giving something a bad label to make the audience reject it without examining the evidence;
* Glittering generalities — the opposite of name calling;
* Card stacking — the selective use of facts and half-truths;
* Bandwagon — appeals to the desire, common to most of us, to follow the crowd;
* Plain folks — an attempt to convince an audience that they, and their ideas, are “of the people”;
* Transfer — carries over the authority, sanction and prestige of something we respect or dispute to something the speaker would want us to accept; and
* Testimonials — involving a respected (or disrespected) person endorsing or rejecting an idea or person.

These techniques, first listed in the 1930s, paint an uncanny portrait of what you can see and hear any night on the O’Reilly Factor.

Using analysis techniques first developed in the 1930s by the Institute for Propaganda Analysis, [professors] Conway, Grabe and Grieves found that O’Reilly employed six of the seven propaganda devices nearly 13 times each minute in his editorials. His editorials also are presented on his Web site and in his newspaper columns.

I wonder which one of the seven he didn’t use.

A Serial Bully is defined as one who takes behavior first employed in childhood and carries it forward into adult life, at home, in the workplace, or both. Here is what the British website bullyonline has to say:

The serial bully appears to lack insight into his or her behaviour and seems to be oblivious to the crassness and inappropriateness thereof; however, it is more likely that bullies know what they are doing but elect to switch off the moral and ethical considerations by which normal people are bound. If bullies knows what they are doing, they are responsible for their behaviour and thus liable for its consequences to other people. If bullies don’t know what they are doing, they should be suspended from duty on the grounds of diminished responsibility and the provisions of the Mental Health Act should apply

O’Reilly shouts at the TelePrompter

The first technique cited on the Indiana list above is Name Calling. In using this practice Bill O’Reilly reminds me of columns Sydney J. Harris of the the Chicago Daily News liked to write, containing lists of terms headed “You say” and “I say.” Here are some of mine:

I say Liberal. You say Far Left.
I say Far Right. You say Conservative.
I say Biased. You say Fair and Balanced.
I say Democratic party. You say Lunatic Lefties.
I say Right-Wing Wingnuts. You say Republicans.
I say Creationism. You say Intelligent Design.
I say Environmentalists. You say Tree-Huggers.

And on and on and on. If generally neutral terms were used (Conservative, Liberal, Democrat, Republican) every discussion wouldn’t be determined by the terms used to open it. That would lose viewers. Good. It would be healthier for the body politic if they just watched mainstream television.

The Indiana Study

A valuable site about bullies

Don McNeil’s Breakfast Club. A kinescope of a live radio broadcast. Close your eyes. Don never shouted.

… with the imaginary black man kidnapped me tale that’s been used lately. This time? Stupid bitch was $250 short on her drug deal but sent text messages to her family saying she’d been raped, kidnapped, beaten, forcibly shot up with the dopes.

The next time someone tries to sell me the line that we live in a post-racial society? I’m cramming this and every other story about the invisible black man who rapes/kills/kidnaps hapless white women right down their goddamned throats.

After discussions, upon discussions where sometimes I feel like the person I’m talking with genuinely “gets it” and many other times where people just can’t/won’t/refuse to understand their privilege, I’ve decided to spell it out for people and hope they actually read, comprehend and think about what’s coming in this post.

What’s about to be said here is based on MY experiences, what I’ve read by other people who have done research on the topic and who have shared their insights with me over the years. This is fueled by hearing one time too many.. but I’m POOR  I can’t be privileged! I don’t treat people like that, stop accusing me of being racist! etc….

First up at bat.. PETA protests the famous Flying Fish market. They are claiming this is animal abuse, and is like “throwing dead kittens”. Does anyone there realize two important things? 1. The fish are already DEAD and 2. They are being purchased and will eventually be eaten by customers of the market.  The third important thing is that this cements the notion that PETA and its followers are nuts.

Who in their right mind actually protests the handling of already dead fish that are on their way to someone’s dinner plate? Who has this kind of time and why on earth do you care that much about fish that are being sold as food? Get real PETA, find something useful to protest like puppy mills, dog fighting, but not the “mistreatment” of already dead fish.

Next up is the L4D2 boycott by gamers, who claim it’s too soon and that Valve hasn’t come up with promised additional content for the first L4D (Left 4 Dead) and that 12 months is too soon to follow up with a sequel. Um… that makes no sense really. L4D2 isn’t even scheduled to come out until Q4 of 09, so there’s plenty of time for Valve to release additional content for the first L4D.  I’m pretty happy we’re getting a sequel in less than 24 months when gamers often have to wait over 2 years for a sequel to a game, suffer through months of hype and often are disappointed by the final release because it doesn’t live up to the constant hype of [Game title] Sequel #X.

I honestly want to know what gamers think they are going to accomplish by doing this? Unless they get huge numbers of people who sign up for this protest, and here’s the important part actually stick with their stance of NOT BUYING the game when it’s released, their protest won’t do anything to Valve. In a market where games are released world wide and on multiple platforms, a protest of thousands means nothing against the millions of people who are likely to pick up the game anyway.

I swear reading stories like this, and ones about a woman who sued because she didn’t know Crunchberries weren’t real fruit, the guy who shot and killed his grandson for cutting into his watermelon too soon and men putting out Craigslist ads to have their wife raped as part of revenge or the guy who raped his unconscious girlfriend while streaming it live to the internet;  I give up any hope for the human race. These stories and the continual parade of stupid, horrifying and astounding acts of hatred make me want to pack up a towel, find the nearest space shuttle and head out to the next hospitable planet because this one is doomed.

Stolen off LJ from kittie_kattie

I have a new level of non existance: Apparantly PoC didn’t start getting into sci-fi/fantasy until the interent showed us the way. Seriously? What the fuck is that shit?

*~*~* wild unicorn herd check in: “If you identify as a POC/nonwhite person and you read or watch scifi or fantasy, give yourself a name check in this thread.

I am particularly wanting shoutouts from people who do not live in the US and who have still managed to read genre fiction.

I’m tired of people trying to render us invisible unless they have been given a memo about our existences.” ~ delux_vivens.

I’ve failed to effectively discuss RaceFail 09′, and I’m thoroughly, entirely past fashionably late on discussing it, but the sheer stupidity of the idea that POC weren’t fans UNTIL the internet astounds me. Well, not in that I can’t believe it way, but in the someone actually let that come out of their mouth and actually thinks its a plausible explanation? Here’s a newsbite you silly people, just because you don’t see it? Doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Just because you don’t see alot of people of color at conventions doesn’t mean that we are not fans of Sci Fi, etc.

Learn a lesson and realize your validation means fuck all to us. We have been existing and will still exist whether or not you realize it, see it or acknowledge it. I was raised on Star Trek original series, Battle Star Galactica, read comics till I fell asleep, dreamt of traipsing amongst the stars well before some of you probably were around. Stop thinking that if you say something enough its going to become true. Stop thinking we need your hey, I see you there kind of validation to go on with our daily lives.

We don’t need you to co-sign on the fact that black folks like something other than hip hop, malt liquor, soul food and blaxpoitation films.For the last time WE DON’T NEED YOU OR YOUR VALIDATION TO EXIST!

Did I mention how much I love Kate Harding? Well I do, because I got this link to Feministing’s article on just how creepy that new show I want to save your life is.

I keep seeing the ads for this show everywhere, and frankly it disgusts and creeps me out. This guy is following these women around, watching everything they do, eat, etc and correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that stalking someone?

These women aren’t obese, or honestly all that fat. The woman in the adverts I’ve seen around town seem to be average. Not particularly skinny but not omg you’re gonnna diiiiieee fat either.

I’m so sick of the idea that women are community property to be molded into others image of what’s acceptable, normal and desirable. I’ll be happy when the fashion industry burns to the ground for perpetuating these unattainable “norms” that only silicone, plastic surgery and starvation can achieve.

Lush is promoting Guerrilla Gardening with Seed Bombs

What is Guerilla Gardening?

The concept of Guerilla Gardening was formed on the mission to transform abandoned lots and neglected pieces of land in the middle of concrete jungles, into something of beauty. Guerilla Gardeners perform random acts of gardening. They target vacant lots, railway land, under used public squares and back alleys – any piece of land that could use a LUSHer environment.

Guerilla Gardeners around the globe are reclaiming the streets one concrete slab and neglected piece of land at a time.

Ready, Set, Grow!

Seed bombs are a great way to reach areas that may not be easily accessible. We encourage you to find these locations in your city and toss a Seed Bomb, watch it grow and make it greener and more beautiful. Unexpected flowers in unexpected places make everyone’s day!

How to make a Seed Bomb:
Seed Bombs are the ultimate tool for any Guerilla Gardener. All you need is clay, soil, seeds, water and a bit of love!

Ingredients:
5 parts* clay
3 parts* compost soil
1 part* seeds (its best to use seeds native to your land)
1-2 parts* water
Large bowl
*Parts refer to any form of measurement size you want, cup, mug, black LUSH pot.

Directions
Step 1: Combine all ingredients, except the water, into a large bowl and mix well until ingredients are combined.
Step 2: Slowly add 1-2 cups water and mix until thick (similar consistently to cookie dough).
Step 3: Roll the mixture into quarter size balls and let sit for 2-3 days until completely hard
Step 4: Toss onto an empty piece of land and watch it grow!

Palimpsest Train Adventure kickoff concert Life Force Arts Center 3148 N Lincoln Av. Chicago, IL 60657 $10 – Purchase tickets online. with S.J. Tucker and author Catherynne M. Valente

More info here: http://sjtucker.com/chicago.php

To celebrate the works of talented, underrepresented authors and deliver them to a readership that demands more.

**DISCLAIMER: THIS POST IS NOT AN INVITATION TO POST YOUR THOUGHTS ON RACE FAIL 09. WANT TO KNOW ABOUT IT? GOOGLE IS YOUR FRIEND**

As some of you who have been following RaceFail 09′ know… one good thing has surfaced from this fiasco. verb_noire is a new press started by karnythia & thewayoftheid. Those of you on my f-list that would consider submitting works, the submission guidelines will be up this week.

The mission statement is:

What does that mean? That if you’re a talented writer with an awesome, original story about a POC girl/guy/transgendered character, there is a place for you. And that if you’re a sci-fi/fantasy fan who has grown tired of the constant whitewashing of these genres, there is a place for you, too.

Now that isn’t to say that we will accept ANY ol’ manuscript as long as it features a POC protagonist, because we will NOT. What we’re looking for is quality, soul and PASSION, something that will resonate with readers for years to come.

“Everyone has a story.” These words have driven my professional career for the last decade. These words are also the driving force behind this project, because I believe that EVERYONE has at least one good story in them, and that story demands to be shared with the world.

The rough part, of course, will be funding. In the next few days, you will be seeing a crazy amount of “Donate” buttons on the sites of friends, family and other folks down for the cause. Please click on them and spread the word, if you’re so inclined.

Other folks are promoting Verb all over the place and I want to add to the voices saying hey you! Awesome writer who thinks your voice will never be heard? Come here, check this out and submit your work to folks who won’t try to mainstream it into a shadow of itself.

telesilla is also promoting verb_noire at this post Go read it!

And even though they have surpassed their fund raising goal, it will keep money to keep this venture afloat and viable. So please if you can: A donation button is at Verb Noire

Bomani D’Mite Armah breaks things down in his post: What can brown do for you?

Full post under the jump, because I can’t add to his perfect post. And remember, he’s not just a rapper!

So folks have had enough of the SF communities epic fail at depicting CoC (characters of color). There has been massive wank, fail and omgwtf is wrong with you fuckers all over the internets. Well LJ’er Karnythia has spoken up about Race Fail 09′. She has encouraged folks to link away so I’m doing that.

For clarity, here’s  a link to the timeline of race fail 09, posted by Karnythia from Rydra_Wong’s link spam.

Don’t be e-bullies kids… it’s not nice mmmkay? It will also get you kicked in the e-nads thusly.

