I figured I would head off with this image because it’s appropriate to the discussion, even though Judge Sotomayor is Latina. The hubub around her completely out-of-context statement that “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life,” doesn’t only ring true, but the fact that it’s triggered the standard right-wing “must defend our white privilege at all costs” response is laughable. “It’s reverse racism!” they cry, “She’s discriminating against white people!” they say. Every time I hear someone even remotely seriously saying it, it makes me laugh.

But frankly, this is all part of the “new racism.” The kind that’s quiet, spoken outwardly only in safe company of like faces-and minds. The kind that supports the good old boy’s network at all costs, the kind that treats up and coming smart Black businesspeople like children while simultaneously telling them that this is good for them, the same kind of racism that forces white Americans to fiercely deny racism even exists and that instead minorities just “play the race card” too often.

Of course, it’s all distractions from the point, and denies the fact that the so-called “race card” doesn’t even exist.

What the ongoing attack on Judge Sotomayor suggests is that the public morality of American life and social policy regarding matters of racial justice are increasingly subject to a politics of denial. Denial in this case is not merely about the failure of public memory or the refusal to know, but an active ongoing attempt on the part of many conservatives to rewrite the discourse of race so as to deny its valence as a force for discrimination and exclusion either by translating it as a threat to American culture or relegating it to the language of the private sphere. The idea of race and the conditions of racism have real political effects and eliding them only makes those effects harder to recognize.

Politics of denial – that’s an excellent way of putting it. So what do we do?

Bob Herbert has recently responded to the attacks on Judge Sotomayor by arguing that:

Here’s the thing. Suddenly these hideously pompous and self-righteous white males of the right are all concerned about racism. They’re so concerned that they’re fully capable of finding it in places where it doesn’t for a moment exist. Not just finding it, but being outraged by it to the point of apoplexy. Oh, they tell us, this racism is a bad thing! Are we supposed to not notice that these are the tribunes of a party that rose to power on the filthy waves of racial demagoguery…. Where were the howls of outrage at this strategy that was articulated by Lee Atwater as follows: “By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’ – that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff.”(9)

Herbert is only partly right on this issue. The right-wing attack on Sotomayor is about more than “the howling of a fading species.” It is about how racism takes on different forms in different historical contexts and the need for it to be challenged critically and politically. Of course, Herbert is correct in suggesting that the conservative appropriation of the new racism is not just disingenuous but hypocritical, and that even a minor lesson in history reveals the bigotry behind the strategy. But he is remiss in not suggesting that we actually take up the discourse of the new racism and do it in ways that give it real meaning and substance, so it can be both easily recognized and politically challenged in terms not set by conservatives.

Frankly, I’m more with Herbert on this one, but I see the need for dialogue. At the same time, we need to shine the light on this denial and selfish clinging to privilege first, call it out for what it is, and then we can all sit down like nice and we can explain why the conservatives are wrong on this one – much like they are on everything else.

[ Judge Sonia Sotomayor and the New Racism: Getting Beyond the Politics of Denial ]
Source: Truthout

In more signs that the Republican Party’s self-destruct timer is ticking, even some of their most venerable members are speaking out against the bile-spewing hatemonger that seems to make policy for the party. Colin Powell is the latest person to speak out against Limbaugh’s sideline quarterbacking, slamming even the so-called party head, Michael Steele. And while every Republican in government who dares to step out of line has to quickly bow and back away from their statements in order to appease The Limbaugh and the angry, dejected Republican wing that he represents, Colin Powell is willing to say something about it:

Reiterating his support for closing down the terrorist detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Powell said Cheney’s opposition was an affront to Obama’s predecessor as well.

“Mr. Cheney is not only disagreeing with President Obama’s policy, he’s disagreeing with President Bush’s policy,” Powell said.

And, citing Cheney’s suggestion in a speech last week that President Obama only wanted to close Guantanamo to make Europeans happy, Powell said, “No, we’re doing it to reassure Europeans, Muslims, Arabs, all the people around the world, that we’re a nation of law.”

