Today’s video of the day shows classic from Black Panther Huey P. Newton, one of greatest minds of the 20th century. His legacy of service, sacrifice, and struggle reminds us all that The People will win!!!!!

If you can’t sleep tonight at 2AM, I’ll be on the Fox News Channel’s “Red Eye” program. The show is a lot of fun and it airs from 2-3…

“It is necessary for intellectuals, students, soldiers and the average peasant to pay attention and involve themselves with political work. This is particularly true in wartime.” – Mao Tse Tung

In Praise of Red Tape
By Christopher Hayes

Is there any figure in American political discourse more reviled than the bureaucrat? Say the word and a potent caricature leaps to mind: the petty and shiftless paper pusher who wields his small amount of power with malice and caprice. Whatever the issue–from school reform to overhauling the nation’s intelligence apparatus–the bureaucrat is on the wrong side of it.

It’s slander with a long pedigree–Cicero called the bureaucrat “the most despicable” of men, “petty, dull, almost witless…a holder of little authority in which he delights, as a boy delights in possessing a vicious dog”–but in the last forty years, conservatives have converted this casual contempt into an ideological fixture. Since as far back as the Goldwater campaign, the American right has generally found that “the government” is too abstract an entity for most people to actively loathe. It’s far more effective to demonize the people who execute its daily functions. Bureaucrats are to conservatives what the bourgeoisie was to Marx: an oppressive class of joyless knaves. Milton Friedman quipped that “hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned”; Ronald Reagan said in 1966 that “the best minds are not in government” because if any were, “business would hire them away”; and George Wallace expressed his desire to “take those bearded bureaucrats” in Washington who were in the process of desegregating the South, “and throw them in the Potomac.”

But a funny thing has happened over the past six years. At a time when the press failed to check a reactionary Administration, when the opposition party all too often chose timidity, it was the lowly and anonymous bureaucrats, clad in rumpled suits, ID badges dangling from their necks, who, in their own quiet, behind-the-scenes way, took to the ramparts to defend the integrity of the American system of government.

It was the midlevel intelligence professionals in the CIA whose expertise led them to argue that Iraq had no means of acquiring nuclear material; it was the planners and country experts at the State Department who prepared a 1,200-page document about postwar Iraq outlining in depressing detail the many challenges and brutalizing exigencies our occupying forces now face. It was professional scientists in the bowels of the Environmental Protection Agency who pushed their reports warning of the effects of climate change, only to have them censored and purged. It was concerned and conscientious spooks and cryptographers at the National Security Agency who contacted reporters to raise alarms about the warrantless wiretapping of Americans. It was a midlevel career bureaucrat at the Department of Education named Jon Oberg who spent his own time–nights and weekends–studying the student loan program and discovered that taxpayers were being ripped off by private lenders to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. Despite warnings from his (appointed) superiors, he published his results in an internal memo sent to the entire department. He retired shortly thereafter.

Perhaps the most dramatic example of the virtue of bureaucracy came during the recent revelations of James Comey’s late-night confrontation with the President’s henchmen in the hospital room of the drugged and groggy Attorney General John Ashcroft. True, Comey and Ashcroft were both appointed apparatchiks, but ones who acted, for this moment, like bureaucrats, responsible to the integrity of their office and the rules and processes by which those offices were governed. And they were no doubt pressured by the fact that many of the career civil servants in the Justice Department had reportedly vowed to quit if the wiretapping program in question was approved.

For the rest of the story, click here.

The public is far more disturbed by misogynistic lyrics in rap music than in rock music — the domain of white musicians. Seems it isn’t sexism that the dominant culture is opposed to, but rather the black voices communicating the message.

Caucasian Please! America’s Cultural Double Standard For Misogyny & Racism
By Dr. Edward Rhymes 

In the wake of MSNBC’s and CBS’s firing of Don Imus, the debate over misogyny, sexism and racism has now taken flight — or submerged, depending on your point of view. There are many, mostly white, people who believe that Imus was a fall guy and he is receiving blame and criticism for what many rap artists do continually in the lyrics and videos: debase and degrade Black women. A Black guest on an MSNBC news program even went as far as to say, “Where would a 66 year-old white guy even had heard the phrase nappy-headed ho” — alluding to hip-hop music’s perceived powerful influence upon American culture and life (and apparently over the radio legend as well) — and by so doing gave a veneer of truth to the theory that rap music is the main culprit to be blamed for this contemporary brand of chauvinism.

However, I concur with bell hooks, the noted sociologist and black-feminist activist who said that “to see gangsta rap as a reflection of dominant values in our culture rather than as an aberrant ‘pathological’ standpoint, does not mean that a rigorous feminist critique of the sexist and misogyny expressed in this music is not needed. Without a doubt black males, young and old, must be held politically accountable for their sexism.

Yet this critique must always be contextualized or we risk making it appear that the behavior this thinking supports and condones — rape, male violence against women, etc. — is a black male thing. And this is what is happening. Young black males are forced to take the ‘heat’ for encouraging, via their music, the hatred of and violence against women that is a central core of patriarchy.”

There are those in the media, mostly white males (but also some black pundits as well), who now want the Black community to take a look at hip-hop music and correct the diabolical “double-standard” that dwells therein. Before a real conversation can be had, we have to blow-up the myths, expose the lies and cast a powerful and discerning light on the “real” double-standards and duplicity. Kim Deterline and Art Jones in their essay, Fear of a Rap Planet, point out that “the issue with media coverage of rap is not whether African Americans engaged in a campaign against what they see as violent, sexist or racist imagery in rap should be heard — they should. …[W]hy are community voices fighting racism and sexism in mainstream news media, films and advertisements not treated similarly?

The answer may be found in white-owned corporate media’s historical role as facilitator of racial scapegoating. Perhaps before advocating censorship of a music form with origins in a voiceless community, mainstream media pundits should look at the violence perpetuated by their own racism and sexism.”

For the rest of the story, click here.