Twice as Good

The Washington Post argues that Marcus Mabry's book, Twice As Good: Condoleezza Rice And Her Path To Power, offers only a glimpse of the moderate-conservative Republican diplomat. "In Twice as Good, we encounter the secretary of state in a straightforward biography that is at once utterly predictable and moderately surprising. By the end of this exceptionally well-researched book, whatever opinion you take away probably will stem more from your own expectations than from the Condoleezza Rice portrayed in these pages.

For one thing, despite Mabry's meticulous research -- the book is divided into three parts, totals 13 chapters and is footnoted within an inch of its life -- Rice comes off as essentially the same person we've come to know over the past dozen years: intellectually tough, physically attractive, burnished. Confident in a know-it-all way, yet emotionally inscrutable. What accounts for her power? Her steely composure?

Her seemingly bottomless patience for President Bush's intellectual incuriosity? Mabry, a veteran journalist, gets the key in the lock but opens the door only wide enough to reveal a teasing sliver of the rooms beyond. Rice's back story is remarkable in terms of its archetypal place in mid-20th-century American social and political history: Born in segregated, post-World War II Alabama to striving parents, Rice wanted for little. Together, as the fires of racial change began raging across the Deep South, her parents endeavored to raise a daughter who was impervious to racism and discrimination.



They succeeded in keeping their daughter out of that fray, though they also made her aware of racism and its insidious potential to rot one's soul. Condoleezza Rice has never failed to cite her parents' and grandparents' keep-your-chin-up-and-work-harder-than-everyone-else strategy as a valuable part of her foundation. The book's title comes from a well-known saying among black families, at least black families of a certain era: 'Then as now, many African-American parents told their children, 'You have to be twice as good,'' Mabry writes. 'Meaning, they had to be twice as good...given you're black.'The Washington Post review continues:



"But Mabry suggests that this imperviousness to racism somehow smothered compassion and empathy toward others and hindered her ability to admit or countenance weakness of any kind in herself. More intriguingly, Mabry writes that Rice lacks a key internal ingredient, one that separates mere holders of power from the truly great leaders: a conduit for giving or receiving strong, sometimes messy, feelings....Between May and November 2006, Mabry interviewed Rice twice, totaling slightly more than three hours, for this book.



Not surprisingly, he found her 'radiating grace and warmth' and 'extraordinarily disciplined, the product of a generation of Southern African-Americans who believed strongly in propriety and a stark separation between the public and the private.'...The door is opened on her political aspirations, but Rice doesn't let Mabry see any more than she wants him to see. Thus, her political persona is firmly rooted in the here and now. Mabry writes smoothly and with confidence; he captures Rice's discipline and toughness, and he demonstrates cleanly where it originates. But Rice, even while agreeing to be interviewed by Mabry, succeeded in concealing the rooms we most wanted to see, the sachets, tchotchkes and hope chests that might have clued us in to the woman beneath the ramrod posture and perfect perm."

What Kind Of Black Are We?

Asks Afi-Odelia E. Scruggs of The Washington Post, in examining the Pan-Africanist dream:

"That used to be an easy question for Americans to answer. African American identity was built on two criteria: African ancestry and an ancestral connection to chattel slavery. We looked at skin color, hair texture, and the size of noses and lips to determine whether a person met the first criterion.

The second was assumed: If you were black in this country, somebody in your family had been enslaved. In the past 30 years, however, 1 million people have come from Africa to the United States -- more than were brought during the transatlantic slave trade. According to the most recent census figures, 1.5 million blacks claim Caribbean ancestry.

In fact, scholars say, the United States is the only place in the world where all of Africa's children -- native-born Africans, Afro Caribbeans, Afro Hispanics, Afro Europeans and African Americans -- are represented."She continues: "But the change has profound implications for the country's 35 million blacks. It sometimes leads to interracial tensions, which were on display during last week's CNN-YouTube Democratic presidential debate. A black college student asked Sen. Barack Obama -- whose mother is a white Kansan and whose father is Kenyan -- whether he is 'authentically black enough.' The student's question speaks to the larger issue of how to define blackness at a time when our gains in the United States are fragile. We are suspicious of interlopers reaping the fruits of a long history of labors in this country.



