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