As the surviving Black Panthers begin dying off, it’s worth revisiting their analysis of the 1960s inner city as a colonized space analogous to colonized Africa. The Panthers are popularly remembered for unnecessary violence (at least this is how most of my students interpret them) even if Malcolm X is a nice symbol we can deploy when we want. But given the conditions of the inner cities–police brutality, no social services, no jobs, no health care, no public transportation, no grocery stores, white flight and strictly segregated suburbs, etc., I am certainly not going to say the Panthers were wrong in their analysis. Given J. Edgar Hoover’s desire to kill them all, I might say they were quite right. One might criticize their methods, but that’s real easy to do in 2011 and I’m not going to attack them for arming themselves against the police. I’d probably think about picking up a gun in the same circumstances.And, well, here's this from Pratt's citation at Discover the Networks:
Even if Pratt did commit the murder, the justice system was so openly racist that it’s impossible to know. Today, we’ve really advanced on this front, having hidden just enough of the open racism and incorporated just enough black people into the machines of capitalism and the state to partially hide the fact that our spatially and racially unequal economic system combines with the courts to push as many African-Americans and other people of color into prison as possible.
[In 1970] Pratt was arrested and charged with the December 1968 armed robbery and murder of Los Angeles schoolteacher Caroline Olsen. At his trial, witnesses identified Pratt as one of two men who had attempted to rob a local store shortly before Olsen was slain (also by two men, according to eyewitnesses). Olsen's husband, who was wounded by the assailants, testified that Pratt was his wife’s killer. Pratt's car, a GTO convertible with North Carolina license plates, was identified by witnesses at both crime scenes. His gun, a .45 automatic, was determined to be the weapon that had killed Olsen. Julius Butler, a member of the Panthers, testified that Pratt had boasted about the murder to him.And see Matt Krasnowski's piece, "Pratt isn't Home Free in '68 Slaying Case," orginally appearing at the San Diego Union Tribune, July 1, 1999.
Pratt's alibi was that he was allegedly attending a Black Panther meeting in Oakland at the time of Olsen's murder. No Panthers stepped forward to corroborate his testimony. (Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, and Elaine Brown flatly denied it.) Pratt further claimed that his car was being used by other Panthers on the day of the murder; that the murder weapon, although it was later found in his apartment, wasn't his; and that two other Panthers (who were already dead by the time of Pratt's trial) had actually killed Olsen.
In 1972 Pratt was convicted of the Olsen murder. His counsel in the trial was a young Johnnie Cochran, who would eventually become widely known for his defense of O.J. Simpson in the latter's 1995 murder trial. Cochran has written that it was the Pratt case that radicalized him and convinced him that the American justice system was systemically biased against African Americans. Cochran also believed that his failure to "play the race card" (i.e., depict his client as the victim of a racist justice system) caused him to lose the case, a mistake he vowed never to make again.
SANTA MONICA, Calif. — When a group of activists proposed banning circumcision in San Francisco last fall, many people simply brushed them aside. Even in that liberal seaside city, it seemed implausible that thousands of people would support an effort to outlaw an ancient ritual that Jews and Muslims believe fulfills a commandment issued by God.Right. An anti-Semitic conversion.
But last month, the group collected the more than 7,100 signatures needed to get a measure on the fall ballot that would make it illegal to snip the foreskin of a minor within city limits. Now a similar effort is under way in Santa Monica to get such a measure on the ballot for November 2012.
If the anticircumcision activists (they prefer the term “intactivists”) have their way, cities across the country may be voting on whether to criminalize a practice that is common in many American hospitals. Activists say the measures would protect children from an unnecessary medical procedure, calling it “male genital mutilation.”
“This is the furthest we’ve gotten, and it is a huge step for us,” said Matthew Hess, an activist based in San Diego who wrote both bills.
Mr. Hess has created similar legislation for states across the country, but those measures never had much traction. Now he is fielding calls from people who want to organize similar movements in their cities.
“This is a conversation we are long overdue to have in this country,” he said. “The end goal for us is making cutting boys’ foreskin a federal crime.”
ENTENTE CORDIALENow, go check out James Fallows, who suggests we not belittle China's efforts to deploy an aircraft carrier fleet, "Please Read This Article About the Chinese Navy." And whether one agrees with Fallows or not, the key to remember is that at one point Britain's navy was the unrivaled master of the seas. Today the U.S. fills that role. Britain and France are now both struggling to maintain a single operational aircraft carrier, while in the U.S. our outgoing secretary of defense has recommended military downsizing. It all relates in the rise and fall of nations. Quite an interesting set of interrelated developments.
One area earmarked for cooperation is the use of aircraft carriers. In a sweeping review last year, Britain cut its defence budget of 36.9 billion pounds by 8 percent in real terms up to 2015, scrapping its only aircraft carrier.
