Get past the ad and go to the open. It’s about 8 minutes long.
Non-traditional casting aside, don’t you think there are enough unemployed Asian American actors out there to add to the realism of a comedy sketch?
http://www.hulu.com/watch/193087/saturday-night-live-scarlett-johansson?c=5:449
My protest over the BP spill has been muted because I’m a user.
Not of BP. But of oil in general. My outrage would be like ratting out one’s drug-dealer. (It is an oil addiction. George W. Bush told me so).
Lately, blog/twitter readers would notice I’ve chosen the escape route of dwelling on the ending of favorite television shows and the losing streak and offensive ineptitude of my favorite baseball team. Contemplating those sort of things is so much better on the soul than contemplating the end of the earth, which in truth is what the BP spill represents.
To see the constant video of the oil streaming and the damage to the Gulf, the wetlands, the animals is too much to bear.
We need to say f-you to the profiteers and the government that enables them. We’ve already saved Wall Street and the car industry. When we save Big Oil at times like this you can see the trade off.
At least BP isn’t in the nuclear game. That’s the only thing that makes the time to end spill slightly more bearable. Oil is less forever than nuclear. But a screwup is a screwup, and no one seems to be prepared for these worse case events.
Go to the video. See the oil flow. Let’s see a BP spill finale now.
In the meantime, let’s vote BP off the Island. And hope Obama, and Sec. Chu and Sec. Salazar stop dancing with the oily.
The White House is using APA month in May to launch its Asian American Pacific Island Initiative, which hopes to continue what the Clinton administration had started and what the Bush administration ignored.
Kiran Ahuja, the White House initiative’s executive director,acknowledged that the Clinton administration did a lot of work in the tail end of its tenue by identifiying issue areas like education and health as Asian American community concerns. But the Bush administration, she said scaled back the scope and focused on entrepeneurship in its day before finally letting the White Hous initiative die.
Now Ahuja said she plans to build on the work of the Clinton administration, essentially making up for lost time and lost momentum.
“We’re ready to hit the ground running,” Ahuja told a telephone news conference. The broader focus will include data collection on education, health care and jobs to help identify where Asian Americans are underserved. “We know across the board there are barriers to the community being engaged.”
Ahuja was not specific but said the May roll out will begin an effort that will include high level agency heads in the government meeting with community leaders.
Again, a good first step as a show of concern for our community. But it does also show how the community has been ignored in some vital areas during the Bush years.
The new partisan parlor game in Washington is a devilish one, all about sucking the life out of the Obama administration one aide at a time. Unfortunately by targeting Van Jones, a man with an unfailing belief and passion for the environment and the creation of a green agenda for America, the right has only succeeded in forcing out a bright, competent person of color who could have done a lot of good for this country.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2009/09/06/van_jones_resigns.html
When I first met Jones in the late ‘90s, I was naturally impressed. On New California Media, a television program I hosted and produced on PBS and cable outlets in the state, Jones was a frequent guest. He was a Yale law grad and the founder of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, and when I needed someone to comment on community issues, Jones knew his stuff and his rhetoric. His was passionate,intelligent and smooth. I figured politics would be a natural progression. But when his focus turned to green and the environment, while I was surprised, I saw it as a good move for him politically. And more his style.
Green is everybody. Green is the world. Green is the future.
For any person of color, race is always an issue. In environmental issues, race is often a key dividing line between who gets to go green and who stays toxic. People of color are all too often shut out and dumped on when the talk turns to green. So Van going green made a lot of sense. But I also felt that going green gave him a sense of liberation from tired old race politics. Van was no child of ’60s. He was now. Going green gave him some real stuff to chew on in the coming years.
So isn’t it ironic that what comes back to haunt him are statements and positions from his activist past. None of it is relevant. Anti-war stuff?Crude references to Republicans? But all of it can be made to be a distraction as Jones pointed out in his resignation statement. And once the right finds a small hole to exploit, it bores in and makes it seem like the Grand Canyon. What would have come next? Van Jones with Paris Hilton? Breaking pita bread with Muslims? In the absurd political world of the right, it’s all fair game in the effort to find things that will destroy an administration one person at a time.
If good people like Van Jones can’t fight these kind of tactics, then public life in the age of the politics of personal destruction is simply not worth it.
Van Jones’ resignation is a loss because he represented the hope that a lot of young people saw in the Obama campaign. Maybe that’s the right’s grand plan. Kill the hope.
