Commentary by Black Kos Editor Deoliver47
Kamala Harris sworn in as first African-American Asian-American Attorney General of California
Harris’ ceremony was held at the California Museum for History, Women & the Arts.
She is the first woman and first African American/Indian-American elected as California’s attorney general.
The California Museum For History, Women & The Arts showcases the achievements of Californians throughout history. Former First Lady Maria Shriver led the effort to re-establish the museum in 2005.
The Museum was the perfect place for this historic swearing-in ceremony.
Her website has this article from the San Francisco Chronicle
Voters chose Kamala Harris' full view of the law
From a political standpoint, Kamala Harris' upset victory over Steve Cooley for state attorney general was remarkable. He was the district attorney from Los Angeles, which allowed him to start the campaign with a deeper support base and the opportunity to chide the San Francisco district attorney as a caricature of the leftist city she served.
...
California voters, however, had other ideas. They chose Harris, the 46-year-old career prosecutor with the more thoughtful and expansive vision of the role of an attorney general. As with Brown, Harris said she would not defend laws she regarded as blatantly unconstitutional (such as Prop. 8, the voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage) and would help assure the implementation of the state's landmark climate-change law. Harris pledged to enforce the state's death penalty law despite her personal opposition to it - but she repeatedly and correctly reminded voters that it was not the most pressing criminal-justice issue in the state.
Her top priority would be to try new approaches to reducing the state's unacceptably high recidivism rate, which represents a serious peril to public safety and a steady drain on the state budget.
We were all pulling for her here, and we congratulate Sister Harris, and the voters of California who rallied to her support.
For those not familiar with her background, Harris exemplifies much of what the landscape of the US will look like in the future.
Bio
Harris was born in Oakland, California. She is the daughter of a Tamil Indian mother, Dr. Shyamala Gopalan – a breast cancer specialist who immigrated to the United States from Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India in 1960 – and a Jamaican American father, Stanford University economics professor Donald Harris. She has one sister, Maya Lakshmi, and grew up in a household that blended the traditions of each of her cultures, attending Hindu and Baptist ceremonies.
Harris attended Howard University in Washington, D.C., where she was initiated into Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, and received her Juris Doctor (JD) from University of California, Hastings College of the Law in 1989.
Daughter of immigrants, she was raised by her mom. Both of her parents were activists in civil rights struggles which she discusses in this video feature done by Lifetime.
She speaks of her parents, "They were marching and shouting about this thing we call Justice, so I thought at a very young age that's what everyone does...fight for Justice"
She had a strong track record as the San Francisco District attorney doing just that.
Hate Crimes and Civil Rights
Harris has created a special Hate Crimes Unit as San Francisco District Attorney. She has focused on hate crimes against LGBT children and teens in schools. She convened a national conference to confront the "gay-transgender panic defense", which has been used to justify violent hate crimes.[38] Harris supports same-sex marriage in California and opposed both Proposition 22 and Proposition 8.
In 2004, The National Urban League honored Harris as a "Woman of Power" and she received the Thurgood Marshall Award from the National Black Prosecutors Association in 2005. In her campaign for California Attorney General, she has received the endorsements of numerous groups, including the abortion rights EMILY's List, California Legislative Black Caucus, Asian American Action Fund, Black Women Organized for Political Action, Mexican American Bar Association, South Asians for Opportunity, and the National Women's Political Caucus.
Harris has been vocal in the immigration debate, supporting San Francisco's immigration policy of not inquiring about immigration status in the process of a criminal invesitgation. Harris argues that it is important that immigrants be able to talk with law enforcement without fear.
Her book "Smart on Crime"
discusses her ideas about crime and the criminal justice system.
The old approaches to fighting crime just aren't working. Two thirds of people released from prison commit another crime within two years. In Smart on Crime, career prosecutor Kamala D. Harris shatters the old distinctions, rooted in false choices and myths, and offers a compelling argument for how to make the criminal justice system truly, not just rhetorically, tough. Harris spells out the necessary shifts that will increase public safety, reduce costs, and strengthen our communities when our politicians and law enforcement officials learn how to become tough and smart on crime.
Politico described her as the Democrat's Anti-Palin, and discussed her track-record in the DA's office.
