Former Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, standing beside a damaged yacht, Tuesday accused the Israeli navy of ramming the vessel to halt the delivery of medical supplies to the embattled Gaza Strip.
“Our mission was a peaceful mission,” McKinney told CNN after she and 15 others aboard the boat made it safely to the harbor in the Lebanese seaport of Tyre.
McKinney, the recent Green Party candidate for U.S. president and frequent center of controversy, is the most prominent political figure to join the relief voyages sponsored by the Free Gaza Movement.
McKinney was slated to travel by car to Beirut where she was expected to conducted media interviews and meet with Lebanese government officials, said Paul Larudee, a co-founder of the California-based Free Gaza group. [...]
The Conference on Research Directions is a biannual event that will be held at the beautiful Hilton Oceanfront Resort on Hilton Head, South Carolina, from May 3-6, 2009. Hilton Head is also the home of the Gullah people. These are African people who created a self-sustaining community after slavery with retention of the African heritage. Conferees will have the opportunity to take the Gullah Heritage Tour in addition to experiencing a Gullah heritage celebration, distinctive Gullah food delicacies, folk art, artifacts and landmarks. The conferees will be able to experience a beautiful oceanfront resort and also explore the West African heritage and seminal events in American history.
This conference is designed to bridge the gap between research and practice in education. All researchers and practitioners who are interested in the latest strategies for closing the academic achievement gap that affects African American children should attend. [...]
Interview with Iconic Educator, Dr. Janice Hale, by Tolu Olorunda.
It is rare for an educator to reach great heights of popularity and acclaim, but Dr. Janice Hale has earned every stripe of fame. As an internationally-renowned scholar, Dr. Hale is no stranger to controversies surrounding her work and theories. No other than Rev. Dr. Jeremiah E. Wright Jr. acknowledged her in his, much-talked about, speech in Detroit earlier this year. Wright celebrated Dr. Hale as someone we owe “a debt of gratitude.” [...]
YourBlackWorld.com recently had the esteemed opportunity to engage Dr. Janice Hale in dialogue on a wide array of topics. Included in the conversation were issues surrounding the recent selection of Arne Duncan as Sec. of Education, problems confronting Black students, the ISAAC program, Early Childhood education and more. As one never known for mincing words, Dr. Hale took no prisoners as she expressed her feelings about Bill Cosby… Excuse me, Dr. Bill Cosby, modern-day Civil Rights Organizations, Oprah Winfrey, and the public/private school system. Get your pens and pads ready. Class is in session:
Thanks for being with us, Dr. Hale. To kick things off, how did it feel being snubbed for the Sec. of Education position, which you lobbied so tenaciously for?
*Laughs* That’s so funny. I don’t feel snubbed about that. What I feel snubbed about is that, I feel in my book “Learning While Black,” I really provide solutions for what is wrong with education and how to fix African-American education, and I don’t feel my solutions have gotten any attention. [...]
Based on the selection of Arne Duncan – who holds a bachelor’s in Sociology – as Sec. of Education, what is incumbent upon Black folks in pushing an agenda that would improve learning conditions of Black students?
Full Interview At Your Black Education
White Liberals Scold Obama… But Come Off Cynical & Hypocritical
By: Tolu Olorunda
Reprinted From Dissident Voice
In the wake of President-Elect Obama’s recent cabinet-appointments, many white liberals have taken it upon themselves to release pent-up aggression at a man they thought was the “progressive” candidate he had earlier claimed to be.. As they saw it, Obama had “betrayed” the loyalty that earned him victory. As a sort of catharsis, railing Obama’s reputation over the coals of indignation could make them feel better about their decision to elect a man who promised virtually nothing (of substance) in his bid for the presidency. White liberals, especially, have had to learn so much, in the last 1 month, about the man whose political dirty-laundry was never hidden from the public to begin with.
In a highly predictable move, they have sought to bash everything Obama, or Obama-like, and couch their frustration in the ‘eloquence,’ and ‘con-artistry’ of Obama. Spare me the misplaced aggravation. [...]
Whilst Black progressives sought to rip the mask off of Barack Obama, in an attempt to unveil his true identity, we were deemed ‘Obama-haters,’ whose egos sought to stifle the chances of a Black man making history. [...]
Full Article At Your Black Politics
Interview with Youth Motivational Speaker, Caitlin Powell, by Tolu Olorunda.
Caitlin Powell is a role-model, motivational speaker, writer, telecaster and singer – all packed into one. The catch: She’s a mere 10 years of age! Though a fifth grader, Caitlin’s exceptional intellect is inspiring kids and parents across the country. Caitlin, who loves reading and studying math, is also the host of her very own webcast titled, “Caitlin’s Corner TV.” As one who takes advanced courses in her school, Caitlin knows, first hand, how challenging school can be. In her nationally-syndicated webcast, Caitlin offers tips and advices to her peers, on how to lead a fruitful life and embrace the challenges that come. Caitlin Powell is also a role model to her two younger siblings, who look up to her, being the oldest, for leadership. YourBlackWorld.com recently had the opportunity to speak with Caitlin on her interests, the joy of reading, motivational speaking and much, much more:
Thanks for joining us, Caitlin. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Well, I’m involved in my courses at my school; I love to sing; I’m on the telecast – it’s a lot of fun. I do the announcer #1, announcer # 2, camera-director and sound. My favorite is actually announcer #1, because you get to share a lot of information about what’s going on in the school. [...]
In your latest webcast, you mentioned math as your favorite subject. Why is that?
Well, it gets my brain working; it’s really hard and challenging – and I love a good challenge. So, I stay really smart, and I hope I have a good future.
A lot of your peers dislike math for this reason. Why? And how can you help them come to love it, just as much as you do?
Full Interview At Your Black Scholar
Book Review of “Reggie Wakes Up”
By: Tolu Olorunda
Staff Writer – YourBlackWorld.com
“Under the FUBU is a guru, that’s untapped…”
-Hip-Hop artist, Common, The 6th Sense.
With the recent victory of President-Elect Obama, many have speculated a change of attitude in young black men, vis-à-vis the thirst for educational prowess. Whilst this prediction does seem, by all measures, accurately reflective of the lingering emotion within Black circles, some have suggested the need for a handbook of sorts, as necessary in guiding Black students, male and female, toward a more promising future. Of such is Zekita Tucker, a St. Louis author and publisher, whose advocacy for Black students builds on the legacies established by W.E.B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, Janice Hale, etc. Zekita Tucker, of fame “Don’t Call Me Nigga 
,” has a new book out titled, “Reggie Wakes Up .”
Reggie Wakes Up is a blueprint for teachers and students alike – with an emphasis on public schools. [...]
Meant for ages 8 and up, Reggie Wakes Up takes a hard look into the public school system, and its effects on the psyche of Black students [...]
More At Your Black Education
CHICAGO (AP) – In an unwavering statement of innocence, Gov. Rod Blagojevich said Friday he will be vindicated of criminal corruption charges and has no intention of letting what he called a “political lynch mob” force him from his job.
“I will fight. I will fight. I will fight until I take my last breath. I have done nothing wrong,” Blagojevich said, speaking for about three minutes in his first substantial public comments since his arrest last week on federal corruption charges.
The Democrat is accused, among other things, of plotting to sell or trade President-elect Barack Obama’s U.S. Senate seat in secretly recorded phone conversations.
“I’m not going to quit a job the people hired me to do because of false accusations and a political lynch mob,” Blagojevich said.
It was a little before 8 at night when the breaker went out at Emily Milburn’s home in Galveston. She was busy preparing her children for school the next day, so she asked her 12-year-old daughter, Dymond, to pop outside and turn the switch back on.
As Dymond headed toward the breaker, a blue van drove up and three men jumped out rushing toward her. One of them grabbed her saying, “You’re a prostitute. You’re coming with me.”
Dymond grabbed onto a tree and started screaming, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.” One of the men covered her mouth. Two of the men beat her about the face and throat. [...]
All this is according to a lawsuit filed in Galveston federal court by Milburn against the officers. The lawsuit alleges that the officers thought Dymond, an African-American, was a hooker due to the “tight shorts” she was wearing, despite not fitting the racial description of any of the female suspects. The police went to the wrong house, two blocks away from the area of the reported illegal activity, Milburn’s attorney, Anthony Griffin, tells Hair Balls.
After the incident, Dymond was hospitalized and suffered black eyes as well as throat and ear drum injuries.
Three weeks later, according to the lawsuit, police went to Dymond’s school, where she was an honor student, and arrested her for assaulting a public servant.
A new documentary, written, produced and directed by Daphne S. Valerius, takes a critical look into the fragile souls of Black girls, with emphasis on how media images are “instituted, established and controlled.” With appearances by Jada Pinkett Simth, Regina King and Chuck D of Public Enemy, amongst many others, The Souls of Black Girls seeks to uncover some of society’s less-known realities about color-coding and racialized-gender bias. By examining “historical and existing media images of women of color” the documentary asks if Black girls are “suffering from a self-image disorder as a result of trying to attain the standards of beauty that are celebrated in media images.”
The Souls of Black Girls Trailer:
AOL Black Voices Interview with Daphne Valerius:
Why I love The Great Jim Brown
By: Dr. Boyce Watkins
Founder – YourBlackWorld.com
www.BoyceWatkins.net
I got a phone call today. I get a lot of calls from “observers” (translation: supporters and haterologists), and I appreciate every single one of them. However, being as busy as I am, I usually don’t have time to call anyone back. I call my mama back and if my daughter would call me, she would be at the top of my list. I also call my grandmother. That’s enough to fill the free time at airports or on the way to the office. [...]
On this day, I had some free time. I was driving to the office and I had a message from a woman named Karen. Karen’s family is full of Syracuse alumni. Honestly, most calls and emails I get from Syracuse alumni are not all that favorable. [...]
But Karen was worth the investment because she was super duper cool. It also turned out that Karen is the daughter of the greatest alumnus in Syracuse University history, the great Jim Brown.
Jim was not amazing for what he did on the field. Yes, he had super human strength and was such an outstanding athlete that they changed the rules to find ways to stop him. But that doesn’t impress me, for black men have always possessed amazing athletic ability. [...]
What impressed the HELL out of me was Jim Brown’s COURAGE. That is what left his mark on the university, and that is what will leave his mark on the world [...]
More At The Boyce Blog
Poverty: Policies and Possibilities (Part 2 — Read: Part 1)
By: Shannon Joyce Prince
Contributing Writer – YourBlackWorld.com
Imagine a program that built a childcare center which gave teens construction work experience, used Department of Agriculture funds to pay poor women to cook for poor children, taught poor women to become day care teachers and run day cares, and helped poor women get their GED’s. Imagine this program also provided mortgage counseling and founded a health center that provided forty local women with jobs. Now imagine the program was run almost entirely by black welfare mothers. Such a program did once exist. It was called Operation Life. It was at its peak during the 70’s and 80’s and is detailed in the book Storming Caesar’s Palace by Annelise Orleck.
Operation Life was based on the principle that the poor themselves are the experts on poverty and many current successful programs make that adage their foundation. [...]
Another factor in reducing poverty is looking for creative solutions that solve multiple problems. [...]
For example, many poor neighborhoods have constructed community gardens in vacant lots. In Philadelphia, crime on some blocks dropped 90% after the creation of community gardens [...]
More At Your Black Life
ATLANTA – A Muslim woman arrested for refusing to take off her head scarf at a courthouse security checkpoint said Wednesday that she felt her human and civil rights were violated. A judge ordered Lisa Valentine, 40, to serve 10 days in jail for contempt of court, said police in Douglasville, a city of about 20,000 people on Atlanta’s west suburban outskirts.
Valentine violated a court policy that prohibits people from wearing any headgear in court, police said after they arrested her Tuesday.
Kelley Jackson, a spokeswoman for Georgia Attorney General Thurbert Baker, said state law doesn’t permit or prohibit head scarfs.
“It’s at the discretion of the judge and the sheriffs and is up to the security officers in the court house to enforce their decision,” she said.
Valentine, who recently moved to Georgia from New Haven, Conn., said the incident reminded her of stories she’d heard of the civil rights-era South [...]
The way Donnell Herrington tells it, there was no warning. One second he was trudging through the heat. The next he was lying prostrate on the pavement, his life spilling out of a hole in his throat, his body racked with pain, his vision blurred and distorted.
It was September 1, 2005, some three days after Hurricane Katrina crashed into New Orleans, and somebody had just blasted Herrington, who is African-American, with a shotgun. “I just hit the ground. I didn’t even know what happened,” recalls Herrington, a burly 32-year-old with a soft drawl.
The sudden eruption of gunfire horrified Herrington’s companions–his cousin Marcel Alexander, then 17, and friend Chris Collins, then 18, who are also black. “I looked at Donnell and he had this big old hole in his neck,” Alexander recalls. “I tried to help him up, and they started shooting again.” [...]
Herrington shouted at the other men to run and turned to face his attackers: three armed white males. Herrington says he hadn’t even seen the men or their weapons before the shooting began. As Alexander and Collins fled, Herrington ran in the opposite direction, his hand pressed to the bleeding wound on his throat. Behind him, he says, the gunmen yelled, “Get him! Get that nigger!”
[FYI: This is by no means "news" to those who consistently payed close attention to Katrina's latest developments. For more info on this, pls. visit: http://www.cwsworkshop.org/katrinareader/node/573].
Nearly a decade after the NAACP condemned a “virtual whiteout” in broadcast TV, the civil rights group said major networks have stalled in their efforts to further ethnic diversity on-screen and off.
Television shows of the future could be even less inclusive because of a failure to cultivate young minority stars and to bring minorities into decision-making positions, NAACP President and CEO Benjamin Todd Jealous said.
The effect on the country could be profound, Jealous said.
“This is America: So goes TV, so goes reality. We don’t think it’s any accident that before we had a black president in reality, we had a black president on TV,” he said, referring to the chief executive portrayed by Dennis Haysbert on Fox’s “24.”
A “critical lack of programming by, for or about people of color” can be traced in part to the lack of minorities who have the power to approve new series or make final creative decisions, said Vicangelo Bulluck, executive director of NAACP’s Hollywood bureau [...]
Would Sojourner Truth Want To ‘Lick The Rapper?’
By: Zekita
One morning while riding in my car I decided to venture away from my regular News programming on the radio and turned to one of our local Hip Hop and R&B stations. It wasn’t long before the commercial for some debt creating pay-day loan went off and my ears, mind, and soul was being violated by rapper lil’ Wayne’s song ‘Lollipop.’ As I listened in disgust to the monotony of his lyrics (similar to many I had heard in some contemporary rap songs today) about how some women wanted to ‘lick the rapper’ amongst other things, my eyes began to tear up from those degrading and humiliating lyrics. [...]
And then I thought back to the glorious African American women like Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Nzingha, Yaa Asante, and Mary McLeod Bethune. I turned my thoughts to these women and I wonder. [...]
I wonder if Harriet Tubman feels like all 19 of her potentially deadly trips were traveled completely in vain. I wonder if Sojourner Truth still feels like a ‘woman’ [...]
More At Your Black Brothers
Greek protesters pushed their way into television and radio studios 
Tuesday, forcing broadcasters to put out anti-government messages in a change of tactics after days of violent street protests.
A group of about 10 youths got into the studio of NET state television and turned off a broadcast of a speech by Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis, station officials said. The protesters forced studio cameras to instead show them holding up banners that read: “Stop watching, get out onto the streets,” and “Free everyone who has been arrested.” No one was hurt, and no arrests were reported.
NET chairman Christos Panagopoulos said the protesters appeared to know how to operate cameras and studio controls.
“This goes beyond any limit,” he said.
In the northern city of Thessaloniki, protesters made their way into three local radio stations, agreeing to leave only when a protest message was read out on the air [...]
