My Granddaughter! Welcome to the world.

The 7 Kwanza Principles are:
Dec 26: Umoja (Unity) - To strive for and maintain unity in the family, community, and nation.
Dec 27: Kujichaguila (Self Determination) - To create, name and define our lives for ourselves.
Dec 28: Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility) - To build and maintain our community
while working with others to solve problems.
Dec 29: Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics) - To build and maintain our own stores, shops and
other businesses to profit from them together.
Dec 30: Nia (Purpose) - To make our collective vocation the building and developing of our
community.
Dec 31: Kuumba (Creativity) - To leave our community for beneficial and more beautiful than
we inherited it.
Jan 1: Imani (Faith) - To believe in our people, teachers, and leaders and the virtue and victory
of our struggle.

My Favorite Girl

Alicia Keys and J Z on AIDS Day. It's off the chain!

Steve Harvey says: Hip Hop Reported the News, and the News Happened to be Bad.

http://blackpeoplethink.blogspot.com/2009/12/black-people-think-steve-harvey-speaks.html

Why I Oppose the War

POTUS and the Saggin Pants Issue

POTUS and Willie Mays (The "Say, Hey" Kid)

The Originals Baby I'm For Real

Red Skelton on Being American, 1969

Smokey on Being Black in America

Why Do People Hate You, Mr. President?

No More Email?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203803904574431151489408372.html?mod=rss_US_News

The Lost Generation: Unemployment

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_42/b4151032038302.htm

3 on 3 with Obama

Contrast: Obama and 50 Cents

The Truth About Hate and Obama

Merlene Davis The Lexington Herald-Leader
last updated: September 09, 2009 08:03:56 AM

Barack Hussein Obama is president of the United States of America. As such, he is due the respect that the highest office of the land commands.Spew rumors, falsehoods and outright lies about his policies, about his birth place, about his intentions. That's freedom of speech.

Attack his wife's clothing choices, his children's pet, his mother-in-law's room in the White House. He is a public figure, and this is America. And by all means question his health care agenda, the stimulus spending and his increasing the number of troops in Afghanistan. That's government of the people, by the people.

But to have public figures in Kentucky, representing conservative views, use the word "creepy" to describe Obama's plan to speak to all the nation's schoolchildren today is nothing but embarrassing. Their attitude dishonors the office of the president, not just Obama himself.

Several years ago, I interviewed a Liberian couple who were living in Lexington with their son and who were hoping to live out their golden years in a country that provided a sanctuary from the wars they had fled back home. They told me that the difference between Liberia and the United States is that here, there is a peaceful transfer of power after an election. In Liberia, they said, the loser wouldn't relinquish power, choosing instead to start a war or kill his opponent in defiance of what the voters had wanted. We are doing the very same thing with words in this country since Obama became president.

I was not a fan of George W. Bush's presidency. I didn't think he had a good grasp of what the ordinary citizen needed. He seemed to prefer to go along with the big oil companies, with big business and with policies that kept them happy. I never approved of his push for war with Iraq and thought we should have stayed focused on finding Osama bin Laden. Still, never once would I have characterized him as "creepy" because he wanted to talk with schoolchildren. He was the president. My kids needed to listen to what the commander in chief had to say. It's respect for authority. It's respect for the president. It is respect for our upbringing.

For reasons that every black person knows and many white people are learning, this president is receiving 400 percent more death threats than then-President George W. Bush, according to the Secret Service. It's not all about Obama's desire to bring equity and compassion into the health care reform debate, although some people couch it that way. President Harry Truman tried to get health care reform several times, but he failed. President Lyndon Johnson signed a socialist program called Medicare into law. Neither drew as much ire as Obama. It's not his pro-choice stance on abortion. The U.S. Supreme Court has had numerous opportunities to overturn Roe vs. Wade. In 1992, the 20th anniversary of that law, the Supreme Court had eight members who were appointed by Republican presidents who were opposed to abortion. Those justices decided to let Roe vs. Wade stand. They are the ones who can change the abortion laws of this land, not a president. But they didn't.

