Tag Archives: library

Happy 90th Birthday, Jimmy Carter

by iscciaglewstrone123 Posted on October 1, 2014

Mother Jones

President Jimmy Carter celebrates his 90th birthday today, October 1. On the occasion of the 39th President’s birthday, let’s take a look back at his Presidency (and Governorship) with a handful of photos.

Jimmy Carter, touring a display of American-made cars in Detroit is presented with a birthday cake from the United Auto Workers (UAW) Local #900, 1980. Jimmy Carter Presidential Library/National Archives

Graduation of Jimmy Carter from U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland, Rosalynn Carter and Lillian Carter Pinning on Ensign Bars, 1946. Jimmy Carter Presidential Library/National Archives

Then Georgia State Sen. Jimmy Carter hugs his wife, Rosalynn, at his Atlanta campaign headquarters in 1966 after making a strong showing in the Democratic primary election for governor of Georgia. AP

Jimmy Carter gets applause and victory signs at his Atlanta campaign headquarters as his mother Lillian Carter looks on, 1970. Carter faced former Governor Carl Sanders in a runoff for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination. John Storey/AP

Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter, right, and Delaware Governor Sherman Tribbitt say hello to Atlanta Braves Hank Aaron, left, following a rain canceled game with the Los Angeles Dodgers on September 27, 1973 in Atlanta. The cancellation slowed Aaron’s opportunity to tie or break Babe Ruth’s home run record. AP

Jimmy Carter, the Democratic nominee for President of the United States, left, visits with John Denver aboard Carter’s plane en-route to Los Angeles, 1976. AP

Jimmy Carter and Sen. Hubert Humphrey at the Democratic National Convention, New York City. Library of Congress

President-elect Jimmy Carter with Rosalynn and Amy Carter on Inauguration Day. Jimmy Carter Presidential Library/National Archives

President Jimmy Carter and Rosalynn Carter dancing at the Inaugural Ball. Jimmy Carter Presidential Library/National Archives

Jimmy Carter and Tim Kraft, the President’s Appointments Secretary, shortly after Carter’s inauguration. Jimmy Carter Presidential Library/National Archives

Jimmy Carter and his mother Miss Lillian Carter, 1977. Jimmy Carter Presidential Library/National Archives

President Carter on television during his first fireside chat at the White House. Library of Congress

Amy Carter and Jimmy Carter participate in a speed reading course at the White House, 1977. Jimmy Carter Presidential Library/National Archives

President Jimmy Carter greets Mohammed Ali at a White House dinner celebrating the signing of the Panama Canal Treaty. Library of Congress

Jimmy Carter at bat during a softball game in Plains, GA, 1977. Jimmy Carter Presidential Library/National Archives

Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, 1977. Jimmy Carter Presidential Library/National Archives

Jimmy Carter with grandson Jason Carter at the White House Easter Egg Roll. Jimmy Carter Presidential Library/National Archives

Jimmy Carter with Andy Warhol during a reception for inaugural portfolio artists. Jimmy Carter Presidential Library/National Archives

President Jimmy Carter and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat surrounded by the media at the White House. Marion S. Trikosko/White House/Library of Congress

President Jimmy Carter and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat have refreshments in the garden of the White House. Marion S. Trikosko/White House/Library of Congress

Anwar Sadat, Jimmy Carter and Menahem Begin examine a canon during a trip to the Gettysburg National Military Park. Jimmy Carter Presidential Library/National Archives

Reporters take notes while watching President Jimmy Carter on television making an announcement about the aborted attempt to rescue U.S. hostages in Iran. Marion S. Trikosko/White House/Library of Congress

Contact sheet of negatives showing meeting with President Jimmy Carter and Ralph Nader. Jimmy Carter Presidential Library/National Archives

Photograph of four Presidents (Ford, Reagan, Carter, Nixon) in the Blue Room prior to leaving for Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s Funeral, 1981. National Archives

For those keeping track, Gerald Ford was the longest living president. He lived to be 93 years, 163 days old. Ronald Reagan was just 45 days shy of Ford. George H.W. Bush is the oldest living president. He was born on June 12, 1924, just a few months before Carter.