Lending credence to Democrats argument that moving the Gitmo detainees to American soil would not put the country in danger, Powell said he was “not terribly worried about one of these guys going to a super lock-up.”

As for Limbaugh – whose name Powell pronounced as “Lim-bow” – the former secretary of state said he was an “entertainer” but who had such influence over the party that officials had to live in fear of offending him.

He lamented that RNC Chairman Michael Steele had “to lay prostrate on the floor” apologizing to Limbaugh after criticizing him and that other GOP members of Congress had to be similarly repentant after taking on the radio host.

“Well, if he’s out there he should be subject to criticism, just as I’m subject to criticism,” Powell said.

Steele, who’s giving on Tuesday what the RNC is touting as a major speech out his vision for the party, said in an interview this week with “Fox News,” that “I want a party that speaks to people. The idea that we only narrowly speak to one segment of the population is boneheaded and it’s not reflective of the history of this party,” adding, “How is kicking Colin Powell out or kicking Dick Cheney out or Rush Limbaugh in going to feed a child who’s hungry tonight?”

Now the only problem with any of this is that Michael Steele will probably catch flak for wanting to feed hungry children. We all know Republicans aren’t interested in poverty, unless it’s a hedge fund manager who thinks that taxes are taking too big a bite out of their seven-figure salary.

Slowly but surely, the Republicans are disenfranchising the only sensible members of their party. They’re watching Steele like a hawk and practically begging him to step down, they’re kicking Colin Powell in the face for daring to speak his mind and disagreeing with other party members, and they’ve sidelined Arlen Specter enough that he switched parties.

The clock is ticking.

[ Colin Powell Fires Back at Rush Limbaugh, Dick Cheney ]
Source: TruthOut

Bill is on point here. I’m a little distressed at the way the health care discussion is shaping up, and how a single-payer system is looking more and more like it’ll be on the sidelines instead of a legitimate option that not only should be considered, but should be considered for what it is: a way to give every American man, woman, and child quality health care in this country without socializing our health care system.

But that’s not how you’re going to hear it in the industry, and that’s not how you’re going to hear it from the labs, pharmaceutical companies, and private insurance companies who could care less about the health care part of health care and instead are far more interested in the profits and payments they can squeeze out of the American people and the companies that employ us.

Even President Obama, back when he was Senator Obama, completely advocated a single payer health care system, and now that he’s in power with a Democratic majority in the House and Senate to back him up, he’s backing away a bit from the big sweeping changes that he could very well push through (even though unlike Bill I acknowledge it would be political suicide for both Obama and the Democrats to force an issue as bombastic as health care – an issue that blew up in President Clinton’s face back in the 90s).

So the banks were too big to fail and now, apparently, health care is too big to fix, at least the way a majority of people indicate they would like it to be fixed, with a single payer option. President Obama favors a public health plan competing with the medical cartel that he hopes will create a real market that would bring down costs. But single payer has vanished from his radar.

Nor is single payer getting much coverage in the mainstream media. Barely a mention was given to the hundreds of doctors, nurses and other health care professionals who came to Washington last week to protest the absence of official debate over single payer.

Is it the proverbial tree falling in the forest, making a noise that journalists can’t or won’t hear? Could the indifference of the press be because both the President of the United States and Congress have been avoiding single payer like, well, like the plague? As we see so often, government officials set the agenda by what they do and don’t talk about.

Instead, President Obama is looking for consensus, seeking peace among all the parties involved. Except for single payer advocates.

This is a good point. The single payer advocates, even though we represent the well-polled will of the American people, who would rather pay the government to guarantee health care for all of us than have to wrestle with insurance companies and doctors’ offices every time we have a booboo, or heaven forbid wind up with something serious like cancer. Frankly, I think more people are more wary of the costs and the hassle of dealing with the health care system than they are afraid of any actual illness they may come down with.

Unfortunately, the advocates of real health care reform have some serious opposition to stand up against. Back in May, industry representatives and other unlikely allies got together at the White House and agreed to voluntarily cut costs to the tune of billions of dollars (which makes you wonder that if they could save the American people billions just by agreeing to do it, why they didn’t before), in a photo-op that many people were pleased with but many more were skeptical about. Why? Because even while they were shaking hands with the President, their operatives were working hard in the background:

So why bother with the charm offensive on Pennsylvania Avenue? Could it be, as some critics suggest, a Trojan horse, getting the health industry a place at the table so they can leap up at the right moment and again knife to death any real reform?

