Michelle Malkin published a hit piece on Obama's proposed social renewal plan for America, and how he intends to serve the needs of the least of us here in America. In the process, she revealed herself to be the racist, classist bitch that she is.

HRW and the ACLU recently released a rather informative report on the practice of corporal punishment of children in US public schools. Among other things, the report found that blacks were more likely to get paddled by a large ratio and that the offences for getting punished are relatively minor ones such as "such as chewing gum, talking back to a teacher, or violating the dress code."

Here's an excerpt that stuck out at me:

I had a pregnant girl get paddled once for being tardy. She was five months pregnant. She was 16. The principal paddled her ... she was showing and it was known that she was pregnant. She was part of a group that was tardy to class. And she yelled something along the lines of "you shouldn't paddle me, I’m pregnant."

We are in the process of selecting the next President of the United States, the "Leader of the Free World", a man who will guide this country through some very difficult times, not a drinking buddy.  So stop asking who we'd rather have a beer with.  That's an insultingly stupid question.  It cheapens the discourse.

But that's not the stupid polling question that's been bothering me this election cycle.  No.  The stupid question that I wish the pollsters would stop asking is any version of the following:

Is America ready for a (fill in the blank) president?

Up. Down. Swing Around. Poll Dancing Explained.

Obama's in trouble. Registered voters are now switching to McCain. Will he be back up by Friday?

Or will he drop again?

If you're like me and you follow the daily tracking pulls such as the Gallup and the Rassmussen poll, you're likely to get confused. How is it that people change their minds so often? I know that despite my candidate's missteps I don't change my mind...unless of course it's revealed that he slept with his videographer or something.

So I was watching MSNBC last night, "The Verdict", and Dan Abrams was talking about VP choices.  The on-screen graphics had a playing card motif.  

McCain was the King of Diamonds.

Obama was the King of Spades.  

I found this today.

Apparently it has been going around the internets so I thought I would post it.

Very beautiful.

Why did you make me black Lord?...

Jump to see entire poem...

   
I attended my first Black History class in 1968 at the University of Maryland. The class came about because black students demanded it in that tumultuous year. They were supported by a small but significant number of white students.

On the first day of class it was a shock to all of us to find out that a southern white professor was the teacher. Because of UM's Jim Crow history, it had almost no black faculty at the time. But Professor Dan Carter turned out to be very knowledgeable and an relentless foe of Dixie apartheid. All of us learned a lot from that man.

It's Saturday night. I feel like having some fun.

Warning: if you don't have a warped sense of humor, you should probably go back to the home page now.

For tonight, there is not a liberal America, there is not a conservative America, there is the United States of America.

Jump.

Let me start with a couple caveats and social location points.  First, I am more than happy to come back to this diary in four years, if Senator Obama wins.  I am more than happy to be proven wrong.

I am a multi-racial/white skinned privilege, young man, BA in Race and Gender Studies.  I, like Senator Obama, find myself traversing worlds (emerging middle class out of an impoverished background, disabled, bisexual - all things that are seen by some and invisible to others).

It says quite a bit about the privilege I have that I am able to spend my Saturday afternoon typing this instead of working or taking care of someone.  And now - onto the meat.

Either the McCain campaign is grasping for straws or they are mired in a jealous obsession about what Barack Obama looks like shirtless on the beach in Hawaii. Regardless of which interpretation you take, you have a veritable Hobson's choice between infantile whining or trying to point out that Obama, 25 years younger, is both virile and attractive.

Pasty faced McCain will never win a beauty contest — unless he is competing against Mark Penn — but the criticism of both the media for printing the photo and the McCain campaign for complaining about it reeks of petty jealousy.

I have been reading Jane Jacobs' 1961 city planning classic, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities." Drawing mostly on her experiences of metropolitan New York, the book discusses common characteristics, not of "gentrified" civic areas, but of endogenously created "healthy city neighborhoods." The book's arguments and examples have, in places, clearly aged since 1961; its essentially seditious character hasn't.

