Where am I? There are 3.67 billion women in the world. Most of them, like me, are brown. I am not in the bottom. I don't live on one dollar a day. Although I'm a poor woman in America I eat the best food, I'm reasonably healthy, and I am one of the 17 percent of Black Americans who have earned a college degree. I am also one of a even smaller percentage who hold a graduate degree. I have lived three years longer (and Insha'Allah in the fall of this year it will be four) than the average woman in sub-Saharan Africa. No one can beat me, rape me, or kill me or my daughters without answering to secular law. I am not at the top and I admit that my life is not worth as much, under the American system as my blond and blue-eyed sisters. But no matter for that. This is not a skimming of shallow waters. This is the deepest wave which we all will have to learn to circumnavigate in order to move forward.
I can rise higher towards the top and in so doing, it is incumbent upon me to raise up those who are on the bottom. It is my duty, as an educated, Black American, conscious woman to help those who seek to be the same and more.
On Sat, Sep 8, 2012 at 10:07 AM, La Vonda R. Staples <lrstaples@gmail.com> wrote:
And here's the point of all of this:Reagan began the descent of the Republican party when he went to Philadelphia MS and said, 'business as usual." He stood on that sight where those three boys were murdered and shat, heavily, on their graves. He was no better than Bull Connor or for that matter, Strom Thurmond.Later, the redemption of the Republican party was George Bush the father. For his efforts they put him out.Bill Clinton, although a Democrat was Republican, conservative in policy.And now we come to the epitome of why Obama will win, as Dr. Gloria stated, by default. George Bush the son had nothing to say. He was a puppet and a pawn. He let that crew, who could not run his father, run him. And they used him like a two dollar hoe locked up in a cheap hotel with the A string of a football team. They turned him out.They used abortion, gay marriage, and illegal aliens to gain 8 years in the White House. While simultaneously beating the hell out of their sheep. They took over time pay and taxed it at forty percent. And they paid no attention to the beginnings of the sub-prime loan crisis until the folks who had voted for them were out on the streets.AT NO TIME did they EVER change their strategy of lying and spending time on things which do not matter. There are constitutional reasons for abortion in America. It didn't start with Roe v. Wade. It started with a married woman trying to get birth control without her husband's consent in Greenwich v. CT. Gay marriage is an issue of privacy. And I, for one, as one who believes in God but also one who believes that a family is the basic unit of the state (see Brown, "The Body and Society"), I KNOW that the greater issue in America is that we have no fault divorce. A man can leave the mother of his children who and go down to the courthouse and file to divorce her. In 30 days the deal is done. That is a greater issue than homosexuals. And on that score? I firmly believe that if two people create a financial unit those two people have the right to determine how their goods are to be divided in the instance of dissolution and/or death.The campaign of George Bush the son ridiculed intellect. And as a result we have three states, MO, TX, and AR who seek to include supernatural theories of God into the school curriculum while US students score lower than Pakistani children in math and science.So, it's not that Obama is so incredibly great. It's that the Republican party has relied on ignorance, xenophobia, sexism, and racism to win. It worked in the past. It's not working now because their constituency, like all whores, is not living to a good old age. And their children, more than hating or fearing race and sex, hate the sickness of their parents.For me? I am the great great granddaughter of a slave. I reserve the right to vote for a candidate because he is Black. I wouldn't vote for Herman Cain. I wouldn't vote for Clarence Thomas. Those are merely coloured men. I vote for a man with whom I find no fault.Do I care about what he does to Africa? Yes. One day I will have to walk the streets of Dakar, Lagos, Freetown, and Accra and I will, more than likely, feel the backlash of hatred against Americans. But before I was Black I was a girl. And this girl dances with the boy who brought her to the party ALWAYS. There is no place in the world where a woman can have so many opportunities to fulfill her destiny as a human being than in the United States of America. And that is the truth from the mouth of Allah the Merciful who brought my DNA to this land over 200 years ago.So you can talk that talk honey and walk that walk money - you cannot dispute - cannot even raise a pimple on a gnat's ass - that the house of the Republicans has fallen. Whether or not they have the good sense to re-build in hopes of winning in the next four years is up to them.The loss of African lives under the hand of Mr. Obama is NOTHING next to the death and incarceration of the Big Men of Africa under the 1950's and 1960's CIA and MI-6. I'm not a political scientist. I'm a historian. And though it may seem like a terrible thing for a Black scholar to say - these deaths are nothing compared with the progress of the very IMAGE of what a Black man can and cannot do in the scheme of world history.La Vonda R. Staples--On Fri, Sep 7, 2012 at 11:29 PM, Emeagwali, Gloria (History) <emeagwali@mail.ccsu.edu> wrote:
Let's face it, Romney does not have a plan for creating jobs- so Obama wins this one by default.
Romney destroyed jobs, closed down plants and created turmoil for workers as testified by several of them
a few days ago. He has no credible plan to turn things around and one suspects that things will get much worse
on that front, should he move to the White House. His strengths may lie somewhere else - yet to be discovered.