Wheelers and dealers from the health sector aren’t waiting for that moment. According to the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics, they’ve spent more than $134 million on lobbying in the first quarter of 2009 alone. And some already are shelling out big bucks for a publicity blitz and ads attacking any health care reform that threatens to reduce the profits from sickness and disease.

The Washington Post’s health care reform blog reported Tuesday that Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina has hired an outside PR firm to put together a video campaign assaulting Obama’s public plan. And this month alone, the group Conservatives for Patients’ Rights is spending more than a million dollars for attack ads. They’ve hired a public relations firm called CRC – Creative Response Concepts. You remember them – the same high-minded folks who brought you the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the gang who savaged John Kerry’s service record in Vietnam.

The ads feature the chairman of Conservatives for Patients’ Rights, Rick Scott. Who’s he? As a former deputy inspector general from the Department of Health and Human Services told The New York Times, “He hopes people don’t Google his name.”

Scott’s not a doctor; he just acts like one on TV. He’s an entrepreneur who took two hospitals in Texas and built them into the largest health care chain in the world, Columbia/HCA. In 1997, he was fired by the board of directors after Columbia/HCA was caught in a scheme that ripped off the Feds and state governments for hundreds of millions of dollars in bogus Medicare and Medicaid payments, the largest such fraud in history. The company had to cough up $1.7 billion dollars to get out of the mess.

We have a long way to go, and progressive groups are really going to have to step up to the plate. The health care industry is going to fight for its profits under any circumstances, and that includes over your -and my- dead bodies.

[ Bill Moyers: How Can We Expect an Industry That Profits from Disease and Sickness to Police Itself? ]
Source: Alternet

There’s still this murmur out and about – especially in race-based political discussions – that because Barack Obama is the President of the United States that all of our issues with race are behind us. That somehow on November 4th, we wiped the slate clean and America doesn’t have race issues, especially between White Americans and Black Americans of any heritage. It’s not true, and it’s worrysome not because there are actually people out there who believe it, but because there are young people out there who – while hopeful of a post-racial society – believe it’s actually come to pass. There’s still a lot of work to be done for us to get anywhere near there, and it’s going to be a long, difficult road regardless of recent successes and the hope they bring us.

While “post-racial” may mean less overt racism, the idea that we have moved into a post-racial period in American history is not merely premature – it is an act of willful denial and ignorance. Paul Ortiz puts it well in his comments on the myth of post-racialism:

The idea that we’ve moved to a post-racial period in American social history is undermined by an avalanche of recent events. Hurricane Katrina. The US Supreme Court’s dismantling of Brown vs. Board of Education and the resegregation of American schools. The Clash of Civilizations thesis that promotes the idea of a War against Islam. The backlash facing immigrant workers. A grotesque prison industrial complex. [Moreover] … [w]hile Americans were being robbed blind and primed for yet another bailout of the banks and investment sectors, they were treated to new evidence from Fox News and poverty experts that the great moral threats facing the nation were greedy union workers, black single mothers, Latino gang bangers and illegal immigrants.[3]

Missing from the exuberant claims that Americans are now living in a post-racial society is the historical legacy of a neoconservative revolution, officially launched in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan, and its ensuing racialist attacks on the welfare “Queens”; Bill Clinton’s cheerful compliance in signing bills that expanded the punishing industries; and George W. Bush’s “willingness to make punishment his preferred response to social problems.”

When people like me discuss racism in America and the work that needs to be done, we’re not talking about something that happened “a long time ago” that White Americans today “had nothing to do with so why should they feel guilty about it.” We’re talking about the recent past; the look-over-your-shoulder past, and the things that are happening right now, today. We’re talking about the pervasive cancer that is White privilege, and we’re talking about the policies, laws, and institutions that reinforce racism in American society today. We’re talking about White Americans who are so sure they’re not racist because they have Black or Latino friends or maybe even dated one that they speak from their own privilege, convinced they can’t possibly be wrong.