Obama Slam-Duncans Education
By: Greg Palast
Today, President-elect Barack Obama stuck it to you. He’s chosen Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education.
Who? Duncan is most decidedly NOT an educator. He’s a lawyer. But Duncan has this extraordinary qualification: He’s Obama’s pick-up basketball buddy from Hyde Park.
I can’t make this up.
Not that Duncan hasn’t mucked about in the educational system. Chicago Boss Richie Daley put this guy in charge of the horror show called Chicago Public Schools where Duncan turned a bad system into a REALLY bad system.
And Obama knows it. Indeed, although he plays roundball with Duncan (who was captain of the Harvard basketball team), State Senator Obama was one of the only local Chicago officials who refused to send his kids to Duncan’s public schools. [...]
So, if The One won’t trust his kids to Duncan, why is he handing Duncan ours?
More At Your Black Education
BAGHDAD — Calling someone the “son of a shoe” is one of the worst insults in Iraq. But the lowly shoe and the Iraqi who threw both of his at President Bush, with widely admired aim, were embraced around the Arab world on Monday as symbols of rage at a still unpopular war.
In Saudi Arabia, a newspaper reported that a man had offered $10 million to buy just one of what has almost certainly become the world’s most famous pair of black dress shoes.
A daughter of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the Libyan leader, reportedly awarded the shoe thrower, Muntader al-Zaidi, a 29-year-old journalist, a medal of courage.
In the Baghdad neighborhood of Sadr City, people calling for an immediate American withdrawal removed their footwear and placed the shoes and sandals at the end of long poles, waving them high in the air [...]
At a time when social-consciousness is at its peak, and millions of citizens around the world are scratching their heads to figure out how much of a foreign policy disaster the Iraq War was/is — especially in light of the shoe-throwing incident last Sunday — some of our more… ‘conservative-minded’ fellows still don’t get it. Of such is FOX News superstar-Negro, Juan Williams, who declared, last night, that dissenting Iraqis are petty “ingrate[s]” who don’t value the 2003-invasion, which has wrecked more than a million lives:
Who could have guessed that the great moralist, Newt Gingrich, who, last year, called Spanish the “language of… the ghetto,” is having second thoughts, and realizing ethical flaws, in the smear-tactics he helped commission.
Well, in a letter to RNC Chairman Mike Duncan, Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich had the following to say about the GOP’s recent attempts to tie President-Elect Barack Obama to the Pay-to-Play endeavors of Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich:
From Politico:
I was saddened to learn that at a time of national trial, when a president-elect is preparing to take office in the midst of the worst financial crisis in over seventy years, that the Republican National Committee is engaged in the sort of negative, attack politics that the voters rejected in the 2006 and 2008 election cycles.
The recent web advertisement, “Questions Remain,” is a destructive distraction. [...]
In a time when America is facing real challenges, Republicans should be working to help the incoming President succeed in meeting them, regardless of his Party.
From now until the inaugural, Republicans should be offering to help the President-elect prepare to take office. [...]
The RNC should pull the ad down immediately.
Maya Rudolph’s return guest spot and Kenan Thompson’s role in a digital short were the lone African American appearances on “Saturday Night Live” over the weekend – other than musical guest Kanye West.
New York’s African American governor David Patterson was played by Fred Armisen, a cast member of Venezuelan, German and Japanese heritage who also plays President-elect Barack Obama.
Of the 90 or so actors to grace the “SNL” stage since its 1975 premiere, only eight have been African-American. And that’s an issue for “The View” co-host Sherri Shepherd.
In an AOL interview, she points out that there aren’t even enough African-Americans for a proper skit of her ABC daytime show. While Thompson portrays co-host Whoopi Goldberg, Shepherd’s character is simply left out of the sketch.
“Couldn’t they have gotten Maya Rudolph to play me?” Shepherd asked. “She is so awesome! They need more black people in their cast!”
“I agree with her,” Baron Vaughn, a black comic, told the New York Daily News. Diversity “doesn’t seem to be something that interests them [...]“
MAJORA CARTER, one of the city’s best-known advocates for environmental justice, was sitting on a picnic table in Barretto Point Park in the South Bronx under the intense lights of an NBC film crew.
On this late September afternoon, after a month of traveling, delivering speeches, serving as host of a Sundance Channel program and a Science Channel pilot, Ms. Carter was noticeably flagging. Yet her signature feistiness was much in evidence when the producer of the documentary for which Ms. Carter was being interviewed asked her to explain why global warming affects not just polar bears but people around the globe.
Ms. Carter responded by describing air pollution in troubled urban areas like Hunts Point, the South Bronx neighborhood where she was raised and currently works.
The producer rephrased her question, in response to which Ms. Carter snapped, “I don’t do that.” [...]
In just over a decade, Ms. Carter, 42, has vaulted from working as a volunteer for what was a nascent organization called the Point Community Development Corporation and knowing almost nothing about environmental issues to becoming a nationally known advocate for environmental justice [...]
An area high school student will be in a court of law next week to fight for her right to get back on the basketball court.
Jasmine Watson is one of the top basketball players in Michiana but right now she’s not playing anywhere, because of a high school transfer controversy. [...]
The IHSAA ruled it was done for primarily athletic reasons; a violation of state rules.
But Jasmine, her family, and their supporters, say there’s more to it than that. [...]
“A mother should have the right to make a decision on how to feed her family when faced with (tough) economic conditions,” said Gladys Muhammad with the Martin Luther King, Jr. Foundation. [...]
“The mom was unemployed. She lost her home to foreclosure, her husband was not there, and so she had to move to South Bend where she does have family she does have the best resources,” said Trina Robinson, President of the South Bend NAACP [...]
SNL’s Bigoted Paterson Sketch Falls Flat
By: Tolu Olorunda
Staff Writer – YourBlackWorld.com
In a highly distasteful Saturday Night Live sketch, depicting New York Gov David Paterson as a New Jersey-hating, wandering, drug-loving, blind buffoon, many found comedic value. As the studio audience applauded and cheered, even with the Paterson-impersonator equating blindness with “something awful,” the mock-fest increasingly drew deeper into the well of immorality. However, others were not so amused – including the Governor himself. In a Press-Conference Monday morning, David Paterson commented that, while he can “take a joke,” the SNL spoof came off more as a “third-grade depiction of [blind] people and the way they look.” Paterson was concerned that SNL misled its audience into thinking that “disability goes hand-in-hand with an inability to run a government or business.” [...]
In addition to Governor Paterson, the National Federation of the Blind also faults Saturday Night Live with pushing the envelope on satire [...]
More W/ Video At Your Black Life
ELYRIA — Daniel Petric was so angry that his father would not allow him to play the violent video game Halo 3 that he killed his mother and shot his father, then tried to make it appear to be a murder-suicide, prosecutors told a Lorain County judge this morning in the boy’s murder trial.
Petric, now 17, had sneaked out of his house to buy the game. But his parents caught him as he came in with the game and took it from him. His father, Mark, put the game in a lockbox in the parents’ closet. He also kept a 9 mm handgun in the box, according to prosecutors.
Daniel Petric took the gun and the game out of the box, they said. [...]
“Would you guys close your eyes,” Daniel Petric asked. “I have a surprise for you.”
Mark Petric said he expected a pleasant surprise. The next thing he knew, his head went numb. He had been shot in the head [...]
Racial Gap In Colon Cancer Deaths Widening
Mysteries In Jennifer Hudson Murders Unraveling
Christian Missionaries Accused Of Preying In Morocco
Zimbabwe To Block Western Efforts At UN Security Council
ANC Dissidents Launching New Party Ahead Of South Africa Vote
Lawmaker Encourages Black Barber Shops To Provide Health Check-Ups
To anyone who lived through the media feeding frenzy of the 1990s, during which the nation’s leading news organizations spent the better part of a decade destroying their own credibility by relentlessly hyping a series of non-scandals, the past few days, in which the media have tried to shoehorn Barack Obama into the Rod Blagojevich scandal, have been sickeningly familiar.
Whenever reporters think — or want you to think — they’ve uncovered a presidential scandal, they waste little time in comparing it to previous controversies. Yesterday, CNN’s Rick Sanchez tried desperately to get the phrase “Blagogate” to stick — the latest in a long and overwhelmingly annoying post-Watergate pattern of ham-handed efforts to hype a scandal by appending the suffix “-gate” to the end of a word. [...]
CNN’s Wolf Blitzer announced yesterday that “some are calling this Obama’s first presidential scandal.” It isn’t. There is no evidence he has done anything wrong. This is not Obama’s first presidential scandal — but it shows signs of becoming the first media scandal of the Obama presidency. [...]
If that happens — if the media continue to behave as they did in covering Whitewater — they will damage the country. It’s really that simple [...]
In this fast-paced, sexually charged thriller, a newly appointed judge
is caught up in a gritty case involving a brutally murdered woman as
well as a blackmail scheme involving an overzealous femme fatale
determined to sleep her way to the top of Detroit’s society page. [...]
In one of the city’s most horrific crimes ever, a young single parent has been discovered decapitated in an alleyway, with her head located several blocks away. The police are stumped until the arrest of a drug dealer promises to reveal vital information about the case.
The only problem? The drug dealer won’t talk to anyone but Judge Mathis. [...]
Crossing paths with people from his past who have decided to benefit from criminal activity, Mathis stands up for the innocents who cannot defend themselves. From establishing a drug rehabilitation center to helping the youth through a mentoring program, Mathis is much more than a judge, for he once walked on the wrong side of the law as well [...]
It seems that as time changes, nothing seems to ever change as it relates to African American issues in our society. Growing up in the 1950s I often heard the refrain, that blacks were the last hired and the first fired.
That trend continues as National Public Radio, a liberal news organization, has just announced they are discontinuing the Program, “News & Notes, hosted by veteran broadcast and digital media journalist Farai Chideya. NPR cites the fact that the program received low ratings and did not attract the funding necessary from national sponsors. [...]
In addition the News & Notes, the station also eliminated the program “Day to Day”.
“News & Notes” was a one-hour daily program and was produced at the NPR West studios in Culver City, CA. A roster of respected experts contributed regular segments on a wide range of subjects, with input from the program’s audience [...]
Hip-Hop Emcee/Newscaster, Jasiri X, returns with his weekly Hip-Hop newscasts. For this week, current events include the failing economy, George Bush’s confessions, the ongoing Plaxico Burress fiasco, the Detroit 3 Auto-Bailout, Chicago workers sit-in, Clarence “Tom Us” questioning President-Elect Obama’s citizenship, and more:
Canyon County Commissioner Steve Rule is coming under fire for circulating an e-mail that compares Michelle Obama’s election-night dress to a black widow spider. [...]
Jill Kuraitis of New West.net obtained a printed copy of the e-mail, which 
Rule received from a family member then forwarded to 26 people from his county e-mail account on Dec. 2.
Kuraitis said the e-mail features a photo of a black widow spider next to a photo of Michelle Obama in a black and red dress holding her elder daughter’s hand at the election-night event where Barack Obama accepted his election as the next president of the United States. Featuring boldface and underlines for emphasis, the e-mail reads, in part: “The female has a very wide backside, is Black, and has a red hour glass shaped marking on her belly You can find this spider in: Closets, Wood piles, Under Beds And soonTHE WHITE HOUSE!!!!”
Kuraitis decried the message as racist. [...]
“I didn’t see it that way,” Rule told the Idaho Statesman. “I didn’t study the e-mail I just thought the markings on her dress was very similar to that of the spider, and I thought it was kind of funny [...]
Poverty: Policies and Possibilities
By: Shannon Joyce Prince
Reprinted From Black Agenda Report
“Poor people can use themselves as weapons against poverty.”
With the recession imperiling the nation’s well-being, poverty is on everyone’s mind regardless of their political orientation. Yet too often the poor are cast as ignorant and impotent pawns needing either a kick in the pants or a magical cocktail of resources and programs. The dialogue typically stalls around what “we” must do for or to “them” as though the poor lack ingenuity and agency.
In this commentary I identify four ideas that can be used to battle poverty: ending marriage penalties, deregulating selected industries, creating tax-funded social programs run by the poor, and creating community gardens. [...]
The problem often isn’t that the poor aren’t pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, but rather when they do so they are told they don’t have the appropriate credentials. [...] For example, many poor black women braid hair as a way of making money. However, as the National Center for Public Policy Research points out, many states have threatened these women with arrest because they don’t have cosmetology licenses; licenses that often demand taking courses that cost around $10,000, and frequently don’t even cover hair braiding in their curriculum [...]
More At Your Black Politics
As the Obama transition team is filling out the rest of the President-elect’s cabinet, one name that pops to the surface is Rep. Sanford Bishop.
The Georgia Democrat is believed to be in the running for Agriculture Secretary, and his staff readily admits that he wants the post — though they say that no deal is “officially” in the works.
“The congressman would very much like to have the position if it is in fact offered,” said Bishop’s chief of staff Phyllis Hallmon. “But we have had no official interaction with the President-elect’s staff.” [...]
A blue dog Democrat, Bishop is also regarded as the most conservative African-American Democrat in Congress. He has long championed federal subsidies and price boosters for peanuts (understandably — they’re his home state’s biggest product) [...]
HONOLULU — Federal agents have arrested a Hawaii man after he allegedly threatened to attack and kill president-elect Barack Obama when he visits Hawaii on vacation this month.
Mark Miyashiro allegedly made the threats Dec. 3 to a doctor who is treating him for a schizophrenic disorder.
Miyashiro then allegedly made more threats when Secret Services agents interviewed and arrested him at his home in Kaneohe after the doctor notified authorities.
They also confiscated a Russian SKS assault rifle.
Miyashiro is charged with one count of threatening the life of the president or the president-elect. That’s punishable by up to five years in federal prison, a $250,000 fine and up to three years probation [...]
Black Colleges Face Whiteout
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
As the great unraveling of finance capitalism unfolds, lots of issues that were prime concerns in Black politics not long ago, are getting buried in the economic debris. [...] It is in times of general crisis that the enemies of identifiably African American institutions find new opportunities for mischief. Such is the case in Georgia, where efforts are afoot to dismantle at least two Black colleges: Savannah and Albany state universities.
Members of the Republican-controlled state legislature are using the economic crisis as a rationale to merge majority Black Savannah State with mostly white Armstrong Atlantic State University. Historically Black Albany State University would be forced to combine with majority white Darton College. Adding insult to injury, Darton College is only a two-year institution, a community college, while Albany State is a full university.
Modern-day racists have learned to cloak their anti-Black ideas in progressive-sounding language [...]
Listen To Commentary At Your Black Life
The White, White House Press Corps
By: Sam Fulwood III
Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential campaign boosted-no, it actually created-the careers of a whole cadre of black political reporters.
Barack Obama’s historic capture of Oval Office? Well, not so much. [...]
A generation ago, as the peripatetic preacher crisscrossed the country to the chants of “Run, Jesse, Run!” black journalists-among them Gwen Ifill of The (Baltimore) Evening Sun, Julie Johnson of The (Baltimore) Sun and later The New York Times and ABC News, George Curry of the Chicago Tribune, Ron Smothers of The New York Times, Milton Coleman of The Washington Post, Kevin Merida of The Dallas Morning News and Kenneth Walker of ABC News-traveled along, reporting and interpreting the historic political campaign.
Nearly a quarter century later, Barack Obama made the same primary run, and it was not the symbolic stab at the White House that Jackson’s represented [...]
More At Your Black Politics
The Sports MCs Present: The Saturday Huddle
By: The Sports MCs
BASN
The approach of autumn leaves and pom – poms can mean only one thing: college football is back for another season of Pigskin Pimpin’.
And the prognosticators and perpetrators will, no doubt offer their take on which institution will get paid the most BCS money come January.
But what always seems to get lost in the sauce is the fact the machine that is college football keeps it crack – a – lackin’ for everyone; except those most responsible for its success – the student – athletes.
