African-American Opinion Blog

Lynn Swann gets campaign support from Bush

2006-08-16T22:53:00.000-07:00

African American Political Pundit says: The headlines read "Lynn Swann, Happy to Be on the President's Team". When a read those headlines I said, "this guy Swann has got to be one real idiot" but I guess that's why he is down by 20 percentage points. You see Lynn Swann is politically stupid enough to think the President has coat tails. Lynn Swann must be placing his head in the dame sand. Has he not read the polls? High gasoline prices, flat wages, the Bush war in Iraq, all have left most Americans pissed off if not anxious.

Enter in-experienced Swann, a Republican, who is facing a 20-point deficit and a huge fundraising gap in his race against incumbent and popular Pennsylvania Gov. Edward G. Rendell. A recent Poll indicates Swann Gained No Ground on Rendell the 2006 Pennsylvania Governor Poll shows Rendell holding big lead in race for governor.

Wth all the polls showing he is done like a Thanksgiving "turkey"Lynn Swann says, I'm Happy to be on the President's team". Although Bush has Helped Swann Raise Campaign Cash.

Donors paid $10,000 per person or couple for a private reception and photo opportunity with the president, and $650 a person or $1,000 for a couple for a general reception. Swann campaign spokesman Leonardo Alcivar said the event raised about $700,000.

Most of the donors probably know Swann has no chance of winning the election, they just wanted have a photo op with Bush. I guess it will be a swann song come November for Mr. Swann during his concession speech. Hopefully one of Bush's speech writers are preparing now. Candidly, Swann seems like a nice guy, he just should have stayed out of politics and coached football.

He was a better football player than a politican.

Black Leaders Urge Fight Against AIDS et al

2006-08-16T06:24:00.000-07:00

Source: acting white

Black Leaders Urge Fight Against AIDS - AP
Why the U.S. Has Not Stemmed HIV - Washington Post
Black America Must Confront AIDS - Washington Post

Julian Bond, the NAACP, and other Black leadership are finally taking to the stage to collect their ‘better late than never’ awards for calling overdue attention to the AIDS epidemic. Sadly, and with the scourge of the disease firmly resident in the Black community, the highest-level Black leaders have finally found their voices.

But it will take more than a few words to move Black clergy and their congregations from the homophobic sermonizing that has been a hallmark and distracting gauntlet, over the past 25 years. Yes, twenty-five years!

Now that AIDS has completely jumped to the heterosexual community, one fear is that Black church leaders will figure out how to partition Black gay men out of their initiatives for battling the disease. This continuing blame-game would only compound the tragedy, and further the spread.Is there hope that Black clergy, across the nation, might experience a level of divine inspiration that will allow them to set aside judgments and tend to the whole ‘flock’?

Perhaps, but homophobia runs deep in the Black community, driving gay men even deeper into their closeted lives.Only timed will reveal if therapies to treat and prevent AIDS, which have gained significant footing, will continue to face their biggest challenge, in part, from the pulpit.

James C. Collier

Widening the racial divide

2006-08-15T08:10:00.000-07:00

Opportunists distort boy's tragic shooting

blackcommunity.blackvoices.aol.com
Dennis Byrne, a Chicago-area writer and consultant

August 14, 2006

Residents of the Near North Side Cabrini-Green low-income housing project may have a lot to complain about, but not the shooting of a 14-year-old boy who menaced police officers with a gun.

It doesn't matter that the boy was wielding "only" a BB gun that happened to look like the real thing. When you show police officers any kind of weapon, fake or otherwise, you shouldn't be outraged when cops defend themselves. Even if the weapon can "only" fire a projectile at 400 feet a second.

As Mayor Richard Daley said, it was a tragedy that the boy was shot, and we hope for his recovery.

But, it is no reason to storm City Hall and the police station, peacefully or otherwise, with complaints about everything from inadequate housing to police brutality.

But that's what the usual band of opportunists are doing, taking to the streets and media, attempting to drive another wedge between the races. In their protests and warnings, they too easily equate an apparently justified defensive response by police to years of outrageous police torture. A complaint about a single event becomes elevated into blanket statements of condemnation and disgust.

Talk about "disproportionate" responses.