View original article:

Happy 90th Birthday, Jimmy Carter

Posted in Anchor, Casio, FF, GE, Jason, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, solar, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Happy 90th Birthday, Jimmy Carter

Teddy Roosevelt, Lewis Hine and Lazy Frogs: 15 Photos

by SuzannaBohn Posted on September 15, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

While searching through the Library of Congress archives last week, I noticed that a number of photos included the date they were photographed or published. I pulled together a handful, giving a little look at what was happening on this date through history. These photos are often pretty mundane, but even the most common, everyday occurrences take on new meaning, or at least become more a bit interesting when viewed from a distance in time.

Here are a few photos from August 15th, all photos from the Library of Congress, with captions as provided with the photos.

Cyanotype image of construction of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., 1890.

Theodore Roosevelt, 1913.

“Chopping corn” Everett Adams, 15 years and Ora Adams, 9 years. Address Hiatt, Ky. Go to Hickory Grove School, but they have been absent most of the past 6 weeks for work, sickness, etc. Location: Rockcastle County, Kentucky, by Lewis W. Hine, 1916

Theo. Roosevelt, Jr. playing tennis, 1922.

Miss M. Pearl. McCall, 1922.

Senators Goose Goslin slides safely into home and collides with Yankees catcher Wally Schang in 2nd game of double header, 1925.

Just plumb too lazy to catch his food on the fly like regular frogs do, Popeye, giant frog from Louisiana in the U.S. Department of Commerce aquarium, has to be fed his meals from acting as nursemaid for the critter, 1937.

CORE members swing down Fort Hamilton Parkway, Brooklyn, toward 69th St. ferry on trek to Washington. World Telegram & Sun photo by O. Fernandez, 1963.

Defense housing, Ben Morrell Project, Norfolk, Virginia. Housing for civilian and married enlisted personnel at the Norfolk, Virginia housing naval base. Constructed at a cost of $3,356,000 by the Navy. Of the 1,362 units built, 1,062 were completed August 15, 1941. Rents range from $17 to $23 a month.

Mare Island Naval Shipyard, Firehouse, Vallejo, Solano County, CA, 1919

Senator Cappe of Kansas, 1921

John Coolidge, Mrs. Coolidge, & President Coolidge enroute to Vermont, 1924.

William A. Hill, Boston, Attorney for the utility king, Howard C. Hopson, leaves the Senate side of the Capitol with his counsel, Moultrie Hitt, Washington attorney, where Hill appeared in response to a citation for contempt growing out of the activities of Hopson, who is wanted by the Senate Lobby Investigating committee, 1935.

Red Bud School. County Supervisor in doorway. Teacher thought 20 absent on account of work, etc. Location: Rockcastle County, Kentucky by Lewis W. Hine, 1916.

View of Cincinnati, Ohio. Copyright entry no. 490 dated August 15, 1866 in volume covering time period, Nov. 9, 1864 – May 9, 1867. (click on photo for link to larger view)

See the original post: 

Teddy Roosevelt, Lewis Hine and Lazy Frogs: 15 Photos

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Teddy Roosevelt, Lewis Hine and Lazy Frogs: 15 Photos

At 85, Jules Feiffer Finally Gives Us a Graphic Novel

by NoreenSinnett Posted on August 22, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Jules Feiffer JZ Holden

As you might expect, Jules Feiffer, 85, has a long, impressive résumé, starting from his apprenticeship, at age 16, with comic industry legend Will Eisner. Raised in the Bronx, New York, Feiffer went on to publish dozens of books, plays, and screenplays—his animated short, Munro, won an Oscar in 1961. He also illustrated children’s books. (Exhibit A: The Phantom Tollbooth.) His syndicated strip in the weekly Village Voice, which ran for more than four decades, earned him a George Polk award in 1961 and a Pulitzer for editorial cartooning in 1986.

Despite his accomplishments, Feiffer had never really managed to pull off the style of long-form pictorial storytelling pioneered by Eisner and others—until now. Kill My Mother, billed as his first graphic novel, is a hard-boiled mystery-romance-thriller that takes us from Depression-era Los Angeles to 1940s Hollywood to the jungles of the Tarawa Atoll during World War II. It’s a fun, not-safe-for-work tale, replete with plot twists and secret identities. Bonus: Badass women hold the reins in this story.

