Community Checkup

The week was full of foolishness. Here’s two moments that stood out as the absolute worst for me.
#1: Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones responding to the picture put out of Obama in an African garb where she says that we shouldn’t feel shame about Obama wearing “his native clothing–the clothing of his country.”
You [...]

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Nader has experienced a lot of hate in his day. Now that he’s running again there will be much more coming at him. The hate carried over towards him from 2000 is captured perfectly in Melissa Harris-Lacewell’s argument:
Ralph Nader… has some evil lying on his doorstep. The arrogant, destructive, self-aggrandizing hubris that marks [...]

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Whether you support Obama or Clinton, it’s always good to be up on the spin and inaccuracies coming from both of them. Here’s some facts from FactCheck.org on Thursday’s debate.
Summary from FactCheck.org (click here for full analysis)
The most recent Obama-Clinton debate drew little blood, but we noted a few factual claims that could use [...]

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Chris Matthews dropped some major blows on Senator Watson from TX last night—completely embarrassing the man. In general, I like Matthews, but he does have a tendency to fly off the handle and humiliate his guests at times (sometimes appropriately, sometimes not). Last night, while watching the election results on MSNBC with Matthews and Keith [...]

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What’s been going on with me lately? Have I entered Bizarro World or what? First, I praise Brother Slickback, a man I’m almost always critical of. Now I’m about to bash my man Tavis who I’ve been behind for years. I feel like John Lewis. Am I turning into [...]

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Sike! John Lewis’ camp is now saying that he didn’t change his pledge from Clinton to Obama. Call this one a back flip.
From the AJC:
A story in Friday’s New York Times that said U.S. Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) was going to back Barack Obama for president is inaccurate, a spokeswoman for the former civil [...]

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From the New York Times:
MILWAUKEE — Representative John Lewis, an elder statesman from the civil rights era and one of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s most prominent black supporters, said Thursday night that he planned to cast his vote as a superdelegate for Senator in hopes of preventing a fight at the Democratic convention.
“In recent days, [...]

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From Media Matters and Electronic Village:
Fox News Radio host Tom Sullivan took a call from a listener who stated that when listening to Barack Obama speak, “it harkens back to when I was younger and I used to watch those deals with Hitler, how he would excite the crowd and they’d come to their feet [...]

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Can black culture be defined?
We’ve had some discussion on this topic in the earlier “sellout” post and here is part 2. Again, a piece by McWhorter touching on the issue of the “fluidity and complexity” of cultural definitions. This time he attempts to put some parameters on the definition:
What is black culture? Definitions [...]

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I’m one of Al’s biggest critics, but I have to give him props for his letter to the DNC urging them to not seat the Michigan and Florida delegates. He stood tall on this one, bucking the efforts of NAACP chairman Julian Bond to play foul politics. From Al:
I write this [...]

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