December 17, 2014

Pres. Obama worked for over a year on the release of Alan Gross and Cuba Policy and the media was..

clueless



http://theobamadiary.com/

December 17, 2014

Bernie Sanders: What the last week has been about...

December 17, 2014

Bernie Sanders:Sanders Statement on Cuba Announcements:

http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/sanders-statement-on-cuba-announcements

December 16, 2014

How Watermelons Became a Racist Trope

It seems as if every few weeks there’s another watermelon controversy. The Boston Herald got in trouble for publishing a cartoon of the White House fence-jumper, having made his way into Obama’s bathroom, recommending watermelon-flavored toothpaste to the president. A high-school football coach in Charleston, South Carolina, was briefly fired for a bizarre post-game celebration ritual in which his team smashed a watermelon while making ape-like noises. While hosting the National Book Awards, author Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket) joked about how his friend Jacqueline Woodson, who had won the young people’s literature award for her memoir Brown Girl Dreaming, was allergic to watermelon. And most recently, activists protesting the killing of Michael Brown were greeted with an ugly display while marching through Rosebud, Missouri, on their way from Ferguson to Jefferson City: malt liquor, fried chicken, a Confederate flag, and, of course, a watermelon.

While mainstream-media figures deride these instances of racism, or at least racial insensitivity, another conversation takes place on Twitter feeds and comment boards: What, many ask, does a watermelon have to do with race? What’s so offensive about liking watermelon? Don’t white people like watermelon too? Since these conversations tend to focus on the individual intent of the cartoonist, coach, or emcee, it’s all too easy to exculpate them from blame, since the racial meaning of the watermelon is so ambiguous.

But the stereotype that African Americans are excessively fond of watermelon emerged for a specific historical reason and served a specific political purpose. The trope came into full force when slaves won their emancipation during the Civil War. Free black people grew, ate, and sold watermelons, and in doing so made the fruit a symbol of their freedom. Southern whites, threatened by blacks’ newfound freedom, responded by making the fruit a symbol of black people’s perceived uncleanliness, laziness, childishness, and unwanted public presence. This racist trope then exploded in American popular culture, becoming so pervasive that its historical origin became obscure. Few Americans in 1900 would’ve guessed the stereotype was less than half a century old.

Not that the raw material for the racist watermelon trope didn’t exist before emancipation. In the early modern European imagination, the typical watermelon-eater was an Italian or Arab peasant. The watermelon, noted a British officer stationed in Egypt in 1801, was “a poor Arab’s feast,” a meager substitute for a proper meal. In the port city of Rosetta he saw the locals eating watermelons “ravenously ... as if afraid the passer-by was going to snatch them away,” and watermelon rinds littered the streets. There, the fruit symbolized many of the same qualities as it would in post-emancipation America: uncleanliness, because eating watermelon is so messy. Laziness, because growing watermelons is so easy, and it’s hard to eat watermelon and keep working—it’s a fruit you have to sit down and eat. Childishness, because watermelons are sweet, colorful, and devoid of much nutritional value. And unwanted public presence, because it’s hard to eat a watermelon by yourself. These tropes made their way to America, but the watermelon did not yet have a racial meaning. Americans were just as likely to associate the watermelon with white Kentucky hillbillies or New Hampshire yokels as with black South Carolina slaves.

More here: http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/12/how-watermelons-became-a-racist-trope/383529/

December 16, 2014

Elizabeth Warren Is Not the Ted Cruz of the Left

The symmetry was irresistible. Last weekend, as Ted Cruz almost blew up the budget deal over immigration and Elizabeth Warren almost blew it up over banking regulations, pundits seized upon an analogy. Both senators are articulate, ideological, media-savvy, beloved by party activists, and problematic for party leaders. Thus, Warren is the Cruz of the left.

Bad analogy, argues Vox’s Matthew Yglesias, noting that it’s Cruz and the GOP that want “to use government funding as leverage to undo policy measures Democrats enacted in the 111th Congress.” Warren just doesn’t “want to pay the ransom.” The Washington Post’s Sean Sullivan is dubious too, noting that Mitch McConnell and John Boehner dislike Cruz a lot more than Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi dislike Warren.

But there’s another, more fundamental, difference. Cruz deepens America’s red-blue divide. Warren could scramble it.

Think about Cruz’s highest-profile crusades: against Obamacare, against Obama’s executive action on immigration, against raising the debt ceiling, against gun control. They all exhilarated conservative activists and repelled their liberal counterparts.

With Warren it’s different. Her signature crusade is against the economic and political power of Wall Street. And it’s a crusade that appeals to elements of the American right. Most conservatives don’t like big banks either. In 2012, Pew found that while 78 percent of Democrats said Wall Street “only cares about making money for itself,” 66 percent of Republicans did too. Sixty percent of Mitt Romney voters said there was “too much power in hands of a few big companies.” And according to a 2013 Huffington Post poll, Republicans agreed that “banks and financial institutions have grown too big and powerful” by a margin of almost two to one.

More here: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/elizabeth-warren-is-not-the-ted-cruz-of-the-left/383786/

December 16, 2014

No one who is serious about global warming could support the KeystoneXL pipeline.....

December 16, 2014

This is great!! Amazing talent....

This young man is fantastic, watch closely, sound on/full screen.

The Hands are Truly Quicker than the Eyes !

I know you’ll you enjoy it .

http://biertijd.com/mediaplayer/?itemid=48417

And...

December 16, 2014

I cannot do this. I would not make it home....

http://theobamadiary.com/

December 16, 2014

Deaths from police shootings:

http://theobamadiary.com/

December 16, 2014

Luckovich toon: But as for me and Grandpa…