Mother Jones: Your publisher says this is your first graphic novel, yet Wikipedia credits you with writing one of the original graphic novels, Tantrum, back in 1979.

Jules Feiffer: There’s a vast difference. Tantrum was really an extension of the approach and humor I used in my Village Voice strip. Kill My Mother departs completely from anything I’ve ever done. I’d call it my first noir graphic novel. But it won’t be my last, because I’m working on another one! It’s a prequel and a sequel.

MJ: Kill My Mother is a pretty wild tale. The last few chapters feel downright Shakespearean. Why this story and why this era?

JF: I don’t have a clue. I start off with a premise, and whatever direction I think it may go, it often decides to go somewhere else on its own. To write a story is often a matter of stumbling along until the story does what it wants to. I’m simply the stenographer. Sometimes I try to sharpen them up with editing, but I don’t try to edit at all while I’m writing, I just let them go. Kill My Mother was going all kinds of different places in my head and in my notes than where it ended up.

Feiffer in 1958 with the proofs of his first collection, Sick Sick Sick.
Dick DeMarsico/World Telegram (via Library of Congress).

MJ: Stylistically speaking, what new things did this format enable you to try?

JF: The thing that made me want to be a cartoonist in the first place, back in the 1930s, before comic books came on the scene, was adventure comic strips. The most exciting of the strip-layers was a guy named Milt Caniff, who did “Terry and the Pirates,” which was akin to a movie on paper. He built storyboards and he did very impressionistic work and real characters who were interesting and involved. He and Will Eisner were my role models. Those were the cartoonists I wanted to emulate in these adventure strips. I ended up writing Eisner’s “The Spirit” for three or four years, so I understood the form. But I couldn’t do the drawings. No matter how hard I tried, it was pitiful. It took me until age 80 to perfect a style that worked in that kind of genre. And I amazed myself! I thought, when I wrote this story, somebody else would have to illustrate it. The publisher tells me to try it, and so I try—and by God, things began to click!

A page from Kill My Mother Jules Feiffer

MJ: That’s exciting!

JF: And terrifying. Each one of the 149 pages, I would sit down and say, “I’m not qualified to do this.” Laughs. And then I’d have to prove myself wrong. Every day was an act of excitement and an act of terror.

MJ: Four years ago, you told Mother Jones that you thought most graphic novels were “self-pitying confessionals.”

JF: Well, over the last 20 years there’s been the emergence of some extraordinary talents: Chris Ware, Dan Clowes. David Small did a brilliant book, which affected me very strongly, called Stitches. I’m not sure, had I not had Stitches, whether I would have gotten the idea to do my own book. Also, Craig Thompson has a book called Blankets. These are real stories with real characters, and artwork that’s not like anyone else’s and works like a dream. So I think this field is in its own golden age right now.

MJ: Your central characters here are these badass, highly motivated girls and women. The men are pretty much louts and losers. Was that a conscious decision?

JF: No, and it’s interesting you point that out. The only thing conscious about it was that the person I originally had in mind to do the illustrations was a woman who had worked as my assistant, and I thought it would be more interesting for her if the central characters were mostly women. Once I got into it, and it became clear she didn’t want to do the book because she had her own fish to fry—she was doing very well with it, her own fish—I just kept on with it. And I loved those characters.

MJ: You may not have seen this, but a female blogger was recently threatened with rape, among other indignities, after she criticized the depiction of women in a Teen Titans comic book. Has the comic world always treated women so badly?

JF: There’s no rap against comics that isn’t true. They were sexist, they were racist, you name it—and they kind of gloried in that. If someone attacked them, back in the time I was growing up reading comics in the ’40s and the ’50s, the purveyors would look at you not knowing what the hell you were talking about. This is just what they did: “What’s wrong with this?” Over the years, when the women’s movement got going, there was greater sensitivity about it, but by that time I’d stopped reading the commercial comics, Marvel and all of that. But there are a lot of women in the graphic-novel and alternative-comics fields taking things in a different direction.

MJ: I gather the audience is pretty different, too.