Did the number of death threats they received go up 400 percent? If it is about the deficit that the Obama administration has dug out in this economy, then there should have been a similar outcry and similar death threats for Bush, who quietly used a bulldozer to get the hole started. But it is not about that. Obama has been a magnet for these unfounded fears, these innuendos, these lies because he is black. He has not done anything that would justify the outrage we are seeing in factions across this nation. Nothing. He hasn't had time. He has been in office less than eight months.

What this is about is that there are too many people who are afraid of what a black man might do because they have no idea what a black man is all about. The fear is unfounded and insane, fueled by our inability or lack of desire to interact with folks who are different.I hear he'll lead this country into socialism or Marxism, as if he has the power to do that all by himself. When did the Constitution change? Brainwash our children into voting for health care? When did we give children the right to vote? Get them to persuade their parents to vote for Obama's policies? When did our children become the decision-makers in our homes?

What has happened to critical thinking in this country? Why are we following along with the first Pied Piper who blows an unreasonable note? President George H.W. Bush spoke with schoolchildren in 1991 and advocated his educational policies. I didn't see a single parent, black or white, conservative or liberal, Democrat or Republican, pass out from fright.

So you tell me why this president is so different, why people carry guns to his rallies, why ministers call for him to die and go to hell. What God do they serve? Obama is talking about staying in school and getting a good education, and I hope the kids watch and listen. The more they see a black man in the Oval Office, the less likely they will be to imitate the head of the Republican Party in Kentucky or a conservative talk-show host.

What/who is/are journalist(s)?

http://aejmc.org/release/?p=262

Fox Shep Smith Explains w/o Bias the Public Option

The Difference btwn Men and Women's Brains LOL

Breast Cancer Research Findings

http://www.tatom.org/documents/CNN.com-StudyNewstudyshows.htm

A message from Talk Show Bob Law

Bob sent you a message.

--------------------
Subject: Bob Law Note

A few days ago I responded to a comment from Mae Jackson here on Face Book My comment provoked at least one response. Let me be a little clearer. I appreciate Jack Uhrich’s concern for my using a term like “most whites support white supremacy.” However, I believe we are better served if we stare into the harsh glare of reality, rather than embrace comforting clichés. Perhaps the truth can still startle people and compel them to appropriate action. Since my comment someone has posted a poll on face book, asking “Should Obama be killed?” The choices were: “No, Maybe, Yes, and Yes if he cuts my health care.”

We have also seen white crowds with signs calling the president everything from a Nazi, to Satan’s advocate, and of course, congressman Joe Wilson’s outburst in congress, calling Obama a liar.

It is interesting that Blacks are often told to be careful of what we say, or how we might express our anger and frustrations, because we endanger the prospect of coalition building. For over a century, Blacks in America have marched and protested against every perceived affront. Blacks have marched and sued for equal rights, minority rights, woman’s rights, poor peoples rights, gay rights, voting rights, and immigrant rights. Blacks are the leading coalition builders in this nation. We have held hands, sung songs, fasted and prayed with everyone. Yet we have barley moved an inch economically and politically in terms of real power and influence.

In my years in the civil rights and human rights movement, I have known whites who worked tirelessly for justice. However, they have never been a majority representation of the white community. Blacks are most often urged to chase an ambiguous romanticized notion of alliances with other groups without any explanation as to how these alliances are to actually benefit and empower Black people.

I point out that there is a prominent white preacher, Reverend Steven Anderson, of the Faithful World Baptist Church in Arizona, openly calling on God to kill President Obama and there are no prominent white theologians, or major white organizations or editorial boards denouncing this murderous theology. Very different than the white response to Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

When we marched in Jena, Louisiana in support of the Jena six, few whites joined us. I gathered some 200 people on the steps of New York’s City Hall in support of the marchers in Jena on that same day. White organizations and individuals did not join me. Most whites ignored us. The same was true when we marched down 5th Avenue in New York City, to protest the police killing of Sean Bell. The marchers were 95% Black. Most whites ignored our mobilizations.