But now we have to talk about new ways to be black. We have to talk about standards other than ancestry and slavery. The 2000 Census provides a dramatic reason why. Although the majority of African Americans were born in the United States, nearly 25 percent of growth in the black population between 1990 and 2000 was due to immigration, according to John Logan, a sociology professor at Brown University who studies black immigration."And more: "Immigrants and native-born Americans of all races need to recognize that the old criteria don't fit the new reality.



'You can be 'African American' because of the enslavement experience,' said Tina Richardson, a Lehigh University psychologist who studies racial identity. 'You can be an 'African in America,' where you're grounded in an African experience other than the African American experience.'....African and Caribbean immigrants often talk about being Yoruba or Mande, about being from Barbados or from Trinidad. Because of slavery, many native-born blacks don't know their specific ethnic heritage and thus remain defined primarily by race. For now, we are African Americans, with more emphasis on the latter part of that identity than we might care to acknowledge."

MADE IN CHINA: HAZMAT!

What China seems to have forgotten about the marketplace is that the consumer buys products they can rely on.

Products that won't kill them, hurt them burn them. That's reasonable.

China never really got the concept of the individual and working for one's moral value. They were free market whores -- rampant, reckless economic freedom with no political freedom. Sorry folks, ain't gonna work in the long term.

The toothpaste with poison, the buns with cardboard .............. now this?

The marketplace will flee from Chinese products. You'll see.

Read (and see the wild pictures) here:

http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2007/07/made-in-china-h.html

Sorry Everyone

I want to apologise to everyone for not posting been away because
of a death in my family so I have not been posting; please accept my
apology.

Here is a free coupn for a free scoop of TCBY ice cream:http://www.glamour.com/images/sweeps/tcby.pdf

Not sure if they have one in every state but there is a TCBY in
Manhattan at Manhattan Mall in Herald Square.

Enjoy !

Richard

Happy Birthday, Dr. Biscet

Who is Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet?

Via e-mail, the Coalition of Cuban-American Women has one answer:

A black Cuban physician (Specialist in Internal Medicine) and follower of Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King, he is a leader in the peaceful civil rights movement that struggles to establish a state based on the rule of law through nonviolent civil disobedience in Cuba.

Arrested more than 26 times, Dr. Biscet is president of the unofficial Lawton Foundation for Human Rights in Havana, a pro-life, human rights organization. Due to his human rights activities, Dr. Biscet was expelled from the Cuban National Health System; prohibited from practicing as a physician in his own country; his wife was dismissed from her job as a nurse; and his family was evicted from their home.

He served a 3-year sentence in a maximum security prison 450 miles away from his home (1999-2002), accused of “insult to the symbols of the homeland," "public disorder," and "incitement to commit an offense," for displaying two Cuban flags in an inverted vertical position at a press conference where a public march was announced to denounce human rights violations during the 1999 Latin American Summit in Havana.

Dr. Biscet was released on October 31, 2002, was rearrested 36 days later, and was tried April 7, 2003, during a Cuban governmental crackdown that took place in March-April 2003. He was sentenced under Article 91 of the Penal Code to 25 years in prison. Since 1999, he has been confined to maximum-security prisons facilities under the most severe prison protocol and to punishment cells for refusing, as a prisoner of conscience, to obey any prison rule applied to common prisoners. On one occasion, he lost 40 pounds when he was placed in an underground dungeon with a dangerous criminal. He is presently suffering from severe essential hypertension, duodenal ulcer, osteoarthritis of the cervical spine, and he has lost most of his teeth due to a severe oral infection.

The 19th was Dr. Biscet's 46th birthday.

His wife pays tribute to Biscet, in a letter posted here.
(Cross-posted at Uncommon Sense.)

Al Qaeda Leadership Plays Richard Clarke the Fool

News today on the capture of Khaled Abdul-Fattah Dawoud Mahmoud al-Mashhadani in Iraq makes Richard Clarke, the former national security operations coordinator, look dim and foolish.