JF: Yes, it is. I mean, you’ve got Fun Home, the autobiographical novel by Alison Bechdel, which got an awful lot of attention and deservedly so. It was a brilliant piece of work.

MJ: Speaking of changes, do you suppose you’ll will ever retire?

JF: When I gave up my strip, it was almost a full retirement because I was just doing things that came to my mind, like picture books for kids. And then, out of nowhere, I got involved in writing the book for a musical version of my first kids’ book The Man on the Ceiling—I’m working on that now. I mean, artists generally don’t retire. The great Al Hirschfeld died at 99 with his hands twitching because he wanted to draw. Much to my surprise, I had as much fun working on Kill My Mother as anything I’ve ever done. And this is what I’m going to concentrate on from here on in—depending on how much here on in there is before I start drooling and falling down stairs.

View post: 

At 85, Jules Feiffer Finally Gives Us a Graphic Novel

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on At 85, Jules Feiffer Finally Gives Us a Graphic Novel

The White House Won’t Comment on Whether President Obama Uses Emoji

by GiseleMickey Posted on June 18, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

ABC News reports:

President Obama showed just how “hip” he was on Tuesday when he made a reference to emojis in a speech in Pittsburgh…”Now, to her credit, Malia, for example, wrote me a letter for Father’s Day, which obviously was a lot more important to me than if she had just texted a little emoji or whatever those things are.”

It’s unclear whether the president uses emojis himself, but with two teenager daughters in the White House, it’s likely that he’s come into contact with the popular animated characters sent via texts.

“President Barack Obama gave what was almost certainly the first public presidential statement on emoji,” Business Insider‘s Hunter Walker reports.

For the uninitiated, emoji are small digital images that originated in Japan. Approximately 250 new emoji are on their way. Last year, the Library of Congress added an emoji translation of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick to its collections. Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) made Senate history in March when his campaign used an emoji in a press release. Emoji is also quite possibly the most impenetrable form of NSA-proof communication.

The White House did not immediately respond to Mother Jones‘ request for comment on whether or not the president has ever dabbled in emoji.

(h/t Betsy Woodruff)

Excerpt from: 

The White House Won’t Comment on Whether President Obama Uses Emoji

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Oster, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The White House Won’t Comment on Whether President Obama Uses Emoji

Bill Clinton in 1996: GOP Opposed Commerce Department Because It Was Run By “A Black Democrat”

by GuadaluMJXP Posted on June 6, 2014

Mother Jones

During a January 1996 staff session, while then-President Bill Clinton and his staff were working on his upcoming State of the Union speech, Clinton let loose in a long rant about a Republican proposal to gut the Commerce Department. One reason for the GOP opposition to the government agency was race, he noted. Republicans in Congress, Clinton said, only began to dislike the Commerce Department after he appointed an African-American to head the department.

“The reason they want to get rid of the Department of Commerce,” Clinton said, “is they are foaming at the mouth that Ron Brown is better than all of those Republican corporate executives who got those cheeky jobs because they gave big money to Republican presidential candidates. And here is this black guy who is a better Secretary of Commerce than anybody since Herbert Hoover, which he was a success at.”

Notes from this meeting were released by the Clinton Library as part of a larger document dump on Friday. Throughout the spring, the library has released batches of internal documents from the Clinton White House.

Clinton’s diatribe immediately followed a discussion of how he should pitch the successful outcomes of the administration’s crime policy, which dovetailed into a larger discussion of Republican opposition to Clinton’s administration. “I mean, they’ve taken a laundry list, and everything we did, if it’s really working, they really want to get rid of it,” Clinton said. That’s when the president began griping about the Republicans targeting the Commerce Department for possible elimination, indicating that race was a factor. “They will get rid of the Department of Commerce so they’ll never have to remember that Ron Brown, a black Democrat, was better than all their big, corporate muckety-mucks that make American jobs. I mean, it’s crazy. It’s unbelievable.”

An unnamed aide asked Clinton if that sentence should go into the State of the Union address. There was laughter in the room. “No,” Clinton responded, “but I mean, they need a rabies shot.”