This is what I had to say to karnythia’s post:

On a serious note, I had never heard of the fuckwads that are primary to this fiasco before this week. Now that I have heard of them? I’ll be even more selective in who gets my hard earned cash for reading material.

I had a chance to catch up on this epic fail of all fails via ryda_wong’s linkspam, delux_vivens, and other folks and all I got is who the fuck do these people think they are? E-Bullying, making not so vague threats as if you really have the power to do something to up and coming authors? Intentionally “outing” bloggers in some perverse tug of war and power trip? You fail fuckwads, and all you’ve done for me is make me more eager to support ventures like verb_noire, not pay for your shitty writing and keep my money for those who will act as if I’m a person, not the exotic other that you just can’t understand… that you can’t personify as regular fucking people and not these mythical things that you now refuse to deal with.

No loss to us, in case you hadn’t noticed dumbasses. From the bits I’ve read from the principal players? No one will weep if you never write a fucking word again. So take your crappy ass toys and leave, we’ll be over here making progress against your epic fail.

Edited at 2009-03-05 10:23 am (local)

For the edification of the few dumbasses who still want to claim.. but I didn’t know (insert phrase/imagery/well known historical fact) had a racist connotation! Really!!!! Here’s some facts for you:

1. Watermelons + black folks = RACIST IMAGERY Saying you had no idea? Makes you out to be a dumbass racist, or at the very least a total dumbass who doesn’t know any history.

2. Monkeys + black folks = RACIST IMAGERY For example.. the now infamous Delonas cartoon in that rag the NY Post

3. Calling a grown man or woman boy, gal, or anything other than their names… racist you fuckwads. Example: McCain calling Obama “That One” during the 2nd debate

4. Wearing blackface… NOT OK, NOT OK, NOT FUCKING OK. It wasn’t ok when it was an accepted form of “entertainment” and it sure as fuck isn’t OK now. Just don’t do it (I’m looking at you JAPAN)

5. Tossing around images of Nooses, bonus points for throwing in the words lynch, lynching, lynchmob. In case you need an example.. the photoshopped piece that went around suggesting a “solution” to the Obama problem.

6. Lots of verbiage that should just stop being used. Nigger obviously, porchmonkey and its variants… coon, coon dog, and the phrase knowing your place. Doing it for a laugh or trying to say well black say it why can’t I will get you a bitchslap for your troubles.

Anything I’m missing?

Yes… I heard about the NY Post editorial cartoon. Not posting at length since I’ve said what I’ve got to say all over the internets yesterday. I also don’t want to even conceive of what kind of arguments could be had over it here. Instead I give you what I sent the Post:

To whom it may concern at the NY Post:

I’m sure I’m not the first or last person who will write in outrage over the Sean Delonas depicting a chimpanzee being shot. All I can say without devolving into filth, flarn and filth is that you and your papers higher ups should have known better than to let that garbage sit out for the world to see. You can defend it to the end, and claim it was in reference to the chimpanzee attack in Conneticut all you like, but when the words in the panel talk about signing the stimulus bill, which has NOTHING to do with the animal attack? You’ve failed to be able to use that as an excuse. I’m sure there are Post readers who are defending this trash, but honestly can you not do a simple equation to see where this outrage is coming from? Blacks have been compared to monkey’s in the past, our President is black and he just signed a stimulus package. Hmm, can you see what I see now defenders of this garbage? I’m not going to waste my time trying to persuade you folks at the Post, but I do hope you realize that you have failed to be edgy, relevant or even amusing with this pitiful attempt at political satire. Try again, and try using someone with a higher intelligence quotient than a chimp. It might be funny.

[Initials]

Chicago, IL

That’s all I got to say about it here. I’m not giving it any more press either by linking. Want to see it? Google is your friend.

Baker in NYC sells these cookies and cannot for the life of him see what people are upset about. Are you fucking kidding me? I refuse to post a picture but here’s a link to the story:

LaFayette French Bakery in Greenwich Village is selling Drunken Negro Face cookies.. omg what?

BOYCOTT THIS RACIST FUCKWAD. BOYCOTT BOYCOTT BOYCOTT

or better yet… EXTERMINATE EXTERMINATE

OMG What the fucking fuck is wrong with people? Never mind, he’s a sick controlling abusive fucktard. Seen via wondersheep’s LJ and Kate Harding’s take on it for Shapely Prose

The article on his arrest can be read here. What the fuck… he beat her for getting peas and corn!?!! Not candy, not chocolate, not soda… but peas and corn.

I’m so over humanity right now it’s not funny.

Full story after the jump:

US Democracy Server: Patch Day

Version 44.0

President

• Leadership: Will now scale properly to national crises. Intelligence was not being properly applied.
• A bug has been fixed that allowed the President to ignore the effects of debuffs applied by the Legislative classes.
• Drain Treasury: There appears to be a bug that allowed loot to be transferred from the treasury to anyone on the President’s friends list, or in the President’s party. We are investigating.
• Messages to and from the President will now be correctly saved to the chat log.
• Messages originating from the President were being misclassified as originating from The American People.
• A rendering error that frequently caused the President to appear wrapped in the American Flag texture has been addressed.

Vice President

• The Vice President has been correctly reclassified as a pet.
• No longer immune to damage from the Legislative and Judicial classes.
• The Vice President will no longer aggro on friendly targets. This bug was identified with Ranged Attacks and the Head Shot ability.
• Reveal Identity: this debuff will no longer be able to target Covert Operatives.
• Messages to and from the Vice President will now be correctly saved to the chat log.
• A rendering bug was affecting the Vice President’s visibility, making him virtually invisible to the rest of the server. This has been addressed.

Cabinet

• There was a bug in the last release that prevented the Cabinet from disagreeing with the President, which was the cause of a number of serious balance issues. This bug has been addressed, and we will continue to monitor the situation.

Judiciary

• Many concerns have been raised regarding balance issues in the Supreme Court. This system is maintained on a different patch schedule, and will require longer to address.
• A large number of NPCs in the Judiciary were incorrectly flagged “ideological.” We are trying to identify these cases and rectify this situation.

Homeland Security

• Homeland Security Advisory System: We have identified a bug in this system that prevents the threat level from dropping below Elevated (Yellow). The code for Guarded (Blue) and Low (Green) has been commented out. We are testing the fix and hope to have it in by the next patch.
• Torture: This debuff is being removed after a record number of complaints.
• Item: Large Bottle of Water is incorrectly generating threat with TSA Agents when held in inventory. We are looking into the issue.
• Asking questions about Homeland Security was incorrectly triggering the Chain-Jingoism debuff.

Economy

• Serious on-going issues with server economy are still being addressed. We expect further roll-backs, and appreciate your help identifying and fixing bugs. We can’t make these fixes without your help.

PVP

• Reputation with various factions are being rebalanced. The gradated reputation scale was erroneously being overwritten by the binary For Us/ Against Us flag.

Quests

• The” Desert Storm” quest chain was displaying an erroneous “Mission Accomplished” message near the beginning of the chain.
• The quest chain that begins with “There’s no Cake like Yellow Cake” and terminates  with “W-M-Denied” has been identified as uncompletable, and has been removed.

Reagents

• Many recipes that currently call for Crude Oil can now be made with Wind, Solar, Geothermal and Ethanol reagents. We hope to roll out even more sweeping changes in the next patch.

Events

• The “Axis of Evil” event is drawing to a close. Look forward to the “Rebuilding Bridges” event starting in January.

I’m so proud right now. So damn proud of our country, it’s people and of our new President. Yes, it was so good to hear “Do you, Barack HUSSEIN Obama …” and not have them skirt the issue of his middle name. It was good to hear him swear his oath to this country and it’s people. Hell, I’m not going to lie, I’m ecstatic that we are seeing the beginning of a new era today and ending 8 years of oppression based on lies, fear mongering and hate.

Now, the party will go on for a couple of days and we’ll all revel in a new era. However, the real work needs to be started. It needs to begin and continue with the people who mobilized to put President Obama in the Oval Office. This work does not rest solely on his shoulders or Vice President Bidens’ but on every single person in this country.

Whether you voted for him or not, President Obama is now our leader. I would hope that those of you that spent so much time hating, disbelieving and being obstinate in your views of this man, his ideals and the ideals of the party he is with can put aside that hatred to achieve the greater good. Which is restoring this country to the great nation it once was. I’m not saying the US is down for the count now, but we’re going to need some crutches for a while.

I ask those of you who are on the “other side of the aisle” to put down your animosity, your vitriol and join with your brothers and sisters in rejoicing today, and every day that we are starting with a new administration. One that says here, this is what I did today… that says I need you, the people to help me get to the mountain top.

If you cannot do that, it’s your loss and I honestly feel sorry for you. This nation was not built on the ideals that party loyalty means lack of patriotism or less love for this country because we don’t share the same ideals or values. We are all American’s and we all must work to redeem this country in the eyes of each and every person who has suffered, each person lost to war, hate, lack of money, education, poverty … the list goes on.

I do not come to admonish those who do not join me in cheering our new leadership, I come to offer the olive branch of our common humanity and ask you to join me in working together for a better day, month and years to come.

I’m off to celebrate more watch the parade and I hope you can do so with joy in your heart and hope for our future.

For those folks offended by Dr. Lowry’s words… I can’t change that you are offended that is your right but there’s nothing I can do about it. Don’t come crying to me with your offense at it. If you are so bothered, then take it up him. I’m just giving you some context so you can think about just why you might be offended. I’d posted this in my livejournal but after comment flames I decided to not even try there any more.

For your rememberance, the quote is:

“[W]hen black will not be asked to get back, when brown can stick around, when yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man, and when white will embrace what is right.”

That is NOT, I repeat and repeat again, is NOT, based on race. Lowry was not talking about white folk, or Asian folk, or Native Folk, or Latino folk. It was NOT ABOUT RACE. That bit? Is based on a popular saying among black people in the 50s and 60s about colorism. It was popular when my mom was a kid, and it was a mean thing. Long story short? It was talking about black people’s variant skin tones and the preference of lighter tones over darker ones. It went as such:

“If you’re white, you’re alright. If you’re red, get ahead. If you’re yellow, you’re mellow. If you’re brown, stick around. If you’re black, get back.”

Basically? The darker you were as a black person, the more you sucked. It’s the kind of shit spawned by the pencil test and the paper bag test and all that other shit that people used to make light skinned black folk think they were better cause they were light. And Dr. Lowry? was playing on that. That’s what the laughter was about.

The closing benediction as given by Reverend Lowry on 20 January 2009 after the swearing in of Barack Hussein Obama as the 44th President of the United States.

God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, thou who has brought us thus far along the way, thou who has by thy might led us into the light, keep us forever in the path, we pray, lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met thee, lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget thee. Shadowed beneath thy hand may we forever stand — true to thee, O God, and true to our native land.

We truly give thanks for the glorious experience we’ve shared this day. We pray now, O Lord, for your blessing upon thy servant, Barack Obama, the 44th president of these United States, his family and his administration. He has come to this high office at a low moment in the national and, indeed, the global fiscal climate. But because we know you got the whole world in your hand, we pray for not only our nation, but for the community of nations. Our faith does not shrink, though pressed by the flood of mortal ills.

For we know that, Lord, you’re able and you’re willing to work through faithful leadership to restore stability, mend our brokenness, heal our wounds and deliver us from the exploitation of the poor or the least of these and from favoritism toward the rich, the elite of these.

We thank you for the empowering of thy servant, our 44th president, to inspire our nation to believe that, yes, we can work together to achieve a more perfect union. And while we have sown the seeds of greed — the wind of greed and corruption, and even as we reap the whirlwind of social and economic disruption, we seek forgiveness and we come in a spirit of unity and solidarity to commit our support to our president by our willingness to make sacrifices, to respect your creation, to turn to each other and not on each other.

And now, Lord, in the complex arena of human relations, help us to make choices on the side of love, not hate; on the side of inclusion, not exclusion; tolerance, not intolerance.

And as we leave this mountaintop, help us to hold on to the spirit of fellowship and the oneness of our family. Let us take that power back to our homes, our workplaces, our churches, our temples, our mosques, or wherever we seek your will.