The discredited Richard Clarke published his analysis today on the latest National Intelligence Estimate, or NIE, that was released this week.

This is what he had to say about Al Qaeda in Iraq:

Second, the NIE notes that Al Qaeda may use "regional terrorist groups" and cites, as an example, "Al Qaeda in Iraq." What it does not say, but can be read between the lines: "Al Qaeda in Iraq" is a different organization than the folks in Pakistan and Afghanistan who attacked us. Put another way, the President is wrong when he claims that we are fighting in Iraq the people who attacked New York and Virginia. "Al Qaeda in Iraq" did not even exist until after we invaded Iraq.

No, Richard Clarke, you are wrong.

The news earlier today shows how far off you are on the Al Qaeda organization in Iraq. This is what was reported just today:


Khaled Abdul-Fattah Dawoud Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, also known as Abu Shahid, was captured in Mosul on July 4, said Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner, a military spokesman.

"Al-Mashhadani is believed to be the most senior Iraqi in the al-Qaida in Iraq network," Bergner said. He said al-Mashhadani was a close associate of Abu Ayub al-Masri, the Egyptian-born head of al-Qaida in Iraq.

Bergner said al-Mashhadani served as an intermediary between al-Masri and Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahri.

"In fact, communication between the senior al-Qaida leadership and al- Masri frequently went through al-Mashhadani," Bergner said.

"Along with al-Masri, al-Mashhadani co-founded a virtual organization in cyberspace called the Islamic State of Iraq in 2006," Bergner said. "The Islamic State of Iraq is the latest efforts by al-Qaida to market itself and its goal of imposing a Taliban-like state on the Iraqi people."

"In his words, the Islamic State of Iraq is a front organization that masks the foreign influence and leadership within al-Qaida in Iraq in an attempt to put an Iraqi face on the leadership of al-Qaida in Iraq," Bergner said.

You see, Mr. Clarke, these terrorists in Iraq ARE the same people who attacked New York and Virginia. Today we learned that Al Qaeda tried to fool the people in Iraq by putting an Iraqi face on the foreign run organization.

It looks like someone was fooled.

They fooled you, Richard Clarke.

Bond Must Go

by Shavar Jeffries


Julian Bond opened the NAACP convention yesterday with a speech as banal as it was irrelevant. Once again, he focused his fire on the Bush Administration, unloading invective after tired invective on the failures of the White House to address the material needs of the Black community.

He compared the federal government's inert response to Katrina to lynching ("Katrina, like lynching, not only destroyed the work of generations in a single day, but is resulting in a deliberate effort to dispossess black landholders."); he declared that the rejection of immigration reform further repudiates the Bush Presidency ("The extent of the [people's] repudiation, it was evident late last month when the immigration reform bill . . . died in the Senate."); and the coup de grace: he charged that the voluntary-integration decision alienated Black children from the law ("The Bush Court removed black children from the law's protection.") (I'm going to deal with that specific charge in a separate post).

In the process, he also reminded us that his NAACP is a social-justice organization concerned with racial discrimination, not a social-services organization concerned with meeting the practical needs of Black people: "[W]e are dedicated to an aggressive campaign of social justice, fighting racial discrimination.

We've done this in the past and will continue to do it in the future."Bond seems incapable of appreciating the yawning gulf between his vision for the NAACP and the concrete needs of the masses of Black families, who struggle mightily to raise children in communities ravaged by joblessness, bad schools, gang violence, single motherhood, and perhaps most pernicious, hopelessness. He offers nothing in the sort of a strategy to pragmatically address these challenges. Instead, he offers stale bromides about the twin obsessions of Bond's NAACP: government and White folk. As Bond would have it, Black folk's capacity to generate solutions to their challenges is apparently limited to petitioning either of these external powers.