Enter the MCs.
In our endeavor to flip the script, we plan to show some of the inner workings of this machine – and hopefully address some big – picture issues that will get some of the capitalist pigs to move over in the trough — or least think twice before they oink [...]
More At Your Black Education
Burress and the Bloomberg
By: Dave Zirin
Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week: all Plaxico, all the time. There’s nothing like an NFL player shooting a hole in his own leg in a packed nightclub to become our latest walking, talking weapon of mass distraction. Why ponder the global economic meltdown, two wars, and rising unemployment, when millionaire black athletes like Plaxico Burress walk among us… with guns?
Don’t think that this is a defense of the New York Giants star wide receiver. Having a loaded gun in your pants, with no safety, in a crowded club, is about as smart as using a toaster as a bathtub toy. In fact, shooting yourself in the leg is really one of more preferable outcomes. Now Burress faces three and a half years in prison for carrying a loaded handgun in the city.
Right on cue, the moralists are slithering onto their soapboxes to hiss at the latest athletic bogeyman. Hypocrisy reigns supreme [...]
More At Your Black Sports
Hip-Hop Emcee/Journalist, Jasiri X, returns for a second season, with his weekly Hip-Hop newscasts. This week’s current events include, O.J. Simpson, Plaxico Burress , the Mumbai attack, Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, and more:
[For the week of November 23 - November 29]:
VIGALANTEE: Hunting for Souls
By: Tolu Olorunda
Staff Writer – YourBlackWorld.com
Vigalantee (born Roger Suggs) is no stranger to the underground Hip-Hop scene. Born in Chicago, Vigalantee has always been a fan of Hip-Hop – though a critic, when necessary. In addition to his musical career, Vigalantee is also an arduous community-organizer and activist, whose youth program is touching many young lives across the city of Kansas. As the name suggests, Vigalantee is hunting for more than nice beats or dope rhymes. As a young man, trapped in between the perils of inter-racial animosity and intra-racial hostility, Vigalantee knows how critical it is for young Black kids to find worthy role-models in the communities that shape their destinies.
Vigalantee grew up in Chicago, and experienced, firsthand, the much-referenced tales of gang warfare. Concerned with the emotional toll this reality wreaks on a child, his mother sent him to a relative’s home in Georgia. Vigalantee describes this as the unraveling of another “extreme” living condition [...]
More At Your Black Brothers
CHICAGO – Gov. Rod Blagojevich ordered all state agencies Monday to stop doing business with Bank of America to try to pressure the bank into helping laid-off workers staging a sit-in at their shuttered factory. [...]
The sit-in began Friday and has fast become a symbol of the sour economy’s impact on labor. The workers have promised to remain inside the plant in shifts until they get assurances they will receive severance and vacation pay. [...]
Their plight has drawn support from President-elect Barack Obama, the 
Rev. Jesse Jackson and others. [...]
The laid-off workers are occupying the plant around-the-clock in eight-hour shifts, Fried said. About 60 were inside early Monday.
Obama said Sunday the company should honor its commitments to the laid-off employees.
“The workers who are asking for the benefits and payments that they have earned, I think they’re absolutely right and understand that what’s happening to them is reflective of what’s happening across this economy,” Obama said.
Workers at Republic Windows and Doors crowded into the small company lobby to hear the Rev. Jesse Jackson speak in support of their sit-in, which began three days ago.
“These workers are to this struggle perhaps what Rosa Parks was to social justice 50 years ago,” Jackson says. “This, in many ways, is the beginning of a larger movement for mass action to resist economic violence.”
Jackson says he came to the factory to show his solidarity for the workers, who were laid off Friday as their company closed its doors. Company officials say they had to close because the Bank of America denied the company’s request for $5 million credit. [...]
Bank of America received $25 billion in federal bailout cash, which Republic workers say obligates it to support the company.
“We’re going to have a self induced depression because we are trying to change our economy from the top down,” says Jackson. “It must be changed from the bottom up.”
Jackson says if the change doesn’t happen soon, the consequences will be dire [...]
As President Bush prepares to move into his new Dallas home at the end of his term, neighborhood residents worry about having him close by. [...]
But the exclusive Dallas community the Bush family will soon join has a troubled history of its own.
Until 2000, the neighborhood association’s covenant said only white people were allowed to live there, though an exception was made for servants.
Enacted in 1956, part of the original document reads: “Said property shall be used and occupied by white persons except those shall not prevent occupancy by domestic servants of different race or nationality in the employ of a tenant.” [...]
The neighborhood is home to many famous people, including former presidential candidate Ross Perot and Mark Cuban, the billionaire businessman and Dallas Mavericks owner [...]
WASHINGTON – President-elect Barack Obama has chosen retired Gen. Eric K. Shinseki to be the next Veterans Affairs secretary, turning to a former Army chief of staff once vilified by the Bush administration for questioning its Iraq war strategy.
Obama will announce the selection of Shinseki, the first Army four-star general of Japanese-American ancestry, at a news conference Sunday in Chicago. He will be the first Asian-American to hold the post of Veterans Affairs secretary, adding to the growing diversity of Obama’s Cabinet. [...]
“When I reflect on the sacrifices that have been made by our veterans and I think about how so many veterans around the country are struggling even more than those who have not served — higher unemployment rates, higher homeless rates, higher substance abuse rates, medical care that is inadequate — it breaks my heart,” Obama told NBC [...]
Jamie and Gladys Scott have been wrongfully convicted of armed robbery and received double life sentences each. No one was murdered or taken to the hospital during this robbery, no one was even injured. The transcripts state that 9, 10 or 11 dollars was stolen. Witnesses confessed during the trial, that the sheriff coerced and threatened them to lie on the Scott Sisters. They have been in prison now 14 years.
The transcripts state that one witness ( a teenager) testified that the sheriff told him he would be sent to Parchman (the notorious Mississippi Prison), to be made out of a woman (raped by men) if he did not lie on the Scott Sisters. He later wrote an affidavit swearing that Jamie and Gladys had absolutely nothing to do with this robbery [...]
Tiny wooden cabins line the dirt road once known as Slave Street as it winds through Friendfield Plantation.
More than 200 slaves lived in the whitewashed shacks in the early 1800s, and some of their descendants remained for more than 100 years after the Civil War. The last tenants abandoned the hovels about 30 years ago, and even they would have struggled to imagine a distant daughter of the plantation one day calling the White House home. [...]
Their documented passage begins with Jim Robinson, Michelle Obama’s great-great-grandfather, who was born about 1850 and lived as a slave, at least until the Civil War, on the sprawling rice plantation. Records show he remained on the estate after the war, working as a sharecropper and living in the old slave quarters with his wife, Louiser, and their children. He could neither read nor write, according to the 1880 census.
Robinson would be the last illiterate branch of Michelle Obama’s family tree.
Census records show each generation of Robinsons became more educated than the last [...]
Race Matters MORE in the ‘Age of Obama’
By: Tolu Olorunda
Staff Writer – YourBlackWorld.com
Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be misled. Race still matters, even in the age of a bi-racial president. In fact, I submit that Race matters more at this transitional period in our multi-cultural society. The presidential campaign of President-Elect Obama sought to vehemently sweep Race-consciousness under the rug, but little did they know, that this stubborn, inextricable faction of our existence would not surrender without a fight. [...]
Without Obama’s permission, Race resurrected itself early on in the 2008 presidential campaign. It began when White journalists first took it upon themselves to question Obama’s blackness. [...] Shortly after, the “gotcha media” would find some legitimate dirt that could reduce Obama to a sheer spectacle. Unbeknownst to 60% of Black folks, they had, all their lives, committed a crime worthy of the death penalty: attended a Black church which advocated self-love, self-control, self-respect, and self-help [...]
More At Your Black Life
The harebrained lawsuit demanding disclosure whether President elect Barack Obama is a U.S. citizen or not was laughed out of New Jersey 
courts in October. A few weeks later Supreme Court Justice David Souter gave it just as short shrift. He denied a stay to get Obama removed from the ballot in that state. But that didn´t end the matter. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas saw to that. He took the almost never heard of step of reopening the issue by agreeing to put the matter to a conference vote. [...]
But Thomas´s legal meddle on the Obama birth certificate non-issue fits perfectly in with his jaundiced interpretation of law and its practice and his private vow to get revenge on his liberal tormentors. Obama is the latest would be victim. He almost certainly stirred Thomas´s personal ire back in August. Obama was asked at a joint church gathering with Republican rival John McCain at the mega Saddleback church in Lake Forest, California which justice he wouldn´t have nominated to the Supreme Court. He didn´t hesitate. He named Thomas. And he told why [...]
HAVERSTRAW, N.Y. (AP) ― A white teacher attempted to enliven a seventh grade discussion of slavery by binding the hands and feet of two black girls, prompting a complaint from one girl’s mother and the local chapter of the NAACP.
After the mother complained to the school, the superintendent said he was having “conversations with our staff on how to deliver effective lessons.”
“If a student was upset, then it was a bad idea,” said Superintendent Brian Monahan of the North Rockland School District in New York City’s northern suburbs.
The teacher apologized to the 13-year-old student and her mother during a meeting Thursday that also included a representative of the local NAACP. But the mother, Christine Shand of Haverstraw, said Friday she thinks the teacher should be removed from the class [...]
The Georgia NAACP called for an investigation of the Clayton County Commission on Tuesday after the board voted for 311 historic African-American graves to be moved to another cemetery.
The Clayton County Commission voted unanimously to issue a permit to College Park recycling company Stephens MDS to relocate the graves to make room to expand a landfill. The cemetery is inaccessible and had not been visited for years before news of the possible move was announced, company officials said.
Edward DuBose, president of the Georgia NAACP, accused the five commissioners of a conflict of interest. According to DuBose, all of the commissioners have previously accepted campaign contributions from Stephens. “I’m calling for an investigation of each of the county commissioners,” DuBose told the commission. “This board sits on about $7,000 of this company’s money. We want to look to see if you were too connected to the financial contributions that were given by the company.”
From AJC
Odetta, the singer whose deep voice wove together the strongest songs of American folk music and the civil rights movement, died Tuesday. She was 77.
The cause was heart disease, said her manager, Doug Yeager.
He added that she had been hoping to sing at Barack Obama’s inauguration. [...]
[Odetta In 2005, "House of the Rising Sun"]:
Her voice was an accompaniment to the black-and-white images of the freedom marchers who walked the roads of Alabama and Mississippi and the boulevards of Washington in quest of an end to racial discrimination. [...]
Born in Birmingham on Dec. 31, 1930, Odetta Holmes spent her first six years in the depths of the Depression. The music of that time and place — in particular prison song and work songs recorded in the fields of the deep South — shaped her life [...]
A Wal-Mart employee in Long Island, New York died after being trampled to death by a mob of shoppers on Friday, the traditional first day of the holiday shopping season. The 34-year-old worker Jdimytai Damour was killed after a crowd of 2,000 broke down store doors and ran over him shortly before the store”s schedule 5 a.m. opening. Four shoppers were injured in the stampede. Nassau County police were trying to determine what happened during the stampede, but said it was unclear if there would be any criminal charges:
Essence may have scooped Vogue, sort of, in being the first women’s magazine to put Michelle Obama on its cover since the presidential election, but the Time Inc. title did so by relying on archival images. Essence’s January issue is dedicated to President-elect Barack Obama, with essays and commentary from Maya Angelou, Bill Cosby, Chris Rock, Gwen Ifill and other notable African-Americans:
Michelle Obama may be the pride of the South Side, but her undergraduate years at Princeton also helped shape her worldview.
A new biography, Michelle (Simon & Schuster), by Washington Post reporter Liza Mundy, delves into Obama’s years at the elite university, in particular Obama’s senior thesis, “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community.”
“The question of what upper-income blacks owe to the less fortunate was a major preoccupation,” Mundy writes. [...]
Her thesis found that when African Americans are at Princeton as students, they tended to identify more with their race, but after graduating, less so. Obama, now 44, pledged not to forget the black underclass [...]
More At Your Black News
The Gift of Canibus: Hip-Hop and Anti-Intellectualism
By: Tolu Olorunda
Staff Writer – YourBlackWorld.com
“History is a weapon being used against us/
Humanity has been abused before but few remember/
… Turn the radio and TV off, think for a second/
Technology is a blessing but it’s also a weapon/
A weapon of mass destruction giving global instructions/
Teaching us how to hate but does it in a way that we love it/
Take my beloved rap music, erase the beat/
Consumers act like they’re afraid of intelligent speech/”
- Hip-Hop artist and philosopher, Canibus, in One Ought Not To Think.
Canibus, like the herbal supplement, Cannabis, is as subjective to the user, as the value of Hip-Hop music is to the listener. In the course of this essay, I, a Canibus fan/student, seek to make a case for the artist otherwise known as Germaine Williams. Though a marginalized figure, Canibus is an Emcee; an artist; a lyrical scientist; a philosopher; an educator; a history lesson, and an infinite source of inspiration to those wrestling with dominant forms of anti-intellectualism being wielded against music lovers. I personally believe Canibus to be a rare mineral resource in an industry engulfed with misogyny, homoeroticism, opulence, hollowness, illiteracy, and cronyism. Since 1996, Canibus has struggled to keep Hip-Hop’s demons at bay. But, truth be told, that struggle remains a contentious one, even till this day. To be sure, Canibus is not a name fluttered on the lips of Black and Brown kids; but perhaps this reality further reinforces my claim, that his wit, perspicacity and voluminous vocabulary is perceived more as a threat, than an accomplishment, in the Hip-Hop realm of existence. Canibus teaches us in – perhaps his most lucid track to date – Poet Laureate II, that Hip-Hop music’s demise lies in its inability to grapple with the ongoing battle being waged between the quest for power, and a declining zeal for poetically-inspired rhymes [...]
More At Your Black Education
It has been 20 years since the first World AIDS Day drew attention to the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
Today, with some 33 million people living with HIV, World AIDS Day and events like the International Conference on AIDS and STIs in Africa, taking place in Senegal, December 3-7, remain “extraordinarily important for those who are trying to fight AIDS in this world,” says Shanta Devarajan, Chief Economist for the World Bank’s Africa region.
AIDS is increasingly seen as not only a health problem, but society’s problem, says Devarajan. “We need 
all the resources and all the mechanisms that we have in society to fight AIDS.”
HIV/AIDS Increasingly a Development Priority
Finance ministers and heads of state in hard-hit Sub-Saharan Africa, such as Uganda President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, are increasingly making the battle against HIV/AIDS a top priority, he adds. South Africa has rolled out one of the biggest antiretroviral (ARV) treatment programs in the world. [...]
While HIV prevention efforts are paying off, with behavior change noted particularly among young people. For every two people in Sub-Saharan Africa gaining access to treatment, five become newly infected. This ratio must change [...]
“Outta My Way, I’m shopping at Wal-Mart.”
That actual bumper-sticker sums up the attitude of the only thing worse than Wal-Mart in our culture: Wal-Mart shoppers.
The killing of a Wal-Mart worker this week during an early morning crush of customers at the retailer’s 
Valley Stream, Long Island store has given the company a Black Eye from Black Friday.
Law enforcement officials are reviewing the video tape of the incident for possible criminal charges, but Wal-Mart corporate attorneys are no doubt looking at the video to determine the extent of the company’s legal liability in the case. The retailer may be more preoccupied with how to prevent a multi-million lawsuit from the family of the dead worker, than how to prevent another Black Friday death. [...]
The 2,000 or so Wal-Mart shoppers at the Valley Stream store were merely lab rats responding to a stimulus. When the door opened, they went after the cheese [...]
(WHAS11) -It’s considered the ceremonial kickoff to the online holiday shopping season, and if you like to stay away from the crowds, you might be more of a Cyber Monday person than a Black Friday person. [...]