Predictions about Harris's bright future stems as much from her resume -- she spent a decade as a front-line prosecutor in San Francisco before taking over the district attorney's office, where she pioneered efforts to slow recidivism -- as her liberal credentials. In an approach hailed by progressives, she advocates for "smart" reform of the criminal justice system, including tackling root causes like recidivism, and is opposed to the death penalty, refusing to ask for it in the prosecution of a cop-killer -- a decision that a national GOP group allied with Cooley, the Los Angeles district attorney, bludgeoned her with in the closing days of the campaign.
And her signature program, "Back on Track," reportedly reduced the recidivism rate in San Francisco from the state standard of 70 percent to less than 10 percent. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger praised it as a model for the state, and Harris wants to build on that model in her new job.
But like Obama, Harris has sought to avoid being tied to Democratic orthodoxy. Her "Smart on Crime" approach in San Francisco included cracking down on truancy -- including charging the parents of chronically truant children with a misdemeanor punishable by jail time and a fine. Civil libertarians and conservatives alike raised questions about the move, but Harris was unapologetic.
"My staff went bananas" at the policy, Harris said, as did school administrators. Citing statistics linking crime and truancy, she argues that she's nipping a problem in the bud."My bottom line is these children have to be in school," she said."There will be outrage when in 10 years they're a menace to society hanging out on the corner."
Her victory was hard fought and the election was a squeaker but she pulled it off and discussed that win with Lawrence O'Donnell who joked with her about his interview helping her in the final days of the battle against a Karl Rove mounted campaign against her.
Let's take a look at her acceptance speech when she won the nomination:
Kamala Harris victory speech in San Francisco - 2010 California Primary
Now she's got the victory.
Congratulations to Kamala Harris and congratulations to the people of California.
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For many rural people in Zimbabwe, cash is so scarce that the 85-bed Chidamoyo Christian Hospital allows bartering. NYT: Zimbabwe Health Care, Paid With Peanuts
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People lined up on the veranda of the American mission hospital here from miles around to barter for doctor visits and medicines, clutching scrawny chickens, squirming goats and buckets of maize. But mostly, they arrived with sacks of peanuts on their heads.
The hospital’s cavernous chapel is now filled with what looks like a giant sand dune of unshelled nuts. The hospital makes them into peanut butter that is mixed into patients’ breakfast porridge, spread on teatime snacks and melted into vegetables at dinnertime.
"We literally are providing medical services for peanuts!" exclaimed Kathy McCarty, a nurse from California who has run this rural hospital, 35 miles from the nearest tarred road, since 1981.
The hospital, along with countless Zimbabweans, turned to barter in earnest in 2008 when inflation peaked at what the International Monetary Fund estimates was an astonishing 500 billion percent, wiping out life savings, making even trillion-dollar notes worthless and propelling the health and education systems into a vertiginous collapse.
Since then, a power-sharing government has formed after years of decline under President Robert Mugabe, and the economy has stabilized. Zimbabwe abandoned its currency last year, replacing it with the American dollar, and inflation has fallen to a demure 3.6 percent. Teachers are back in their classrooms and nurses are back on their wards.
Robin Hammond for The New York Times
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Slate's Eliza Griswold is touring Ethiopia. Slate: In the Land of Sheba: A Pilgrimage to Ethiopia
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To find the nearest espresso bar, the Ali Bal Café, I leave the market and re-enter the city by one of its five gates—this one is called Axum, because Harar's Muslim rulers, including the most famous, Ahmed the Left-Handed, rode through it on his way to make war with the Christians.
1
Inside the gate, the narrow streets are jammed with blankets covered in piles of wizened onions and chilies. I find the coffee shop. Sulking over one cappuccino, then another, I consider how to redeem the day and myself. I am tired: tired of making my own plans, tired of following my own serpentine curiosity, tired of pushing myself to write poems before they are ready to be written.
