I'm a white woman, so I probably don't have much authority to comment on issues of race. But, you see, my son is bi-racial, a product, he will proudly tell you, of an Irish mother and a Haitian father. In raising him for the last 15 years, I have gained a perspective on issues of race than I might otherwise have had.

As someone who wants a better racial landscape for my son, there have been several occurrences in the last week that have truly saddened me.  It started early in the week when Glen Beck uncovered some "dirt" on Van Jones, President Obama's energy czar. He aired a video in which Mr. Jones refers to Republicans as assholes and publicized that Jones had signed a petition that blamed the government for 9/11.

Then Thursday evening I watched the Boise State, University of Oregon football game. For those of you who don't follow sports, after the game a player from Boise State, Byron Hout, said something obnoxious to an Oregon player named LaGarrette Blount and Blount lost it. He sucker punched the Boise State player and then got into it with the Boise State fans and had to be dragged off of the field

Finally, I got up on Thursday morning to an e-mail from my son's school informing me that if I prefer for my son not to watch a speech by the President of the United States on Tuesday morning, the school will find appropriate alternative activities for him during that time. This is in course in response to the flap over the president's speech asking kids to work hard and stay in school and the right wing meme that President Obama will use the speech to try to "indoctrinate" our children.

Should Van Jones have known better than to call Republicans assholes in a public venue or be more careful what he adds his name to? Yes. Should LaGarrette Blount have known better than to lose his cool, particularly in front of a national audience? Yes. Should President Obama's staff have thought through the first version of his curriculum that went along with his speech and realized that including items like "ask children to write a letter to the president saying what they can do to help him" was probably ill advised? Yes.

I know it doesn't seem like these three items are linked, but for me, I'm starting to wonder if they are all part of the same problem. In all of these instances, I believe, we have black men coming under attack by white people and being asked to pay a disproportionate price for mistakes they may have made.

A few years ago, Dick Cheney told a senator on the senate floor to "go fuck himself." He spent eight years trying to dismantle the Constitution of the United States. Yet I didn't hear Republicans saying things like "His extremist views and coarse rhetoric have no place in this administration or the public debate" as Mike Pence did when he called for Van Jones to resign or be fired. As we now know, Pence got his wish when Van Jones resigned on Saturday night due to what he rightly termed a Republican smear campaign.

So what is Van Jones' crime in proportion to someone like Cheney? He helped found colorofchange.org, the organization that has successfully lobbied for advertisers to drop Glen Beck for saying that our President hates white people. He is a successful black man who, among other accomplishments, started an organization called Green for All, whose goal is to build a green economy while simultaneously lifting citizens out of poverty, many of those citizens from poor and minority communities. In short, he is a threat to the white privilege that people like Mike Pence have grown to enjoy and will do anything to protect.

As for the Blount situation, if you watch the video of the incident, you will see that Hout instigated it. But, guess what? Blount has likely lost any chance of playing football, having been suspended for the rest of the season and Hout will have to run extra laps during practice in the next week. Oh, did I happen to mention that Blount is black and Hout is white? It may not be the case, but what it looks like to lots of people, particularly young African Americans like my son, is that a white guy can start a fight and when a black guy responds it's the black guy who gets punished while the white guy walks away, virtually unscathed.  

Now, let's get to our president. Barack Obama is the leader of our country, yet school system after school system is allowing parents to opt out of listening to our president send a positive message to kids about the importance of their education. Of course, other presidents, namely Republican presidents, have been allowed to speak to our children without school systems giving parents the opportunity to opt out. In allowing for this current opt out, what is the message that schools are sending our children, especially African American children like my son? In part, I think, it's that you don't have to respect the president if he's a black man.

So, here's I guess, why I am so saddened. Of course in hind sight I was naïve. But, I thought that the very act of electing a black man for president meant we had turned a corner on the sordid racial past of our country, but now I'm not so sure. The forces out there that will try and hold black people down are strong and loud and dangerous. They will swear up and down to you that their actions have nothing to do with race. And it's difficult to fight because, while we can have suspicions that these fights are, at least in part, about race, we can't really prove it.

We have a long way to go before we can offer my son and other African Americans the country they deserve, a country where they actually have equity. We have a lot of work to do and it's hard work in which we continually question our assumptions and the assumptions of those around us. It's work in which we stand up and make ourselves heard, even when we know it will be uncomfortable for people to hear us.

I think about the woman who cried at a recent town hall meeting "I want my country back." I don't want her country back. Instead, what I want is a country that gives all of its citizens the respect and opportunity they deserve. I want a country that tries to have a better understanding of its own racial heritage and what that heritage implies for all of its citizens.  And in that country, we start by giving our president the deference he deserves to give a speech to our children, no matter the color of our president's skin.