The Better Business Bureau recommends you focus your shopping with reputable merchants.
The BBB also warns you to use caution when shopping online. Scammers are out there waiting to take advantage of eager consumers.
And always make sure the site is secure.
Double check for the “https,” most importantly the “s”.
That means you are in a secure site for your personal information.
The BBB also recommends you pay with a credit card, because under federal law the shopper can dispute the charges if the items never arrive.
Also, make sure your computer is up to date with the latest anti-virus protection.
Strategies For Overcoming The Holiday Blues
By: Dr. Gloria Morrow
The holiday season can be the loneliest time of the year, especially during the month of December. Even though the research refutes the notion that the highest rate of suicides occurs in the month of December, many people do experience the Holiday Blues because of the loss of a loved one, exhaustion, separation from family and close friends, feelings of failure due to unmet goals and expectations, significant changes and increased stress. Some may even experience the Holiday Blues because they cannot afford to go Christmas shopping.
This year has been particularly difficult for many people in the African American community because of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and the massive loss of life, property, jobs, and familiar surroundings. Therefore, it may be harder for people to handle the stress of such events, especially around the holidays [...]
New York Giants receiver has told the team that he accidentally shot himself Friday night, a league official told ESPN’s Sal Paolantonio.
The incident happened at the Latin Quarter nightclub on Manhattan’s East Side. The club is a sprawling 15,000-square foot, two-story restaurant and club located in the Radisson Lexington Hotel. Katia Laine, a manager at the hotel, told The Associated Press that police officers had been to the club.
Burress went to the Hospital for Special Surgery in Manhattan, where he stayed overnight. He was released from the hospital Saturday afternoon.
A league official told Paolantonio the bullet went through the skin and muscle tissue of Burress’ right thigh, and did not hit any major arteries, and there were no broken bones.
The Giants, in a statement Saturday afternoon, said Burress suffered a wound to his right thigh. The team did not specify in its statement how the shooting occured [...]
The State of Mississippi versus Jamie Scott and Gladys Scott: My First Encounter with Justice Denied
By: Nancy R. Lockhart, M.J.
http://www.freewebs.com/nlockha/index.htm
Originally Appeared In Black Commentator
While driving the moving truck from South Carolina to Chicago, Illinois in July of 2005, many things ran across my mind as I took the solo trip. I pondered receiving the Master of Jurisprudence degree from Loyola University School of Law and later a career as a governmental regulatory compliance manager. It never dawned on me that I would receive a brutal education in social justice; an education that would prove to be more valuable than sheepskin from any institution. This would become an education that re-directed every thought flowing as I drove that big truck from South Carolina. I left Chicago with the Master of Jurisprudence and absolutely no desire to follow my original dreams.
I secured a position as a Community Services Consultant with Rainbow/PUSH Coalition while completing my studies. I will never forget the frigid, Chicago morning when I opened a letter from Mrs. Evelyn Rasco, a mother and widow. She told the story of her daughters, and said she had written Rainbow/PUSH for 11 years, without a response. She redirected her strategy this time and wrote Congressman Jackson in a plea to get the letter to his father’s (Rev. Jackson) office. The letter was hand delivered [...]
GREENBURGH, N.Y. (AP) — The New York Knicks needed Stephon Marbury to play, then suspended him a game and docked him nearly $400,000 in salary Friday after claiming he refused.
The disgruntled guard insists he never told coach Mike D’Antoni “no” and plans to appeal.
Just another chapter in Marbury’s turbulent tenure with his hometown team.
D’Antoni wouldn’t go into specifics of their conversation that took place before Wednesday’s loss in Detroit, though he made it clear he asked the point guard to play because the Knicks were short-handed.
“I don’t want to get into it, guys. I think I already told you, I asked him to play. We just asked. You’re a coach, and we needed him to play,” D’Antoni said after practice Friday. [...]
Marbury will not be paid when he sits out Saturday’s home game against Golden State and will lose an additional game’s pay for Wednesday’s actions [...]
CLEVELAND (AP) — LeBron James reacted strongly to Charles Barkley’s comments that the Cavaliers star isn’t showing respect for Cleveland fans and his teammates by discussing his possible free agency following the 2010 season.
“He’s stupid. That’s all I’ve got to say about that,” James said Friday night before the Cavaliers’ game against Golden State.
Barkley made the comments on TNT’s NBA studio show and Dan Patrick’s radio show.
“If I was LeBron James, I would shut the hell up,” the Hall of Famer said on Patrick’s show. “I’m a big LeBron fan. He’s a stud. You gotta give him his props. I’m getting so annoyed he’s talking about what he’s going to do in two years. I think it’s disrespectful to the game. I think it’s disrespectful to the Cavaliers.”
James, under contract for two more seasons, was bombarded with questions about his future when the Cavaliers visited New York to play the Knicks on Tuesday night [...]
It had turned into a bit of schtick at Patti LaBelle’s concerts: She would tell the crowd about an impending reunion of Labelle, the group in which she and fellow singers Sarah Dash and Nona Hendryx scored a smash hit with “Lady Marmalade” (1974) before breaking up in 1976.
“Every time Patti performed at a show,” Dash said, “she’d say, ‘Oh, we’re going to have a reunion,’ and people would just go absolutely berserk.”
After awhile, however, Hendryx decided to call her on it.
“Nona said to Pat, ‘You should probably stop saying that if it’s not going to happen. Don’t play with our audience that way,’ ” Dash said.
Now they’re no longer playing. After recording a tribute to civil-rights activist Rosa Parks, “Dear Rosa,” in 2006, Labelle has followed through with “Back to Now,” its first album of new material in 31 years [...]
About 100 people gathered before dawn Tuesday for a candlelight vigil and prayer service on the second anniversary of the fatal police shooting of an unarmed man on his wedding day that sparked outrage in the black community.
The Rev. Al Sharpton and Sean Bell’s fiancee, Nicole Paultre Bell, led the memorial on the street in Queens where the 23-year-old black man was killed outside a strip club on Nov. 25, 2006 after leaving his bachelor’s party.
At precisely 4:10 a.m. — the time of the shooting — the mourners rang a large bell 50 times to mark the number of bullets fired at the Bell and two of his friends, who were seriously injured.
After laying wreaths and flowers, the group marched half a mile to a church, where Sharpton held a prayer service [...]
[Eddie Jordan reviewing the 2007-2008 season in May]:
Eddie Jordan Fired… But Why?
By: Tolu Olorunda
Staff Writer – YourBlackWorld.com
On Monday, Nov. 24, The Washington Wizards fired veteran coach, Eddie Jordan, who helped transport the Wizards to the playoffs four years in a row. Over the last few days, however, many fans/sport columnists, pundits, and even coaches have expressed their regret over this brash and unexpected decision. Here are a few reactions:
We’ve all seen this movie before: A general manager stocks his roster with a dysfunctional mixture of players, but since he’s the one who procured the players he thinks they’re better than they really are. Eventually the team loses, and the coach is canned – because it’s easier to fire the coach than to fire the players, and because the GM is certainly not going to fire himself. This is approximately what happened to Eddie Jordan in Washington. [...] Since he’s been in Washington, Jordan has done a magnificent job with this team even though Arenas and Etan Thomas have been periodically down and out – repeatedly leading them into the playoffs.
- Charley Rosen from MSN Sports
More Reactions At Your Black Sports
Native American Heritage Month
By: Julian Wolfson
November is Native American Heritage Month, a month dedicated to recognizing the culture and traditions of Native Americans, as well as their contributions to the U.S.
One of the most significant days this month will be the celebration of the first national annual Native American Heritage Day on November 28, which was created when Congress passed a resolution on January 3, 2008.
While this month is intended to commemorate the achievements of Native Americans, it also provides an opportunity to reflect upon many of the issues that are important to the Native American community.
One of the biggest concerns for Native Americans is education. As reported by the National Center for Education Statistics, 15.1 percent of Native Americans ages 16-24 years old were high school dropouts in 2006. This stands in stark contrast to the national high school dropout rate of 9.7 percent [...]
More At Your Black News
A Bonus by Any Other Name Still Stinks
Rep. Elijah Cummings
I am beginning to understand why companies like AIG are so committed to spending hundreds of millions of dollars on sports sponsorships. It’s because they like playing games. Since it seems that the executives at these companies did not get the memo, I am here to tell them that the fun and games are over.
I was shocked upon learning — just one day after being told that top AIG executives would be forgoing bonuses this year — that the company’s executives will be receiving ‘cash awards’ as ‘retention payments.’ AIG can dress this money up in fancy names, but no one is fooled. A bonus by any other name still stinks. [...]
AIG just doesn’t seem to get it [...]
Fueled by rising unemployment and food prices, the number of Americans on food stamps is poised to exceed 30 million for the first time this month, surpassing the historic high set in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina. [...]
“We soon will have the most food stamps recipients in the history of our country,” said Jim Weill, president of the Food Research and Action Center, a D.C.-based 
anti-hunger policy organization. “If the economic forecasts come true, we’re likely to see the most hunger that we’ve seen since the 1981 recession and maybe since the 1960s, when these programs were established.”
The Agriculture Department is set to release the new numbers as early as this week. Agency officials declined to confirm the figures but outlined them in a briefing last month for advocates and administrators of state food stamp programs. Breaking the symbolically important 30 million mark comes on the heels of government data showing that 11.9 million people went hungry in the United States at some point last year [...]
When Brenda McElmore showed up to get her hair dyed at a local JCPenney salon in Downey, Calif., she probably didn’t expect to hear “no.” Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened. According to McElmore, the receptionist at the front desk told her, “We don’t do African American hair.” McElmore says she was “astonished” to be denied service strictly because of her race.
After writing several letters to JCPenney about the incident, a representative responded with an apology, explaining that the “salon’s receptionist did not feel [the salon's employees] had the technical proficiency to perform the service required.” McElmore was not satisfied with that answer. “If you only want color — I’m not asking for a perm or a style or anything else — it doesn’t take a special person or a special skill to do that,” she said during a press conference last month [...]
Three years since Katrina and the government continues to fail us. Malik Rahim has spoken out with courage, asked the difficult questions and built viable community alternatives. He is a strong organizer who acted while the politicians waited. Now he wants to take his courage to Congress.
After Hurricane Katrina, Malik founded Common Ground, an organization which:
Malik is in a winnable race for U.S. Congress in Louisiana’s 2nd District. The Louisiana Secretary of State changed the elections calendar after Hurricane Gustav, so the general election for that seat is on Dec. 6.
“We still have one more Congressional election within our grasp,” writes Cynthia McKinney, legendary former congresswoman from Georgia and this year’s Green Party presidential candidate [...]
Ludacris “Theater of the Mind” (Island Def Jam)
For some odd reason, Ludacris feels the need to prove himself on his latest studio CD.
“Theater of the Mind,” the rapper’s sixth album, is full of trash talk as to why he is rap’s “MVP.” But talk is cheap.
Ludacris is not only a platinum rapper, he’s also a major success in film, TV, on the Web and even in the food industry (the rapper opened a Thai restaurant in Atlanta). He’s also known as one of the game’s best lyricists.
But he disappoints on “Theater of the Mind” by trying constantly to prove it with boasts that are boring and empty, devoid of the cleverness we’ve come to expect from Luda [...]
The concept isn’t difficult to grasp. Kanye West’s mother died suddenly one year ago, and a few months later, the superstar rapper and producer broke things off with his fiancé. West spent two weeks in Hawaii recording what he calls a “pop” album.
The production is minimal and chilly in a way that recalls Junior Boys or early Depeche Mode. The basic beats were created using the old school Roland TR-808 drum machine.
The vocals — overwhelmingly sung, not rapped — have almost uniformly been processed by the pitch-correction software AutoTune. All this is intended to create a sombre soundscape that reflects West’s emotional state, and on paper, the math is simple and appealing. In actual practice, however, things go horribly wrong [...]
Sources tell ABC News that Defense Secretary Robert Gates will be staying on in the top Pentagon job, for at least the first year of the Obama administration. “It is a done deal,” a source close to the process tells ABC News.
Gates, while a registered independent, has served numerous Republican administrations. President George W. Bush nominated Gates to replace the Donald Rumsfeld after the 2006 midterm elections, when the war in Iraq was spiraling out of control.
The former Eagle Scout is expected to be rolled out immediately after the Thanksgiving Holiday weekend as part of a larger national security team expected to include Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, as Secretary of State; Marine Gen. Jim Jones (Ret.) as National Security Adviser; Admiral Dennis Blair (Ret.) as Director of National Intelligence; and Dr. Susan Rice as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.
As CIA Director for President George H.W. Bush in 1992, Gates conveyed to incoming President Bill Clinton that he wished to stay on in that role. Clinton did not keep him on, replacing him instead with Jim Woolsey.
From ABC News
Jeremiah Wright, in a rare media appearance, told Sirius XM Satellite Radio’s Mark Thompson that he understands why Obama distanced himself from him, but doesn’t forgive the media the way it covered him.
His reaction to Obama’s victory, he said, was a “mixed bag of being proud of him and being blessed to have lived” through the moment, and pain at being “put up by the media” as a “weapon of mass destruction to destroy his candidacy.”
Wright, who posed what may have been the deepest challenge to Obama’s candidacy, and provoked its most racially-charged moments, is now a footnote to a winning campaign. He opened little new ground, and expressed joy that his former friend was now president, and no remorse at his own role.
The negative press, and the final wave of negative ads, had been particularly painful, he said.
“I sort of never realized how that affects my family, what that does to my kids or my grandkids,” he said.
Wright also seemed to dispute the notion that the inflammatory moments that aired on cable television and the Internet were out of character, though he said they were out of context [...]
DETROIT (AP) — General Motors Corp. said Monday it is ending its nine-year endorsement deal with golf superstar Tiger Woods as the automaker continues to cut expenses and hoard cash while trying to survive the worst sales downturn in a quarter-century.
The cash-strapped company said in a statement that it is looking to reduce costs, and that the world’s No. 1 golfer also wants more personal time as he expects his second child.
Woods has endorsed GM products around the world and mainly has been seen in Buick commercials as the company tried to give the nameplate a more youthful image. He has carried the Buick brand on his golf bag since 2000, and his most recent promotion was to caddie for a contest winner for nine holes at Torrey Pines, where Woods won the U.S. Open this summer for his 14th career major.
The endorsement deal, believed to be worth at least $7 million a year, was to end in 2009 [...]
Desirée Rogers, a prominent Chicago businesswoman and Harvard MBA, will be named the first African American White House social secretary, sources in the presidential transition office said yesterday.
Rogers, 49, is a friend of Michelle and President-elect Barack Obama’s, and a leader in Chicago corporate and civic circles; her appointment signals that the first couple consider the job crucial to how they introduce themselves to the country and the globe. She was a major fundraiser for Obama.
“This appointment sends a strong message that the Obamas want to use the White House strategically, to maximize its use in a way that is consistent with their philosophy — [to] open it to a broader range of people, ” said Valerie Jarrett, an Obama intimate and friend of Rogers’s who also will work in the White House. “Desirée is a heavy hitter — she comes with her own range of contacts from around the country. She’s close to Michelle and she knows everyone who will be working in the West Wing, so she will be able to create a synergy.” [...]
Ann Jordan, who has known Rogers for years, says: “She’s a very talented, successful, well-educated women who uses her skills well — she’s very organized [...]
Now here’s a good way for the GOP to make the case that it hasn’t been reduced to a southern regional 
rump party that’s held hostage by intolerant crackpots: Elect as the new chairman of the Republican National Committee a southerner who just resigned a longtime membership in a whites-only country club.
Katon Dawson, the South Carolina GOP chairman, announced his candidacy for RNC chair yesterday.
And guess what: Back in September, when Dawson was first quietly laying the groundwork for his RNC run, The State newspaper reported that he resigned his membership in the nearly 80-year-old Forest Lake Club. Members told the newspaper at the time that the club’s deed has a whites-only restriction and has no black members.