None of this is working, and Harar is not at all what I'd imagined. It's less than a square mile packed tight with warrens of houses and mosques; at least 99, as many as the Islamic names for God. This is supposed to be a place out of time; a place unchanged since Richard Burton attempted to be the first white man to enter the city when he snuck into Harar in 1854, dressed as a Muslim traveler. Any infidel was to be put to death. According to Burton, he impressed and successfully fooled the emir. Still, his derring-do seemed to depress him. On leaving Harar, he writes in First Footsteps in East Africa: "[H]ow melancholy a thing is success. Whilst failure inspirits a man, attainment reads the sad, prosy lesson that all our glories 'are shadows, not substantial things.' "
Besides melancholy, I have nothing in common with Burton. His grandiosity appalls me, and I'd bet his travels were far easier than he makes them out to be. For some reason, we love travelers and ascribe to them all manner of bravery we'd find unnecessary if we attempted the trip ourselves. Right now, I feel more kinship with French poet and failed gunrunner Arthur Rimbaud, who also made a home in Harar 30 years later, in 1884.
Rimbaud was 27 and already done writing poetry when he arrived in Ethiopia from Aden, Yemen, and tried to make his living as a photographer. That didn't work. He moved on to try to trade salt and coffee. I find his house, or what is called his house, as no one really knows for sure where he lived. This house has peaked and sloping mahogany roofs. It looks like the home of an Indian or Chinese trader, which isn't unusual, since all manner of cultural crossroads ran through Harar at the time. Still, Rimbaud had a hard go of it here. "His neighbors accused him of poisoning their dogs," the museum keeper says. He is sitting on the steps eager for visitors. "He was accused of having an affair with a man, but this was disproved." The museum keeper knows a great deal. He has read through the entire library on the house's first floor.
Rimbaud had odd dreams—absinthe seemed to carve odd rivers in his brain, I scribble in my notebook.
"Are you left-handed?" the guide asks me. "Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are. I don't accept that Rimbaud was a spy, but perhaps he was gay. My view is that his society was essentially conservative. Artists are a little ahead of their society. They break taboos to provoke people."
At 37, Rimbaud grew very ill. A sore on his hip was infected. (He thought it was cancer, but it was gangrene.) He sailed for home, dying in a hospital along the way.
The day is not half over, and my blues are deepening into plum. So much for a pilgrimage; the darkest heart is proving to be my own.
I wonder what Rimbaud would have made of Burton's bloviations about failure. Did failure inspire Rimbaud? It certainly killed him.
Two streets away, there's another museum, this one founded by a man named Sharif. Sharif is a very corpulent and friendly person, and he is waiting for visitors when I walk under the house's mahogany arch. A wealthy businessman, he lives in Haile Selassie's old house. Selassie, too, hailed from Harar. Sharif reclines on carpets in his office, chewing a porridge of qat, the African and Yemeni pastime, which is roughly the equivalent of masticating wintergreen. Qat works as both a stimulant and a pacifier. In some places, women chew the stuff. Not here. I don't want it anyway. He offers me coffee, and we make ourselves comfortable to talk.
Harar is sometimes called Africa's Mecca. Like Negash, the first Muslim settlement, Harar is a holy place for many of Africa's 400 million Muslims, a seat of ancient learning and trade. To preserve the city's heritage, Sharif has bought up everything he can of its past.
Vegetables on sale at Harar Market
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As small-scale renewable energy becomes cheaper, it is providing power to people far from electricity grids. New York Times: African Huts Far From the Grid Glow With Renewable Power.
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For Sara Ruto, the desperate yearning for electricity began last year with the purchase of her first cellphone, a lifeline for receiving small money transfers, contacting relatives in the city or checking chicken prices at the nearest market.
Charging the phone was no simple matter in this farming village far from Kenya’s electric grid.
Every week, Ms. Ruto walked two miles to hire a motorcycle taxi for the three-hour ride to Mogotio, the nearest town with electricity. There, she dropped off her cellphone at a store that recharges phones for 30 cents. Yet the service was in such demand that she had to leave it behind for three full days before returning.
That wearying routine ended in February when the family sold some animals to buy a small Chinese-made solar power system for about $80. Now balanced precariously atop their tin roof, a lone solar panel provides enough electricity to charge the phone and run four bright overhead lights with switches.
"My main motivation was the phone, but this has changed so many other things," Ms. Ruto said on a recent evening as she relaxed on a bench in the mud-walled shack she shares with her husband and six children.
