President Barack Obama you were perfect in the delivery and content of your speech on the 24th of Feb, 09. You are doing the best job anyone could ask for. You and your team have developed a very good plan to get us out of the financial mess we are in. And you have explained your plan and intentions to the fullest. No other President has been so open in the explanation of the plans for our country. I believe you will be successful in achieving the goals you have made for the improvements we need in this country. Mostly because it's a good plan but also because when you put your mind, heart and soul into something your level of success rates go up. And I can see that you believe what you are telling us and together we will fix the nation. Thank You for being who you are. Thank You for the HOPE you have given us all. Thank You for the wise decisions you have made for the betterment of our nation. Just Thank You, President Barack Obama I will pray for you, your family and your cabinet to be safe, make future good choices and to be successful.
A CBS News poll of approximately 500 people saw approval of the president rise from 62 percent before the speech to 69 percent afterward.
Meanwhile, a poll on CNN showed that 68 percent of respondents -- who skewed a bit Democratic -- viewed the speech positively, 24 somewhat positively, and only eight percent not positively. Eighty-two percent supported the president's economic plan as outlined in the speech, while 17 percent opposed it.
Those results were buttressed by the findings of longtime Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg. In his own dial poll, which included 50 participants of mixed gender, education and politics, Greenberg found a large swath of bipartisan support for Obama's addres. That included a 14 percent jump, from 62 to 76 percent, in the favorability rating for the president.
Saying at the onset that this was an "immensely successful speech," he highlighted a few issues on which Obama won over the audience.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/24/polls-show-obama-won-the_n_169700.html
I love Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell because of our common thread: we both fell in love with someone from outside our culture.
Here in rural and racist Kentucky, the Klan is relevant to a small percentage and has the weight of sympathy and mild agreement to a larger percentage of our population. In some counties in Kentucky, there are less than 10 black people -- not 10% but 10 total -- in an entire county.
It is with a reassuring sigh that Mitch McConnell an elected official to not have the heart of the racist. When he fell in love with his wife, he was forced to ask his inner self the ultimate racist question: is it wrong to mix the races? He has also an arranged marriage with her culture, and to understand deeply the value of other cultures & religions as well.
So, although I disagree with Senator McConnell on many issues (including the Economic Recovery Bill), I hold him in high regard and respect, and kinda like him a little. Although I liked him more on election night when he almost lost to an unknown Democrat.
I am looking for Inauguration tickets for my parents, who are longtime civil rights activists in Florida named John Due and Dr. Patricia Stephens Due. Beyond my campaign calls and carefully-budgeted contributions, I am a political outsider…so I am making a simple appeal.
My parent celebrated their 46th wedding anniversary on Jan. 5, and the first lesson they passed to their three daughters was the most profound lesson there is: Individuals can change the world for the better.
My parents were foot-soldiers in the civil rights struggle. Like thousands of other activists of all races, they never got a holiday or a stamp—but without their sacrifices in the 1960s and beyond, we would not be inaugurating Barack Obama on Jan. 20.
As the late novelist Octavia E. Butler told us, “The only lasting truth is Change.”
But change always comes with a price.
To this day, my mother wears dark glasses even indoors because her eyes were injured by a teargas bomb thrown in her face by a police officer during a nonviolent march in Tallahassee in 1960. She was also shot at while trying to register Florida voters in 1963 and 1964. My father, who once represented Dr. King after an arrest in St. Augustine, got a call from the FBI warning him that he might be the target of a racist’s bomb—and that was in the late-1980s. U.S. bombings were in the news; home-grown, just like in Birmingham. I remember that call well.
So, yes—I want my parents to see the official ceremony up close; far more than I want to actually witness the Inauguration myself…although I surely do. My parents wouldn’t only be attending for themselves: They would be there on behalf of the countless other activists who did not, or could not, make it to witness this day.