Dawson claimed to the paper that he’d actually been working since August to change the club’s admission practices after reading about them in the press [...]
Three Houston police officers under investigation for allegedly beating the father of Green Bay Packers wide receiver Donald Driver have been taken off patrol duty.
The decision was welcomed by Marvin Driver Jr.’s family members, who said they now want the officers fired and brought up on charges.
“We just want justice,” Michael Driver, Marvin Driver’s son, said after a news conference Friday outside his father’s home.
[...]
Family members of 56-year-old Marvin Driver claim he was arrested early Monday morning outside his mother’s home, where he also lives, for outstanding traffic warrants. But before arriving at a Houston jail, they say, he was taken to a gas station, where he was beaten by at least two officers and had something forced down his throat [...]
More At Your Black Sports
Even before the storm, they were some of the country’s neediest kids. Now, the children of Katrina who stayed longest in ramshackle government trailer parks in Baton Rouge are “the sickest I have ever seen in the U.S.,” says Irwin Redlener, president of the Children’s Health Fund and a professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. According to a new report by CHF and 
Mailman focusing on 261 displaced children, the well-being of the poorest Katrina kids has “declined to an alarming level” since the hurricane. Forty-one percent are anemic—twice the rate found in children in New York City homeless shelters, and more than twice the CDC’s record rate for high-risk minorities. More than half the kids have mental-health problems. [...]
Some kids may end up with permanent developmental and cognitive delays, but many can still be helped. The first step will be finding them. FEMA was supposed to provide Louisiana with contact information for the families that moved out of the trailers; it has not done so [...]
Food Network star Chef Jeff Henderson inspired hundreds of local high school students to follow his lead and achieve their dreams.
The one time cocaine dealer turned inspirational chef told his incredible life story to those who attended the Inspire Luncheon, sponsored by Cleveland’s West Side Ecumenical Ministry (WSEM).
Chef Jeff graciously spent a good amount of time personally meeting the youngsters, and told them education and a thirst for knowledge are the most powerful keys to achieving their dreams.
He pointed to some of the Cleveland-area people who were helped to their current success by WSEM programs and outreaches, and told the high school students the future they dream of is possible.
Henderson is the author of the best-selling book Cooked, which follows his journey “from the streets to the stove,” as Chef Jeff puts it. From a federal prison term, he eventually became one of Las Vegas’ most famous chefs, at the Belaggio and Caesar’s Palace.
He now hosts a Food Network show, The Chef Jeff Project, in which he mentors six young people who have had troubled lives [...]
More At Your Black Brothers
US president-elect Barack Obama Saturday announced plans to create 2.5 million new jobs as he forged ahead in his bid to shore up the flagging economy ahead of his January inauguration.
The job stimulus would take place over the next two years, Obama said in his weekly radio address, as he prepared to reveal the members of his economic team early next week, according to media reports.
Expected to lead Obama’s team as Treasury secretary is New York central banker Timothy Geithner, 47, who would be tasked with overseeing the 700-billion-dollar bailout package as the world’s largest economy is staring at recession.
With Congress on recess as of Friday, Obama outlined in broad strokes his plan for a broad stimulus package to lift Americans out of economic peril fueled by sweeping housing foreclosures and job losses.
Obama, who has vowed to make the economy his priority when he takes office from President George W. Bush on January 20, said the effort should produce 2.5 million new jobs by January of 2011.
“We’ll be working out the details in the weeks ahead, but it will be a two-year, nationwide effort to jumpstart job creation in America and lay the foundation for a strong and growing economy,” Obama said [...]
Does Hollywood employ the infamous brown-paper bag test in casting Black females? Is it a racist, sexist and colorist industry? Do Black Women have a steeper hill to climb to become successful in the business? Are light-skinned Black female actresses, like Halle Berry and Alicia Keys, deemed less threatening than their dark-skinned counterparts? Well, many Black aspiring actresses think so. And to further legitimize their claim, well-established chocolate-skinned Black actresses like Nia Long believe so, as well.
A group of aspiring actresses share their experiences with Harvard-professor Henry Louis Gates Jr:
Actress Nia Long speaks unflinchingly about an industry she calls “very unfair”:
Black Rage, Barack’s Redemption
By: Tolu Olorunda
Staff Writer – YourBlackWorld.com
After much deliberation, I’m convinced that President-Elect Obama’s disturbing perspective of the African-American community is not motivated by malice or cowardice, but simply a result of his upbringing. In other words, his distinctly condescending attacks on Black consciousness are merely a product of the overwhelming, disproportionate influence his White mother and White grandparents had on him. In contrast, Michelle Obama, raised by Black parents and nurtured in the womb of Black America, is prone to persuade a more empathetic view of the African-American community. It is virtually impossible for Barack Obama to have emerged from the loving arms of a woman who, “once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe,” and not have inherited some of such Negrophobia, which has cast dark shadows on Black male psyche. In Just Walk on By, Author, Brent Staples wrote of the degree of “lethality nighttime pedestrians” attribute to certain Black males who fit the kinds of cringe-worthy stereotypes which Obama’s grandmother (God rest her soul) must have expressed constantly. The impact of this on the young Barry cannot be overlooked [...]
More At Your Black Politics
Schools, out-of-school programs, tutors, mentors and juvenile detention educators are discovering a “sound” approach to reading instruction. H.E.L.P. (Hip-Hop Educational Literacy Program) is a line of supplemental instructional materials for language arts intervention and enrichment.
Co-founded by Hip-Hop artist, professional educator, and arts advocate Gabriel “Asheru” Benn, this innovative approach allows teachers, educators, mentors and caregivers to tune in the pervasive popularity of the Hip-Hop genre. H.E.L.P. uses high-interest reading and real-world relevance to improve literacy while bridging demographic, cultural, language, and achievement gaps:
[Princeton Professor Dr. Cornel West Endorses The Program]:
Teacher-created, student-tested and standard-correlated workbooks integrate the five essential components of effective reading instruction as identified by the National Reading Panel. Resource guides and professional development training facilitate effective use of the materials to engage reluctant readers, promote cultural responsive topics, address multiple learning styles and accommodate differentiated instruction.
Carefully-selected, clean song lyrics from well-known Hip-Hop recording artists are the sound foundation for H.E.L.P.’s creative reading and writing activities. Positive character-building messages, poignant social issues, literary devices, historical references, metaphors, rhymes, and broad vocabulary within the songs all provide cross-curricular opportunities during powerful language arts instruction in one-on-one, small group and classroom environments [...]
Visit The Official H.E.L.P. Website
Watch The H.E.L.P. Infomercial
Lawless Capital, Rushing to Armageddon
A Black Agenda Radio commentary
By: Glen Ford
The fundamental law of capital – the system’s need to extract by any means possible ever increasing returns on investment, or die – brought the world to the current catastrophe. Inevitably, despite all the noise about the need for transparency and tightening of regulations on the behavior of capital, the system’s response to its crisis is to descend into even greater depths of lawlessness.
The frenzy of unchecked illegality pulsates outward from the chaotic center of crisis and criminality: Wall Street, which has succeeded in establishing a kind of privatized martial law economic regime in the waning months of the Bush kleptocracy. The $700 billion “bailout” is revealed as a brazen bait-and-switch bamboozlement, in which Goldman Sachs Family Don Hank Paulson, under color-of-law as Treasury Secretary, ignores the terms of congressional legislation to dispense mountains of public wealth to his bankster friends as he sees fit. In return for their cut of the loot, the banking mafia give the public – nothing! No recycling of the billions into loans to small business or college-bound students or any of the intended beneficiaries. [...]
If there is one person who possesses the moral capital to demand an accounting from the conspirators, it is Barack Obama [...]
Listen & Read More At: Your Black Politics
Two years later, the Kathryn Johnston case is back where it started —- with the Atlanta Police Department.
The November 2006 killing of the 92-year-old woman by a rogue drug squad in her own home has been solved. Early on, federal investigators echoed suspicions of the community that such corruption was widespread. But in closing the investigation, they now say the wrongdoing was more isolated. Atlanta police last week said they were starting a task force to investigate internal wrongdoing.
Yet questions persist. Narcotics officers told investigators they cut corners, faked search warrants, planted drugs and raided homes because of pressure from superiors to make arrests. There were complaints from other officers that there were performance quotas, a charge higher-ups always denied.
But there never has been a public explanation about whether allegations about pressure from superiors were accurate, and if so, who was applying it. Also, did any higher-ups know how the drug unit operated? Or why they didn’t know?
“There were thoughts this would uncover a huge ring of corruption in the Police Department. It never did,” said William McKenney, an attorney for narcotics officer Arthur Tesler, who late last month pleaded guilty to federal charges in connection with Johnston’s death [...]
Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said on Wednesday that Israel had made a final decision not to participate in a U.N. forum on racism and urged other countries to boycott what she termed an “anti-Israel tribunal.”
The United Nations said it regretted the decision.
The World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, to be held in Geneva in April, is a follow-up to a 2001 summit in Durban, South Africa on the same issues.
Israel and the United States walked out of the first conference in protest over draft texts branding Israel as a racist and apartheid state — language that was later dropped.
In a speech to visiting U.S. Jewish leaders, Livni said she announced last February that Israel would not participate in the 2009 meeting unless it was clear it would not be used “as a platform for further anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic” activity.
She said documents prepared for next year’s forum showed it was “turning once again into an anti-Israeli tribunal, singling out and delegitimizing the State of Israel.”
As a result, she said: “I decided that Israel will not participate and will not legitimize the Durban-2 conference.”
“We call upon the international community not to participate in this conference, which seeks to legitimize hatred and extremism under the banner of the fight against racism,” Livni added [...]
Odetta Gordon, who is often called “The Voice of the Civil Rights Movement,” remains in a New York City hospital, suffering from kidney failure.
The legendary folk singer, who is 77 years old, entered the hospital last Saturday (11/8) for a check-up and IV nourishment. However, on Sunday (11/9) evening, she went into kidney failure, according to a statement by her manager.
Doctors are trying to stabilize her system and prevent the weakening of her other organs. She is on dialysis to rid her body of the toxic poisons that have built up due to her failing kidneys. Her doctors said the treatment seems to be slowly working.
Gordon is expected to remain in the ICU Unit for at least another week, according to the statement.
She is coherent and talking, and determined to perform at Barack Obama’s Inauguration in January, according to family members.
Her family encourages fans to send cards to Ms. Odetta Gordon; Room #719, 7th Floor ICU Unit; Lenox Hill Hospital; 100 East 77th Street; New York, NY, 10021.
From Live Daily
SPRINGFIELD, MA — (OfficialWire) — 11/09/08 — The fire that destroyed a church under construction in Springfield, Mass., was arson, law enforcement officials say.
State Fire Marshal Stephen D. Coan said the fire that destroyed the Macedonian Church of God in Christ was intentionally set Wednesday, but there was no conclusive evidence the arson was a hate crime, the Boston Globe reported Sunday.
The church’s congregation is primarily black and the fire was set the day after Barack Obama was elected U.S. president, the Globe noted.
Hampden District Attorney William M. Bennett said all efforts would be taken to ensure those responsible for the blaze were apprehended.
“We know it’s arson. We know it’s a very serious crime and we’re going to do everything we can to identify the perpetrator and to prosecute that person or persons responsible,” Bennett said.
The Globe said the church construction project was nearly 75 percent complete when the fire occurred.
From Official Wire
The National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC), , Nov 18, 2008 /PRNewswire-USNewswire via COMTEX/ — 
The National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC), a plaintiff in the successful 1993 lawsuit to open the meetings and records of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s health care task force, today criticized Barack Obama for selecting Eric Holder as his Attorney General nominee.
According to NLPC President Peter Flaherty, “Holder is not ethically qualified to serve as Attorney General. His track record is not one of independence or objectivity. Instead, he has been guided by politics and self-interest.”
On December 21, 1994, federal Judge Royce Lamberth, who presided over the litigation to open the health care task force, asked Holder, who at the time was the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, to investigate Ira Magaziner for possible perjury and criminal contempt of court. He also suggested that Attorney General Janet Reno should appoint an independent counsel to investigate.
Reno announced on March 3, 1995 that she would not appoint an independent prosecutor. On August 3, 1995 Eric Holder announced that he, too, would not prosecute Magazine [...]
On the November 11 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio program, Sean Hannity again suggested that President-elect Barack Obama is to blame for the decline in the stock market and said of Wall Street’s performance: “Wall Street keeps sinking. Could it be the Obama recession: The fear that taxes are gonna go up, forcing people to pull out of the market?” Hannity is not alone among conservatives in the media in referring to an “Obama recession” in purported explanation for the state of the stock market. As MSNBC’s Chris Matthews noted on November 12, radio host Rush Limbaugh “says the recession isn’t President Bush’s fault. It’s the fault, catch this, of the president who hasn’t yet taken office. It’s an ‘Obama recession’; that’s what he’s calling it.” Matthews characterized Limbaugh’s reference to an “Obama recession” as “some of the bitter sore loser’s rhetoric we are hearing from the right these days.”
Limbaugh referred to an “Obama recession” on the November 6 and November 11 broadcasts of his nationally syndicated radio show. But as Media Matters for America has noted, analysts have refuted the proposition that the market decline is attributable to Obama’s election, citing other factors such as weak economic data [...]
More W/ Video At Media Matters
Stupid American Videos or “Is Our Children Learning?”
By: Dr. Lenore J. Daniels, PhD
Reprinted From Black Commentator
But we are unbelievably ignorant concerning what goes on in our country – to say nothing of what does on in the rest of the world – and appear to have become too timid to question what we are told.
- James Baldwin, Nothing Personal
Viewing these videos gave me an excuse for spending time on You Tube. It’s about culture, I said to myself. In fact, it is about the American culture. Since so many Americans have never read Whitman or Hemingway or Morrison. Many have limited knowledge of Frederick Douglass, Cesar Chavez, or Sitting Bull. Since most don’t read and have never read a novel and others can’t tell the difference between fiction and non-fiction. Of the 158 countries in the United Nations, writers Morris Berman, the U.S. ranks “forty-ninth in literacy.” 60 percent of the American adult population “has never read a book of any kind, and only 6 percent reads as much as one book a year, where a book is defined to include Harlequin romances and self-help manuals.” Berman’s research also discovered that 120 Americans are illiterate or “read at no better than a fifth-grade level.” It’s no wonder that most American citizens can’t tell the difference between thinking and non-thinking.
For most Americans, American culture is McDonald or Nike [...]
Full Article At Your Black Education
New Orleans’ youthful, outspoken mayor grabbed the national spotlight after Hurricane Katrina and government incompetence conspired to destroy his city. Three years and another hurricane later he’s facing a different flood-of crime, corruption, and scandal-and this time there’s no FEMA to blame.
Nagin’s office décor mirrors the city’s culture, a mix of Spanish, French, and African influences: On one wall, there is a bright painting; behind his desk hangs an African quilt featuring jazzy embroidery of musical instruments; leaning against a wall is a photo of Nagin greeting Bush during the Katrina crisis.
[...]
The mayor’s unwillingness to tolerate criticism hardened into a state of willful denial this summer, thanks to a scandal involving a program run by the New Orleans Homeownership Corp. News reports revealing that contractors had charged the city for work they did not do prompted the convening of a grand jury. Nagin doesn’t seem worried about the federal investigation, even though one of the program’s highest-paid contractors—S&A Construction—is run by his brother-in-law, Cedric Smith. He vows that Smith will face justice if he is culpable. “Everybody’s looking at it,” Nagin says with a smile, “which is great. Because now I’ve got professional investigators versus bloggers.”
Despite the iconic post-Katrina images of New Orleans citizens waving for help from their rooftops, a voluntary-evacuation order by Nagin had cleared most of the city [...]
