The New Black Panthers and the Old White Men

The discussion centers on whether the Justice Department's civil rights division mishandled a lawsuit against members of the New Black Panther Party, which was filed weeks before the Obama administration took office. The suit was focused on the party and two of its members, who stood out front of a polling place in Philadelphia on Election Day 2008 wearing military gear. They were captured on video and were accused of trying to discourage some people from voting. One carried a nightstick. 


This is an except taken from a piece in the Washington Post dated 7/14/10 and written by Krissah Thompson

It begins: A 2008 voter-intimidation case has become a political controversy for the Obama administration as conservative lawyers, politicians and commentators raise concerns that the Department of Justice has failed to protect the civil rights of white voters. 

Abigail Thernstrom (a member of the Bush Civil Rights Commission) said that she did not find testimony convincing and that the facts of the case raised doubts in her mind, noting that the Black Panthers were standing in front of a majority-black precinct that had voted overwhelmingly for Democrats in previous elections -- not a prime spot for intimidating white voters. 


There is nothing more disgusting to me than hearing whites complain that they are being discriminated against on the basis of race when they are attempting to deport every brown person in this country who wasn't living here a hundred years ago and has a birth certificate and passport to prove it when they're asked to show their papers to some beefy red faced jackass with a gun strapped around his bulging belly who calls himself a teapartier and a patriot.  Frankly I'm ready for the uprising of all of us with some native or African DNA to deport all those racist idiots.  I'm so sick of them and their fake indignation over "illegals."  You are all illegals in my book.  My DNA dates back three thousand years of living on this continent.  Go fuck yourselves, you lilly white idiots.  Go back to the Old Country wherever that is.  Get a job cleaning someone's home or gardening for them.  Then you can start complaining about how good things were in the USofA when you were the boss of everything.

Borrowed From Eugene Robinson and The Washington Post

This is a presidency on steroids. Barack Obama's executive actions alone would be enough for any new administration's first month: decreeing an end to torture and the Guantanamo prison, extending health insurance to more children, reversing Bush-era policies on family planning. That the White House also managed to push through Congress a spending bill of unprecedented size and scope -- designed both to provide an economic stimulus and reorder the nation's priorities -- is little short of astonishing.

And yet I read liberal bloggers criticizing him for not doing it a certain way. His been mocked in the blogosphere here for making nice with the Republicans only to have them stab him in the back and vote unanimously against the Stimulus package.

This week, executives from General Motors and Chrysler are reporting on their progress in transforming themselves into lean, mean carmaking machines, capable of leading American industry into a new golden age. They will also explain that they need some more money, and fast, if they are not to crash and burn. GM, which got a $9.4 billion cash infusion from the government just two months ago, wants the remaining $4 billion that the Bush administration approved; Chrysler, which got $4 billion in December, urgently needs $3billion more.

I have mixed feelings about the American auto industry. Why have they been so slow to adjust to changes in the market for smaller, more efficient, better made cars and trucks? It is not the problem created by union workers making too much money for working on the assembly line. It's the fault of the executives who have been unwilling to lead the industry with hybrids and other alternatives to the big bloated gas guzzlers of the past. It's the salaries of the men at the top and the poor decisions they've made that have made the U.S. auto industry a failure. Off with their heads. Keep the workers, fire the CEO's and designers. Start over.

Thanks to an amendment that Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) inserted into the stimulus bill, Washington now has control over bonuses and severance packages at financial companies that have taken funds from the Bush administration's $700 billion Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP): No more eight-figure bonuses for Wall Street "geniuses" whose cleverness helped drive their companies, and a good deal of the economy, into the ground.

Dodd added a measure that makes it easier for firms that chafe at Washington-imposed restrictions -- on executive compensation, for example -- to pull out of TARP. The details are complicated, but what's important is that banks and other financial institutions that are relatively healthy may well begin to leave the program. The impression would be that the firms remaining in the program are relatively sick -- and people tend to be uncomfortable keeping their money in banks that can be described as relatively sick.

I'm in favor of nationalizing failing banks. I want no more gobbling up of smaller banks by the likes of Citibank. The only healthy banks I know about are the small local banks. I've heard of no problems with the credit unions, like the one I am a member of. It's the big bloated financial institutions that are causing the problems. So nationalize them or let them fail.

Then there's the housing problem, which may be the most difficult of all. Foreclosures and plummeting home values are at the heart of the economic crisis. Either millions of Americans are going to lose their homes or millions of mortgage contracts are somehow going to be modified. That's not an attractive choice.

All Barack Obama wanted was to be president. He may have to become an auto executive, a banker, a mortgage broker and who knows what else before this crisis is done.

