The Onion sets forth the case for fingerprinting and photographing foreigners (the foreign-looking ones, that is).
Author Archives: Josh Eidelson
Ever since Reagan signed MLK Day into law, Martin Luther King has, one suspects, made an annual habit of rolling in his grave, as politicians from both sides of the aisle scramble to repackage the ardent radical as a non-threatening role model who wanted to desegregate water fountains. This year, Bush has apparently made a last minute decision to take a trip to see Dr. King’s grave himself – followed by a $2,000 a plate fundraising dinner. The graveside visit, as the Center for American Progress points out, the graveside visit allows Bush to pass the trip’s costs back to the American people. And there’s more:
Because of all the tight security, access to a historic black church near the memorial site will be limited. The church will be the site of a civil rights symposium, and initially, the Secret Service told organizers they would have to cut it short. But after discussions and threats by black leaders to lock themselves in the church, the Secret Service agreed to keep the church open.
As King Associate Rev. James Orange observed:
I feel disrespected by the administration and the Secret Service. On Dr. King’s birthday last year, his administration initiated plans to gut affirmative action. Here we are a year later, and the same person who tried to turn back the clock on me wants to use Dr. King’s birthday because it’s an election year.
South Korea is trying to crush its migrant workers’ national trade union with deportations and police power. Workers have been sitting in in protest in the Myongdong Cathedral in central Seoul for over two months. Watch what they’re up against here.
The company which owns the Hartford Hilton on property leased from the city decided to sell it to a company that planned to close it for renovations and fire its entire union workforce. So the mayor took a stand and exercised the city’s right, as the property owner, to beat the offer, bought the hotel, and is selling it to a more progressive employer.
There’s no way I would have been watching The West Wing this season if not for a perhaps perverse sense of loyalty to what it was back when it was Aaron Sorkin’s show. The writing, as many have observed, has tanked, and everything else has gone down with it. Tonight, however, may have been a new low. Whereas Sorkin could actually (and did) make the census riveting television, this season’s writers have made the policy discussion so dry and so trite that the one clever line of the show was when Leo responds to the President’s monologue by asking the others whether they were taking notes. And the character development may actually be worse. It was only in the last minutes of the episode, however, that I was offended in a way I can’t remember ever (despite often coming down pretty far to the left of the positions advanced there) being offended by the show.
President Bartlett has rightfully chosen to take a strong stance against mandatory minimums in drug sentencing and has commuted the sentences of thirty-some first-time non-violent drug offenders stuck with outrageous sentences under mandatory minimums. After the State of the Union, he’s introduced to a Black woman who’s one of the thirty-plus just released and expresses her gratitude. At this point Bartlett launches into a lecture on how lucky she is to be getting a second chance, how dire the consequences if she screws up again, how much the futures of other prison inmates are riding on her behavior, and how important it is that she appreciate her freedom. The sight (fictitious or not) of a white Nobel Laureate/ US President born to privilege taking the opportunity of having taken small steps towards ameliorating awful, punitive, and racist policy lecturing a Black woman who’s just made it out of years of humiliating and unjust punishment for a non-violent offense on how grateful she should be to him and how if she played by the rules he might be more magnanimous to others of her kind was offensive to the point of being difficult to watch. And that the woman simply smiles, blushes, and thanks him again for his kindness is absurd. I expected better.
This is nice news for the Dean campaign; this is very, very good news for it. It’ll be interesting to see what those who saw Mosely-Braun as a DLC puppet running to draw Black votes away from Sharpton will make of her endorsement of the man who calls them the “Republican wing of the Democratic party.” Although, come to think of it, this year’s primary schedule was also supposed to help assure the ascendence of a candidate approved by the Democratic establishment, and look how that worked out.
The Pennsylvania ACLU and and Center for Democracy and Technology are bringing legal challenge against a state web censorship law which has blocked over a million legal websites. A victory there could provide momentum towards overturning state laws in several nearby states which levy punishment against public institutions which fail to restrict the right of adults and children to access information on the web. Let’s hope so.
The Boston Globe takes a critical look at foundation donations and finds that much of it, as Paul Grogan of the Boston Foundation attests,
goes to established institutions that the givers are associated with in some way…very class-based — geared to elite institutions that serve the givers, their family members, and their class.
The recipients of the most cash from the top 1,000 non-profit foundations? Harvard and Stanford. Yale’s in the top twenty too – as are another thirteen prestigious universities.
One of the women on welfare I worked with at the Philadelphia Unemployment Project, Gerry, once said to me, “What we need to tell Washington is to give us caps and gowns, not wedding gowns.” Washington, unfortunately, isn’t listening. Bush’s new proposal to invest $1.5 billion not in vocational training, or daycare, food stamps, but in pressuring poor women to marry their children’s fathers is as misguided as it is offensive. One particular statistic proponents of such a plan should keep in mind: well over half of women on welfare report having been victims of domestic abuse. In other words, Bush’s proposal would drive women back into abusive relationships.
With 39% of DC precincts reporting, Dean leads 41 to Sharpton’s 36%.
The Immigrant Worker Freedom Ride Coalition has compiled critiques of the Bush Immigration Reform Proposal from the groups which have been organizing and fighting for progressive immigration reform for the past years – the National Immigration Forum, the National Council of La Raza, the American Immigration Lawyers Association, the Gamaliel Foundation, the AFL-CIO, and others. These statements should challenge anyone who believes that immigrants or their advocates can be bought off with partial solutions, or that Bush’s policy shift represents the peak of the movement.
Bush is now touting declining unemployment numbers:
Unemployment dropped today to 5.7 percent. That’s not good enough. We want more people still working. But nevertheless, it is a positive sign that the economy is getting better.
But as the Baltimore Sun reported:
The nation’s unemployment rate dropped sharply to a 14-month low in December, but underlying that positive number was grim economic news – only a handful of new jobs were created and hundreds of thousands of discouraged people dropped out of the work force.
In other words, the Bush economy is so strong, Americans have given up on even looking for jobs in it.
Josh Eidelson 