Shit, shit, shit! I did it again. I meant to act with grace and dignity, but instead let my real personality come out - the one that can't help but pick a fight when she sees something she thinks is wrong.

Today on my lunch hour, I went to a rally in support of health care reform. It was sponsored by a group called the Main Street Alliance, a coalition of small business owners and community organizations that support health care reform. The purpose of the rally was to have speakers share why they support health care reform and try to dispel some of the myths that have been circulating about what reform will/will not do.

When I got there I saw the teabaggers (and yes, I use that term in its most pejorative sense) out in full force. Given the likelihood that their presence might lead me to cause some kind of stir, I probably should have turned around and left. But, I didn't.

This is the first time I have seen teabagger tactics in person and I realized, when they talk about free speech they see that as a one way street. It's their free speech rights and yours be damned. One man was holding a sign that said something about Obama being a facist so I turned around and held my sign up too and his response to me was "you are censoring my free speech rights." Huh?

I held my cool for about 20 minutes (could be a record for me) and then it happened. There was a woman speaking about her family being denied coverage. She had her small child with her, holding the little girl's hand as she spoke. One of the teabaggers went and stood close to the front of the crowd and yelled "Obama wants to kill your grandmother." I wish you could have seen the look on the little girl's face. I did. And I did something about it.

I went and stood in the teabagger's face, nose to nose, close enough to smell that he had eaten garlic sometime in the last several hours and I started chanting over and over again, "Health care now!" until I backed him away from where the woman and her little girl were standing. Then another woman holding a sign that said "Obama is a Socialist" hit me over the head with her sign. It sounds like I'm making this up, doesn't it? I swear to you I'm not.

At that point, all bets were off. So, I just got in her face too (after she realized that she was committing battery and stopped hitting me) and started chanting "Health care now!" She was yelling things back to me. I didn't hear much of it, but I did hear her say that I was there to get the government to support abortions and make her pay for it.

Quite the lunch hour, wasn't it. So, here's what I learned. 1) Teabaggers only care about free speech when it is they who are doing the speaking. 2) Like most bullies, teabaggers will back down when you call them on their shit. 3) When teabaggers don't like what someone has to say, they are capable of resorting to violence. 4) Teabaggers actually believe the myths they spew. 5) It doesn't take long to lose your voice when you chant "Health Care Now!" over and over again.

Truthfully, I'm not sure how I feel about my behavior. I go back and forth. I see that little girl with the look of horror on her face with some idiot too insensitive to realize that shouting that someone is going to kill the little girl's grandmother is beyond the pale. Then, I imagine how embarrassed my 15-year-old son would have been to be witness to his mother yelling at people.

Maybe I need to grow up and stop trying to start donnybrooks, but then again maybe more of us should don our health care reform supersuits, stop bitching about fighting for what we believe in and actually get out there and do something about it.

I saw a great saying on a card the other day. It said, "Given a cape and a nice tiara, I'm certain that I could save the world."  Ah hell, pass my tiara and get out of my way!

With the increasingly nasty tone at this month's town halls over health care, I have been thinking a lot lately about the notion of free speech in a civil society. But over the past few days, this very important concept has come to a head for me in my little Facebook world.

I read a post from a friend that says that people who refer to their adult women friends as "girlfriend" should be slapped. I do that all the time, so I guess I am somehow inferior. When I made a post about Michael Vick that said, "I stand by our legal system's notion of restorative justice; if you commit a crime and serve your time you are entitled to move on and not be punished for your crime for the rest of your life" someone responded by saying that they think Michael Vick should be shot in the face. I have been called a Nazi by the father of one of my son's friends because I asked his 14 year old son to tone down his profanity. I have been called a dumbass because I said I understood Kevin Youkilis' anger over being hit by a baseball traveling at 98 miles per hour. I have been called basically sweet, but stupid by my cousin because I posted something in favor of health care reform. Quite a weekend, huh? With friends like that...

So, am I an innocent victim of all this vitriol? Absolutely not. You see, the thing is, you reap what you sow. I have chosen lately to operate under that same set of rules - that someone who disagrees with me is not worthy of my respect. I've been the perpetrator of that kind of dialogue here on this site. I have attacked people instead of their ideas when I have disagreed with them. In fact, I owe someone called Linus an apology for something mean I said a couple of weeks ago. If you read this, I'm truly sorry for being so nasty to you.

As I drove to work today I suddenly realized that tears were streaming down my face and they still stream as I write this post. This war with words is not the kind of world I want to create, so for me, it stops now. I am going to try to operate under the paradigm that just because something can be said, doesn't mean it must be said. The purpose of free speech and a free exchange of ideas is to create a better world, not a demeaned one. I am not one of the main posters on this site, but if you have seen my posts, you may notice that I changed out my avatar with a real picture of myself. I am not longer going to hide behind my anonymity as a way of being able to post things to this site that I would not say to you if I were to meet you in the real world.