And because the Bond NAACP's approach is so preoccupied with outside forces, he's left with little but the ad hominem when those forces don't share his concern for the Black community.Sadly, the NAACP -- the grand organization founded by W.E.B. DuBois and which was indispensable to the dismantling of Jim Crow -- is now a relic. We badly need a re-imagined, reinvigorated NAACP. As long as Julian Bond is at the helm, that new reality is implausible. Bond must go

Reality Series Chronicles Lives Of Spoiled Black Teens

"I have no problem with the Hills," 18-year-old Staci assures on yesterday's premiere of the Black Entertainment Television reality series "Baldwin Hills". "They have a problem with me."

Like many outsiders — Staci is the lone female cast member who doesn't live in the titular neighborhood — she is a bit defensive and too proud to really admit it, instead passing judgment on the show's better-heeled girls by feigning disinterest. "Let them do what they do," she says. "Be bougie."Clearly inspired by MTV's "Laguna Beach", "Baldwin Hills" follows a handful of teens who live in and around the so-called black Beverly Hills in the Los Angeles, California area. "Not all black people live in the ghetto," goes the show's intro. "This is our 'hood — big houses, manicured lawns, amazing vistas." The Unusually Entitled Young Person has become a familiar television trope in recent years, but save for reruns of 'The Cosby Show" and "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air", black teens in this income bracket are largely absent.

Vibe magazine writes: "The series depicts the privileged - and pressured - lives of some of Los Angeles's freshest princes and princesses of 'Black Beverly Hills' - and contrasts them with the experiences of teens from a less privileged neighborhood around the corner. One such instance involves Gerren, a 16-year-old junior / fashion model whose Italian Vogue and Elle cover shoots led Oprah [Winfrey] to deem her 'mini-Naomi.' Staci, an 18-year-old from Dorsey High School, lives just below Gerren's wealthy neighborhood, but insists she goes through the same things as the rich girls. Then Gerren visualizes her dream whip: 'I want pink Gucci linen with pink fur and pink rims.' Cut to Staci: 'Maybe not,' she says, with a slight roll of the eyes."

OYE COMO VA

Without Prejudice......a Different Kind of Game Show!

Courtesy of http://afronerd.blogspot.com/

Production has begun on WITHOUT PREJUDICE?, GSN’s newest and most controversial game series, premiering Tuesday, July 17, (9:00 – 10:00 PM, ET) it was announced today by Jamie Roberts, Senior Vice President of Programming for GSN.

“We are so excited about this show and the climate for something this politically charged couldn’t be more perfect,” said Roberts. “’Without Prejudice?’ is truly a ground breaking show - a rare US TV first. It is inspired, modern entertainment that dares to frame electric debates of hot button issues such as sexism, immigration, religion and gun control into a reality game structure.”

Hosted by Dr. Robi Ludwig, renowned psychotherapist and award-winning journalist, this thought-provoking series is about five contestants opening their lives for examination by five ordinary strangers who will decide which of the contestants, in their opinion, deserves to receive a one-time prize of $25,000. The panel and viewers at home will find out more about each of the contestants as the show goes on and as they do, the panel will eliminate contestants.

Dr. Ludwig’s academic credentials include a doctorate in psychology (Psy.D) from the Southern California University for Professional Studies. She holds a post master’s certificate in advanced clinical work from Hunter College, a master’s degree in social work from the University of Pennsylvania and a bachelor’s degree in mass communications from Cedar Crest College. Her practical experience as a psychotherapist began in 1988 when she worked as a counselor for patients with severe psychiatric disorders. Ludwig has treated all forms of mental illness, substance abuse, grieving, sexual identity issues, job stress, emotional and sexual abuse problems as well as common social and parenting issues in both private practice and in a clinical setting.

WITHOUT PREJUDICE? made its original debut in the UK to critical acclaim and won an International Emmy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Non-scripted Popular Arts Programming its first season. It has aired in numerous countries, including Chile and Holland. Produced by 12 Yard Productions, David Young and Andrew Culpin serve as executive producers and Andrew Musson as supervising producer.

Quote Of The Day

"The Europeans waste a lot of our time coming here talking about aid. We told them: if you talk about aid, I go to sleep. What we need is market access -- open your markets to our products."

— Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, arguing that the European Union gives aid with one hand while refusing to cut subsidies and tariffs with the other hand, making it impossible for poor countries to compete