In regarding Martin Luther King, Jr.; today’s federal holiday, as always, snaps us in our complacent faces. One cannot look at the accomplishments, and honor of a great man, and be unaware of the distance yet untraveled. If you are a fan of the Indigo Girls, or “hooked in”, you know the term “Blood Quantum”. Otherwise, this issue might have slid right past you. Some forms of racial discrimination are alive and well, still contained in our laws and treaties with others. They continue to rankle and corrode.
Blood Quantum
A complicated system that determines tribal membership threatens the future of American Indians
FEATURE STORY – From the January 19, 2009 issue of High Country News
By Andrea Appleton
[LeRoy Comes Last and his family live on a hump of benchland in northeastern Montana, on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation. In all directions the land is flat and treeless, with just a few soft ridges here and there, as if someone lay sleeping beneath the topsoil. To the south, U.S. Highway 2 cuts toward the town of Poplar in one direction and Wolf Point in the other. Just beyond lie the tracks of the Great Northern Railway, where passenger trains with names like Empire Builder once ran. And farther still, yellow cottonwoods mark the course of the Missouri River, the reservation’s southern boundary….]
As a definite wriggler, President Elect Obama needs to hear clearly our views on the Free Choice Act.
Employee Free Choice Act Is Labor’s Last Chance
Wednesday, 14 January 2009
[“The likelihood is that much of Obama’s inner circle – top-heavy as it is with bankers – will counsel that he refrain from throwing the full weight of his presidency” behind the Employee Free Choice Act. Labor will have to force the issue, or face oblivion….]
http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=973&Itemid=1
The Richardson Saga continues to cast a pall over the Suquaros.
SEC seeks papers in alleged NM investment scheme
January 15, 2009 – 6:08pm
By TIM KORTE
Associated Press Writer
[ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) – The Securities and Exchange Commission has asked for documents from a former state investment officer who claims New Mexico taxpayers lost more than $90 million in an alleged “pay-to-play” scheme involving contributors to Gov. Bill Richardson’s failed presidential campaign.
The SEC regional office in Denver asked Foy on Dec. 1 for “all documents relating to investments by the state of New Mexico in or with Vanderbilt Financial and any related entities.” Its interest in the case was disclosed after materials related to Frank Foy’s whistleblower lawsuit were unsealed Thursday….]
Anarchy and Terrorism have a distinct arch of history. Some pundits have suggested that the current terrorist activities in the Middle East are actually part of a progression of historical activity that washed over Europe and Russia in the late 19th and early twentieth centuries. Rather than ending, anarchy and terrorism were suspended for a time in the end of World War II. The idea is that to some extent, these are “natural” processes out of which arise, a new and not always better form of government.
Bomb’s Away
Thomas Palaima | January 09, 2009 | Books & the Culture
[In a Ben Sargent editorial cartoon published in the Austin American-Statesman after the Nov. 26-29, 2008, Mumbai terrorist attacks, a heavyset man looks back over his shoulder at the reader. The man looks surly and uneducated. He is unshaven, prognathic and pug-nosed. He has on a worn winter overcoat and a longshoreman’s stocking cap. He has just entered the kind of run-down office where femmes fatales went to hire private eyes in 1940s and ’50s films noirs, only this office is identified on the opaque glass pane of its entrance door as A-1 SCHOOL OF TERRORISM….]
PUMA, The New Agenda, 4ERA, 51 Percent
Grab and Keel 
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