So, my name is Carey. I live in Idaho. I'm a single mother, raising a child I adore more than anything on this earth. I organize educational programs for a living and I want to leave this world better than I found it. I am craving a vigorous exchange of ideas, but I'm no longer interested in anyone's nastiness, least of all, my own. Will you join me?

"The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of IngSoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible."  G. Orwell

At Obama's press conference on Monday night Mara Liasson asked this question:

What do you think you're going to have to do to get more bipartisanship? Are you going to need a new legislative model, bringing in Republicans from the very beginning, getting more involved in the details yourself from the beginning, or using bipartisan commissions?

The assertation of a lack of bipartisanship was a faulty one and I'm glad Obama called her on it in his response. In my mind it was also lazy journalism that ascribed truth to the Republican paradigm without taking into account the full picture.

I'm a strong proponent that most truth is relative. I think it's impossible in most circumstances for any of us to be truly objective, because we bring out own life experiences to bear. That's the only way I am able to co-exist with my Republican friends when I, at heart, really don't understand why they can believe what they believe.

But journalists like Ms. Liasson have a different standard. Jounalists like anyone else have a right to their own world views. But the nature of their work is supposed to be to take their own world views out of the picture and not become propagandists who move an agenda forward.

One such piece of propaganda has been the Republican side being able to get away with saying that this stimulus plan has not been bipartisan in nature. For the last eight years, they have operated under a principle that says, if we speak it, is it truth. And journalists have been complicit. When Republicans have asserted that Democrats were not inclusive in writing the stimulus bill I have not heard one journalist ask the question about Boehner holding a meeting to implore his colleagues to vote against the bill even before Obama went to the Congress to meet with Republicans to get their input. How can one be bipartisan when one side has already played their hand?

So, we arrive at today and Karl Rove's asseratation that Obama has acted in a "my way or the highway" manner during this process. Let's not even get into how rich that comment is from the man who had great responsibility in orchestrating the Bush Whitehouse. I'm just waiting to see who has the courage to call Mr. Rove on his nonsense. MSM, where the hell are you? You have a job to do and it doesn't look like the one you have been doing lately.

I've been hearing rumblings on both sides of the political spectrum that are expressing something that has been nagging me regarding the stimulus package. Chris Matthews talked about it last night on Hardball and I heard something similar from Jack Welch this morning on Morning Joe.

This stimulus package is becoming convoluted. Watching Congress and the White House handle this is like viewing a Pirandello play. Most of us aren't even sure what is in the bill anymore, if we even really knew in the first place.

Why does the stimulus package have to be one big bill? Would it make sense to look at this categorically and divide the bill into several smaller bills that begin to accomplish the same things in more full and meaningful ways? I was thinking about this yesterday as Obama signed the SCHIP Bill. We can get our arms around what that bill is trying to accomplish because it's narrow in scope. 

I'm wondering if we need maybe four smaller bills that each address a category of economic problem. To me, we need to fix the current bank bailout bill to make it do what it should have done in the first place. Then we need three other bills: one to address housing, one for jobs, and one for safety net issues for people who are already in dire straights. All the other pieces that are being thrown into this current stimulus package might be important goals, but are they really urgent items that need to be tackled right now?

Secondly, we need to take a look back at recent history. What has happened in the last eight years when our Congress has passed bills that are marketed as being urgent and in need of immediate passing? Anyone? The Patriot Act? The authorization for war in Iraq? And even more recently, the bank bailout? It seems to me that what we should have learned from these examples is that if we don't take the time to really think through how to correctly address an issue from the onset that we as a country spend a lot of time trying to go back and fix our mistakes.

The United States needs Congress to do something soon, but more importantly, Congress and the Whitehouse need to do something right. President Obama does not need to try to keep all his campaign promises in one bill and Americans need to give up their need for instant gratification and have the patience to wait for a bill or bills that will really begin to fix the issues our country faces. 

This is my first post and I don't know WTF I'm doing, but here goes anyway.

Let me get this straight: Timothy Geithner didn't pay $34,000 in payroll taxes, Tom Daschle didn't pay over $140,000 in taxes, most of which was for someone to personally drive him around and Nancy Killefer had to pay less than $1,000 in back taxes for household help.

Is it just me or did yet another working mother just get thrown under the bus? Even today's AP article has the snarky audacity to point out that "she had two nannies and a personal assistant to run her life when she was on the road." Imagine, a working mother needing help to balance all the demands on her life? Here we go again with the double standard that it doesn't seem that anyone even bothers to question.

I think we have to ask ourselves: why is Nancy Killefer's resignation being accepted when Tim Geithner and Tom Daschle's appointments are moving forward? Could it be that it's still easier to villify a woman who stuggles to balance the pieces of her life than it is to villify a man who makes similar, dare I say, even more selfish mistakes?