Clinton appointed Brown, the first African-American to lead the Commerce Department, in 1993. But in April 1996, while Brown was on an official trip in Croatia, Brown’s plane crashed, killing the commerce secretary and 34 others.

Bill Clinton on Republican Opposition to Ron Brown Clinton Library

Credit: 

Bill Clinton in 1996: GOP Opposed Commerce Department Because It Was Run By “A Black Democrat”

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Bill Clinton in 1996: GOP Opposed Commerce Department Because It Was Run By “A Black Democrat”

Meet the People Behind the Wayback Machine, One of Our Favorite Things About the Internet

by VirginiGrills Posted on May 22, 2014

Mother Jones

Brewster Kahle is quick to point out that we are not standing inside a former Scientology church. Visitors to this looming white building in San Francisco’s Inner Richmond District are often confused about its past life as a meeting place for Christian Scientists, not to be confused with Scientologists. It is now a different kind of house of worship, known as the Internet Archive, where free digital access to all knowledge is the canon.

“The average life of a web page is about 100 days before it’s either changed or deleted,” says Kahle. “Even if it’s supported by big companies: Google Video came down, Yahoo Video came down, Apple went and wiped out all the pages in Mobile Me.” Capturing this transient web was Kahle’s original mission for the Internet Archive when he founded it in 1996. Nearly two decades later, the 53-year-old compares his organization to a “Library of Alexandria, version two.”

That may be an understatement. In addition to hosting the Wayback Machine, an ever-growing collection of more than 400 billion copies of web pages, the Internet Archive has also expanded its services by providing millions of free digitized books, TV shows, movies, songs, documents, and software titles. Want to see what MotherJones.com looked like in 1996? Here you go. Are you a Deadhead in search of rare recordings? There are more than 9,000 to choose from. Remember when federal websites were closed for business during the government shutdown? They were still available thanks to the Internet Archive.

Walking through the Internet Archive’s physical headquarters, which has occupied this former church since 2009, is a surreal experience. Built in 1923, the grand worship hall on the second floor remains intact, with wooden pews lining the floor and a podium sitting atop a stage. But stacks of humming blinking server racks now rest against the walls. And then there are the figurines—dozens of half-size human models that populate the outside rows of pews and immortalize Archive employees and volunteers throughout the years. Kahle’s mini-mannequin stands in the front row. Next to him is Aaron Swartz, the “Internet folk hero” who was a volunteer and contractor from 2007 to 2009. Swartz committed suicide in 2013 following a federal indictment for downloading the contents of the digital library JSTOR from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Kahle remains disappointed with how prosecutors, MIT, and JSTOR handled the Swartz case. “Shame on them,” he says. “I think it’s a symbol of the old world and the old approach that must be overturned. There are some organizations that are still built around this idea of restricting, restricting, restricting, and that’s not going to fly.”

While Kahle is against restricting access to knowledge, he adamantly supports internet users’ right to privacy. In 2007, the FBI sent the Internet Archive a secret National Security Letter (PDF) seeking information about one of its patrons. With the help of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Kahle challenged the request and won. “That a library has to sue the US government is not terribly appropriate,” he says. But the Internet Archive’s relationship with the feds is not entirely prickly. It also provides web crawling and book scanning services for the Library of Congress. Kahle says the Patent and Trademark Office has used the Wayback Machine to research which ideas are novel or not.

A collection like the Internet Archive’s is extremely valuable. Kahle estimates it has about 15 petabytes of information (a petabyte is approximately one million gigabytes of data). That’s a lot less than Facebook’s estimated 300 petabytes, but there’s a big difference: “The Internet Archive is a nonprofit, and nope, there’s no buying it,” says Kahle. Kahle has sold other companies in the past. The Internet Archive was started with funding from the 1995 sale of his search system WAIS, which AOL purchased for $15 million. His online tracking service Alexa was sold to Amazon for $250 million in 1999. The Internet Archive’s current budget is around $12 million.