Bless President Barack, First Lady Michelle. Look over our little, angelic Sasha and Malia.

We go now to walk together, children, pledging that we won’t get weary in the difficult days ahead. We know you will not leave us alone, with your hands of power and your heart of love.

Help us then, now, Lord, to work for that day when nation shall not lift up sword against nation, when tanks will be beaten into tractors, when every man and every woman shall sit under his or her own vine and fig tree, and none shall be afraid; when justice will roll down like waters and righteousness as a mighty stream.

Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get back, when brown can stick around — (laughter) — when yellow will be mellow — (laughter) — when the red man can get ahead, man — (laughter) — and when white will embrace what is right.

Let all those who do justice and love mercy say amen.

AUDIENCE: Amen!
REV. LOWERY: Say amen –
AUDIENCE: Amen!
REV. LOWERY: — and amen.
AUDIENCE: Amen! (Cheers, applause.)
END.

Full text of the speech given before more than a million on the National Mall

1:28 PM CST, January 20, 2009

President Barack Obama, with First Lady Michelle Obama and daughters Malia and Sasha at his side, acknowledges the crowd after being sworn in as the country’s 44th President. (Tribune photo by Terrence Antonio James / January 20, 2009)

My fellow citizens:

I stand here today humbled by the task before us, grateful for the trust you have bestowed, mindful of the sacrifices borne by our ancestors. I thank President Bush for his service to our nation, as well as the generosity and cooperation he has shown throughout this transition.

Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath. The words have been spoken during rising tides of prosperity and the still waters of peace. Yet, every so often, the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms. At these moments, America has carried on not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office, but because We the People have remained faithful to the ideals of our forbearers, and true to our founding documents.

So it has been. So it must be with this generation of Americans.

That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood. Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age. Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly; our schools fail too many; and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.

These are the indicators of crisis, subject to data and statistics. Less measurable but no less profound is a sapping of confidence across our land–a nagging fear that America’s decline is inevitable, and that the next generation must lower its sights.

Today, I say to you that the challenges we face are real. They are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this, America–they will be met.

On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.

On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics.

We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit, to choose our better history, to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.

In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted–for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things–some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.

For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life.

For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West; endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth.

For us, they fought and died, in places like Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sahn.

Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions; greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction.

This is the journey we continue today. We remain the most prosperous, powerful nation on Earth. Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began. Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week or last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished. But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions–that time has surely passed. Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.

For everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The state of the economy calls for action, bold and swift, and we will act–not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. All this we will do.

Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions–who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans. Their memories are short. For they have forgotten what this country has already done; what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose, and necessity to courage.

What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them–that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply. The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works–whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end. And those of us who manage the public’s dollars will be held to account–to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day–because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.

Nor is the question before us whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched, but this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control–and that a nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous. The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our gross domestic product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on the ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart–not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good.

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience sake. And so to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: Know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more.

Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with the sturdy alliances and enduring convictions. They understood that our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please. Instead, they knew that our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.

We are the keepers of this legacy. Guided by these principles once more, we can meet those new threats that demand even greater effort–even greater cooperation and understanding between nations. We will begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people, and forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan. With old friends and former foes, we will work tirelessly to lessen the nuclear threat, and roll back the specter of a warming planet. We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.

For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus–and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.

To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect. To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society’s ills on the West–know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy. To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.

To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds. And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to the suffering outside our borders; nor can we consume the world’s resources without regard to effect. For the world has changed, and we must change with it.

As we consider the road that unfolds before us, we remember with humble gratitude those brave Americans who, at this very hour, patrol far-off deserts and distant mountains. They have something to tell us, just as the fallen heroes who lie in Arlington whisper through the ages. We honor them not only because they are guardians of our liberty, but because they embody the spirit of service; a willingness to find meaning in something greater than themselves. And yet, at this moment–a moment that will define a generation–it is precisely this spirit that must inhabit us all.

For as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies. It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break, the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours. It is the firefighter’s courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent’s willingness to nurture a child, that finally decides our fate.

Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends–honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism–these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility–a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.

This is the price and the promise of citizenship.

This is the source of our confidence–the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny.

This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed–why men and women and children of every race and every faith can join in celebration across this magnificent mall, and why a man whose father less than 60 years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.

So let us mark this day with remembrance, of who we are and how far we have traveled. In the year of America’s birth, in the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river. The capital was abandoned. The enemy was advancing. The snow was stained with blood. At a moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words be read to the people:

“Let it be told to [the] future world … that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive … that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet” it.

America: In the face of our common dangers, in this winter of our hardship, let us remember these timeless words. With hope and virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come. Let it be said by our children’s children that when we were tested, we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God’s grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.

Thank you. God bless you. And may God bless the United States of America.

Copyright © 2009, Chicago Tribune

I’m so proud right now. So damn proud of our country, it’s people and of our new President. Yes, it was so good to hear Do you, Barack HUSSEIN Obama … and not have them skirt the issue of his middle name. It was good to hear him swear his oath to this country and it’s people. Hell, I’m not going to lie, I’m ecstatic that we are seeing the beginning of a new era today and ending 8 years of oppression based on lies, fear mongering and hate.

Now, the party will go on for a couple of days and we’ll all revel in a new era. However, the real work needs to be started. It needs to begin and continue with the people who mobilized to put President Obama in the Oval Office. This work does not rest solely on his shoulders or Vice President Bidens’ but on every single person in this country.

Whether you voted for him or not, President Obama is now our leader. I would hope that those of you that spent so much time hating, disbelieving and being obstinate in your views of this man, his ideals and the ideals of the party he is with can put aside that hatred to achieve the greater good. Which is restoring this country to the great nation it once was. I’m not saying the US is down for the count now, but we’re going to need some crutches for a while.

I ask those of you who are on the “other side of the aisle” to put down your animosity, your vitriol and join with your brothers and sisters in rejoicing today, and every day that we are starting with a new administration. One that says here, this is what I did today… that says I need you, the people to help me get to the mountain top.

If you cannot do that, it’s your loss and I honestly feel sorry for you. This nation was not built on the ideals that party loyalty means lack of patriotism or less love for this country because we don’t share the same ideals or values. We are all American’s and we all must work to redeem this country in the eyes of each and every person who has suffered, each person lost to war, hate, lack of money, education, poverty … the list goes on.

I do not come to admonish those who do not join me in cheering our new leadership, I come to offer the olive branch of our common humanity and ask you to join me in working together for a better day, month and years to come.

I’m off to celebrate more watch the parade and I hope you can do so with joy in your heart and hope for our future.

I’m waiting until all the festivities are said and done to post on this occasion. Have fun, enjoy history and for those not joining us in celebration don’t be a dick and have an attitude and try to harsh our squuuueeeee!

*skips off to get ready for the day*

Thorswitch has an excellent post on Dr. King’s vision for a black president that aired on the BBC.

From the Orlando Sentinel:

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. predicted the United States would have a black president, but his timing was a bit off. He saw the milestone coming a lot sooner.

You can see a clip of King’s prediction on “BBC World News America” at 7 tonight.

King talked to the BBC’s Bob McKenzie in 1964. McKenzie asked:

“Robert Kennedy, when he was attorney general, said that he could imagine the possibility of a Negro President in the United States within perhaps 40 years. Do you think this is at all realistic?”

King said: “Well, let me say first that I think it is necessary to make it clear that there are Negroes who are presently qualified to be president of the United States. There are many who are qualified in terms of integrity, in terms of vision, in terms of leadership ability. But we do know that there are certain problems and prejudices and mores in our society which make it difficult now. However, I am very optimistic about the future. Frankly, I have seen certain changes in the United States over the last two years that surprise me. I’ve seen levels of compliance with the Civil Rights Bill and changes that have been most surprising. So, on the basis of this, I think we may be able to get a Negro president in less than 40 years. I would think that this could come in 25 years or less.”

While MLK was a bit more optimistic than RFK, given the state of race relations in America at the time, I find it a bit surprising that they would have thought an African-American could become President in such a relatively short period of time. Personally, I didn’t think I’d live to see it happen – though I’m as happy as I can be that I am, especially since it’s a man I think has the potential to be an excellent president (and not just in comparison to Bush – that’s a benchmark just about anyone with a pulse could clear.)

I’m finding myself, tonight, feeling like I’m holding my breath. There’s no doubt that there are any number of miscreants and – to borrow a phrase – “evildoers” who do not want to see “President Obama” become a reality, and while I don’t think anything will actually happen, there’s still a part of me that’s concerned that someone may try to disrupt the proceedings or – worse – assassinate Obama.

It’s a bit like it was when the calendar changed over to 2000 – so much worry over whether the computers of the world would keep working or not, yet when the day came – I think largely due to the fact that there’d been so much concern expressed about the possible problems and people took the time to try to prevent them – really, nothing happened. And that was pretty much what I expected – I had a bit of doubt, but no serious worries that anything major would go wrong. I seem to be in much of the same mindframe for tomorrow – that the knowledge that someone, somewhere is going to at the very least WANT to try something – will have prompted the Secret Service, FBI, DC police and/or whomever else might be of assistance to have the absolute best security plan in place and have been working to track down any threats they may have become aware of – so that when the time comes, our new President will be safe, the inauguration will happen without trouble, and we can finally start moving out of the shadow we’ve been under for the last 8 years.

Tonight, though, all I can do is ask that Odin, Thor, Frejya, Tyr and the rest of the Aesir and Vanir will place Obama under their protection, give him the strength, the wisdom and the sense of justice he’ll need in the coming years, to be the great leader he has the potential to be.

I usually give a nod to Dr. King for all of his achievements and place in history… but this year is special to me. Special for the fact that tomorrow instead of another Dream Deferred, we get to see a Dream Realized by so many people.

I wrote before on waking up after election day to realize that yes, we did and it wasn’t a mere dream. I repeat this sentiment today as I see the excitement mounting in DC, hear from friends who are there to bear witness to history in the making.

I’m sure that pundits all over are readying speeches, remarks and such linking today’s holiday and the history en route tomorrow as President Elect Obama becomes President Obama. I’m sure other folks more skilled with a digital pen and wordsmithing will wax rhapsodic on 20 January 2009 for ages to come but for me, I’m pleased to see the dream realized; to see a man rise from the roots of his community to the top most branch of the government he has served for so long.

I salute you Dr. King for all you have done, for laying down the foundation for President Obama to step up tomorrow and start fulfilling the promises laid on the campaign trail, to the people and to his daughters and other children of this nation that will live with the legacy of his presidency be it great or failure.

President Obama, once you have sworn the oath and stepped into the oval office… I charge you to remember and honor those of us who helped you get there. Those of us who called, campaigned, helped you hurdle over road blocks to get to the new address you’re taking up tomorrow.

We the people see you, and are waiting to see what you can do for this great country and we hope that you can continue to keep the dream and hope alive while reminding us that Yes, we can every day you are in office.

Cheers Mr. President, now get to work!

LJ’er Karnythia hipped me to this sad tale, and I have no words for the fury rising over the fact that these people may starve to death or freeze to death while their Governor sits on her ass and reviews their plea.

Letter tells personal side of Emmonak fuel crisis
ENERGY CRUNCH: REsident had villagers describe their plight as they make do, or do without.

By KYLE HOPKINS
khopkins@adn.com

(01/14/09 22:12:32)

Don’t read the comments, but read the story about people in this country who are starving and cold and alone.

With a phone and a computer keyboard, Nicholas Tucker has turned a spotlight on his neighbors in the western Alaska village of Emmonak by telling stories of people trapped in a food and fuel crisis.

Earlier this month, Tucker asked fellow villagers to describe what Alaska’s rural energy crunch meant to them. He says he talked to a 70 year-old husband who cries when he’s alone because he can’t feed his family, and a young wife who can’t sleep because she doesn’t know where she’ll get her next gallon of heating fuel.