HUNTINGTON, W.Va. – As a portly woman plodded ahead of him on the sidewalk, the obese mayor of America’s fattest and unhealthiest city explained why health is not a big local issue.
“It doesn’t come up,” said David Felinton, 5-foot-9 and 233 pounds, as he walked toward City Hall one recent morning. “We’ve got a lot of economic challenges here in Huntington. That’s usually the focus.”
Huntington’s economy has withered, its poverty rate is worse than the national average, and vagrants haunt a downtown riverfront park. But this city’s financial woes are not nearly as bad as its health.
Nearly half the adults in Huntington’s five-county metropolitan area are obese – an astounding percentage, far bigger than the national average in a country with a well-known weight problem.
Huntington leads in a half-dozen other illness measures, too, including heart disease and diabetes. It’s even tops in the percentage of elderly people who have lost all their teeth (half of them have). [...]
The Huntington area’s health problems, cited in a U.S. health report, are a terrible distinction for the city, but the locals barely talk about it. Many don’t even know how poorly the city ranks.
Culture and history are at least part of the problem, health officials say. [...]
Cross burnings. Schoolchildren chanting “Assassinate Obama.” Black figures hung from nooses. Racial epithets scrawled on homes and cars.
Incidents around the country referring to President-elect Barack Obama are dampening the postelection glow of racial progress and harmony, highlighting the stubborn racism that remains in America.
From California to Maine, police have documented a range of alleged crimes, from vandalism and vague threats to at least one physical attack. Insults and taunts have been delivered by adults, college students and second-graders.
There have been “hundreds” of incidents since the election, many more than usual, said Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate crimes.
One was in Snellville, Ga., where Denene Millner said a boy on the school bus told her 9-year-old daughter the day after the election: “I hope Obama gets assassinated.” That night, someone trashed her sister-in-law’s front lawn, mangled the Obama lawn signs, and left two pizza boxes filled with human feces outside the front door, Millner said.
She described her emotions as a combination of anger and fear [...]
More At Your Black News
CHICAGO (AP) — A lawsuit filed Thursday alleges that while a huge Chicago crowd celebrated the election of the first black U.S. president, some white city police officers committed hate crimes against a black family cheering Barack Obama’s victory from home.
The federal lawsuit claims several officers discharged pepper spray on members of a family celebrating Obama’s win outside their home on the city’s West Side last week.
After some of the family members fled into the home, the armed officers knocked down the door and shouted profanity-laced racial insults before leaving, according to the suit.
The eight plaintiffs include Niger Arnold, 31, of Chicago, and her four children, who had been visiting relatives at the home.
“Chicago looked very good on national TV that night. For many people, it was the beginning of a new era in America,” attorney Gregory Kulis said. “Obviously, some Chicago police thought otherwise.”
The lawsuit, which seeks $50,000 in damages, claims use of excessive force, unlawful search and seizure, battery, and a hate crime. It cites only the unnamed officers and does not name the Chicago Police Department.
A separate lawsuit filed last week by Kulis claims Christina Ballard and Cornelius Voss, who are black, were driving home in Chicago with family members on election night when white officers in unmarked cars drove alongside the vehicle.
That lawsuit alleges that after some of the children cheered for Obama through the open car windows, the officers discharged pepper spray and yelled “white power” and the N-word [...]
More At The Associated Press
Barack Obama: The Test of Black CommUNITY
By: Tolu Olorunda
Staff Writer – YourBlackWorld.com
“But we must understand that we are now at a stage of struggle for a People’s Democracy… The mass support of Obama by the national Afro-American movement, especially its progressive sector, will reinvigorate our struggle… We must enter into that mainstream struggle & make our own demands, utilize the pressure of our needs & our numbers. We are almost 50 million people with the 16th GNP in the world… almost 600 Billion dollars a year. We have the muscle and the money. We need to make our move.”
-Renowned Poet and Activist, Amiri Baraka, in a speech earlier this year.
The Black CommUNITY has laid its bed and must now lie in it. To be sure, this author is not particularly pleased with the 95% level of unconditional support from the Black CommUNITY, vis-à-vis Obama’s presidential bid. Nevertheless, Obama’s unpredictable popularity within the Black CommUNITY is a testament to an often glossed over, deep-seated desire/potential for divine unity of the Black CommUNITY. Obama’s candidacy, thankfully, buttressed this reality in unequivocal terms. Many have privately joked, over the past week, about the seeming impossibility of the Black CommUNITY agreeing on any specific agenda, let alone a political one. Some have quipped that the last time such unprecedented levels of support was rendered in favor of anything, O.J. Simpson was on trial for double murder. The comedic value of such statement notwithstanding, its veracity is unquestionable. Having rallied around this man, with unwavering support, let there be no more excuses for our disunity, or inability to remain unified around the ultimate cause: Total liberation.
On at least three key issues, the world will need the assistance of the Black CommUNITY to emerge victorious:
Find Out At Your Black Politics
Remember a few years back when Jay-Z asked — at a Hot 97 Summer Jam concert — “I’m about a dollar, what the f*** is 50 Cents?” Well, Sean Carter might not be alone in expressing that sentiment. In a recent interview with NY1, Donald “I can sell houses to god” Trump spoke of his “friend,” 50 Cent, in not-so flattering terms:
“I’m in many, many rappers’ songs. And I know them,” said Trump. “50 Cent is sort of a friend of mine. I mean, he likes me. He just did a show, it was a copy of ‘The Apprentice.’ It will fail because he’s not Trump, but he’s actually a nice guy.”
– Well, Mr. Trump, how many times have you been shot?
What if our best and brightest were president? GOOD videos seeks to answer this question in a series of mini-docs with several activists and “community-minded” celebrities. What if Van Jones, Danny Glover, Majora Carter, Mos Def, MURS or Wyclef was president? To hear them tell it, the world would look entirely different. Perhaps Sen. Obama’s staff should be paying keen attention to their proposals:
Watch their campaign ads at: Your Black Education
Our Bright Future
It has been two decades since Tracy Chapman burst into pop consciousness, launched improbably from the coffeehouses of Cambridge, Mass., to the top of the charts with her eponymously titled debut.
While she has a reputation as a singer of politically charged folk songs, she has always stood on firmer ground as a poet of romantic longing and loss. Her haunting alto, shot through with loneliness, seems to quaver perpetually on the edge of despondency. Her best-loved songs, including “Fast Car” and “Give Me One Reason,” portray women scratching out doomed lives on the margins in much the same way Bruce Springsteen gives voice to burned-out high school heroes – although with considerably less brio.
Miss Chapman doesn’t stray far from her singer-songwriter roots on “Our Bright Future,” her eighth full-length studio release and her second for Atlantic Records. [...]
[T]he “bright future” alluded to in the title track is not one offered as forthcoming. Indeed, Miss Chapman seems oddly out of step with a political moment that has brought earnest expressions of joy to most folk-rock aficionados [...]
More At Your Black News
Proponents of Gay Marriage Have No Legal Argument Under Loving v. Virginia
By Syreeta L. McNeal, CPA, JD
Recently, proponents of gay marriage in California are protesting the passage of California’s Proposition 8. California Proposition 8 amended the California Constitution to restrict the definition of marriage to a union between a man and a woman.[1] Proponents of gay marriage have been making the argument that their struggle is equivalent to the struggle of African-Americans in seeking their civil rights in the 1960’s. One case that proponents of gay marriage readily equate their struggle to is Loving v. Virgina.[2] This article is intended to debunk the legal argument purported by proponents of gay marriage and show that this case does not embrace recognition of gay marriage on a state level.
Overview of Loving v. Virginia
On June 12, 1967, the United States Supreme Court held that Virginia’s statutory scheme to prevent marriages between persons solely on the basis of racial classifications held to violate the Equal Protection and Due Processes Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment.[3] Listed below is the issue, relevant facts, relevant law and analysis by Chief Justice Warren in rendering his opinion:
Find Out At Your Black Life
We enter a new era of Sacramento politics with a new type of leader:
Kevin Johnson, ex-NBA star, mayor-elect by landslide, a jumble of virtues and contradictions who will never be boring.
Johnson could be exactly what Sacramento needs right now. He could help shake Sacramento’s undervalued sense of itself. Or he could be a disaster. Anything seems possible and nothing seems impossible with Johnson.
At Monday’s unveiling of his transition team, Johnson was surrounded by movers and shakers basking in his presence. [...]
The woman screening candidates for Johnson’s chief of staff is Michelle Rhee, chancellor of schools in Washington, D.C. Google her. She could be Secretary of Education someday. Yet here she is, in Sacramento, helping out our new mayor.
The man helping Johnson reach out to the Latino community? Amador Bustos, whose company virtually owns the Spanish-language radio market in Northern California.
Yeah. Sacramento is ready for new leadership. Sacramento yearns for it. That’s part of the reason so many people responded to Johnson so positively [...]
More At Your Black Brothers
Hope and Wisdom
By: Shannon Joyce Prince
Remember back seven years ago to the aftermath of September 11th, when the world was divided into the good and the axis of evil, those who had democracy and those whose envy of it drove them to murderous fundamentalism? Remember the charge of the extreme right – that anybody who didn’t support the ‘War on Terror’ or didn’t show the appropriate level of ambivalence towards Islam or Middle Easterners, or paused to quibble over whether or not “enemy countries” had weapons of mass destruction, was unpatriotic and insufficiently American? Remember how the left, the middle, and the moderate right took issue with that kind of Manichean thinking while the war hawks said it didn’t matter if those who were leading us to war were honest or which Middle Eastern country we bombed, because we were representing the concepts of freedom and democracy, thus the nitty-gritty about reality and truth weren’t important?
I’ve been stunned to hear that same kind of rhetoric from the left. Either you support President-elect Obama or you’re a too cool for school revolutionary snob, a Gloomy Gus, or someone too idealistic, unrealistic, or cynical to be pragmatic or useful [...]
More At Your Black Scholar
Did Tiger Woods pave Barack Obama’s path? Are you joking?
By: Dave Zirin
Originally Appeared In NY Daily News
It’s always dangerous, but never boring, when a newspaper sports columnist uncorks a political thesis. Enter Mike Bianchi of the Orlando Sentinel. Bianchi thinks that there are some unsung heroes who deserve credit for helping put a black man in the White House – and they are athletes. “If you’re searching for tangible reasons why it became possible for Barack Obama to make his historic run at the presidency … look no further than the golf course, basketball court or football field.”
Bianchi believes that, since sports have conditioned white America to accept African-Americans as heroes and leaders, black sportsmen deserve a pat on the back. He wonders: “Where else but sports can you go to Amway Arena and see 15,000 mostly white fans cheer and celebrate the accomplishments of a team that is mostly black?”
Sounds lovely. But it happens to be embarrassingly wrong – and an insult to the reason that millions waited on long lines to cast their vote [...]
More At Your Black Politics
ABC’s ‘Life on Mars’ Rewrites Black History
By: Tolu Olorunda
Staff Writer – YourBlackWorld.com
In approximately 42 minutes, Life on Mars, a new ABC TV series, sought to do the impossible: Rewrite Black history. On Nov. 6th, ABC broadcast an episode called, Things to Do in New York When You Think You’re Dead. The premise of this particular episode was centered on emerging racial tensions within Black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods, following the death of a 9-year old Black girl -believed to have been murdered by a Puerto Rican man. This watered-down version of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing was, I presume, intended to promoted dialogue around issues of inter-racial fellowship. Unfortunately, such megalomaniac decisions by big-media companies have only, historically, intensified the problem. It’s like MSNBC claiming its exploitation of incarcerated inmates in the Lockdown series is only a means to an end of educating younger people of the dangerous and horrific conditions of prison life. Or worse, BET intimating that its obsession with the American Gangster series is a way of informing young Black and Brown kids of the history and peril of gang deathstyle. In short, such inference is devoid of logic [...]
Full Article At Your Black Power
PEARL, MS (WLBT) – Teachers are prohibiting students from talking about President-Elect Barack Obama. WLBT’s newsroom has been flooded by calls and emails from angry parents in several cities. These parents say their children were threatened with suspension if they said Obama’s name or wore clothing that supports him. [...]
“It’s like they’ve taken their rights way,” said Natalie Taylor. She decided not to show her face because she is afraid of retaliation against her son who attends Pearl Junior High School.
“He told me he was warned by one of the teachers before school started that he could not mention the name because he would get in trouble,” said Taylor. [...]
“Racism at its best, that’s really what it is,” said Paula Loften of Magee. She has two children in the Simpson County School District in Magee. She is angry that students are not allowed to wear any clothing that supports the new President-Elect.
“One student was sent home to change because she had on a Barack Obama T-shirt and on the back it said “yes we can,” said Loten [...]
More At Your Black Education
An Anaheim police officer chasing burglary suspects shot and killed an innocent 20-year-old man who heard a commotion and emerged from his house early Tuesday holding what authorities said was either a broomstick or a shower rod.
The officer encountered Julian Alexander on his front lawn and shot him twice in the chest about 1:30 a.m.
Paramedics treated Alexander at the scene in the 300 block of North Muller Street before taking him to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Alexander’s wife and mother-in-law said he went outside, believing that he heard possible intruders. The women heard two gunshots and tried to run outside but were stopped by an officer. From their window, they saw Alexander on the ground, handcuffed and bleeding.
“He was a good kid, trying to protect his house,” said Michelle Mooney, his mother-in-law. “And the police, instead of asking questions, they just shot first. Somebody has to be held responsible for this.”
The officer who shot Alexander was not identified and was placed on leave. The shooting is being investigated by the Anaheim Police Department’s office of independent review and the Orange County district attorney’s office.
Relatives said police refused to let them see Alexander at UCI Medical Center [...]
Jamie and Gladys Scott are two sisters who were convicted of armed robbery, which they did not commit.
Their transcripts state that nine, ten or eleven dollars was stolen. No one was injured or murdered. Witnesses were coerced and threatened to lie on The Scott Sisters. Affidavits by those who committed the crime state that Jamie and Gladys were not involved. Yet, they have been in prison for over 14 years.
Please sign their petition:
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/Free-Jamie-Gladys/index.html
& visit the new website for more:
An Open Letter to Barack Obama
By: Alice Walker
Dear Brother Obama,
You have no idea, really, of how profound this moment is for us. Us being the black people of the Southern United States. You think you know, because you are thoughtful, and you have studied our history. But seeing you deliver the torch so many others before you carried, year after year, decade after decade, century after century, only to be struck down before igniting the flame of justice and of law, is almost more than the heart can bear.
[...]
I would advise you to remember that you did not create the disaster that the world is experiencing, and you alone are not responsible for bringing the world back to balance. A primary responsibility that you do have, however, is to cultivate happiness in your own life. To make a schedule that permits sufficient time of rest and play with your gorgeous wife and lovely daughters.
[...]
I would further advise you not to take on other people’s enemies. Most damage that others do to us is out of fear, humiliation and pain. Those feelings occur in all of us, not just in those of us who profess a certain religious or racial devotion. We must learn actually not to have enemies, but only confused adversaries who are ourselves in disguise [...]
More At Your Black Scholar
You could see this coming, and this is what I’m talking about when you ignore the elephant in the room. Rod McCullom of Rod 2.0 blogs reports on the escalation of the “blame the blacks” meme that has been swirling about the blogosphere and the MSM.
A number of Rod 2.0 and Jasmyne Cannick readers report being subjected to taunts, threats and racist abuse at last night’s marriage equality rally in Los Angeles. Geoffrey, a student at UCLA and regular Rod 2.0 reader, joined the massive protest outside the Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Westwood. Geoffrey was called the n-word at least twice.