One of the Internet Archive’s fastest growing collections is its TV News Archive. For 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, HD feeds from more than 65 news channels, both foreign and domestic, are recorded on the Internet Archive servers. The feeds are fully searchable the following day. Roger Macdonald, who runs the project’s entire Television Archive, preaches treating all media as data. He says many TV and cable networks are “scared about experimenting” with closed captioning data that could make their content searchable by a global audience. By making its videos text-searchable, “our service has vaulted over the confines of the linear video storytelling,” he says. For example, when Harvard and MIT researchers studied how the media covered the Trayvon Martin shooting, they turned to the TV News Archive, using its closed captioning data to help map the story’s evolution.

In 2013, the Internet Archive received an unusual message from Michael Metelits. Metelits’s mother, Marion Stokes, who had recently passed away, had recorded more than 35 years of TV news in Philadelphia and Boston with her VHS and Betamax machines. Metelits was left with approximately 40,000 well-organized tapes, but he had nowhere to put them. So he emailed the Archive. “I thought there might be a typo in his email,” Macdonald recalls. “I couldn’t imagine an individual doing that.”

The donated collection turned out to be a goldmine. The TV News Archive began recording in 2000; Stokes had them beat by more than 20 years. And not only were her tapes in good condition, they also recorded closed captioning data, providing vital metadata. Digitizing and logging the massive trove, now stored in Richmond, California, is a challenge, to say the least. Macdonald says they’ve “only just scratched the surface of imagining what’s there.”

Sean Fagan, logistics specialist for the Internet Archive, with the Marion Stokes collection— 35 years of TV news recorded on VHS and Beta tapes. Brett Brownell

Looming above the Richmond storage facility where the Stokes collection resides is another element of Kahle’s ongoing mission. It’s an antenna broadcasting free internet, one of two free wi-fi access points the Archive provides to San Francisco Bay Area residents. (A third free wi-fi setup is in North Carolina.) He says cities “haven’t been doing their part” to provide faster access to the web and that communication infrastructure is “just as much the lifeblood as water or transportation to a city.”

Adding to its long list of projects, the Internet Archive is also taking a swing at the housing market. Kahle wants to apply the tech industry concept of “open sourcing” to disrupt (if you will) the Bay Area’s affordable housing crisis, which has been fueled in part by the booming tech industry. The Internet Archive has set up a separate nonprofit to purchase an 11-unit apartment building six blocks from its San Francisco headquarters, which it hopes will offer “debt free” housing to nonprofit employees. Macdonald says the first Internet Archive employee will move in later this year. Eventually, Kahle’s dream is “to transition 5 percent of all housing into a new housing class that would be dedicated to supporting the nonprofit sector.”

Even as he sets more ambitious goals, Kahle worries that the end of net neutrality could spell the end of the open web he’s fought to preserve. “If we lose net neutrality,” he says, “or if we let monopolization happen, whether it’s Comcast and AT&T in the United States, or other players in other countries, we will lose the magic that we’ve had for the last 20 or 30 years with this internet.” He urges other technologists to get involved. “We can’t just wait on government to do something. They’ll be bashed around by the commercial players that have all to gain from monopolization.”

Thinking about the current state of internet, Kahle says, “I wake up sometimes really depressed, and sometimes really optimistic.” But, he adds, “As they said in other struggles, you should know which side you’re on, and at least the Internet Archive knows which side it’s on.”

See the article here: 

Meet the People Behind the Wayback Machine, One of Our Favorite Things About the Internet

Posted in Anchor, Brita, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Meet the People Behind the Wayback Machine, One of Our Favorite Things About the Internet

60 Years Ago Today, The Supreme Court Told Schools to Desegregate. Here’s How Fast We’re Backsliding.

by SFGJrg Posted on May 17, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Sixty years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that segregation in schools was unconstitutional. The changes required by Brown v. Board of Education decision were not immediate, but they were profound and lasting. Today, schools in the South are the least segregated for black students in the nation.

Of course, that doesn’t tell the whole story. In honor of the Brown anniversary, UCLA’s Civil Rights Project released a report that analyzes the progress of desegregation since 1954. According to the report, starting in the 1980s, schools began to ditch integration efforts and shift focus to universal education standards as a way to level the playing field for students in unequal schools. In 1991, when the Supreme Court ruled that school districts could end their desegregation plans, it put the nail in integration’s coffin.