In a long letter, he spelled out the heart-rending plights of 25 households, identified only by initials. He sent it to politicians, a food bank, a Native corporation and rural newspapers. Alaska Newspapers Inc. published the letter on its Web site earlier this week, and statewide public radio followed with an interview. By Wednesday, the story of Emmonak’s plight was spreading across the blogosphere, and state officials and others were scrambling to figure out what was going on.

Division of Community and Regional Affairs Director Tara Jollie said the state has been working with the community, and that she had talked with city officials there this week.

“I’m not getting the same sense of crisis in the tone of voice, but I am hearing from all parties that it’s a real tough time,” she said.

It’s unclear whether things are worse in Emmonak than other villages in the hard-hit Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, or whether a single eloquent voice struck an Internet nerve.

In any case, by Wednesday Tucker’s phone rang non-stop as churches offered to fly food to the village and strangers from the Lower 48 asked how they could help. The local Native store gave him a calling card Wednesday that Tucker planned to use to call the state.

“Have you heard anything about Emmonak? Is there anyone that can help us,” he wants to ask..

Three factors have hammered the Yup’ik village — home to about 800 people at the mouth of the Yukon River — over the past year.

Local commercial fishermen didn’t make any money from king salmon — a staple of the economy — Tucker said, and an early freeze-up forced the village to miss its winter fuel barge.

Then the cold snap hit.

Tucker says he suspects other nearby villages are hurting in the same way.

Heating oil $11 a gallon?

Jollie, the head of the Community and Regional Affairs Division, said she got copies of Tucker’s letter from the Emmonak city clerk and Angoon Sen. Albert Kookesh.

“We’re working as fast as we can to be thoughtful and responsive. There’s fact-finding that has to happen in any situation,” she said.

A rural subcabinet appointed by Gov. Sarah Palin will review the Division’s findings at a special meeting planned for Friday, Jollie said.

Palin’s rural advisor resigned in October. Palin spokesman Bill McAllister said possible replacements have been interviewed, but as far as he knows, no one’s been selected to fill the job.

Emmonak leaders hoped the state would declare a fuel emergency in the village when an early freeze the kept the barge carrying heating fuel and gasoline from arriving in October. But state officials said such declarations are reserved for natural disasters, such as a storm destroying village fuel tanks.

Heating oil currently costs $7.68 a gallon, according to the Emmonak village corporation that sells the fuel.

But that price could soon rise, because the corporation had to start flying in extra heating fuel last week to make up for the missed barge.

Former Emmonak City Manager Martin Moore estimated in December that flying in the oil could raise the price as high as $11 a gallon.

‘not messing around’

The same day heating oil began to arrive by plane, Tucker put out a call over VHF radio asking people to tell him their stories. More than 20 people replied.

In the close-knit village where some people are embarrassed to have their private lives laid bare, Tucker identified the families by their initials.

He described a single father with five children living off moose meat alone: “Right now, we can’t eat during the day, only at supper time. And, it is still not enough. If there had been no school lunch, our kids would be starving.”

Another passage described a family of six: “(The husband’s) family has been out of food for quite some time now. Their one-year-old child is out of milk, can’t get it and he has no idea when he will be able to get the next can. He has been borrowing milk from anyone he can.”

The next day, Tucker gave his letter to local officials who gathered for a meeting on fuel prices.

It calls for someone, anyone, to fly food into the village over the next several months. “I’m not messing around. If we can get a massive air lift, do it,” he said in a phone interview Wednesday.

“I don’t care how it’s done,” he said.

food or fuel

The Food Bank of Alaska sends food from Anchorage to Emmonak to be distributed through the Emmonak women’s shelter, said executive director Susannah Morgan.

Families can pick up a box of food per month, with the amount depending on how many people live in the household.

Morgan said the shelter currently has food to distribute and that she recently talked to shelter officials. Both sides agreed, she said, that not enough locals knew about the resource.

“It’s not unusual for people who haven’t been used to fighting hunger not to know where the hunger resources are,” she said.

Tucker plans to ask the shelter to increase its orders.

Meantime, Alaska Newspapers Inc. — a subsidiary of the regional Calista Corp. — is launching a food drive for the village.

As Tucker notes in his letter, other villages may be struggling in the same way as Emmonak, said Managing Editor Tony Hall. “I really have to believe this is going on in a lot of other villages too, but we just haven’t heard.”

Tucker said churches in Fairbanks are also planning to send food and money by air, while people from the Lower 48 are calling him to ask how they can help.

A local Catholic church plans to hold a miniature potlatch this weekend — an event where people can bring a few bags of ramen or boxes of pilot bread for their neighbors, Tucker said.

Many of the people he talked to told him they’re choosing between food and fuel.

Tucker describes himself as a longtime advocate for fisheries and social issues in the region.

Asked what started Tucker on his mission, his wife Dorothy described a conversation she had one night with the couple’s 8-year-old son.

The boy told her he was hungry.

“I said, ‘I’m sorry we got nothing. We got no cereal we got nothing, so he went to bed hungry,” Dorothy said.

Later, she talked to her husband.

“I told him I was really sad, and I was thinking of other people too. Some just have one meal a day, save the rest for the next day.”

Daily News reporter Tom Kizzia contributed to this story.

The Chicago Red Eye asked if Racism is Dead today. I don’t know what news they have been reading, or what world they have found themselves in, but after reading the following stories I’d have to answer them with fuck no Racism IS alive and fucking well in this “post-racial” America.

First is the story of the guy gunned down in a BART station by a police officer. Then the officer just fucking resigns rather than face the investigation into his actions. To add insult to injury, BART officials apologize a week later and are sorry. Now, Oakland residents are rioting because of the shooting of this young man.

Then there is the story of Robbie Tolan, who was shot by a police officer who didn’t identify himself and claimed Tolan and his cousin had stolen his own car. The officer roughed up Tolan’s mother when she came out to check on the commotion. He had just signed a minor league contract and is the son of Bobby Tolan and was scheduled to start camp soon. Instead, he’s in the hospital with a bullet in his liver and his career is over before it had a chance to begin. The Houston police claim there was no racial profiling in this case, but why the fuck would they accuse a man, who’s standing in his own driveway, unarmed of stealing his own car and pull their gun on them?

Hmm, when you live in an affluent suburb, you are well off and you don’t fit the profile of the neighborhood that’s why. Even if the car was stolen, there was no need to shoot an unarmed man … it seems like the police don’t even give a fuck any more. They are shooting first and asking questions later.

Post-racial era my ass.

I am so goddamned sick and tired of hearing clips of Bobby “Everyone’s a racist” Rush flapping his gums about how the vacant (I’m considering it vacant until the DNC allows someone to take it) seat left by our President-Elect has to go to a black politician.

Now Burris is going to DC anyway and will be turned away, further embarrassing himself and the people of Illinois. I’m infuriated that he had the utter fucking gall to claim Manifest Destiny (Lord’s will) in his song and dance at a church yesterday. He’s not the Junior Senator from IL. No one wants you Burris, you were appointed by the dirty, scratch that… filthy Blagojevich and no one wants to allow this to happen. Granted there may be no legal way to block it, but he can’t think anyone will take him seriously or that he can ever have a hand in politics again after Blago gave him the political equivalent of the clap?

I… I’ve got no words for the anger this is invoking in me. I’m so sick of these assholes in our local and state government making the Land of Lincoln a laughing stock around the world I could scream.

Shapely Prose has a very good article on just how fucked up the relationship dynamic in Twilight really is.

In full disclosure, I’ve never read the books and frankly have no interest in them, especially after reviews and the omg wtf is this shit reaction after the last book in the series was released. But I can relate to the dissection of how fucked up the relationship (if you can call it that) is between the two main characters.

Spoilers after the jump in case there is anyone out there whose reading and hasn’t read the books yet.

Gay is NOT the new Black* For Fuck’s sake. Karnythia posted about the Advocate Cover that is generating much talk about it’s idiocy.

*Caveat ahead= Don’t tell me it’s supposed to be a fashion thing. Read the whole cover, subtitles and all and then come back to comment.

I am entirely, totally fucking through with _________ is the new Black (rights movement) just cut this shit out, like 10 years ago. Just fucking stop it.

You know its cold when…

Originally uploaded by bleu_woulfe

even the pigeons are huddling for warmth near the eternal flame.

Now some brilliant idiot thought up the idea of “calling in gay” to protest Prop 8’s passage.

Seen in LJ Bisexual Community

My personal opinion is its a really stupid fucking idea and will do nothing to help repeal Prop 8. Where was all this energy before the damn thing passed? Where did all of this outrage go when there was a chance to truly campaign against Prop 8?

So sick of this bullshit now.

Why defend freedom of icky speech?

Posted by Neil at 11:11 AM

This is a bit long. Apologies. I’d meant to talk about other things, but I started writing this reply this morning and got a bit carried away.

I have questions about the Handley case. What makes lolicon something worth defending? Yaoi, as I understand it, isn’t necessarily child porn, but the lolicon stuff is all about sexualizing prepubescent girls, yes? And haven’t there been lots of credible psych studies saying that if you find a support community for a fetish, belief or behavior, you’re more likely to indulge in it? That’s why social movements are so important for oppressed or non-mainstream groups (meaning everything from the fetish community to free-market libertarianism) -and why NAMBLA is so very, very scary (they are, essentially, a support group for baby-rapists.)

The question, for me, is even if we only save ONE child from rape or attempted rape, or even just lots of uncomfortable hugs from Creepy Uncle Dave, is that not worth leaving a couple naked bodies out of a comic? It is, after all, more than possible to imply and discuss these issues (ex. if someone loses their virginity at 14, and chooses to write a comic about it) without having a big ol’ pic of 14 yr. old poon being penetrated as the graphic. I also think there’s a world of difference between the Sandman story-which depicts child rape as the horrific thing it is (and, I believe, also ends with a horrific death for the pervert, doesn’t it?) and depicting child rape as a sexy and titillating thing. I think there is also a difference between acknowledging children’s sexuality, and pornography about children that is created for adults. Where on this spectrum does something like lolicon fall? And, again, why do you, personally, think that it should be defended?

Thanks for reading my ramble, and for being accessible to us, and engaged in things like CBLDF. Mostly, they are a fantastic org., but I’m really on the fence with this case…

Jess

Let me see if I can push you off the fence, a little. I’m afraid it’s going to a long, and probably a bit rambly answer — a credo, and how I arrived at that.

If you accept — and I do — that freedom of speech is important, then you are going to have to defend the indefensible. That means you are going to be defending the right of people to read, or to write, or to say, what you don’t say or like or want said.

The Law is a huge blunt weapon that does not and will not make distinctions between what you find acceptable and what you don’t. This is how the Law is made.

People making art find out where the limits of free expression are by going beyond them and getting into trouble.

You know why I say that? Because no one should die for a goddamn sale on crap that’s probably left over from last year.
All of you fucking nutcases that trampled this poor guy to DEATH so you could save a few dollars? Get a goddamned grip on yourselves and go home. You all ought to be ashamed, motherfucking ashamed of yourselves.

I’m done with humanity for the day.

Neil Gaiman talks about the Christopher Handley trial where a comic reader is being attacked for owning what some perceive as “child porn”. O_o?!

It’s bad enough people want to regulate what can and can’t be sold but now they are going after his private collection of manga? Context on how the case got started is:

Mr. Handley’s case began in May 2006 when he received an express mail package from Japan that contained seven Japanese comic books. That package was intercepted by the Postal Inspector, who applied for a search warrant after determining that the package contained cartoon images of objectionable content. Unaware that his materials were searched, Handley drove away from the post office and was followed by various law enforcement officers, who pulled him over and followed him to his home. Once there, agents from the Postal Inspector’s office, Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, Special Agents from the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation, and officers from the Glenwood Police Department seized Handley’s collection of over 1,200 manga books or publications; and hundreds of DVDs, VHS tapes, laser disks; seven computers, and other documents. Though Handley’s collection was comprised of hundreds of comics covering a wide spectrum of manga, the government is prosecuting images appearing in a small handful.

