From Huffpost
Friday, April 30, 2010
FBI Investigating Massey & MSHA for Bribery
NPR reports that the FBI is now investigating Massey Energy and MSHA regarding the possible bribery of Federal officials. Current or former employees are likely talking to authorities. Authorities are also looking into possible criminal negligence in connection with the recent deaths of 29 miners. I guess this is more of the same free market capitalism that I wrote about before, where corporations put profits over lives and are willing to do anything for the bottom line. The name of the game seems to be to get over any way they can.... by any means.
The bribery allegations, if true, would explain why there were so many violations with no credible threat of concrete action. It appears to me that MSHA was seen by Massey as more of a nuisance than a serious regulator.
Louisiana Governor Jindal Rediscovers Federal Government- Asks For Aid As Oil Spill Reaches Coast
Huge Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico Now Making Landfall
Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal Requests Aid From the Federal Government (After Lambasting It).
Where is Caribou Barbie? The "Drill Baby Drill" folks have been awfully quiet during this calamity.
"Every asshole who ever chanted 'Drill Baby Drill' should have to report to the Gulf Coast today for cleanup duty." -- Bill Maher
The current spill could rival or even surpass the Exxon Valdez disaster.
Read more
Blacks and The Racial Litmus Test
It didn't take long for Black bloggers to show their ignorance once the photo of Sandra Bullock and her adopted son emerged this week....and I knew it wouldn't take long. As soon as I saw the photo I knew that certain people from the so-called "Black Community" would have something stupid to say. (No I won't link to their sites). But at least one suggested Bullock's adoption attempt was a possible publicity stunt. Another mentioned that special sensitivity training should be required for Whites... you know... gatekeeper nonsense. Basically, some just seemed annoyed that a Black baby had been adopted by a White woman.
Apparently the adoption isn't final.... but she is continuing with the process.
I'm all for it.
I lived in an abusive home from a toddler until I was about 11 years old. My bio mother (egg donor) was neglectful and was consumed by a world of alcohol, drugs and men. I wasn't at the top of the priority list. What kept me alive was my grandmother.... who was the only responsible adult in my life at the time. She basically raised me. And even then, I came close to death a couple of times. It was my father who saved me once and for all in the Winter of 1984, removing me from a St. Louis ghetto. Before that, I would have loved the idea of someone (ANYONE QUALIFIED) adopting me.... no matter what race they were.
Blacks (at least some of them) are being hypocrites on this.... ignorant hypocrites to be exact. If Black women were not having children out of wedlock at such high rates....or having children that they could not care for, then there wouldn't be such a big need for trans-racial adoption in the first place. But they don't want to talk about that. They also don't want to mention the fact that Black children are over-represented in Foster care systems across the Country. The fact is.... there are not enough Blacks stepping up to take care of their own children. Nor are there enough (qualified) Blacks stepping up to adopt Black children once they are in the social services system. But rather than wrestle with reality... (at least some) Blacks would rather criticize those who are willing and able to adopt.
I'm tired of the Black litmus tests. They annoy me to no end.
I'm tired of the color based litmus tests for relationships, adoptions, Supreme Court justices, Congressional districts, and the rest. Don't get me wrong... I love it when an African American reaches high office or achieves an important milestone... but is it necessary for Blacks to create a racial test for every situation?
When Racism Masquerades as Something Else
(The following is an excellent commentary from the Philadelphia Inquirer. Carlos Dews puts into focus the current political climate, particularly the Tea Party...calling it what it really is. Dews' commentary is supported by facts from The University of Washington).
Don't let the virulent hatred of Obama's presidency - veiled in "policy differences" - fool you. Just ask someone raised around bigotry.
By Carlos Dews
[Dews is an author, a professor of English literature, and chairman of the Department of English Language and Literature at John Cabot University in Rome]
'The nigger show."
I first heard this expression used to describe the Obama administration during a visit to my hometown in East Texas during the early summer of 2009. I understood what the epithet meant: Our minds are made up, the president lacks legitimacy, and there is nothing he can do that we will support. I was not surprised to hear such a phrase.
I grew up in the 1960s during the ragged end of the Jim Crow era, where many of the books in my school library were stamped Colored School, meaning they had been brought to the white school when the town was forced to integrate the public school system. I recall my parents had instructed me, before my first day of elementary school, not to sit in a chair where a black child had sat. And I remember my sister joked that her yearbook, when it appeared at the end of her first year of integrated high school, was in "black and white."
