Wokists Want Cheating for Black Students at UCLA, Prof Who Said No, Suing for his Suspension and Banning

Just when one thinks cancel culture and wokism cannot become more deranged, news comes a UCLA professor, Gordon Klein, is fighting back against his past suspension and banning for his refusal to help black students cheat, (see Common Sense with Bari Weiss).

Reports Newsweek:

A University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) professor who was suspended and later reinstated for refusing to give Black students leniency on their final exams following the death of George Floyd has filed a lawsuit against the school.

Gordon Klein, who teaches financial analysis, law, and public policy at UCLA,filed a lawsuit Monday claiming that he suffered financially and emotionally because of the incident. Although he retained his position, Klein alleged he was dropped from consulting jobs at law firms and other corporations and that his reputation was tarnished as a result.

Klein discussed his reasons for suing the school with a post on the website 'Common Sense with Bari Weiss' and said he was seeking unspecified damages 'not only to correct the tortures he had endured but also to protect academic freedom.'

A group of UCLA students had targeted 80 professors and demanded black UCLA students' performance on final exams be treated with "leniency," if poor grades resulted, specifying that the grades be registered only if black students did well.

This "no harm" grading system for black students only was demanded following the George Floyd murder.

Klein refused, and was summarily suspended and banned from the UCLA campus, (see Common Sense with Bari Weiss) before being reinstated in Oct 2020. 

Now, Klein is suing the University of California system, (Reason).

Writes Klein: "As I noted in my legal complaint, the student clarified, in a subsequent conversation with a university investigator, that he 'intended that the requested adjustments apply to Black students and not the class generally.'"

Klein had sent a reply to the student claiming to speak for all black students, and was met with a shower of invective; "One email, dated June 11, read: 'You are a typical bigoted, prejudiced and racist dirty, filthy, crooked, arrogant Jew kike mother f**ker! Too bad Hitler and the Nazis are not around to give you a much needed Zyklon B shower.'"

This is the mentality of wokes who would judge people by skin color, disregarding character and all other qualities and commitment, as they sink into old-school anti-Semitism.

Diversity Idiocy Is Rearing Its Head, Looking for Big Money Following Chauvin Verdict

Vicki McKenna is a heretic and radio
personality in Madison, Wisconsin.

Update: Madison West High School principal apologizes for email scheduling racially segregated meetings

Madison, Wisconsin — Diversity consultants look to ramp up their snake oil sales in the wake of important legal victories against racism, especially George Floyd.

Race consultants are making out like bandits sermonizing their fallacious drivel to corporations, police departments, universities, and all manner of education.

Here in Madison, Wisconsin local radio personality Vicki McKenna has had enough.

Vicki McKenna blew the whistle on the Madison Metropolitan School District's politically correct-identity politics tripe in the wake of the verdict against the killer cop Derek Chauvin.

The School District featured Zoom links for "white parents" and for "parents of color," in strict accordance to the ridiculous way liberal dogma describes race and racism.

This idiocy was too much. Writes McKenna:

Jim Crow 2.0, courtesy of the Madison School District. pic.twitter.com/qMKwHu4mMp

— Vicki McKenna (@VickiMcKenna) April 23, 2021

McKenna is right. Her tweet was picked up by Glenn Greenwald who added his own experience with the separate-by-color, identity politics practice.

For the last (and actually only) diversity session I attended before leaving The Intercept, the highly-paid outside consultant emailed everyone before saying employees would be divided by race into different rooms (white room & POC room) and it was shocking. Now it's standard: https://t.co/0c6YmFMCX0

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 23, 2021

Near the start of the session, before we were segregated by race, one employee of mixed race -- one white parent, the other parent Indian-American -- nervously and earnestly asked which room she should go into. This dividing people up this way is going to have long-term impact.

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 23, 2021

Most of us have had our own experience with diversity consultants.

At one well-meaning company, (though the diversity consultants were cynical), a week-long diversity training seminar feature consultants explaining that we all have biases, a comment on human nature that we are just empty vessels to be filled somehow with prejudices, with no mention how critical reasoning and independent thinking played into who we are.

