Jack & Jill Politics

Found this in the comments section at Ta-Nehisi Coates:

To anyone who thinks $600 million is too much to spend on a presidential campaign, here is a little context. Obama was not just running against another candidate, he was running against more than 300 years of American culture and mythology depicting Black americans as sub human. Think about all the books, newspapers, folk tales, movies, magazines etc. that in ways big and small were devoted to promoting this canard. At less than two million a year, I’d say that’s the bargain of this or any millenium.

Posted by anna perez

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Just as the Emancipation Proclamation forever changed America’s relationship with African-Americans, just so what happened one week ago will inevitably change who we are as Americans and how America sees us. I could tell a joke about how we’re obviously going to have to make up a new name for ourselves having gone from negroes to colored people to black people to Afro-Americans to people of color to African-Americans.

Yet, while this represents an incredible opening, there’s still much to do. Henry Louis Gates has an incredible piece over at The Root that is highly recommended for a true historical perspective. Here’s an excerpt:

How many of our ancestors have given their lives—how many millions of slaves toiled in the fields in endlessly thankless and mindless labor—before this generation could live to see a black person become president? “How long, Lord?” the spiritual goes; “not long!” is the resounding response. What would Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois say if they could know what our people had at long last achieved? What would Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman say? What would Dr. King himself say? Would they say that all those lost hours of brutalizing toil and labor leading to spent, half-fulfilled lives, all those humiliations that our ancestors had to suffer through each and every day, all those slights and rebuffs and recriminations, all those rapes and murders, lynchings and assassinations, all those Jim Crow laws and protest marches, those snarling dogs and bone-breaking water hoses, all of those beatings and all of those killings, all of those black collective dreams deferred—that the unbearable pain of all of those tragedies had, in the end, been assuaged at least somewhat through Barack Obama’s election? This certainly doesn’t wipe that bloody slate clean. His victory is not redemption for all of this suffering; rather, it is the symbolic culmination of the black freedom struggle, the grand achievement of a great, collective dream.

And indeed, while watching Barack Obama and his family in the White House as the first family will surely erode racism, there’s a backlash coming. For every freedom we achieve, there’s usually a corresponding push backwards and we must be ready to pull the nation forward in the face of such reactionary attempts.

It was only 25 or 30 years after the Emancipation that Jim Crow was unleashed and African-Americans, while free were oppressed afresh. There will be those who will watch for every slip of Obama’s to prove that blacks are inferior. There will be those who believe that everything is equal now and there is no more racism in America. Observe The Wall Street Journal:

While Mr. Obama lost among white voters, as most modern Democrats do, his success is due in part to the fact that he also muted any politics of racial grievance. We have had in recent years two black Secretaries of State, black CEOs of our largest corporations, black Governors and Generals — and now we will have a President. One promise of his victory is that perhaps we can put to rest the myth of racism as a barrier to achievement in this splendid country. Mr. Obama has a special obligation to help do so.

Yet we know that the playing field is still not level for people of color in America despite this dramatic, positive step. How many black CEOs are there now for example - it’s a small percentage after all and not proportionate to our population. Our work for equal access and equal opportunity continues, bouyed mightily by what happened just one week from today and the Inauguration to come.

Where were you one week ago when you heard the news? I was in a studio waiting for a BBC interview that didn’t happen watching McCain concede, then driving to the Current TV/Digg election night party listening to Obama’s historic victory speech on the radio. Wow what a moment. Then at the party, it was like a happy bomb had gone off by the time I’d gotten there. I still felt like I’d been hit by a 2-by-4 and then I remember dancing with a glass of champagne overhead with Digg.com CEO Jay Adelson (who’s a surprisingly good dancer!).

Then I headed to San Francisco’s Castro district. Driving there was crazy with people standing in the streets jumping up and down, every bar overflowing, cars driving slowly waving giant American flags. On Disvisdero Street, people were out in the streets and in the Castro, there was thousands of people partying and watching a giant LCD tv with streets blocked. The energy was incredible. I can’t remember when I’ve hugged more people. I kept getting texts from friends from my hometown in Washington DC telling me they’d joined a spontaneous party/rally in front of the White House which was incredible — as a lifelong resident of DC, I can tell you, that is not a normal DC response to an election. Amazing…

What about you - where were you that night? Let’s commemorate together. Cuz our kids & grandkids are gonna ask…

Discussion Thread, y’all.  AIG wants to feed at the Government Trough, receive corporate welfare for malfeasance, and with the bill running $900 billion of yours and my tax dollars, they’re still planning boondoggle events at $350,000 for their people.  Hat tip AmericaBlog - via ABC News.