The outward signs of racism of my home state have now disappeared, but racial hatred remains. My father and his friends still use the word nigger to refer to all black people, and the people of my hometown don't hesitate to spout their racist rhetoric to my face, assuming I agree with them. I hold my tongue for the sake of having continued access to this kind of truth. I learned long ago how not to accept the hatred I was being taught and how to survive not having done so. More recently, I realized that I also learned another lesson: how to recognize racism when it masquerades as something else.
More than 40 years after my first experiences with racism, I am thousands of miles away in Rome, but surrounded by ghosts. Last year, I received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for a community program called the Big Read, which sponsors activities to encourage communities to come together to read and discuss a single book. I chose Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, in part because I thought that some of the most salient issues in the novel - racism, classism, xenophobia, the Jim Crow era - were perhaps relevant to an increasingly diverse, contemporary Italy.
That there is racism in Italy is obvious to anyone who pays attention to current affairs. In fact, during the first week of the Big Read Rome, a story in one of Italy's national newspapers detailed the experience of a Nigerian woman being called sporca nera (essentially, dirty nigger) by two women she asked to stop smoking on a Roman bus.
But I never imagined that consideration of the novel would prove so relevant to a country that had just elected its first black president.
Ironically, until the election of Barack Obama, my discussions of racism in the United States seemed historical. I felt that with the passage of the civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s, the country had turned a corner, that the slow evaporation of overt racism was perhaps inevitable. Now, my personal experience of Southern racism feels current and all too familiar. A news story about the Big Read that appeared in La Repubblica on Sept. 20 (unaware that my grant was awarded during the Bush administration), presciently brought Rome, Obama, To Kill a Mockingbird, and racism together in its headline: "Obama brings antiracist book to Rome."
Jimmy Carter was lambasted for having recently explained that the vehemence with which many Americans resist Obama's presidency is an expression of racism. Carter was accused of fanning the flames of racial misunderstanding by labeling as "racist" what on the surface could be perceived as legitimate policy differences. Like Carter, as a white Southern man, I can see beyond the seemingly legitimate rhetoric to discern what is festering behind much of the opposition to Obama and to his administration's policy initiatives. I also have access, via the racist world from which I came, direct confirmation of the racial hatred toward Obama.
The veiled racism I sense in the United States today is couched, in public discourse at least, in terms that allow for plausible deniability of racist intent. And those who resist any policy initiative from the Obama administration engage in a scorched-earth policy that reminds me of the self-centered white flight, the abandonment of public schools, and the proliferation of private schools, that followed the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate public schools. The very people, like my own rural, working-class family back in East Texas, who stand to gain from the efforts of the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress are, because of their racism, willing to oppose policies that would benefit them the most. Their racism outweighs their own self-interest.
Unfortunately, racists in the United States have learned one valuable lesson since the 1960s: They cannot express their racism directly. In public, they must veil their racial hatred behind policy differences. This obfuscation makes direct confrontation difficult. Anyone pointing out their racist motivations runs the risk of unfairly playing "the race card." But I know what members of my family mean when they say - as so many said during the town hall meetings in August - that they "want their country back." They want it back, safely, in the hands of someone like them, a white person. They feel that a black man has no right to be the president of their country.
During a phone conversation a few weeks after Obama's election, my father lamented that he and my mother might have to stop visiting the casinos in Shreveport, La.: Given Obama's election, "the niggers are already walking around like they own the place. They won't even give up their seats for white women anymore. I don't know what we're going to do with 'em."
My students often ask me how I managed to avoid accepting the lesson in racism offered by my family. From the time I was 4 or 5 years old - roughly the same age as Scout Finch, the narrator of To Kill a Mockingbird - I recall knowing that I didn't agree with racism. More important, my paternal grandmother provided me with the encouragement that I could ignore what I was being taught. She provided me with the courage to resist.
My grandmother hoped that my father and his father represented the last generations of the type of Southern man that had shaped her life - virulently racist, prone to violence, proud of their ignorance, and self-defeatingly stubborn. It was a type of Southern man that she hoped and prayed I could avoid becoming.
However, my father and his father were not the last of their kind; their racial hatred has been passed on. My grandmother, if she were alive, would recognize the same tendencies among many of the people who shout down politicians and bring guns to public rallies. She would also see how the only change they have made is to replace overt racist epithets with more euphemistic language.
Rather than seeing my home state and its racist attitudes, slowly, over time, pulled in the direction of more acceptance, the country as a whole has become more like the South, the racial or cultural equivalent of what is called the Walmartization of American retail.