The politics of racism has hardly disappeared from the landscape of American culture and the institutions that support it. Poor minority kids now find themselves on a fast track extending from school to juvenile courts to prison. And the number of poor and minority kids, now aptly called the “recession generation” by Dr. Irwin Redlener, president of New York City’s Children’s Health fund, has increased from 13 million before the economic meltdown to an expected 17 million by the end of the year. And who are these kids? These are the kids marginalized by race and class, who are largely seen either as a drain on the economy or stand in the way of market freedoms, free trade, consumerism and the whitewashed fantasies of a cleansed, Disneyfied social order. These are kids who, not only have to fend for themselves in the face of life’s tragedies, but are also supposed to do it without being seen by the dominant society. Excommunicated from the sphere of human concern, they have been rendered invisible, utterly disposable, and heir to that army of socially homeless that allegedly no longer existed in colorblind America. Most of them, if not homeless, live in dilapidated housing, attend schools that are underfunded and literally falling apart, receive food stamps and eat mostly junk food when they can get it.

But there’s more to this unconscious racism than might initially be implied. Even those who claim to be fighting this kind of racial bias are themselves susceptible to it, in the form of the “my ism is worse than your ism” feminists that appears during the Presidential campaign – you remember the ones, the ones who would rather vote McCain than a Black man, if they can’t vote for a White woman? Even the ones who begrudgingly supported Obama against McCain but didn’t miss an opportunity to toss a few barbs his way because he was Black? Or the Ron Paul supporters who cheerfully defended their candidate from his own incredibly racist remarks?

Progressives, powell says, are as susceptible to accepting racialization as conservatives. “The failure to actually embrace race in a constructive, much more sophisticated way is one of the great failures of the progressive movement,” he says.

It is not enough to pursue “race-neutral” policies or to use proxies for race, such as poverty, powell says. For example, in the absence of structural changes in patterns and practices that leave African Americans and women underrepresented in construction trades, the money in the economic recovery bill that is now being poured into infrastructure projects will invariably end up benefiting whites and males more than African Americans and females, powell says.

This is absolutely true – and while both of the articles that these quotes are coming from urge President Obama to put some more focus on race issues and highlight some of these injustices, I can only add my voice – especially to my fellow progressives who believe themselves beyond reproach. We know where the conservatives and their allies in hate stand. We need to ensure that we’re more like our own ideals than we are like them. Then together we can make even more real, hopeful progress.

[ Youth and the Myth of a Post-Racial Society Under Barack Obama ]
Source: Truthout

[ What the Right, and the Left, Doesn't Get About Race ]
Source: Campaign for America’s Future

One of my favorite stories from the news lately that’s gotten some attention but not nearly enough in my opinion, is the fact that during the wrangling over the Stimulus bill, President Obama and the Congressional Democrats noticed that HHS had stopped funding research into pandemic preparedness when it became apparent that the threat of Avian Flu was less severe than initially anticipated. Obama attempted to reinsert funding for pandemic preparedness into the stimulus plan, but when negotiating to get the two Republican senate votes required to pass it, that funding was removed to appease the Republicans.

As happy as I am that some of the Republicans had enough sense to come to the table instead of just plugging their ears and singing the Star Spangled Baner, it’s clearer now than it ever has been that their political games are putting the nation at risk, and not in some vague way. As we face down the Swine Flu, which hopefully also won’t turn out to be as large a threat as some are worried it will be, we have an HHS that isn’t fully funded to help develop a strategy to combat a quickly-spreading or potentially pandemic virus.

Remember way back in the day, President Obama delivered his Not Really The State Of The Union address, and the GOP trotted out Future Of The Republican Party Supra-Genius Bobbly Jindal to provide a rebuttal? Well, we all had some laughs, didn’t we? Mainly because Jindal was all: “They want to spend stimulus money on volcano monitoring? Why everyone knows that the Hill Witch keeps tabs on our volcanoes by floating chicken bones in her own intestinal ichor!” And then Alaska’s Mount Redoubt erupted, suggesting there might be something to this “let’s monitor volcanoes with government-funded science” idea.

