From The Boston Globe
By Derrick Z. Jackson

Congress has been rushing to save financial CEOs from themselves with a $700 billion bailout that amounts to a tax of $2,333 on every man, woman, and child in America. This is after three decades of the nation’s leaders punishing struggling Americans for their lack of personal responsibility, from Ronald Reagan’s assault on “welfare queens” to the bipartisan slashing and capping of welfare benefits by President Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

More recently, presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama have said undocumented folks should pay fines to get in line for citizenship.

Then, of course, there were the 1.5 million home foreclosures last year and the 2.5 million foreclosures projected for this year by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. Many economists and politicians have washed their hands of them, saying, tsk, tsk, they were irresponsible for taking on too much responsibility!

If scapegoating struggling Americans on personal responsibility fails to work, we just ignore them, as sure as the Ninth Ward of New Orleans remains the American Dresden after Hurricane Katrina - while rebuilt Gulf Coast casinos break new revenue records.

All those millions of Americans, facing everything from slashed food stamps to swamped homes, live in a patronizing America where Clinton signs the 1996 welfare bill by saying, “We’re going to take this historic chance to try to recreate the nation’s social bargain with the poor. We’re going to try to change the parameters of the debate. We’re going to make it all new again and see if we can’t create a system of incentives which reinforce work and family and independence. We can change what is wrong.”

Read more Social Bargain

From The Seattle Times
By Leonard Pitts Jr.

black (blak) adjective

1: of the color black;

2: of or relating to the African-American people;

3: dirty, soiled;

4: thoroughly sinister or evil;

5: connected with the supernatural and especially the devil

— adapted from Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary

Last year, Sen. Joe Biden made a comment some people considered racially insensitive toward Sen. Barack Obama. Obama’s response was a mild one — he called Biden’s remark “historically inaccurate.” This earned him a harsh rebuke from one of my readers. Obama, this gentleman told me via e-mail, had just lost his vote by acting like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, i.e., an angry black man. “Up to now,” the reader wrote, “I did not see him as an Afro American.”

Which brings us to our question for the day: What does black mean?

By now, I suspect Obama sees black as the horror-movie monster who returns to life (string music shrieking) after the hero has seemingly killed it and turned to walk away. Can you blame him? In the past 20 months, we’ve had the “Is he black enough?” controversy and the crazy preacher controversy, we’ve had Bob Johnson going off his meds, we’ve had Geraldine Ferraro calling Obama an affirmative-action candidate, Rep. Lynn Westmoreland calling him “uppity” and Rep. Geoff Davis calling him “boy.”

Lately, I’ve heard some African-Americans — including Obama supporters — griping at the notion that voting for him is their racial duty.

Read more Like What?

From True Blue Liberal
By William John Cox

It’s been awhile since a black man was lynched in America, but the Rove Gang’s getting the crowd ginned up for another one and the town’s on edge.

The last lynching took place 10 years ago in East Texas Bush Country when three young white racists chained James Byrd, a 49-year-old father of three, to the back of their pickup truck and dragged him down the highway until his body was dismembered.

If John McCain and his character assassins and vote riggers succeed, the next one will occur in November and it may tear apart America’s body politic.

The 2008 presidential election will make history. Americans will elect either their first African American president, their oldest president, or their first woman vice president who, given the medical odds, will have a good chance of becoming the first woman president.

During this election, bigotry is the elephant in the room; everybody is tiptoeing around wearing blindfolds, but it and its spoor are too much to ignore.

As an expression for an evil influence or hex, a “whammy” was added to the vernacular in 1941 when a boxing manager said a “double whammy” was the only way African-American boxer Joe Lewis was ever to be knocked out.

We will soon know whether Barack Obama and the American people have suffered a single, double, or triple whammy and we will all suffer from the assault. Read the rest of this entry »

From The Red Room
By Tim Wise

For those who still can’t grasp the concept of white privilege, or who are constantly looking for some easy-to-understand examples of it, perhaps this list will help.

White privilege is when you can get pregnant at seventeen like Bristol Palin and everyone is quick to insist that your life and that of your family is a personal matter, and that no one has a right to judge you or your parents, because “every family has challenges,” even as black and Latino families with similar “challenges” are regularly typified as irresponsible, pathological and arbiters of social decay.

White privilege is when you can call yourself a “fuckin’ redneck,” like Bristol Palin’s boyfriend does, and talk about how if anyone messes with you, you’ll “kick their fuckin’ ass,” and talk about how you like to “shoot shit” for fun, and still be viewed as a responsible, all-American boy (and a great son-in-law to be) rather than a thug.