I’ll let Mr. Aravosis speak on this issue:

This is clearly an organization that doesn’t have a clue. Fire the entire damned executive team and start over. For other businesses who are struggling to get through this tough economy, they trim costs. For AIG? They schedule yet another executive event for $350,000 with all the trimmings. Maybe it is necessary to get everyone together but c’mon, there’s no need for spending money that they are already borrowing from taxpayers. Change needs to come at AIG immediately and no more golden parachutes as they’re sent packing.

Now, one of our regular commenters, Sepia, pointed out something very shrewd about our President-Elect, if, in fact, this was the reason Summers’ name got floated like a trial balloon.  Here’s Sepia’s take on it:

According to Tom Brokaw on The Today Show, Larry Summers WAS the favorite for the spot, but that has since changed over the weekend. Too much baggage. He said that there’s much debate within the Obama camp about who should fill the spot. Some want Paul Volker and perhaps have him teamed up with Timothy Geithner.

I think this info about Summers being a top choice was purposely leaked to get a feel about what we think.

Well, it’s actually nice to have a President who can think; who’s intellectually curious about what goes on around him and who tries to get a take on the pulse of the Nation and act accordingly.  It will also serve him well when he makes those bold moves we expect him to make in the coming years to get America back on track.

But this Banking Bailout mess is the gift that keeps on giving…to Wall Street, ’cause we’re not getting jack from this bailout, except our pockets picked.  I’m hoping that someone will call a Congressional hearing in the new year and demand AIG to explain themselves about how they were clammering about being broke, but you can find $350K to spend on a boondoggle Executive Retreat, while people are losing their jobs, their homes, have no medical insurance, can’t get prescriptions when they get sick - all of it gone to hell in a handbasket.

Chime in with your thoughts, opinions, rants and raves.

I’ve weighed in with my comments on this proposition and the fact that my “Christian” friends have called me a heathen because my position on this proposition is that gay people should have the freedom to do whatever they want.

I’ve also been told that my reasoning as a Christian is “flawed” because I feel this way, and because I believe people who claim to be Christian, more often than not, use the Bible to beat up and control anyone who has independence of thought. I guess my reasoning is “flawed” because I still believe in the basic humanity of people, regardless of their identity, orientation or how they choose to live their lives.

Enough of that.  An autopsy has finally been performed to determine why Prop. 8 passed. From TIME Magazine:

Longtime gay rights advocate Dean Trantalis of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and others on the conference call expressed concern that the gay rights movement had become too focused on marriage, and is now paying the price in other more critical areas. “Marriage was never our issue,” Trantalis said. “It was thrust upon us by the other side, and they’ve done a very good job of beating us up over it.”

The concern is that conservatives will use those same tactics - statewide referendums aimed at overruling court decisions or rebuffing reluctant legislators - to restrict other rights. In Arkansas, for example, voters easily passed an initiative that did what state legislators had refused to do: ban adoptions or even foster-parent roles for unmarried couples, including gays. Now the state joins Utah, Florida and Mississippi as places where gay couples cannot adopt. Trantalis and others are worried that even as the gay rights movement continues to win court victories, those very victories may prompt stronger and stronger backlashes, jeopardizing other hard-won rights, from adoption to antidiscrimination measures by local governments and in the workplace.

On the Evangelical side, Mohler told TIME that religious conservatives see the threat from the gay rights’ agenda as much broader than just an affront to traditional notions of marriage. “Full normalization of homosexuality would eventually mean the end to all morals legislation of any kind,” he says, echoing the line of reasoning made famous by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in his dissent in the high court’s 2003 decision striking down state laws that made gay sex a crime.

I fully realize African-Americans have a long way to go in dealing with the issue of gay-anything, just as Latinos, Asians, Native Americans and Caucasians have to deal with it.  The whole issue at hand is the allowance of discrimination ANYWHERE, which gets on the slippery slope to discrimination EVERYWHERE.  My position on this is if discrimination is legalized for gay people, what’s to stop the religious powers from attempting to reinstate Jim Crow laws again?  Or repudiation of interracial marriages; or repudiation of Women’s Rights? There is no limit to repudiation of hard won rights, especially by those who felt like if they gave them to us, when they get ready, they can take them away.

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Good morning.

Let’s continue the good postings from yesterday.

Drop those links. Engage in debate. Give us trivia and gossip too.

And always, have a peaceful day.

I heard about Miriam Makeba’s passing on the radio this morning but only now do I have a chance to post my respects. My mother loved her (and Hugh Masekela), and we got to see her years back at the Berklee Performing Arts Center in Boston before my mom passed. Every time I hear Makeba, I think of moms.

I hope they are both enjoying well-deserved rest and celebration beyond this world.

