Category Archive

Christine O’Donnell, the newly minted Republican candidate for the US Senate from Delaware, has spent her entire adult life offering wacky soundbites to the nation’s media. First to break were her anti-masturbation comments — she believes, among other things, that if a man knows how to masturbate, he won’t be interested in sex — but that was just the tip of the iceberg.

Yesterday the internets were all abuzz with her contention that she hates lying so much that she’d have told Hitler where the Jews were hiding. And now we have this nugget, from a 2003 Washington Times article on the rise of co-ed facilities in American college dorms:

“What’s next? Orgy rooms? Menage a trois rooms?”

Reached for comment yesterday, by the way, O’Donnell refused to say whether she still opposes masturbation. “My opponents dug up a quote I gave 16 years ago,” she said. “I was a pundit. I was very passionate in my 20s and wanted to share my beliefs.”

Indeed.

According to reports on Facebook and an activist blog, activists from AFSCME local 3299, a statewide local representing University of California employees, will be leading an attempt to shut down today’s meeting of the UC Regents.

Protest organizers say the Regents will be voting today “to vote to force paycuts up to 5% on all [UC] employees … so UC executives can keep their lavish retirement benefits,” and they plan to block that vote by mass action.

The Regents have been meeting since Tuesday on the campus of UC San Francisco Mission Bay. The meeting is scheduled to resume sometime this morning, and protest buses are scheduled to leave Berkeley at 6:45 (that’s about ten minutes from now).

UC Student Regent Jesse Cheng has been liveblogging the meeting all week, and his site will most likely have news on the protest as it unfolds today.

Update | Here’s some background on today’s vote, from the Fresno Bee. AFSCME is quoted in the article as predicting that proposed changes would reduce pensions of UC’s lowest-paid employees by as much as 36%.

7:00 am California time | Multiple reports say that activists will attempt to citizens’ arrest UC President Mark Yudof at today’s meeting. Also, there’s apparently going to be a big puppet.

7:05 am | It’s important to point out that only two UC campuses — Berkeley and Merced — are in session right now. The system’s other eight schools start classes later this month. (On September 24 2009, many of you will recall, UC students started off their school year with a bang, staging a ten-thousand-student walkout across the system in response to massive fee hikes and the defunding of the university.)

8:00 am | An official UC account just tweeted that today’s Regents meeting is scheduled to begin in half an hour, with a live audio stream going online at 8:59.

9:15 am | One Twitter report from a bystander says that “loud protests” are causing “chaos” on the UCSF campus.

9:25 am | The start time of the livestream has been pushed off multiple times, with no explanation.

9:50 am | Livestreaming is finally up, and public comment is underway.

10:10 am | UC Student Regent Jesse Cheng has started his day’s liveblogging, and says that the public comment period was delayed because of an extended closed session. He reports that a lot of union members are in the building for the public comment period, but doesn’t mention any disruption.

Seems really strange to me that a statewide union local would make an empty threat to shut down a Regents meeting, but it appears that may be what happened this morning. Weird.

10:15 am | I spoke too soon, and my instincts were right. There’s an action inside the meeting going on now — it began at the end of the public comment period.

10:20 am | UC police have cleared the room.

1:15 pm | The meeting continued as scheduled after the disruption, and there appear to have been no arrests.

Friday | The Daily Californian has a rundown of yesterday’s events.

I know I already did a Quote of the Day today, but I just stumbled across this one at Amanda Hess’s new blog, and I need to post it too.

Background: Dana Beyer was a candidate for the Maryland House of Delegates yesterday. An eye surgeon, she made health care reform a central issue in her campaign. She put up a respectable showing in the race — in that branch of the Maryland state legislature, each district is represented by multiple Delegates, and Beyer finished fourth, just a few points behind the three incumbents.

Beyer is transgender, and after she conceded, the Washington Blade asked her what effect she thought her identity had had on the race. Her answer is the Quote of the Day:

“The media didn’t bring it up other than the gay media. It was never raised in my interviews with the Post or the Gazette. With all the other media, people didn’t seem to think it was relevant. And no voter has ever, back in 2006 or this year, ever brought up the issue. And one could say, ‘Oh well they’re just being very polite,’ but it’s hard to believe that the 15,000 doors I knocked on were all just very polite people. Or that they were truly homophobic but they were just being nice to me. I don’t believe that. I think they really didn’t care.”

“The first demonstrations we had were just a handful of people. In fact when Dr. King himself went to jail, only fifty-five people would go with him. So, when young people today ask me, ‘When are we going to be able to get together like you all were in the sixties?’ — nobody was ‘together’ in the sixties! It was a small group of dedicated people who got it started…

“And then the kids took it over.”

–Andrew Young, interviewed by Spike Lee for the documentary 4 Little Girls, discussing the Birmingham campaign.

I’ve used this as a Quote of the Day once before, but I just love it so much…

Today is the 47th anniversary of the 1963 Birmingham church bombing, in which four black girls were killed by white supremacists who planted dynamite at the steps of their church.

The bombing is one of the best known incidents in the history of the American civil rights movement. There are a few things about it, however, that most folks don’t know, but should.

First, the girls who were killed that day weren’t small children. They were adolescents — three were fourteen years old, and the fourth, Denise McNair, was eleven. They were kids, but they weren’t the little kids of popular memory. Their lives were taken from them as they were on the verge of becoming young women.

Second, they weren’t the only black people killed in Birmingham that day. As tempers flared throughout the city a white police officer shot and killed 16-year-old Johnny Robinson. Robinson, who was shot in the back, had earlier thrown rocks at a car draped with a Confederate flag. Later that day, Virgil Ware, thirteen, was riding on the handlebars of his brother’s bike when he was shot by Larry Joe Sims, a white sixteen-year-old returning from an anti-integration rally.

The teen who killed Virgil Ware was convicted of second-degree manslaughter and sentenced to two years probation. The officer who killed Johnny Robinson was never charged with a crime.

There is a mythology to our collective memory of the civil rights movement, a mythology in which the righteousness of the integrationist cause is sometimes misrepresented as innocence. Teenagers become — as in the title of Spike Lee’s magnificent documentary on the church bombing — “little girls.” A teenager driven by anger to throw rocks at racists disappears entirely.

We should remember Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley — and Johnny Robinson and Virgil Ware, too. And we should do them the honor of remembering them as they were.