Candlestick

3 amazing guests are joining the celebration.  You should, too.  

For Music: Cool John Ferguson
Playing a blues rooted in low country gospel traditions, Cool John Ferguson is a force to be reckoned with.  He’s collaborated with blues greats, like BB King and Beverly Guitar Watkins, toured at festivals and clubs around the world, and Taj Mahal says he sits among the top 5 guitarist in the world.  Check out his song, “Durham Blues”, from his newest album, These Two Hands.

For Dynamism: Rev. Lennox Yearwood
A minister, an organizer, an engager, a community re-shaper -  this man knows how to affect change.   You know him as president of the Hip Hop Caucus, for his “Vote or Die” and “Respect My Vote” campaigns where he worked with hip hop icons Jay-Z, Russel Simmons, T.I., and Keyshia Cole.  You know him as the man responsible for turning out record numbers of people on Election Day 2008.  He’s at the helm of a 700,000 member database with field teams in 48 cities across 30 states.  He’s been on CNN, BET Tonight, Al Jazeera, PBS, Fox, MTV, BBC, C-Span, and Hardball.  He’s been featured in the Washington Post, New York Times, VIBE, and Ebony Magazine ranks him among the most 100 powerful people in America.  Wow. Now, he’ll be celebrating our 40th anniversary with us.

We would like to invite you to our 40th Anniversary event at American Tobacco Campus will also feature award-winning editor of Rolling Stone magazine, Eric Bates.

Welcome to my 2011 diary, a more or less daily glimpse into the transparent life of a political hermit. For starters, here's my annual state of the site report, plus some other odds and ends.

Cross-posted from an article by Chris Kromm at the Institute for Southern Studies.

Ask a casual political observer to name the nation's biggest Republican operatives, and a few would come readily to mind. Most could you tell you about Karl Rove -- the legendary Bush adviser and GOP strategist who this year aims to spend $52 million by November to help elect conservative candidates.

Some might even know Charles and David Koch, the Kansas-based oil billionaires who have poured over a hundred million dollars since 1980 into conservative causes and spent millions more on political candidates and lobbyists.

Cross-posted from an article by Chris Kromm on Facing South

In his speech from New Orleans on the fifth anniversary of Katrina yesterday, President Obama declared that he intended to honor the nation's promise to help rebuild the Gulf Coast:

[W]hile an incredible amount of progress has been made, on this fifth anniversary, I wanted to come here and tell the people of this city directly: My administration is going to stand with you -- and fight alongside you -- until the job is done. Until New Orleans is all the way back, all the way.

Cross-posted from an article by Chris Kromm on Facing South

As we approach the five year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, today the Institute for Southern Studies is releasing a new report which looks at what has changed -- and what hasn't changed -- since the deadly storm took over 1,800 lives and devastated the Gulf Coast.

Our report, Learning from Katrina: Lessons from Five years of Recovery and Renewal in the Gulf Coast [pdf], finds that many of the problems exposed in the botched federal response to the storm--from breakdowns in disaster planning to a misguided and mismanaged recovery--have yet to be addressed in Washington.

Cross-posted from an article by Sue Sturgis on Facing South

The Obama administration released the first-ever U.S. report to the U.N. Human Rights Council this week.

Prepared as part of the ongoing U.N. Universal Periodic Review (UPR) process that involved consultations with civil society groups nationwide, the report [pdf] acknowledges that the U.S. human rights record is less than perfect. However, it fails to address a number of pressing human rights issues facing the nation -- including the problems experienced by U.S. residents displaced by domestic disasters like Hurricane Katrina.

"While this report demonstrates the Obama administration's willingness to recommit to engagement on international human rights, the administration must now prove that it is prepared to not only talk the talk, but also walk the walk," said Jamil Dakwar, director of the ACLU Human Rights Program.

Cross-posted from an article by Sue Sturgis on Facing South

President Obama plans to be in New Orleans on Aug. 29 to commemorate the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina -- a prime opportunity to put disaster recovery issues back atop the national agenda.

Duke Energy announced this week that it would move the planned location of an electrical substation it's building out of the direct view of the sacred Cherokee site of Kituwah in western North Carolina.

The decision comes after protests from the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, who consider Kituwah their mother town. The site adjacent to the Tuckaseegee River in what is now Swain County, N.C. has been inhabited for nearly 10,000 years and long used as a center for religious rituals.

"Finding a new location for this important infrastructure allows us to deliver on our commitment to customers, without impacting the landscape around Kituwah," said Brett Carter, president of Duke Energy Carolinas.

For many, the scandal surrounding Shirley Sherrod's dubious ouster from the U.S. Agriculture Department was the first they'd heard of civil rights battles over farm policy, particularly the landmark Pigford case focused on redressing decades of discriminatory policies against African-American farmers.

Filed in 1997 by North Carolina farmer Timothy Pigford, the class-action lawsuit against the USDA led to two momentous victories for the plaintiffs: In 1999, the black farmers reached a settlement with the government for over $1 billion.

However, many black farmers never had their cases heard because they filed late - over 73,000 petitions that became Pigford II. (The reasons for the late filings have been blamed on inadequate notice being provided, extenuating circumstances like hurricanes, and, according to one of the judges, bad lawyers for the farmers, "bordering on legal malpractice" [pdf].)