While the short distance between coalition bases and Libya means an aircraft carrier is not essential, Forissier said a British carrier would have been useful to reduce air time, boost attacks and relieve the Charles de Gaulle.
Forissier would like the French flagship to return to base to replace older Super Etendard jet fighters with the latest Rafales. If it were forced to continue its operations "it would only begin to have serious problems in the autumn," he said.
A new British carrier, the Queen Elizabeth, due by 2020 will be designed so each country could fly its planes off the other's ship. The aim is to have one carrier at sea at all times.
British crew will learn on the Charles de Gaulle so that the Queen Elizabeth can enter operation once finished. One British watch officer is currently operating on the French vessel.
While similar foreign policy aims made a Franco-British alliance inevitable, national sovereignty remained, he said.
"France needs its aircraft carrier and Britain needs one to carry out its sovereignty as it wishes, but what is important is to make the planes inter-operable so that we can train on either one in periods of maintenance."
Forissier believes the two governments should consider building together a cheaper carrier to be used for training.
"If we both want to have a permanent operating presence then we'll both need two aircraft carriers and I don't think given the financial situation our governments have the means."
While Paris has hardly touched its military budget, Forissier said he was "stunned" by the Royal Navy cuts, at a time when it has had costly operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
"The Royal Navy, which was always an example for us, is in a tough situation," he said. "It makes me wonder whether we'll also have to go through this in the future."
Part of avoiding that has been the closer cooperation.
"I know in Great Britain you pay tribute to Nelson and here we pay tribute to Napoleon, but really we have good reasons to work together," he said, looking at a painting celebrating a French naval victory over the Royal Navy in 1781.
So the public employee unions have been on the defensive across the nation, and they've been losing battles in state capitols from Wisconsin, to Ohio, to Tennessee.
Although there have been some violent incidents and death threats, overall, despite the talk from many right-leaning pundits about "union goons," the actual danger posed by the union members appears to have been very small by labor-historical standards. Apparently, you just can't get good goons nowadays.
And that makes sense. In the old days of the labor movement, the unionized industries were, you know, actual industries, involving miners, steelworkers and the like. And those are trades that foster exactly the qualities you need in good goons.
Why? Because they're very dangerous activities that put a premium on teamwork. (Even in totalitarian countries, people know that it's dangerous to get the miners upset.)
Those kinds of work foster a mind-set that's not entirely different from what you find in successful combat troops: team spirit, the sense that you have to rely on your peers to cover your back, and you'd better do the same for them. (Also, in those lines of work it's easy for those suspected of shaky loyalty to have "accidents.")
When people who are used to dealing with cave-ins, or ladles of molten metal, hit the streets, they're putting those traits to work in an environment that's probably less dangerous than the one they work in every day. That makes them pretty formidable.
In fact, it made them so formidable that they were able to put together unions solid enough to send the industries they depended on overseas, where labor was more tractable, because the bosses weren't willing to face the headache of trying to get rid of the unions, and couldn't afford to pay the wages the unions, with their toughness, had managed to extract.
“I think she could win,” Dean told The Hill in an interview Friday. “She wouldn’t be my first choice if I were a Republican but I think she could win.”VIDEO HAT TIP: Nice Deb.
Dean warns the sluggish economy could have more of a political impact than many Washington strategists and pundits assume.
“Any time you have a contest — particularly when unemployment is as high as it is — nobody gets a walkover,” Dean said. “Whoever the Republicans nominate, including people like Sarah Palin, whom the inside-the-Beltway crowd dismisses — my view is if you get the nomination of a major party, you can win the presidency, I don’t care what people write about you inside the Beltway,” Dean said.
Rachel Mellon, now 100 years old and long one of the richest women in America, has lived a life of maximum discretion and minimum exposure. Even in her prime, in the 1960s, when she redesigned the White House Rose Garden for her friend Jacqueline Kennedy, she avoided the public eye.Check the whole thing. Mrs. Mellon was widowed to Paul Mellon, heir to the Mellon family banking fortune (think "Carnegie-Mellon"). Paul Mellon died in 1999 and Mrs. Mellon also lost her daughter, Eliza, from her first marriage, and a longtime companion, Robert Isabell, "a legendary events planner ... she buried him on her property." Basically, the old dame got lonely, and thus:
So it was a rude shock when Mrs. Mellon, known chiefly for her passion for horticulture (she has collected more than 10,000 books on botany) and her simple yet impeccable taste, became ensnared in the protracted scandal surrounding John Edwards, the former Democratic candidate for president.
Mr. Edwards was indicted by a federal grand jury on Friday on charges that he violated campaign finance laws in an effort to conceal an extramarital affair while running for president in 2008, mainly by using $725,000 given to him secretly by Mrs. Mellon. Mr. Edwards pleaded not guilty, and the case is headed for trial. Mrs. Mellon was not named in the indictment — she was referred to as Person C — but is essentially an unindicted co-conspirator.