"Death and Life's" core premise, that those closest to a problem, given resources to do so, are the ones best able to solve it, applies more broadly than just to city planning; it is a cornerstone progressive value. Jacobs argues that public housing projects, for example, fail and become magnets for crime, because the big-city governments that develop and maintain them discount this basic truth.

Maybe the book has grabbed me because of its spotlight on compact city living, in the throes of the current oil shortage. Maybe it's  that the discussion of the paternalistic veneer of government, wholly corrupted by the interests of big wealth, rings eerily contemporary to me. There's one passage, though, from the book's remarkable chapter, "Unslumming and Slumming," that has especially haunted me:

Just a quick diary on an ad I just noticed while I was checking my email.  The picture below popped up on the side bar and I honestly had to do a double take???  Hmmm, is it Barack Obama, Jessie Jackson, or Al Sharpton?  Hmm, tough one.... Now if they would have put two white guys in there with Obama, that would have been easy. Of course he’s the Black dude.  But throwing these two other Black politicians, hmm, that makes it tough.

It's a lazy Thursday afternoon here in Houston, so of course I'm at home watching the Astros game (we're currently winning, by the way, which will make it 8 in a row). But I digress. I just saw the most despicable, classless, tasteless commercial for a local talk radio station here in Houston - 740 KTRH.

By Faith Chatham - August 14, 2008

Why just "black" churches.... why not churches?
Why pit a white church leader against a black church leader?
How unifiying is this?

Yes, the clips are taken out of context but they reflect attitudes.
Why don't we see photos of the Obama children with their white grandmother?
She reared Barack and paid his private school tuition but seem to be far back in the closet during his campaign for president.

Does the "multicultural" candidate aviod photos with his white relatives because he playing more to the African American voters?

Far down in the comments on this journal someone posted a link to Obama's Scrapbook. It has many photos of him with his mom and grandparents. It is a wonderful scrapbook. I'm glad that it was shared with us.Obama's Scrapbook

There are many interesting and important lessons in the history of a vote for a particular law or bill, including the vote to establish the Martin Luther King Day national holiday. Among these lessons is that persistance sometimes pays off - the proposal was first established in 1968 and was eventually passed, fifteen years later, in 1983. Another lesson is that racists - i.e., a good chunk of those opposing this holiday, will hide behind rhetoric, unless they are like Jesse Helms, and are rewarded by their voters for parading their racism (and right wing lunatic fringe beliefs). And another lesson, key for us now, is that John McCain, opposing the bill, was a profile in pandering, dishonesty, and insensitivity. And he still is.

I read Roger Ebert's review of the film Tropic Thunder today, and I was disappointed that he glides so easily over the question of Robert Downey Jr. in blackface. I'm a big fan of Ebert's reviews and his opinion is really one of the few that I care about before going to see any movie (Ed Gonzales's are the others that I put stake into). The review is not that good in comparison to his other ones, generally speaking, but I was expecting some kind of thoughtful criticism of race in the movie, and none was offered. This is disconcerting because the movie is so highly anticipated and will make boatloads of money and influence huge numbers of people in its representations.

But more so than simply not confronting the use of stereotypes in the movie, Ebert seemingly contradicts himself when you compare this review to his review of Spike Lee's Bamboozled, where he heavily criticizes Lee's use of blackface and stereotypical imagery precisely because he believes the imagery is too powerful and controversial in its own right to be successful. Frankly, he seems to give white Hollywood a pass where he wouldn't give a black filmmaker.

After the fold I've copied the e-mail that I sent to feedback@rogerebert.com, and I've included links to the two reviews.

In encouraging the U.S. to defend the nation of Georgia, why did John McCain insist on labeling Georgia a "Christian Nation"?

I have been reading through many of my posts on other sites, and have been confronted with a paradoxical nature of race in terms of this campaign.  My discussions are not unique, as most other bloggers and the mainstream media has grappled with the same issues.  I am left with a lingering question, that I really have no clear answer to.  Who decides what is racist?