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I want to know who on Obama’s team is making these suggestions and what are they smoking.  Do they have any friggin’ idea who the hell Lawrence Summers IS?

He’s as good as a Bush Administration appointee (even though he succeeded Robert Rubin in 1999) - he was an assistant Treasury Secretary who became the eyes and ears on deregulations and shyt for the late Ken Lay of the Enron Ripping Off Poor Californians during the energy blackouts back in early 2001, as well as costing Gray Davis his job as California’s Governor.  Read the “love note” he sent to Lay when he took over as Treasury Secretary:

May 25, 1999

Mr. Kenneth L. Lay
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Enron
PO Box 1188
Houston, Texas 77251

Dear Ken:

Thanks very much for you kind letter of congratulations. I am grateful for your best wishes and deeply honored by the President’s choice. As I said in the Rose Garden, Secretary Rubin’s act is a tough one to follow and there are certainly plenty of challenges ahead. I am looking forward to the opportunity and to continuing on the course that has been set.

I hope our paths will cross again soon.

Sincerely,

Lawrence H. Summers

[Hand-written scrawl] PS - I’ll keep my eye on power deregulation and energy market infrastructure issues.

The actual written note is here at OpenLeft.  Read it and pay attention to the handwritten portion.

Not to mention Summers is the same SOB who got in trouble with women regarding his views on their earning potential and other shyt while still collecting a paycheck from Harvard University.  Does Obama want a Treasury Secretary who thinks like THIS:

In January 2005, Summers described, at a Conference on Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce sponsored by the National Bureau of Economic Research, the different ways of explaining why there were more men than women in high-end science and engineering positions. He gave the three main hypotheses in the following order: that more men than women were willing to make the commitment in terms of time and flexibility demanded by high-powered jobs, that there were differences in the innate abilities of men and women (more specifically, men’s higher variance in innate abilities or preferences relevant to science and engineering), and that the discrepancy was due to discrimination or socialization. (*emphasis mine) He also stated his view that the order given reflected the relative importance of each of the three factors.^[15] An attendee made Summers’ remarks public, and an intense response followed in the national news media and on Harvard’s campus.

Jesus.  Do “they” want to tank Obama before he warms up his seat in the Oval Office? <<<eye roll>>>

The Return of Bill Clinton?  Could Be if Obama Appoints too Many of His Former Cabinet Members

I can stomach Rahm Emmanuel as Chief of Staff.  And in a perfect world, Jamie Gorelick might be ideal as Attorney General; however, the knives are out for her as I write this:

Carries as baggage: Her work at Fannie Mae, which had to be bailed out by the government in September as part of a $200 billion deal. Ms. Gorelick left the company just as it was coming under attack for huge accounting failures. She has also drawn criticism for her role at the Justice Department, in which she allegedly created an intelligence “wall” that hindered counterterrorism agents in the years before the Sept. 11 attacks. Conservatives called for her removal from the Sept. 11 commission, but her fellow members rallied around her and said critics were distorting her record. The criticism grew so heated that the F.B.I. investigated a death threat against her family, and President Bush had to intervene personally to stop the Justice Department from releasing sealed reports involving her. Some conservative bloggers have already begun trying to derail Ms. Gorelick’s possible nomination as attorney general, pointing to her experiences at both Fannie Mae and the Sept. 11 commission.

Far more disturbing to me is that Mr. Obama is perfectly willing to employ most of his cabinet with former Clinton Administration appointees.  Where have we seen this before?

Can you say The Current Administration?  Nearly everyone on board in both terms, came from either Poppy Bush’s administration; Ronald Reagan’s Administration, and Richard Nixon’s Administration.  And they all came with the same disasterous policies that didn’t fly in those previous administrations, either.

I want to see President Obama demonstrate more independence in his Cabinet choices.  I don’t think too many Clintonistas should be rewarded for the slimy, kitchen-sink, scorched-earth campaign they ran - giving tacit consent to John McCain to engage in similar slime and mayhem - even including a pretty woman who hosted campaign rallies that served as recruitment events for the KKK.

If the incoming President is bringing change to Washington, too many Clintonistas may bring the shyt with them that makes him a one-term president; not to mention setting Hillary up for 2012.  Which may be the Clintons’ strategy ALL ALONG.

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Artist Elizabeth Peyton based upon a photo of Michelle and Sasha Obama at the DNC

Good morning.

As we begin a new week, don’t forget about us here at JJP.

Drop those links. Engage in debate. Give us trivia and gossip too.

And always, have a peaceful day.

Good Evening.

Continue to drop those links. Engage in debate. Give us trivia and gossip too.

And have a peaceful day.