It might be easy to see literature as impotent in the face of the persistence and adaptability of racism. But I continue to believe in the transformative potential of literature and its ability to provide an alternative view of the world. And for children who are not lucky enough to have grandmothers like mine, I believe that books like To Kill a Mockingbird can provide inoculation against the virus that is racism.
by Carlos Dews, author, a professor of English literature, and chairman of the Department of English Language and Literature at John Cabot University in Rome.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This article originally appeared in the December 2009 issue of Aspenia, the Italian journal published by the Aspen Foundation Italy.
Don't let the virulent hatred of Obama's presidency - veiled in "policy differences" - fool you. Just ask someone raised around bigotry.
By Carlos Dews
[Dews is an author, a professor of English literature, and chairman of the Department of English Language and Literature at John Cabot University in Rome]
'The nigger show."
I first heard this expression used to describe the Obama administration during a visit to my hometown in East Texas during the early summer of 2009. I understood what the epithet meant: Our minds are made up, the president lacks legitimacy, and there is nothing he can do that we will support. I was not surprised to hear such a phrase.
I grew up in the 1960s during the ragged end of the Jim Crow era, where many of the books in my school library were stamped Colored School, meaning they had been brought to the white school when the town was forced to integrate the public school system. I recall my parents had instructed me, before my first day of elementary school, not to sit in a chair where a black child had sat. And I remember my sister joked that her yearbook, when it appeared at the end of her first year of integrated high school, was in "black and white."
The outward signs of racism of my home state have now disappeared, but racial hatred remains. My father and his friends still use the word nigger to refer to all black people, and the people of my hometown don't hesitate to spout their racist rhetoric to my face, assuming I agree with them. I hold my tongue for the sake of having continued access to this kind of truth. I learned long ago how not to accept the hatred I was being taught and how to survive not having done so. More recently, I realized that I also learned another lesson: how to recognize racism when it masquerades as something else.
More than 40 years after my first experiences with racism, I am thousands of miles away in Rome, but surrounded by ghosts. Last year, I received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for a community program called the Big Read, which sponsors activities to encourage communities to come together to read and discuss a single book. I chose Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, in part because I thought that some of the most salient issues in the novel - racism, classism, xenophobia, the Jim Crow era - were perhaps relevant to an increasingly diverse, contemporary Italy.
That there is racism in Italy is obvious to anyone who pays attention to current affairs. In fact, during the first week of the Big Read Rome, a story in one of Italy's national newspapers detailed the experience of a Nigerian woman being called sporca nera (essentially, dirty nigger) by two women she asked to stop smoking on a Roman bus.
But I never imagined that consideration of the novel would prove so relevant to a country that had just elected its first black president.
Ironically, until the election of Barack Obama, my discussions of racism in the United States seemed historical. I felt that with the passage of the civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s, the country had turned a corner, that the slow evaporation of overt racism was perhaps inevitable. Now, my personal experience of Southern racism feels current and all too familiar. A news story about the Big Read that appeared in La Repubblica on Sept. 20 (unaware that my grant was awarded during the Bush administration), presciently brought Rome, Obama, To Kill a Mockingbird, and racism together in its headline: "Obama brings antiracist book to Rome."
Jimmy Carter was lambasted for having recently explained that the vehemence with which many Americans resist Obama's presidency is an expression of racism. Carter was accused of fanning the flames of racial misunderstanding by labeling as "racist" what on the surface could be perceived as legitimate policy differences. Like Carter, as a white Southern man, I can see beyond the seemingly legitimate rhetoric to discern what is festering behind much of the opposition to Obama and to his administration's policy initiatives. I also have access, via the racist world from which I came, direct confirmation of the racial hatred toward Obama.
The veiled racism I sense in the United States today is couched, in public discourse at least, in terms that allow for plausible deniability of racist intent. And those who resist any policy initiative from the Obama administration engage in a scorched-earth policy that reminds me of the self-centered white flight, the abandonment of public schools, and the proliferation of private schools, that followed the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate public schools. The very people, like my own rural, working-class family back in East Texas, who stand to gain from the efforts of the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress are, because of their racism, willing to oppose policies that would benefit them the most. Their racism outweighs their own self-interest.
Unfortunately, racists in the United States have learned one valuable lesson since the 1960s: They cannot express their racism directly. In public, they must veil their racial hatred behind policy differences. This obfuscation makes direct confrontation difficult. Anyone pointing out their racist motivations runs the risk of unfairly playing "the race card." But I know what members of my family mean when they say - as so many said during the town hall meetings in August - that they "want their country back." They want it back, safely, in the hands of someone like them, a white person. They feel that a black man has no right to be the president of their country.
