Spreading the Word Goes Live!

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Today is the inaugural broadcast of our internet radio show!  To listen in (and call in) click the link below.

Spreading the Word – blogtalkradio

We’ll be going live at 1pm PDT.

Today’s discussion will focus on The Myth of Race in Barack’s First Term.

In the last few weeks, the definition of race and the politics of identity have been sharply brought into focus. From the continued racial attacks on PresidentObama, to the definition of “The Other” in Arizona, to the vibrant community ofLatinos in Social Media and This Week In Blackness, the perception of self and projection of unity continue to weave their way in and out of our political and everyday lives. Does race exist? Or is it a paradigm that the historically disenfranchised have adopted to maintain a semblance of personhood and sanity? Join Reynaldo Macias and Lybroan James as they dive deep to find out.

We’ll be joined by Lybroan James, mathematician, scholar, and author of the blog for the love of math.

Here’s the Call-in number for you to join us: (818) 369-0351

Related Articles

• My Parents Are Teachers (powerfulbeyondmeasure.wordpress.com)
• Let’s uncomplicate the racism issue (mysanantonio.com)
• Who Am I Really?? (openingmymouth.wordpress.com)
• You are what you look like: biracial, multiracial, black, white, well, most of the time (heloise8.wordpress.com)

Why I Unfollowed Bill Maher and Cornel West

There are many people who are unhappy with the President of the United States. There are also many people who are unhappy. When the groaners are standing behind you, it’s hard to tell that the expression on their faces doesn’t change, regardless of what they’re saying. When Bill Maher was howling about President Bush, I was right on his team, tuning in every Friday Night to hear his latest screed. And while I knew his politics were a little more libertarian than mine, it didn’t occur to me that his basic career premise for twenty-plus years has been to gripe at whomsoever is in power.

Then President Obama, after a brief honeymoon, began receiving the same treatment. There was no real acknowledgement of a difference. No space for Obama to begin to fix or address the problems and issues left by the last administration. It was “gimme my pot” and “pull out of Iraq yesterday” and “why aren’t you listening to me?” More crying, whining and demanding without recognition of anything done well. It got boring. If I wanted to listen to that, there’s Fox News.

And Brother West. His “critical friendship” leaves no room for opposition. While I’ve been trying to read Race Matters with the made up words he uses in it (and yes, I know, he’s smart enough to actually make up words when he’s got an idea that hasn’t been languaged yet), his constant drumbeat of “what Brother Barack’s not doing” gives me a headache. It’s unfortunate that these two talented individuals find no space to appreciate what has been accomplished, and instead rely on collecting funds and paychecks by harping on what isn’t happening.

But that’s why I unfollowed (in all senses of the word) both of them. They are a little disingenuous and they made my head hurt.

OBAMA 2012

The President of the United States is only running against one person next year – himself.  And while his leadership has been questioned, by Democrats, Republicans, people in between and people on the extremes, it is ultimately his own record which will determine whether or not he gets reelected in 2012.

Of late, there have been a good number of progressives disappointed in him for not being as progressive as they are: Lt. Dan Choi was irritated with the lack of movement on Don’t Ask Don’t Tell; Representative Kucinich is raising the question of impeachment over the United States’ bombardment of Libya; in these very pages, I myself have been disappointed at some of his administration’s actions over the past two years.

And of course, the birthers, the Teahadists, political opponents and haters-at-large who have been calling for his brown head, or his “most liberal” head, or his “fascist communist” head, have been calling for his removal, impeachment, assassination, etc. since before his election.  Unfortunately for them, their most likely candidate is a serial philanderer whose most recent political experience is resigning from Congress to yell from the sidelines instead of doing the work of the nation.

President Barack Obama hasn’t done all the things I wanted him to do when he was elected.  But he has done a lot of them. And he is guiding the country on the best path back from the brink President Bush abandoned us on.  That’s why the campaign begins now.

OBAMA 2012!

Related Articles

• Dennis Kucinich: Obama’s Libya Attack An Impeachable Offense
• A Phone Call from the President
• Trump again questions Obama’s birthplace
• Newt Gingrich Contradicts Self on Libya, Tries to Explain
• Top Dem rejects calls for Obama impeachment over Libya

A Bad Taste In My Mouth

President Obama met today with the Dalai Lama, over the strenuous objections of the People’s Republic of China.  Then he put out a weak statement that said in part “The President stated his strong support for the preservation of Tibet’s unique religious, cultural and linguistic identity and the protection of human rights for Tibetans in the People’s Republic of China.”  At once, he asserted the United States’ moral standing by acknowledging the oppression in Tibet, and acquiesced to China’s emerging financial dominance and their role in global affairs on the UN Security Council and beyond.

