Back in early December, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper suspended the country’s legislature for more than 7 weeks in a bid to stave off a challenge from opposition parties seeking to bring down his government. This week however, with a new budget unveiled on Tuesday by Finance Minister Jim Flaherty it would appear that with new Liberal leadership, political maturity is back in the great white north.
"The only good union is a dead union!" Osama bin Laden stated in prepared remarks today.
DATELINE MUSCAT, OMAN: Another shocking revelation of anti-Union plotting and scheming today, but this time it was not CEO’s of TARP Bailout recipient banks. The attendees? Senior Al Qaeda management, including Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and over two dozen more senior managers. It marked a historic first time for so many senior managers from Al Qaeda to be in one place at the same time. Under normal circumstances and for security reasons, Al Qaeda leaders are not allowed within 50 miles of each other but desperate times call for desperate measures.
(Cross posted at The National Gadfly)
My partner thought that she was Italian until she was 36 years old. Her name is Italian and she beautiful in a Sophia Loren sort of way, so this was never questioned. This Ani’s story and I asked her if I could write about it. She had no problem, but I will try to protect her anonomity as best as I can, and hope that I can relate her experience adequitely.
For the US, for Obama’s administration, I think this is some great news. According to TPM, Samantha Power is going to be working at a high level in the NSC.
Samantha Power, the Harvard University professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning author who earned notoriety for calling Hillary Rodham Clinton a “monster” while working to elect Barack Obama president, will take a senior foreign policy job at the White House, The Associated Press has learned.
Officials familiar with the decision say Obama has tapped Power to be senior director for multilateral affairs at the National Security Council, a job that will require close contact and potential travel with Clinton, who is now secretary of state. NSC staffers often accompany the secretary of state on foreign trips.
I have watched the Obama’s now, since the early days of the campaign, and as they danced together at the inaugural balls to the strains of Beyoncé covering Etta James, “At Last”, I mused about what we (as black American’s and we as women of color) have finally achieved “at last”.
When Reverend Lowery did the benediction earlier that day, his words echoed an old childhood schoolyard rhyme “if you’re white you’re all right, if you’re brown stick around, if you’re black stay back…”
Yes, we have the first POTUS of African descent. But that is not the focus of this diary. Of more significance for many women of color, we have a first couple, where the wife is darker in complexion than her spouse.
Much has been written about Barack Obama’s mother being white, and Michelle Obama as a really black American. What I have not seen discussed are the social implications of the image they present to many in not only the African-American community, but to those of us who may also be from other communities of afro-descendancy (Puerto Rico, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Brazil, Jamaica etc), where skin-color gradations have historically had a significant relationship to social class, and where this relationship has applied specifically to women of color.
Cross-posted to my own blog
I’ve been thinking about the comments I received to my Google and Facebook posts, as well as some related posts and articles (the article’s worth reading, btw) by other people from the last few days. I want to make one more point about this privacy stuff, and then move on for a while
According to Reuters, U.S. Army suicide rates are at their highest since the military first began tracking them in 1980. With 128 soldiers having committed suicide in 2008, and 15 additional deaths still under investigation, this is the first time the number of military suicides has been higher than the adjusted rate of suicide in the general civilian population since Vietnam.
On an icy day in January, a new President in the United States took the oath of office with soaring words of hope, idealism and courage. At a time of the worst global recession in living memory and a multitude of challenges, he did not shrink from reality but embraced the capacity to change it. Those who heard him were lifted.
Speaking to the millions in America, but heard by billions around the world, President Barack Obama said:
“What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them – that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply.”
Obama spoke of America, but he could have been speaking of the world. We are everywhere in need of renewal and hope. None more so than on the climate challenge where we need fresh vision and a politics that looks forwards not backwards. The stakes are so high that anything less than an audacious, global effort to reconcile our differences and make peace with the planet will fail humanity. We will not regret it in our parochial nationalisms as Indians or Americans, but as humans – as a species that failed itself, and condemned the rest.
This is why 2009 matters and why this year’s UN Conference on Climate Change (COP15) in Copenhagen in December must not fail.
I just saw what appears to be the craziest political ad I have ever seen. It is for the upcoming election in Israel, and apparently the Green Leaf Party (legalize pot) has teamed up with, I kid you not – the Holocaust Survivors Party. The ad speaks for itself.
Another ad the I think is fantastic and more like a music video was a Party Political Broadcast by the UK Green Party – for the EU Parliamentary Elections. Good stuff.
Here’s an oldie – times (and attention spans) have changed.
Lastly – this is a Canadian political ad from our recent election in the Fall. It’s a NDP ad attacking the Conservatives and is in French. But is so over-the-top that the language barrier shouldn’t be an issue.
God I love politics. What’s on your mind this snowy evening?
Looking over the vote in the House on the Stimulus Package, where almost all the Democrats and none of the Republicans voting for Obama’s proposal (despite his extremely visible outreached hand, meetings, compromises on more than one issue, etc.), I realized that the Republican (read Neo-Conservative) Movement was still in full swing. It was one thing to go up against a majority of American economists, a growing number of unemployed workers, lower-middle-class homeowners whose mortgages were about to et their homes… but it is strictly another thing not to have any Party concessions (like one or two votes in favor) to show that the attempts at bipartisanship by the President would be somewhat acknowledged.