“It was so sad,” said Mario Buatta, a New York decorator dubbed the Prince of Chintz who knew Mrs. Mellon in earlier days. “She’s had such a clean life.”
Mr. Edwards ingratiated himself with Mrs. Mellon to the point where she gave him millions of dollars as well as a gold necklace as a good-luck charm for the campaign trail, according to a tell-all memoir by Andrew Young, Mr. Edwards’s former aide, who is also an unindicted co-conspirator in the case.I can't even express my contempt for John Edwards. Political scandals are a dime a dozen, but this one's among the sleaziest I can ever recall --- and that's saying a lot, considering the deep bench among Democrat Party scumbags.
In May 2007, when Mr. Edwards’s mistress, Rielle Hunter, told Mr. Edwards she was pregnant, Mr. Edwards and Mr. Young began looking for people who could give them money to help conceal the affair, the indictment said.
About the same time, it said, Mrs. Mellon wrote a note to Mr. Young, saying: “I was sitting alone in a grim mood — furious that the press attacked Senator Edwards on the price of a haircut. But it inspired me — from now on, all haircuts, etc. that are necessary and important for his campaign — please send the bills to me. ... It is a way to help our friend without government restrictions.”
At that point, the indictment said, Mrs. Mellon had already contributed the maximum permitted by law — $2,300 — to Mr. Edwards’s campaign.
Over the next eight months, the indictment said, Mrs. Mellon sent checks for Mr. Edwards through Mr. Huffman, the decorator, totaling $725,000, “falsely” referring in memo lines to things like “chairs,” “antique Charleston table” and “bookcase.”
After Mr. Edwards dropped out of the presidential race in early 2008, Mr. Young said, he still hoped that Mrs. Mellon would give him $50 million and access to her private jet so he could lead a fight against poverty around the world. (This never occurred.)
Reporting from Toledo, Ohio — Facing a cascade of slipping economic signs that could endanger his reelection, President Obama sought to shift attention to a decision he made early in his term that appears to be paying off: bailing out the auto industry.Ohio. It's a key battleground state, with 18 electoral college votes. Keep your eye on the Buckeyes over this next 18 months. Obambi will be traveling up that way a lot more.
Obama's appearance Friday at a Chrysler plant in this politically important state showed how few economic stories he can highlight. New figures Friday showed unemployment rose to 9.1%, the second straight month that the jobless rate climbed. Speculation grew that the economy might slip into another recession, which would hurt families nationwide just as the 2012 campaign begins.
Obama's trip — his 13th to Ohio since his inauguration — follows a week's worth of coordinated messages in which administration officials depicted him as being able to make the "gutsy" decisions that should give voters confidence in uncertain times.
Drawing attention to the auto bailout would have been risky at one point. Before the 2010 midterm elections, independent voters disdained bailouts, deficits and stimulus measures.
But Democrats now believe the auto bailout in particular is a way to distinguish themselves from Republicans. They see government intervention as an important tool in protecting both workers and business from the shocks of unfettered markets, and they believe voters buy that argument.
NRCC's letter to Comcast Boston is here.
We recently tracked several thousand students as they moved through and graduated from a diverse set of more than two dozen colleges and universities, and we found consistent evidence that many students were not being appropriately challenged. In a typical semester, 50% of students did not take a single course requiring more than 20 pages of writing, 32% did not have any classes that required reading more than 40 pages per week, and 36% reported studying alone five or fewer hours per week.There's more, especially the discussion of why higher education got off track. Still, it'd be worth checking the book itself, for in my experience it's the absence of skills and the culture of anti-intellectualism that's most detrimental to college learning. I'm tempted to say I struggled with maintaining high standards when I first started at LBCC. But that wouldn't be quite accurate. Over time experience has shown how I can better maintain high standards AND improve student performance (it requires intensely personalized instruction, which is hard to do with hundreds of students). That said, I'm less rigid than I was 8 or 9 years ago, and in some cases that means I'm just plain easier (flexibility is key, which sometimes might mean "easier"). Professors are dealing with a range of abilities starting with students who'd be doing just fine at Berkeley or UCLA to those who can barely string a couple of correct sentences together. I'm sad sometimes when I meet students who literally can't read. I largely quit having students do expository reading in class (reading aloud) because I felt bad for the students who struggled to read through a paragraph from the textbook. It's not one particular demographic in particular, although a lot of Latino students are ESL and a lot of blacks demonstrate something of a stunted degree of formal learning, and I'm talking rudimentary basic skills acquisition. And worse, with the exception of the odd student here or there, black kids generally don't seem to care. (Don't even get me going about the black student athletes.)
