the Choice is Yours

Dres of the platinum-selling hip hop group Black Sheep has revitalized the1991 hit The Choice is Yours, rewriting lyrics and donating his time and services to create an innovative pro-Obama voter initiative video. Partnered with Austin based creative teams at Voodoo Cowboy Entertainmentand Super!Alright! Media in an all-volunteer effort, Dres re-recorded and shot the updated version of TheChoice is Yours in Austin, Texas in just under two days.

Chair Fail

Remembering St. Clair

By Jacquie Jones One of my earliest memories of St. Clair Bourne was winding up at a party at his old apartment at 105th and Broadway, right in the heart of what was becoming, in those days, in the 1980s, the “Upper West Side.” It was still kind of Harlem, then, old Harlem, fringe and kind of sexy. But what impressed me at the time – and I was barely out of Howard University, mind you, if at all – was the company that was kept there. The writer Quincy Troupe and film historian and scholar Clyde Taylor, Hugh Masekela, Kathleen Cleaver, the father of all Black documentary filmmakers, Bill Greaves – all the people who had chronicled and given life to the history and struggle that had brought us up to that moment. So, I just smoked my cigarette (it was the 80s, remember) and tried to look like I belonged. That was twenty years ago.

Since then, somehow, my distanced awe of Saint and all he represented to me turned into something else, something more.

It is true that with over forty titles to his credit, St. Claire Bourne is easily one of our most prolific filmmakers in any genre. And with a list of titles that reads like the who’s who of great Black men, he had, throughout his career, an agenda no self-righteous “Afro-American” – a term he stuck with til the end, could argue with: Black filmmakers have to right the wrongs of the past, cover our heroes in glory, speak the truth.

Avon Kirkland, director of Street Soldiers a film about the work of MacArthur Genius Joe Marshall and the PBS biography of Ralph Ellison and another real veteran of these wars, said of our friend, “his most outstanding virtue: his bone-deep commitment to black people and racial justice. We argued all the time about craft, didacticism, the nature of the universe, etc., but hugged each other warmly, whenever we encountered each other, as if we increasingly came to understand and eventually celebrate that we were, after all, brothers in a (still) strange land.”
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It is hard to believe now, but if you were to go back in time 18 months, you would find quite a few people –particularly people of color - talking seriously about looking outside of the Democratic Party for a new political home. Not that they’re rushing to join the Republican Party but on Washington’s political cocktail circuit, longtime Black Democratic lobbyists and operatives were openly decrying the neglect of the DNC, and were seriously considering opening their minds to Republican-centered clients. On the street level, people were talking of a new generation of Black professionals who were aggressively undeclared in their politics and open to the highest and best bidder.

If the Republican Party ever had an opportunity to expand its ranks and make a “bigger tent,” it was in this election, and no one was more in a position to expand that tent than John McCain. But they and he blew it. McCain (out of ambition) and the right wing of the GOP (out of habit) went to the dark side, throwing distraction, division and fear in our faces when issues were what the nation was calling for.

As a result, The Republican Party is decidedly weaker now, and its moderate wing has allowed itself to be marginalized by an aggressive, highly vocal and less levelheaded core. That’s too bad, really. America is stronger when sober voices from all sides are heard and considered. With only the crazies having the microphone, the GOP will be split, splintered and fuming from the sidelines, just like the Democrats during the Reagan-Bush years.

The great irony is that Barack Obama may be the best thing to happen to the Republican Party. The moderates know this, which is why we’ve seen a growing number of high profile Republican endorsements of Obama. They know that as the first Black president, Obama would need to govern as close to the center as possible. He may in fact turn out to be more of a moderate Republican president than a Republican because he would not be influenced by the hard right.

Likewise, an Obama administration will probably be the most bi-partisan in history, and any Republicans in it will be from the center, not the right. If those moderates can claim co-ownership of success, they can gain the leverage to recapture the Republican base from a newly-marginalized right wing.

But can moderate Republicans make the case to their friends in the next few days? “A vote for Obama is a vote for the future of the GOP.” It’s a tough sell, but it just may be true.

Each Room Is a Stage, Every Day Is a Show

By DAVE ITZKOFF
Published: October 28, 2008

THE chef at Benihana was struggling to entertain the customers around his table, but Tracy Morgan wouldn’t surrender the spotlight. On a recent Thursday afternoon, Mr. Morgan, the comedian and “30 Rock” star, was putting on a show for the gathering crowd — tourists, office workers, restaurant staff and a pair of NBC publicists sent to keep an eye on him — his voice booming like thunder amid the clanging of knives and the sizzling of the grill.

Presiding over a dining room he visits two or three times a week, Mr. Morgan, 39, mocked the chef for his gold-capped tooth (“You from down South or something?” he asked) and chided him for fumbling an egg (“You got girl problems?”); he wished happy birthday to a woman at an adjacent table and updated the staff on his exploits (“Still makin’ them babies”); he accused King Kong of racism (“All these black women in the jungle, and he went all that way for one white woman?”), then began to tell a story about his family before crooning a verse of Prince’s “When Doves Cry” into a reporter’s tape recorder.

When they see Mr. Morgan in the flesh, the stunned onlookers who shout “Yo, Tracy!” and slap him high-fives expect him to play the buffoon. And no one relishes that role more than Mr. Morgan himself, who has embraced the part on “30 Rock” and in public appearances both paid and unpaid.

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the Obama Bumaye! Tee

(click Obama Bumaye! for t-shirt purchase)

Proposal failed.

New Orleans Rising, by Hammer and Art

By SHAILA DEWAN
Published: October 28, 2008
NEW ORLEANS — Over the last few weeks more than a few locals have stopped by to inform a small construction crew in the Lower Ninth Ward here that it obviously does not know what it is doing.

Ms. Del Aguila, an assistant to the artist Wangechi Mutu, and her crew have been building the frame of a traditional shotgun house, not as a permanent dwelling but as part of Prospect.1 New Orleans, an ambitious new art biennial that is to open here on Saturday and continue through Jan. 18.

Billed as the largest exhibition of contemporary art ever held on American soil, the biennial is intended to help restore the cultural vibrancy of a city that remains on its knees three years after Hurricane Katrina.

With a star-filled roster of 81 artists and a projected 50,000 visitors from out of town, it may indeed bring benefits to New Orleans. But it is already clear that the arrangement has not been one-sided, and the New Orleans contribution has been rich. With its history of destruction and rebirth, artistic triumph and economic struggle, this crumpled crescent of a city provides a singular interpretive context that acts as a resonance chamber. Click here for full story

Touch of Gold

ATF: Plot by skinheads to kill Obama is foiled

Two Neo-Nazis held in Tennessee, charged with attempted mass murder

By BREAKING NEWS
NBC News and news services
updated 4 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - A plot by two Neo-Nazi skinheads to assassinate Barack Obama and kill dozens of other African Americans has been foiled, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms said Monday.

Daniel Cowart, 20, of Bells, Tenn., and Paul Schlesselman, 18, of West Helena, Ark., were charged Friday with making threats against a presidential candidate, illegal possession of a sawed-off shotgun and conspiracy to rob a gun store.

In court records unsealed Monday, agents said they disrupted plans that included robbing a gun store and targeting an unnamed but predominantly African-American high school.

The two men were arrested in Crockett County, Tenn., and have already made a court appearance.

The plot unraveled when one of the men was arrested on other charges and in the course of interviews he revealed plans for the plot.


According to the court records, the pair discussed robbing a gun shop in order to gather weapons and ammunition to use in a "killing spree."

The defendants allegedly further discussed their killing spree to include targeting a predominately African-American school, and to continue their spree until it culminated with an attempt to assassinate Obama.

Check back for details on this breaking news report

How To Deal With The Police If You Get Pulled Over

Block the Vote:Will the GOP's campaign to deter new voters and discard Democratic ballots determine the next president

These days, the old west rail hub of Las Vegas, New Mexico, is little more than a dusty economic dead zone amid a boneyard of bare mesas. In national elections, the town overwhelmingly votes Democratic: More than 80 percent of all residents are Hispanic, and one in four lives below the poverty line. On February 5th, the day of the Super Tuesday caucus, a school-bus driver named Paul Maez arrived at his local polling station to cast his ballot. To his surprise, Maez found that his name had vanished from the list of registered voters, thanks to a statewide effort to deter fraudulent voting. For Maez, the shock was especially acute: He is the supervisor of elections in Las Vegas.

Maez was not alone in being denied his right to vote. On Super Tuesday, one in nine Democrats who tried to cast ballots in New Mexico found their names missing from the registration lists. The numbers were even higher in precincts like Las Vegas, where nearly 20 percent of the county's voters were absent from the rolls. With their status in limbo, the voters were forced to cast "provisional" ballots, which can be reviewed and discarded by election officials without explanation. On Super Tuesday, more than half of all provisional ballots cast were thrown out statewide.

This November, what happened to Maez will happen to hundreds of thousands of voters across the country. In state after state, Republican operatives — the party's elite commandos of bare-knuckle politics — are wielding new federal legislation to systematically disenfranchise Democrats. If this year's race is as close as the past two elections, the GOP's nationwide campaign could be large enough to determine the presidency in November. "I don't think the Democrats get it," says John Boyd, a voting-rights attorney in Albuquerque who has taken on the Republican Party for impeding access to the ballot. "All these new rules and games are turning voting into an obstacle course that could flip the vote to the GOP in half a dozen states."
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Working Joes and pay-stub realities

by John Griswold
John McCain has been working "Joe the Plumber" overtime, calling on Joe to fix the broken pipes that are flooding his campaign.

Using Joe as a springboard, McCain is now labeling Obama's purposed tax cuts as "welfare" for the 40 percent of working-class Americans who "pay no federal income taxes at all." As a guy who doesn't need to read his pay stub, McCain might be excused this ignorance of take-home pay reality; as a presidential candidate, I don't think so.

The truth? If you are legally employed in this country you pay federal income taxes, at a rate of around 15 percent of your gross pay, before your "income taxes" are ever calculated. I say around 15 percent because this bite is kept shrouded in tax code doublespeak, and it's a little hard to nail down.

As a master carpenter, self-employed for decades and now part owner of a small construction business, I know a bit about nailing. The self-employed can tell McCain about that first 15 percent. They confront it on form SE of their federal return, right after gross receipts and just before deductions. But for the majority of workers who receive a paycheck, it's more cleverly disguised.

This first 15 percent is called the payroll tax, and as the Bard once asked, "What's in a name?" It's entered on form 1040, just below the "income tax" box. You add the two figures, make a check out for the total, and send it to the IRS.

Now I'm probably missing some subtle distinction here, but when I write a check on my income to the IRS, I call it income tax. If you are a payroll employee you have already paid this tax in payroll deductions. The IRS suggests that your employer "contributed" half of the total. Don't believe it.

Let me put on my small-businessman hat. We don't contribute a dime to pay our employees' payroll taxes, at least we try not to. We have no lottery winnings or stock dividends to dip into when we pay our quarterly taxes.

Like every other viable business, we charge the full cost of employment for our crews, including the taxes they incur. And our guys earn every dime of this cost. If they didn't, we wouldn't last a quarter.

The chunk that FICA saws off of their checks doesn't end their liabilities. For example, we must pay 11 percent of payroll for workers' compensation insurance, a figure that never shows up on a carpenter's pay stub.

Some nit-picking accounting type will probably point out that this fee isn't an income tax either (though it is mandatory in every state). But when Joe rips open his pay envelope he is interested in the bottom line, not the semantics. As with payroll taxes, we have no magic pot of money to pay this mandate. Either our employees earn it or they are out of a job.

The truth is that our "Joes" are taxed out of more than 25 percent of their income before they even look at their "income taxes." As Warren Buffet has pointed out, they pay a higher tax rate than he pays as one of the world's richest men.

And we working stiffs can probably handle the taxes that keep our parents in their own homes and give them medical care that the marketplace would never offer, and that might cushion our retirements when our hands and backs finally give out.

But I'll be damned if we want some soft-handed suit calling us welfare queens. I'm speaking here of the consultant types who probably wrote these lines for McCain. I doubt that he would repeat them if he had ever paid a quarterly tax or filled out a form SE.

And if Uncle Sam kicks back to our guys a portion of the quarterly checks that we cut, I'm here to tell him, those checks were paid for with blood, sweat, creativity and the occasional tear.
* JOHN "GRIZ THE CARPENTER" GRISWOLD works in Salt Lake City.

BUDWEISER WASSUP ORIGINAL + PIZZA GUY

No Pod!

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