How does crow taste?

There is no way to directly approach China’s human rights violations or its invasion of Tibet while Guantanamo Bay is still open and we still have armed forces in Iraq.  There isn’t a way to meet with the Dalai Lama and still play nice with the boot on his people’s neck.  This is another place where the moral high ground has been eroded, where the ideals that we espouse have become whispers, where the mountain of debt that we’ve created as a nation is crushing the values upon which we’re built.

Yes, President Bush and Vice-President Cheney left a nation confused and angered, bewildered and bedeviled.  But in these small moments are where Change is supposed to occur.  Acknowledging “Tibetans in the People’s Republic of China” is the have your cake and eat it too approach to diplomacy.  Unfortunately, that cake tastes like oppression, tastes like moral ambiguity, tastes like betrayal.

President Obama, it tastes like Bush.

Obama meets with Dalai Lama despite Chinese objections

Statement from the Press Secretary on the President’s Meeting with His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama

Getting the JOB done

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is literally one year old today.  Despite the crowing of @johnboehner and House Republicans, or Senator John Cornyn who speaks out of both sides of his mouth, “it is not hypocritical for members of his party to tout projects funded by the federal stimulus project,“ the stimulation of the economy has and is continuing to work.

As I drive through Los Angeles, I see lots of the signs, “This project funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.”  Those are jobs, people getting up and going to work funded by the stimulus.  Listening to the President this morning, and the governor of Wisconsin afterwards, there are millions of people who are working today that wouldn’t be if the ARRA hadn’t been passed.

It’s one thing to interpret the numbers.  It’s quite another to lie about the effectiveness of legislation because you don’t like it.  The President has a job, and he’s doing it.  The Recovery Act shows that Congress can do its job, or at least it has in the recent past.  And there are millions of other people who’s jobs depend on them both continuing in that pattern.

Cornyn: It’s not hypocritical to tout stimulus

Stimulus Bill Worked

Judging Stimulus by Job Data Reveals Success

The White Devils

The Honorable Elijah Muhammad used to lie and say that, “the White Man IS the devil.” He was wrong, and a bit of a devil himself by saying it. What he should have said was that we all have the capacity to be devil-ish, and we should guard against that in our thoughts, words and deeds.
Dick Cheney is bucking to make truth of the original statement. Yearning to be relevant, he is on the tv machine again saying that torture works, diplomacy is weak, and “we don’t have much to apologize for.” His ridiculous statements are asinine, but they are driven by the same malice and soul-sucking greed that drove him to approve those tactics when we invaded a sovereign country under his tenure. His exstence makes us less safe. He is that original snake, pleading reasonableness with a forked tongue.
Ms. California is also vying for the title. No matter how many pearls you put on a pig, it’s still a pig. And no matter how much you dress up hate and bigotry, how many pageant gowns and fake smiles and bikinis, her response about marriage being between a man and a woman (followed by a mealy-mouthed explanation) was Dick Cheney in drag.
When you spew hate, you are the devil. It doesn’t matter if you’re black or white.

Hitting the Reset Button

My children like to play Parking Lot. It’s a great game, both as a board game and as an app for my iPhone. For those who don’t know, it’s a puzzle game where you move cars, trucks and buses out of the way to get your car out of the parking lot. It’s a problem solving exercise that strengthens the brain while it entertains. When you get stuck, though, it can be frustrating to the point of nail-biting, cursing whoever invented the automobile, or flipping the bird at inanimate objects. For the cool, calm and collected, it comes with a reset button which allows you to put everything back in place and start again having learned from your mistakes and miscues to approach the same problem.

Many of us, in the United States and around the world, are operating as if life has a reset button, too. I know personally that the President’s forceful passivity on the torture situation is causing me to raise my voice, both here and in person. The tea baggers don’t like President Obama, don’t like paying less taxes, don’t like bailing out corporations, don’t like socialism, don’t like “big government”, and I would venture to say, don’t like much of anything right now.

But President Obama appears to be working without a reset button, looking at the cars on the board (or the crises he has inherited), and making the best moves available to him. On some fronts, he is moving the cars back to where they were before President Bush came into office – rescinding torture as an American tool of interrogation; drawing down our military involvement in Iraq; allowing the Bush tax cuts for the rich to expire; repealing the ban on adult stem cell research, etc.

In other cases, he is moving the cars from the position they’re in to what he deems more beneficial positions for the future – more troops and attention paid to Afghanistan and Al Qaeda; actual diplomacy with Iran; repealing the ridiculously stringent relationship between the United States and Cuba; understanding that our economic turbulence requires both indirect (tax cuts for many Americans) and direct (bailouts of restructured companies) government interventions which are politically unpopular, etc.

In both cases, millions of us are screaming, saying, writing, blogging, thinking, critiquing, criticizing, and encouraging his moves. For the ninety days that he’s been moving the pieces, he’s made a lot of progress toward actually getting our yellow car out of its parking space, and moving it forward toward its goal. There are still obstacles in our way – nuclear North Korea; staggering unemployment; Republicants; budget deficits; over-extended military personnel and their families; corporate and other pirates; escaped war criminals, etc. But unlike those of us screaming from the sidelines, President Obama is making the moves to get us out of the lot.

And he’s doing it without the reset button.

Opposition Grows to Obama’s Decision Not To Prosecute CIA Agents

Obama ‘gravely concerned’ about U.S. journalist in Iranian prison

We can move U.S.-Cuban relations in a new direction

Bailout overseer draws fire from right

Picking Letters, 10 a Day, That Reach Obama

Obama defends greeting Hugo Chavez

Senator says Obama’s appearance with Chavez ‘irresponsible’

Summit of the Americas ‘productive’

A World of Trouble For Obama

Two al Qaeda leaders waterboarded 266 times

No, Mr. President. I Won’t Look The Other Way

“In releasing these memos, it is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution.”

-President Barack Obama, April 16, 2009

I concur with President Obama most of the time.  But he’s wrong today, and he’s messing it up for everyone.  The memorandum from President Bush’s administration that he released today outline torture: the decision to authorize, the proscriptions and applications, the “limitations” and durations of.  To quote Howard Feinman, they are “a window into a heart of darkness.”

Part of my support for him until this time was the necessity for rectification, for redirection, for a return to the ideals that fundamentally support the United States of America.  And my support of him was based on the deeply held belief that CHANGE meant holding people responsible for the decisions they chose to make, the actions they chose to take, and the values that those actions expressed.

Releasing the memos with the right hand, and exonerating the torturers with the left hand while claiming that he is “looking forward not looking back” is an offense against those ideals which he has espoused almost as great as the former president claiming divine authority to invade Iraq.

No, Mr. President.  I won’t look the other way.

Frankly, I’m embarrassed that you are.  There are prosecutors in Spain who understand that the treatment of people in United States’ custody under the Bush Administration, under the purview of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and Alberto Gonzales and John Yi and George W. Bush, was torture and constituted criminal activity, if not crimes against humanity.

Forgive the profanity . . . it is the result of believing that truth, justice, honor, integrity and equality are not simply cool logos on t-shirts, but the reason that my ancestors fought, bled and died on these and other shores.  And those ideals were shat upon by the elected leader of this nation and his coterie for eight years.

I supported you, Mr. President, because I believed that you were intent upon restoring if not those perfected ideals, at least domestic and international responsibility to pursue those ideals.  Today’s duel decisions call into question that intent.  Not because it is simply a decision you’ve made that I disagree with.  I don’t believe that any president would make decisions I agree with 100% of the time unless I were elected to that office myself, which is obviously not the case.

Today’s decisions literally give cover to the prison guards, literally allow the torturers to continue on the payroll that I fund, and leave the ideals for which I struggle and teach each day laying on the floor of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay with their heads bashed in, and leave me gasping for air wondering how to teach my children about justice, about morality, about right and wrong when one of the primary examples I use each day cowers behind rhetoric of progress while allowing regress to fester with impunity.

Loving my country and being a patriot means speaking truth to power, and yours is as has often been said, the most powerful office in the world.  We as a people cannot afford to simply look forward.  That is the ridiculous attitude that lets idiots claim racism no longer exists because you were elected.  Releasing the document which catalogues torture without holding the torturers accountable is moral cowardice, which means that they did the right thing if only because they got away with it.  You have become accomplice after the fact by your failure to hold them accountable.

It is important that we move forward, that we look to the future and the reconstruction of our nation.  But it is equally as important that those responsible for the current state of the union face the consequences of their actions.

No, Mr. President.  I won’t look the other way.

And neither should you.

Bush-era interrogation memo: No torture without ‘severe pain’ intent

Rights groups criticize CIA immunity on interrogations

Future of the U.S. depends on torture accountability

Memos reveal harsh CIA interrogation methods

President Obama’s Statement on the Memos

Teabags, Taxes and the “new” Republican Right

“Watch yourself. Be on guard. This place is full of vultures, vultures everywhere. Everywhere.” – Casablanca

There is a “movement” of idiots afoot protesting President George Bush’s tax structure, though they claim they’re against President Obama’s bailouts (like TARP, which started under . . . President Bush). They’ve mistaken the stimulus package passed by President Barack Obama and the 111th Congress for something that affects them as they file their taxes for 2008. What’s more, Faux News is promoting this farce and trying to make it sound like a news story instead of a (permanent opposition to a Democratic president) publicity stunt. Fashioned after the famed Boston Tea Party, where American colonists disguised themselves as Native Americans and destroyed private property in protest of taxation without representation, today’s ‘tea baggers’ are protesting against the wrong people for the wrong reasons. However, they haven’t realized that much like the Virginia Republican Party, which was displaying softcore lesbian pornography on its website a few days ago “by mistake”, that their preferred method of protest, teabagging, is a rather vulgar masculine display of power and authority it modern parlance.

This confusion about what is good for the United States, and what is Right in the United States, and what is simply peeing into the wind is exemplified by the people who speak for the Republican Party in public. Take House Minority Whip Cantor’s comments about tax increases today.

“At a time when American families and small businesses are facing difficult challenges and financial uncertainty, Washington must not make their situations worse by imposing the largest tax increase in American history.”

His comments have absolutely nothing to do with the taxes we’re filing. He (and the teabaggers . . . giggle) are trying to link together President Obama, the economic crisis, and the fact that our government must have taxes as revenue in order to function. How did he vote on Congressional salary increases? How do the teabaggers expect that the services they depend on like police departments, fire departments and public schools to name a few, are to be paid for?

The tax structure today is lower than it was under that paragon of conservative economic virtue, President Reagan. President Obama’s tax cut for the majority of American families (including those who run small businesses) took effect in March of 2009 – which means that they affect next year’s tax returns, not today. The New Right is so wrapped up in fighting President Obama (even though they lost the election, remember) that they can’t see straight.

I’ve grown tired of the whining, the preening, the Rushing. Protest is the right of every citizen of the United States, and really the world. But you should know what you’re protesting for (or against) before you open your mouth, paint a sign, or threaten to tea bag someone.

Anti-Tax ‘Tea Party’ Protests Expected Across U.S.

The Fine Art of Teabagging

April 15th is Patriots Day

Right-wing extremism may be on rise, report says

Nationwide ‘tea party’ protests blast bailout

He Said, She Said

The constant campaign has a few tributaries. The latest to flow across my consciousness is the “response” gimmick. Perhaps the most famous of these is the opposition party’s response to the President’s State of the Union Address to Congress each year. The use of this device serves to perpetuate the feeling, the attitude, the bickering that is necessarily part and parcel of the campaign for office.

More bushlit, Fewer ideas

The problem, though, with putting Governor Jindal on after President Obama, or House Minority Whip Eric Cantor on after the President’s chief economic advisor Christina Romer is that it elevates the person rebutting, when they don’t have similar authority or credibility to speak. With David Gregory asking similar questions of the sloppy second, instead of clear understanding of what the President is going to do, we get muddle and confusion, partisan back and forth and a general feeling of frustration and rising despair, on both sides of the aisle. Democrats and those supporting the President’s plan correctly point out that the Republicans lost the election, had their economic policies as stated discredited, and that they are simply clinging to a strategy of saying no and hoping the President’s plans don’t succeed to the level he’s shooting for so they have something to crow about and campaign on in 2010. Republicants and those opposed to the President’s plans to resuscitate the economy, confront our enemies, supply aid to our allies complain that he’s spending too much money, he’s not cutting enough taxes, he’s not living up to his campaign promises, he’s not being bipartisan, and they are spouting bushlit about earmarks when they themselves are earmarking. Update: Arianna has a different take on this.

There are people elected, appointed, confirmed and charged with the the governance of our country. Then there are people clawing for power, not taking responsibilities for their past actions, constantly howling into the microphone instead of doing a little introspection and figuring out how to be helpful. They need to be quiet for a moment, stop reacting from their political corner, because they’re missing the point.

And the he said, she said is giving me a headache.