Talk about demagoguery.

For some, the temptation to elevate an individual event into universal statements about white or black people and law enforcement is irresistible.

It's more than intellectually dishonest or ignorant; it jeopardizes the workings of our civil society. It drives the community and police further apart, and makes law enforcement, especially in the neighborhoods that need it most, all the more difficult.

As are the attempts to turn this into another "blame-the-victim" episode.

The boy, we are tutored, is a victim of poverty and racism, of an environment of police brutality, and of a gentry plot to force residents out of Cabrini.

Therefore, we're further tutored, you can ignore his displaying a BB gun that looks identical to a 9mm handgun to police who were investigating an attempted arm robbery just minutes before.

The cycle of poverty and ignorance will never end as long as this dodge is deployed for every upsetting or tragic event.

Funny, while I was researching this latest cause celebre among the racial dividers, I came across something else, something positive, that has received virtually no attention. Responding to community concerns, police in early August announced that they had shut down two open-air drug markets and charged 21 people in separate undercover investigations on the West Side. For the racial dividers, this good news has no substance.

But maybe we can learn something from the racial dividers, when it comes to Salomeja Januska.

They had nothing to say about the 94-year-old woman who was mugged in her old Marquette Park neighborhood she had dared to revisit to purchase some Lithuanian groceries. Outside an old favorite deli, a 30- to 35-year-old man "came out of nowhere," grabbed her purse and then pushed her to the ground, shattering her right arm. She's expected to recover after undergoing surgery at Holy Cross Hospital.

Ironically, the mugger escaped by running down the gangway of her former home, which she had moved from three years ago to escape the growing number of muggings and sexual assaults.

Januska is white. The police said the attacker is black, a fact that didn't make it into many, if any, stories.

Now, if the racial dividers were white, they'd be turning this attack into a universal statement. About how it proves that crime goes up with the appearance of blacks in the neighborhood. About how young black men are preying on old white women. About how blacks are ruining the city. And so forth.

You might hear this in bars and rec rooms. But you didn't hear much, if any, of this in the media, because saying such things is inexcusably racist. Even though these are empirical questions, which may or may not be true.

The point here is an old one: You can openly march on City Hall making the most outrageous claims about how an individual event involving a black "victim" proves the most racist hypotheses. And the press will dutifully report those claims, often sympathetically.

But stretching an individual event, such as a black man's attack on an old white woman, into sweeping generalizations about race is intolerable, never to be publicly uttered.

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Jeffmet

marijuana (Weed) Kills

2006-08-14T18:47:00.000-07:00

Source: blackblogdigest.com

Of all the things that prevent black youth from succeeding, nothing does so more than
marijuana. Yet thanks to so-called prophets like Bob Marley and virtually everyone involved in hip hop, weed has become a sacrament of black youth.

But "weed" is just that -- a killer of life. This is fact. No more guessing. The harmful effects of marijuana are thoroughly documented and readily available to anyone wanting to know the truth. Hop heads don't want to know the truth. Hop heads ignore the science and in its place adopt the same suicidal creed Bob Marley promoted all of his life.
But what we now know is that the cancer that ravaged and killed Marley at age 36 was caused by his insane, unrelenting marijuana smoking. His body was rife with tumors. His doctors had never seen anything like it before. The man actually had cancer in his toes. Nobody gets cancer in their toes. Simply put, Marley killed himself. He was a degenerate marijuana addict. He smoked non-stop-- from the moment he woke till the moment he went to bed. The man could not function without a headful of ganja.
He couldn't sleep without a headful of ganja. In fact, it is doubtful that during the last 10 years of his life there was period lasting more than an hour when he wasn't high -- awake or asleep! I remember seeing one of his rare taped interviews. The disastrous effect of decades of ganja smoking was horrifying to behold. His confusion was grotesque. No matter what question the reporter asked his answers were incoherent. the reporter asked him to explain his music and he couldn't. the reporter asked him to explain the rasta way of life, and he couldn't. Then he began getting angry with himself for his grotesque performance.
That's when he began attacking the reporter for being a "tool of the oppressor" only interested in spreading lies.
This was the first time I had ever seen a Marley interview. I could not believe what a pathetic human being he was. Never had I seen such vivid evidence of how weed rots the brain and soul.

