Monday, January 26, 2009

Check me out on NPR today: News and Notes today.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99868650

New findings suggest President Obama is positively influencing black students' performance on standardized tests.
Plus, the first lady says she thinks two new dolls named after her daughters, Sasha and Malia, are "inappropriate."
And what chances do this year's black Oscar nominees have of winning? Tony Cox speaks with Ron Scott of the Detroit News; Kimberly Coleman of Sista Girl Speaks Up; and Chris Rabb of Afro-Netizen

Sunday, January 25, 2009

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Mission Accomplished!

My Inauguration weekend did not turn out the way I wanted it to. The first sign came in the way of a bad cold which forced me to stay inside both Friday and Saturday and after that it was down hill or so I thought. My invitation to an exclusive ball fell thru and so did my ticket to the Inauguration. After all of this happened I thought about staying in my home and just watching CNN for the weekend, but I made a promise to work on Radio Row and interview policy makers in the new administration.

When I got off of the train in Union Station it was truly a remarkable experience to walk amongst the crowd, to see all of the people speak in different tongues was a spiritual experience. I saw people of every size and every hue wearing Obama gear of every kind; it was an amazing a sight and I will never forget the electricity that filled the air!!

I got a chance to interview members of Congress and other policy makers but the most moving experience was interviewing a group called Rednecks For Obama. This is a group started by citizens from Union, MO self proclaimed "Rednecks" in support of President Obama. I wish words could capture this interview but they cannot and their support of the new President was the most sincere that I have ever heard.

When I asked one of the members if some of their friends gave them a hard time because the color of the new President one of them said "Yeah, but so what I don' t care what color he is I just want the best man for the job." I cried during this entire interview because it really is a sign of how far we have really come.

I will let historians put this day in history, but for me I will take this little nugget with me because I know that my ancestors, and the ancestors of those "Rednecks for Obama" are looking down, smiling and saying " Mission Accomplished"

WOW WOW WOW!!!

We are about to witness something real today. May God bless you all and may God bless the United States of America.

Monday, January 19, 2009

I wish you all could be here!!

The Vibe in DC is amazing. People are here from all over the world and wearing Obama gear and giving love to each other. I know on this MLK day Marting Luther King Jr. is looking down all on us and smiling.



HAPPH MLK JR. DAY!!!

Saturday, January 17, 2009

I cannot find the words!

I know that I should be blogging but it is hard to find the words. I am overwhelmed with emotion about this inaguration. Perhaps after everything happens the words will come.

Monday, January 12, 2009

CNN Story on Former Slave.

I found this to be so uplifting.


Editor's note: The n-word appears in this piece because CNN feels the context in which it is used is pertinent to the story of James "Little Man" Presley.

James "Little Man" Presley has worked in the cotton fields of Sledge, Mississippi, since he was just 6 years old.

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more photos »