During a phone conversation a few weeks after Obama's election, my father lamented that he and my mother might have to stop visiting the casinos in Shreveport, La.: Given Obama's election, "the niggers are already walking around like they own the place. They won't even give up their seats for white women anymore. I don't know what we're going to do with 'em."
My students often ask me how I managed to avoid accepting the lesson in racism offered by my family. From the time I was 4 or 5 years old - roughly the same age as Scout Finch, the narrator of To Kill a Mockingbird - I recall knowing that I didn't agree with racism. More important, my paternal grandmother provided me with the encouragement that I could ignore what I was being taught. She provided me with the courage to resist.
My grandmother hoped that my father and his father represented the last generations of the type of Southern man that had shaped her life - virulently racist, prone to violence, proud of their ignorance, and self-defeatingly stubborn. It was a type of Southern man that she hoped and prayed I could avoid becoming.
However, my father and his father were not the last of their kind; their racial hatred has been passed on. My grandmother, if she were alive, would recognize the same tendencies among many of the people who shout down politicians and bring guns to public rallies. She would also see how the only change they have made is to replace overt racist epithets with more euphemistic language.
Rather than seeing my home state and its racist attitudes, slowly, over time, pulled in the direction of more acceptance, the country as a whole has become more like the South, the racial or cultural equivalent of what is called the Walmartization of American retail.
It might be easy to see literature as impotent in the face of the persistence and adaptability of racism. But I continue to believe in the transformative potential of literature and its ability to provide an alternative view of the world. And for children who are not lucky enough to have grandmothers like mine, I believe that books like To Kill a Mockingbird can provide inoculation against the virus that is racism.
by Carlos Dews, author, a professor of English literature, and chairman of the Department of English Language and Literature at John Cabot University in Rome.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This article originally appeared in the December 2009 issue of Aspenia, the Italian journal published by the Aspen Foundation Italy.
Republicans Live In a Perpetual Fantasy Land
I know you all probably remember the video from a few weeks ago of the Tennessee lawmaker who said that the unemployed should stop being lazy and find a job.... leave em' to starve...society shouldn't help them. People struggling should stop whining. (Basically suggesting that those who are struggling to survive are lazy bums).
Now more video has recently emerged showing another Tennessee lawmaker (what is it about Tennessee and the South?) suggesting that Americans could use vegetables as currency to pay for Health care. Wow! This comes as Harry Reid's Senate challenger, Sue Lowden, stated last week that people could bring chickens to their doctors in exchange for care. This is so far off the crazy scale that it's just hard to conceive.
Here is the video of the latest lunacy.... paying with Veggies.
I love how lawmaker Joe Towns explains reality to Mr. Crazy. (at the end of the Maddow segment).
This is a perfect example of how Republicans live in a parallel universe. They create their own reality, their own rules, etc... and increasingly question real life (as the rest of us see it).
Now more video has recently emerged showing another Tennessee lawmaker (what is it about Tennessee and the South?) suggesting that Americans could use vegetables as currency to pay for Health care. Wow! This comes as Harry Reid's Senate challenger, Sue Lowden, stated last week that people could bring chickens to their doctors in exchange for care. This is so far off the crazy scale that it's just hard to conceive.
Here is the video of the latest lunacy.... paying with Veggies.
I love how lawmaker Joe Towns explains reality to Mr. Crazy. (at the end of the Maddow segment).
This is a perfect example of how Republicans live in a parallel universe. They create their own reality, their own rules, etc... and increasingly question real life (as the rest of us see it).
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Rachel Maddow takes on the architect of the' If you ain't White, you better have papers' Law
hat tip-SouthernGirl2
Rachel Maddow interviews the president of the Federation of American Immigration Reform
Rachel ripped Dan Stein to shreds
from Political Carnival
The president of FAIR (Federation of American Immigration Reform), Dan Stein, was on the Rachel Maddow Show. It was brutal.
Because of this interview (read: tussle; read: battle; read: slaughter), we have a new word: "Steined"... as in, "You've been Steined by Rachel Maddow".
Witness the peerless Rachel "Stein" Stein:
Rachel Maddow interviews the president of the Federation of American Immigration Reform
Rachel ripped Dan Stein to shreds
from Political Carnival
The president of FAIR (Federation of American Immigration Reform), Dan Stein, was on the Rachel Maddow Show. It was brutal.
Because of this interview (read: tussle; read: battle; read: slaughter), we have a new word: "Steined"... as in, "You've been Steined by Rachel Maddow".
Witness the peerless Rachel "Stein" Stein:
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
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