On the last day, each of the seminar participants confessed to her bias. Some mentioned Italian people, some mentioned black people, and so on.

When it my turn, I announced I had no biases and I was disappointed that everyone had jettisoned rational thinking to adopt bigotries. It's idiocy.

A friend at the company asked how the seminar went and I told her. She said, her admission of people against whom she had a bias was, 'Germans of a certain age."

Diversity consultants are good for a laugh, but this swindle is taking our country by storm.

Matt Taibbi too had a good laugh, but these corporate-consultant hucksters rake in a lot of money from credulous liberals.

Writes Taibbi in his scathing review of Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility last year:

A core principle of the academic movement that shot through elite schools in America since the early nineties was the view that individual rights, humanism, and the democratic process are all just stalking-horses for white supremacy. The concept, as articulated in books like former corporate consultant Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility (Amazon’s #1 seller!) reduces everything, even the smallest and most innocent human interactions, to racial power contests. ...

DiAngelo isn’t the first person to make a buck pushing tricked-up pseudo-intellectual horseshit as corporate wisdom, but she might be the first to do it selling Hitlerian race theory. White Fragility has a simple message: there is no such thing as a universal human experience, and we are defined not by our individual personalities or moral choices, but only by our racial category.

If your category is “white,” bad news: you have no identity apart from your participation in white supremacy ('Anti-blackness is foundational to our very identities… Whiteness has always been predicated on blackness'), which naturally means 'a positive white identity is an impossible goal.'

DiAngelo instructs us there is nothing to be done here, except 'strive to be less white.' To deny this theory, or to have the effrontery to sneak away from the tedium of DiAngelo’s lecturing – what she describes as 'leaving the stress-inducing situation' – is to affirm her conception of white supremacy. This intellectual equivalent of the 'ordeal by water' (if you float, you’re a witch) is orthodoxy across much of academia.

Greenwald too has been bashing this hokum for years:

The diversity and inclusion consultancy industry is creepy, authoritarian, cultish and toxic, with a painfully cramped and stilted understanding of how people interact with each other and the rules they must obey. There's a reason - several reasons - the corporate world loves it.

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 29, 2020

Radical, independent thinkers lead the most recent movement against American racism. 

Let's foster young intellectuals, and not suppress their minds with dogma.

Identity Politics — Dennis Hopper and Quentin Tarantino May Save Career of Academic Whose Human Identity Is Center of Kook Storm

Madison, Wisconsin — Race traitors are among us.

Make it, Race charlatans are among us. They have betrayed us.

Correction: Race charlatans are ethnicity charlatans or People-of-color charlatans who have betrayed us, and must be banished.

Identity politics — the cuckoo, nonsensical, irrational racial conception scheme that ascribes to you your identity — has been driven into new depths of inanity, (Inside HigherEd).

From the Wisconsin State Journal comes a report of a person-of-color charlatan who has admitted to corrupting the neo-fascist, liberal human classification system popular with Democrats, some quasi-academics and those pretending to agreement.

Reports Kelly Meyerhofer in the State Journal on this scandal that would make 19th century British anthropologists shake their heads:

CV Vitolo-Haddad, a graduate student in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication who uses they/them pronouns, said they identify as Southern Italian/Sicilian. But in a series of apologies issued over the past week, they said they have distorted their ancestry, failed to correct others’ assumptions about their ethnic origins and relied on their parents’ 'conflicting stories' of their heritage.

'I have let guesses about my ancestry become answers I wanted but couldn’t prove,' Vitolo-Haddad wrote in an apology posted Sunday on the blogging platform Medium. 'I have let people make assumptions when I should have corrected them.'

In a second apology posted Tuesday, Vitolo-Haddad wrote that when asked if they identify as Black on three separate occasions, they did not say no.

'In trying to make sense of my experiences with race, I grossly misstepped and placed myself in positions to be trusted on false premises,' Vitolo-Haddad wrote. 'I went along with however people saw me. … All of those actions were deeply misguided and have caused an incredible amount of hurt for the Madison community, those I organize with, and everyone who has been exposed to this public reckoning. It was my choice and error to identify any differently.'