As small-scale renewable energy becomes cheaper, more reliable and more efficient, it is providing the first drops of modern power to people who live far from slow-growing electricity grids and fuel pipelines in developing countries. Although dwarfed by the big renewable energy projects that many industrialized countries are embracing to rein in greenhouse gas emissions, these tiny systems are playing an epic, transformative role.
Ed Ou/The New York Times
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UN peacekeepers have been instructed to do all they can to investigate sites of alleged human rights violations, following November's disputed election. BBC: UN to investigate Ivory Coast violation reports
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The UN says it had tried to go to the site of one reported mass grave, but was blocked by security forces loyal to incumbent President Laurent Gbagbo.
Human rights groups claim allies of Mr Gbagbo have been abducting opponents.
Meanwhile, regional group Ecowas and the African Union are due to meet to Mr Gbagbo for more talks on Monday.
So far Mr Gbagbo has refused demands from the world community to stand down in favour of his rival in the 28 November presidential polls, Alassane Ouattara, who is internationally recognised as the victor.
Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga, who is leading AU negotiations, has arrived in Nigeria to meet Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan, who heads Ecowas, before talks in Ivory Coast.
'Record violations'
UN spokeman Martin Nesirky said UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon told Mr Ouattara in a phonecall on Saturday that he was "alarmed by the reports of egregious human rights violations".
"He (Mr Ban) said UNOCI had been instructed to do everything possible to gain access to the affected areas both for prevention and to investigate and record the violations so that those responsible will be held accountable," Mr Nesirky said in a statement.
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The Root asked ColorOfChange's James Rucker to explain why blacks and Hispanics who blog or use smartphones should pay attention to the results of a vote by the FCC in late December. The Root: New Rules Exclude Key Way Blacks Get Online.
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Earlier this week, the Federal Communications Commission voted to adopt rules that will affect the way average people receive data and other content over the Internet. The results of the vote -- meant as a compromise between the interests of big business and the needs of "the little guy" -- are likely to have a disproportionate impact on minorities.
Dubbed "net neutrality" rules, they are meant to fulfill a promise that President Barack Obama made to protect a "level playing field" for all comers to the online space and prevent Internet service providers from blocking or slowing down Web traffic out of competition or greed.
The president said the vote "will help preserve the free and open nature of the Internet while encouraging innovation, protecting consumer choice and defending free speech." However, it seems that few others are thrilled with the results of the FCC's vote.
Republican lawmakers vowed to overthrow the rules, which they described as unnecessary regulation and a power grab by the government. The rules prohibit ISPs from blocking legal Web traffic, although they appear to allow providers to sell faster delivery speeds for additional money.
The rules also leave out wireless carriers, who provide Internet access to smartphones, among other devices. The sole African-American FCC commissioner, Mignon Clyburn, expressed reservations about that exemption because of the heavy reliance on wireless by minorities.
The Root asked James Rucker, co-founder of the online-activism (and pro-net neutrality) group ColorOfChange, why a number of grassroots groups are also unhappy with the FCC's new rules.
The Root: You've called the results of the FCC's vote a giveaway to the biggest corporate players. Why?
James Rucker: There are basically three big issues on the table. One is the prevention of paid prioritization, where an Internet service provider, based on who is sending [it] traffic, can put them on a lower tier or a higher tier. What that basically means is that if you have AT&T or Verizon and they're looking at Skype traffic coming across, they can say, well, this is Skype, a competitor to us -- we're in the phone business, effectively -- and we want them to pay more [in order for their data to go through at the same speed as the ISP's].
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US talk-show host Oprah Winfrey has launched her own TV network, which will offer round-the-clock lifestyle programmes. BBC: Oprah Winfrey launches OWN TV network
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The channel is called OWN, or the Oprah Winfrey Network. It is a joint venture with the Discovery channels.
OWN's start date has been delayed twice and its cost has reportedly swollen to $189m (£121m).
Among the programmes scheduled is a reality show starring the Duchess of York, Sarah Ferguson.
Winfrey has built up a huge fan base during 25 years as the host of the syndicated Oprah Winfrey Show.
The programmes on the new station have a focus on empowerment, improvement, positivity aimed mainly at women, who are Ms Winfrey's core audience.
"I wanted to build a network which empowers you, the viewer, to turn your dreams into reality," Ms Winfrey said on a preview programme that launched the network on Saturday.
