Jack & Jill Politics

[Intro from Jill - please welcome Ali Savino, our first white guest blogger. We figured it might be time to integrate...just a little.]

Hi, I’m Ali, and I’ll be your first token white person here at Jack and Jill Politics. Now I may be out of my depth here, so I’ll try to resist the urge to list off all of my black friends so that y’all know that I’m down. But I have been fortunate enough to know both Jack and Jill well before they started up this little endeavor through mutual connections in the netroots world. Since jumping on the Dean campaign in 2003, I’ve been a proud active member of this sliver of life where internet meets politics. The political bloggers have been kind

enough to embrace me as one of their own even though my work has been mainly behind the scenes, most recently helping start up the Center for Independent Media that trains, supports, and underwrites state level bloggers who have made a big difference in this election.

For me, this feels like a long, dark crawl out of a crumbling mine shaft and I just made it out of the hole to breath fresh clean air for the first time in 8 years. Part of me never thought we would make it out alive. For my entire political life, since 2003, we have lived under the oppressive, backwards regime of George W Bush. Us progressives have finally been freed of our political prison.

This is something we have been fighting for years as progressives. But I can’t imagine how good it must feel as a black American who has been fighting for this moment in time for generations. I imagine it must feel euphoric to win a battle this long in the making.

And sure this is just one battle, and there is still many battles left to fight for equal pay and equal opportunity and everything else that goes with it. But it’s a victory, and a huge one at that, and I for one am so happy for your community. In a way, I’m jealous. I wish I knew what it was like from your perspective to experience this incredible moment in history.

I would like to think that it is also a victory for us whites, in that maybe in a small way we have left a little bit of the nasty legacy of racial intolerance behind. It’s progress, and that makes me proud.

On MSNBC, Monday night, someone just said that this election has made 34% of Americans more proud of their country. That’s an amazing number given the recent apathy of our electorate and the negative and vicious campaign we just witnessed. There is something in the air. You can feel it all around us. This mantra of change isn’t just a stump speech refrain or a platitude. You can see it embodied in the campaign. You can feel it with their volunteers and political activists across this country. You can sense it within the America population as a whole. People are ready for change. Real change.

I am so proud of our country right now. Proud that we are finally turning the corner on the horrible, racist, Southern Strategy that the Republicans have wielded to divide our country. Proud that we have ended the reign of old white dudes that headed our country but did not reflect our diverse culture. Proud that in many ways this race was not about Race but rather about choosing someone who speaks to our collective future. Proud that we took a chance to hopefully move forward..

We have turned a corner in America. We have taken a huge step to move beyond the stupid cultural divides that have defined recent elections. And we have hope. We have hope that we can be better, that America can do better. The world is watching, and we finally have a leader that can do us proud.

[Intro from Jill - please welcome Ali Savino, our first white guest blogger. We figured it might be time to integrate...just a little.]

Hi, I’m Ali, and I’ll be your first token white person here at Jack and Jill Politics. Now I may be out of my depth here, so I’ll try to resist the urge to list off all of my black friends so that y’all know that I’m down. But I have been fortunate enough to know both Jack and Jill well before they started up this little endeavor through mutual connections in the netroots world. Since jumping on the Dean campaign in 2003, I’ve been a proud active member of this sliver of life where internet meets politics. The political bloggers have been kind enough to embrace me as one of their own even though my work has been mainly behind the scenes, most recently helping start up the Center

for Independent Media that trains, supports, and underwrites state level bloggers who have made a big difference in this election.

For me, this feels like a long, dark crawl out of a crumbling mine shaft and I just made it out of the hole to breath fresh clean air for the first time in 8 years. Part of me never thought we would make it out alive. For my entire political life, since 2003, we have lived under the oppressive, backwards regime of George W Bush. Us progressives have finally been freed of our political prison.

This is something we have been fighting for years as progressives. But I can’t imagine how good it must feel as a black American who has been fighting for this moment in time for generations. I imagine it must feel euphoric to win a battle this long in the making.

And sure this is just one battle, and there is still many battles left to fight for equal pay and equal opportunity and everything else that goes with it. But it’s a victory, and a huge one at that, and I for one am so happy for your community. In a way, I’m jealous. I wish I knew what it was like from your perspective to experience this incredible moment in history.