It was like being at a klan rally except the klansmen were wearing Abercrombie polos and Birkenstocks. YOU NIGGER, one man shouted at men. If your people want to call me a FAGGOT, I will call you a nigger. Someone else said same thing to me on the next block near the temple…me and my friend were walking, he is also gay but Korean, and a young WeHo clone said after last night the niggers better not come to West Hollywood if they knew what was BEST for them.
The backlash is upon us, and it’s going to get uglier unless our organizations step forward and say something. The desire to scapegoat blacks for Prop 8’s defeat has exposed the now not-so-latent racism in our movement [...]
The Republican vice presidential candidate attracted criticism for accusing Mr Obama of “palling around with terrorists”, citing his association with the sixties radical William Ayers.
The attacks provoked a near lynch mob atmosphere at her rallies, with supporters yelling “terrorist” and “kill him” until the McCain campaign ordered her to tone down the rhetoric.
But it has now emerged that her demagogic tone may have unintentionally encouraged white supremacists to go even further.
The Secret Service warned the Obama family in mid October that they had seen a dramatic increase in the number of threats against the Democratic candidate, coinciding with Mrs Palin’s attacks.
Michelle Obama, the future First Lady, was so upset that she turned to her friend and campaign adviser Valerie Jarrett and said: “Why would they try to make people hate us?”
More At Your Black News
ROME (AFP) — South African singer Miriam Makeba has died aged 76 after being taken ill near the southern Italian town of Caserta following a concert, ANSA news agency reported Monday.
She died overnight after taking part in a concert for Roberto Saviano, a writer threatened with death by the Mafia, the Italian agency said.
Miriam Makeba, known as “Mama Africa”, was the legendary voice of the African continent who became a symbol of the fight against apartheid in her home country.
[...]
Born from a Swazi mother and Xhosa father, Makeba captured international attention as vocalist for the South African group, The Manhattan Brothers, while they toured the United States in 1959.
The following year, when she wanted to return home to bury her mother, the apartheid state revoked her citizenship and later also banned her music. As a result she spent 31 years in exile, living in the United States and later in Guinea.
She became the first black African woman to receive a Grammy Award which she shared with folk singer Harry Belafonte in 1965 [...]
Funk veteran George Clinton and percussion maven Sheila E will venture out of 
their comfort zones along with five other stars in the third season of CMT’s singing competition series, “Gone Country.”
Rounding out the cast are former Miss USA Tara Conner, singer Taylor Dayne, Monkees lead vocalist/drummer Micky Dolenz, actor Richard Grieco and “American Idol” first-season runner-up Justin Guarini.
The contestants will spend two weeks working with songwriters on a country tune. The celebrity judged by host John Rich as the most prepared to impress a country audience will record and release their single to country radio.
Production is currently underway in Nashville for a January 2009 premiere. Previous winners were Julio Iglesias Jr. (Season 1) and Sebastian Bach (Season 2).
From Eurweb
Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan says President-elect Barack Obama has a God-given capacity to handle what Farrakhan calls the “horrible burden” Obama will face as the nation’s leader.
Farrakhan says Obama will be helped by “God and people of good will.”
The 75-year-old spoke Sunday at Mosque Maryam, the Chicago-based movement’s headquarters. The address is called “America’s New Beginning: President-elect Barack Obama.”
Farrakhan says he stayed quiet about his support the past few months out of fear it’d hurt Obama’s campaign [...]
Video & More At Your Black Politics
DOHA (AFP) — Serena Williams’ chances of ending the year on a high note evaporated unexpectedly when
she withdrew Friday from the Sony Ericsson championships with a stomach muscle problem.
The younger of the two world-beating sisters had been in tears during her oddly one-sided 5-7, 6-1, 6-0 defeat to Venus Williams during their round robin match Thursday – and it emerged that she may have suffered the injury then.
“I had zero pain last night,” Serena said of her post-match experience. “But I didn’t serve well and I think that’s why I was doing that. I might have been over-compensating.
“When I got home I didn’t feel pain. But when I woke up I was in pain. I have had this before and so when I felt this it was like a red flag. I went to see how I felt in practice yesterday, and it was hard when I was hitting ground strokes. I didn’t want to risk it.”
Serena was challenged by a British journalist who suggested that sometimes in a major tournament such as this she should play through the pain for the sake of the event and for the sponsors.
“I think what I should do is make you work out, have a severe stomach strain and play for the sponsors,” she chided.
When the journalist suggested he would have, Serena responded with satirical laughter, adding: “You really should. You should go for it and live the dream!”
Later she explained: “I had this once in LA and played through it and I was out for six to eight weeks. So when I had these symptoms I thought I must start the new year well. I can’t afford to be out for so long.”
The setback means that Serena is unable to take the chance of avenging herself for her Olympic loss to Elena Dementieva, who went on to take the gold medal in Beijing in August [...]
The death toll from the Friday school collapse in Haiti climbed to 82 on Saturday, with 107 injured, Haiti President Rene Preval reported cited by Haitian Press Network.
Rescue workers found early Saturday 21 bodies in a classroom, all believed to be students from one class.
It is not known how many students were in the school when it collapsed Friday morning, but reports say that anywhere between 500 and 700 children and teenagers typically crowded into the three-story concrete building of College La Promesse.
Most of the students at the school ranged in age from 10 to 20, officials said, but some are younger. Haitian press reports said kindergarten, primary and secondary students attended the school.
The school is in an extremely poor part of town and the roads are nearly impassable. A United Nations helicopter was unable to land in the area [...]
By: Tolu Olorunda
Staff Writer – YourBlackWorld.com
In light of Sen. Obama’s historic win on Tuesday night, certain perspectives must be taken into consideration in order to avoid being taken for a 4 year ride, which provides nothing, having promised NOTHING! In the long and winded 20-month battle for a seat at the table of presidency, Sen. Obama has often conducted himself with an unimpeachable level of dignity, grace and humility. Nevertheless, there have been times when the Good Senator has fallen short of those ranks. In fact, he has, throughout the course of his presidential bid, played the 90% hand that fed, clothed, nurtured and made him: The Black Community. Whilst many Black progressives seem quite comfortable with being snubbed – in exchange for a Black presidency – not every card-carrying member of the Black Community appreciates the Illinois Senator’s disposition on the issue of Race. They are fully aware of the tightrope which needs to be walked for a Black man to transport himself to the pedestal of history, but many see a tension between overt opportunism and the potential for a progressive Black president. In my humble judgment, there are ten issues of concern to the Black Community on which Sen. Obama has failed woefully in the course of his political career and this historic campaign:
More At Your Black Power
Stop Blaming California’s Black Voters for Prop 8
By: Raymond Leon Roker
Excuse me? I voted against Proposition 8. I’m among the 30 percent of black Californians that did so. And as much as I can condemn the homophobia and intolerance that drove a portion of the 70 percent of blacks that voted in favor of Proposition 8’s ban on gay marriage, it’s an outrage to lay its passage at their feet. I’ve read several editorials already about how the ungrateful blacks betrayed gays right after America gave them their first president. I know there are some wounds and frayed nerves right now, but this type of condescending, divide and conquer isn’t going to help at all. And it’s a gross oversimplification of what happened.
According to the exit polling, there’s enough blame to go around. Don’t forget the 49 percent of Asians who voted for Prop 8. And the 53 percent of Latinos who fell in line for it too. And then there is the white vote in support of 8. Slightly under 50% percent of them, a group representing 63% of California voters, voted “Yes” on 8. Last I checked blacks held little sway over all of those groups [...]
More At Your Black Life
MILFORD — As protesters outside held a giant American flag and yelled words like “traitor” and “racist,” the Rev. Jeremiah Wright discussed his views on race and Christianity before an audience of hundreds Thursday night in Kingdom Life Christian Church.
Wright, President-elect Barack Obama’s former pastor, whose racially and politically charged remarks in sermons propelled him to notoriety in March, was invited to a forum on the Bible, race and American history by the Rev. John C. Rankin, an evangelical scholar and head of the Hartford-based Theological Education Institute.
A soft-spoken Wright, retired senior pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, told the diverse crowd his controversial remarks were taken out of context as media sound bites.
“They could care less what I preach,” he said in response to a question. “Their intention was to use me as a weapon of mass destruction to destroy that man’s candidacy. “¦ Perceptions of me are based on 10 seconds.”
The spotlight fell Wright when ABC News reported a review of dozens of his sermons found repeated denunciations of the U.S. and lists of its injustices to blacks and other minorities [...]
If Harriet Tubman Were President
By: Dr. Lenore Daniels
If Harriet Tubman were elected president of the United States, the Underground Railroad would become a modern-day institution in which the “wretched of the earth” here in the U.S. would be gathered together to rise from beneath the heels of their enslavers. These citizens would form local committees to review what is best in the U.S. Constitution as well as review the Iroquois Constitution and the Black Panther education and food distribution programs. Freedom would take on a new meaning and the word “reform” would be removed from the lexicon of all languages. “Economically poor,” “liberal,” democrat,” “republican,” “fundamental Christian,” and “conservative” would not represent anyone. And we would come up with a flag that would represent all the people and not be used to intimidate those of us who still do not feel welcomed.
[...]
If Martin Luther King were president, funding for wars would cease. Troops would return home. A new institution to train and/or re-educate negotiators and mediators would recognize the importance of a culturally/globally literate neighbor-consultant in the world [...]
The Obama ‘08 Phenomenon: What Have We Learned?
By: BAR executive editor Glen Ford
“This generation will have to learn from damn near scratch what a real social movement looks like.”
Without question, the nation has experienced an election of historical significance, for reasons that go beyond the obvious “first Black” aspect of race. This has also been the most-hyped presidential campaign in U.S. history, if for no other reason than the simple fact that every presidential campaign is more hyped than the last, since hype is what corporate media sells. But what has the experience taught us?
We have learned that a large and decisive national minority of whites can be persuaded to vote for a certain kind of Black man for president if that Black man possesses the following characteristics:
Find Out At Your Black Politics
The voting booths hadn’t even cooled down from last night’s historic election, before the Wall Street Journal exploited the moment by not only suggesting that “racism as a barrier to achievement” will no longer exist now that a black man has been elected, but by actually declaring that these barriers were a “myth” in the first place. I guess it took a stubborn stronghold of white, male, corporate privilege, where black achievement is the exception, not the rule, to make such a claim.
Obama’s achievements are indeed an American achievement and all those who were able to vote their dreams and not their fears reveal the very best instincts of this country’s citizenry. But let’s not forget the popular “real America” theme that Sarah Palin drilled home to her party faithful, a creepy, divisive, and yes, racist, maneuver that tried to paint Barack as a bogey man that threatened “American” values [...]
Morning in Obamerica
By: Ishmael Reed
The wolf shall also dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.
The great American satirist George Schuyler’s prescient and comic work, Black No More, is about a scientist named Dr. Crookmore who comes up with a formula that turns blacks to white (I wonder how Schuyler would treat the current profitable back- to- Africa DNA hokum). As a result of a country that is totally white, The Civil Rights organizations go out of business, and even the last hold out, the character, based upon the black nationalist Marcus Garvey, in the end, tries some of Dr. Crookmore solution. Would something like this happen were Barack Obama to become president? A country where there exists no social divisions and the issue of race has become defused.
The leader of the NAACP says that the work of the organization will continue even with an Obama victory. Why? Wouldn’t it be better that the NAACP shut its doors as cable’s leading conservative intellectual, Tucker Carlson has suggested? Auction off its assets and join the post race fever?
Full Article At Your Black Scholar
President Elect Obama – America’s Struggle in Context
By: Dr. Wilmer J. Leon III
With the election of Illinois Sen. Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States, Americans have taken a giant leap forward. It has taken this country 219 years to elect its first African-American president (George Washington was elected in 1789). It is imperative that this historic moment always be viewed within its proper historic context.
[...]
As I think about President-elect Obama’s defeat of Senator John McCain and bask in the comfort of this historic event, I must also fear its backlash. History tells us that white supremacy dies hard in America and its proponents will not take America’s victory lying down.
I think back to 1908 and Jack Johnson’s defeat of Tommy Burns to become the first African-American boxing heavyweight champion of the world. This led to the search for the “Great White Hope,” James Jackson Jefferies. Before Johnson fought Jefferies on July 4, 1910, the crowd chanted, “Kill the nigger.” Johnson’s defeat of Jefferies ignited numerous incidents of white violence against African-Americans. It set off some of the worst racial violence in American history [...]
Full Article At Your Black Scholar
WASHINGTON – Barack Obama was elected the nation’s first black president Tuesday night in a historic triumph that overcame racial barriers as old as America itself.
The 47-year-old Democratic senator from Illinois sealed his victory by defeating Republican Sen. John McCain in a string of wins in hardfought battleground states — Ohio, Florida, Virginia and Iowa.
A huge crowd thronged Grant Park in Chicago to cheer his improbable triumph and await his first public speech as president-elect.
From Michigan Live
Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., won perhaps the most critical state in his quest for the presidency Tuesday by claiming Pennsylvania and its 21 electoral votes away from Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., news networks reported. While Ohio and Florida played vital roles in the last two presidential contests, it was The Keystone State’s turn to live up to its name in this contest. Obama’s win in Pennsylvania is expected to set the table for his overall victory, as it puts him just a few electoral votes away from the 270 he needs for the presidency.
From Market Watch
Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., has scored a critical victory in his run for the presidency over Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., by winning the key battleground state of Ohio, news networks reported late Tuesday. Ohio’s 20 electoral votes have been critical in the last several elections, correctly gauging the winner in every presidential contest since 1964. Ohio put George W. Bush over the top four years ago as he took the state by a narrow margin of slightly more than 2%. Obama was projected the winner by Fox News and MSNBC The win now puts 185 electoral votes in Obama’s column. A total of 270 electoral votes are needed to win.
From Market Watch
In many states across the country, voters are experiencing inexplicable hurdles as they attempt to fulfill their constitutional duty. Video the Vote has provide an incredible forum for these voters to air out their frustration. Voters across the country are reporting on machine malfunctions, police intimidation, official incompetence and more.
Visit Video the Vote’s twitter page to receive the latest:
The Illusion of Post-Racial America
By: Aman Gill
An Obama Victory Would be a Milestone, but Could Stall Struggles Against Racism
It’s increasingly popular to argue that the fuel for unrest has disappeared because the problem of racism has receded into America’s past. This idea has long held sway on the right, but, paradoxically, it’s taken Barack Obama’s candidacy to elevate this persistent right-wing myth into conventional wisdom.
CIVIL RIGHTS UNFULFILLED
“The history he [Obama] needs to know is the history he rejects,” says Lenore Daniels, editorial board member of the Black Commentator, a weekly online magazine. “He rejects the whole Black Power movement: ‘Just the civil rights were fine, we’ll leave it at that, there was progress.’ [But] the Black Power movement is still relevant. That was a movement talking about economic equality, where King left off.”
[...]
Obama’s view of a united, post-racial America is in the tradition of how the political establishment – Democrat and Republican – responded to heightened militancy [...]
Full Article At Your Black Scholar
Akon, the Grammy-winning, multi-platinum-selling R&B star, has said that he will renounce his US citizenship and leave the country if John McCain wins next week’s presidential election.
[...]
“If he [Obama] doesn’t get into office, I’m gonna change my citizenship,” he said. “I’m moving back to Africa. You can hold me to that. I’m afraid to live there if he [McCain] is President. The decisions he makes scare me: he’s making selfish decisions, he’s doing whatever it takes to get into office.”
Akon cited the selection of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as McCain’s running-mate as one of the decisions that gave him concern. “I don’t think he’s going to last eight years,” he said, referring to McCain, “so she’s definitely going to be president. Oh my goodness – that’s scarier. And who would be her running mate? Joe the Plumber?
“I’m very afraid,” he continued. “If the people don’t see [that life in America will deteriorate under McCain], then that’s a dangerous place to be for the next four years. I can’t even envision how bad it’s gonna be [...]