Jonathan Kozol, a progressive white educator in his book, “The Shame Of The Nation”, reveals the restoration of apartheid schooling in America to the demise of Black and brown students. There is not one city in America where a significant number of whites have worked to change this appalling condition. There is not one city where a significant number of whites have worked to eliminate what Kozol calls these “Savage Inequalities.” Most whites have tolerated these injustices in city after city.

In his lectures, Tim Wise, who is white, points out that most whites benefit from white privilege in this society, and there is no real indication that most whites want to change that condition.
In the same way that everyone both Black and white feels free to point to the contradictions in the Black community, perhaps we make meaningful progress if we are just as candid about the contradictions among whites.

Racism, white privilege, white preference (that’s what white supremacy is) are still very real in this society, and Blacks still seem to be the ones, who in significant numbers, are working most diligently to eradicate these evils.

Michael Jackson

The Race Card

My old man

Message from a White Man

Andrew M. Manis is associate professor of history at Macon State College in Georgia and wrote this for an editorial in the Macon Telegraph. Andrew M. Manis: When Are WE Going to Get Over It? For much of the last forty years, ever since America "fixed" its race problem in the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, we white people have been impatient with African Americans who continued to blame race for their difficulties. Often we have heard whites ask, "When are African Americans finally going to get over it?
Now I want to ask:
"When are we White Americans going to get over our ridiculous obsession with skin color? Recent reports that "Election Spurs Hundreds' of Race Threats, Crimes" should frighten and infuriate every one of us. Having grown up in "Bombingham," Alabama in the 1960s, I remember overhearing an avalanche of comments about what many white classmates and their parents wanted to do to John and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Eventually, as you may recall, in all three cases, someone decided to do more than "talk the talk."
Since our recent presidential election, to our eternal shame we are once again hearing the same reprehensible talk I remember from my boyhood. We white people have controlled political life in the disunited colonies and United States for some 400 years on this continent.
Conservative whites have been in power 28 of the last 40 years. Even during the eight Clinton years, conservatives in Congress blocked most of his agenda and pulled him to the right. Yet never in that period did I read any headlines suggesting that anyone was calling for the assassinations of presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, or either of the Bushes. Criticize them, yes.
Call for their impeachment, perhaps. But there were no bounties on their heads. And even when someone did try to kill Ronald Reagan, the perpetrator was non-political mental case who wanted merely to impress Jody Foster.
But elect a liberal who happens to be Black and we're back in the sixties again. At this point in our history, we should be proud that we've proven what conservatives are always saying -- that in America anything is possible, EVEN electing a black man as president.
But instead we now hear that school children from Maine to California are talking about wanting to "assassinate Obama."

Fighting the urge to throw up, I can only ask, "How long?" How long before we white people realize we can't make our nation, much less the whole world, look like us? How long until we white people can - once and for all - get over this hell-conceived preoccupation with skin color?
How long until we white people get over the demonic conviction that white skin makes us superior? How long before we white people get over our bitter resentments about being demoted to the status of equality with non-whites? How long before we get over our expectations that we should be at the head of the line merely because of our white skin?
How long until we white people end our silence and call out our peers when they share the latest racist jokes in the privacy of our white-only conversations? I believe in free speech, but how long until we white people start making racist loudmouths as socially uncomfortable as we do flag burners? How long until we white people will stop insisting that blacks exercise personal responsibility, build strong families, educate themselves enough to edit the Harvard Law Review, and work hard enough to become President of the United States, only to threaten to assassinate them when they do? How long before we start "living out the true meaning" of our creeds, both civil and religious, that all men and women are created equal and that "red and yellow, black and white" all are precious in God's sight?
Until this past November 4, I didn't believe this country would ever elect an African American to the presidency. I still don't believe I'll live long enough to see us white people get over our racism problem.

But here's my three-point plan:

First, everyday that Barack Obama lives in the White House that Black Slaves Built, I'm going to pray that God (and the Secret Service) will protect him and his family from us white people. Second, I'm going to report to the FBI any white person I overhear saying, in seriousness or in jest, anything of a threatening nature about President Obama.