What I want to know is what prompted that postal inspector to assume he was getting obscene materials? Had he opened packages before? Did he assume any and all things coming in from Japan had to be that cartoon porn? I’m wondering why no one is looking into the motivation of the Postal Inspector to get a search warrant for a package sent to a private consumer?

I hope the Comic Book Legal Defence Fund and Mr.Handley win their case, and I hope this sends a message that adult comics aren’t obscene.

Pass it on

Done!

Done with Nomotta orange/yellow bulky yarn. Yay for being done!

Via LJ User slit

I find it curious that African-American women are all lazy unwed welfare-cheating baby-making machines and African-American men are all violent drug-abusing absentee fathers RIGHT UNTIL they are standing in the way of gay rights, at which point they become socially conservative homophobes who can’t see past their religious family values. If you’re going to scapegoat people of color for all the world’s problems, at least make your stereotypes consistent, ya know? C’mon.

First of all, as other people have amply demonstrated, Prop 8 was not lost by people of color, despite what Dan Savage and a whole lot of other people think.

sparkymonster: Brown People Did Not Pass Prop. 8

Propositioning Privilege: The reality is that white people are not being blamed as a racial group for the loss because of the sense that queer=white and there is no racial investment that would benefit from an argument that pathologized whiteness as inherently homophobic in the way that white privilege benefits from pathologizing blackness this way. This is a great, comprehensive look at how both sides of the Prop 8 campaign were handled.

Racialicious roundtable on Proposition 8

More links at Alas, A Blog

And as bias_cut shows, if it weren’t for people of color most of the gay marriage bans still would have passed and McCain would have won the election in a landslide.

Even acknowledging this, I don’t think it excuses the way No-on-8 campaign was run. I don’t live in California, so I can’t really speak to this outside of what I’ve seen on the internet, but I do want to say a few things about white Left movements, including but not limited to white queer movements, and how they (try to, sort of) do alliances with people of color. This has been brewing for me for a while now; it’s not a new problem and I know other people reading this have thought about many of these things so forgive me if it comes off as repetitious or preaching to the choir. I think it still needs to be addressed.

1. Think about how you use civil rights imagery. There are parallels there, and they should be drawn, but to compare the passing of Prop 8 with lynching and Jim Crow disrespects Black history. Even the Loving decision, which is the most obvious parallel (and one Mildred Loving herself endorsed) had a profoundly different history than the history of gays and lesbians. Angry Black Woman discusses the background on that decision and how it was frankly not a huge priority during the civil rights era: So I have to wonder why the No on 8 people chose to present this as a parallel of the African-American Civil Rights Movement. To my mind, this helped trivialize their desire to marry, particularly among older blacks who remember when being able to marry white people was the least of their worries.

I think for white people the relationship is clear: if it was wrong to discriminate against relationships on the basis of race, it should likewise be wrong to discriminate against relationships on the basis of gender. But sexual ‘relationships’ between races had been going on for generations; what made Loving historic for a lot of people was that it was finally talking about such relationships in the context of mutual consent and agency for both partners — as opposed to systemic sexual violence against women of color by white men and the lynching of Black men perceived to be pursuing white women. It wasn’t so much “yay! we get to marry white people! this is the best day of our lives!” :p Which is related to:

2. Think about how you talk about “sex” and “freedom.” White people tend to think of consent as an individual thing. Did she, singular, say yes? They’re not usually thinking of the three or four hundred years in which white men raped slaves and live-in domestic workers, or the women and girls today who are caught up in the sex trafficking industry. The right not to have sex was a lot harder to win than the right to have it, and I think a lot of folks (myself included) are skeptical of feminist/queer movements when they treat history as if it’s all “our sex lives used to be so repressed and limited but hurray now we’re free!” Add to that the number of Black men who’ve been falsely accused of raping white women, and there’s an additional layer of reluctance to sign up for a cause that makes more cops the answer to sexual violence and invests a lot of energy in saving white women from all manner of discomfort while having little to say about the imprisonment of Black men for the most petty of crimes. Reluctance especially when, again, white movements treat sexual violence solely as an individual problem (one man raping one woman) rather than a community problem (one race or nationality being granted total sexual agency under the law and another race or nationality just hoping and praying to stay the hell out of their way).

3. Think about how you talk about Black churches. For many white gays and lesbians, the church is a place of repression and silencing, and one of the first institutions they are ready to abandon when they come into adulthood. But the church has played a different role in black communities — Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and many many other civil rights leaders tied their work to religious tradition. Black churches have been a powerful source of progressive organizing in communities of color, as well as a source of emotional and financial support for people who are struggling. I’m not saying there isn’t more work to be done there, and I’m not saying religion played no role in getting people to support Prop 8. But to speak of African-American religiosity as if it’s the same thing as your white neighbor’s homophobic Bible-thumpin’ Leviticus-quoting Rapture-believing denim-jumper-wearing young-earth anti-science women-get-back-in-the-kitchen 700 Club brand of Christianity is to shit on the people who brought you school desegregation and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Black churches are potential allies, and indeed many religious leaders have already come out in favor of LGBT rights, but those alliances aren’t going to get very far if white Leftists keep talking about them as if they are forces of institutionalized oppression when in reality their role in American history has been precisely the opposite.

4. Think about how you talk about your neighborhood. I’m not going to go into the whole history of gentrification except to note that it goes beyond where any one person decides to locate. It’s about how you treat and speak about your community. Would the elderly want to live in your neighborhood? Not would they be welcome but would they actually want to? Would they have things to do? What about families with small children who are not part of your particular subculture or political community? Would you send your own kids to the local schools?

I know white Leftists and/or LGBT folks live all over the map and these issues aren’t germane to everybody, but “building community” seems to be something we value and devote a lot of time to without thinking about the impact it has and the message it sends to people outside “our” (actually quite insular) community. I’ve seen this come up a LOT, not just around Prop 8 but in general when the possibility of POC/queer alliances comes up.

5. Think about how you talk about other people’s neighborhoods. I saw a fair bit of No-on-8 people talking about their reluctance to canvass in “bad” areas. I am going to go out on a limb and guess these were pretty much all communities of color. As far as I can tell, the Yes-on-8 people weren’t complaining about this. Now to some extent that’s apples and oranges because queer and transgender people have different concerns about safety than straight people (even Mormons) do when they’re walking around in unfamiliar territory, but those concerns apply in white neighborhoods as much or more so and I didn’t hear anyone saying “I can’t doorknock in the suburbs or they’ll kill me.” I know when I hear someone say they won’t go into certain parts of the city, even someone else’s city, I feel like a wall just went up between us — even if I’d previously seen this person as a friend or ally — because that’s the kind of neighborhood I live in. And I’m white. So think about how that comes across. As delux_vivens and others have said repeatedly in the past few days, the No campaign didn’t ask for those votes, so it is disingenuous to express shock after the fact.

6. Queerness does not negate whiteness. Neither does communism, anarchism, or any other brand of radical politics. This one was hard for me when I was younger, because the force of what for the sake of brevity I’ll call Mainstream Society^TM was so strong that I saw all people who were any brand of “other” as natural allies. To an extent, there’s value in that world view. In 1991 I went to a large demonstration in Chicago that was organized by CISPES, ACT UP, and the anti-war movement; the point was to solidify connections between groups that might otherwise seem disparate and single issue, to reject divide-and-conquer strategies of the Right, and to make sure our activist work was attentive to the interrelatedness of different forms of oppression.

But “interrelatedness” != “same as,” and at some point I had to confront how my work on Issue X didn’t give me an automatic pass on Issues Y and Z. Nor did it undermine the institutionalized benefits I’d received from growing up in a white family in a country where race matters very deeply. Over time I also realized how what I thought of as my “alternative” status was actually alienating to many people of color: that in many ways my flagrant disregard of Mainstream Society^TM was the ultimate sign of white privilege. I could go around carrying a placard with my hair dyed three colors and clothes covered in safety pins, but if an African American woman my same age walked out of the house with so much as a rip on her sleeve or a scuff on her shoe she risked being pegged as a charity case and borderline illiterate. That was difficult for me to work out, because the way I presented myself wasn’t just a fashion thing — it was a rejection of mainstream beauty standards for women and traditional notions of gender. Appearance and self-presentation were politicized for me. I’m not saying we should all go around in pantsuits and business casual and try to be as safe and non-threatening as possible when talking about politics (don’t read me that way), nor am I saying there aren’t people of color who are also concerned about how these issues intersect (don’t read me that way either), but when I looked at this whole thing from the perspective of people who were already, inherently, considered suspect and outsiders, it made the issue much more complicated for me. I used to be all “get out there! mix shit up!” end of story. But when you can put on a suit and tie and put your daughter in her Girl Scout uniform and go to church to pray to Jesus and still lose your child in a directed attack because of who you are, it makes me a lot less critical of people who might be reserved about pushing the envelope, especially if they’re expected to do it in solidarity with people who’ve never shown much solidarity with them. Which brings me to:

7. Acknowledge your debt. This goes back to #1 and #3 above. If you’re going to present your issue (I’m thinking of Prop 8, but other stuff, too) as the outgrowth of the civil rights movement, then it seems smart to learn more about that movement and to get to know people who were involved in it. Civil rights weren’t gifts from enlightened white people, nor were they just part of the natural progression of history. They were earned with blood. Don’t be casual about that. Don’t bring it up only in the context of how it relates to your issue(s). And if you are going to ask for people to support your issue on principle, not because it benefits them but because It’s Just The Right Thing To Do, you might work harder to support their issues on principle, too. By “support” I don’t mean “agree with it in my mind”; I mean get out there and ask where you can be of service. In the case of California, there were at least two ballot measures that directly affected minority communities. I saw very few white activists write about these, especially compared to the number of straight POC I saw writing about Prop 8. ladyjax writes more about this: When white people roll up on Black folks about being oppressors, there’s some truth to it but that gets lost when people start to remember: ‘Hmm, that rally for (immigration rights, education, housing, etc. etc.). I didn’t see you there.’ … Sometimes the fight isn’t always about what you want but about reciprocation.

8. Stop assuming African-American support. Everything I’m saying here could fall under the umbrella of “don’t take people of color for granted,” but I wanted to say something specifically about what seems to be a common assumption — that African Americans, even more than other minorities and definitely more than white people, “should just understand” what gays and lesbians are going through “because it happened to them, too.” First of all, as I (and many others) said above, the parallels between the two movements are not nearly as clear as they’ve been made out to be. Second, to make this an issue of understanding or the lack thereof, rather than resentment at being ignored and trivialized or pushed out of one’s own neighborhood, isn’t helpful. But most of all, it misses the mother of all points, which is that Prop 8, like most everything that sucks, is overwhelmingly about white money and white power. Even if they voted yes in higher percentages, African Americans are not more guilty than whites, who funded this thing and got it done. Black homophobia isn’t especially galling because of their history in this country. White homophobia is especially galling because white conservatives have the resources and, my god, the energy to make defeating LGBT rights such a priority.

9. Stop assuming African-American NON-support. The flip side to the white liberal saying “there’s no point in asking for African-American support because we know we already have it” is the white Leftist saying “there’s no point in asking for African-American support because we know we’ll never get it.” Either because of beliefs about Black homophobia or (more charitably) beliefs about Black communities having more pressing priorities, it’s still a reluctance to form alliances. Over and over again, at least in blogs, I’ve been seeing black and brown women saying “no one approached us” or “we weren’t asked to help.” These are women who voted no anyway (if they’re Californian, or from one of the other states that had a ballot measure of this kind), but while doing so some have bitterly pointed out it’s another sign that people of color are being treated as silent foot soldiers in a movement while white organizers take over the leadership.

10. Finally, there are queer people of color! I almost didn’t include this because it seems too obvious to mention, but I don’t want the fact that I am addressing a white audience right now to be taken as a sign that I’m ignoring queer POC or that I’m painting the queer movement as exclusively white. That’s been another huge issue in this debate. (See Pam’s House Blend post about the treatment of Black gay activists after Prop 8 passed, The N-bomb is dropped on black passersby at Prop 8 protests and ask yourself with friends like these….?) I have much more to say about this, especially as it relates to the treatment of Islam by gay and lesbian activists because that’s where most of my attention goes anymore, but really it merits its own post.