I feel sorry for Ms. Vitolo-Haddad.

And it-she-they-lifeform [sorry for being being Carbon-centric]-space-time-system should retract their apologies and blow the whistle on the racist ideology that is racking up actual victims as its zealots go to absurd length to protect old-school genocide and slavery in theory and practice.

CV Vitolo-Haddad did not fail to correct erroneous assumptions and also identify herself in error.

Let me explain.

She, I mean they is a Southern Italian/Sicilian. Right?

Well, I just watched Dennis Hopper explain to Christopher Walken in True Romance (Tony Scott, 1993) that the Moors invaded ancient Italy and raped a sufficient number of white Italians to make Sicilians a bonefide, how did Hopper put it, a boenfide 'person of color 1,200 years later,' is what he said.

I think we owe gratitude to True Romance screenwriter, Quentin Tarantino, and Dennis Hopper for explaining how and why Vitolo-Haddad could not and did not erroneously identify with people of color.

Then again, we can also thank such endeavors like the UW-Madison Dept of Geology and Geophysics, Biomedical Sciences, Paleontology and Genetics, for example, for their heretical work that includes findings that the human species is some 300,000 years old, we are composed of several non-human species, and race-ethnicity-people-of-whatever is nonsense that noone can seriously misrepresent any more than they can fail to correct that she is a Chicago Bears fan.

So, science, history, Dennis Hopper and Christopher Walken may save CV Vitolo-Haddad.

But I find myself wondering how much of the University system is worth saving. 

Here's Dennis Hopper explaining to Christopher Walken in True Romance (Tony Scott, 1993) the vacuity of race and the interconnections of humanity, even for those who deny we are all of the same species.

Michael Johnson of Boys, Girls Clubs of Dane County Confers Legitimacy onto Leading Wisconsin Racist

Updated - Madison, Wisconsin — Shame on Michael Johnson, President and CEO of Boys and Girls Clubs of Dane County.

Johnson has been back on the job for two years, but this is plenty of time for him to sell out and self-deal.

Johnson breathlessly posted in social media the news he is meeting with Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R) this week. 

Then the Johnson-Vos summit was close, Johnson wrote. 

Then Johnson emerged with secret "immediate action steps" to protect black and brown youth. What are these action steps; Johnson didn't say, (WISC-TV)?

But Johnson did get his headlines, and the man who goes by the handle, MJohnsonCEO on Twitter, has met another objective, getting his name in the news and upping his profile.

The problem is Johnson in the process is legitimizing a leading Wisconsin racist, Robin Vos, as Republican police have morphed into sadism and open allegiance with white power citizen groups, as Republicans cheer them on.

Two lives taken by GOP-supported racists, Jacob Blake's spinal cord severed, organs eviscerated, and Johnson plays for headlines?

Johnson calls himself a "change agent."

 

But Vos is not a good-faith player, and we are going to long for the days that Republicans committed mere petty acts of juvenile spite and mass incarceration.

 

What drives Johnson conferring legitimacy onto Vos? 

 

It's the monarch syndrome, a delusion of royalty. 

 

The narcissistic belief of Michael Johnson's is that he is a king, and, indeed, his highness is hostile to public criticism of his public performance, which Johnson sees as seditious libel, or being "disrespect(ed)," in his description.

I have news for Michael Johnson. This is a classical liberal democracy and a semi-free country, though political speech of public figures is one aspect in which we do lead the world.

Conferring legitimacy onto racists for headlines is a betrayal. Johnson was wrong to do it for cheap headlines to up his profile.

 

But I look forward to reading all about these "immediate action steps" from the increasingly narcissistic and dishonest Michael Johnson.

Vos, police and Republicans are not seeking dialogue. As Scott Gordon writes, "people [are] exploding in fury against racist policing" that kill and maim.

And Republicans in black and blue and gerrymandered offices are cheering them on. Johnson giving these people cover in their lies should be challenged repeatedly.

Desperate Scott Walker Asks Appellate Court to Kill Fed Injunction Against Voter ID

Updates II: See The Wisconsin Supreme Court Is Not Conservative (Fischer).