Third, I'm going to pray to live long enough to see America surprise the world once again, when white people can "in spirit and in truth" sing of our damnable color prejudice,

"We HAVE overcome." ************************************** It takes a Village to protect our President!!!

Have a great day.Art

Health Insurance Debate

A Robert Woods Johnson Report indicates that over the last ten yearswages have gone up 29%, health insurance rates have gone up 120% andthe profits of the private health insurance industry have gone up 428%. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-creamer/growing-momentum-for-publ_b_303415.html

I Would Have Caught a Case

A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste, for real tho

Bad Azz Children are out of Control

http://www.myfoxchicago.com/dpp/news/metro/video_derrion_albert

Glenn Beck is not very smart

The Prophet Motive
Glenn Beck in an age of anxiety

By Megan Garber

Single PagePrintEmailCommentsDigg Facebook Reddit StumbleUpon Delicious Here is one rule I’ve discovered as a consumer of media-celebrity coverage: if you know what a celebrity’s tongue looks like…you probably know too much about him.

To wit:



Yes. So we have, it seems, yet another way that the words “Glenn Beck” can be fairly associated with the words “too much.” This past week, the media formerly known as ‘mainstream’ have indulged in what can fairly be called an obsession with the Fox News favorite. Whether the guy’s being analyzed as a “post-modern conservative” or dismissed as “some sort of trans-partisan populist libertarian“—and whether your view tends to skew Beck’s recent omnipresence toward the messianic or the miasmic—one thing is clear: we seem to be living within (as The New York Times’s Opinionator blog put it, with only the faintest trace of irony)…the “Glenn Beck Moment.” Beck is not only on the air; he is also, somehow, in it.

The week’s coverage of Beck (grouped, via the broadest of brushes, into one Beckian bundle) suggests that he is, as a subject of journalism, one of those figures about whom you can say very much and also very little at the same time. Beck the celebrity. Beck the author. Beck the leader. Beck the rabble-rouser. Beck the fear-monger. Beck the éminence green. Beck the truth-teller. Beck the liar. He has been the subject of everything from extensive biographic narrative, to mocking TV takedowns, to straight-faced explorations, to witty deconstructions, to numeric analyses, to satiric portrayals by no less a zeitgeist factory than Saturday Night Live. The sum total of that coverage has an airy quality—or, more precisely, an errant quality (in every sense of the term). It wanders, refusing to commit to a direction. “Is Glenn Beck Bad for America?” Time magazine asks, without bothering to answer its own question.

Part of the problem is that it’s an incomplete question. Because one thing that the obsessive coverage of Beck proves is that, paradoxically, we still don’t know what the guy is in the first place—definitionally. Is he a journalist? An entertainer? A fear-monger? A demagogue? Beck is all of those things; but that’s also largely a moot point, because definitions don’t much matter, anyway.

And yet: Beck’s compound identity does matter to the extent that it presents a challenge to those who would try to assess his overall cultural value. Which is to say, to journalists. Because each identity carries with it an entirely different set of standards and assumptions: journalism here. Entertainment there. Politics…there. Et cetera. In that sense, Glenn Beck being everywhere also means that Glenn Beck fits in nowhere. As David Frum put it to Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickinson:

Glenn Beck offers pure alienation. Limbaugh denounces Democrats. Beck denounces politicians. Limbaugh is at least a little bit in the solutions business. That is to say, Limbaugh thinks if taxes were lower and the economy were more deregulated, things would be better. That’s not the point of Glenn Beck. He’s advocating a completely different approach: That there’s a dominant outside world that is hostile and alien and threatening.
And all that is, in its way, troubling. Journalists, after all, are, among other things, cartographers: they map their subjects, charting their locations upon the rocky terrain of our shared cultural life. As such, they also prefer to perceive—and present—politics as playing themselves out upon a continuum of convenient dichotomies: liberal versus conservative, establishment versus anti-establishment, etc. And they prefer those who engage in politics, from within or without, to adhere to these confines. Rush Limbaugh: conservative. Keith Olbermann: liberal. Et cetera. Journalists prefer, in other words, to set the terms of political engagement.

