So you Thought Bill & Hillary were your Bestest Friends???

Important information to know. This video is a little staticy in a couple of places but the audio is always very clear.

The 1st Debate

Ok, let's be fair here. . . Barack Obama won the debate. John McCain's arguments were hard to follow and he never seemed in control of what he was saying. His presentation lacked enthusiasm and clarity, he came of as uncomfortable. McCain seemed annoyed when at odds with Obama over a variety of issues, including Iraq, sanctions, and spending. He also opted to refer to about Sarah Palin as his maverick partner, who, after her uncertain week, may no longer be his ticket to the White House.

Obama on the other hand was polished, confident, and focused. He came off as fully prepared, and able to convey a depth of knowledge on nearly every issue. Obama was unhurried, and rarely lost his train of thought. His obvious preparation and sharp answers contradicted McCain's frequent claims that the Democrat was uninformed and "didn't understand" key issues. Linking McCain to Bush in his very first answer, he kept it up as his primary line of attack. Obama forcefully hit McCain for his early support of the Iraq War and though he never drew blood, he did keep McCain off balance.

Often interrupting McCain attacks with swift explanations and comebacks, Obama managed to turn accusations of being liberal as evidence of his relentless opposition to George Bush. He was so confident by the end that he reminded the nation that his father was from Kenya. Two more performances like that and he will be very tough to beat on Election Day.

Frantz Fannon

A Great Read

Crisis

I heard a radio personality say That relaxed lending policies caused the market to collapse. He said it was the mentality that everyone deserved a home no matter what. He said the Clinton administration encouraged this policy. It was only a matter of time that this would be blamed on the minorities. A friend of mine said she heard Rush Limbaugh refer to it as “reparations”. A United States Senator also leveled blame on minority loans. Well the sub-prime loans could hardly be equated to 40 acres and a mule. These loans did get more people in homes, but they also led to more foreclosures because people simply could not afford the payments, but along the way the loan makers made millions as they traded the bad paper back and forth. So now it's time to pay the piper and it looks as is those that got theirs first expect those of us who haven't made a dim to pay up. The power was in the hand of the lender, and it is truly shameful to now try to blame the borrower.

Book Review - The Senator & the Socialite

Lawrence Otis Graham tries to tell the story of Blanche Kelso Bruce and his wife Josephine Willson Bruce in The Senator and the Socialite: The True Story of America's First Black Dynasty. Starting the story before the Civil War, Graham follows the “First Black Dynasty" through three generations and their ultimate fall from grace. Blanche and Josephine are only the first half of the book followed by his son and grandchildren.

Blanche Kelso Bruce was born to a slave mother and her owner in 1841. Favored because of his bloodline connection to the master, Blanche was taught to read and was well prepared for freedom when he moved to Kansas at the age of twenty-two. He studied at Oberlin College and made his way to Mississippi, where he rose quickly in politics and purchased a plantation in 1874. It was through the purchase of this plantation farmed by sharecroppers that Bruce amassed a real-estate fortune. He became the first black man to serve a full term in the United States Senate, although he would only serve one term. In 1878 Bruce married the light-skinned Josephine Willson, who was the daughter of a wealthy black Philadelphia doctor and consequently came from the North's tiny black upper class. Together they broke down racial barriers in Washington, D.C. by befriending the right people, from President Ulysses S. Grant to Frederick Douglass to John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Booker T. Washington. After serving as a United States Senator Bruce gained appointments under Presidents James A. Garfield, Chester A. Arthur, William H. Harrison, and William McKinley. The impressive rise of the couple leads to enormous wealth and status, with Bruce even having his name printed on U.S. currency through his appointment to the top Treasury Department post.

As white supremacists inflicted violence, destruction and chaos across the South with increasing boldness after Reconstruction and as southern Blacks were losing their life and liberty, the Bruces son, Roscoe Conkling Bruce, who was named for a racially liberal New York senator who was a close friend of Blanche’s, headed off to Philips Exeter Academy, a private boarding school, followed by Harvard College. While attending Harvard Roscoe spied for Booker T. Washington on Boston's 'anti-Bookerite' black radicals.

While Blanche Bruces reputation would open some doors for his son, even with a degree from Harvard nobody would hire a black man. Consequently, Roscoe was hired by and became a protégé of the powerful Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee University and eventually became the superintendent of Washington, D.C.'s segregated Black schools, a job that Tuskegee had maneuvered out of the expectant hands of W. E. B. Du Bois. Du Bois's attacks on Washington’s accommodation of white supremacy, which he published in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), were becoming increasingly popular among Washington, D.C.'s Black educated middle class. That Roscoe Bruce was hired on at Tuskegee is not happenstance, for the Bruce family shared its founder, Booker T. Washington's, philosophy of accommodation and dependence on connections with rich white people. A scandal erupted in 1919 wh8ich ended Roscoe's political career and forced his family out of Washington, D.C.

Roscoe's wife, Clara, a smart, former Radcliffe student, tried to save her family by earning a law degree at Boston University. The first Black editor of a law review in U.S. history, and the first woman, Clara's Bruce’s law career was curtailed by the lack of opportunity for Black lawyers (and women in general) in early twentieth-century America. Roscoe and Clara moved to New York in the 1920s and formed an alliance with John D. Rockefeller Jr. while becoming a force in Harlem society.

Factual errors spoil the work in many places. Graham confuses the famous Washington, D.C. minister Francis Grimke with Archibald Grimke, a Harvard-educated lawyer who lived in Boston, and refers to Paul Laurence Dunbar as a "Harlem Renaissance poet." Dunbar, who died in 1906, did most of his writing in Ohio and Washington, D.C. Washington, D.C. is not now and has never been the Deep South and upper-class white and black people did mix to a surprising extent. Many Blacks found real economic and social opportunity in the city, and northern Democratic and Republican congressmen were generally considered friendly to Black Washingtonians. Graham's bibliography is extensive but does not compensate for the lack of citations and omits Constance McLaughlin Green's Pulitzer Prize-winning scholarship Washington (1963) and The Secret City: A History of Race Relations in the Nation's Capital (1967).