I noticed a depressingly-interesting trend when I was going over results from SuperDuperWhooper Tuesday and previously at the Election Center run by cnn.com:

There is a recommended diary right now, Coffee with Dad that I wrote a comment to.

Well, it started out as a comment.  But it didn't stop there, because it couldn't.  So I kept writing, since my need to try and help the author understand where I'm coming from kept getting in the way of succinctness and brevity. Suffice it to say that I could not accept the author's apologies -- of which there were several -- about her father's words.  But my inability to do so it not because of her father's words.  

The newest survival tip to young non-white male persons who encounter law enforcement (since even in these circumstances, they're disproportionately male and disproportionately Black or Latino) is to avoid carrying your hairbrush with you, especially if you are not 100% sane.  

This appears to be the early lesson we're learning from the death of yet another non-white teenager, 18-year old Khiel Coppin, last night in my old neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, New York.  The early reports are that New York's finest believed he had a gatt when in fact he was carrying a Goody.

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Of all the many things that one could say about the sobering -- frightening -- events surrounding the descent of Pakistan in the past four days into martial law and a dictatorship, the one thing you can't say is that General Musharraf and his minions don't know their Shakespeare.

Most folks still think that Dick the Butcher's urging of Henry Cade, the instigator of mob unrest in Henry VI Part II meant that lawyers should get the kibosh generally just because we are pains in the butt.

I concede that some of us can be a pain in the butt.

But many of us are also on the front lines of defense of justice in a free country.  Whether we're talking about ours, or someone else's.

There's got to be some sort of "lose your ever-loving mind" drug in the water being drunk by law enforcement officers working with Black kids this past year.

I say that because I woke up Saturday morning after a very trying business trip, finally at home again but looking at a weekend full of work, to read on CNN that there are some ignoramuses in Greenville, Ohio, who think that a 10 year old Black child named Timothy Byers is capable of the mental state necessary to murder his entire family.  They have reached that conclusion, and charged the 10 year little boy old with murder, solely because he set a fire that caused his house to burn down.  And, since he confessed to deliberately setting a fire (a confession made outside the presence of his guardians -- his grandparents due to the death of his mother in the fire) he's a murderer.

Except for one tiny detail:  nobody disputes that this little boy didn't mean to hurt anyone.

You had to know that Uncle Thomas was waiting for the day when he could finally tell a version of his story of the Anita Hill fiasco where he wasn't under oath and wasn't under the scrutiny of the media watching his every move, facial tic and breath to make sure that he was telling the truth.

Well, today's the day.

Either Bob Herbert of the New York Times and Roland Martin of CNN coordinate their stories the way that teenage girls coordinate their outfits or there was a critical mass of "Enough is Enough" dust floating in the air yesterday.  Because BOTH journalists -- one an icon of the print media, the other an icon of cable news -- have penned barnburner pieces chewing the Grand Old Party (aka Republican Party) a new you-know-what for how it treats Black voters.

[10 minute work break - this couldn't wait!!!!]

Maybe I was right the other day:  maybe the tide really IS turning in Jena.

Or, in this case, the larger state of Louisiana.  Where, less than an hour ago, the Court of Appeals overturned Mychal Bell's conviction on charges of aggravated battery on the grounds that he should not have been tried as an adult once the "adult criminal charge" (the bogus attempted murder charge) had been dismissed by the State.

With last week's reversal of Bell's conspiracy conviction by the trial court itself on the same ground, this means that the State of Louisiana, if it really wishes to push this thing, will have to start from Ground Zero.

Only fools would do that.  Because unlike before, this time the world is watching.

(But hey, only fools would have allowed this situation to get to the point where kids were accused of attempted murder for a schoolyard fight, too.)

Numbers about 1Q and 2Q 2007 foreclosure activity (BEFORE the markets started melting down in July and August, mind you) were released by the Mortgage Bankers' Association Wednesday. They should frighten anyone who understands anything about the impact of foreclosure activity on not only home values, but on overall access to credit -- the engine that that everyone admits has been fueling Dubbya's so-called "robust economy" in a country where many contend that consumer spending represents 2/3 of the GDP.