Dr. Gloria Emeagwali
www.vimeo.com/user5946750/videos<http://www.vimeo.com/user5946750/videos>
________________________________
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com [usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Abdul Karim Bangura [theai@earthlink.net]
Sent: Friday, September 07, 2012 9:17 PM
To: USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
Cc: leonenet
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The Unbaiased AP Says It Best In Its headline
Gloomy jobs report shadows race with 60 days left
<http://enews.earthlink.net/article/pho?guid=20120907/cbb71beb-4cc3-4721-ad06-8fb546b69b04&article_path=/article/us&article_guid=20120907/cbb71beb-4cc3-4721-ad06-8fb546b69b04>
President Barack Obama shakes hands with the crowd gathered Friday, Sept. 7, 2012, at the Eastern Iowa Airport in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. (AP Photo - Matthew Putney)
BEN FELLER
From Associated Press
September 07, 2012 7:33 PM EDT
CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) — A dismal new snapshot of jobs in America shadowed the presidential campaign on Friday, testing the voter patience that will save or sink President Barack Obama's re-election bid. Seizing on the timing, Republican Mitt Romney said Obama's convention party had given way to quite a "hangover."
Employers added just 96,000 jobs in August, not nearly enough to seriously dent unemployment, let alone inspire confidence that the economy is getting better. Even the good news — the unemployment rate dropped from 8.3 percent to 8.1 percent — resulted from many job-hunters just giving up.
"We're going in the wrong direction," Romney declared, a view echoed by a majority of Americans still reeling from a massive recession.
Obama put the emphasis on a trend showing employers have added jobs for 30 months in a row now. He did so with a nod to public frustration.
"We know it's not good enough," Obama said, dealing with the downbeat news mere hours after his confetti-flying Democratic National Convention. "We need to create more jobs, faster."
With 60 frenetic days left until the election, the economic report was not grim enough to alter the political narrative of a consistently tight race. Yet the attention it commanded eroded any hope of a post-convention boost for Obama.
Instead, it underlined his point that economic recovery will not be "quick or easy." No president has won re-election with unemployment over 8 percent since Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Obama has embraced that Great Depression comparison, hoping to show why he and the nation need more time.
Their conventions behind them and their debates just ahead, Obama and Romney sprinted into the next phase of campaign, targeting eight or so toss-up states. The two men headed the same way Friday, appearing in Iowa and New Hampshire, two states with small but potentially decisive electoral prizes.
The economy has added just 139,000 jobs a month this year, a slower pace than last year. It takes roughly 200,000 jobs a month to shrink unemployment. In perspective, the economy was bleeding hundreds of thousands of jobs when Obama took office, but that does not comfort the jobless today.
The new results only sharpened the competing and defining storylines of the election. Romney says the poor pace of job growth demands that Obama be thrown out of office, while the incumbent implores voters to compare the candidates' economic visions and see why only his would help the middle class.
If the jobs numbers did hang over Obama, he did not show it, smiling and waving during rallies in Portsmouth, N.H., and Iowa City, Iowa. In both cities he returned to the themes of his convention speech, poking fun again at Romney while shrinking his competitor's economic theory to one idea.
"Tax cuts. Tax cuts. Cut some more regulations. Oh, and more tax cuts," Obama told the thousands who packed the grounds at Portsmouth's Strawbery Banke Museum. "Tax cuts when times are good. Tax cuts when times are bad. Tax cuts to help you lose a few extra pounds. Tax cuts to help you improve your love life. It'll cure anything."
Romney was biting as well.
On repeated occasions Friday, he challenged Obama's competency, lumping together the jobs report and Obama's prime-time convention address.
"There was nothing in the speech that gives confidence that the president knows what he's doing when it comes to jobs," Romney told Fox News.
It was a rejoinder to Thursday night, when Obama stood before a cheering crowd and essentially put the candidates on different levels.
"The times have changed, and so have I," Obama said. "I'm no longer just a candidate. I'm the president."
Trying to extend the buzz of his convention, Obama went back on the trail with Vice President Joe Biden and their wives as well. One of the longest days of his campaign would take him from North Carolina to New Hampshire to Iowa and ultimately Florida, where he begins a bus tour on Saturday.
The monthly jobs snapshot came out even before organizers in Charlotte had finished clearing away the convention.
"If last night was the party," Romney said in a statement, "this morning is the hangover."
Romney's campaign also unveiled a battery of TV ads in Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia. The themes of the ads are tailored to the economic concerns within those states, from growing debt to potential defense cuts to collapsing home values.
The gloomy reaction to job growth came in part because it fell even below the expectations that economists had for August. On top of that, hourly pay fell, the job totals for July and June were reduced, and the number of people in the work force dropped to its lowest level in 31 years.
"This is not even close to what a recovery looks like," Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan told CNBC.
Obama aides said they came out of their convention with momentum and small but consistent leads in the decisive states. With each passing week of little movement in the polls, the campaign attention is turning to what's left: voter mobilization drives and October's three presidential debates.
__
Associated Press writers Jim Kuhnhenn in Portsmouth, N.H., Thomas Beaumont in Orange City, Iowa, and Nancy Benac and Christopher S. Rugaber in Washington contributed to this report.
__
Follow Ben Feller on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/benfellerdc
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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La Vonda R. Staples, WriterBA Psychology 2005 and MA European History 2009"If your dreams do not scare you, they are not big enough."Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, This Child Will Be Great; Memoir of a Remarkable Life by Africa's First Woman President.
La Vonda R. Staples, Writer
BA Psychology 2005 and MA European History 2009
"If your dreams do not scare you, they are not big enough."
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, This Child Will Be Great; Memoir of a Remarkable Life by Africa's First Woman President.
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