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Monday, January 17, 2011

my OP-ED: I have A Dream: and its the one Martin Luther King had. To reach the mountain together....

my thoughts today on MLK day.
Genesis 1: 26 Then God said, 'Let us make man in OUR Image, according to our likeness
                 27 So God created Man in His own image; He created him in the image of God; He created them     .                     male and female.
In The Beginning GOD Created man and woman in His Image.  It does not say color it does not say nationality it does not state tall or short, weak or strong.  I find that It is imperative that WE the People created by our God  in His image  should take a good hard look in the mirror and at each other.  God made no mistakes, not with His creation. We have always had the opportunity to live in harmony with each other.  But somewhere around 1600  Black men where brought over from Africa as our minions. And for approximately 200 years we doubled tripled the amount of Black people to tend our farms, take care of our households. Work for no wage, no rights, to be sold at the owners whim to be used by owners as propagation  for more young slaves. Women were raped, beaten and separated from families.  Young children were taken from parents and sold to different masters.  Where did we get off enslaving people, where did we get the idea that we were better than blacks, that they had no rights, not until 1964.  And then it took years to change the minds of certain Republicans.  Be4 the segregated bathrooms, drinking fountains, seating in restaurants  churches, the idea of black congresspersons, even black mayors, governors, and not until 2008 We the People elected the first black President.  Does that change the way we look at blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, Mexican. Unfortunetly no, we still look at others differently, and I believe that Martin Luther King if he was still here would be appalled by what he would be seeing.  He had a dream and we as human beings have a long way to go to get to Kings dream.  And now the 112th Congress Republicans want to change things and that scares me.


If I have any of the below information wrong please let me know and give me the right information......




The Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Pub.L. 88-352, 78 Stat. 241, enacted July 2, 1964) was a landmark piece of legislation in the United States that outlawed major forms of discrimination against blacks and women, including racial segregation. It ended unequal application of voter registration requirements and racial segregation in schools, at the workplace and by facilities that served the general public ("public accommodations"). Powers given to enforce the act were initially weak, but were supplemented during later years. Congress asserted its authority to legislate under several different parts of the United States Constitution, principally its power to regulate interstate commerce under Article One (section 8), its duty to guarantee all citizens equal protection of the laws under the Fourteenth Amendment and its duty to protect voting rights under theFifteenth Amendment.


The bill was called for by President John F. Kennedy in his civil rights speech of June 11, 1963,[1] in which he asked for legislation "giving all Americans the right to be served in facilities which are open to the public—hotels, restaurants, theaters, retail stores, and similar establishments," as well as "greater protection for the right to vote."
In late November 1963 the Assassination of John F. Kennedy changed the political situation. The new president, Lyndon Johnson, utilized his experience in legislative politics and the bully pulpit he wielded as president in support of the bill. In his first address to Congress on November 27, 1963, Johnson told the legislators, "No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy's memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long."[4
On the return of Congress from the winter recess, however, it became apparent that public opinion in the North favored the bill and the petition would acquire the necessary signatures. To prevent the humiliation of the success of the petition, Chairman Smith allowed the bill to pass through the Rules Committee. The bill was brought to a vote in the House on February 10, 1964, and passed by a vote of 290 to 130, and sent to the Senate.

The bill came before the full Senate for debate on March 30, 1964 and the "Southern Bloc" of 18 southern Democratic Senators and one Republican Senator led by Richard Russell (D-GA) launched a filibuster to prevent its passage.[6] Said Russell: "We will resist to the bitter end any measure or any movement which would have a tendency to bring about social equality and intermingling and amalgamation of the races in our (Southern) states."[7]
The most fervent opposition to the bill came from Senator Strom Thurmond (D-SC): "This so-called Civil Rights Proposals, which the President has sent to Capitol Hill for enactment into law, are unconstitutional, unnecessary unwise and extend beyond the realm of reason. This is the worst civil-rights package ever presented to the Congress and is reminiscent of the Reconstruction proposals and actions of the radical Republican Congress."[8]
On June 19, the substitute (compromise) bill passed the Senate by a vote of 71–29, and quickly passed through the House-Senate conference committee, which adopted the Senate version of the bill. The conference bill was passed by both houses of Congress, and was signed into law by President Johnson on July 2, 1964.[11]