SLEDGE, Mississippi (CNN) -- James Presley stands amid chopped cotton, the thick Mississippi mud caked on his well-worn boots. A smile spreads across his face when he talks about voting for Barack Obama and what that might mean for generations to come. His voice picks up a notch. He holds his head up a bit higher.
"There's a heap of pride in voting for a black man," he says.
At 78, Presley is a legend of the past living in the present and now hopeful for the future. A grandson of slaves, he's one of the few men left in America so closely tied to his slave past, still farming cotton on the same land as his ancestors. He's picked cotton since he was just 6 years old.
He and his wife of 57 years, Eva May, raised 13 children and six grandchildren in a cypress-sided house in the middle of cotton fields in northwestern Mississippi. He was a sharecropper most his life, but rarely qualified for food stamps. Watch "Obama, he come up like" »
His father died in 1935 when he was 5, and he had to step up and be the "Little Man" of the house, a nickname that has stuck seven decades later.
He's lived a raw-knuckled life where hope moved at a molasses-slow pace. The last time he had hope for a better future was four decades ago -- first with President John F. Kennedy and then with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Obama has changed everything to the poor in these parts.
"I'm a church man," he says. "And I kind of figured this here is about like it was with Moses with the children of Israel. On that day, when he gets to be president, we're all going to be rejoicing."
Does he have plans to celebrate on Inauguration Day?
"Oh man, it's gonna be nice. I believe we're gonna have a good time," he says. "I never thought one would get there." See photos of the weather-beaten home where Little Man raised so many children »
As the nation prepares for Obama's inauguration on January 20, CNN.com traveled to Sledge, Mississippi, a forgotten town of about 500 people in the heart of the Mississippi Delta that some consider to be the birthplace of blues in America.
Don't Miss
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My great-granddaddy hired Little Man
Road trip evokes memories of father, Old South
Nearly 20 percent of residents over the age of 60 live below the poverty line, according to the 2000 census. That number nearly doubles, to 37.5 percent, for residents under the age of 19. About three-quarters of the population are black. Two-thirds of the people here make less than $35,000 a year.
Presley says the fact the nation will have a black president will have a ripple effect in poor communities like his. For the first time ever, he says, black parents and grandparents can tell youngsters in rural America that through education, anything is possible -- that the White House isn't just for white folks.
Three of his children graduated from college. Two have died -- one as a youth, one as an adult. It never gets easier, he says, no matter what age they die. Obama has already brought inspiration to future generations of his own family.
"I might be dead and gone, but it's going to be a good thing to me, because I know that they ain't gotta go through what I went through. They'll have a better time, a more joyous time, than what I had when I come along. It is gonna be grand to them and to me, too."
After Presley's father died, he was raised by his mother, and he finds comfort that Obama was raised by a "single mother, like me." Read: My great-granddaddy hired Little Man as a boy
"He knows what it is to come up without a father and what it is to come up for what you work for," Presley says. "Me and the poor man coming up, we had to work for what bread I got."
Presley shifts back and forth on his feet as he speaks. His flannel shirt and oil-stained jeans seem befitting of his life on the farm. He peers out from a camouflage hat, the fuzzy ear flaps pulled up over his head. He speaks in an accent as thick as the mud on his boots.
His hands speak to decades of hard labor. His fingers appear swollen with overworked muscles. The skin seems about a quarter-inch thick. If his hands could speak, he says, "They'd be crying, instead of talking, for what they've been through."
"You see how rusty and rough they are. They've been through something, ain't they?"
At 6-foot, 2-inches and 214 pounds, Presley has what seems an odd nickname. "They call me Little Man," he says.