But Beck refuses to follow the rules. He refuses, even, to acknowledge the existence of any rules in the first place. He is not quite conservative; he is not quite anti-establishment. And the fundamental incoherence of his expressed political positions—which, as Nate Silver points out, are actually quite in line, in their incoherence itself, with the eclectic hodgepodge of most Americans’ political views—thwarts the angled lines of our narrow political frames. Beck is his own gurgling amalgam of definitions, his own strange blend of identities and anxieties. He denies, finally, to be mapped—by denying the legitimacy of the map itself. As Glenn Greenwald puts it,

Beck’s growing deviation from GOP (and neoconservative) dogma. Increasingly, there is great difficulty in understanding not only Beck’s political orientation but, even more so, the movement that has sprung up around him. Within that confusion lies several important observations about our political culture, particularly the inability to process anything that does not fall comfortably into the conventional “left-right” dichotomy through which everything is understood.
There’s something admirable about that, to be sure—something even, dare I say, American—but there’s something immensely disturbing, too. Call it the anxiety of the outlier: there’s nothing more frustrating than someone who refuses to play by the rules. And when that someone has millions of devoted followers…there’s nothing scarier, either.

And that’s particularly so within the larger context of the current moment in journalism—a moment that finds us preoccupied, even more than we usually are, with definitions themselves. Congress is currently reviewing two bills—one from the House, one from the Senate—which, in proposing a legal shield for journalists, also grapple with that perennial yet increasingly pivotal question: Who is a journalist in the first place? That’s a different question now than it was ten or five or even two years ago; and it’s a question, of course, wrapped up in the transition—gradual but also, seemingly, sudden—from journalism as a narrowly professional identity to journalism as a broader cultural activity.

The doors to American journalism are open wider than they have ever been before. That’s a good thing, generally; but it also means, of course, a decline in the power journalists have to define the spaces and set the terms of our political conversation. And it means that the story we tell ourselves about who we are no longer contains a single plot line. It is now a jumble, populated—and, increasingly, defined by—characters like Glenn Beck. In that way, Beck is a kind of printing press incarnate—revolutionary, explosive, and teeming with attendant anxieties. He is a tongue-wagging metaphor for the cognitive confusion of our journalistic moment. He is, among everything else, a reminder of the new world that professional journalists must come to terms with—a world in which one answer to the question of ‘who is a journalist?’ might just be: Glenn Beck.

President Obama Address the CBC 9/27/08

Dearborn, Michigan Police Officer 911

CNN is doing a year-long expose on Detroit

http://money.cnn.com/news/specials/assignment_detroit/

Man beats woman at Cracker Barrell

Detroit and Graduate School

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/opinion/27taylor.html

President Obama was Snubbed.

Serena Williams was robbed!

Michael Jordan's speech at the Hall of Fame

Jimmy Kimmel on the Obamas. Funny

Robert Mugabe

Mike and the NIck Bros

Social Media

The Late Rev Ik's Philosophy on Life

The Mindset of the Class of 2013

http://www.beloit.edu/mindset/2013.php

Residents Now Need ID Cards to Travel About

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/19/AR2009081901745.html

Water Shortage in 36 US States

http://www.alternet.org/water/82378/

Bloggers

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/video/module.html?mod=0&pkg=18082009&seg=6

Newspaper Survival

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/video/module.html?mod=0&pkg=18082009&seg=6

Newspapers Problem with Ad Rates Online (PBS)

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/video/module.html?mod=0&pkg=18082009&seg=6

Women of the Civil Rights Movement

http://www.life.com/image/50431112/in-gallery/23107/civil-rights-women-of-the-struggle

Historic Pictures of the Civil Rights Movement

http://www.life.com/image/51952105/in-gallery/22802/civil-rights-pivotal-events

Facebook PSA

Life Lessons

Newt

Obama addresses Ghana

http://www.whitehouse.gov/videos/2009/July/20090711_Ghana.mp3

This audio takes a few minutes to get started.