What I will say is that I’ve read some excellent stuff lately (offline) about building alliances between queer communities and immigrants/people of color, and/or about addressing racism in queer organizing, and as much as I like it it still needles me that so much of it assumes an audience of white gays and lesbians, exclusively. Never straight people of color, and, well, the existence of LGBT people of color would ruin the whole argument so they’re just left out altogether. The assumption seems to be that white people can be educated about race but queer POC come from backgrounds so hopelessly homophobic that their only choice is to try to assimilate into a white queer community (who will try to be “more sensitive” but will ultimately still control and define the community’s agenda).

But when the argument is always framed that way — “I know y’all are good on gay and lesbian issues, but now let’s talk about race” — well, just who are you talking to there? I did it myself above, without thinking about it, by linking to the CISPES web site (in case someone doesn’t know what that is) but not bothering to link to ACT UP (because I assume anyone reading me has heard of that). That’s what I’m talking about. So if you’re trying to build alliances but are always assuming that your audience is already politicized around queer stuff but isn’t politicized around race issues, you are implicitly communicating your exclusion of people for whom it works the other way around, or who have been prioritizing both things long before they ever stumbled across whatever you’re on about at this moment. But again, a post in itself. This one’s long enough.

Tags:

• election ‘08,
• racism

Ok, I woke up and it’s not a dream. Well it is a dream come true for so many people who never thought they’d live to see this happen. I called my mom and she was in tears. My great Grandmother wasn’t able to vote until she was 50, my Grandmother wasn’t able to vote until her 20’s. My mother and I never had to wait to exercise our right to vote.

I’m just… I still don’t have coherent words at how much it thrills me to have seen this history, been a part of this history. I did not give my time but I did give my money and my heart to then Senator Obama. I did what I could to follow and help in the minor ways I could. Those of you who did more, who phone banked, my boss JK who not only donated, but got his daughter involved by canvassing with her in Indiana just two days after returning from a two week tour in Thailand and ferried people to vote in IN yesterday. To those of you who gave of yourselves to make this happen, I thank you.

To see people turn out in droves to make this happen, to see people wait hours to cast their ballot swelled me with pride and joy. To see so many young people get out and vote, take an interest in the Democratic Process makes me burst with pride for the future generations of this country.

For those who supported McCain, my sincere condolences that your candidate lost. Not a slap in the face, not a jeer because it won’t help anything. It won’t help to heal the rifts this country has suffered for so long. For those that continue to spew the hate, the ridiculous rhetoric that likely cost McCain the election I’m sorry for you. For those that honestly believe the lies that we will be handed over to Iraq, and our money will be stolen in the night to share amongst the less fortunate like a modern William Tell tale… I honestly feel sorry for you and hope that you find your way back to reason soon. For anyone who thinks that election was “stolen” wake the fuck up. There was a 2-1 victory in the Electoral College and McCain conceded gracefully; despite the classy booing of his supporters. Because no matter your hate and vitriol it will not change the fact that Obama, President-Elect Barack Hussein Obama is our next leader and there is no need for hate and divisiveness at this time in our nations history.

My fellow Americans (and those watching from overseas) I’m proud of my country, proud of my fellow citizens who made history along with me and who made their voices heard for change. The picture below says so much about this week in history.

I’m glad to be able to say YES WE DID.

Since I’m up… I’ll get my VOTE Dammit post out of the way…

Even though Washington Post gives Obama a clear advantage, people cannot be complacent

The National Election for our next President is TODAY. Go fucking vote… I don’t care who you are voting for or against, just go vote dammit.

Every election cycle I get so sick of hearing people bitch and whine about the current administration and what its doing/not doing for the people. The majority of these whiners DID NOT VOTE because they felt that their one vote didn’t matter, or that no matter who won they were going to be overlooked and fucked over yet again.

Well, that’s BS to me. The whole idea of voting of the democratic process was to allow the people’s voice to be heard and felt. I know its easy to be cynical after the last two presidential elections and how they were “stolen” (I’m not going to argue for or against that with you all so don’t even start) but that should make you want to vote even more.

Make your voice heard today. Get your ass out of that chair and get to wherever it is that you are supposed to vote. Don’t let lines deter you, don’t say I’ll go after work/school and then blow it off. It’s for your future as a citizen and your responsibility to vote.

Remember, blood was shed so women and blacks could vote. It hasn’t always been a right to be able to vote, and its a hard won privilege that you can vote.

So just go do it… and if you don’t vote then just STFU about what we end up with in office for the next four years. No VOTE = No VOICE

/vote or else diatribe

Employees are allowed up to two hours paid time off to vote. An employee must apply for leave prior to election day. The employer must permit a two-hour absence from work if the employee’s working hours begin less than two hours after polls open and less than two hours before polls close. (10 Ill. Comp. Stat. Sections 5/7-42 and 10 Ill. Comp. Stat. 5/17-15)

ILLINOIS POLLING PLACE HOURS ARE 6am-7pm.

VOTE!! NO EXCUSES!!

Here’s why.

Reposted from the Livejournal BarackObama2008 community with permission from LJ’er imautobot

I think it makes yet another excellent argument against voting for McCain. Please read and think about it, not read and attack someone for a well thought out argument because it doesn’t mesh with your opinions.

Okay, here we are just three days away from the Presidential election. People of strong values on both sides are throwing a lot of mud around. I feel it’s only fair that I chime in with a few facts instead of propaganda. These will be counter points to McCain related points. I know some of you don’t agree with me, but I did the courtesy of reading your posts (more than once in some instances). Reciprocation is all I ask.

First off let me say that John McCain does have some admirable qualities, I will not deny him that. I like the fact that he has never accepted “pork barrel” money. And respect I his service to his country and his time as a POW.

Truth be told, I wish John McCain was the Republican nominee for the 2000 election. I believe that had he been the President during these past 8 years that we never would have initiated the Iraq war. We would have pulled Bin Laden kicking and screaming from his Afghanistan caves, and prosecuted him to the fullest extent of the law. We needed John’s leadership before 9/11, now it’s more complicated. Two wars and a financial disaster later, John McCain is no longer the answer.

The Iraq War was born out of the Bush Doctrine (something Sarah Palin wasn’t briefed on either before or after her nomination). The Bush Doctrine states that we have the right to engage forces where there is a perceived threat (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_doctrine). That’s like me punching my neighbor in the face today because 4 days from now I “think” he’s going to let his dog crap on my lawn. Sounds pretty stupid when you think about it. We are not talking about more certain threats like North Korea or Iran who we know have nuclear weapons programs and whom would supply terrorists with those weapons. We are talking about a war based on the presumption of weapons of mass destruction. A war initiated with no real evidence to support itself. By going into Iraq we have destabilized the region to the point that it cannot fend off hostile forces. We have wasted trillions on this endeavor. And the greatest toll has been in lives. More Americans have now been killed in Iraq than were killed on 9/11. More than 100,000 Iraq’s have been killed, many are non-combatants. In the realm of politics those people are called “collateral damage.” Now imagine your country being invaded under false pretenses, and someone you love was killed by that invading force. Now imagine that loved one’s death being referred to as collateral damage. Upsetting isn’t it? This is the Bush Doctrine in practice, a doctrine that John McCain subscribes to. The republicans keep calling this national defense, but a more accurate term would be national offense. Frankly, attacking someone without provocation doesn’t seem that different from a terrorist act to me.

Let’s move onto domestic policy.

Tax cuts and “socialism”. The bailout, which went through last month, is effectively socialism. Our government took the problems of a handful of companies who made poor decisions and dumped those problems on the masses without giving them any say in the matter. Spreading a problem over a nation is no different than “spreading the wealth.” And what’s worse is that John McCain “postponed” his campaign to help spearhead this “socialist” bailout. Then the last person who could have stopped this act of socialism (George W. Bush) signed off on the deal. So it’s interesting that the republicans like to refer to Obama’s tax policies as “socialist,” when it would seem that socialism is a good thing if it serves their means. Do I also have to mention that Bush’s economic policies (which McCain agreed with) helped bring about these problems (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkAtUq0OJ68)?
Obama’s tax proposals amount to an additional 3% to those making more than $250,000. If your are making a quarter of a million dollars a year and can’t afford 3% more in taxes then you’ve got a real problem. If we were making $250,000 a year we could easily pay a 50% tax and still be netting 2.5 times our current gross. So it’s hard for me to be sympathetic to those who will have to pay 3% more. Frankly I’d like to think that someone making that kind of scratch isn’t spending every dime they earn. As for the rest of us, I really don’t care if I get a tax cut. Obama’s plan might be overreaching (in lieu of the 700 billion dollar bailout and the 10 Trillion dollar debt the Bush admin left us with). But he’s not going to have that realization till he gets into office, not unlike a certain other (read my lips) Bush. McCain’s tax plans are the polar opposite, he intends to reward already wealthy people. Both ideas could be called “socialist”. Where Obama would help the middle class and add 3% to the rich, McCain’s plan helps those who have money get more, and does nothing for middle class. While offering the (implied) assurance that rich Americans will use that money to build America. That’s a broad assumption, and a rather unfair one considering the wealthy tend to worry about themselves before anyone else. Poor people are notorious spenders, that’s why they’re poor. Cutting their taxes guarantees the money will go back into the economy.

No doubt McCain’s interests are protected in his plan. It warrants mention that his wife only paid 26.3% in federal taxes for 2007 (http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSTRE49G7DM20081018 ). Which based upon the 2007 Federal Tax Rate Schedules (http://www.irs.gov/formspubs/article/0,,id=164272,00.html ) she effectively paid only 1.3% more in taxes than we did. Under the 2007 tax rate schedule she should have paid 35%. So it would seem the rich are already getting a pretty sweet deal. Maybe the McCain’s have to watch every penny. After all, they do own 7 houses, 13 cars, and a corporate jet. But isn’t it also interesting the number of wealthy people who are actually pro-Obama. Billionaire Warren Buffett, Oprah, and dozens of well off reporters from the “liberal” media come to mind, but also the torrent of celebrities who are appearing in the bi-partisan “don’t vote” videos ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhDRVKDcXQo , http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TGf2o4qeBo ). It would seem there are some wealthy people who don’t mind that pesky 3%.

With regard to taxes someone said Obama is trying to oppress freedom through taxation and implied that such oppression is a slippery slope, that “religion, guns, and free speech” would be next. What’s wrong with this? First off, the Federal Income Tax was originally instituted to pay for war and on Aug. 5th 1861 it became part of the revenue act of 1861. Though eventually repealed after the Civil War, it was later reinstated in 1894 as part of the Wilson-Gorman tariff, making it the first peacetime income tax. Income tax has pretty much been a staple ever since. My point is that the original reason of the Income Tax was to pay for War, a cause fought for Freedom. Seems kind of hypocritical to imply that Obama’s taxation oppress freedom when the Republicans started wars based on the premise of protecting freedom. Given the national debt having doubled during the Bush administration it’s clear they entered into the wars without any clear and defined means of paying for it. Taxation is the cost of Freedom! As for Obama’s goals leading to the oppression of the of the 1st and 2nd amendments… The concept is beyond stupidity. Amendments have been amended and added to the U.S. Constitution since it’s inception, but the core values of those Amendments have remained in tact. No single man has the ability to make the changes that the republicans are implying. All three branches of government must approve such changes. In order for that to happen, a majority must vote in favor. Indicating that more than 50% of the house and Senate approved such a modification, and then the President. To think that one corrupt man (even the president) has the authority to destroy the foundations of our government is ignorant at best. The (unrealistic) Republican fear is that with a democratic Congress, and a democratic President the odds of this happening are overwhelming, it’s just not true. Keep in mind that the first 6 years of the Bush administration the republicans were the dominant force in congress, and not a single democrat panicked under the minute possibility that they would undermine values we’ve held for 200+ years. The idea of it gets stupider the more you think about it. Someone tries to pass a bill to restrict speech or religion, that’s someone who’s out of a job, regardless of party affiliation.

John McCain has been rather outspoken about a progressive income tax while forgetting that a personal hero of his, Teddy Roosevelt, was a strong proponent of such a tax.

“No man should receive a dollar unless that dollar has been fairly earned. Every dollar received should represent a dollar’s worth of service rendered, not gambling in stocks, but service rendered. The really big fortune, the swollen fortune, by the mere fact of its size, acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is possessed by men of relatively small means. Therefore, I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes, and in another tax which is far more easily collected and far more effective, a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion, and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate.” – Republican and former U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt.
One more thing about socialism, every year Alaskan residents are given a stipend ($3,269 in 2007) from the oil companies for nothing more than being in Alaska. Imagine that? A whole state, “spreading the wealth”. Does that make Sarah Palin a socialist? (http://www.scholarsandrogues.com/2008/10/28/joe-biden-should-have-told-the-truth-sarah-palin-is-a-marxist/)

Let’s talk about healthcare.

This is another one of those things that apparently makes Obama a socialist. When Michael Moore made Bowling for Columbine he got a quote from some Canadian kids who were skipping school. He asked why they should have healthcare provided by the state. To which a pink haired girl replied, “because everyone has a right to live.” It’s so basic and elegant. And it’s so ironic that the same Christians who drown on and on about the Pro-Life movement really don’t give a damn about their common man who can’t afford medical care. Maybe we should refer to the uninsured as REALLY late term abortions, and then maybe these people can see the error in their judgment. After all didn’t Jesus say, “That you do unto the least of my brothers is that you do unto me”?
McCain wants to give individuals a $2500 tax credit and families a $5000 tax credit so they can go buy their own policy. It sounds nice, but what if you have a good Catholic family with 6 kids? 5K isn’t going to cut it in the majority of cases.
Both healthcare plans are going to run at a deficit, and this isn’t a problem with a black and white solution. Assuming that either of the candidates gets into office and does as promised (reign in government spending), then either plan could be paid for. And if we can withdrawal from Iraq we can more easily afford these plans. As a common sense strategy we should do this, our goal should be the preservation of life. Both war and a deficient healthcare system cause death. And dead people can’t pay taxes. Does that make sense?

Added note: John McCain has never NOT had socialized healthcare in his adult life. As a veteran John has received government-assisted healthcare, and as a U.S. Senator he continues that care paid for by the American Taxpayers.

Onto Abortion

Obama’s views on abortion are not a departure from the current standard. He has made NO comments indicating a desired change in the current Roe v. Wade inspired laws. Someone misquoted Obama as having said, “I don’t want to see someone who has made a mistake punished with a child.” (http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0308/Stop_these_abortions_.html) It’s intentionally selective quotes like that which the republicans use to paint Obama as a monster. This is his actual quote “Look, I got two daughters — 9 years old and 6 years old, I am going to teach them first about values and morals, but if they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby. I don’t want them punished with an STD at age 16, so it doesn’t make sense to not give them information. “. Obama was taken out of context while trying to address sexual education in lieu of Abstinence programs which have a high rate of failure (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/13/AR2007041301003.html) . His position that knowledge of contraception can prevent unwanted pregnancy was twisted into an endorsement of casual abortions. If anything Obama wants less abortions, that’s why he wants sexual education programs. To those who get this stuff from only right wing sources, please consider the source and do additional research before assuming it’s 100% accurate. Google is an easy, wonderful and bi-partisan tool!

Joe the Plumber

Oh man, where do I start? How did this guy become an Everyman? A microcosm of Americans? I’m not so sure. You see Joe Wurzelbacher could have easily had his life ruined by John McCain. Up until John pulled poor Joe into the limelight no one knew he was an unlicensed plumber. Now the whole world knows it! Now call me crazy, but it’s been my understanding that having household maintenance done by unqualified contractor can open up a nasty can of worms, especially if problems arise after a property is sold. Take that into consideration and you can imagine that Joe’s plumbing days are over. Since McCain has destroyed Joe’s ability to continue to work as a trusted plumber he has helped his Everyman status by getting him a publicist, a book deal, and maybe a country western album, I shit you not!

(http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,24581913-663,00.html , http://www.cmt.com/news/news-in-brief/1598224/joe-the-plumber-may-have-country-music-plans.jhtml) But maybe McCain should stop beating this dead horse because my ability to relate to “Joe the elitist author/singer” is eroding with each passing second. Not to mention that someone who already had tax problems probably isn’t the smartest person to dictate tax policy. That’s like asking an oil executive to dictate policy on alternative energy.
Someone said Obama was “embarrassed” by a question from an honest plumber and spent a week trashing the guy. I don’t know what clip they watched, but I saw Obama clearly tell the guy that his taxes would go up. He didn’t lie to him, but Joe did in fact poorly present himself. Obama didn’t spend a week trashing Joe, the media did that. It was all true, and it was easy, because Joe was a fraud. An unlicensed plumber, with a $1200 tax lien, making less than $100,000 a year, and about 0% chance to buy the business he was talking about. If anything Joe has a lot to gain from Obama’s tax proposals. Unfortunately for Joe, the Republican’s keep contesting and purging voters whose information doesn’t quite match up with the Voter register, and his information is skewed just enough that his “provisional” ballot could be worthless. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/uselectionroadtrip/2008/oct/17/uselections2008-ohio)

John McCain’s health

From a statistical standpoint, John McCain at 72 years old is more likely (speculatively 7 times more likely) to die of natural causes during his administration than Barack Obama (http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/lifestyle/health/chi-mccain-lifespan-01-oct01,0,2007761.story) . This is particularly troubling for me because it leaves Sarah Palin at the helm of the world’s most powerful nation. And though she has more formal education (a degree in journalism) than John McCain, she has no foreign policy or economic policy experience. As an added note, John McCain would be the oldest person to ever get elected to the U.S. Presidency. With the runner up’s being Ronald Reagan at 69, and William Henry Harrison whom died 30 days after taking office at the age of 68.

“Willingness to abandon the people of Iraq”

As I said previously our entry into Iraq has destabilized that area so much that leaving now would leave the country open to attack from several outside influences. It’s a mess we got ourselves into, and it’s a mess not easily resolved. Obama is not now nor has he ever pushed for an immediate troop withdrawal. Even when McCain accused him of not approving legislation, which supported our troops, it was done because that legislation was missing a deadline for total troop withdrawal. We cannot just walk out of Iraq and act like nothing happened, but by the same token we need to make our exit. As much as McCain has been resistant to this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfknKVjuyNk) the Iraqi government stated this week that is wants the U.S. out of Iraq by 2011. (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article5032531.ece) So unfortunately regardless of the Republican’s desire to leave when their damn good and ready, they are being shown the door by someone who isn’t Obama. At that time the stability of the region will no longer be our responsibility because that is what the Iraqi people chose.

“Manufactured Messiah”

WOW! Really? Just sit back and soak that in.

Okay. The Office of the U.S. President is the highest leadership role in (probably) the whole world. It’s a role where we as citizens turn to for guidance during tough times. The last 8 years have been the worst 8 years since the Vietnam era. We have been looking to our president to lead us out of war, and recession. We look to our president to come to our aide when entire cities are laid waste by hurricanes and buildings toppled by terrorist piloted aircraft. What we got was a dud. When our president was told about the first 9/11 attack before he still made an appearance at Emma E. Booker Elementary School, he was told about the second attack while at the school. (http://www.historycommons.org/essay.jsp?article=essayaninterestingday ) Our Commander and Chief Sat there like a dumbass for 7 minutes reading “The Pet Goat”, clearly not grasping the gravity of the situation or even choosing to act on it. Flash ahead to Hurricane Katrina. Bush waits 2 weeks to tour the damage. As of this day there are places in New Orleans that still look like a war zone. Bush was briefed on potential levee failures before Katrina, he did not ask a single question, or attempt to act. Iraq, a war based on lies. Osama Bin Laden, whom orchestrated the largest act of terrorism on U.S. soil, still AT LARGE! Bailout, direct result of banking deregulation spearheaded by Bush and the republican party, and a gateway to what’s shaping up to be the worse recession since World War II (http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/news/article.html?in_article_id=456380&in_page_id=2&ct=5) .

Now McCain and his supporters are apt to point out that he is not President Bush. However, you can find him making several statements where he admits that he has voted with the president 90% of the time. What does that tell us? Well, it tells me that what the McCain camp calls a “Manufactured Messiah” is a better hope than one who has supported policies and actions which have doomed America in the eyes of the world. They need that name to try and belie the possibility that Obama might actually do something better than they can. Frankly the bar is so low now that it’s hard to imagine anyone capable of doing a worse job. I suppose when you look at it that way, McCain is still kind of a good thing.

Let’s talk about William Ayers

Bill Ayers was a war activist during the 60’s and 70’s whose actions by today’s standards would be prosecuted aggressively in line with the Patriot Act. His motivations are probably something that few my age could understand since that understanding can only come from living in and experiencing the political environment of that era. By the McCain camp’s definition Ayers is a Terrorist, plain and simple. His acts were certainly reprehensible. However, the McCain camp definition of Ayers is a lie. Ayers WAS a Terrorist who has since reformed and shown no ill intent for nearly 3 decades.

Why does Ayers matter? Because Barack Obama and William Ayers both served on the board of an anti-poverty group called Woods Fund of Chicago. And between 2000 and 2002 the two met 12 times in service to that board. The McCain campaign is trying to imply that these 12 instances have somehow groomed Obama to be a terrorist in the making. The idea that merely being among evil people somehow motivates good people to do equally evil things is as retarded as the idea that homosexuals can convert straight people. John McCain’s connecting Obama to Ayers is equally pathetic. They go on to misquote Ayers as saying “We didn’t do enough.” This is the same pathetic selective quoting they use against Obama with regard to Abortion. Ayers’ actually said, “The one thing I don’t regret is opposing the war in Vietnam with every ounce of my being…. When I say, ‘We didn’t do enough,’ a lot of people rush to think, ‘That must mean, “We didn’t bomb enough shit.”‘ But that’s not the point at all. It’s not a tactical statement, it’s an obvious political and ethical statement. In this context, ‘we’ means ‘everyone’.”

Rashid Khalidi

A new addition to the McCain camp’s arsenal. Khalidi is a professor at Columbia University who was a PLO supporter, apparently publicly lavished praise for Obama making it seem as though there is some clandestine connection between Barack Obama and an Anti-Semite. Problem is, the McCain campaign wants to link Obama straight to the PLO and skip Rashid Khalidi all together. Why is that? Because in the 90’s a group that John McCain led (the International Republican Institute) gave Khalidi nearly half a million dollars. It seems as though the guilt by association game is catching up with McCain. How’s it go? People in glass houses….. (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/28/mccain-funded-work-of-pal_n_138606.html) And would you believe there’s an Ayers connection in there too? (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27461933/)

Look, I don’t care if you are voting for or against Barack Obama. What matters the most is that you DO vote, and do so in an informed conscientious fashion. Don’t come to me spouting rhetoric straight out of the McCain camp playbook. Back your statements up with facts! You wouldn’t bring a knife to a gunfight, would you?

Look what I’ve done here. I not only gave you my opinions, I gave you non-partisan resources to back up those opinions. Not a single resource comes directly from the Obama camp. Why? Because there is enough empirical evidence to prove Obama’s integrity, sincerity, and humanity without resorting to the hate and fear mongering which has been popularized by the McCain camp.

We have made several campaign contributions to Barack Obama. He is our choice! And barring a verifiable genetic link to Osama Bin Laden, our vote will not change.

From John Scalzi… Horrible things that will happen if you don’t vote

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2008/10/31/election-list-x-some-of-the-horrible-things-that-will-happen-to-you-if-you-dont-vote/

http://scalzi.wordpress.com/?p=5057

This is all true.

