Pope Francis Beethoven Concert No-Show, ‘Snub” Stuns Cardinals, Sends Signal To Vatican

Posted on June 25, 2013 by The Soul Brother

By Philip Pullella

imagesA last-minute no-show by Pope Francis at a concert where he was to have been the guest of honour has sent another clear signal that he is going to do things his way and does not like the Vatican high life. The gala classical concert on Saturday was scheduled before his election in March. But the white papal armchair set up in the presumption that he would be there remained empty. Minutes before the concert was due to start, an archbishop told the crowd of cardinals and Italian dignitaries that an “urgent commitment that cannot be postponed” would prevent Francis from attending. The prelates, assured that health was not the reason for the no-show, looked disoriented, realising that the message he wanted to send was that, with the Church in crisis, he – and perhaps they – had too much pastoral work to do to attend social events. “It took us by surprise,” said one Vatican source on Monday. “We are still in a period of growing pains. He is still learning how to be pope and we are still learning how he wants to do it.”

via Pope Francis Beethoven Concert No-Show, ‘Snub” Stuns Cardinals, Sends Signal To Vatican.

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Deepak Chopra – Finding your life’s path

Posted on June 25, 2013 by The Soul Brother
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As Demographics Shift, Kids’ Books Stay Stubbornly White

Posted on June 25, 2013 by The Soul Brother
Childrens' books

Childrens’ books (Photo credit: ImaginaryGirl)

By Elizabeth Blair

When it comes to diversity, children’s books are sorely lacking; instead of presenting a representative range of faces, they’re overwhelmingly white. How bad is the disconnect? A report by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that only 3 percent of children’s books are by or about Latinos — even though nearly a quarter of all public school children today are Latino. When kids are presented with bookshelves that unbalanced, parents can have a powerful influence. Take 8-year-old Havana Machado, who likes Dr. Seuss and Diary of a Wimpy Kid. At her mothers’ insistence, Havana also has lots of books featuring strong Latinas, like Josefina and Marisol from the American Girl Doll books. She says she likes these characters because, with their long, dark hair and olive skin, they look a lot like her. Havana’s mother, Melinda Machado, grew up in San Antonio, and her family is from Cuba and Mexico. She says she didn’t see Latino characters in books when she was a little girl, so she makes sure her daughter does. “But you do have to look,” she explains. “I think children today are told, ‘You can be anything.’ But if they don’t see themselves in the story, I think, as they get older, they’re going to question, ‘Can I really?’ ” Only a small fraction of children’s books have main characters that are Latino or Native American or black or Asian. And it’s been that way for a very long time. In 1965, The Saturday Review ran an article with the headline “The All-White World of Children’s Books” — and the topic is still talked about today, nearly 50 years later.

via As Demographics Shift, Kids’ Books Stay Stubbornly White : Code Switch : NPR.

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When Journalists Attack

Posted on June 25, 2013 by The Soul Brother
Jon Favreau at the Austin, TX premiere of I Lo...

Jon Favreau at the Austin, TX premiere of I Love You, Man (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Jon Favreau

If you saw the news at any point in the last month, chances are that you heard Barack Obama compared in some way to Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal (BuzzFeed has my favorite compilation here). A quick and admittedly unscientific Google search on the comparisons turns up 1.7 million hits, and they are not limited to right-wing media or Republican politicians. Partisan and nonpartisan journalists across the political spectrum casually and frequently linked Obama to Nixon over and over again, this publication included.

A quick refresher for those of us who weren’t around during the Watergate Era: reams of hard evidence, unearthed through some heroic reporting and independent investigation, revealed that the president of the United States had personally and repeatedly used the power of the federal government—the IRS, the FBI, the CIA—to target and destroy his potential challengers for reelection.

From Nixon’s mouth: “Are we looking over the financial contributors to the Democratic National Committee? Are we running their income tax returns? We have all this power and we aren’t using it. Now, what the Christ is the matter?”

Indeed. The stated goal of the Nixon administration, spelled out in a memo from the White House counsel(!), was to “use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.” And that they did. Richard Nixon actually ordered IRS audits on his political enemies. He actually sanctioned multiple break-ins, including one of a psychiatrist’s office to steal the patient files of Daniel Ellsberg, a true whistleblower. At one point, he placed Ted Kennedy, his most powerful political opponent, under 24-hour surveillance. And six days after the Watergate break-in, Nixon told his chief of staff to “call the FBI and say that we wish, for the country, don’t go any further into this case, period.”

Just to provide some perspective, there was apparently a moment toward the end of the Watergate hearings where the Secretary of Defense told military commanders not to obey their commander in chief if Nixon tried to “restore order” by sending out troops.

Read More When Journalists Attack – The Daily Beast.

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Affirmative Action Court Ruling: Can the Policy Survive?

Posted on June 25, 2013 by The Soul Brother
English: United States Supreme Court building ...

English: United States Supreme Court building in Washington D.C., USA. Front facade. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Keli Goff

Now that the Supreme Court has kicked Fisher v. University of Texas, its first major affirmative action case in a decade, back to the lower court, the outcome is still up on the air. But something that experts interviewed by The Root appear to be in agreement on is that regardless of what happens with the case, affirmative action is at a crossroads.

Today even supporters of affirmative action, particularly in higher education, acknowledge that the system is far from perfect, with not nearly enough students who are in need of equal opportunity benefiting from the policy. Discussions with some of the nation’s foremost experts on the subject indicate that the biggest threat to affirmative action’s survival may not be the Supreme Court but the ever-changing definition of who is supposed to benefit from such programs, versus the reality of who actually is.

“The scope of affirmative action originally dealt with the disenfranchisement of African Americans here in this country, and I am using the term ‘African American,’ ” Clemson University professor Juan Gilbert noted when speaking with The Root. “Fast-forward [to] today and [look at] African Americans, and who’s benefiting?”

To that point, Editor-in-Chief of The Root Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Harvard law professor Lani Guinier sparked nationwide discussion in 2004 when they noted that a majority of the black undergraduates at Harvard University did not fit the traditional definition of “African American.” They estimated that many, perhaps up to two-thirds, were immigrants or the children of immigrants — meaning that their parents probably, and their grandparents certainly, did not experience America’s particular brand of rampant legalized segregation and discrimination that predated the modern-day civil rights movement, of which affirmative action programs were an outcome.

via Affirmative Action Court Ruling: Can the Policy Survive?.

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Aide To Republican Congressman Fails To Live On Food Stamps For A Week

Posted on June 25, 2013 by The Soul Brother
Steve Stockman

Steve Stockman (Photo credit: Gage Skidmore)

By Igor Volsky

An aide to Rep. Steve Stockman (R-TX) failed the so-called “SNAP Challenge” last week, just days after accusing Democrats of “intentionally buying overpriced food and shopping at high-priced chains.”

The aide, Donny Ferguson, accepted the challenge in response to dozens of Democrats who lived off the program for a week to draw attention to the inadequacy of the average benefit of $4.50 per day.

In a press release issued by Stockman’s office, Ferguson initially bragged that he “was able to buy enough food to eat well for a week on just $27.58, almost four dollars less than the $31.50 “SNAP Challenge” figure.” The list, which is posted on Stockman’s website, included prepared foods like red beans and rice, peanut butter, and even popsicles, but no vegetables. “That is my diet for the week and I’m not eating outside of it. Feeling great and I’ve gained two pounds,” Ferguson told ThinkProgress on Wednesday, adding,”Reality has a way of mocking liberalism.”

But days later, it seems that the challenges of living on just a little more than $31.50 a week caught up with Ferguson.

Read More ThinkProgress.

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Child Poverty Has Risen Even As Unemployment Falls

Posted on June 25, 2013 by The Soul Brother

By Bryce Covert

29POVERTY-articleLargeEven as unemployment has gradually declined, the child poverty rate has been on the rise, according to a new report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Between 2010 and 2011, the number of children living in poverty rose from 15.7 million to 16.4 million. The child poverty rate also rose from 19 to 23 percent from 2005 to 2011, representing an increase of 3 million children.

The rates are even worse for younger kids: Children age five and under have a poverty rate of 26 percent. They are also worse for racial minorities: African-American children have a 39 percent poverty rate, almost three times that of white children, who have a rate of 14 percent.

Their families also have high rates of poverty. In 2011, nearly half – 45 percent – of children lived in families with incomes below 200 percent of the federal poverty line, or $45,622 for a family of four. Families have also taken a hit from the recession. Nearly a third of children in the U.S., or 23.8 million, lived in families where no parent had full-time, year-round employment in 2011, a figure that has risen by 3.6 million since 2008. The employment figures are also higher for racial minorities, as about half of African-American and American Indian children had no parent with full-time, year-round employment, compared to just a quarter of white children.

Read More Child Poverty Has Risen Even As Unemployment Falls.

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Supreme Court Strikes Down Key Provision Of Voting Rights Law

Posted on June 25, 2013 by The Soul Brother

By Eyder Peralta

English: The United States Supreme Court, the ...

By a 5-to-4 decision, the Supreme Court has struck down a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that establishes a formula to identify states that may require extra scrutiny by Justice Department. The decision focuses on section 4 of the Act. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts writes that the decision “in no way affects the permanent, nationwide ban on racial discrimination in voting found in [Section] 2. We issue no holding on [Section] 5 itself, only on the coverage formula. Congress may draft another formula based on current conditions.” Legal scholar Jeffrey Toobin tells CNN that the court has effectively said “times have changed so much that the formula is invalid.” And by striking Section 4, he said, “in practice, the other section of the law – Section 5 — is dormant.” The case, known as Shelby County v. Holder, involves Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which was renewed by Congress in 2006 for a period of 25 years. The petitioner, Shelby County, Alabama, argued that Section 5 of the VRA subjects them to a double standard and infringes on state sovereignty. Specifically, the plaintiff argued that Congress exceeded its authority under the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteeing equal protection and the Fifteenth Amendment covering voting rights and therefore violated the Tenth Amendment and Article IV of the constitution – both of which deal with state’s rights.

Read More Supreme Court Strikes Down Key Provision Of Voting Rights Law : The Two-Way : NPR.

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Dispatch From Academia: Equity in the Archives

Posted on June 25, 2013 by The Soul Brother

By Eve Dunbar

Sutton Hall—The University of Texas at Austin

Sutton Hall—The University of Texas at Austin (Photo credit: nikkorsnapper)

It’s a cold snowy afternoon in mid-March and I really need to leave the warmth of my office at Vassar College. There’s a stack of student papers at home and research on Zora Neale Hurston waiting for me in the Special Collections and Rare Books section of the library. Like a lot of young people, I’m easily distracted by Facebook, and freezing March days make that distraction more palpable. Today, a ProPublica piece has gone viral among my “friends,” many of whom are faculty of color. The piece totally debunks the idea that Abigail Fisher—the white plaintiff in the case threatening to kill off what’s left of affirmative action in higher education—actually had the grades or standardized test scores to compete with the students of color who got into the University of Texas at Austin when she applied in 2008.

I’ve been watching Fisher vs. The University of Texas, which bears the 23-year-old’s name, partially because I’m a black, female tenured professor who earned my doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin in 2004. But mostly I’ve been watching because the case has the potential to dismantle the “academic pipeline” that we count on to deliver a steady flow of excellent candidates of color into the academic job pool.

The case reminds me that if I had come of age a decade later, my body and body of knowledge might have faded from the academy, because the higher education odds were never stacked in my favor. As a black woman from a working-class family, raised for the first 10 years of my life by a young single mother in Hartford, Conn., and later by my grandparents in the rural, small Pennsylvania town of Greencastle, my race, gender, class and even geography would have all but guaranteed my exclusion from the ranks of college graduates, English PhDs, and the tenured professorate. These historic odds would have had very little to do with me, my academic talent or my work ethic; I was born nerdy and come from a family of workers.

Read More  Dispatch From Academia: Equity in the Archives – COLORLINES.

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Choices

Posted on June 25, 2013 by The Soul Brother

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