He wears the nickname with pride. The youngest of three sisters and four brothers, he says that after his father died in 1935, he became the "Little Man" of the house. "I was tall, but I was small. So they called me Little Man," he says.
He doesn't remember much about his father. He can't recall the day he died or the sound of his voice. He was too young. He never met his slave grandparents either. They died long before he was born. But the fact they were slaves still stings.
"That doesn't make you feel too good, you know, to be sold like a cow. But back then, they couldn't help it. So I reckon I'm just glad that things come out better like it is now."
A thick fog hangs over the fields on this day. Presley pauses. He scans the fields and says, "I think about the good times and the hard times."
"When I started farming, we planted with hands ... and hauled it to the gin by wagon, a mule and a wagon. One bale at a time," he says.
He worked the fields when he was 6, the age of a typical kindergartner these days. "I was making 50 cents a day, from sunup to sundown."
"Back then, you know, I didn't get no schooling. I had to get out, come home and break the land, cut the stalks, plow the land and get it ready for the crop."
Presley has a total of four years of education, classes that he took in between growing seasons. His mother taught him to read and write, but he admits even to this day he struggles with both.
When it comes to life as a black man -- a sharecropper -- in Mississippi, he says it's tough to explain how difficult it was. He points to a nearby bluff and says that when he was just a boy, a black man was lynched from a tree. "I never saw him hanging up there," he says. "All I seen was the tree."
Blacks were segregated from whites. They couldn't go to the same schools. They had separate water fountains. Blacks couldn't go in the front doors of businesses. And just about everywhere you went, he says, racism was rampant.
"You go into a place, and they say, 'Nigger, get outta here.' You don't want nobody telling you that. You're a citizen around town. If you're a citizen, I'm a citizen like you," he says. "It makes you feel mighty bad."
"When I was a young boy, they was bad about that, calling you that."
He registered to vote for the first time in 1959 and cast his first presidential ballot for Kennedy. He says he's voted in every presidential election ever since.
"We felt like we were moving on up when we voted for him," he says. When Kennedy was assassinated, "everybody was kind of sad on that day, because he looked like the first president that had come in and was trying to help the poor folks."
King brought hope, too. "He was the only hope that we were looking for -- to bring us out," Presley says. But when King was killed on April 4, 1968, he says, it "put us right back where we was."
"It was pitiful that day," he says. "Everybody around here was in mourning."
He says Obama has brought inspiration to blacks in these parts, the likes of which hasn't been seen since 1968.
"With Obama coming in, it's gonna be another Martin Luther King helping us," he says. "Maybe in the next 40 years, we'll be better off."
He says Americans should never take their voting rights for granted. He was 30 years old before he first voted. "It means a lot to me, because I can put in for who I want to be president and who not to be president," he says. "So I just feel proud that I can vote."
Before parting on this day, Presley gives a tour of the weather-beaten, four-bedroom house where he raised his 13 children and six grandkids. The wood-framed house was the first home he ever lived in with running water, a bathroom and electric stove. The house is dilapidated, many of its windows broken, its doors barely hanging on hinges.
"I've had a good life, despite the hard times. I sure did," says Presley, who is retiring after 72 years of working the fields.
What's his message to the world?
"The important thing in life is to try to live and do the best you can," he says. "We done had it bad. Let us help give our children a better life, our grandchildren, our great-grandchildren. Let's try to give them a better life than we had. But anyway, just keep the good work going, is all I say."
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EIGHT DAYS UNTIL PRESIDENT OBAMA!