Well, as it turns out, volcano monitoring wasn’t the only worthwhile public safety program that was deemed extravagant in the stimulus package, funding for pandemic preparation was axed as well. And playing a critical role was Susan Collins — for whom the necessity of obtaining her vote is in inverse proportion to the intelligence she shows in policy making:

Famously, Maine Senator Collins, the supposedly moderate Republican who demanded cuts in health care spending in exchange for her support of a watered-down version of the stimulus, fumed about the pandemic funding: “Does it belong in this bill? Should we have $870 million in this bill No, we should not.”

Even now, Collins continues to use her official website to highlight the fact that she led the fight to strip the pandemic preparedness money out of the Senate’s version of the stimulus measure.

Remember this when we go to the polls in 2010, folks.

[ GOP Pigs Stripped 'Flu Pandemic Preparedness' From Stimulus ]
Source: AlterNet

I missed this one the first time around and a friend forwarded the note to me; the Republicans and conservatives in Congress are still fighting as hard as possible to keep us in this miserable job-shedding recession as hard as possible. Not because they have an alternative plan, not because they have a different way out, but only because they have this need to be contrary and pull in the opposite direction whenever America makes progress. If there’s any indication that conservatives in America have not only lost their way but lost their minds, it’s now.

Over at the Campaign for America’s Future, Bernie Horn outlines some of the conservative ideas that got us into this mess that apparently they seem to think will also get us back out. For example:

Zombie idea: Trickle-down tax cuts stimulate the economy and benefit average Americans. Another relic of the Reagan era is the idea that tax cuts for the rich will lead to more investment and an increase in good jobs for middle and lower-income workers. John Kenneth Galbraith called it the horse-and-sparrow theory: “If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.”

Right wingers also asserted that, by stimulating growth, trickle-down tax cuts would offset the government’s lost revenue—they would pay for themselves. That was quickly proven false as the national debt tripled over the course of Reagan’s eight years in office. Similarly, George W. Bush’s trickle-down tax cuts helped double the national debt between 2001 and 2009.

In fact, the notion that tax cuts for the rich can significantly improve America’s economy is dead and buried. Jarad Bernstein lays out the evidence in an article, “Trickle Down…R.I.P.,” conclusively proving that middle- and lower-class families do well when the tax system is more progressive and lose ground when taxes shift to benefit the wealthy.

Trickle-down economics continues to rise up from the graveyard into congressional bills and amendments proposed by Republican leaders in the U.S. House and Senate. But polls show that these are lifeless ideas. Americans instead endorse a very different initiative—Barack Obama’s tax cut for the middle-class.

This was my primary problem with the way Republicans in Congress attacked the stimulus plan: they wanted more tax cuts because apparently THAT would fix the problem, even though economists and historians both united in opposition to the idea. The goal was a healthy mix of tax cuts in the right places (and not just for the Bush-era friends at the top of the income ladder) and spending that could get people working, get infrastructure upgraded and new projects built, and put the wheels of the economy back in motion. Already that mix is proving to be the right one, and conservatives have fallen suddenly and eerily silent on it the issue – more proof that it’s clear they were on the wrong side of history. Again.

Let’s look at one more that I love:

Zombie idea: The right-wing “culture war” can be won. Conservative “movement” politics is all about defining enemies, like Hollywood liberals bringing down public morality, abortionists who oppose “life,” and those who practice the gay “lifestyle.”

The truth is, George W. Bush only gave lip service to social conservatives. He took very little action on their behalf. Why? It would have been bad politics. Americans aren’t interested in a culture war. Even fundamentalist leader James Dobson admitted: “We are right now in the most discouraging period of that long conflict…. Humanly speaking, we can say that we have lost all those battles.”

Just look at the issue of LGBT rights over the course of the Bush presidency. Same-sex marriage has become legal, not just in places like New England (and for a while California), but in Iowa! In fact, there were really no major protests anywhere in America when same-sex marriage was legalized almost simultaneously in Iowa and Vermont.