Update: See also Firestone, New York Times: "An enduring Republican fantasy is that there are armies of fraudulent voters lurking in the baseboards of American life, waiting for the opportunity to crash the polls and undermine the electoral system. It’s never really been clear who these voters are or how their schemes work; perhaps they are illegal immigrants casting votes for amnesty, or poor people seeking handouts.  Most Republican politicians know these criminals don’t actually exist, but they have found it useful to take advantage of the party base’s pervasive fear of outsiders, just as when they shot down immigration reform. In this case, they persuaded the base of the need for voter ID laws to ensure 'ballot integrity,' knowing the real effect would be to reduce Democratic turnout."
---
Rick Hasen and Josh Gerstein have the story.

Scott Walker is running the numbers on his reelection and he is scared, so desperate that he wants to keep as many people away from the polls as possible.

Hence, Wisconsin's corrupt GOP Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen filed a new motion for Scott Walker asserting that the federal court's April 2014 "injunction purports to permanently enjoin a voting regulation that is designed to preserve the right to vote of all eligible Wisconsin voters," notes Gerstein.

Though Scott Walker and Van Hollen have produced zero instances of in-person voter fraud, Van Hollen asserts anyway that in-person voter fraud is "real."

And so is the Devil whom Justice Antonin Scalia fears.

Evidence is a bad thing in the minds of Walker and Van Hollen.

Van Hollen and Walker both publicly refuse to comment on the mountain of evidence presented at trial last year that showed 100,000s of people would be disenfranchised by Act 23, the GOP's voter obstruction law now enjoined.

U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman recognized this evidence on fabricated notions of voter fraud and real people whose right to vote would be destroyed, writing, "The evidence at trial established that virtually no voter impersonation occurs in Wisconsin. The defendants (Scott Walker et al) could not point to a single instance of known voter impersonation occurring in Wisconsin at any time in the recent past." [pp 11,12]

Hillary Still Trying to Bring Down Our Ship

via MAL Contends

When an American politician in the presidential general election campaign says his/her opponent is out-of-the-mainstream, it's a lie.

The losing opponent will garner at least some 45 percent of the vote, disconfirming out-of-the-mainstream status, though election votes are imprecise indicators of public opinion.

The complex reality of the American political culture sees support for universal health care, social security for our seniors, full employment, as well as a mass base for fascism, racist policies at home, a decided antipathy to civil liberties, and near-genocidal wars of aggression abroad, amid what can most accurately be described as a depoliticized electorate.

But the he's-not-like-us charge is aimed at the person; a personal attack that the opponent is somehow alien, out-of-touch, different, elitist, not-of-this-culture, even malicious and the related charge that he/she is dangerous and unpredictable.

This charge is particularly ugly when there is a racial element to it, as there has been in every general election since the Republicans' southern strategy was first employed by Nixon in 1968, through Reagan (recall the Philadelphia, Miss speech blowing the racial dog-whistle right where the civil rights workers, Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, were murdered), through the Bushes and soon McCain/Lieberman.

But one does not expect to hear this charge by a Democrat against another Democrat in the primary. But Hillary has employed the tactic time and again since getting killed in Wisconsin (Feb. 19). [After the April 1 election, I have to wonder if it would have worked.]

And the desperate Hillary is at it again, using this line of attack in the Democratic primary, and the charge is just as fallacious, and even more disgusting because it's doubtful that Hillary can win in the primary, though she may inflict damage to Obama weakening him in a general election.

Hillary's latest slimy appeal is based on Obama's recent statement that recognizes that many Americans are bitter, which of-course they are.

Said Obama, " ... it's not surprising then that they [people of rural Pennsylvania] get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Obama was trying to build bridges and unify, anathema to Republicans and Hillary who count on division and the worst angels of American political nature to prevail in elections.

And the political frustration-aggression hypothesis that Obama poses is spot-on as one group blames another for their ills, though Obama's winning is just too much for Hillary and the down-home crowd she pretends to represent.

