Barack Obama

  • Donations Needed to Bring Yefri Home

    (Pictured above: the parents of Yefri Sorto-Hernandez.  You may find the Go Fund Me page raising funds for his bond here.) Over the last six months, I’ve been part of a network of concerned educators, family members, activists and allies that have been working to gain the release of a group called the NC6 from…

  • Please Call ICE to Stop NC Deportations

    ICE has recently kidnapped 5 high school students in North Carolina for deportation, one of them at Riverside High School here in Durham.  Please consider calling them in Washington to urge them to release these students, who are now being held in a jail in Georgia.  They could be deported at any time.  MoveOn.org also…

  • Dirty Harry Does Diversity.2: Indicting Invictus

    (Like the original Magnum Force, this post is a sequel to the first Dirty Harry.) Of all of Clint Eastwood’s “Sympathy for the Other” movies, Invictus was the most popular in the Land of the Liberals.  J. Edgar (gays), Million Dollar Baby (women), and Gran Torino (SE Asians) all did well but received more criticism than…

  • Read Robin D.G. Kelley on Ferguson

    This is simply to refer folks to an excellent article about Ferguson by Robin D.G. Kelley I read on the Counterpunch website after it was posted by Imani Perry on Facebook. http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/11/25/75039/ Please consider a subscription to Counterpunch as well as checking out Kelley’s excellent books. In musical circles, Kelley is most known for his biography…

  • World on a Wire

    As I keep track of the unfolding struggle over the FCC’s proposed creation of a corporate “fast lane” on the internet that would regulate non-corporate media to second class status online, I’m reminded of the film World on a Wire by Rainer Fassbinder, which I watched on DVD a couple of months ago.  Despite being…

  • Are you ready for some futbol? History and the World Cup

    During the recently concluded qualifying rounds for next summer’s 2014 World Cup, I was reminded of Paraguay’s run at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.  So much hope for a more equitable world seemed to mis/dis-placed onto the upsets Ghana and Paraguay scored to advance to the quarterfinals of that event. The tournament ultimately…

  • Top 40 Over 40.13: Weird Al’s “Party In the CIA”

    I can think of few more unlikely candidates for creative growth after 40 than Weird Al Yankovic.  Back when I was in grade school, he came on the pop culture radar with “Eat It,” his parody of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.”  His string of similar Dr. Demento style hits willfully sucked all of the sexual…

  • Corporate Welfare.2: Subsidizing Sallie Mae

    Continuing this series on the publicly funded nature of so called private enterprise in this country…. Sometimes subsidies know how to disguise themselves.  Blackwater’s defense contracts bring them direct cash payments for no-bid contracts.  But student lenders like Sallie Mae get their government cheese in the form of regulations on interest rates.  In a double…

  • The Democratic Cliff

    The current metaphor of “the fiscal cliff” marks the return of a few common tropes in American politics.  First is the latest incarnation of what Naomi Klein has referred to as the Shock Doctrine, the use and sometimes manufacturing of “crisis” situations to force people to accept right wing / neoliberal policies that legislative bodies…