I would like to think that it is also a victory for us whites, in that maybe in a small way we have left a little bit of the nasty legacy of racial intolerance behind. It’s progress, and that makes me proud.

On MSNBC, Monday night, someone just said that this election has made 34% of Americans more proud of their country. That’s an amazing number given the recent apathy of our electorate and the negative and vicious campaign we just witnessed. There is something in the air. You can feel

it all around us. This mantra of change isn’t just a stump speech refrain or a platitude. You can see it embodied in the campaign. You can feel it with their volunteers and political activists across this country. You can sense it within the America population as a whole. People are ready for change. Real change.

I am so proud of our country right now. Proud that we are finally turning the corner on the horrible, racist, Southern Strategy that the Republicans have wielded to divide our country. Proud that we have ended the reign of old white dudes that headed our country but did not reflect our diverse culture. Proud that in many ways this race was not about Race but rather about choosing someone who speaks to our collective future. Proud that we took a chance to hopefully move forward..

We have turned a corner in America. We have taken a huge step to move beyond the stupid cultural divides that have defined recent elections. And we have hope. We have hope that we can be better, that America can do better. The world is watching, and we finally have a leader that can do us proud.

Hey y’all – we have experienced some technical challenges. Part of the JackandJillPolitics.com archive from 2006 to 2013 is missing. Specifically, posts from Feb 29, 2011 to April 14, 2013. We are working hard to restore these. In the meantime, you can find these posts stored on the Internet Archive (starting in 2011). We hope to have these back on the site as soon as we can. If you have questions, feel free to contact Cheryl Contee: cheryl @ fissionstrategy.com via email or @ch3ryl on twitter.

You might be wondering what we’ve been doing since our last official post in April 2013. We’ve been busy! Come holler at us over at our new adventures.

Baratunde Thurston is now the CEO and co-founder of Cultivated Wit and co-host of the podcast About Race. He wrote the New York Times bestseller How To Be Black and served for five years as director of digital for the satirical news outlet The Onion. When he’s not delivering talks at schools and gatherings such as SXSW and TED, he writes the monthly back page column for Fast Company and contributes to the MIT Media Lab as a director’s fellow. Baratunde has advised the Obama White House, has more than 10 years’ experience in standup comedy and more than 30 years’ experience being black. Keep up over at Baratunde.com. Above, you can find his SXSW 2012 keynote on The Power of Comedy to change the world. I was in the audience and loved it. Check it out: You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, etc.

Cheryl Contee today is the CEO and co-founder of the digital agency Fission Strategy, which helps the world’s leading non-profits, foundations and social enterprises use the Internet in innovative ways to create change globally. She is also the co-founder of Attentive.ly, a rising tech startup specializing in cutting edge influencer marketing technology. Attentive.ly has attracted over $2 million in seed capital, a rare achievement for a female-founded, minority-founded and female tech-led startup. Attentive.ly has won several industry awards and Cheryl’s work was featured in Essence Magazine. Cheryl’s experiences in startup land led her to partner with Van Jones and Amy Henderson of DreamCorps to co-found. #YesWeCode, which represents the movement to help over 100,000 low opportunity youth to become high quality coders & technologists.

In 2014, Cheryl was named as an Affiliate of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society in 2014 and as one of The Influencers 50 in Campaigns and Elections magazine. Cheryl was included in the first The Root 100 list of established and emerging African-American leaders. Huffington Post listed her as one of the Top 27 Female Founders in Tech to Follow on Twitter in 2011, as did Black Enterprise. Fast Company named her one of their 2010 Most Influential Women in Tech, activist category.

Cheryl has appeared in the Washington Post, New York Times, San Francisco Magazine, C-Span, Black Enterprise, BBC, Current TV, MSNBC and CNN, among other media appearances. She is also proud to serve on several boards and advisory committees including Netroots Nation, Focus100/Digital Undivided, Guttmacher Institute, Citizen Engagement Lab and serves as an ambassador for Social Venture Network (SVN).