Well it is almost here. DC is alredy jumping with anticipation for the inaguration. I will be giving updates and pictures. Stay tuned!

Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Check out Roland Martin's column

I am having bloggers block so I will let Roland speak for me.

Editor's note: A nationally syndicated columnist, Roland S. Martin is the author of "Listening to the Spirit Within: 50 Perspectives on Faith" and "Speak, Brother! A Black Man's View of America." Visit his Web site for more information.

Roland S. Martin says Gov. Rod Blagojevich had every right to fill the vacant U.S. Senate seat.

(CNN) -- It is total hypocrisy for the naysayers of embattled Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich to assert that he didn't have the legal right to appoint Roland Burris to fill the U.S. Senate seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama.
According to the Illinois Constitution, the governor of the state has the sole responsibility for appointing the replacement. Did Blagojevich resign, or has he been impeached? Nope. If you call Springfield, Illinois, and ask for the governor's office, they'll tell you that Blagojevich's name is still on the door.
It seems a lot of folks are excited and happy that Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White took a stand by refusing to sign the paperwork certifying Burris as the Senate appointee.
Yet what these same folks somehow refuse to recognize is that Blagojevich isn't some guy sitting around in his office, twiddling his fingers, flipping through the cable channels with a remote and waiting to get impeached. He is still carrying out his duties as governor.
Did you know that since his arrest in December, Blagojevich has pardoned 22 people? I haven't heard a huge outcry over this tainted governor setting folks free.
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In Depth: Commentaries
Did you know that Blagojevich continues to sign bills that were passed by the General Assembly? U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald cited a pending bill on the governor's desk related to horse racing as a reason for arresting him, but Blagojevich can still sign any bill he so chooses.
Did you know that two days ago, Blagojevich, as determined by state law, set March 3 as the primary and April 7 as the general election to fill the congressional seat of Rahm Emanuel, who resigned after agreeing to become Obama's chief of staff? By the way, guess who signed the certification of that election? Jesse White.
The law says the governor can set a special election to fill a congressional seat, so doesn't the same law state that he can fill a Senate seat?
Yes, Blagojevich's appointment of a U.S. Senate seat is easily seen as being tainted because of what has been described by federal law enforcement officials in their criminal complaint against him. But the reality is that Blagojevich hasn't been indicted, convicted or impeached. And whether we like it or not, no matter how smelly it looks, he still maintains the absolute right to do the job he was elected to do.
I was one of the many voices who said that in light of what he was arrested for, Blagojevich should resign his seat because his presence paralyzes state government. And I still believe that.
But we are way beyond that now. He chose not to do so, which is his right.
Then the Illinois General Assembly had the authority to strip Blagojevich of the right to choose the U.S. Senate replacement, but the Democratic-controlled body got greedy and chose not to do so.
Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, who is also chairman of the state Democratic Party, had a bill in committee to do so, and had signaled that he was going to pass the legislation. But Democrats were scared that a Republican could win a special election, and they didn't want to risk it. I'm sure they also were banking on Blagojevich resigning.
So in the end, could the spectacle of Burris being turned away at the door of the U.S. Senate been avoided? Yep. But Democrats chose not to do so, and now they look like fools for leading this circus.
But let's go back to Blagojevich and the law.
Critics contend that Blagojevich doesn't have the right to appoint anyone to the seat. Yet even Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid conceded that according to the body's rules, and not law, Blagojevich has the right to walk on the floor of the U.S. Senate and talk and fellowship with Senate members.
Think about this for a second. Senate Democrats are objecting to Blagojevich's appointment, saying they will reject Burris and not allow him to walk on the floor. But the same guy whose appointee they want to reject has the right to floor privileges in the Senate? So have we gotten to the point that we are picking and choosing what rules and laws with which Blagojevich can comply?
It's worth noting that Sen. Larry Craig was arrested in an airport bathroom and later pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct, but he got to keep his seat and focus on his job. Sen. Ted Stevens was arrested on corruption charges, was tried and convicted, but he was still able to carry out his official duties.
So if Craig, Stevens and any number of other House members who have been arrested were allowed to continue doing their job even after state or federal charges were brought, should the rules be different for Blagojevich?
We have moved beyond what we all think Blagojevich should do. Folks wanted him to resign. He didn't. Others wanted him not to appoint a Senate replacement. He did. All we are left with is the real question -- and that is whether Blagojevich had the legal right to do what he did. And the fact is yes, he did.
It may not look right, feel right or smell right, but when it comes to the law, it's crystal clear. And if you don't like it, change the law.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Roland Martin.

Monday, January 5, 2009

FOR ALL THE ATHEISTS OUT THERE !!!

Ann Coulter's "Today" Show Appearance Canceled



PLEASE KNOW THERE IS A GOD!!

I have been so busy trying to catch up on life that I have not had a chance to blog!! UGH!!!
But Ann Coulter is a waste of energy and space and I think that all networks should ban her.

She is not making money on having an educated opinion but she is making money from being cruel.

Ann Coulter's appearance on the "Today" show has been canceled.
NBC had come under fire for booking Coulter, who had been scheduled to promote her new book, Guilty, on the "Today" show Thursday morning.
But on her website, Coulter announced that the appearance had been "cancelled" (via):
TODAY SHOW AND TODAY SHOW FOURTH HOUR: CANCELLED!
I guess this ends the "they just want to get ratings" argument about liberal media bias.
The liberal media watchdog group Media Matters launched a campaign last week asking, "Is NBC going to help Coulter sell this book?"
In the book, Coulter repeatedly refers to President-Elect Obama as B. Hussein Obama, and mocks Michelle Obama's style while praising Cindy McCain's.
Coulter will appear on CBS' "Early Show" Tuesday morning to promote the book, ac

Saturday, January 3, 2009

Happy 2009!!!!!

Wow I cannot believe we are in a new year already. Here is to making all of you new year's resolutions!

I wil begin re-posting on Monday January 5, 2009. There is so much to talk about.

I belive this year is going to be great great. Here is to happy blogging.

God bless.