Black students integrating a Clinton, Tennessee, school in 1956 Thomas J. O’Halloran/Library of Congress

Today, the picture of American schools is far different than what the 1954 ruling seemed to portend. The UCLA report notes that Latino students are the most segregated in the country. In major and mid-sized cities, where housing discrimination historically separated neighborhoods along racial lines, black and Latino students are often almost entirely isolated from white and Asian students—about 12 percent of black and Latino students in major cities have any exposure to white students. Half of the students who attend 91-100 percent black and Latino schools (which make up 13 percent of all US public schools) are also in schools that are 90 percent low-income—a phenomenon known as “double segregation.” And the Northeast holds the special distinction of having more black children in intensely segregated schools (where school populations are 90-100 percent minority) in 2011 than it did in 1968. In New York state, for instance, 65 percent of black students attend schools that are intensely segregated, as do 57 percent of Latinos students.

Bused to a white school, New York City children face parent protests in 1965. Dick DeMarsico/Library of Congress

Even in the South, where Brown made such a profound difference, school integration is being rolled back. The chart below shows the percentage of black students attending majority white schools in the South over the last 60 years. You can see the progress made after Brown—and how rapidly it’s dissolving.

Read More:

60 Years Ago Today, The Supreme Court Told Schools to Desegregate. Here’s How Fast We’re Backsliding.

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on 60 Years Ago Today, The Supreme Court Told Schools to Desegregate. Here’s How Fast We’re Backsliding.

In Defense of Scott Brown, Carpetbagger

by ClaritaINAJ Posted on March 28, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Illustration: Thomas Nast/Library of Congress; Scott Brown: Seamas Culligan/ZUMA

Scott Brown has a carpetbagging problem. On Monday, the former Republican senator from Massachusetts—who is now running for Senate in New Hampshire—defended his Granite State bona fides by taking a page from Lisa Simpson: “Do I have the best credentials? Probably not. ‘Cause, you know, whatever.”

At this point, it’s the rare Brown story that doesn’t at least allude to the dreaded c-word. “Carpetbagger or Comeback Kid?” asked the Washington Examiner‘s Rebecca Berg. “Scott Brown’s first hurdle in the Granite State will be addressing the carpetbagging charge,” argued US News & World Report‘s David Catanese. Respondents to a March poll from Suffolk University, a plurality of whom disapproved of Brown, used words like “carpetbagger” and “interloper” to describe the ex-senator. His opponent in the Republican primary, former Sen. Bob Smith, has even offered to buy Brown a road map to the state—although Smith has run for Senate in Florida twice in the last decade.

If Brown wants to go back to Washington next winter, he should probably come up with a better response than “whatever.” But his critics in Washington have it all wrong. For more than a century, carpetbaggers have gotten a bad rap for all the wrong reasons.

Continue Reading »

Continue at source:  

In Defense of Scott Brown, Carpetbagger

Posted in alo, Anchor, ATTRA, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Paradise, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on In Defense of Scott Brown, Carpetbagger

GOP Congressional Candidate: Spousal Rape Shouldn’t Be a Crime

by KatharinaDto Posted on January 15, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

After taking a drubbing in last year’s state elections, Virginia Republicans are debating whether their party has come to be defined by its extremists. But in a congressional district in Northern Virginia, one of the state’s main instigators of culture warfare, state Sen. Richard H. “Dick” Black, is running in the Republican primary to replace longtime GOP moderate Rep. Frank Wolf. And he’s guaranteed to ignite wedge-issue passion. Exhibit A: As a state legislator, Black opposed making spousal rape a crime, citing the impossibility of convicting a husband accused of raping his wife “when they’re living together, sleeping in the same bed, she’s in a nightie, and so forth.”

Black has referred to emergency contraception, which does not cause abortions, as “baby pesticide.” Black also fought to block a statue of Abraham Lincoln at a former Confederate site in Richmond. He wasn’t sure, he explained at the time, that statues of Lincoln belonged in Virginia. He has argued that abortion is a worse evil than slavery. And once, to demonstrate why libraries should block pornography on their computers, Black invited a TV reporter to film him using a library terminal to watch violent rape porn.

