Let me be up front. I have never been a fan of Jesse Jackson. I appreciated the movement he tried to create, but always was leery of the man himself. I was viewed with some suspicion by some of my white liberal friends because I didn't jump on the Jesse Jackson bandwagon, but the truth is he creeped me out.

The first chance I had to directly observe Jesse Jackson in action was when then bishop Desmond Tutu came to speak at UC San Diego where I was a student. This was back when Tutu had to be very careful what he said or he might join Mandela in prison. His speech was amazing, and had the main message that too often America put itself on the wrong side...and for once we should do the right thing, back the right horse.

Through the entire event, Jesse Jackson was there, often pushing himself to the forefront and hogging the spotlight. I found his presence irritated me, and this despite all the good things I had heard about him from fellow liberals. And it seemed to me, though I may have just been projecting, that Tutu himself seemed to look a bit askance at Jackson.

One of the illest songs to come out of this campaign.

Not only is NAS remixing Barack Obama's victory speech, he's thrown the immortal Tupac.
Download it here.

By the by, what do you think about the cover of NAS' album?

H/T To dnA over at Too Sense.

Yesterday I wrote the following about Hillary Rodham Clinton :

Shameless.

Despicable.

Unfit to be President of the United States.

My words hit the front pages of both Daily Kos and The Moderate Voice. By evening Keith Olbermann had the following to say about Hillary Clinton's latest "gaffe" :

The most important part of the transcript is after the jump :

Per email, Senator Obama's speech as prepared for delivery.

[Update]: There's video.

"A More Perfect Union"
Remarks of Senator Barack Obama
Constitution Center
Tuesday, March 18th, 2008
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

As Prepared for Delivery

“We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.”

Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787.

The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.

Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution – a Constitution that had at is very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.

And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part – through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk - to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.

This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this campaign – to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America. I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together – unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction – towards a better future for of children and our grandchildren.

This belief comes from my unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people. But it also comes from my own American story.

NYPD, it turns out, is not color blind. Sunday’s New York Daily News I-Team has wonderfully researched, well written article by Tina Moore, Benjamin Lesser and Greg B. Smith in which they show (definitively, in my opinion) that NYPD’s practice of Stop & Frisk on NYC subways is aimed at Hispanics and Blacks and unrelated to law enforcement purposes.

Because NYPD practices here are so outrageous, Mayor Bloomberg and his Police Commissioner must be held accountable for their vastly disproportionate racial impacts. As you may recall, NYPD has made every effort to hide the racial data generated by their stop and frisk program. Some of it has leaked out, (See, my earlier report with links here if you want further background).

Pam Spaulding alerted me to the demotardic shenanigans of Andrew Cuomo. My quick response is ending up being a larger piece on race, so let me just get the news out first.

Andrew Cuomo, the Attorney General for the State of New York and Hillary Clinton supporter, has earned not just a culturekitchen Demotard award. He also gets to hang on his door a Reappropriate "Racism Fairy" badge and enjoy a video prelude from Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing :

Andrew Cuomo (who could easily be played by John Tuturro, the italian guy in the video clip) said of the primary process that, “You can’t shuck and jive at a press conference ... all those moves you can make with the press don’t work when you’re in someone’s living room.”

His response to criticism for the quote? Well, what he really meant was "bob and weave" your way through a situation. That it was never meant as a reference to Barack Obama.

Yes, because "shuck and jive" is really all about bobbing and weaving.

Geezus.

I have more respect from Klansmembers than from Europeanoid liberals with repressed racist tendencies that get manifested in curiously inappropriate moments like, you know, when they're talking up their white candidate who's poised to lose the nomination to a black man.

The subject of this post is simple and incredibly complex at the same time. Is it the standard practice of NYPD to stop, frisk and/or search blacks in NYC much more frequently than they do whites? The simple answer is yes. The complex answer is no. The complex answer was produced by the Rand Corporation under contract with an NYPD-entity ( The NYC Police Foundation.) Do you believe the Rand Corporation? I have a bridge in Brooklyn for you.
(Some background materials with links have been added long after the jump)

NYPD officers stop New Yorkers all the time; we’re pulled over for broken tail lights, for riding a bike without a bell, as we stand on the street. How those police stops break out racially is not the subject of this post – even though I personally suspect that were those stops ever studied, there might well be a disparate racial impact noted.

However, sometimes the way in which Police stop New Yorkers is more intrusive than others.

The whole situation around Omar Rivera's cruel death is just sickening to me.

I am a "white collar" working-class mother to two boys who had to contend every day for 3 years that their father and I were winging it without medical insurance. We've been lucky to have found a pro-active, pro-alternative medicine, health care safe haven in our family doctor's practice at the Sidney Hillman Family Practice.

But our health care experience is not common for most New Yorkers. Most people jump from one practice to another in a game of health insurance coverage musical chairs. And those who are too poor to work out any payment scale have to contend with whatever they can get either through an indigents' clinic or whichever emergency room that may attend them.

What's so horrible about Omar's death is that it reminds me of a "so true it hurts" bit in Chris Rock's stand up routine, Bigger and Blacker.

When you read about the Jena 6, it feels like you must be reading about something that happened more than 50 years ago before the Civil Rights Movement. It's hard to believe that it is happening in 2007.

There is some good news, but the battle is not over yet.

Background Info for those of you not yet familiar with the Jena 6

The Jena 6 incident started at Jena High School when some black students sat under a tree that had been traditionally reserved the white students. The next day, nooses painted with the school colors were hung from the tree. The students responsible for hanging the nooses were expelled but the School Superintendent later reversed their expulsions referring to the noose hangings as a “prank.”