Said Clinton: "Sen. Obama's remarks are elitist, and they are out of touch. The people of faith I know don't 'cling to' religion because they're bitter. ... I also disagree with Sen. Obama's assertion that people in this country 'cling to guns' and have certain attitudes about immigration or trade simply out of frustration.
I stopped posting Slate's The Hillary Deathwatch on my blog, because it's enough to know that the witch is history, but not soon enough.

Clinton video is below.

Obama Speech Draws Raves

Via PocketNines at Kos

Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial:
With his brilliant speech on race relations yesterday at the National Constitution Center, Barack Obama showed why his campaign for president has the aura of a mission.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Editorial:
As an example of contemporary oratory, it was stunning. As political rhetoric, it was designed to do far more than damage control and, in the end, distilled the essence of his candidacy.

New York Times Editorial:
We can’t know how effective Mr. Obama’s words will be with those who will not draw the distinctions between faith and politics that he drew, or who will reject his frank talk about race. What is evident, though, is that he not only cleared the air over a particular controversy — he raised the discussion to a higher plane.

Los Angeles Times Editorial:
No single speech will recalibrate America's consideration of race and politics, but we are closer today, thanks to this remarkable address, to facing our history and perfecting our nation.

Dallas Morning News Editorial:
Has any major U.S. politician in modern times ever given a speech about race in America as unflinching, human and ultimately hopeful as the one Barack Obama delivered yesterday? ...

It was possibly the most important major speech on race in America since Dr. King died, and it probably saved Mr. Obama's candidacy. If, in the end, Barack Obama does not win the nomination, let it never be said that he did not serve his country.

Chicago Sun-Times Editorial:
So Obama, in that exceptional way he has of brushing aside polemics, stepped up to a podium in Philadelphia and challenged us to see all the shades of gray, to embrace our greater and shared humanity.

It was a moving moment in American history to hear a man who could be president dissect the rancorous matter of race with such candor, and it called to mind other piercing addresses by the likes of FDR, Kennedy and King.

Sacramento Bee Editorial:
This was not a campaign speech; it was Barack Obama speaking to the ages. Clearly, he has thought about this issue for a very long time. Americans can learn from him, no matter what course the campaign may take.

Boston Globe Editorial:
... Obama took the opportunity to engage the question of race in America, starting a bold, uncomfortably honest conversation. He asked Americans to talk openly about the deep wells of anger and resentment over racism, discrimination, and affirmative action. It's a call to break out of the country's racial stalemate and finally reach a new national understanding.

Seattle Times Editorial:
In the annals of American history, a watershed moment should come from "A More Perfect Union," Sen. Barack Obama's powerful speech linking 221 years of race relations.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch Editorial:
On Tuesday morning, at a moment of maximum peril to his own ambitions, Sen. Barack Obama delivered not just a speech, but an extraordinary gift to America: A way to transcend racial divisions and political cynicism and set about the task of forming a more perfect union.

The 45-minute address, delivered to an audience of 200 elected officials and religious leaders at Philadelphia's Constitution Center, would have been remarkable under any circumstances. Under the circumstances that beset the senator from Illinois, it was the equivalent of a World Series walk-off grand-slam home run, a singular moment in the history of American political rhetoric.

Houston Chronicle Editorial:
Obama, confronted with flaws in his own church "family," passes these tests. His thoughtful exploration of those flaws certainly was good for his campaign. But by fully and realistically exploring and discussing the hard topic of race, Obama did more. He showed deep understanding of this complex culture, and faith in the strength of the national family.

Newsday Editorial:
The complex calculus of racial animus in this nation is real. And it is powerful. And, as Obama said, "to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races." This nation needs to bridge that chasm. One speech won't do it. Nor will one candidacy. But it would help if we stop using race as a political cudgel.

Newark Star-Ledger Editorial:
This was not a speech written by a political spinmeister just back from taking the pulse of the latest focus group. It was the heartfelt speech of a man who has spent a good part of his life thinking about what it means to be an American.

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Editorial:
When we think of words in politics or governance that had to be said, we think of the Gettysburg Address or Franklin Delano Roosevelt's admonition that all we had to fear was "fear itself." And now we think of Obama's speech on race - words that sorely needed saying.