White privilege is when you can attend four different colleges in six years like Sarah Palin did (one of which you basically failed out of, then returned to after making up some coursework at a community college), and no one questions your intelligence or commitment to achievement, whereas a person of color who did this would be viewed as unfit for college, and probably someone who only got in in the first place because of affirmative action.

White privilege is when you can claim that being mayor of a town smaller than most medium-sized colleges, and then Governor of a state with about the same number of people as the lower fifth of the island of Manhattan, makes you ready to potentially be president, and people don’t all piss on themselves with laughter, while being a black U.S. Senator, two-term state Senator, and constitutional law scholar, means you’re “untested.”
 Read the rest of this entry »

From The Washington Post
By Randall Kennedy

I am a black man born in 1954, the year of Brown v. Board of Education. Fleeing the abuses of Jim Crow, my parents moved from South Carolina to Washington, D.C., later that decade. Tales of racial oppression and racial resistance were staples of conversation in our household. My father often spoke of watching Thurgood Marshall argue the case ( Rice v. Elmore) that invalidated the rule permitting only whites to vote in South Carolina’s Democratic primary. Memories of that story played a large part in producing the tears I shed on the evening Barack Obama won this year’s primary in the Palmetto State.

Related memories — the most haunting being our visit to a D.C. funeral home to pay last respects to Medgar Evers, the courageous head of the Mississipppi branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People who was murdered by a segregationist — helped reduce me to tears, again, on the night the senator from Illinois accepted his party’s nomination as its candidate for president.

Never before have my emotions been so exercised by a political campaign. For one thing, never before has a candidate so fully challenged the many inhibitions that have prevented people of all races, including African Americans, from seriously envisioning presidential power in the hands of someone other than a white American. With intelligence, verve and elegance, Obama has opened the public mind to the idea of a black president and made that idea broadly attractive.

Read more What If?

From The Seattle PI
By Roberta Riley

Oh how John McCain courts women. With Sarah Palin at his side and our unpopular president sidelined, he promises huge, glass ceiling-shattering change.

What is the substance behind his symbolism? On every issue of concern to women — from education to equal pay, health care and physical security to retirement and financial security — John McCain and George W. Bush are identical and abysmal. It is their best-kept secret.

How can this be?

Lipstick doesn’t just differentiate the hockey moms from the pit bulls, as Palin joked in her convention speech. Lipstick conceals the harsh, anti-woman actions of McCain and Bush. Bush searched high and low for women, preferably attractive ones, from groups opposed to such things as equal pay, health care for all, contraception and shelters for battered women. Then he handed them the reins of government. McCain approved his Cabinet appointees, who have now quietly dismembered federal programs near and dear to women. Their favorite tools are executive orders, rule changes and unfunded mandates, which do not require congressional approval and rarely grab headlines. They excel at doublespeak. When congressional action is needed, McCain votes with Bush 95 percent of the time, and now he’s recruited Bush’s lipstick crew to his team.

On the 35th anniversary of Title IX, the federal law requiring equal opportunity for females in education, Bush’s Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings, held a warm, fuzzy news conference to celebrate the law’s successes. Then she silently weakened the rules for Title IX compliance, threatening sports opportunities and scholarships for women. McCain tacitly approved. Not only is the slice for females getting smaller, the whole pie is shrinking because Spellings, who regulates the federally guaranteed student loan program, ignored the inspector general’s advice and refused to recoup the hundreds of millions in excess profits that predatory college loan lenders siphoned from funds meant for students.

Read more Of The Same

From Salon
By Rebecca Traister

I have been dreaming about Sarah Palin. (Apparently, I’m not alone.) I wish I could say that I’d been conjuring witty, politically sophisticated nightmares in which she leads troops into Vancouver or kindergartners in the recitation of “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” But, alas, mine have been nonsensical, kiddie-style doozies in which she kidnaps my cats, or enjoys a meal with my girlfriends while I bang on the restaurant window. There’s also a chilling one, in which a scary witch stands on a wind-swept hill and leers at me.

What troubles me most — aside from the fact that there is suddenly a Republican candidate potent enough to so ensnare my psyche — is my sense that these are dreams in which it matters very much that Palin is a woman.

I have been writing about feminism for more than five years; I have been covering the gender politics of the 2008 presidential election for more than two. And I am absolutely gobsmacked by the intensity of my feelings about Sarah Palin. I am stunned not only by the way in which her candidacy has changed the rules in the gender debate, or how it is twisting and garbling the fight for women’s progress. But I’m also startled by how Palin herself is testing my own beliefs about how I react to women in power.