In addition, over the past eight years laws have been enacted in dozens of states and cities preventing discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and many of those laws also protect transgender persons. Hate crimes laws have passed in every corner of the nation. And that was under Bush. President Obama is appointing openly gay people to important positions throughout the federal government.

Polls show that support for LGBT rights is growing rapidly and that young people are enthusiastic supporters. Even some leaders on the right can read the handwriting on the wall. McCain-Palin campaign strategist Steve Schmidt recently urged the GOP to endorse same-sex marriage. Put a fork in it—the culture war is done.

That’s what I’m talking about.

[ Conservative Zombie Ideas Haunting Us Still ]
Source: Campaign for America’s Future

I think the answer is unequivocally yes, and without a shadow of a doubt.

This story’s been cleaned up a bit in the media lately, but living where I do and having access to local news from the area, the story was first reported on the local scene as a shooting that Poplawski, in all of his sickness, went through with because he was worried about a possible future ban on assault weapons or restriction on handguns by the Obama Administration.

Those same paranoid right-wing fears have driven up gun and ammo purchases around the country by paranoid conservatives who are so deathly frightened that someone’s going to take their guns away and white-out the 2nd amendment. Like the title says, paranoid right-wing media, and paranoid right-wing delusional fear. Obama even said on the campaign trail that he supported an individual’s right to bear arms, and that he supported the 2nd amendment. Even so, conservatives are so afraid that they’ve gone running to the gun store to pick up the guns and ammo they’ll apparently need when all of the brown people come after them demanding things like equality.

On April 6, two days after the 22-year-old Richard Poplawski allegedly murdered three police officers in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a radio host named Alex Jones settled in before a microphone in his studio in Austin, Texas to do some damage control. “The mainstream media has certainly enjoyed tying me into this story,” Jones complained. “They’re attacking me and saying I’m delusional and there’s no New World Order The Second Amendment, what the country’s founded on–it’s all my fault!”

Poplawski was a neo-Nazi wannabe who railed against blacks, Jews, “Zionists,” and gun control. And like many members of the far-right fringe, he allegedly visited Jones’ Web sites and posted alarming reports by Jones’ writers on the white supremacist message board, Stormfront. (Poplawski’s posts are here, authored under the handle, “Braced For Fate.”) While Alex Jones generally avoids overt racism, he has found an eager audience on Stormfront by conjuring dark visions of an impending New World Order, claiming FEMA is secretly building a national concentration camp network, and announcing that President Barack Obama has planned mass gun seizures on his way to establishing a leftist dictatorship. “Remember, the first step in establishing a dictatorship is to disarm the citizens,” warned a March 13 commentary on Jones’ website, Prison Planet.

Now it would be easy to stop here and blame some crazy conservative fringe for this crime, but it runs much deeper than that – conservatives, as they’re so good at doing, are playing their best card: fear.

But hysterical warnings of government gun grabs and a socialist takeover of the U.S. are no longer the sole proprietary interest of fringe players like Jones. In the Obama era, Jones’ conspiracy theories have graduated to primetime on Fox News. And radicals like Poplawski are tuning in. Indeed, according to the Anti-Defamation League, the alleged killer posted a YouTube clip to Stormfront of top-rated Fox News host Glenn Beck contemplating the existence of FEMA-managed concentration camps. (”He backed out,” Poplawski wrote cryptically beside the video.) Three weeks later, Poplawski posted another Youtube clip to Stormfront, this time of a video blogger advocating “Tea Parties,” or grassroots conservative protests organized by Beck and Fox News contributor Newt Gingrich (see here and here) against President Barack Obama’s bailout plan.

Just when you think these folks can’t out-crazy themselves.

[ Did Paranoid Right-Wing Media Fuel the Pittsburgh Cop Killer's Rage? ]
Source: Alternet

Ah Glenn Beck – the slimy underbelly of cable news, lower than even some Faux News hosts dare to sink. My dislike for Glenn Beck is very well documented.