San Jose Mercury-News Editorial:
If Obama is, as we hope, the leader who can draw people across political divides to create real change and a renewed optimism in America, then confronting race head-on was inevitable. Perhaps Pastor Wright did us all a favor.

The Oregonian Editorial::
But every American, young and old, should hear this speech. Obama certainly isn't a post-racial candidate, if there is such a thing, and he didn't claim to be one Tuesday. But he did offer an inspiring vision of a nation where unity eclipses division, and where the identity we cherish most is the one we all share: American.

Des Moines Register Editorial:
His speech was frank and honest. And it offered hope that by confronting the racial resentments that continue to divide us, this nation can move forward toward becoming a more tolerant and understanding place.

Rochester Democrat and Chronicle Editorial:
Then again, Obama has already astounded conventional wisdom with the progress he's made in this year's presidential campaign. For the nation's sake, hope that America's conscience was at least pricked to want to do better.

Kansas City Star Editorial:
It would have been politically expedient for Obama to disown Wright totally. But in a reflection of his own integrity, Obama said Wright was instrumental in the development of his faith and had other virtues that his critics were ignoring.

Eugene Robinson, Washington Post:
Yesterday morning, in what may be remembered as a landmark speech regardless of who becomes the next president, Obama established new parameters for a dialogue on race in America that might actually lead somewhere -- that might break out of the sour stasis of grievance and countergrievance, of insensitivity and hypersensitivity, of mutual mistrust.

Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Dish:
I have never felt more convinced that this man's candidacy - not this man, his candidacy - and what he can bring us to achieve - is an historic opportunity. This was a testing; and he did not merely pass it by uttering safe bromides. He addressed the intimate, painful love he has for an imperfect and sometimes embittered man. And how that love enables him to see that man's faults and pain as well as his promise. This is what my faith is about. It is what the Gospels are about. This is a candidate who does not merely speak as a Christian. He acts like a Christian.

Courtland Milloy, Washington Post
Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), who co-chairs the Maryland for Obama campaign, hit the nail on the head when he told me: "Obama has the ability to elevate our thinking beyond the chicken-yard scratching and biting. He calls on us to soar like eagles. And if he can't always take you there, he can sure dare you to go."

David Corn, MotherJones.com:
With this address, Obama was trying to show the nation a pathway to a society free of racial gridlock and denial. Moreover, he declared that bridging the very real racial divide of today is essential to forging the popular coalition necessary to transform America into a society with a universal and effective health care system, an education system that serves poor and rich children, and an economy that yields a decent-paying jobs for all. Obama was not playing the race card. He was shooting the moon.

John Dickerson, Slate:
Can you give a State of the Union address before you're president? Barack Obama talked about race in America for 45 minutes in a nearly 5,000-word speech. That was longer than some of the annual presidential addresses, and though, yes, those speeches tend to cover more topics, this one felt like it addressed the actual state of our union more than those dreary January list readings presidents are obligated to perform.

Janny Scott, New York Times:
Yet the speech was also hopeful, patriotic, quintessentially American — delivered against a blue backdrop and a phalanx of stars and stripes. Mr. Obama invoked the fundamental values of equality of opportunity, fairness, social justice. He confronted race head-on, then reached beyond it to talk sympathetically about the experiences of the white working class and the plight of workers stripped of jobs and pensions.

Jonathan Alter, Newsweek:
In introducing the speech, Harris Wofford, the former senator from Pennsylvania, hinted at the historic weight that hung over the occasion. Wofford, a friend of Martin Luther King Jr.'s and a onetime adviser to President John F. Kennedy, recalled a White House conversation with King, after Kennedy had informed King that there would be no quick vote on the sweeping civil rights legislation pending. "Martin turned to me and said, 'I had hoped we at long last had a president who had the intelligence to understand this problem and the political skill to solve it and the moral passion to see it through. I'm convinced ... that he has got the intelligence and the skill. We'll have to see if he has the passion'."
Wofford suggested that Obama did in fact possess all three qualities. The critics, reporters, cable commentators—and ultimately the voters—will all be weighing that assertion in the aftermath of the most personal and extensive discussion of the legacy of slavery made by any major American politician in memory. For the moment, Obama gave them much more to talk about than the sermons of Jeremiah Wright.