In 1998, Black was elected a delegate to the Virginia House. He sparked multiple battles over social issues until he was voted out of office in 2005. But Black wasn’t done. In 2011, after moving several times around Northern Virginia in search of a friendly district, Black was voted back into the Legislature, this time to the state Senate.

In the GOP nomination fight to replace Wolf, Black, who commands substantial support among the conservative grassroots, would have a strong chance to beat his moderate opponents if the party chooses to nominate candidates through a convention, rather than a primary. (Tea partiers and social conservatives have dominated Virginia Republicans’ nominating contests in recent years.) The party will decide between the two on January 23. Republicans have held the seat Black is seeking for 14 years, but the congressional district voted for Mitt Romney by only a slim margin in 2012. A not-so-conservative Republican nominee may be key to keeping the seat in Republican hands. Since returning to the Legislature in 2011, Black has preferred to present himself as a fiscal conservative, not a fire-breathing social conservative. But he may still have to defend his years as Virginia’s foremost far-right warrior.

Black entered politics in the late 1990s after retiring as a military prosecutor. He spoke frequently to media outlets about sexual assault in the military, and called military rape “as predictable as human nature.” “Think of yourself at 25,” Black told a newspaper in 1996. “Wouldn’t you love to have a group of 19-year-old girls under your control, day in, day out?”

Black’s first political position was with the Loudoun County Library Board in Northern Virginia, where he wrote a policy blocking pornography on library computers. The move drew national attention. First Amendment litigation against the Loudoun County Library Board struck down Black’s restrictions and wound up costing the county $100,000. During that time period, Loudoun librarians say they only ever received one complaint about porn on their computers—against Black, when he pulled his rape pornography stunt.

Continue Reading »

Visit link:  

GOP Congressional Candidate: Spousal Rape Shouldn’t Be a Crime

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on GOP Congressional Candidate: Spousal Rape Shouldn’t Be a Crime

Read and take over: Occupying urban streets with guerrilla libraries

by Louise6qy Posted on February 13, 2013

Read and take over: Occupying urban streets with guerrilla libraries

By Susie Cagle

Whether because of budget cuts or natural disasters, many of our nation’s libraries are struggling. But DIY efforts are filling the cracks in a few especially hard-hit communities.

Urban Librarians Unite

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, Urban Librarians Unite in New York has set up sidewalk mini libraries outside less-mini libraries that have closed due to storm damage.

These tiny, all weather libraries house about a hundred books at a time and there is no expectation whatsoever that the books will come back. … The Mini Libraries are a resource for our communities, a chance to experiment in library science, and a reminder to the public that even if the library itself is in ruins the librarians are still thinking of them.

ULU is quick to point out that its orange boxes, while super-awesome, aren’t a replacement for real library infrastructure.

Advocates of little libraries are often rabid supporters of big libraries as well and it is their respect for the institution that makes them want to emulate it. It is impossible to mistake a citizen’s reading exchange for a well run reference desk. Our Mini Libraries will suffer from the same limitations as any little library. They could never be mistaken as an alternative to the branch libraries they substitute and intended to support. They do offer some comfort and succor, especially to kids and families, and they remind people that libraries — and their librarians — are nimble, caring and quick to respond to the needs of their communities.

We hope that our Mini Libraries will evolve.

“I smell the spirit of Occupy,” writes a Seattle Post-Intelligencer blogger.

Jaime Omar YassinThe Biblioteca before the city booted it off library grounds.

For an even more grassroots effort on the opposite coast, there’s the six-month-old Biblioteca Popular in Oakland. On Aug. 13, 2012, activists occupied an abandoned library in East Oakland only to be booted by the city within the day. Undeterred, they set up on the grounds and sidewalk outside, providing garden space, kids’ activities, and books in both English and Spanish. At first the city left Biblioteca alone, but then three weeks ago it locked down the grounds and gardens, pushing the library onto the sidewalk outside, where it remains now.

All power to the book people.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

Twitter

.

Read more:

Cities

,

Living

Also in Grist

Please enable JavaScript to see recommended stories

See original article: 

Read and take over: Occupying urban streets with guerrilla libraries

Posted in Citizen, GE, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Read and take over: Occupying urban streets with guerrilla libraries