The Democrats' choice to have a response to Bush tonight by Bill Richardson simulcast in Spanish is a good one on both counts: The Democrats can use Spanish without hypocrisy because unlike the GOP, they haven't been fighting to keep the fastest-growing language in the US out of schools and voting booths (certain elements, of course, can be depended on to deride this, like any move for inclusion or any policy benefiting people of color, as patronizing/ race-baiting/pandering); and Richardson is a successful and respected Southern Latino Governor who recently came into the spotlight negotiating with North Korea - and an excellent candidate for Vice President.

Let's say you're the Secretary of Health and Human Services and your scientists' research concludes that there's a "national problem" of "pervasive" racial disparities in access to affordable health care with a crippling "personal and societal price." What do you do? Rewrite the report, apparently. Looks like the Ranking Democrat on the Committee on the House Government Reform Committee and the chairs of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Black Caucus, Asian Pacific Amrican Caucus, and Native American Caucus are less than pleased.

There's no way I would have been watching The West Wing this season if not for a perhaps perverse sense of loyalty to what it was back when it was Aaron Sorkin's show. The writing, as many have observed, has tanked, and everything else has gone down with it. Tonight, however, may have been a new low. Whereas Sorkin could actually (and did) make the census riveting television, this season's writers have made the policy discussion so dry and so trite that the one clever line of the show was when Leo responds to the President's monologue by asking the others whether they were taking notes. And the character development may actually be worse. It was only in the last minutes of the episode, however, that I was offended in a way I can't remember ever (despite often coming down pretty far to the left of the positions advanced there) being offended by the show. President Bartlett has rightfully chosen to take a strong stance against mandatory minimums in drug sentencing and has commuted the sentences of thirty-some first-time non-violent drug offenders stuck with outrageous sentences under mandatory minimums. After the State of the Union, he's introduced to a Black woman who's one of the thirty-plus just released and expresses her gratitude. At this point Bartlett launches into a lecture on how lucky she is to be getting a second chance, how dire the consequences if she screws up again, how much the futures of other prison inmates are riding on her behavior, and how important it is that she appreciate her freedom. The sight (fictitious or not) of a white Nobel Laureate/ US President born to privilege taking the opportunity of having taken small steps towards ameliorating awful, punitive, and racist policy lecturing a Black woman who's just made it out of years of humiliating and unjust punishment for a non-violent offense on how grateful she should be to him and how if she played by the rules he might be more magnanimous to others of her kind was offensive to the point of being difficult to watch. And that the woman simply smiles, blushes, and thanks him again for his kindness is absurd. I expected better.

As DC Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton recently observed: Not content with denying D.C. residents congressional voting rights, Congress has gone out of its way to silence us by placing a rider in the D.C. appropriation that keeps residents from lobbying Congress or country for their rights," she wrote. This insult added to injury should be enough to send residents to the polls to vote on Tuesday in a primary whose purpose is to tell the country what most Americans do not know, according to opinion polls: that Congress denies voting rights to the citizens of its own capital. The New York Times is more dismissive of the primary: This is, alas, a nonbinding beauty contest. But it relates the case for representation in simple and inarguable terms: While Wyoming, population 494,000, has one representative and two senators, Washington, population 571,000, has none. One wonders whether those half a million people would have gone without a vote for so many years if more of them were White. FirstPrimaryBlog has the latest on tomorrow's primary, including guest statements from Kucinich, Lieberman, and Sharpton in support of, respectively, statehood, congressional representation, and one or the other. Five of the candidates - including Lieberman - made the shameful decision to withdraw from D.C.'s primary, leaving Dean, Sharpton, Kucinich, and Mosely-Braun. My prediction is Dean comes in first, Sharpton second.

Incidentally, if you're checking out the Bush-Cheney site - don't miss the "Compassion" photo album. See if you can figure out what differentiates the people in those pictures from the ones in the photo albums for "Economy" or "Environment." Here's a hint: it's not the content of their character.

Mark Kurlansky tells one half of the story of the Nixon election and the Republican "Southern Strategy" that has flourished since, calling the Grand Old Party on its shameless appeals to racism as an electoral tactic. The story he doesn't tell, however, is the simultaneous breakdown of the New Deal coalition and the agency of the Democrats in its collapse - a story that Democrats have too often obscured in working to expose the mendacious tactics of the right. It was four years earlier that the Democratic Convention sent the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party home.

CNN misses the point: For some, these men who defended a system that allowed slavery should not be memorialized on public schools where thousands of black children are educated. What about the white students educated there? Isn't that a problem as well?

Just watched an episode of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy last night. My sense has been, and still is, that those who are arguing that the show symbolizes a crude minstrelesque stereotyping of gay folks and those who are arguing that the show symbolizes a new prominence and acceptance of gay folks are both right. The most powerful argument of the former camp, I think, is that after performing stereotypical queer labor for heteros, the "Fab Five," leave the heteros alone and go back into their queer home to watch from a distance as the people they've served experience romance. The fact that they're drinking martinis doesn't diminish the resemblance to servant quarters. The powerful argument of the latter camp, I think, is that queer folks are being brought into heteros' homes not only to joke, advise, and support them but specifically to facilitate the development of healthier monogomous, faithful, loving relationships. What struck me most strongly on watching the show last night, however, was the class-typing which pervades it. I think that the "positive stereotypes" associated with the "Fab Five," while they share some of the problematic nature and potential utility in social progress as, say, the idea that Blacks beat Whites as Basketball, are comparatively noteworthy in that they're almost totally inaccesible to a large swathe of the homosexual community. What are gay teenagers gorwing up in urban ghettos - especially those of color - to make of a queer icon distinguished by his inpeccable fashion who in a recent episode found an unacceptable shirt in a hetero man's closet and asked him, "What are you, poor?" There's a compelling argument that the recent media buzz over "metrosexuals" - basically, hetero men who follow homosexual stereotypes - represents a reification of the claim that homosexuality and the expressions associated with it - warmth, compassion, fashion - both other you and make you less of a man. There's a compelling argument to be made that the buzz over "metrosexuals" represents a problematization of constructs of gender and sexuality, and a growing comfort with the idea that multiple masculinities are available to heterosexual and homosexual guys alike. But what both of these arguments gloss over is that "metrosexuality" further weds sexuality and class by implying that northeastern urban wealthy trendy heterosexual men can perform homosexual stereotypes too. It shouldn't be surprising that the internet parodies of this show - some quite hateful - which have risen up have also been pervaded with class-typing: regular, blue-collar, beer-guzzling, poorly-dressed men converting effete trendy queers. But perhaps it should be concerning. Just as it should be concerning how many of the official and unofficial spokespeople of the political gay rights movement are white, upper-middle class folks (some of whom have a great deal of vested interest in divorcing the movement from class- and race- based justice movements). What's needed is more voices, and diverse ones. Let a thousand queer TV shows bloom - but please, let them depict more than the type of gay folks in the Fab Five.

It occurs to me that Zach's aspersions about my personal hygiene may be a hint that I haven't yet responded to his latest thoughts on Rush, the Right, and such. I don't think there's much left to say. I of course agree with Zach that gloating at embarrassments of political enemies is less constructive than learning from them - that's, in fact, exactly what I was endeavoring to do. I, like Zach, appreciate "insight both strategic and theoretical into the ways in which ideologies of control and strategies of Empire are linked" - I stand by my original (if I may be so bold) insight that the role of the right's class agenda in determining the application of its social agenda raises questions about the integrity of the latter and the relationship between the two. On the other hand, while I share Zach's aspiration of "destablilizing the structures of gender, sexuality, and race," I don't find the use of the term "minority" to refer to groups that are, empirically, smaller in this country than the majority along whichever axis we're referring to a particularly problematic terminology. I would also maintain that while identities are constructed, they exist, and factual explorations of the breakdown of identities - who identifies how? what else do they have in common? where do they live? how are they changing? - in this country should be marshalled by the left rather than condemned and left as the province of the everyone else. Finally, resoundingly, I would affectionately but bitingly make a comment to the effect that sometimes we have to choose between laundering clothes and organizing a movement and then sing Pete Seeger's rendition of "Which side are you on?"