Not surprisingly, given such a widespread lack of academic rigor, about a third of students failed to demonstrate significant gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing ability (as measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment) during their four years of college.
The students themselves must bear some of the blame for this, of course. Improvement in thinking and writing skills requires academic engagement; simply hanging out on a college campus for multiple years isn't enough. Yet at many institutions, that seems to be sufficient to earn a degree. At many schools, students can choose from a menu of easy programs and classes that allow them to graduate without having received a rigorous college education. Colleges are complicit, in that they reward students with high grades for little effort. Indeed, the students in our study who reported studying alone five or fewer hours per week nevertheless had an average cumulative GPA of 3.16.
To be sure, there were many exceptions to this dismal portrait of the state of undergraduate learning. Some academic programs and colleges are quite rigorous, and some students we followed pushed themselves and excelled. In general, traditional arts and science fields (math, science, humanities and the social sciences) tended to be more demanding, and students who majored in those subjects studied more and showed higher gains. So too did students attending more selective colleges. In addition, at every college and university examined, we found some students who were applying themselves and learning at impressive levels.
These real accomplishments do not, however, exonerate the colleges and universities that are happy to collect annual tuition dollars but then fail to provide many students with a high-quality education.
All I know is I'm not especially happy that this board and the FAQ are pretty much all we have, and if your question gets ignored (as this one's been for the last 24 days or so) there's nothing one can do but just keep waiting... This day & age, it ain't no way to run a railroad...And boy, the dude's really given up on the hairline.
A ballot measure to ban circumcision in San Francisco has taken a strange twist with the publication, by the measure’s sponsors, of a comic book in which an anti-circumcision superhero -– blond, buff and handsome -– battles evil Jewish characters who recall the stereotypical images of classic anti-Semitism.From the rather crude comment thread at Joe. My. God.:
"Foreskin Man" was written and created by Matthew Hess, one of the leaders behind the initiative to ban circumcision, the ritual cutting of foreskin on a baby's penis that, in the Jewish religion, is considered central to the covenant between the Jewish people and God. Opponents consider it painful and barbaric, akin to female circumcision rites in Africa that have attracted international condemnation.
The measure will be on the ballot in San Francisco in November. Hess is with a San Diego group, MGM Bill, which is also seeking signatures to put a similar measure on the ballot in Santa Monica.
A guy whose last name is Hess probably should think about immediate perceptions that his work might be antisemitic.Word.
from Markos MoulitsasRead Tommy's report for the whole e-mail exchange.
to Tommy Christopher
date Thu, Jun 2, 2011 at 10:34 PM
subject Re: VERY Urgent you call me! One of your bloggers is compromising identities of two minors
That’s a community member’s post. Not my staff. I don’t exert editorial control over what the community writes absent legal imperatives or deeply offensive material. Right now, I’m seeing neither ...
Take a good look at that entry, Tommy. Still call yourself a "liberal"?
Kudos to Tommy on the report, in any case, "Andrew Breitbart Did Not Run ‘Weinergate’ Evidence Which Turned Out to Be Fake" (via The Other McCain).
June is shaping up to be one big dress rehearsal for the tsunami in September. On Sunday, Palestinians will mark the anniversary of the 1967 Six-Day War with processions and demonstrations in the territories and along Israel's borders. Toward the end of the month, a new flotilla to Gaza is planned, with the declared aim of breaching the blockade - which in practice has long since been lifted. In the meantime, the Palestinians will continue pressing their initiative for a unilateral declaration of a state come September.More details, and then:
From the Golan Heights to the West Bank, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman's suggestion to the Palestinians will continue to resonate: to march en masse to Jerusalem. The idea is to create a popular, nonviolent demonstration along the lines of Tahrir Square, which would leave Israel unable to mount an effective response.
Without ignoring the plans for Naksa Day, the country's leaders are now primarily concerned with blocking the Gaza flotilla, which is scheduled to depart on June 20. Currently, the plan is to have 15 boats carry about 1,500 Islamic and European left-wing activists who are seeking a bloody clash with the IDF. So far, only four boats have been recruited. Gantz promised the MKs that the IDF would block all attempts to breach the maritime blockade of Gaza, and added the self-evident: that the flotilla is a provocation, not an actual attempt to assist Gaza's residents.Yeah. Weapons.
Maj. Gen. (res. ) Giora Eiland, who headed the internal IDF inquiry into last year's flotilla episode, offered an interesting hypothetical proposition this week. If it were possible to get the Turkish government (as opposed to the organizers, who are from the extremist Islamic organization IHH ) to promise to examine the boats in advance, and ensure that they are not carrying weapons, he said, then Israel should consider letting the vessels into Gaza.
Like the mythical jerk who ignored common sense and flew too close to the sun, Weiner keeps flapping his lips while the brouhaha’s heat melts the wax off his sullied wings.Great essay. And a great interview:And also:
