1.    If you haven’t noticed yet, the flurry of news surrounding Haiti relief is done. This is where the real work begins because character is what we do when no one is looking. So here we go, no more moving facebook updates, editorial cartoons, or grand speeches by political leaders. Now that no one is looking is the perfect opportunity to give more of your self. So let’s chill with the “We will never forget” slogans because if you remember and don’t do anything, what’s the point?

2.    So it appears that the Dems have decided to finally commit to using reconciliation to finish health care reform. Senate Majority Leader Reid put forth a goal of having this done in 60 days and I hope and pray Democrats get this done because it is simply unconscionable for a country flush with so much wealth to have so many people go without adequate healthcare.

3.    I wanted to share a quote that has had me thinking, “The greatest hindrance to living is expectancy, which depends upon the morrow and wastes to-day.”

-Lucius Annaeus Seneca
“On the Shortness of Life”
translated by John W. Basore, Loeb Classical Library
London: William Heinemann, 1932

In response to this quote, what expectations do you have of yourself and others?  How do you think these expectations have helped or hindered? What informs these expectations? Do you really carpe diem or are you one of those people who go through the week like a zombie expecting to truly live when get off work on Friday?

4.    I haven’t heard anything about the guy that flew his plane into the IRS building. See now if the guy was Muslim, it would be front page every day for at least two weeks. What I don’t want is more finger pointing based on race, what I want is appropriate and proportional responses based on behavior, not race.

5.   Black History month is almost over and before we move on, I just want to thank all the Black people whose efforts and names will never make it into a history book or a PBS Black History month program. I represent am 27 years of Black History but I also stand on the shoulders of giants and so many elders have pulled me aside to show guidance and encouragement. Black History did not end with Civil Rights but it will be if we don’t have a burning desire to make the world better for our kids and grand kids. How much more would those coming after us resent us for being so selfish for not fighting as if all is well.

Stay up fam,

Brandon Q.

p.s. I really wish I could write more fam. Law school and life make it difficult to write the more in depth pieces I used to do more often. My apologies.

Fake version of Obama

Being fake is like driving the wrong way on the freeway: dumb, dangerous, and destructive. This is true in life, relationships, and public policy.

Stop Fake Reform

Last week I signed a letterto the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) calling each out for stopping the acceptance of PAC & lobbyist money for one day — the day President Obama comes to fund-raise for them.

Why this is a problem

Private money perverts politics. It destroys electoral integrity by weighting the outcome in favor of moneyed interests. The DSCC & DCCC are perfectly fine with this. President Obama is not. I’m not either.

Campaigns & elections should be publicly financed. Our taxes pay the salaries of elected officials already, so why don’t we pay for their selection too? That way, things won’t get too out of control (we won’t waste money), and we’ll be more likely to hold people accountable (because we literally paid for them to be there).

Join me, several other prominent Black & progressive bloggers, and 2,400+ other people  in signing this letter and stopping this madness.

Stop Fake Reform now.

Remember: nothing changes until something changes.

One Love. One II.

Photo Credit: tideswimmer on Flickr

My experience was probably similar to many of my peers across the country today and that’s unfortunate because this concern (for some, an obsession) with leading a healthy lifestyle belies the new reality in American healthcare; being healthy is the new healthcare. Think about it, insurance companies only want to insure people who are healthy and God forbid, you have any preconditions. The costs of healthcare is simply out of control. More and more, we hear about people who are drowned in medical costs, even when they have health insurance.

So if you have a son or daughter coming of age (early twenties – early thirties) and you give them grief about eating healthy, cut them some slack… for real. The reality is that provided you are healthy, managing your health insurance can be nerve racking, especially when many young professionals are forced to do consulting, stay mobile, and manage the immense debt stemming from undergraduate and graduate school.

Now when you take that stress and add a baby into the mix and the stress levels go through the roof because even if you have a job, you know that a mild emergency can lead to financial ruin. And businesses know that people will be compelled to stay in a job for the sake of medical benefits for their kids. And when you find out your deductible and co pays are going up, complaining is impossible when so many millions of Americans are not covered at all.

We need universal health care like crazy…period. We are living in a world where if you really want health insurance, you need to insure your health. So while it may cost more to eat healthier or join a gym, you really can’t afford not to.

Stay up fam,

Brandon Q.

Barack Obama warned us that some would try to make this big election be about small things. My warning is that we don’t let this big opportunity only lead to small change.

Big Opportunity

More than 137 million voters cast ballots this election, up 14% from 2004. 63.7 million (56%) of those people voted for Barack Obama, giving him more votes than any candidate in the history of US Presidential Election history. That is what you call a mandate.

Being the candidate with more supporters than any other President has ever had, Obama has been given a chance to serve more people than anyone could imagine. He can impact the finances of millions of people. He can improve the health of hundreds of millions of people. He can increase the moral standing of a nation in the eyes of billions of people. What a great opportunity to carry out public service and set the tone for the spirit of shared service & shared sacrifice that he so eloquently espouses.

Big Change

To whom much is given, much is required. (Luke 12:48)

The level of support and passion surrounding Barack Obama says more about the people supporting him than about Obama himself. It says that Obama is an inspirational figure, but that was evident before he started running for President. More importantly, it says that people are hungry. Hungry for change. Hungry for a new approach. Hungry for something to do. This is why Obama always talks about this election not being about him, but instead being about us.

With everybody so hungry, the onus is on the Obama team to give us something to eat. I don’t want a snack. I want a full, seven course meal. Legions of people do not organize for incremental change. Armies form to march forth into bold victory.

Now is our chance to make real, fundamental change in very progressive ways. This change will not happen because Barack Obama is a progressive. It can & will happen if we push our government, our newly-elected President, and, most importantly, ourselves to work towards the new kind of politics that Barack Obama helped us to believe was possible.

Let’s be bold. Let’s ask for a lot out of this administration. Let’s make Barack Obama a successful President by ensuring that he keeps his promise to start making big changes to the way America works. We helped him make history on November 4th. Let’s keep making history for the next 4 years.

One Love. One II.

P.S. Homework assignment: Everyone under 30 should talk to someone over 60 about what this election means to them.

Here is their checklist:

1. Check Your Registration. Make sure there are no errors, mistakes, or discrepancies which would prevent you from being able to vote.
2. Vote Now. Vote early, in person or by mail, if you can in your state. Check if you can using Know How To Vote.
3. Learn how to vote. Read your voter pamphlet to understand how your paper ballot works, and if voting using an electronic machine, get a clear demonstration first.
4. Identify State & Local election officials. Get their names and numbers because these are the people to call if there are problems.
5. Vote as early as possible on Election Day to avoid long lines & hassle.
6. If you have ID, bring it with you. If you have a cell phone, bring that too.
7. Avoid straight-party voting. Vote for each race individually, to make sure your votes each count exactly as you want them to.
8. Verify your vote, especially when voting on an electronic voting machine. There have already been cases in states like West Virginia where people used the touch screen to select Barack Obama but had the machine count their vote for John McCain. Just like at the store, get a receipt.
9. Observe, Document, Report. If you or anyone else that you see has issues voting, take good notes & inform the authorities using resources such as 866-OUR-VOTE.

One Love. One II.

P.S. I recently joined the Communications Advisory Board of YES! Magazine.

I’m looking forward to talking with Jeff again about Politics and Technology soon.

Enjoy.

One Love. One II.

NAACP and Hurricane Ike

According to Jealous, the NAACP National Office sent 3 of its staff people to do two things:

1. Ensure fairness in the distribution of aid
2. Ensure the sins of Katrina are not repeated

They’ve got their work cut out for them, and Jealous actually told us something else disturbing about the lead-up to the storm:

Some poor communities complained to the NAACP that they were not adequately warned of the storm, its seriousness, or the voluntary/mandatory evacuations. This is because the warnings happened almost exclusively on TV, and these people had no TV.

People with questions in the state and out of state can call the NAACP Command Center, which is at their Texas State Conference, at (512) 322-9547.It is a travesty that the NAACP’s Command Center is set up before FEMA’s.

Making sure peoplve vote

While Jealous is working to make sure that folks in the wake of Ike get proper aid and electrical power, he and the NAACP are working hard to make sure that those folks’ electoral power is also fully restored and available. The rights of voters in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina was a major issue, and I actually marched in support of the re-enfranchisement of those voters. 

In what Jealous called “a sign of things to come,” he announced Upload 2 Uplift, a website that gives people the ability to do 2 things:

1. Register themselves to vote online, or print out registration forms that they can mail in
2. Register their friends and contacts to vote

#2 is very important, and it’s this “social voter registration” capability that really sets this tool apart from other online voter registration tools. Many  people know they have friends that are not registered to vote. If you know that person’s email address, you can give them a very simple way to register quickly online. Additionally, the system will send people reminders by email and/or text message to let them know when to vote and where to vote, if they want it too. Pretty cool.

A great start

This was a good meeting for Jealous, and he demonstrated a new way of thinking about the NAACP and about advocacy & civic engagement. By including Black bloggers in his first press conference, Ben Jealous showed that blogging and other forms of new and online media will be an important part of the NAACP’s strategy going forward. By creating its first real online tool, the NAACP shows that technology and the Internet will be important parts of their strategy going forward. I am looking forward to see what they do with this momentum.

One Love. One II.

What’s up fam, this week James Dickson ripped into The New York Times (NYT) for their not publishing an article on the conflict in Iraq penned by Senator John McCain. For context, McCain’s piece was a defense of his supporting the conflict in Iraq and it was a response to an article written by Senator Barack Obama that was published the week before.

James said,

Rather than the nation ignoring McCain’s piece, as it almost certainly would have, the NYT has made it the first must-read political tract of 2008. Rather than bypass the piece when it would’ve run in the NYT, I instead read the piece — which, admittedly, was the typical “BUT THE DEMOCRATS ARE WORSE!!!1″ Republican attack line — on CNN.com, a site that, if it has lower circulation than NYT, isn’t by much.

I actually disagree that McCain’s piece is now a must-read political tract. This type of analogy is is akin to people buying NWA’s music solely because it was banned. And not for nothing, Obama is a really good writer and it is painfully obvious that he wrote his article while it appears that McCain’s article was written by the Communications staff and quite frankly, it read like it went through the campaign filter about ten times before they sent it to the NYT.

James himself admitted that McCain’s piece was lackluster which begs the question, why does the NYT editors have to publish bad journalism? Regardless, James went on to point out that decisions like the one made by NYT serve to highlight the growing prominence of the blogosphere and the decline of mainstream media. I think this claim is a bit overblown because the vast majority of political blogs react to articles in the mainstream media via commentary/analysis. (like we are doing right now)

The larger issue is that McCain is losing in the marketplace of ideas and by that I mean that his ability to paint an inspiring vision of a better America is similar to the article he submitted to the NYT; lackluster. And while the notion of fair and balanced news analysis is seductive, it is fleeting, which is why you can get more in-depth analysis by reading Black on Black Thought.

Stay up fam,

Brandon Q.

]]> http://thesuperspade.wordpress.com/2008/07/23/mccain-feels-disrespected-by-nyt-black-on-black-thought/feed/ 0 brandonq http://thesuperspade.wordpress.com/2008/07/22/confronting-racism-at-fox-news/ http://thesuperspade.wordpress.com/2008/07/22/confronting-racism-at-fox-news/#comments Tue, 22 Jul 2008 15:29:53 +0000 Garlin Gilchrist II http://www.thesuperspade.com/?p=1565 ]]>

The SuperSpade is partnering with Color of Change, Brave New Films, MoveOn.org, and now rapper Nas to outline just how racist Fox News is and how this racism has been used to stir up fear, uncertainty, and doubt about Barack Obama.

We encourage everyone to sign this petition that Color of Change created to show your support for shining light on the many, many, many examples of racism at Fox. Over 620,000 people have signed on already.

The petition itself will be delivered to Fox News HQ by Color of Change, Nas, and other supporters on Wednesday, 23 July 2008. Make sure you sign it to be a part of this action!

Also, listen to this Nas song from his latest album that talks specifically about Fox News.

One Love. One II.

Most importantly, Brandon will be leading a panel discussion today designed by the two of us called Black Blogging Beyond Obama. The goals of the panel are to discuss what the importance and position of Black online activism is and should be when we broaden our scope beyond election-focused efforts. Here’s a summary:

Black bloggers voice will be paid close attention given Obama’s candidacy and while the increased attention and addition of new voices are welcome; our collective voice is just as pertinent for issues unrelated to Obama’s campaign. As such, what steps should we be taking now to make sure that this message is not lost on each other and the larger blogosphere/media infrastructure?

I know B will knock it out of the park today and this weekend, raising the level of thought in Black political discourse to ever-increasing heights.

UPDATE: Video of the panel is availabe here.

One Love. One II.