And this is precisely what the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA) says smoking marijuana will do to YOU! No guessing here, people. Smoke marijuana and the THC will rot your brain. Look forward to it.

Also, the fact that alcohol causes liver disease in no way lessens what THC does to the body, so please, Negro, don't even bring that dumb shit up.

Also, according to NIDA smoking the shit doubles or triples the likelihood of developing cancer of the head or neck. Marley died of a cancer tumor in his head. So why do you idiots contiueconsume this poison? Why?

Rastas will tell you that ganja is a "gift from God" that it was placed on the earth to "give humankind enlightenment and love." But Rastas will also tell you that Haile Selassie was a prophet and blacks are descended of the five tribes of Israel. Do you believe that idiocy too or is it you just believe them when they say weed is good for you?

Brothers and sisters, if you don't know about the science or reject the science you are a ignorant fool. Smoke weed and in a little time you will end up a confused, incoherent, cancer-riddled basket-case just like Marley.

Weed kills. And Bob Marley was no hero.

Commentary: Bush’s Cronies Shouldn’t Be Only Ones to Profit from Gulf Rebuilding

2005-10-08T12:33:00.000-07:00

Commentary: Bush’s Cronies Shouldn’t Be Only Ones to Profit from Gulf Rebuilding
By: Judge Greg Mathis, Special to BlackAmericaWeb.com
Copyright, BlackAmericaWeb.com

After Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, the federal government set aside over $62 billion in emergency funds to be used for, among other things, aid to victims and post-storm clean up. Now that the critical rebuilding process has begun, independent contractors are being called in to help with everything from debris removal to roof repair. This will be a large-scale and complicated effort; there are millions of dollars to be made. What’s ironic is that friends of the federal government -- the same federal government that was negligent in its handling of the disaster -- are now benefiting from the devastation caused by the storm.

A major “winner” in the post-Hurricane clean up work is the Shaw Group. Based in Baton Rouge, the construction and engineering firm received two $100 million no-bid contracts -- one from Federal Emergency Management Agency, the other from the Corps of Engineers -- to work on levees and to pump water out of New Orleans. Joe M. Allbaugh, President Bush’s 2000 campaign manager and a former director of the FEMA, is a lobbyist who represents the Shaw Group and Halliburton, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former employer. Kellogg Brown & Root, a Halliburton subsidiary, stands to earn millions under a no-bid contract for work at Naval facilities in Louisiana and Mississippi. Cheney was Halliburton’s CEO until 2001; he stepped down after the presidential elections.

Unfortunately, minority-owned businesses aren’t quite as lucky as the president’s friends. About 1.5 percent of the $1.6 billion already awarded by FEMA has gone to minority businesses. That’s less than one third of the five percent usually required.

To expedite the rebuilding process, Congress and the Bush administration decided to waive certain rules, like open and competitive bidding, for Hurricane Katrina recovery contracts. This opened the door for companies like Shaw, which already had the ear of the decision makers, to lay claim to the billions at stake.

As a result, minority-owned firms are pushed to the side, along with the debris.

This scenario is all too familiar. In 2001, Kellogg Brown & Root was awarded a no-bid contract worth several hundred million dollars by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to repair Iraq's oil infrastructure and put out oil fires.

For far too long, the wealthy establishment in this country has prospered on the backs of the poor. We can no longer allow this to continue. To see the same circle of individuals that were originally neglectful -- directly contributing to the loss of property and human lives -- now profit in Katrina’s aftermath is appalling. It is also unacceptable to know that minority-owned firms are losing out on these multi-million dollar contracts. It only seems fair that a majority of the clean up work in New Orleans, a predominantly black city, should go to local firms, owned by people of color. These companies and their employees have ties to the community. These personal, emotional and financial connections are necessary to ensure the city is rebuilt and repopulated as quickly as possible.

With millions being handed out in such a haphazard manner, there are plenty of opportunities for waste and fraud; the federal government must be held accountable. As a community, we must protest this good old-boy network and publicly criticize the way these government contracts are being awarded.

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Judge Greg Mathis is chairman of the Rainbow PUSH-Excel Board and a national board member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.