They are frightening because, as of the end of June, 2007, in addition to the 0.65% of mortgages in the foreclosure process, 5.12% of the mortgages which were not in foreclosure were "delinquent", i.e. the mortgage payments were at least 30 days behind. 

That means that, right now, 1 in every 20 home mortgages in the United States is behind and, thus, at potential risk.

1 in 20.

([Blogger's Advance Coda:  I wrote this in the wee hours of yesterday but have been working and am therefore just now posting it today, a day later (but hopefully not a dollar short!).  It's still hopefully food for thought/discussion, whether here or at my separate blog, Maat's Feather or at MLW - or all three.  So, I'll just post a piece of it here, since it's very long, and if folks want to read the whole thing, then they can head on over.  I know that many eschew my very long diaries and several have complained about them.  But hey, sometimes, there's a lot to be said.)

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Something that not too many folks are talking about in connection with the mortgage and market shakeouts is the divergent impact of this problem on communities, depending on the demographics.

At present, there still appears to be no meaningful harm to the upper end of the housing market in terms of either devaluation or a flattening sales curve.  For the wealthy, real estate business (as opposed to mortgage-backed securities investment, anyhow!) appears to still be booming.  Inventories in some of the more "upscale" (almost all white and Asian) places to live in the Bay Area are just around 30 days - which means that sales are beyond brisk.

Yesterday morning, after a bleary-eyed drive up to the City of Berkeley, CA following a night with Lewis Black at San Francisco's Davies Symphony Hall (in which he advocated for the election of Santa Claus rather than yet another same-old same-old politician labeled Democrat or Republican, or, at a minimum, forcing whoever won to wear the red suit as a unifying force for the country) I began my work day to the sounds of the drums first approaching, and ultimately being played to the heavens by the Youth as they danced into Zellerbach Hall.  The conga, the snare, the timbale, of varying rhythm melody yet all nonetheless in harmony with the same, insistent calls.  (Polyrhythmic music, as they some it in today's newfangled music labeling language.  We used to say "The Drums", knowing exactly what that meant.)

The Drums, as a Call to Action.

From the moment I heard yesterday that George Bush had decreed "No vacation if you don't pass a covert wiretapping bill I will sign" I knew how it would go down.  Odds were better than 75% that there would be a brief public theatre of outrage, followed by quick capitulation by enough Democrats to ensure that Bush got exactly what he demanded and folks would still be on time for their "recess parties".  

And, sure enough, that's exactly how it went down in the Senate, which voted to approve the Republican covert spying bill by a vote of 60-32 thanks to the help of 16 Democrats.  

(Cross posted at various places, including Political Sapphire and Maat's Feather.)

"Can I sit under the white tree?"

"Let me smoke with you white boys."

What do these two statements have in common?

I've been wondering how long it would be before someone in the mainstream called a spade a spade, where this year's Supreme Court term is concerned.  Finally, this morning, the New York Times almost hits the mark, in its editorial Justice Denied.

It draws the nexus between this Court's decisions this year and the dismantling of Warren Court jurisprudence, particularly as it relates to the rights of the oppressed:

At the end of its first full term, Chief Justice John Roberts’s court is emerging as the Warren court’s mirror image.

Dear Elizabeth:

Dear Thelma.  Dear Gloria.  Dear Jefferson.  Dear Melba, and Terrence.  Dear Ernest, Carlotta and Minnijean. (Dear Daisy, too.  Since but for you the Nine would not have made it.)

And I mustn’t ever, ever, forget Dear Linda, whose father made a name for her by going to court to secure a decent education for her and her little sister Cheryl.  

Dear Nettie and Nikki too, just because:

I’m so sorry.

Too much work, too much travel, so little time to blog.  But I wanted to be sure to highlight yesterday's post by Oliver Willis on the intersection between the Black Church and Democratic Politics from yesterday:  The Old Hotness.

and will probably lose some as well, over what I am going to say, since the current fashion is that something is wrong with you if you are not up in arms feeling like sexist wrongness has victimized Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwen.