Today’s video of the day shows Sheila Jackson-Lee’s recent town hall debacle. While taking a question from a cancer survivor, Jackson-Lee answered her cell phone. I haven’t heard the Congresswoman’s side of the story, nor do I know the nature of the phone call. Still, her behavior was both disrespectful and politically unwise. At a moment when the national narrative is quickly becoming “Congress doesn’t care about everyday people,” this is the last thing Obama and the rest of the Democratic Party needs.

Last week, a Chicago-area judge sentenced Clifton Williams to 6 months in jail. The crime? No, not drugs, theft, or violence. The offense for which Williams was sentenced was far more ordinary: yawning.

Williams, who sat in the galley as his cousin was being sentenced on drug charges, let out a yawn and stretch while Judge Daniel Rozak was handing out the sentence. Rozak immediately found him in contempt-of-court and handed him a 6 month sentence, the largest sentence legally permissable without a mandatory review. Ironically, Williams’ cousin received 2 years of probation for slinging crack.

Of course, it is unlikely that Williams is completely innocent. In fact, I have no doubt that he let out a yawn as means of disrupting the court. It is also unlikely that Williams, who has already been incarcerated for a week, will have to serve the entire sentence. Most people in the county get out of jail in a few days by apologizing to the judge. Still, this feels like an egregious abuse of judicial power.

Without question, courtrooms are central to the functioning of our democract. As such, they deserve full decorum and respect. It is for this reason that judges have broad legal discretion to effectively manage their court rooms.  Unfortunately, some judges do not use their authority in the interest of order and justice, but rather to satiate their thirst for unchecked power and uncritical deference.

Judge Rozak seems to be one of those people.

This year, 5 contempt charges have been brought in the county. Four have been brought by Rozak. In fact, since 1999, Rozak has accounted for one-third of all contempt charges. Given the fact that there are more than 30 judges in the 12th Judicial Circuit, we have every reason to believe that his behavior is both excessive and irregular.

Given the current assault on individual freedom and justice, particularly for our most vulnerable citizens, it is important that we keep a spotlight on such activities, both in Chicago and in our own cities. More importantly, we must organize and challenge the system that allows such behavior to go unexamined and unpunished.

The Repression of the Repressed
By Mumia Abu-Jamal

In the 30 years since the Islamic Revolution, the U.S. has been the focal point of Iran’s foreign and domestic policy; the pivot around which all else spins.

It has been the central theme animating its diplomacy, and also the organizing tool that the elites have utilized to elicit support from broad sectors of the population.

The recent spate of threats from the previous (George W.) Bush administration, and the nomination of Iran to the fatuous ‘axis of evil’ served to only reinforce state power, and strengthen the hands of the powerful clerics, for they were able to deploy Iranian nationalism as a mobilizing force.

The Iraq War was a godsend to Iran, for it removed its bitterest enemy, Saddam Hussein, and led to the emergence of the Shia majority as a power, right next door.

Yet, all is not well in the Islamic Republic, as shown by the recent eruption of protests that followed the announcement of the presidential results. The irony is that all 3 approved presidential candidates, Mir Hossein Mousavi, Mehdi Karroubi, and, yes — even Mahmoud Ahmadinejad were given permission to negotiate with Washington.

I say ‘given permission’ because under the Iranian constitution the president doesn’t run things — the Supreme Leader does.

In Iran, all of the wheels of state power, political, military and judicial, converge in the person of Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Khamenei — the Supreme Leader.

When the 1979 Iranian revolution caught fire, all major segments of Iranian society  turned against the man known as  “America’s Shah”, who was regarded as a U.S. puppet.  The Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was a dictator, whose secret police, the Savak, were dreaded and feared for their use of torture.

After the Revolution did torture continue?  Certainly.  As Will and Ariel Durant taught us, “Nothing is clearer in history, than the adoption by successful rebels of the methods they were accustomed to condemn in the forces they deposed”
[The Lessons of History (1968), p. 341]

In fact, the Iranian revolution was a rightest revolution, that wiped out leftist forces from the workers’ movements, the students, radical political parties and democratic activists.

In part, that explains much of the present repression against the many forces which converged around the elections, for they are seen, not just as adversaries, but enemies of the state — and worse, enemies of God.

Iranian scholar Farhi Farideh, in her brilliant 1990 study, States and Urban-Based Revolutions: Iran and Nicaragua  (University of Illinois Press) argues that every successful revolution uses “dangerous” memories from hidden histories to inspire, teach and mobilize new generations to rebel and recreate new social and political realities.

Iran has thousands of years — even before its Islamization — to draw upon, to find new ways — and perhaps old ways -to recreate a thriving civilization in the Middle East.

– (c) ‘09 maj

Today’s photo of the day shows Euna Lee and Laura Ling returning home to their families. It will be interesting to see how this incident enable Kim Jong-il to re-brand himself amongst the North Korean people. Also, I’m wondering if the use of Bill Clinton in an “unofficial capacity” enabled President Obama to engage in the type of bilateral diplomacy that he promised during his campaign without drawing the ire of increasingly unhappy voters. All of that aside, this is a great moment for the Lee and Ling families, the Obama Administration, and the broader American public.

Obama’s View of Education Is Stuck in Reverse

By Henry A. Giroux

Barack Obama views education as a high priority in his administration. Unlike in the Bush administration, he appears far more aware that public and higher education are important sites of struggle with enormous implications for young people, the existing social order, and the future. While President Obama and his secretary of education, Arne Duncan, have focused on public education, they have done so by largely embracing the Bush administration’s view of educational reform, which includes more testing, more empirically based accountability measures, more charter schools, more military academies, defining the purpose of education in largely economic terms, and punishing public schools that don’t measure up to high-stakes testing measures. For instance, his recent reforms aimed at higher education consists of providing 12 billion dollars to improve community colleges by developing new assessment tools and developing a standardized national curriculum. What comes to mind from this piece of reform is an attempt to upgrade bad secondary schools by adding computers and turning them into trade schools while producing an army of students prepared to take their place in low-skill, low pay service sector jobs.

As Dianne Ravitch has argued, educational reform for the Obama administration “starts with testing and ends with data and more testing.”(1) She rightly insists that Obama is simply giving Bush “a 3rd term in Education.”(2) Arne Duncan, by any educational standard, is a hard-wired disciple of free-market ideology, who largely views schools as a business and defines educational reform within the language of market-driven values and social relations. While he sometimes insists that education represents the civil rights issue of the century, his view of education is as far removed as one can imagine from the discourse of the civil rights movement. In fact, his language largely echoes the conservative market-driven values of both the Bush administration and the Chamber of Commerce. No emancipatory or liberatory goals at work in this discourse. Like Obama, he talks about education being important for democracy, but then he takes a right turn and reduces the purpose of education to preparing students almost exclusively for the workplace, with students defined largely as foot soldiers in the race for the United States to be an economic leader in the global economy. Of course, there is nothing wrong with students learning how to adapt and innovate to the demands of the world economy or learning vital work skills in general. What is wrong is when such a restrictive, instrumental goal becomes the only standard for defining the purpose of education. This is not merely a civically deprived vision of education, it is a dangerously narrow one as well. The discourse of standards and assessment dominate the Obama-Duncan language of reform, and in doing so erase more-crucial issues such as the iniquitous school-financing schemes, the economic disinvestment in poor urban schools, the ongoing reduction of teachers to testing technicians, the increasing racism and segregation of American schools, turning schools over to corporate interests, and the ongoing modeling of schools after prisons and the criminalization of young people. And these are only some of the problems.

For the rest of the story, click here.