Michael Jackson: Gobal Social Activist

Amazing how little we really knew about MJJ before his death. I guess media chooses which stories to cover and which stories are not "news worthy." See video below where MJJ calls out names of unethical famous people. Oh my. *Audio is distorted at times on this amature video.

Women

It is amazing to me why some women wear really wild and outrageous outfits -- then wonder why they are attracting so much attention; like the red-headed girl in this video.

It breaks my heart...

I just do not understand why institutions of higher education cannot seem to grasp the fact that the old model of broadcasting/journalism is dead. With the advent of the Internet, social sites, and multiple platforms of delivering news, entertainment, and information; the old model of TV being the only way for one to access information or to entertain themselves is over!
Broadcasters are going to find themsleves in the same situation as newspapers because they keep trying to force the old model of delivery to the Internet ---exculsiveness and high advertising rates. It just does not work. It is unfair of educators to continue taking tution from young people, giving them flase hope of becoming anchors to something that is arcahic by nature. If young people are taking their careers seriously, they should train ahead of the curve, i.e. brand themselves as journalist/commentators (not their company); be proficient in all platforms, i.e, print, radio, tv, social sites, etc. See link on how to become a community journalist: http://www.youtube.com/reporterscenter

What's this world coming to....

How can a player play w/o his tools? Cadillac does not make Superfly Eldorados anymore. Good luck Superman trying to find a telephone booth to change clothes.

Abandoned Homes and Street Fill-ins

Question: Why not conduct controlled burns of abandoned dilapidated houses in the city, since it cost so much for traditional tear downs?

The World is in a Period of Realignment

50% of the world's riches are controlled by 2% of the population. By 2025 Arabs will be the largest population on earth. White's population is negative (meaning more are dying than are born). Black's population is even, but without growth. Nigeria has more oil than any other country on earth, and also the highest rate of poverty. Water is the new "gold" in the 21st century. Information/education is the new "silver" in the 21st century. Privacy does not exists anymore; anyone can find anything about anyone else simply by begining with an email address.
Marxist ideology argues that the 2% who control 50% of the resouces keep the masses misinformed with disinformation, i.e., race issues, crooked politicians, designer clothes, and entertainment. Many people believe they are watching a television program, when in fact, they are watching commericals -- with a television program in between the commericals. Are we citizens or are we consumers?

They're Shutting Down Detroit

http://heavens-gates.com/usworkers/

Obama's Visit to Saudi Arabia

I wonder if I am the only one who noticed the big, fat, hip-hip, Run-DMC; Ludacris/50 Cent styled gold chain King Abdula presented the President? Obama looked as if he was too embarrassed to wear it, and said,"I'll give this to my aid for safekeeping." ROTFLMAO.

Outta My Mind on Monday Morning...

I wonder what Senator Shelby (R-TN) has to say now that his state has lost the Saturn plant and about 6,000 jobs? Does he still say, "To hell with GM; let them go bankrupt?"

Obama and his run to Five Guys

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/05/29/obama-five-guys-visit-ord_n_209155.html

1990s Detroit City Charter

http://www.municode.com/resources/gateway.asp?pid=10649&sid=22

The Willie Lynch Letter

http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/article_2167.shtml

Obama College Pictures

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/05/28/obama-college-photos-to-g_n_208521.html

Sotomayer Nomination

Excellent choice. Watching Obama is like watch genius in action.

Another Campus Shooting (5/18/09)...

This time at Harvard.



http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/05/18/harvard-shooting-victim-c_n_204946.html

Syracuse's Boyce Watkins

Syracuse's Professor Boyce Watkins lost his tenure-track Assistant Professorship because he took issue with Billy O'Reilly's comments about O'Reilly's visit to Sylvia's Resturant in Harlem.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0EugqlyLQo

May 18: Day one of this blog

The neighorbood thieves went "shopping" last night, tried to take the tires off a friend's car that was in parked in her driveway. Oh, my. My next door neighbor has mobile home parked in the alley, 4 cars parked in his driveway, and a ragedy ass car parked on the street-leaking oil. His backyard has looks like Home Depot. I want to shoot him. Why do people drive down the street and throw trash out of their car windows?