Zach accuses me of "starting a blog war." Nah - but I'll finish it. This would perhaps be the place to warn Zach that we at LWB "will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail." Or somesuch. Zach takes me on for my suggestion that Limbaugh's drug scandal, and the response from the media and the organized right, lend credence to the suggestion by certain ex-conservatives that the social agenda of the right operates primarily as a cover to advance its economic agenda. He argues that my argument is "mechanist," and that it minimalizes the distinctive oppression of sexual and ethnic minorities and the stake of the right in that oppression by rendering it merely a by-product of an economic project. Perhaps unfortunately for those reading this site and Zach's (you know who you are), again I don't think my disagreement with Zach is as wide as it might appear. I argued yesterday not that social conservatism is merely a convenient superstructure over a material class war, but that conservatives lend credence to those who do think so when they take fundamentally libertarian stances on the failures of their fellow travelers to live by their social values. I would argue that the Right (capital "R") of the past years is increasingly a libertarian one, and that there's a great deal of deft politics and crass hypocrisy at work which makes it possible to draw on the libertarians at the Cato Institute as the brain trust of your movement and the Christian Coalition as your grassroots arm. Zach argues that Bob Barr's suggestion that his daughter's abortion is a private matter doesn't detract from his work to make "the state apparatus to control people's bodies in a fascistic linking of gender and power, of sexual reproduction and social reproduction." Certainly, it doesn't make it any less dangerous or any less real to those who suffer as a result. What it does detract from, however, is the integrity of the argument and the credibility of the stance. To argue that the right's real relationship to its social values is soaked in classism does not, as I see it, suggest that sexism, heteronormativity, or racism are derivatives of classism. I would also argue, as I think Zach would as well, that the classism of segments of the right has a foundation of sexual and racial prejudice. The Wall Street Journal ran a long staff editorial a decade or so ago called "No Guardrails," blaming the crime of a violent anti-abortion activist on the society that the left had fashioned for him to grow up in (strained already, yes, but it gets better). The basic thesis of the piece was that all things being equal, the elite might be able to dabble in drugs, sex, and pornography, but everyone should abstain because the lower classes don't have the same reserves of strength so as not to be fully corrupted. This is to me a vital dramatization of the intersections of prejudice. All that said, I stand by my contention that the lifestyles and even personal beliefs of significant parts of the right elite are far less closely in line with their professed politics than are, say, their personal economic practices with their economics and that the right response to those who transgress its social agenda is often motivated by its economic agenda. I also strongly affirm Zach's reminder that all oppressions are not the same and that economic determinism runs the risk of marginalizing both the nature and the victims of other types of oppression. I should also note, perhaps, that I was not born with a copy of the Nation in my hand. Zach ends with a call "to look more deeply at how racism, sexism, heteronormativity, and capitalism are both intertwined and sometimes contradictory as subjectivities from below struggle to reshape and have reshaped the social relations of capitalism." Sounds good to me. But Zach, you're gonna have to start that one off. Much respect to you as well.

The subcontracting company Yale's been using got a surprise this morning when they showed up to the lot in Orange CT where they bus workers over to the University and a dozen of the replacement workers donned "On strike" signs and started picketing. They tried to get the police to push everybody out of the lot, with little success, and ended up going back to home base to choose a new location for Monday. The new strikers are out on the Green now meeting the old strikers; they'll have a press conference there are 10:30 AM. Once again, New Haven has refused to let Yale's leadership divide it.

Yet again, behind the rhetoric of partnership Yale's leadership demonstrates a vision of crass division and stable inequality: A group of ministers accused Yale University on Tuesday of bringing Latino workers to the campus as strikebreakers to cause racial dissension among picketing maintenance workers. Two area cleaning firms delivered 40 to 50 Latinos to the Old Campus on Monday, and "paraded" them through a picket line of mainly African-American strikers in Local 35, according to the Rev. Emilio Hernandez. Hernandez said less than 5 percent of Yale’s workers are Latino, even though they make up 20 percent of the New Haven population. He said the ministers want to increase the presence of Latinos at Yale, but not as strikebreakers, and he accused Yale of trying to arouse racial confrontation. The ministers said several clergy tried to talk to the workers on Monday, but were asked by police to leave. Dan Smokler of the Connecticut Center for a New Economy, which works closely with the strikers, said Tuesday members followed buses with workers from a company in West Haven to a parking lot in the city’s Fair Haven section, where they were transferred to Yale vans and brought to several of Yale’s residential colleges under security escort. He said the workers were told not to talk with the center’s volunteers or they would lose their jobs... Julie Gonzales, a junior at Yale’s Silliman College, said she was particularly offended by the hirings. "To see my university use these kinds of divisive tactics is like a kick in the stomach. A university that is committed to diversity should bring people together, rather than trying to break a strike," Gonzales said. This is the same strategy ONHSA ally Boise Kimber used in telling Ward 6 voters that Delores Colon represented the Latino threat to Blacks in New Haven. She won that race yesterday. This is the same thinking that convinced Bartlett Giamatti in the early 80's that Yale's predominately Black male service and maintenance workers and Yale's predominately White female clerical and technical workers would never go on strike together. This is the grand strategy that Yale has been depending on to crush the unions in this fight - the conviction that once the situation got intense, a coaltion of thousands of clerical, technical, maintenance, and service workers, teaching assistants and researchers, students, faculty, clergy, and community members would fracture quickly. So far, looks like Yale's leadership has a lot to learn. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus is releasing a letter to President Levin condemning Yale's behavior today.