Jobless Recoveries, Take Two

  | 

Putting Poverty on the Agenda


Katrina vanden Heuvel | January 16, 2011

Quote of the Day: The Fourth Amendment Blues

 

| Mon Jan. 17, 2011 12:17 PM PST
From a Florida state appellate court, after reviewing a case in which police officers claimed that a search of a defendent's apartment in a drug case was legal because he invited them in and then cheerfully volunteered the location of his hidden stash:
The judge may have punctiliously performed the duties of his office in this case, but, when considering the large number of “consent” cases that have come before us, the finding of “consent” in so many curious circumstances is a cause for concern.
Indeed. Click the link for more. This is such an obvious case of police perjury that a Hollywood screenwriter would probably turn it down as a little too contemptuous of Southern law enforcement. Despite that, the appellate judge had no choice but to let the search stand. Lovely.

How We Got MLK Day and Who Stood in the Way

Intermittent discrimination and guaranteed enemies

January 17th, 2011


This morning I listened to an interview with Carole Simpson on The Madeleine Brand Show. (The podcast isn’t available as I write this, but when it is it will be here and you can subscribe.)  Summarizing from memory: Simpson said that the racism and sexism early in her career were constant and pervasive. She was called a “ni—- slut”; male colleagues would unzip her dress or plunge their hands down her blouse; when she started out, assignment editors would enjoy the “joke” of telling her to cover an event but giving her a time that was well after it was scheduled to end.
But when Brand asked whether the sexism and racism had “dissipated” over time, Simpson said no.  “Every six to nine months” until she retired, she would get an email or a call, or encounter something in person, that reminded her that in someone else’s eyes she was “just a black woman.”  Simpson’s examples made it sound as if “black” retained much more salience than woman: One colleague offered to fetch her a “collard green sandwich”; an executive, encountering her at an office party in business attire, still assumed she must be a maid.
Still, to complain about discrimination that occurred “every six to nine months” might at first hearing sound a bit bit petty.  Surely that can be laughed off? Not so fast.
Back when I taught a course on affirmative action, I remember reading an author (it might have been Glenn Lourythough I can’t lay my hands on his book at the moment) point out how such intermittent discrimination has real costs when reckoned over a career.  Consider that most people get a big break on a personal level—a boss, colleague, present or former co-worker, ex-college buddy, etc., remembers you as competent and chooses you for a job or promotion—every few years.  Now assume that those breaks happen, because of racism or sexism, once every five and a half years instead of five, because one in ten people is a little bit biased, which seems not a radical estimate.  Worse, assume that once in a few years somebody with a bit of power wishes you ill instead of well and quashes the promotion instead of facilitating it.  Multiply that by a whole career and suddenly everybody who isn’t a white guy ends up at least a level or two below where he or she would have been without bias.  This happens even if one doesn’t assume high or pervasive levels of animus and even if one doesn’t take the psychic costs of racial and sexual insult into account (though the latter seems unfair, especially since the souls of conservative white males seem acutely sensitive to the slightest accusation of racial insensitivity, and is of course not how our civil rights laws see things).
I suspect that one reason that most white males like me find this whole process hard to credit is that we don’t have a personal analogy: it seems there’s nothing in our experience that this intermittent animus closely resembles.  Actually there is, but we don’t think about it that way, and the frame of “institutional” racism obscures it: intermittent racism is like a guarantee that somebody in every workplace you experience will be a personal enemy.
Define an enemy as someone who for no good reason (as you see it, anyway) has it in for you.  Such enemies don’t intend to break your legs or kick you out of your house, but hold you to much higher standards than they hold everyone else to, as well as much higher standards than everyone else holds you to.  For most of us, if we’re fairly decent people and team players, such enemies are uncommon—call them one co-worker in a hundred—but when they appear they really rankle.  They make the workplace unpleasant; they make every meeting fraught; we remember them for years; we’ll do all we can to get rid of them (in the process becoming their enemies) and if we can’t, might well change jobs to avoid them.
Now imagine that in your workplace, one out of every fifteen or twenty colleagues is such an enemy.  Further imagine that your enemies are much more often than not more powerful than you are, since enemy-of-you, while still an uncommon descriptor among those with more power than you, is still highly correlated with having more power than you.  (Translation: most white people don’t hate have it in for blacks, but by far most people who hate have it in for blacks are white.)  This means that you probably can’t fire your enemy, but your enemy may over time be able, especially by biasing job assignments and assessments so that non-enemies come to think ill of you, to get you fired or at least not promoted. Finally, imagine that each of your enemies will have every interest in concealing that enmity, because it’s socially taboo, as well as every possibility of concealing it, because asserting the continued existence of such enmities is also socially taboo.
All this might make you want to quit your job and take another.  Unfortunately, you can pretty much guarantee that exactly the same circumstances will obtain in every job. A one-in-fifteen or -twenty rate of enmity obtains in society as a whole.
Welcome to contemporary American society—and to the grand costs of continued petty racism, even assuming that most people don’t practice it and that the way they practice is much less violent than it once was.
Update: I’ve replaced “hate” by “have it in for” to stress the non-virulent quality of the enmity at issue.

Governor to NAACP: "Kiss My Butt"


  • January 17th, 2011 5:45 am CT

Governor Paul LePage has a history of making tasteless remarks.
Photo: Courtesy of MassAppealNews.com
PORTLAND, Maine – Apparently, not everyone’s in the celebratory spirit. Check this out. Paul LePage, the newly elected Republican Governor of Maine and loyal Tea Party supporter, recently declined an invitation to attend the NAACP’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. celebration for personal reasons.
When asked by a reporter to elaborate on his decision, LePage responded angrily: “Tell them to kiss my butt. They are a special interest. End of story … and I’m not going to be held hostage by special interests. And if they want, they can look at my family picture. My son happens to be black, so they can do whatever they’d like about it.”
LePage is referring to his adopted son from Jamaica.
Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time the Governor has made the news for running his mouth.
While on the campaign trail last fall, LePage had the audacity to tell a group of fishermen if he’s elected “you’re going to be seeing a lot of me on the front page, saying ‘Governor LePage tells (Barack) Obama to go to hell.’”
The speech obviously worked as LePage was subsequently voted into office. My goodness. I don’t know which is worse: LePage winning the election, or the credibility of the voters solely responsible.
As Americans, there’s no question we have grown extremely liberal when it comes to “freedom of speech” and all the intangible rights associated with it. Probably more so since President Obama took office.
However, at what point should an angry comment or threat against our Commander-in-Chief be construed as a detestable act of terrorism?
Yes, determining what constitutes a terrorist threat is indeed arbitrary. Any lawyer will tell us that. But a legislative response is still worth a shot. Especially in today’s hostile economic times.
After all, the fatal shootings in Arizona, which took the lives of several innocent people and left many more wounded, were proven to be a byproduct of hate crimes committed by a practicing white supremacist (Jared Lee Loughner).
LePage’s “Kiss my butt” remark, whether racist or not, only adds kerosene to the political fire.
Regardless the intent, this type of verbiage shouldn’t be tolerated from an elected official or anyone seeking public office for that matter.
Seriously people, we need ‘peacemakers’ in legislature. Not instigators.
I’ve had it.
I say “enough is enough.”
It’s time to re-evaluate the “Freedom of Speech” laws and consider immediate revisions. LePage is not only setting a bad example from a prestigious position of leadership, but his behavior is 100% counterproductive to Dr. King’s dream.
Furthermore, adopting a black son doesn’t classify LePage as morally exempt.
A reprimand, in my view, is still necessary.
Wayne Hodges, an MBA from St. Mary University, is the Editor-in-Chief of “Mass Appeal News.” He also serves as District Committee Delegate in Johnson County, he’s an MPA at the University of Kansas, and he’s an adjunct professor in Kansas City.


Continue reading on Examiner.com: Governor to NAACP: "Kiss My Butt" - Topeka Democrat | Examiner.com http://www.examiner.com/democrat-in-topeka/governor-to-naacp-kiss-my-butt#ixzz1BLWW5nr7