From The Sphere

While I haven't been blogging, I've still been reading blogs, so here's a rundown on some of the highlights.

From the latest additions to my blogroll
• I've linked to Yvette at Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast, but I didn't realize I hadn't blogrolled her until I started writing this post. Yvette's was running a near daily series of posts for Black History Month. Some of my favorites: High-tech Fruit and Strange Lynchings, Black Children without Borders, Gumbo.

• Also recently added is Big Mama's Joint. Big Mama just opened shop last month. It was good from the start, and now the she's turned the place into a group blog with Y-Factor and CSM. Both CSM and Big Mama have been writing about Maureen Jagmin, crusader for school resegregation in Chicago who got caught on tape saying just what she really thinks about "poor blackie." I didn't need to read it to believe it, but reading it is unbelievable... Anyway, they've got all sorts of stuff going on over there. Go check it out.

• A little less recent already (time flies...) is Marian's Blog. Marian's Blog is sort of a special place in the blogosphere because Marian is a little more worldly than most of us blogging out here.

A native of Washington, DC, Marian Douglas' professional experience includes gender, ethnicity and diversity, broadcast journalism, communication research, and post-conflict reconstruction.

She has worked in Africa, Europe and the Americas; her languages include French, Spanish and Italian and functional Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, and Macedonian. Ms Douglas is an observer member of ALNAP - the Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance in Humanitarian Action - an international forum for improving quality and accountability of humanitarian action, based in London, UK. In fall 2004 she was a plenary speaker during the 2004 European Social Forum at London's Alexandra Palace, and was a participant in the Joan Kroc Institute's November conference on women in conflict negotiation and U.N. Resolution 1325.

And there's more . . . There's really too much to try to list, but I'll mention a few things to give you some idea of her range. In January Marian had two posts about the popularity of David Duke in Russia, nicely illustrative of the symbiotic relationship between racism and antisemitism and the cross pollination of Eurpoean and American racisms. Sandra Dee died at about the same time as Hunter S. Thompson, and Marian was more affected by Dee's (aka Alexandra Zuck) passing. Marian's two most recent posts (at this writing) stand at the dizzying crossroads where the personal and the political, gender and race, the national and the international all intersect.

From elsewhere
• Via Sisyphus Shrugged, TBogg notes that David Duke was brought on as a guest on The O'Reilly Factor to discuss Ward Churchill. No More Mister Nice Blog provides some follow up.

• My friend Rebecca, who was my roommate 10 years ago, has collected a bunch of the evidence that discredits Ward Churchill's claims to Native American identity and his scholarship, which he produces with no academic credentials. Aside from being an utterly offensive and inauthentic voice of the left, he is a sham and and a con.

• I mention the David Duke appearance on the O'Reilly Factor because it's an indicator of the mainstreaming of white supremacy, which David Neiwart wrote about on The American Street last month.

• Via Sharp Tools, Nathan Newman discusses the Republican bill to raise the minimum wage. A new dawn of Liberal Republicans? Hardly. The bill will also license sweatshops, kill overtime, and ban state minimum wage laws.

Licensing Sweatshops: While a $1.10 per hour minimum wage increase by itself would help 1.8 million workers, Santorum includes a poison bill exempting any business with revenues of $1 million or less from regulation -- raising the exemption from the current $500,000 level.

The upshot: while 1.2 million workers could qualify for a minimum wage increase, another 6.8 million workers, who work in companies with revenues between $500,000 and $1,000,000 per year, would lose their current minimum wage protection.

Killing Overtime: It gets worse-- the 40-hour work week would be abolished and companies would not have to pay overtime if they cut hours the next week. The proposal is called "flex time", but workers would have no say in the matter. Their hours could be rearranged, upsetting child care and other weekly routines, and companies would no longer have the deterrent of having to pay overtime as a way to encourage giving workers a regular weekly schedule.

Banning State Minimum Wage Laws: But here's a kicker from a GOP supposedly dedicated to states rights. Santorum's bill would ban states from requiring employers to pay tipped workers with a guaranteed wage. Employers could pay tipped workers nothing and force them to live off tips, while states would be preempted from creating a higher wage standard for tipped workers.

(Whole thing.)

• While editing this post and checking some of the links, I noticed that Newman now has a roll call of the Republican House Members who voted yes on Santorum's bill.

The GOPers will now go home and tell their constituents that they voted to raise the minimum wage, but the Democrats wouldn't join them in a "thoughtful" compromise. This makes it all the more important to be ready in the future to respond in opeds and other venues to rebut those claims and nail each of these Senators for this vote AGAINST minimum wage workers, AGAINST overtime protections, and AGAINST tipped workers.

• Digby's Confessions Of An Old New Democrat is an excellent overview of the Democratic Leadership Council's disastrous realignment of the Democratic Party.

• Some people believe that their religious upbringing or the religious upbringing of their parents is merely a set of beliefs, to be accepted or repudiated. It takes a certain degree of privilege to not see one's religious background as part and parcel of the cultural context that shapes one's world view. I always find this set of blinders frustrating to discuss, so when I tried most recently, I got myself into a bit of a tiff with PZ Myers over at The American Street. Myers thinks I have a persecution complex and I think he's trading in some unexamined antisemitism to define himself as an athiest. You be the judge.

• The Real Cost Of Prison's Weblog covers news relating to mass incarceration. It is part of The Real Cost Of Prisons Project, an activity of The Sentencing Project that "brings together prison/justice policy activists with political economists to create popular education workshops and materials which explore both the immediate and long-term costs of incarceration on the individual, her/his family, community and the nation."

• Drop That Book! Here's A Gun, Instead. Riggsveda, the new kid on the block at Corrente, picked up one of those jaw droppers in the the Republican hypocrisy department: The FBI is not doing anything to prevent firearms sales to known terror suspects.

"We're in a tough position,'' an FBI agent told the New York Times. "Obviously we want to keep guns out of the hands of terrorists, but we also have to be mindful of privacy and civil rights concerns, and we can't do anything beyond what the law allows us to do."

Critics of the Bush administration have said that it has put the interests of gun owners before the advice of counter-terrorist officers because of an inbuilt sympathy for weapons enthusiasts. In particular, they pointed out that the former attorney general, John Ashcroft, had for many months prevented the FBI from matching its terrorist watch list against lists of gun buyers on civil liberties grounds.

Of course, a quick perusal of the venerable NRA's website fails to reveal any concerns on this issue at all, despite all their law and order blather about crime. But not to worry. Ashcroft's Patriot Act is still keeping us safe from dangerous readers at the library.

• I've been enjoying That Colored Fella's coverage of the Jeff Gannon story. There are too many posts to link, and Bloghorn doesn't seem to provide categories, so just head on over and start scrolling down. In one post where TCF discusses the right wing backlash over liberal bloggers who have covered this scandal that the mainstream media is ignoring, he responds to Slate writer Josh Levin's racist, sexist, and elitist "Rappers And Bloggers: Separated At Birth!" You can read my comments in the comments.

• Also in the right winger hypocrisy department:

They were livid over SpongeBob Square Pants' participation in a video advocating tolerance, and fuming about Buster the Bunny's visit to a lesbian household. So where's the outrage from the Christian right over the Jeff Gannon Affair? Despite a chunk of time having passed since the Gannon Affair was first uncovered, Christian-right organizations are still cloaked in silence. As of Feb. 24, there wasn't any news about the Gannon Affair available on the web sites of Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council, the American Family Association, or the Traditional Values Coalition. As best as I could determine, no special alerts about the Gannon Affair have been issued; and no campaigns have been launched to get to the bottom of the matter.

(From The Dispassion of the Christian Right by Bill Berkowitz, on Alternet.)

• Professor Kim and Negrophile are both providing links on the gruesome murder of Rashawn Brazell, an African American, gay man, in Brooklyn, NY. Kim features the comments of Karsh, who is asking why the press is not paying attention.

Should African-Americans still be surprised that in 2005, mainstream media still doesn't give a shit about talking about these kinds of incidents when a person of color is the topic? (Not so) surprisingly enough, even Gay.com turns up nothing when a search is done for Mr. Brazell (similar for Southern Voice and Queer Day, but the New York Blade does have a blurb about it.)

Both Professor Kim and Negrophile remind us that the press' silence on Rashawn Brazell resonates with its silence on Sakia Gunn. (Follow the link on Gunn's name for J.K. Jaffe's award winning Indymedia story.) Kim has details on the plea bargain in Sakia Gunn murder prosecution.