Faced with Bustamante's edge over libertarian wonder boy Schwarzenegger, Bustamante's potential to mobilize Latino voters as the first Latino to lead the nation's largest state, and the nagging problem of Arnold's coziness with Nazis, some on the right have been grasping for their reverse Kurt Waldheim scandal. What they've come up with is Bustamante's membership as a college student in MEChA, Movimiento Estudantil Chicana/o de Aztlan. And they've had the audacity to suggest that membership in the national Latino student organization occupies the same moral space as close friendship with Nazis, and that the media only displays more concern about the latter than about the former because of - you guessed it - liberal bias. This argument rests on an idea that the right has spent significant effort trying to infiltrate into the American consciousness: that the nationalism and solidarity of the oppressed and the minority is morally equivalent to the nationalism and solidarity of the oppressor and the majority. This idea is a keystone of the far (and not so far) right and far left argument that identification with an in-group is always an obstacle to identification with a larger group and never a path towards it. I think I stand with the majority of Americans in maintaining unequivocally and without contradiction both that blind nationalism, uncompromising sectarianism, and subtle racism pose and have historically been dangerous threats to the construction of a human community and that identification with a small group - be it a neighborhood or one of Anderson's "Imagined Communities" - can serve both the advancement of marginalized groups and the building of human empathy. But an intentionally divisive fringe, with much of the mainstream media in tow, is steadilly working to build in the minds of Americans a conception of the NAACP as the KKK. This, ironically, echoes the apologia of the hate groups themselves: " has their organizations looking out for their interests, so shouldn't have one looking out for ours?" Michelle Malkin, in her attack on MEChA, quotes an early document of the organization from several decades ago, which reads in part: "We do not recognize capricious frontiers on the bronze continent. Brotherhood unites us, and love for our brothers makes us a people whose time has come and who struggles against the foreigner 'gabacho' who exploits our riches and destroys our culture. With our heart in our hands and our hands in the soil, we declare the independence of our mestizo nation. We are a bronze people with a bronze culture." In other words, Latinos have been oppressed and persecuted by an illegitimate campaign of white violence, and should work together to beat back a continuing assault on the opportunities, communities, and culture of Latinos. And the homeland of Latinos belongs to them, and not to the United States that used war to occupy it. Malkin says of the piece she quotes: Substitute "Aryan" for "mestizo" and "white" for "bronze." Not much difference between the nutty philosophy of Bustamante's MEChA and Papa Schwarzenegger's evil Nazi Party. One difference would be that to be Aryan is to be racially "pure," whereas to be mestizo is, by definition, to share a mixed heritage. The other major difference would be that the Nazi party engaged in a campaign of systematic genocide against oppressed minorities on the grounds that ensuring the purity of the Aryan nation by eliminating the groups secretly responsible for the decline of Germany was a historical imperative. MEChA engages in political and educational work directed towards improving the role of an oppressed minority within a dominant society that incorporated it through violence. That's the difference. Nathan Newman explores the issue here: So what this statement says is that celebration of race mixing is the same as racial purity. Yes, Orwell rides high in the saddle when the rightwing guns for MEChA. Well, what about the "bronze nation" nationalism? What a shock-- an exploited group talking about its ethnic solidarity. The Irish never engaged in such rhetoric or engaged in political cronyism based on ethnic ties -- or if they did, they were all Nazis? The Jews never speak of international solidarity with other Jews in say a small country in the Middle East? The only difference between MEChA-style ethnic nationalism and most historic white ethnic groups, is that the latinos have a clearer grievance by historical standards. It was racist white nationalism that fueled "Manifest Destiny" to take over the whole southwest in a series of wars. Sorry-- the only thing that looks like Nazism is the "white mans burden" conceit of America backed by military invasion that allowed it to attack Mexico and annex its land to the United States. David Neiwert debunks the associations made between Bustamante and a few real racists who are also connected to MEChA here. And I don't think Colorado Luis is off the mark when he suggests that ...in a significant way, white Democrats are the target audience for these attacks. Not necessarily just to make them think twice about voting for Bustamante on the recall, but in the longer term, to promote the fear that when Democrats run minority candidates, they will lose...Meanwhile, Republicans gear up to run their own candidates of color -- Condi Rice for California governor is a popular one I've seen mentioned. Republicans would love it if Democrats were too afraid to nominate people of color for important jobs, while Republicans go ahead and do it. So it is important for the GOP not only that Bustamante lose, but that white Democrats see race as part of the reason for his defeat. That's why we're seeing the MEChA smear instead of, oh, say, an examination of Bustamante's voting record in the California legislature. The most important site to check out, however, for anyone interested in making a thoughtful informed evaluation of MEChA, is its own website - funny how none of the conservative bloggers I've run across touting this counter-Waldheim discovery have bothered to link there (I would be dangerously remiss if I didn't also link here to MECha de Yale). As MEChA's current philosophy reads: The Chicano and Chicana student movement has been plagued by opportunists that have sought to rechannel the energies of our people and divert us from our struggle for self-determination. The educational plight of Chicana and Chicano students continues to be ignored by insensitive administrators. Overall, Chicano and Chicana junior high, high school and college push-out rates have risen since 1969, forcing many Chicanos and Chicanas to a life of poverty. These factors along with a growing right wing trend in the nation are combing to work greater hardships on Chicanos and Chicanas. New repressive and racist immigration laws are continuously directed at our Gente. The Federal government is campaigning to pacify and assimilate our Gente by labeling us "Hispanic." The term "Hispanic" seeks to anglicize and deny our indigenous heritage by ignoring our unique socioeconomic and historical aspect of our Gente. These factors have made it necessary for Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán to affirm our philosophy of liberation (i.e. educational, socioeconomic, and political empowerment) for our Chicano and Chicana nation. Joining with other community-based Chicano and Chicana nationalist organizations, M.E.Ch.A. is committed to ending the cultural tyranny suffered at the hands of institutional and systematic discrimination that holds our Gente captive. We seek an end to oppression and exploitation of the Chicano and Chicana Community