One of the programmes offered will be a reality show in which 10 finalists from thousands of applicants will compete for the chance to host their own TV show.
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How has the election of a black democrat in Dallas effected the Texas legal world? A Texas man imprisoned 30 years ago on rape and murder charges had his conviction overturned on Tuesday after DNA evidence exonerated him. CNN: Innocent man jailed in Texas since 1979 now free
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Dallas County Judge Don Adams overturned Cornelius Dupree Jr.’s conviction Tuesday, clearing his name officially.
"It's a joy to be free," Dupree, 51, said outside court.
Dupree has served more years in a Texas prison for a crime he did not commit than anyone else in the state who was later exonerated by DNA evidence. Only two other people exonerated by DNA have spent more time in prison in the entire country, the Innocence Project said. Texas has freed 41 wrongly convicted prisoners because of DNA testing since 2001, more than any other state.
Dupree told CNN after becoming a free man that he had "mixed emotions" about the hearing considering how long he had been incarcerated.
"I must admit there is a bit of anger, but there is also joy, and the joy overrides the anger," he told CNN. "I'm just so overwhelmed with the joy of being free."
The judge's decision followed comments from Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins, who said the DNA testing shows Dupree "did not commit this crime."
Dupree is trying not to be too angry, despite having 30 years of his life taken away.
"I think that could have happened to anyone," he told CNN. "It's just unfortunate that it happened to me. The system needs to be corrected somehow."
That system he refers to includes Dallas specifically, where a record 21 people have been exonerated on DNA evidence, and Texas as a whole.
"Cornelius Dupree spent the prime of his life behind bars because of mistaken identification that probably would have been avoided if the best practices now used in Dallas had been employed," Barry Scheck, co-director of the Innocence Project, said in a press release. "Let us never forget that, as in the heartbreaking case of Cornelius Dupree, a staggering 75% of wrongful convictions of people later cleared by DNA evidence resulted from misidentifications."
Cornelius Dupree Jr., left, and Innocence Project lawyer Nina Morrison talk to CNN after Dupree became a free man.
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The city where politics is the cities pastime. New York Times Ex-Senator Is Now the Only Major Black Hopeful in a Chicago Race
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Danny K. Davis, a longtime United States representative, has dropped out of the race to become Chicago’s mayor, creating the situation that black leaders here had for months been clamoring for: a campaign that includes only one major African-American candidate.
Carol Moseley Braun, a former senator, became that candidate this weekend, as Mr. Davis announced his plans to step aside and to support Ms. Braun. The Rev. James T. Meeks, the pastor of a large South Side church, quit his campaign about a week ago.
See Deoliver47's diary,Moseley-Braun consolidates support in Chi-town mayoral race
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
At a holiday gathering, a friend recounted a story told by Senator Al Franken, in which he balanced Liberal and Conservative approaches to the history of the United States. The Conservative, Franken said, loves America and its past like a four year old; whereas, Liberals love America like adults.
The four year old loves mommy and mommy can do no wrong; and woe to those in the sand box who might question mommy's correct and consistent exceptionalism. The adult sees their parents as flawed but noble creatures who did the best they could. Could have been better, but the adult still loves them for the energy in protecting the family, for keeping the family together.
The adult cannot just explain away or ignore the terrible compromises their parents made along the way; the adult will acknowledge and attempt to better their own futures with the knowledge of those ancestral histories.
The Conservative either feigns ignorance or simply ignores the history; or conjures a child-like myth to scare away the bedtime ghosts of our past.
On the Steps of the Jefferson Memorial
We invent our gods
the way the Greeks did,
in our own image—but magnified.
Athena, the very mother of wisdom,
squabbled with Poseidon
like any human sibling
until their furious tempers
made the sea writhe.
Zeus wore a crown
of lightning bolts one minute,
a cloak of feathers the next,
as driven by earthly lust
he prepared to swoop
down on Leda.
Despite their power,
frailty ran through them
like the darker veins
in the marble of these temples
we call monuments.
Looking at Jefferson now,
I think of the language
he left for us to live by.
I think of the slave
in the kitchen downstairs.
-- Linda Pastan
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The Front Porch is now open. Happy New Year to our Black Kos family and porch sitters. Black-eyed peas for good luck on the table, with sides of white rice and cornbread.