My feelings about Palin have everything to do with her gender — a factor that I have always believed, as a matter of course, should neither amplify nor diminish impressions of a person’s goodness or badness, smartness or dumbness, gravitas or inconsequence. Why are my rules changing?

Read more Zombie Feminists

From In These Times
By Susan Levine

With the announcement of Sarah Palin as John McCain’s vice-presidential pick, the Republicans are banking on the hope that the historic splits within the women’s movement are alive and well. Those splits, most notably over the urgency of racial and social reforms versus suffrage and women’s rights per se, have limited the scope of the feminist movement and divided women as a political constituency for over a century.

Pat Buchanan happily labels the anti-choice, deeply conservative Palin, a feminist. That kind of feminism brings to mind the tensions that have marked the women’s movement since its inception.

The media – and the McCain campaign – seem convinced that a large bloc of women voters will throw aside consideration of the issues to vote for another woman. This remains to be seen. Some women, however, have always put gender before anything else. While this group has usually been small and relatively isolated, it has consistently captured public attention – and fascination.

After the Civil War, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton left their abolitionist comrades and allied with the blatantly racist Democratic Party. They did so because the Republican Party, in crafting the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to the Constitution balked at including women’s right to vote. Other veteran abolitionists, notably Lucy Stone, supported the amendments, agreeing with Frederick Douglass that this was “the Negro’s hour.” A bitter split ensued among women, one that has lasted until the present day.

Over the course of the next half-century, Stanton and Anthony succeeded in defining woman’s equality in terms of the right to vote. At the same time, however, thousands of women became active in political organizations ranging from the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union to settlement houses, women’s clubs and the YWCA. These organizations pressed for a broad range of issues including property rights, educational opportunities, labor reform, prison reform and citizenship rights for women who married foreign nationals. All of these women supported suffrage but few of them believed that the vote alone would bring equality.

Read more Mistake

From The Pgh Post Gazette
By Tony Norman

Yesterday, I got an e-mail from Patricia Moran, a longtime reader who articulated what millions of people were feeling the morning after Barack Obama became the official presidential standard bearer of his party:

“When I was 16,” Pat’s e-mail read, “I used to work before school in a small restaurant where my stepmother worked. One morning, early, two black people and their child came in and tried to sit down and order breakfast.

“My stepmother refused to serve them. I begged her to make them hamburgers to go — and she did. I still remember the look on the man’s face as I brought the hamburgers out to his car. That was 62 years ago!

“Last night, I saw a black man nominated for president of the United States. No matter who you want for president, what a historic moment for our country this is! We need to stop for a moment and realize how FAR we have FINALLY come, and feel a little pride this morning for our country. I know I am very proud!”

I never drank from a segregated fountain, but I’m old enough to remember what it was like to sit on a yellow school bus chased by white teenagers who objected to black kids integrating a school in their neighborhood.

It was an era when people were more upfront about their prejudices. The kids who pelted our bus with water balloons and eggs and spit at our windows when the bus came to a stop sign always made a game of it. And of course, Philly cops never took it seriously until the neighborhood zip guns came out.

Read more Reality Show

From The Seattle Times
By Ellen Goodman

I didn’t make it to Denver. A death in the family kept me close to home where words like healing, closure, catharsis — those theme songs of the convention — took on a whole different meaning.

This was the first convention I missed since 1972 when I was sent to Miami as a younger reporter because there was a “women’s story” brewing and they needed one. I was there when Shirley Chisholm’s run for the presidency turned into a sprint for the vice presidency. She won more delegates’ hearts than votes.

I was there in 1984 as well, just after Geraldine Ferraro sent goose bumps of possibility across the country, saying “American history is about doors being opened.” We were sure it was a beginning.

And I was there in 1992, in the aftermath of the Clarence Thomas hearings when angry women energized the Year of the Woman, sending four new women to the Senate. The same year Hillary Clinton made her debut and her audition tape as the favorite target of the right wing.

This time I watched history as a civilian. This time, Clinton’s loss — nearly as close as Milorad Cavic’s to Michael Phelps — shared the attention with Obama’s win.

Every commentator chewed on the same question: Could Hillary deliver her supporters? Every pollster gummed the same numbers: Only 42 percent of Clinton’s supporters were solidly behind Obama. Working-class white women between 39 and 50 weren’t yet on board. What could/should/must Hillary do short of threatening to jump from the roof of the convention if they didn’t move to Obama?

Read more Long View