White Journalists Blow Race Coverage: A Review
By: Tolu Olorunda
Staff Writer – YourBlackWorld.com
The stage theatrics performed by the corporate press in analyzing the dynamics of Race vis-à-vis Sen. Obama, has been abysmal, at best. To put it bluntly, they suck. When Barack “Hussein” Obama, a Black man, initially announced his bid for the presidency, it was clear that the predominantly White media was unprepared, to say the least, in tackling the indomitable beast of RACE. The first revelation of this reality came, early 2007, when White pundits began asking the question: “Is Barack Obama Black enough?” It took an unprecedented level of effrontery for the grossly unenlightened conglomerate of White journalists to pose such a question, but, to paraphrase Sinatra, they did it their way.
Before long, the same group of overfed self-congratulators would declare, with such temerity, the dawn of a “post-racial” era. Considering the ground-work of “post-racialism,” it came as no surprise when the White, New York Times columnist, Matt Bai, declared Obama’s candidacy to be “the end of Black politics.” Upon Bai’s preposterous assertion, numerous Black bloggers/Writers asked a simple question: What the heck is going on? Unfortunately, their reluctance to curtail mass media’s long-tradition of re-defining race-discourse had begun to bear fruit [...]
Full Article At Your Black News
The Detroit Pistons shook the NBA in a big way Monday-landing former MVP Allen Iverson from the Denver Nuggets.
The Pistons gave up All-Star point guard and former NBA finals MVP Chauncey Billups and top reserve Antonio McDyess.
The trade was confirmed by a basketball official, who spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity because the deal had not been announced.
Pistons spokesman Kevin Grigg declined to comment, and messages were left for a Nuggets spokesman as well as for an agent representing Billups and McDyess.
The blockbuster deal comes two games into the season for Detroit. The Pistons have been a model of consistency in recent years, but they were determined to change their core following a third straight exit from the Eastern Conference finals last summer [...]
More At Your Black Sports
While attempts at voter suppression are partisan in intent they are racial in effect. The Democrats have not won an election without the black vote since 1964. The most effective and crude way to undermine their base is to minimise the vote in black areas. This is precisely what happened in Florida in 2000, where Republicans lowered the threshold for inclusion on the “purge list” of ineligible voters. By the time they were done, African-Americans accounted for 88% of those purged, even though they only comprised 11% of the actual electorate.
The practical consequences of this interference, manipulation and, at times, intimidation is twofold. It disenfranchises people who either don’t have the time, inclination or wherewithal to stand up to officialdom. And it creates huge lines while others stay and fight. A Democratic party survey from 2004 found half of the state’s African-American voters in Ohio reported some problems at the polls on election day. On average, black voters waited in longer lines than whites, were more likely to be asked for identification when they got there and felt more intimidated.
This year will be worse [...]
They say ignorance comes in all shapes and sizes. No truer words have ever been uttered. For anyone still in doubt over the role Commercial Hip-Hop plays in desecrating the minds of the young, read this immediately!:
Then came Soulja Boy Tell Em. I [Toure from BET] asked him, “What historical figure do you most hate?” He was stumped. I said, “Others have said Hitler, bin Laden, the slave masters…” He said, “Oh wait! Hold up! Shout out to the slave masters! Without them we’d still be in Africa.”
My jaw, at this point, was on the ground.”We wouldn’t be here,” he continued, having no idea how far in it he’d stepped, “to get this ice and tattoos.”
Wow. Never mind that diamonds come from Africa. Never mind that there were many generations of pain in between leaving Africa and getting diamonds. Never mind that the long-term cataclysmic effects of subtracting about tens of millions of young, strong people from Africa over the course of a couple of centuries is a large part of the reason why Africa now appears so distasteful to you. Never mind all that, Soulja Boy. You put country first.
Poor thing… If only he was aborted.
COLORADO SPRINGS — A Fort Carson soldier who boasted about his transformation into a killer on his MySpace page has been formally charged with 19 felony counts, including first-degree murder.
Robert Hull Marko, 21, is being held in the El Paso County jail without 
bail in the slaying of 19-year-old Judilianna “Judi” Lawrence. The body of the developmentally disabled woman was found Oct. 13 on Old Stage Road, according to Colorado Bureau of Investigation records.
The charges filed Monday included felony murder, first-degree murder and five counts of sexual assault with force and with a weapon. He also was charged with sexual assault on a child and kidnapping, according to CBI records.
After a tour of duty that ended in February, Marko was earmarked for psychological counseling because of an “overactive imagination.” He was cleared for combat before he admitted to El Paso County sheriff’s investigators that he slashed Lawrence’s throat.
From Denver Post
Is Juan Williams leaving the house? Not sure he’s welcome back on the field, but that’s an entirely different discussion. On Thursday, Sean Hannity, the self-proclaimed McCain surrogate and FOX News host, attempted, once again, to smear Palestinian-native and Chicago professor, Rashid Khalidi. Unfortunately for Hannity, even Juan Williams wouldn’t back him up on his erroneous claim that an association with Prof. Khalidi is synonymous to dancing with the devil. Juan Williams, known for his anti-black sensibilities, seemed to express some frustration with his pal, Sean Hannity, whose desperate strategies at helping McCain win appear to hold no barriers. To put it plainly, Juan Williams called him out on his B.S. and unadulterated hypocrisy:
Video At Your Black Brothers
WASHINGTON (AFP) – Despite Barack Obama’s message of change and hope, fears persist in the black community about what his election as president could mean for the legacy of racism in America.
Namely, that it might mean nothing at all.
“America is still one of the most segregated countries by race and by class in the industrialized world,” said Dedrick Muhammad, research associate at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, a think tank for social justice.
Muhammad pointed to research showing that black Americans remain far behind the rest of the country economically, with median wealth one-tenth of that in white America, and one in three black children born into poverty.
Like most black Americans, Muhammad supports Obama’s historic bid to become America’s first black president.
However, he said the Illinois senator’s campaign tactic of largely avoiding discussion of race in his campaign has “driven me crazy.”
“What saddens me today is that we don’t talk about black-white inequality,” he said. “I see in Obama a winning strategy, but it is sad to me.”
For the 47-year-old son of a white American mother and black Kenyan father to gain the lead he currently holds over his Republican rival John McCain, Obama has had to tip-toe around any potential racial controversy, analysts say [...]
More At Your Black Politics
Lula Cooper expects the tears to flow if Barack Obama becomes the first black president. But she’s not breaking out the tissues just yet.
“I cried when I marked my ballot for him. We’ve had such an incredible journey to this point,” said the former civil rights activist, her voice quavering. “I think he’s going to win, but I really am very, very cautious.”
Like a Hollywood blockbuster whose conclusion feels assured but still sets the heart racing, the endgame of this election has gripped black America with a powerful mixture of emotions.
Obama’s potential victory represents a previously unimaginable triumph over centuries of racism. But beneath the hope and pride lies fear: of polling inaccuracy, voting chicanery, or the type of injustice and violence that have historically stymied African-American progress [...]
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On Monday, Michelle Obama payed a visit to The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Mrs. Obama talked, amongst many other things, about the road to victory, fashion, Gov. Palin, and her dad — who passed away in 1991 after a long bout with multiple sclerosis. Immediately following her appearance, Chris Rock was available to shake things up. Rock, known for his comedic ingenuity, cracked on everything from the Obamas, to the difference between Black and White kids, to the economy, and his new animated movie: “Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa.”
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The Republican is outwardly confident, but there’s urgency in his voice as he tours North Georgia, trying to boost turnout in his predominately white base: “The other folks are voting,” he bluntly tells supporters.
Just in case anyone was confused about who those “other folks” are, Chambliss gave this quote New York Times:
The development is not lost on Mr. Chambliss. “There has always been a rush to the polls by African-Americans early,” he said at the square in Covington, a quick stop on a bus tour as the campaign entered its final week. He predicted the crowds of early voters would motivate Republicans to turn out. “It has also got our side energized, they see what is happening,” he said.
Former Sen. Max Cleland, who was beaten by Chambliss in 2002, expressed concern in an interview with the Huffington Post about a “white backlash” to Barack Obama in the South. But he also touted the “historic numbers in terms of registration, African-Americans and young people” that is changing the region’s political landscape in “fundamental” ways.
From Huffington Post
Ashley Todd: A Counter-Argument to “Post-Racialism”
By: Tolu Olorunda
Staff Writer – YourBlackWorld.com
Perhaps one of the greatest ironies of the 2008 Presidential race is the constant assertion of the notion of a “post-racial” period, while juxtaposed with an endless torrent of refuting occurrences. Last week, Ashley Todd, a Pittsburgh McCain worker, reported a compelling story of being “robbed at an ATM at the corner of Liberty Avenue and Pearl Street in the Bloomfield area around 9 p.m. Wednesday after leaving a Republican phone bank.” To avoid misleading the local police station, Todd was quick to comment that her purported attacker was a “dark-skinned African-American man about 6′4″,” who “stole $60 from her and became enraged after seeing a bumper sticker supporting Republican Presidential Candidate John McCain on her car.”
The bizarre story took an unusual twist when Ashley Todd told Pittsburgh police that her “dark-skinned” bandit made sure to carve “a ‘B’ in her cheek,” when he noticed the McCain sticker on her car. From the onset, this mystery was suspicious at best. Nevertheless, John McCain and Sarah Palin swiftly conducted personal phone calls with the victim: Ashley Todd. Even Sen. Obama’s camp would not risk being charged with condoning this reported act of bestiality. In a released statement, the campaign stated: “Our thoughts and prayers are with the young woman for her to make a speedy recovery, and we hope that the person who perpetrated this crime is swiftly apprehended and brought to justice.” Damn. Tawana Brawley must be feeling pretty disgusted at this point [...]
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Just a few years ago, at roughly the turn of the millennium, slavery reparations seemed the coming thing. A New York Times article in June 2001 reported that the movement to obtain compensation for slaves’ descendants had “taken on substantial force” and was “gaining steam” both in the nation’s universities and in the black community.
All the major black organizations had signed on, including the NAACP, the Urban League and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Randall Robinson’s book, “The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks,” had hit the bestseller lists in 2000. Many state and local Democratic politicians started to talk up the idea.
Then: nothing. Today, reparations seem to have completely disappeared from the national agenda. Few mention them anymore. What happened?
So the first and last episode of the Barack and Bill Show took place last night in Kissimmee, Florida, with some 35,000 regular people in attendance.
[...]
But beyond the histrionics, the substance of his speech was formulaic, a gussied-up set of cookie-cutter talking points. The four reasons he cited for supporting Obama — his philosophy, his policies, his decision-making ability, and his capacity as a chief executive — could have been applied to any nominee of his party; there wasn’t a single warm personal anecdote or characterological insight (both specialties of Clinton’s when he’s speaking about someone he actually, you know, likes) [...]
Why Wright Happens
By: Debra Dickerson
How come white folks can consort with racists but blacks can’t? Not that I’m conceding that Rev. Wright is a racist. But let’s stick to the point.
Jonathan Stein’s post gives me the perfect opportunity to kvetch about something that’s been driving me crazy about the attacks on Obama via Wright.
Stein’s right that vicious ads like this one will give a great many cover to vote against Obama. But here’s the thing: What about the racists and loonies who helped raise most of us? My father was bitter beyond belief about white racism, even though he had white friends and volunteered to fight in WWII. I can separate his horrific life experiences (Jim Crow sharecropper) out from my own (post-Civil Rights Movement) world view, as do most other Americans. When the elders got together and ranted and raved about the white man, I didn’t go upstairs, write a formal denunciation, and secede from my family. I considered the source and was grateful to have been born later. How dare you demand that we have no complaints? Church, and to a lesser and more troubling extent, certain forms of rap ‘music’, are places we go for catharsis. And catharsis ain’t usually a pretty sight [...]
Full Article At Your Black Scholar
In an interview with CNN’s Campbell Brown, Monday night, NBA legend, Charles Barkley, mentioned that racism was still an integral part of U.S. political life. Surprisingly, FOX News wasn’t to happy about it, and talk-show host, Sean Hannity, made much hoopla about it on his show last night. “Liberal Commentator,” Bob Beckel, was featured as a guest to provide some analysis on Barkley’s charge. Beckel responded saying, “I would rather take the words of a drunk on the corner down here on politics than Charles Barkley’s… He’s a great basketball player, but he ought to stay there. That’s exactly right. And not wander into our neighborhood, you know.” What does Beckel mean by “our neighborhood?” Perhaps, in Beckle and FOX News’s minds, Black athletes can only function one-dimensionally. This might explain why politically-conscious athletes like Etan Thomas have become increasingly marginalized in mainstream athleticism:
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A judge reportedly denied a request by Michael Vick’s lawyers to allow him to plead guilty to state dogfighting charges via videoconference from federal prison on Thursday.
The Richmond Times-Dispatch reported Thursday that Surry County Circuit Judge Samuel E. Campbell denied the request during a hearing in Sussex County court. Vick’s attorneys made the request so that the disgraced former Atlanta Falcons quarterback would not have to leave prison in Leavenworth, Kansas, where he is serving a 23-month sentence for a federal dogfighting charge.
The state’s attorney objected to the defense’s request, and Campbell agreed, as there is no allowance in Virginia law for someone to plead via videoconference, according to the paper [...]
Continued At Your Black Sports
Hip-Hop Emcee/Journalist, Jasiri X, returns with his weekly Hip-Hop newscasts. This week’s current events include: Gov. Palin’s incompetence, the “Ashley Todd hoax,” Robocalls, Jennifer Hudson’s tragedy, Black-on-Black violence,” lynching in Texas and more:
For the week of October 19 – October 25:
Pandering to Racists
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
With unseemly haste, the corporate media consensus seems to have rushed to the conclusion that the so-called “Bradley Effect” is a myth; that white covert racism will not be a significant factor on November 4, and that the polls are accurately reflecting a looming landslide for Barack Obama.
[...]
Those who attempt to discredit the Bradley Effect are, in reality, seeking to declare racism in America a non-issue, unworthy of further attention. They have seized on Barack Obama’s campaign as proof that Black agitation is outdated and even harmful to the national interest.
Obama has encouraged whites to believe that, once he is in the White House, Black complaints about racism in public life can be deemed irrelevant; that the long debate over white skin privilege and entrenched institutional racism will be over. The most shameless proponent of this baseless notion is Frank Rich, a supposedly liberal columnist for the New York Times [...]
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From Democracy Now!
Your Black Life: Lisa Powell: Believe In Your Child
Tags: Black Children, Black Family, Caitlin Powell, Caitlin's Corner, Children, Early Childhood Education, Education, Kids, Lisa Powell, Parents, Your Black World, YourBlackWorld.com
Lisa Powell: Education: A Road Map for the Future
By: Tolu Olorunda
YourBlackWorld.com
Lisa Powell is the mother of Caitlin Powell. Caitlin, as you many know, is a YourBlackWorld.com family member, whose exceptional talent is inspiring thousands of kids and parents across the country. At just 10-years of age, Caitlin Powell is a role-model, motivational speaker, writer, telecaster and singer. Alongside taking advanced-courses in school, she is also the host of her nationally-syndicated webcast, “Caitlin’s Corner TV,” which helps motivate students toward academic success. Caitlin has a rare gift, and her mom is the first to acknowledge that; but it takes the diligence, skill, dedication and patience of a parent, to help nurture raw talent into a resource of enlightenment and inspiration. [...]
Lisa Powell says she first noticed an “excitement” in Caitlin at a very young age, which always took everything she did “to the next level.” Being her first child, she always “set goals” for Caitlin, because she wanted to see her “be the best that she could be.” As an experienced social worker, Powell knows the dangers of “pushing kids too hard,” or not “pushing them hard enough.” Finding the right balance, between those two tangents, was the key to success in raising Caitlin. [...]
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