Jack & Jill Politics

hat tip-Ta-Nehisi Coates

Fanny Lou Hamer, a leader of the Freedom Democratic party, speaks before the credentials committee of the Democratic national convention in Atlantic City, August 22, 1964, in efforts to win accreditation for the group as Mississippi’s delegation to the convention. The Freedom group, composed almost entirely of Negroes, is opposed by the regular all-white Mississippi delegation.
—-AP Photo/stf

Do for Self
Dec 28 2010, 11:30 AM ET 11

There’s an effort under way to raise $125,000 to put a statue of Fannie Lou Hamer in Ruleville, Mississippi. Please contribute. It is not sufficient to spend one’s time complaining about how other people tell history, while making no efforts to tell history ourselves.

We have to go beyond correctives.

Good Morning.

As you make it through Hump Day, don’t forget JJP.

Drop those links. Engage in debate. Give us trivia and gossip too.

And always, have a peaceful day.

Some Videos From the Late Teena Marie.

this tribute is from Coates:

The Indomitable Blackness of Teena Marie

I’m sure some of the old-heads here, can come up with a corollary, but I’m having trouble thinking of a white artist whose relationship to black music mirrored Teena Marie’s. More specifically, I can’t think of a white artist who was more beloved by such a large swath of black people than Teena Marie. Here is how she put it:

Black people would always say, “I didn’t know you were White.” But people like good music. Back in the forties and fifties they made the race records where a group like The Temptations wouldn’t appear on the cover of the album. Mr. Gordy used the same concept with me for my first album. He said that is was so soulful that he wanted to give the music an opportunity to stand on its own merit. Instead of my face, they put a seascape, so by the time my second album came out people were like, Lady T is White? Omigod? Overall my race hasn’t been a problem. I’m a Black artist with White skin. At the end of the day you have to sing what’s in your own soul.

Teena Marie died on Sunday, and on every Martin Luther there was a collective wail. That line—”I’m a black artist with white skin”—is the kind of comment that usually causes black people to suck their teeth and groan. But Teena Marie died with an eternal hood-pass. The term “blue-eyed soul” is presently being affixed to her, but it borders on disrespect. It’’s like Negroes “liked” the Eurythmics, we “liked” Madonna and some of that Hall and Oates, but Teena Marie was beloved. She was not simply in that George Michael “Father Figure” category, she was of that Chaka Khan/Freddie Jackson/Jeffrey Osborne/Denise Williams stamp. You did not hear Teena Marie and say, “I thought she was black,” you said, “No, seriously, I’m sure she’s black.”

Good Afternoon.

As you go through the rest of your day, don’t forget JJP.

Drop those links. Engage in debate. Give us trivia and gossip too.

And continue to have a peaceful day

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hat tips-3CHICSPOLITICO and The Only Adult in the Room

Good Morning.

As you go through your day, don’t forget JJP.

Drop those links. Engage in debate. Give us trivia and gossip too.

And always, have a peaceful day.

As you go through the rest of your day, don’t forget JJP.

Drop those links. Engage in debate. Give us trivia and gossip too.

And continue to have a peaceful day.

Read the rest of this entry »

From Vanity Fair:

Todd S. Purdum of Vanity Fair: Thank you, man.

Obama Is Suffering Because of His Achievements, Not Despite Them
With this weekend’s decisive Senate repeal of the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy for gay service members, can anyone seriously doubt Barack Obama’s patient willingness to play the long game? Or his remarkable success in doing so? In less than two years in office—often against the odds and the smart money’s predictions at any given moment—Obama has managed to achieve a landmark overhaul of the nation’s health insurance system; the most sweeping change in the financial regulatory system since the Great Depression; the stabilization of the domestic auto industry; and the repeal of a once well-intended policy that even the military itself had come to see as unnecessary and unfair.
So why isn’t his political standing higher?

Precisely because of the raft of legislative victories he’s achieved. Obama has pushed through large and complicated new government initiatives at a time of record-low public trust in government (and in institutions of any sort, for that matter), and he has suffered not because he hasn’t “done” anything but because he’s done so much—way, way too much in the eyes of his most conservative critics. With each victory, Obama’s opponents grow more frustrated, filling the airwaves and what passes for political discourse with fulminations about some supposed sin or another. Is it any wonder the guy is bleeding a bit? For his part, Obama resists the pugilistic impulse. To him, the merit of all these programs has been self-evident, and he has been the first to acknowledge that he has not always done all he could to explain them, sensibly and simply, to the American public.

Rachel Maddow sums up the President’s Accomplishments.

Good Morning.

As you begin a new week, don’t forget JJP.

Drop those links. Engage in debate.

Give us trivia and gossip too.

And always, have a peaceful day.

Football – BEST.SPORT.EVER.

Good Morning.

As you spend this weekend with family and friends, don’t forget JJP.

Drop those links. Engage in debate. Give us trivia and gossip too.

And always, have a peaceful day.

The President and First Lady of the United States wishing you a Merry Christmas

Remembering our troops and spreading a little holiday cheer, the President and First Lady offer Season’s Greetings from our nation’s First Family:

From all of us here at JJP, MERRY CHRISTMAS to everyone.

Have a wonderful day, enjoying friends and family.

In case you’re wondering what today is about, Linus can explain:

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Bruce Dixon at Black Agenda Report has been my main source of info on this incredible story which the mainstream media is inexplicably ignoring. Here’s a slice from his update earlier this week:

Last Friday members of the Concerned Coaltion to Protect Prisoner Rights met with Georgia correctional officials. The following Monday they commenced the first of a series of fact finding visits to the state’s correctional institutions, seeking the reasons and right response to the stand of inmates demanding their human rights. Dr. King’s annual holiday is coming up too. What would he say about the prisoners and the nation’s misguided public policy of mass incarceration? What would he do, and what should we?

“‘The prisoners have done all they can do now. It’s up to us to build a movement out here that can make the changes which have to be made.’”

Eight days after the start of Georgia’s historic prisoner’s strike, in which thousands of inmates in at least six prisons refused to leave their cells, demanding wages for work, education and self-improvement programs, medical care, better access to their families and more, representatives of the communities the inmates came from met in downtown Atlanta with state corrections officials. The community delegation, calling itself the Concerned Coalition to Protect Prisoners Rights, was headed by Ed Dubose of the NAACP of Georgia’s state conference, and included representatives from the US Human Rights Organization, the Nation of Islam, the Green Party of Georgia, The Ordinary Peoples Society, and attorneys from the ACLU of Georgia, the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition and elsewhere, along with state representative Roberta Abdul-Salaam.

State officials claimed they knew about the strike action well in advance, and said they locked the institutions down as a preemptive measure. They declared they’d confiscated more than a hundred cell phones, mostly in public places, and identified dozens of inmates whom they believed were leaders of the strike. They admitted confining these inmates to isolation and in some cases transferring them to other institutions.

The coalition asserted that brutal reprisals were being taken against nonviolent strikers by prison authorities, and that constant threats being made against inmates. These incidents, the coalition insisted, along with the vast gulf between the reasonable demands of the inmates and some of the well-known conditions in the state’s penal institutions made the immediate entry into the affected prisons by a fact finding team of advocates, community representatives and attorneys at the earliest moment an absolute necessity. The meeting adjourned awaiting the state’s decision. And late Friday afternoon, state corrections officials agreed to access by a small number of delegated observers, who would visit Macon State Prison, some two hours south of Atlanta the following Monday.

Curtis Johnson over at the NAACP hooked me up with an update from their end of the fact-finding mission. From NAACP.org:

“The NAACP is committed to determining whether any civil or human rights offenses have been taking place in these prisons,” stated NAACP President and CEO Benjamin Todd Jealous. “The requests being made by the inmates – better access to their families, pay for their work, access to education opportunities – are not unreasonable, and could in fact lead to helping them successfully reenter society and become responsible citizens once they have served their time.”

“Prisoners are human beings and, like everyone else, should be afforded their basic rights,” stated Georgia State Conference President Edward Dubose. “We are here to say to the inmates, we have heard your voices loud and clear. The delegation’s visit was the first step in our efforts to investigate and address your concerns.”

The National NAACP has also called upon the United States Department of Justice, through its civil rights division, to urge federal intervention under the authority granted the Department by the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act (42 U.S.C. § 1997 et seq), to ensure that the civil rights of Georgia State inmates are protected.

