I am so mad at this. I can't even begin to write how mad I am. I will begin an email campaign. I really hope that maybe we can get a large progressive organization to hold it's debate on the same day in order to put the CBC and Fox on the spot.

Fox Sets 2 Debates With Congressional Black Caucus

In a statement accompanying the Fox announcement, chairman of the C.B.C., Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, said this:
“As a leading organization dedicated to educating the public on issues of national policy, the CBC Institute is committed to presenting the presidential candidates to the broadest audience possible.”
“Our goal with each debate is to provide a platform that will allow voters to hear the positions of candidates from both political parties. Collaborating with FOX News provides an opportunity to take this presidential election to millions of households.”

According to Fox:

The first of the two debates will be among Democratic candidates and will be held on September 23rd at the Fox Theater in Detroit. The second debate will be among Republican candidates and will take place in the fall of 2007 at a location to be determined. Both debates will serve as a forum for the candidates to make their platforms known.

The CBC thinks this debate will get the GOP to talk about civil rights and issues of color. Instead it will give Foz another opportunity to run their tired old line that "Democrats take the Black vote for granted" and "How more and more Blacks are becoming Republicans" (statistics don't back this up), yada yada yada. The CBC just gave their progressive base the middle finger!

This isn’t the first time the C.B.C. has paired with Fox. It did so in 2003 as a runup to the 2004 election cycle.
The C.B.C. sent out its own release announcing the debate schedule. And it also provided toward the end, a justification perhaps, for this deal:
Fox News Channel (FNC) is a 24-hour general news service covering breaking news as well as political, entertainment and business news. For five years, FNC has been the most watched cable news channel in the nation and currently presents 9 out of the top 10 programs in cable news. Owned by News Corp., FNC is available in more than 85 million homes.

Bringing back home in New Orleans. The devastated Lower 9th Ward is still beautiful to two sisters with deep roots there. They're rebuilding not just houses but their neighborhood.

Today, the Lower 9th Ward is a dreary landscape of deserted brick and wood-frame structures, concrete slabs where homes once stood, unshaded streets and sidewalks buckled by uprooted live oaks and weeks of standing water. At night, a graveyard silence is broken only by the skittering of rats.

It is about as inhospitable a place as exists in post-Katrina New Orleans.

And yet sisters Tanya Harris and Tracy Flores are moving back.

To them, the "Lower 9" is still beautiful. In her mind's eye, Harris is fishing with her grandfather in Bayou Bienvenue at the end of the street where his house stood. She and her sister are sitting on his front porch "door-popping," their grandfather's term for playful gossip and people-watching.

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CULTURE

How did a sport with so much support amongst African-Americans for most of its History, come to this? Where most
inner-city schools lack funding, equipment to support baseball programs

Their coach, Marcus Rogers, would have preferred them to have been playing or practicing Saturday on a baseball diamond, like many of the rest of Shelby-Metro's top high school baseball programs.
Instead, the Fairley Bulldogs spent Saturday morning and most of the afternoon gathered near the front entrances of a Whitehaven Wal-Mart, hustling team baseball cards for $10 a pop to raise money for transportation, equipment and other key needs for the Bulldogs' 2007 baseball season.

"Man, I'm ready to be through with this stuff and to concentrate on just baseball, but it's kind of hard. You've got to have money to do this."

As Saturday's inaugural Civil Rights Game at AutoZone Park commemorating the civil rights movement and baseball's role in it approaches, Rogers, reflecting on his own team's plight and those of the other predominantly black high school baseball programs in the city, described the harsh reality that faces today's inner-city teams.

Unlike their predominantly white county school counterparts that typically clobber the Bulldogs every postseason, Fairley has no baseball booster club, leaving Rogers and his players on their own when it comes to raising money for basic team needs.

Rather than practicing or playing, the Bulldogs have spent much of the early part of this season selling $10 team baseball cards that offer discounts and benefits at area businesses.

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For Some Black Pastors, Accepting Gay Members Means Losing Others

When the Rev. Dennis Meredith of Tabernacle Baptist Church here began preaching acceptance of gay men and lesbians a few years ago, he attracted some gay people who were on the brink of suicide and some who had left the Baptist faith of their childhoods but wanted badly to return.