Election List X: Some of The Horrible Things That Will Happen To You If You Don’t Vote

1. Your penis will fall off. If you are a woman, you will grow a penis, which will then fall off.

2. Your peers will point and laugh at you more than they already do.

3. You will have to listen to smug voters say “if you didn’t vote, you can’t complain” for at least two years.

4. You will be consumed by pillbugs whilst you sleep. They will leave behind nothing but your penis, which as you’ll recall, has already fallen off.

5. You will smell of sour buttermilk until the next New Hampshire primary.

6. Uncontrolled flatulence.

7. Cars will swerve to hit you, even when you are inside your own home.

8. Your World of Warcraft party will turn on you and smite you mightily.

9. Impotence. And not just because your penis has fallen off.

10. Stairs will rise to trip you.

11. Boils. In Biblical plague amounts.

12. Static cling that no amount of Bounce sheets will ever cure.

13. Your cat will take a dump somewhere in the house that you will never find, and the smell will be carried through the air vents for months, all the while the cat will stare at you with that “you’re a real asshole” look they sometimes have. If you do not have a cat, one will be provided for you for the length of time required for it to crap in said undisclosed location.

14. Your credit card will be canceled and your creditors will send someone to repossess your penis. Which has fallen off.

15. Your favorite TV show will be canceled and every time you try to buy the last season on DVD, retailers will be out of stock.

16. Your children will disown you. If you have no children, you will be summarily adopted by a family, and when you attend Thanksgiving at their home, you will be told how disappointed they are in you. For six hours straight. After which they will disown you.

17. Your cabbies will henceforth always take the long route to any destination to which you travel.

18. Zombies, and you without a shotgun.

19. Everyone on your street will win the lottery. You will get a rock.

20. I swear to God, I will learn your address, come to your house, and when you open the door, I will totally kick you in the nads. Which will hurt even more because they’re the only reproductive organs you have left. Because your penis has fallen off.

I trust now you will be sufficiently motivated to vote.

The election lists are now completed. Thank you for your attention.

08 reasons Barack Obama will win next Tuesday

On Tuesday I offered 08 reasons why John McCain might still pull off an upset in next week’s `08 presidential election.

Today I offer 08 reasons why Barack Obama will nevertheless win handily:

1. Obama’s supporters are more energized.
Obama draws enormous crowds wherever he goes and has energized young and first-time voters in a way that will surprise pollsters relying on traditional turn-out models. A recent USA Today/Gallup poll found 74 percent of Obama voters saying they are more enthusiastic about voting this time than in previous elections. Only 48 percent of McCain voters said the same.

These jazzed Obama supporters don’t see their vote as the weary, defensive choice of the lesser of two evils, but as an exciting chance to create a brighter future.

2. Obama has a superior ground game.

In part because Sen. Hillary Clinton challenged him deep into the primary season, Obama is better organized at the neighborhood level than any Democratic presidential candidate in history. His campaign is also making landmark use of technology –– using e-mail, text messages and social networking sites to keep in touch with supporters and urge them to the polls.

3. Obama has a superior air game.

Obama is so flush with cash he’s able to saturate TV and radio in key markets at the end of the campaign with ads that counter McCain’s criticisms of him and launch attacks on McCain. It’s not just the money – which he was able to raise oodles of after opting out of the public financing system— but the determination to respond rapidly and vehemently inside the space of a single news cycle.

4. McCain has lost his brand

Yes, he’s a volatile man running in sensitive times under the banner of troubled party. But he started off with the image of a bi-partisan straight-shooter with a clear, selfless sense of proportion.

Yet he’s campaigned like a crank.

His scattershot, over-the-top assaults on Obama’s character (or, rather, the character of Obama’s associates) have seemed like an effort to change the subject from important issues. And now that McCain’s finally settled on conservative tax policy as his theme down the stretch, his campaign is so desperate for traction that it’s going schoolyard – channeling Joe McCarthy and calling Obama a socialist, a Marxist and even a communist.

5. Sarah Palin is turning out to be the disasta’ from Alaska.

I’m confident historians will rank McCain’s decision to choose a rookie governor from a low-population state to be his running mate as his biggest miscalculation.

Palin’s youth, spunkiness and conservative bona fides fired up the Republican base, sure.

But her ignorance, on display in early TV interviews, mortified the rest of us, and polls now show her as a distinct drag on the ticket.

McCain’s appalling judgment in selecting Palin has been cited by Colin Powell, several high-profile conservative intellectuals and scores of newspaper editorial boards as a reason to support Obama. (Obama leads 231-102 in the endorsement derby)

6. Obama hasn’t lost his cool.

Historians will also note the textbook discipline of the Obama campaign, which stuck to a set of fairly simple “change” messages while the McCain campaign kept trying out new themes.

This steadiness has been mirrored by Obama’s own equanimity, particularly during the debates in which he looked and sounded far more presidential than the twitchy, simpering McCain.

The more people saw of Obama, the less he seemed like the frightening, radical, terrorist sympathizer in McCain’s cartoonish rhetoric.

7. McCain hasn’t been able to fight the Bush headwinds.

No matter how many times McCain said “maverick,” he still couldn’t create enough distance from the deeply unpopular president to make the sale to voters hungering for new leadership.

8. Obama’s been lucky

Things have been relatively quiet all year on the terror and national security fronts – McCain’s strengths. And the major crisis of the campaign season – the economic meltdown – not only played into one of Obama’s perceived strong suits, it also caused McCain to appear impulsive and indecisive in the face of a sudden challenge.

This is not a taunt or a guarantee, but I expect that luck to hold at least through Tuesday night.

I’m a life long democrat, that shouldn’t surprise anyone here. My bit on the lack of support for McCain is so people can understand this isn’t a knee jerk, OMG he’s a Republican so I can’t support him reaction. It’s a reaction to his platform, or rather a lack thereof.

I’m a reasonable, intelligent person(and if you don’t agree THIS isn’t the place to argue that point) and I vote based on who I think will do a better job. I support Obama because he’s had an answer, a laid out plan for what he would do as President. Again, I don’t think he’s a Messiah or has all the answers. No one person can turn around the cesspool that government has become. McCain seems to be using the same catch phrases over and over without ever really explaining his position. All I hear from him is I’ll work for Vets, I’ll keep taxes where they are, we must stay the course in Iraq until we have victory, Obama is dangerous and not ready to lead. He’s never stopped people from claiming that Obama is an A-Rab or has ever talked directly to the Senator in debates. When pressed to repeat some of the negativity in his ads, he turned it back on poor me, they are lying about me and that guy who called me out hurt my feelings, wah.

I’ve got no clear picture on just WHAT McCain would do to reverse the economic downturn we’re in, he wants to keep the war going, he has not said HOW he’d get Bin Laden, just that we’ll stay the course until we win. That’s all well and good but how do you plan to do that McCain? If he’d picked Lieberman as a running mate, and truly stuck to his label of Maverick I’d be a lot more concerned about Obama’s chances next week. As it is he’s picked a woman to capture the vote from disenfranchised Hillary supporters who think with their gender instead of their brains. But as time has gone on, its clear this woman is an opportunist who is willing to toss the party and McCain under the bus so she can step up in 2012 and run.

There isn’t enough space to list all of the things that are wrong with Palin as a VP pick so I’ll give you a few. She is not family focused, she does not understand foreign policy, thinks being next to Russia is a qualifier for knowing about the world, just got a passport last year, exonerated herself and her husband on charges of misconduct as if that is even legal, used Alaskan taxpayer money to fund her family’s travel alongside her on gubernatorial duties, thinks only small towns are the REAL AMERICA and that folks in big cities don’t get it. She questions peoples patriotism if they come from big cities, the folksy you betcha’s are the nail in the coffin. Trying to appeal to the common man with Joe the plumber, Joe Six Pack, etc are condescending to me as a citizen who gets up and goes to work every day.

My other problem with McCain/Palin is that instead of addressing the issues and really hammering the Obama campaign on what they claim are his weaknesses, they are instead just singing the same tune of he’s not American enough, he’s socialist, he’s going to “spread the wealth around” like the bogie man is hiding under our beds that will suddenly jump up and give us all money O_o?! Granted, that selective memory is coming back to bite McCain/Palin; Palin is on record as being proud of the Socialism of Alaska, how they could give back to each man, woman & child in Alaska because they like to spread the wealth. Hmm, forgot you said that Gov?

I want a President that is going to spend the time to address issues. I want them to be able to remain calm, cool and collected. McCain is not that person. Palin cannot wink or you betcha, golly darnit her way out of a G8 summit or arms treaty. I don’t trust either one of them to deal with our allies in a way that will help this country, and I honestly am TERRIFIED of the idea of Palin being thisclose to the Presidency if McCain drops dead.

I’ve had enough of the government treating the country as their personal playground, of them treating the constitution as a whiteboard they can edit as will with no regard for what we, the people want and need from our government.

I urge you to vote next Tuesday, I urge you to do the right thing and Vote for Change.

Day in the Life of Joe Sixpack

Joe gets up at 6 a.m. and fills his coffeepot with water to prepare his morning coffee. The water is clean and good because some tree-hugging liberal fought for minimum water-quality standards. With his first swallow of water, he takes his daily medication. His medications are safe to take because some stupid commie liberal fought to ensure their safety and that they work as advertised.
All but $10 of his medications are paid for by his employer’s medical plan because some liberal union workers fought their employers for paid medical insurance – now Joe gets it too.

He prepares his morning breakfast, bacon and eggs. Joe’s bacon is safe to eat because some girly-man liberal fought for laws to regulate the meat packing industry.

In the morning shower, Joe reaches for his shampoo. His bottle is properly labeled with each ingredient and its amount in the total contents because some crybaby liberal fought for his right to know what he was putting on his body and how much it contained.

Joe dresses, walks outside and takes a deep breath. The air he breathes is clean because some environmentalist wacko liberal fought for the laws to stop industries from polluting our air.

He walks on the government-provided sidewalk to subway station for his government-subsidized ride to work. It saves him considerable money in parking and transportation fees because some fancy-pants liberal fought for affordable public transportation, which gives everyone the opportunity to be a contributor.

Joe begins his work day. He has a good job with excellent pay, medical benefits, retirement, paid holidays and vacation because some lazy liberal union members fought and died for these working standards. Joe’s employer pays these standards because Joe’s employer doesn’t want his employees to call the union.

If Joe is hurt on the job or becomes unemployed, he’ll get a worker compensation or unemployment check because some stupid liberal didn’t think he should lose his home because of his temporary misfortune.

It is noontime and Joe needs to make a bank deposit so he can pay some bills. Joe’s deposit is federally insured by the FSLIC because some godless liberal wanted to protect Joe’s money from unscrupulous bankers who ruined the banking system.

Joe has to pay his Fannie Mae-underwritten mortgage and his below-market federal student loan because some elitist liberal decided that Joe and the government would be better off if he was educated and earned more money over his lifetime. Joe also forgets that his in addition to his federally subsidized student loans, he attended a state funded university.

Joe is home from work. He plans to visit his father this evening at his farm home in the country. He gets in his car for the drive. His car is among the safest in the world because some America-hating liberal fought for car safety standards to go along with the tax-payer funded roads.

He arrives at his boyhood home. His was the third generation to live in the house financed by Farmers’ Home Administration because bankers didn’t want to make rural loans.

The house didn’t have electricity until some big-government liberal stuck his nose where it didn’t belong and demanded rural electrification.

He is happy to see his father, who is now retired. His father lives on Social Security and a union pension because some wine-drinking, cheese-eating liberal made sure he could take care of himself so Joe wouldn’t have to.

Joe gets back in his car for the ride home, and turns on a radio talk show. The radio host keeps saying that liberals are bad and conservatives are good. He doesn’t mention that the beloved Republicans have fought against every protection and benefit Joe enjoys throughout his day. Joe agrees: “We don’t need those big-government liberals ruining our lives! After all, I’m a self-made man who believes everyone should take care of themselves, just like I have.”

Hmm, seems like that selective memory is coming back to haunt Palin & Co.