I diaried this earlier in the week, but I think it needs repeating. Mitt Romney went on "Meet the Press" and told a story that he "remembered". It involves his dad marching with Martin Luther King. Along comes David Broder who also "remembered" the incident. The only problem is it seem sto have never happened!
Was it all a dream? Mitt Romney claims that his father marched with MLK, but the record says otherwise
In the most-watched speech of his political career, speaking on "Faith in America" at College Station, Texas, earlier this month, Mitt Romney evoked the strongest of all symbolic claims to civil-rights credentials: "I saw my father march with Martin Luther King."
He has repeated the claim several times recently, most prominently to Tim Russert on Meet the Press . But, while the late George W. Romney, a four-term governor of Michigan, can lay claim to a strong record on civil rights, the Phoenix can find no evidence that the senior Romney actually marched with King, nor anything in the public record suggesting that he ever claimed to do so.
Nor did Mitt Romney ever previously claim that this took place, until long after his father passed away in 1995 — not even when defending accusations of the Mormon church’s discriminatory past during his 1994 Senate campaign.
Asked about the specifics of George Romney’s march with MLK, Mitt Romney’s campaign told the Phoenix that it took place in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. That jibes with the description proffered by David S. Broder in a Washington Post column written days after Mitt’s College Station speech.
Now that King of Washington wisdom David Broder is caught writing about an event that is well make believe.
Broder, in that column, references a 1967 book he co-authored on the Republican Party, which included a chapter on George Romney. It includes a one-line statement that the senior Romney "has marched with Martin Luther King through the exclusive Grosse Pointe suburb of Detroit."
But that account is incorrect. King never marched in Grosse Pointe, according to the Grosse Pointe Historical Society, and had not appeared in the town at all at the time the Broder book was published. "I’m quite certain of that," says Suzy Berschback, curator of the Grosse Pointe Historical Society. (Border was not immediately available for comment.)
Berschback also believes that George Romney never appeared at a protest, march, or rally in Grosse Pointe. "We’re a small town," she says. "Governors don’t come here very often, except for fundraisers."
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POLITICS
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Violent Protest Over Housing in New Orleans
After protesters clashed violently with the police inside and outside the New Orleans City Council chambers on Thursday, the council voted unanimously to allow the federal government to demolish 4,500 apartments in the four biggest public housing projects in the city.
But the council also called on the Department of Housing and Urban Development to reopen some apartments in the closed projects immediately, and to rebuild all of the public-housing units that it bulldozes. The agency plans to replace barracks-style projects, known as "the bricks," with mixed-income developments.
"We need affordable housing in this city," said Shelley Stephenson Midura, who proposed the resolution adopted by the council. But, she continued, "public housing ought not to be the warehouse for the poor."
Advocates for public housing residents contend that the agency’s plan will not provide enough housing for the 3,000 families who lived in the projects before Hurricane Katrina, almost all of whom were black. Many of them have not been able to return to the city, and some protesters say they are being deliberately excluded from New Orleans.
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Monroe Anderson is an award-winning journalist who penned op-ed columns for both the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times. He is a regular contributor to Ebonyjet.com.
In the presidential race, Republicans, once again, leave us no choice in the matter. A cursory review of the content of their character.
As far as the Republicans candidates are concerned, blacks need not apply.
This was again obvious in September, when Republicans Willard Mitt Romney, Rudolph Giuliani, John McCain and Freddie Thompson decided to pursue other interests rather than appear at the All-American Presidential Forum hosted by Tavis Smiley.
Just so you have some talking points...
Romney–When the former Massachusetts governor gave his speech defending his Mormon religion, he neglected to explain how he had tolerated the church's official racist policies. It wasn't until 13 years after the Civil Rights Act of 1965 was passed that the elders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints got around to no longer officially excluding blacks. And while Romney's explaining what he knew about the church's racist practice and when he knew it, he should also explain why there are no blacks as top-tier advisers on his campaign staff.
Giuliani–He made national news when four of New York's finest cornered Amidou Diallo, a black immigrant from Guinea, in the vestibule of his Bronx apartment building. The plainclothes cops fired 41 shots at Diallo. Unarmed and not a suspect of any crime, Diallo died while trying to go home. Guiliani is now running on 9/11 and his boast of cleaning up New York but when the city's blacks speak of "Giuliani time," there's no nostalgia.
Ron Paul–For some reason, the Texas congressman is the highest polling Republican presidential candidate among blacks. Surely that won't hold when word gets out that he has informed his closest supporters that "our country is being destroyed by a group of actual and potential terrorists -- and they can be identified by the color of their skin." Small wonder he has become the darling of the Ku Klux Klan and the Skinheads.
Thompson–The former U.S. Senator from Tennessee, off-and-on actor and lobbyist, in a speech to the Federal Society, an organization of radical right jurists and lawyers that has pretty much hijacked the nation's jurisprudence system, said: "We need judges and justices who understand that imposing racial quotas is really a denial of what America is all about."
McCain–His anti-civil rights voting record is right there with the worst of them. He's been rated zero percent by the ACLU. In July 1995, the Arizona senator voted yes on banning affirmative action hiring with federal funds. As a member of the U.S. House, he voted against the Dr. King national holiday.
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INTERNATIONAL
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Ethiopians Said to Push Civilians Into Rebel War
The Ethiopian government, one of America’s top allies in Africa, is forcing untrained civilians — including doctors, teachers, office clerks and employees of development programs financed by the World Bank and United Nations — to fight rebels in the desolate Ogaden region, according to Western officials, refugees and Ethiopian administrators who recently defected to avoid being conscripted.
Ethiopia has been struggling with the rebels for years. But with tens of thousands of its troops now enmeshed in a bloody insurgency in Somalia and many thousands more massing on the border for a possible war with Eritrea, the government seems to be relying on civilians to do more of its fighting in the Ogaden, a bone-dry chunk of territory where Ethiopian troops have been accused by human rights groups of widespread abuses.
In a recent report, government officials in the region called upon elders, traders, women and civil servants to form local "security committees" and mobilize their clans to destroy the rebels and their bases of support. The government says that the rebels are terrorists who have carried out assassinations and bombings, and that civilians have volunteered to fight them.
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I have never been a big fan of President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, he of "HIV doesn't cause AIDS" fame and father of Sothern African Neoliberalism. But I agree with former Arch-Bishop Desmon Tutu, Jacob Zuma is unfit to lead South Africa. I find him dangerous in a Mugabe sense, a former hero who is lusting for power for the wrong reasons.
ANC Members Raucously Defy S. African Movement's Elite
Jacob Zuma, who was fired as South Africa's deputy president less than three years ago, was elected leader of the ruling African National Congress on Tuesday, a victory that cements his position as favorite to become president of South Africa in 2009.
Zuma, 65, a populist former guerrilla leader reputed to have several wives and as many as 20 children, unseated incumbent Thabo Mbeki, who remains president of the nation but with a sharply diminished mandate. Delegates at the ANC's national conference here repeatedly made clear they had tired of the aloof and cerebral Mbeki, whirling their arms furiously in a gesture illustrating their call for a turnover in the party's leadership.
For Zuma, the election was the latest step in a once-improbable political comeback. But Tuesday's vote did nothing to dispel the lingering allegations of corruption that prompted his firing by Mbeki in June 2005.
Prosecutors have said they may file new charges against Zuma early in the new year, and an affidavit they filed last week raised the possibility of tax evasion charges as well. Convictions on any of those charges would make Zuma ineligible for government office.
"If they elect him, we'll have to live with that. If he's charged, they'll have to live with that, and cross that bridge when we come to it," said ANC Secretary General Kgalema Motlanthe, speaking at a news conference shortly before results were announced. "It's a strange case because it goes on and one and on. . . . So it's like a never-ending agony."
Also South Africa's top prosecutor says there is enough evidence to charge the new leader of the governing party, Jacob Zuma, with corruption.
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A comprehensive guide to China's role in Darfur
Two weeks ago, Britain introduced a toughly worded Presidential Statement at the U.N. Security Council, demanding that Khartoum's National Islamic Front regime turn over two génocidaires to the International Criminal Court. The first, Ahmed Haroun, who, in a grotesque bit of irony, now serves as Sudan's minister of humanitarian affairs, is accused of having directly orchestrated many of the vicious crimes documented by the U.N. and independent human rights organizations in Darfur. Similarly, Ali Kushayb, a Janjaweed militia leader, is deeply implicated in the most egregious violations of international law--targeted ethnic slaughter and the use of rape as a weapon of war among them.
The Presidential Statement should've easily passed: The evidence against both men is strong, and because of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1593, the ICC has jurisdiction over the matter. What ended up happening, though, was hardly a surprise to anyone who has watched Darfur closely over the last five years. China threatened to veto the non-binding declaration unless its language was essentially gutted, and rather than force the issue, Britain, France, and the U.S.--as well as the other Security Council members--quietly decided to drop the matter. As a result, not only will Haroun and Kushayb remain free, but the government in Khartoum will feel as if it can block the extradition of those subsequently accused by the Court. The ICC just lost its teeth.
This under-reported development provides yet another example of China's enabling role in the Darfur genocide. The crimes that China has abetted in Sudan are almost certainly too numerous to detail in any one place, but, here, for easy documentation, is a précis of how the country has come to have the blood of more than 400,000 Darfuris on its hands.
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OBITUARY
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I didn't realize how sick she was, but I had noted she seemed lackluster her last two terms. I hope one day we actually win the war on cancer.
Rep. Julia Carson (D-IN)dies of lung cancer, Dec 15th 2007
Rep. Julia Carson, the first black and first woman to represent Indianapolis in Congress, died Saturday, a family spokeswoman said. She was 69.
Carson died after a battle with lung cancer, spokeswoman Vanessa Summer said.
Carson announced last month that she was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and that she would not run next year for a seventh term representing Indianapolis' 7th District. She had not been in Washington since September, when she was hospitalized with a leg infection.
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DIARIES OF NOTE ON DAILY KOS
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Race and the Law, 2007. by Barth
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What does "sounding" natural mean? Randi V Oprah : Quien es mas Black? by Vyan
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We still have a long way in America AND on D Kos until we can have a CALM dicussion on race.Racism on Daily Kos - The Blacks and The Jews by onemadson
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Fear of a Black President by aaraujo
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As a person of Jamaican heritage I was drawn to thisrastafarian confusion by scoutnanana
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Aids in South Africa: The Medical Science of Racial Apartheid by Nathan Jaco