At the same time, Tabernacle Baptist, an African-American congregation, lost many of its most loyal, generous parishioners, who could not accept a message that contradicted what they saw as the Bible’s condemnation of same-sex relations. Over the last three years, Tabernacle’s Sunday attendance shrank to 800, from 1,100.

The debate about homosexuality that has roiled predominantly white mainline churches for years has gradually seeped into African-American congregations, threatening their unity, finances and, in some cases, their existence.

In St. Paul, the Rev. Oliver White, senior minister of Grace Community Church, lost nearly all his 70 congregants after he voted in 2005 to support the blessing of same-sex unions in his denomination, the United Church of Christ.

In the Atlanta area, a hub of African-American life, only a few black churches have preached acceptance of gay men and lesbians, Mr. Meredith said. At one of those congregations, Victory Church in Stone Mountain, attendance on Sundays has fallen to 3,000 people, from about 6,000 four or five years ago, said the Rev. Kenneth L. Samuel, the senior pastor.

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Who's gifted? Miami-Dade schools are expanding gifted programs to better represent poor and black students. In Broward, and across the state, Black and poor students are less likely to be identified as gifted.

Their high IQs are their rudders, propelling them through a challenging subject with little guidance or explanation from their teacher.

This gifted class, like others across the Broward County public school district, offers intense, advanced lessons in unique ways to teach students who need an outside-the-box, abstract approach to traditional subjects.

But identifying gifted students is inconsistent, and poor and minority students are often overlooked. Despite Broward's efforts to diversify gifted classes, the numbers show students who are poor or black are the least likely to be recognized as gifted.

Forty-one percent of Broward students are from low-income families, yet poor students make up only 19 percent of the district's gifted classes.

''There is a belief system in this society that being gifted and being a minority or being from poverty don't go together,'' said Joyce VanTassel-Baska, president of the National Association of Gifted Children.

And it may get worse.

Like many other districts, Broward and Miami-Dade allow some leeway for minority and poor students who score less than the 130 IQ score required for gifted. This is because poor students and those learning English may do well on parts of an IQ test but may not be able to score well on areas requiring strong reading and verbal skills.

''These kids really may be extremely bright, but have not had the opportunities other students have had,'' explains Beth Klein, a Weston clinical psychologist.

But Florida is poised to do away with those accommodations. To get into gifted programs, students who score lower on IQ tests will have to score high on the FCATs and other achievement tests -- ones requiring strong reading skills -- regardless of whether they are poor or learning English.

Look no further than the number of gifted students enrolled in some of the county's poorest schools to understand the disparity among gifted classes. At 33 schools where at least half the students are poor, 10 or fewer students have been identified as gifted.

At Sunland Park Elementary in Fort Lauderdale, for example, where 86

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ABC Family Takes Drama to Daring, New Heights Russell Hornsby is all over the map. He's making movies, shooting a TV drama — ABC Family's Lincoln Heights, which airs a new episode tonight at 7 pm/ET —

TVGuide.com: What do you like most about playing Eddie?
Hornsby: I like the fact that he is three-dimensional, that I get to show both sides, because there aren't many African-American dramas on television that are dealing specifically with the black man. To look at this black man as a well-rounded character and see that this is a man who has integrity, heart, humanity and a sense of soul and spirit about him, that's the most fun for me. I modeled Eddie Sutton after my two uncles who live in the Roxbury section of Boston, Massachusetts. They both work in law and government — one is a judge and the other is a constable — and they grew up in the ghetto. They went away to college, but they came back. The judge is now sending friends of his, or their sons and daughters, to jail. I sat in his courtroom and what I saw was that people had respect for him, because not only did he stay, but he was fair. My uncle who's a constable has to evict old friends and their kids from their apartments, because they haven't paid in three, four, five or six months. When you have examples to draw from, it's a much richer experience.

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POLITICS
Patrick Shaped by Father's Absence. As a child, Deval Patrick endured the painful absence of his father, Pat Patrick, a talented sax player who traveled the world with the legendary Sun Ra Arkestra.

He was 18 years old and his family was gathered in the crowded Milton Academy gymnasium on a rainy summer morning in 1974 to watch him graduate. Suddenly, his father, who had largely abandoned the family 15 years earlier and had seen his son rarely, showed up unexpectedly. Deval was not happy to see him.

Patrick's family -- his mother, grandparents, and sister -- sat though the ceremony rigid with tension, angrily eyeing Pat Patrick at the end of the row. And then as they all drove in his grandfather's Buick toward a restaurant to celebrate, his parents began to fight. They screamed at each other, and curses flew. Patrick senior, an emotional man who had opposed his son's attending the elite private school, broke into tears.

Through it all, Deval sat quietly in the front seat. When the car stopped at a light he got out, slammed the door, and stamped back to his dorm.

"It was a disaster," the governor recalled in an interview in his State House office. "I am thinking, this is supposed to be my day. . . . I just bailed."

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Why is there so much racial profiling allowed in Jury cases? St' Louis County is about 50/50 Black and White. So how do you get a jury (twice) that is so far from the demographic medium? The victims in this case were Black so it's not that the Prosecution wanted Whites to be outraged and choose the Death Penalty. It seems that many prosecutors (in my opinion) don't think Blacks are tough enough on crime. For the second time in less than a year, the Missouri Supreme Court has struck down a death sentence over concerns that St. Louis County prosecutors removed blacks from juries for "racially discriminatory reasons."

Both cases involved the same defendant, Vincent McFadden, 26, but separate death sentences were recommended by separate juries for separate murders.

Assistant Public Defender Janet M. Thompson, who argued the case, said the decision, announced Tuesday, reflects a pattern of excluding blacks.

She said her office has unsuccessfully sought data from judges on the rate at which blacks are excluded in St. Louis County juries, and is now calling for lawyers to create their own tracking system.Advertisement
St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch and an assistant were too busy to talk about the case, an employee said Tuesday.

Mark Bishop, who prosecuted both cases for McCulloch's office and is now in private practice, said there was no policy to exclude blacks.

"My hands are tied as far as giving my real opinion about the decision," he said. "I do want to point out that every one of McFadden's victims was African-American. Every witness was African-American. My whole focus was to get justice for these victims. It doesn't matter to me if they're African-American or not. It does not matter to me if he's African-American or not."

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ARIANNA HUFFINGTON writes a strong editorial in the L:A Times dealing with the fact that " Democratic presidential candidates crave the Latino and black vote, but ignore the Drug War's unfair toll on people of color." Her editorial is titled:
The war on drugs' war on minorities

THERE IS A subject being forgotten in the 2008 Democratic race for the White House.

While all the major candidates are vying for the black and Latino vote, they are completely ignoring one of the most pressing issues affecting those constituencies: the failed "war on drugs" — a war that has morphed into a war on people of color.

Consider this: According to a 2006 report by the American Civil Liberties Union, African Americans make up an estimated 15% of drug users, but they account for 37% of those arrested on drug charges, 59% of those convicted and 74% of all drug offenders sentenced to prison. Or consider this: The U.S. has 260,000 people in state prisons on nonviolent drug charges; 183,200 (more than 70%) of them are black or Latino.

Such facts have been bandied about for years. But our politicians have consistently failed to take action on what has become yet another third rail of American politics, a subject to be avoided at all costs by elected officials who fear being incinerated on contact for being soft on crime.

Perhaps you hoped this would change during a spirited Democratic presidential primary? Unfortunately, a quick search of the top Democratic hopefuls' websites reveals that not one of them — not Hillary Clinton, not Barack Obama, not John Edwards, not Joe Biden, not Chris Dodd, not Bill Richardson — even mentions the drug war, let alone offers any solutions.

The silence coming from Clinton and Obama is particularly deafening.

Obama has written eloquently about his own struggle with drugs but has not addressed the tragic effect the war on drugs is having on African American communities.