While I can happily say that I had beef with Beck before it was cool, Stephen Colbert got into the act on his show:

Stephen Colbert ripped apart Fox News host (and New York Times cover boy) Glenn Beck Tuesday night, mocking his 9-12 project, meant to conjure the spirit of compassion and camaraderie Americans felt on September 12, 2001.

“We weren’t told how to behave that day after 9/11, we just knew,” Beck says to describe the project. “It was right, it was the opposite of what we feel today. Are you ready to be the person you were that day after 9/11, on 9/12?”

“Ready!” Colbert shouted, decked out in a gas mask, holding a gun, and wearing adult diapers.

Colbert then used a classic “Daily Show,” exposing the hypocrisy of Beck’s 9-12 project by highlighting comments he made on September 9, 2005.

“This is horrible to say, and I wonder if I’m alone in this,” Beck said on his radio program that day, “you know it took me about a year to start hating the 9/11 victims’ families? I don’t hate all of them. I hate probably about 10 of them. But when I see a 9-11 victim family on television, or whatever, I’m just like, ‘Oh, shut up!’ I’m so sick of them because they’re always complaining. And we did our best for them.”

“The 9-12 project is not for families directly affected by 9/11, just people building their careers on it,” Colbert said.

Colbert went on to mock Beck’s now infamous tendency to cry, and to launch his own “democratic experiment, the 10-31 project.”

“It will be scare and balanced!” he joked.

Oh Stephen, how right you are. But wait – could it be? Could Beck have grown a heart? Possibly started to spawn a brain? Nah, what am I thinking? He’s just faced with sinking ratings.

[ Stephen Colbert Rips Glenn Beck to Shreds: Building His Career On 9/11 ]
Source: AlterNet

It would be easy to ignore the panhandlers walking between cars at intersections, or ignore the people sitting huddled for warmth in doorways and street corners with plastic cups begging for change; to lower your head and move on pretending they’re not there, to pretend that if you gave them money that they’d spend it on drugs or alcohol (as though it would be your right to supervise what they spend money on), to ignore the fact that you’re likely closer to their position than you would like to admit, to pretend that these people aren’t actual people with real stories, real lives, families, dreams, aspirations, problems, loves, and passions.

In the end, it would be easy to pretend they’re not just like you or I. But it’s not about what’s easy, it’s about what’s right.

At InvisiblePeople.tv, Mark Horvath – a man who has lived through homelessness himself – has dedicated his blog and at least a part of his life to making sure that the stories of the people who live in their cars, under bridges, on the streets, and in alleys, are told loud and clear. The stories are heavy, deep, very real, and the people in them are perhaps more aware and present than many of us who float through our days, flitting from fad to fad, place to place, night to night.

There’s something to learn here, and there’s something to be done as well.

[ InvisiblePeople.tv ]

This story reminds me of a play I saw a long long time ago called the Day of Absence, which emulated what would have happened in the deep south back in the 50s should all of the Black people in the local town vanished for one day. All of a sudden, up and gone, leaving the only remaining Black people in the town comatose in the hospital, unable to rise and take care of the town’s white residents.

As America has been building a new sub-class in the form of Mexican and Latin American immigrants (documented and undocumented), the calls are growing louder again to get tough on immigration and border security. That’s all well and good – it’s one thing to say we need to enforce the law and secure our national borders, but it’s another thing to not acknowledge the effects of those broken immigration laws in the first place and what they’ve done to American life and American society. There is no small lesson to learn from looking to see who’s serving you breakfast in the morning, who’s cleaning your office bathrooms, and who’s ringing up your purchases at the local department store. Instead, the media wants us focusing instead on Mexican drug cartels and the flow of narcotics across the southern borders; making it easy to paint “all of them” in the same light.

This article is the story of Pottsville, Iowa, a community economically and emotionally torn apart by the raids on a meat packing plan that wound up imprisoning almost a third of the town’s population. The damage to the community is still felt today, and this story is a detailed telling of the rise and fall of Pottsville, a rural community that in many ways more embodies the American “values” we hold dear than the people who complain so much about those values.

[ A Year Without a Mexican: The Debilitating Loss of Economic Lifeblood ]
Source: Mother Jones (courtesy of AlterNet)