Laying the groundwork for the unveiling of his new new tax plan, Bush has trotted out the tired accusation of "class warfare" to fend off criticism. "Class warfare," when used by Republicans or DLC-leaning Democrats, labels comparison of, say, a tax cut's impact on the rich and the poor in this country, or the level of economic stratification in the US and Norway, as an attempt to pit one class against another. The vitality of the term seems directly linked to its efficacy and its elegance - it removes the need to enter the fray and address the gaping inequalities in this country, it reframes cooperation as the agreement of all people to grin at the gains of the privileged few, and it does so with just the appropriate hint of red-baiting to scare off opponents without seeming, say, "partisan." The Civil Rights Movement of the '60s, with equal logic, could be described as "race warfare," insofar as it addressed injustice in racial terms. Today's Republicans, however, are all too eager to take credit for that one - in part because it gives them the chance to portray opposition to Affirmative Action as a logical continuation of the same process. The extreme of the conservative stance on race today, in fact, is epitomized by Ward Connerly's recent description of race as a "cancer," we must "consign to the ash heap of history" - thus his campaign in California to forbid the government to track whether, say, Black drivers are stopped more often than White drivers, or White women on welfare are sent to vocational training programs, while Black women are sent to "dress for success" classes - solve racial injustice while ignoring it. Conservatives cannot as easily demand that the government not keep track of family income (not that none will try), but they can try to sweet-talk voters into turning away the "anachronistic," "partisan," "divisive" politics of "class warfare." Only such a choice will give them a free pass to bring back that pizza napkin creation "trickle-down economics," one of many 80's ideas (like slap bracelets) that some just aren't ready to give up. Public jobs are socialism, we're told - the best way to create jobs is to flood the top with enough money that a little bit can't help but slip on down. Never mind, for example, the role of consumer demand, rather than management budget, in determining hiring and firing... If you look left or right at what conservative-style capitalism has wrought, you won't be looking up to notice the windfall trickling down... Bush, keep in mind, is a "compassionate conservative," "a uniter, not a divider." Look for a long-overdue extension of unemployment benefits and economic bail-outs for the state governments whose economic crises are most embarrassing as the proverbial canaries in the magician's hand to distract us from the proverbial elephant behind him - generous tax breaks for the usual suspects. Welfare rolls are climbing, unemployment is climbing, and the Bush solution is...tax cuts on stock dividends. But don't worry - Bush "understand[s] the politics of economic stimulus." Decades ago, the Rev. King declared, "To end humiliation was a start, but to end poverty is a bigger task." Accusations of class warfare should be rejected for what they are - baseless tarring of those of us who think solving problems tends to start with addressing them.