So what do we expect of our new President who has yet to be in office one month? Miracles it seems to me. I'm happy with his work so far. My complaint is with the Congressional Leadership. I say if the Republicans do not want to be part of the solution, do not offer them plums to sweeten the deal for them. They will take credit for the weakening of your legislation and then stab you in the back. Let the bastards filibuster. I don't really believe that's a spectacle even their deep south and Utah constituents will find helpful in keeping a job or keeping a home or a car in a rapidly shrinking economy. The South is relatively poor compared to other parts of the country. I doubt the filibuster will play well no matter how conservative you think you are when faced with the possibility of moving your family into you mothers home or living in a shelter.

In Utah we have the second richest church in America to run our government. Too bad they won't pony up--they could bail us all out if they wanted to. $500 million to pour into passing Prop 8 in California was just one tiny drop in the bucket for them.

The Republicans Have a RNC Chairman To Make Them Proud

This from the Washington Post:

Michael S. Steele, the newly elected chairman of the Republican National Committee, arranged for his 2006 Senate campaign to pay a defunct company run by his sister for services that were never performed, his finance chairman from that campaign has told federal prosecutors.

Federal agents in recent days contacted Steele's sister, a spokesman for Steele said yesterday.

The claim about the payment, one of several allegations by Alan B. Fabian, is outlined in a confidential court document. Fabian offered the information last March as he was seeking leniency for himself during plea negotiations on unrelated fraud charges. It is unclear how extensively his claims have been pursued. Prosecutors gave him no credit for cooperation when he was sentenced in October.

Fabian's claims emerge as Steele begins his new role at the RNC, where he oversees the raising and spending of hundreds of millions of dollars in party money. The former Maryland lieutenant governor has faced questions about his handling of campaign money in prior elections and was twice fined for missing filing deadlines.

Reported by Washington post staff reporter Henri E. Cauvin

Nobel Prize Winning Playwright Harold Pinter Dies

Harold Pinter, prospector of 24-karat drama in the tension-racked spaces between words, died in London on Wednesday, at age 78. With his death, the pool of contemporary playwrights of international literary stature has been all but drained dry.

Although he expressed the views of a pacifist, Pinter wrote as if he held his finger on the pin of a grenade. In modernist classics such as "The Homecoming," "Old Times" and "No Man's Land," he devised characters who spoke in elliptical asides and enigmatic bursts. Violence of some nature was never out of the realm of possibility, even in his quietest plays. For Pinter was a connoisseur of subtext, of letting a story unfold on a living room set while a more savage one simmered in the crawl spaces of the mind. His characters routinely rattle each other with what never gains utterance.

His stark black-comic sensibility and economical use of language owed much to Samuel Beckett, the father of existential 20th-century drama. It was a debt that Pinter, who got his start as an actor in postwar Britain, readily acknowledged. When the Nobel Academy gave him the prize for literature in 2005, the act affirmed his link to Beckett, who had won it 36 years earlier. That they are among the few English-speaking dramatists to have received the award speaks to the nonpareil influence they both wielded over the style and force of the modern theater.

Power and turf are always at issue in Pinter. You get to see in his plays how much the anatomy of our emotional entanglements is built on ever-shifting questions of who's up and who's down.
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Whether the conflict is over primacy in a Darwinian family struggle ("The Homecoming"), control of the memories of long-ago events ("Old Times") or the psychological upper hand in a metamorphosing love triangle ("Betrayal"), his works are taut battlefields. Unlike Beckett, though, whose seminal plays such as "Waiting for Godot" are placed in barren, metaphysical landscapes, Pinter's tend toward cozier, bourgeois surroundings. In his hands these spaces seem as raw and terrifying as any heath.

Audiences do, at times, engage in head-scratching over Pinter's peculiar rhythms. As noted by Peter Hall, a friend who directed many of his 30 works for the stage, the playwright's eccentric cadences were challenging for actors, too: the long silences, shorter pauses and brief hesitations were ubiquitous features of his scripts. "The actors had to understand why there were these differences," Hall explained in his 1993 autobiography. "They chafed a little, but finally accepted that what was not said often spoke as forcefully as the words themselves."

Over time, Pinter's work became more overtly political, and his vehemence drew controversy. (As a young man, he claimed status as a conscientious objector.) He was outspoken in his outrage at the invasion of Iraq, and described in a speech in 2005 his reaction to the policies of the Bush and Blair administrations as arousing nausea.

Pinter saved his subtlety for his dramatic voice. His blink-of-an-eye 1988 play "Mountain Language" painted in four short scenes the terrors of a regime that stripped a minority population of its freedom, its dignity and finally, in banning the speaking of its language, even its words. To one who used them to such captivating effect, this truly would have seemed a crime against humanity.