Jim Mitchell, Dallas Morning News:
Politicians rarely achieve such a depth of humanity, in part because they're captive to narrow life experiences, rigid ideology or consultants. It's one thing to know intellectually that race is still a factor in American life and how it polls. It's quite another to eloquently express the profound stain of past racial injustices without being trite, hostile or unabashedly partisan.

Jon Robin Baitz, Huffington Post:
Today we saw and heard a preview of our brightest possible American future in Senator Barack Obama's glorious speech. This, then, is what it means to be presidential. To be moral. To have a real center. To speak honestly, from the heart, for the benefit of all. If there was any doubt about what we have missed in the anti-intellectual, ruthlessly incurious Bush years, and even the slippery Clinton ones (the years of "what is is"), those doubts were laid to rest by Barack Obama's magisterial speech today. A speech in which he distanced himself from a flawed father figure, Reverend Wright, and did so with almost Shakespearian dignity and honor.

Happy Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

[Editor's Note: And a hearty Happy Birthday to my mother today, an Irish, black-taxi-riding woman from Georgia who remains committed to treating all human beings as human beings and is a true inspiration to justice. Anita sees hope in human kindness small and large, and is a big Obama fan. Peace.]

Update: Barack Obama on King (nice)

- Martin Luther King, Jr.'s last speech

From TalkLeft

by Jeralyn

I hope we all take a few minutes today to reacquaint ourselves with the extraordinary wisdom, vision and passion of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Some of my favorites:

- A one-minute video that features excerpts from Dr. King's 1967 speech, Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence , April 4, 1967, Riverside Church, New York City, amidst images of King, Vietnam, Bush, Iraq and more.

- Letter From Birmingham Jail (pdf), April 16, 1963

- I've Been to the Mountaintop: April 3, 1968. Dr. King's last speech, the day before his assassination, in support of the striking Memphis sanitation workers.

- The I Have a Dream Speech

###

Why Are So Many Americans in Prison?

Glenn C. Loury at the Boston Review asked a much-needed question. Why does America take away so many of its citzens' liberties? According to a 2005 report of the International Centre for Prison Studies in London, the United States—with five percent of the world’s population—houses 25 percent of the world’s inmates. Our incarceration rate (714 per 100,000 residents) is almost 40 percent greater than those of our nearest competitors (the Bahamas, Belarus, and Russia). Never before has a supposedly free country denied basic liberty to so many of its citizens. In December 2006, some 2.25 million persons were being held in the nearly 5,000 prisons and jails that are scattered across America’s urban and rural landscapes. ... One third of inmates in state prisons are violent criminals, convicted of homicide, rape, or robbery. But the other two thirds consist mainly of property and drug offenders. Why? Writes Loury: A more convincing argument is that imprisonment rates have continued to rise while crime rates have fallen because we have become progressively more punitive: not because crime has continued to explode (it hasn’t), not because we made a smart policy choice, but because we have made a collective decision to increase the rate of punishment. Loury posits the war on drugs and America's continuing essential racism as other contributing factors to the obscenely high incarceration rate, and correctly identifies and indicts the American voters who routinely reward the punitive-inclined policymakers. But I think Loury ignores the two main culprits: Fear and fear-mongering careerism. The fear that a family will typically feel for another family member in an violence-obsessed media-society and the political careerists (like in Dane County, Wisconsin, District Atty Brian Blanchard and former Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson) who will cater to the most base instincts and insecurities clears the field for the punitive-inclined policymakers who in their liberty-depriving, family-destroying frenzy make America about as freedom-loving a place domestically as it is a peace-loving presence in its foreign policy abroad. Loury does make mention of a population "(s)toked by fear and political opportunism ... ," but in a depoliticized society like the United States where fear and lavish attention to the trivial and meaningless (celebrity, reality shows, sports and so on) continue, I think Loury needs to link the violent prison-industrial complex as a logical outgrowth of our depoliticized culture maintained by the corporate-media. Encouraging a population not to think will inevitably result in more state violence such the liberty-destroying criminal justice system domestically. ###