In 2003, my mother and I published a memoir we co-authored: Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights. Researching that book about ordinary people doing extraordinary things, I learned first-hand how many of the 1960s activists did not make it to 2009 in body, mind or spirit. The war against them took a toll that is still vibrating through the next generations, and time is stealing them away day by day.
But some of them, like my parents, made it to Election Night. And Inauguration Day.
My mother talks about bringing back soil from Washington, D.C., to mix with the red clay of her birthplace in Gadsden County, Florida. Then she wants to plant a tree in honor of all of the foot-soldiers whose shoulders President-elect Obama is standing on.
Neither of my parents expected to get caught up in a political movement when they went to college. But in 1960, as a junior, my mother was arrested at a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth lunch counter in Tallahassee. When she refused to pay her fine, my mother, aunt and three other Florida A&M students spent 49 days in jail, becoming the nation’s first Jail-In.
They received a telegram of support from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and baseball great Jackie Robinson published a letter my mother wrote from jail in his New York Post column. My father, then in college in Indiana, read about my mother in Jet magazine and applied to Florida A&M’s law school so he, too, could join the movement sweeping the South.
The rest is history. A lifelong match was born.
This weekend, my father wrote my mother a heartfelt note explaining why he wouldn’t dream of attending the Inauguration without her: “To go without you—when we are life partners—would have been like going to the 1963 March on Washington without you. It would have been impossible.”
Most children think their parents are special, but my sisters and I had constant confirmation. We saw their names cited in books. The phone rang constantly; people and organizations in need of guidance or support. One day, my mother put in a call to the governor’s office, and then-Gov. Bob Graham called back within an hour.
Although I attended public schools, my parents practically home-schooled me and my sisters with children’s books about Martin Luther King Jr., Cesar Chavez, black cowboys and other oft-overlooked figures in American history. Mom, in particular, didn’t just haul it out in February: We heard about our history all year long.
While my parents often reminded us that Martin Luther King Jr. was just a man like anyone else, we always took the day off from school for his birthday, long before there was a national holiday. We drove to Miami’s Torch of Friendship and stood in a circle to say what Dr. King had meant to us. Then we would have pancakes and go home, where often my parents opened up the house to guests—activists and politicians and students—and played speeches and watched footage. Dr. King’s vibrato delivery always brought tears to my eyes.
Knowing that history—and the pride and perspective it gave me—meant the world to me. That’s why history is so firmly fixed in nearly everything I write. History has great power.
When Roots swept the nation in 1976 and I wanted to learn my family tree, my father told me story about freed slaves who built their own community in Indiana called Lyles Station—and fought off an attack by jealous whites. He even drew me pictures of a rousing battle in a round-house barn, with women handing their men rifles as the men stood firing from the rafters. I had never heard a story like that in any of my history books.
I didn’t follow the path of the activist, and my parents supported my passion to spread ideas using my writing rather than a picket signs or a megaphone. (Although, trust me, I’ve had plenty of experiences with picket signs, and even a megaphone…)
When I left the anti-apartheid takeover of the administration building at Northwestern University in the late-1980s to go out to dinner with a departing friend—rather than face arrest like my more courageous mates—I was embarrassed to tell my mother that I’d sold out. But when I called Mom to relate the shameful tale, she said, “Darling, I’m glad you didn’t get arrested. I went to jail so you wouldn’t have to.”
I went to jail so you wouldn’t have to.
Those are powerful words for a child to hear from her mother. Instead of celebrating Thanksgiving or Christmas as a family last year, my sisters and I brought our families, including five grandchildren, to visit my parents in Quincy, Florida so we could all watch the election returns together. It was a night I’ll never forget.
But I can only imagine what it meant to my parents. And because of their sacrifices as students, I was permitted the luxury of an extended childhood throughout my college years. I had time to develop my craft by day and fill my nights with laughter.
My parents are in fairly good health, but they are 69 and 74. The trip to Washington, D.C. won’t be easy on them. But they want to go. And since they’re going…I wish they had Inauguration tickets.
All I can offer is gratitude, but if you know of available tickets, please contact me at TheLivingBlood@gmail.com.
www.tananarivedue.com
www.tananarivedue.blogspot.com
The justices said they will review a lower court ruling upholding a provision of the Voting Rights Act that requires all or parts of 16 states with a history of racial discrimination, most in the South, to get approval before implementing any changes in the way elections are held.
In 2006, Congress voted overwhelmingly to extend the measure for another 25 years. The 1965 law was designed to prevent governments from making it harder for minorities to vote.
The high court has upheld earlier extensions of the provision that calls for either the U.S. attorney general or a court to sign off in advance on changes to requirements to hold office, polling places and other issues involving the conduct of elections.
The justices will hear the case in April and probably decide it by June, against the backdrop of a presidential election that was unimaginable when the law was enacted more than 40 years ago.
"The elephant in the room is what to make of the Obama election," said Nathaniel Persily, professor of law and political science at Columbia Law School, referring to the election of Barack Obama. "Does the election of the first African-American president undermine the central justification for parts of the Voting Rights Act?"
Under Chief Justice John Roberts, the court has looked skeptically at government efforts to take race into account in the assignment of students to public schools and the drawing of electoral districts.
A second case accepted for argument Friday looks at whether a decision by New Haven, Conn., to scrap a promotion exam after too few minorities passed it violates the civil rights of white and Hispanic firefighters who did well enough to advance.
The latest voting rights challenge comes from a local Texas government that says it was created in the 1980s, has no history of discrimination and shouldn't be subject to what it calls "the most federally invasive law in existence."
Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District Number One, a government board formed to provide local services to about 3,500 people, sued following the 2006 extension. The board asked the court to exempt it from the law and said Congress had not shown a link between the district's need to get advance approval and past racial discrimination.
A federal court in Washington ruled in May that the prior approval provision is constitutional.
The three-judge panel said that the utility board didn't qualify as a "political subdivision" and could not be exempted from the law. It also ruled that racial discrimination in voting persists and that Congress acted appropriately when it extended the law.
Under the law, appeals go directly to the Supreme Court.
But the court could avoid the constitutional issue if it finds that the board has the right to bail out of the law.
Congress has extended the Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act four times, in 1970, 1975, 1982 and 2006.
An array of rights groups, including the NAACP, American Civil Liberties Union and Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, have intervened in the case in support of the law.
President George W. Bush signed the latest extension into law and his administration asked the high court to affirm the lower-court ruling. The government noted in court papers that more than 2,400 proposed voting changes have been blocked since 1982.
"The record includes evidence of discrimination throughout covered jurisdictions perpetrated at every level of government," the government said.
Eight states are covered in their entirety: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Texas. In Virginia, all but 15 cities and counties must comply with the measure.
Parts of California, Florida, Michigan, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina and South Dakota also need permission to make voting changes.
The case is Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Mukasey, 08-322.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Get ready for the in-law in chief.
President-elect Barack Obama's mother-in-law, Marian Robinson, is moving into the White House at least temporarily to join Michelle Obama and the two children, transition officials said Friday.
That's good news not just for late-night comics, but for 10-year-old Malia and 7-year-old Sasha. During the campaign, Robinson retired from her job as a bank executive secretary to help care for her granddaughters.
"Mrs. Robinson will be coming with the family to help the girls get acclimated, and she will determine in the coming months whether or not she wants to stay in D.C. permanently," said Katie McCormick Lelyveld, spokeswoman for Michelle Obama.
Michelle Obama also made another hotly awaited decision: She's keeping the White House chef. Cristeta Comerford took the job in 2005 and is the first woman and first minority to serve as executive chef.
"Cristeta Comerford brings such incredible talent to the White House operation and came very highly regarded from the Bush family," Michelle Obama said in a statement released by the transition team. "Also the mom of a young daughter, I appreciate our shared perspective on the importance of healthy eating and healthy families."
Plenty of in-laws have taken up residence in the White House before, not to mention cousins, grandchildren and other relatives.
"Throughout history there have been many extended first families in office," said Robert Watson, author of "Life in the White House."
Ulysses S. Grant's father-in-law, Richard Dent, stayed for several years. Harry S. Truman's mother-in-law, Madge Gates Wallace, lived there, too, and was critical of her son-in-law.
"She never liked him. She always felt that Bess had married below her station," said Myra Gutin, a first lady historian and professor at Ryder University in New Jersey.
"For his part, he was gracious. Whatever Mother Wallace wanted, she pretty much got."
Mamie Eisenhower's mother also had extended stays, but like her daughter she tended to sleep until noon, said Maria Downs of the White House Historical Association.
Even the presidents' mothers can be tough. Lillian Carter stayed in the White House and got on well with her son Jimmy, but Gutin said that when he first told her, "Mom, I'm going to run for president," she replied, "President of what?"
By all accounts, Obama has a good relationship with his mother-in-law. She had put off retirement for years, but finally retired last summer to take care of the granddaughters while their parents campaigned.
"She didn't want anyone else taking care of the kids but her," McCormick Lelyveld said. "She wanted to be the one there."
Barack Obama has called her one of the unsung heroes of his campaign, and spoke of holding her hand on election night.
But when asked by "60 Minutes" if Robinson would move in, he quipped: "Well, I don't tell my mother-in-law what to do. But I'm not stupid. That's why I got elected president, man."
As your inauguration day approaches I wanted to send you some words of thanks. As a 30 year young, African American woman and mother two that day will forever hold special meaning in my heart. I am looking forward to the day when me and my children and my family will be glued to the TV to watch you take the oath of office to become the President of the United States of America. I want to say Thank You for the sacrifice that I and every American is asking of not only you but of your entire family. God bless you and keep you and your family under his protection. It is at this time that not only does America need change but so does the rest of the world. Here at home many of us went to the polls for the same reasons regardless of age,race,religion, or income we are tired of working harder and getting less. So now we look to you to lead at a time when the stakes are so high and the rewards for you are so very few. I will watch you be sworn in with a sense of pride in knowing that you went to Washington to speak for me, my children, my dreams, and my future. When you arrive in Washington go knowing that while many there will be about the business of exploiting the American people. Many of those same Representatives which we sent to Washington to speak for us have chosen to speak for themselves. Go there knowing that we have sent you there to give our goverment back to us. Thank you again for the burdens, headaches, and worries you have taken our your shoulders for me and my children. Thank you for the decisions you will make which I won't agree with as long as they are made with conviction. During the campaign I watched you stay cool under enormous pressure and I am asking that you take that same calm into the storm of what is Washington. We have chosen you Mr. Obama to go to Washington to put those on notice that our divine destiny is upon us. You have assembled a strong team of advisors and I am confident of the great job you will do. Just know I am not looking for immediate change but more of a progression of change in the attitude of Americans about the challenges we face. Just be honest. Let your decision by your own. It is time for America to get to the business of creating a better America not you alone. The future of this country is resting on the shoulders of our children. If I can ask anything of you please ensure that the next four years sets us on a path towards repairing out broken education system. Please make education is less about test scores and more about learning and innovation. Can we rebuild our tax system so that the government, states, corporations, school districts and communities that investing in education are rewarded. Can we make education more about learning and less about lessons. Why so much importance placed on math but not credit, money management, and debt? Why so much importance being placed on energy and health care and not on investing in science for the generation who correct global warming and cure aids? Can we spend the next four years not exploring space but rather exploring energy from the sun and wind? Can we spend less money overseas fighting wars in foreign lands against terrorism and finally win the war on drugs and poverty here in the streets of America? We will face so many challenges as a nation and Thank You for accepting the job to lead. Now is the time that we must redefine what it is to Patriotic. Is it being Patriotic when Americans refuse to buy American cars while being angry that they seek a bail out? Is it Patriotic to build bridges in Iraq but let our bridges fall apart? Is being Patriotic wanting to stop terrorists from entering our borders from Mexico? Is it Patriotic for a corporation to call itself American and want American money to bail itself out when they ship jobs overseas? The next four years are going to involve some difficult discussions which we must all have which are long overdue.
Thank You Mr. President for all you have done to inspire this country and world. And Thank You for the great work you have yet to do.
There is nothing in the United States Constitution that allows the U. S. Senate the clear-cut capacity to deny Roland Burris the Senate seat vacated by Barack Obama. Indeed, Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich seemed to be thumbing his nose at all of Illinois, if not all of the United States, by appointing Burris. As best we can tell, Burris has a clean political record and has done nothing wrong. Yet Blagojevich seems well on his way to being convicted of attempting to sell Barack Obama’s former Senate seat to the highest bidder.
After Burris was denied access to the Senate chambers on Tuesday January 6, 2009, black pundits of every ilk came out of the woodwork to claim that denying Burris his Senate seat was a blatant attempt to prevent an African-American from becoming a member of the United States Senate. I watched former Georgia State Senator, a founder of SNCC, and former chair of the NAACP Julian Bond attempt to make a case for racism. This was one of his least convincing arguments. For a moment, I wanted to cry.
Bond likened the blockade of Burris to the U. S. Senate to the one Bond received in the state of Georgia back in 1966. I was in kindergarten when a very young and dashing Julian Bond was denied admittance and acceptance to the Georgia State Senate because he had dared to speak out against the Vietnam War. He was bold, defiant; and he was right. Later in 1966 the Supreme Court ruled that the Georgia House of Representatives had denied Bond his right to freedom of speech, and further ordered Georgia’s House of Representatives to seat him. He took his seat in Georgia's House of Representatives in early 1967. Everyone in the state of Georgia and America were the better for it. Today Bond suggested that House Democrats surely must have considered that it might look racist to deny Burris entry to the Senate. I wanted to scream.
There is no evidence that Roland Burris is anything other than an upstanding and highly experienced public servant. What no one, including Julian Bond, seems to want to ask is why Burris would accept an appointment from a governor that has so clearly and blatantly violated the public trust? Why would Burris accept such an appointment from a governor who has refused to step down when propriety and decency demands that the people of Illinois would be best served if he did so? Burris cannot be ignorant of the evidence stacked against Blagojevich, even if Blagojevich has yet to be tried and convicted of his crimes.
It appears that some compromise between Burris and House Democrats has been reached. It appears he will be seated. However, he was not initially denied entry to the Senate because he is black; he was chosen by Blagojevich precisely because he was black and a member of a dying breed of black politician. In vulgar arrogance, Blagojevich knew he could count on old-guard black politicians to yell racism should Burris’ appointment be questioned; this is why he chose a 71-year-old Burris, rather than a younger, less-Illinois-politics-tethered individual to fill Obama’s vacant Senate seat. Many members of the black old-guard are proud of Obama. Yet far too many of them are scrambling for political capital and social relevancy as many of them erroneously hitched their political wagons to a Clinton nomination and presidency in the mistaken belief that a person with African ancestry could never occupy the highest office in the land. The old guard clings to an era that has passed and arguments that have long since lost any semblance of validity.
I fondly remember a young Julian Bond winning election to the Georgia House of Representatives in 1965. He was finally seated in 1966. I was proud of his actions then. Racism was blatant and visceral then; it is real, visceral, but often more inconspicuous now. An Obama presidency will not eliminate racism; he cannot make racism less severe. Yet Obama’s election will make confronting issues of race, racism, and race-baiting more complex; this is precisely why it is important to remember the lessons of the mid-1960s without confusing them with the lessons of 2009.
Copyright © 2009 by Leslye J Allen