Nuff said. I’d encourage the coalition to launch some actions online that will allow the JJP community and the general public to send emails, faxes and calls into GA corrections officials and the GA governor’s office so that they know we’re interested and are watching them…Cuz I think that’s what Dr. King would do.

Last year, despite the attempts of his own father to warn authorities, a dude got on a plane landing in the U.S. and tried to blow up an airplane. That was after he smuggled an impressive amount of explosives through “security” and onto the plane in his underpants.

It happened during Christmas.

This year, the Obama administration seems keen to get ahead of any terrorist activity both to prevent something bad from happening and also to manage the public’s expectation about something bad happening. Cuz apparently that still might happen cuz Al Qaeda hates Christmas and is in fact the real Grinch.

From ABCNews:

“We are concerned these terrorists may seek to exploit the likely significant psychological impact of an attack targeting mass gatherings in large metropolitan areas during the 2010 holiday season, which has symbolic importance to many in the United States,” said the “Security Awareness for the Holiday Season” bulletin released by the FBI and DHS last week.

In the year since Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab attempted to blow up the Detroit-bound Northwest flight with a bomb concealed in his underwear, authorities have discovered or foiled attempted attacks on Times Square, on cargo planes, and a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Oregon.

From Attorney General Eric Holder:

“What I am trying to do in this interview is to make people aware of the fact that the threat is real, the threat is different, the threat is constant,” he said.

Right… um, as a frequent flyer whose brother is a pilot, I can attest that while there’s a lot of security theater crapola at airports, the truth is that there remain many areas where security needs to be tightened and where government has completely failed to update post-9/11 on the backend, behind the scenes. A pilot took some video to try to show the lax security checks for ground crew and TSA, rather than actually addressing the issue, is harassing the pilot. Not cool. TSA = #FAIL. Obviously, this pilot (like a lot of pilots btw) felt that legitimate concerns aren’t being addressed and decided to let the public pressure expedite change. All hail YouTube and the action of one brave person to change the world we live in. Some video is above. It’s time for the Obama admin to clean up the games of the Bush admin and completely overhaul security procedures top to bottom at airports.

Here’s what the administration says it’s trying to do to protect us this holiday season (a few highlights from a long list the White House sent me) after the jump.

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For all of you who are traveling this holiday weekend, please be safe, and enjoy your time with family and friends.

Some scenes from Christmas Programs

It’s a Wonderful Life ending

Good Morning.

TGIF, and spend some of it here with us at JJP.

Drop those links. Engage in debate. Give us trivia and gossip too.

And always, have a peaceful day.

Read the rest of this entry »

Good Afternoon.

As you go through the rest of your day, don’t forget JJP.

Drop those links. Engage in debate. Give us trivia and gossip too.

And continue to have a peaceful day.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not gay, but like many of my generation (and likely yours), I have gay, lesbian, transexual and bi friends. Yes, I’m proud to say I’ve friends of all sizes, sexes, flavors, colors and scents. It’s made my parties much more interesting than they might have been otherwise, that’s for sure.

That’s why I was so moved at the President’s speech on signing the repeal of DADT into law. Because I’m a student of Martin Luther King and I’m down when he says in his seminal book Strength to Love (I think that’s where this is from, but correct me if I’m wrong):

In the final analysis, the rich must not ignore
the poor because both rich and poor are tied in
a single garment of history. All life is
interrelated, and all men are interdependent.
The agony of the poor diminishes the rich,
and the salvation of the poor enlarges the rich.
We are inevitably our brother’s keeper because of
the interrelated structure of reality.
12-10-1964

A gay African-American who was ahead of his time, Bayard Rustin, was the architect of the March on Washington at which King gave his great “I Have A Dream” speech. So I know both Bayard and Martin would be down with Obama’s persistence in increasing equality in America. Peep the video above of Obama’s fantastic speech on signing the DADT repeal. It’s kinda easy to tell when he’s actually spent some time himself on a speech these days.

Here’s the transcript after the jump. I dare you not to get Nat King Cole style misty reading it. There’s also more at the White House blog.

I’d like to give an extra-special shoutout to Lt. Dan Choi and Amber Sandeen who I know personally and who worked hard to bring this to pass…

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