As for Clinton, she flew into Selma, Ala., to reinforce her image as the wife of the black community's most beloved politician and has made much of her plan to attract female voters, but she has ignored the suffering of poor, black women right in her own backyard.

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INTERNATIONAL
Diamonds Move From Blood to Sweat and Tears

Diamond mining in Sierra Leone is no longer the bloody affair made infamous by the nation’s decade-long civil war, in which diamonds played a starring role.

The conflict — begun by rebels who claimed to be ridding the mines of foreign control — killed 50,000 people, forced millions to flee their homes, destroyed the country’s economy and shocked the world with its images of amputated limbs and drug-addled boy soldiers.

An international regulatory system created after the war has prevented diamonds from fueling conflicts and financing terrorist networks. Even so, diamond mining in Sierra Leone remains a grim business that brings the government far too little revenue to right the devastated country, yet feeds off the desperation of some of the world’s poorest people. “The process is more to sanitize the industry from the market side rather than the supply side,” said John Kanu, a policy adviser to the Integrated Diamond Management Program, a United States-backed effort to improve the government’s handling of diamond money. “To make it so people could go to buy a diamond ring and to say, ‘Yes, because of this system, there are no longer any blood diamonds. So my love, and my conscience, can sleep easily.’

“But that doesn’t mean that there is justice,” he said. “That will take a lot, lot longer to change.”

In many cases, the vilified foreign mine owners have simply been replaced by local elites with a firm grip on the industry’s profits.

At the losing end are the miners here in Kono District, who work for little or no pay, hoping to strike it rich but caught in a net of semifeudal relationships that make it all but impossible that they ever will.

A vast majority of Sierra Leone’s diamonds are mined by hand from alluvial deposits near the earth’s surface, so anyone with a shovel, a bucket and a sieve can go into business; and in a country with few formal jobs, at least 150,000 people work as diggers, government officials said.

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Zimbabwean Opposition Leader Released

The country's main opposition leader was freed after being held by police for several hours, party officials said Thursday, as southern African leaders gathered in Tanzania to discuss the crisis in Zimbabwe.

Police denied arresting Morgan Tsvangirai as he prepared to talk to reporters about a wave of political violence that left him briefly hospitalized.

State media reported that police had seized weapons and explosives at the party's headquarters during a raid.

Officials with the Movement for Democratic Change denied the allegations.

''The MDC does not have any arsenal of weapons or armed movement; the story is not credible,'' said Tsvangirai's aide, Eliphas Mukonoweshuro.

He said the opposition was not waging an armed terror campaign against the government, as authorities had claimed. Police had said they arrested a total of 35 opposition members in recent days, saying they belonged

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Uganda's Early Gains Against HIV Eroding

Students packed a grassy field at Makerere University in April 1989 for a farewell concert by singer Philly Lutaaya. This symbol of swaggering virility had grown gaunt, with splotchy skin and the fine, sparse hair of a baby. He sang hauntingly, "Today it's me, tomorrow it's somebody else."

Between songs, he warned the stunned crowd that having several sex partners was a sure way to die in the age of AIDS, echoing pleas also made by political and religious leaders of the time. When Lutaaya died that December, at age 38, the country already had begun its historic reversal of the epidemic, researchers say, because of the power of that single, terrifying message.

Despite this success story, unmatched elsewhere on this AIDS-ridden continent, no country has entirely replicated Uganda's approach. Most instead have followed a diffuse palette of other remedies pushed by Western donors -- condom promotion, abstinence training, HIV testing, drug treatment and stigma reduction -- while forgoing what research shows worked here: fear and a relentless focus on sexual fidelity.

Even in Uganda, these key ingredients have been lost as a new generation coming of age years after Lutaaya's death indulges in the same reckless behavior that first spread the disease so widely.

"We saw him. We saw him die. We abandoned the girlfriends," said Swizen Kyomuhendo, a social scientist at Makerere, who was an undergraduate when Lutaaya spoke there. "When you look at the university students now, they are not as terrified as we were then."

The percentage of sexually active men with multiple partners has more than doubled in recent years, undoing earlier declines, surveys show. Reports of sexually transmitted diseases among women, another indicator of dangerous behavior, have risen sharply as well

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Welcome to Jerusalem, Africa

Ethiopia's Orthodox Christians are among the oldest Christian communities in the world. Their hymns and prayers have been preserved and passed down over the ages. But with its numerous religious holidays, the Christian tradition also worsens the country's grinding poverty.

From the air, Lalibela looks like any other village. An ocean of corrugated iron huts, shrouded by thin columns of smoke that condense into a bluish haze below the rocky plateau. It's a familiar sight all across Ethiopia.

But Lalibela isn't just another village. It's the capital of Ethiopia's Christians, their "holy place," their "wonder of the world." And nowhere else is this clearer than at Bet Gyiorgis, the Church of St. George. The monumental structure - chiseled out of the rocks on the town's western fringes - is some 800 years old. Built in the form of a cross, it is ringed by a dry moat that helps set it apart from the 10 other rock churches, all of which are interconnected by subterranean tunnels.

The interior is dimly lit with beef-tallow lamps. A little daylight filters through the narrow windows. The smell of incense hangs in the air. Elderly, bearded men in white robes are seated along the walls, reading handwritten bibles.

A pious murmuring resounds throughout the church, softly punctuated by harp music teased by a boy from his bagana - a wooden string instrument embellished with gleaming brass plates.

Some 40 percent of the 68 million Ethiopians are Orthodox Christians. Their faith and traditions hark back some 1,600 years. According to the legend, their church was established as the unintended consequence of a kidnapping. Two Christians named Frumentios and Aidesios - both residents of Tyre - were accosted on the Red Sea and abducted to Aksum, Ethiopia's capital at the time. Being educated people, they were soon installed as private tutors to the royal family. They not only taught the king's children mathematics and Greek, but imparted the fundamentals of their Christian faith as well.

Contemporary of Genghis Khan

And they were evidently persuasive. In the middle of the 4th century, King Ezana decided to become baptized. Just a few years later Christianity was proclaimed the state religion. Despite this, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church was headed for centuries by a metropolitan who was appointed by the Coptic patriarch of Alexandria. It wasn't until the middle of the past century that the Ethiopian church became autonomous and appointed its own patriarch in Addis Ababa. Alongside the 17 eparchies in Ethiopia, bishoprics in Nubia and in Jerusalem now fall under his aegis.

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EDUCATION
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Morehouse the all Male, Historically Black College in Atlanta Georgia is going through some trying times. Morehouse Searches for a Leader and a Way to Keep Making Gains

Morehouse, the only all-male historically black college in the country, has long possessed an aura of impeccability and privilege. Founded to serve newly freed slaves, it has educated generations of the black elite, counting among its graduates Maynard Jackson, the first black mayor of Atlanta; David Satcher, a former surgeon general; the film director Spike Lee; and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

But if its place in history is secure, Morehouse’s future has often, in the past decade, seemed precarious. And it will reach a milestone this spring, when Walter E. Massey, who became president in 1995, retires. Dr. Massey has been credited with helping the college rebound from hard times. As Morehouse searches for a replacement, many students and faculty members say the stakes are high if the college is to consolidate its gains.

When Dr. Massey took over, applications were declining because the country’s top colleges had stepped up their pursuit of qualified black men. The historic campus in the heart of Atlanta was aging. The endowment, at $118 million, is still relatively tiny; Swarthmore, a smaller institution, has more than $1 billion.

This year, applications are expected to reach 3,100, up from fewer than 2,700 last year. Four new buildings have been completed, and the ground will soon be broken for a fifth, a performing arts center.

Last year, the college took custody of the papers of Dr. King, bought with $32 million raised by Atlanta’s mayor, Shirley Franklin. And the college completed its largest fund-raising effort to date, a capital campaign taking in $120 million.

Not all the news has been good. In August, Morehouse dropped in an annual ranking by Black Enterprise magazine, from the top institution for African-Americans to No. 45. Dr. Massey said this was because the magazine placed more weight on graduation rates and used data from a Morehouse class that had a particularly low one.

The college has since introduced a scholarship for upperclassmen, to help increase the graduation rate, now at 61 percent. It has also received a $500,000 grant to recruit Hispanic students.

Over the summer, four former students were charged with murdering a current student in what prosecutors say was a robbery attempt. In September, students from Spelman, Morehouse’s sister school, marched on campus in protest after rumors of multiple rapes, which later proved unfounded, by Morehouse students. The result was soul-searching throughout the campus.

“The guys just felt, you know, that the world was collapsing,” Dr. Massey said. “I tried to put it in perspective” by explaining that the timing of the episodes was coincidental.

This year, Morehouse began requiring interviews for applicants, a move that some students on campus viewed as a response to the murder indictments, but that the administration says was done to match the practices of other exclusive colleges.

Naturally the college wants a new leader who will continue to raise its profile. But alumni and students, some of whom fret over the inroads of hip-hop and gangsta cultures on campus, have also wondered whether the choice of someone like the Rev. Calvin O. Butts III, pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, would signal a renewed emphasis on moral leadership. Mr. Butts, who is also president of SUNY College at Old Westbury, is one of the many influential black pastors still minted at Morehouse.

Other frequently mentioned candidates include Michael L. Lomax, president of the United Negro College Fund; Robert Franklin Jr., a professor at the Candler School of Theology at Emory; and John S. Wilson, a faculty member and former executive dean at George Washington University’s Virginia campus. All are, like Dr. Massey, “Morehouse men,” or graduates of the college.

Dr. Massey, a physicist who directed the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts under President George H. W. Bush, left the post of provost of the University of California system to return to Morehouse because, he said, he thought he could have a greater impact at a small institution. He said his goal was to push Morehouse into the ranks of the country’s top liberal arts colleges. But one of his first jobs on arrival was raising money.

“We really had not had, in 20 or 30 years, a capital campaign,” he said. “There was no focused and concerted effort to generate funds and support. But the name Morehouse always resonated positively, even though people didn’t know too much about it. Some people didn’t even know it was all-male.”

Playing on, and against, the much-discussed plight of young black men, Dr. Massey tapped celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, who has given $11 million during Dr. Massey’s tenure, and Ray Charles, who gave $2 million to the capital campaign. Other contributors include David Geffen, who gave $500,000.

Dr. Massey persuaded corporations like Bank of America, Motorola and American Express to think of their contributions as substantial investments rather than token support. All three became major givers. “We’re not a charity. We’re not a poor small struggling school in the South that’s going to fail if you don’t give it money,” Dr. Massey said, recounting his sales pitch. “I also make the case that not all black men are in danger of falling off a cliff.”

A sign that the college was meeting its academic goals came in 2003, Dr. Massey said, when a study by The Wall Street Journal ranked Morehouse 29th on a list of the top 50 feeder schools for the country’s most prestigious graduate programs, ahead of Emory, Brandeis, Reed and Washington University in St. Louis.

Still, Dr. Massey points out that despite its prestige, Morehouse is poor. Its endowment breaks down to $42,000 per student, compared with $360,000 per student at nearby Emory and more than $1 million per student at the wealthiest institutions.

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MONEY
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I have very mixed emotions on this one. On one hand I can see the employers point, but also employees need to make a living and how else can they improve their credit but to make more money? I guess this why Harry Truman wanted a handed economist.Credit checks: A civil-rights issue?

Lisa Bailey worked for five months at Harvard University as a temp entering donations into a database. When the university made the job a salaried position, Bailey, who is black, saw a chance to lift herself out of dead-end jobs.

Bailey's superiors encouraged her to apply, she says, but turned her down after discovering her bad credit history.

Bailey, with her lawyer, has lodged a complaint against Harvard charging racial discrimination. The reason: Studies indicate that minorities are more likely to have bad credit, but credit problems have not been shown to negatively affect job performance.

Some privacy and minority advocates are now seeing credit as a civil-rights issue as minorities start to fight employers and insurers who base decisions on credit histories. Their effort could slow the near doubling in credit checks by employers in the past decade, which affects millions of Americans who are struggling with debt.

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