You can check out some of her recent coverage in Black Enterprise or her writings in the Guardian and Huffington Post.

Note: This post originally appeared on ThisWeekinBlackness.com. That area of the TWIB site has since been archived. Here is the original video and post with comments added inline.

We launched Jack and Jill Politics in 2006–a year in which a black president, or a black man in charge of the nation’s law enforcement, or a Latina Supreme Court Justice seemed like distant, “post-racial” dreams. Certainly the concept of a First Lady from the South Side, Chicago, was way past most folks’ imagination. Healthcare for all was something you had to move to Canada to get with.

Since then, the JJP community not only contributed together to making those dreams a reality, but also reshaped how the opinion of African-Americans are seen in America. When we got started on that old Blogger.com site, it was scary–we were doing something that would make most black people go a little ashy. We wrote under pseudonyms that evoked the names of famous escaped slaves with the hope that their courage might inspire us and our community. We chose a name that would be meaningful mostly to the unheard black middle class–the tax-paying, vote-casting, job-having or wanting majority of us.

Together, with you, we gave voice to the emerging power of the Hip-Hop Generation. We successfully took on race-baiters like Lou Dobbs and Glenn Beck. We pushed older organizations like the NAACP and the Congressional Black Caucus to modernize and be more accountable to the black folks they claimed to represent. We slapped around the media when it dared to broadcast bigotry and straightup ignant mess. We raised the profile of next gen organizations like Green for All, Hip Hop Caucus, Applied Research Center, and Color of Change. We became your eyes and ears as America elected its first black president.

We showed that black people were not only present on new social technologies but we could use it as well as anyone else. It was a great honor to know that our 2008 coverage has been added to the Library of Congress for posterity. That means some of your smart comments are there, too. We strove mightily to highlight the culture of political discourse popular among blacks and those who love them whether in music, poetry, barbershops, beauty salons and a new place–blogs.

Today there are hundreds of thousands of black blogs. And black people are more likely than whites to use online technology like Twitter, Instagram, smartphones and more. It’s time for a new chapter.

That’s why we’re so excited to join forces with This Week in Blackness. Many of you may remember Elon James White’s early TWIB videos– JJP was proud to be among the first to promote them to a people hungry for smart, resonant, fearlessly funny commentary. TWIB is now a growing multimedia platform encompassing radio shows, video shorts and a website platform that’s creating the future of the online community.

We’re moving to TWIB–hope you like the new look! And . . . JJP’s contributors and founders will be blogging and talking up a storm over at TWIB. And together with you, we will next level the game.

More details are on the way . . . just a taste of what’s to come since the blacker the web, the sweeter the juice. . . .

Yours in blackness, @Ch3ryl & @Baratunde

Cheryl Contee (Jill Tubman)

Related posts:

1. Oblivious to the Obvious: All Truth Can Be Found in The Wire
2. The Scary Ethnic Pyramid [infographic]
3. BOSTON ON LOCKDOWN
4. CISPA and Why You Should Care
5. Ray Kelly: [Citizen] Privacy Issue Has Been Taken Off The Table

14 Comments

Cheryl Gittens-JonesApril 15, 2013

Thank you.

Lamarr ParkerApril 15, 2013

swaggin

Yonis Gabow April 15, 2013

level up… cool, more blackness!

Kari Frances April 15, 2013

JJP is where I first was introduced to your work with TWiB, glad to see the partnership formalize, “y’all ’bout to blow up!” as my little cousin likes to say

Cheryl Contee April 15, 2013

we couldn’t be more excited…

Gloria Millner Allen April 15, 2013

Awesomeness!

Timothy Wilkins April 15, 2013

Like the math – two plus two fists raised, definitely equals a million!

Liz McLellan April 15, 2013

Elon….Kingpin.

Justin A. J. Giles April 15, 2013

Makin moves! TWiB is becoming a force!

Khalif Topping April 15, 2013

The 7,125th podcast? My iPhone is gonna be full of FACTS.

Plantsmantx April 15, 2013

If nothing else, it’s ’bout time y’all got a new site template:).

o

African American PunditApril 16, 2013

Congratulations! Great decision. I look forward to reading and watching your partnership grow.

REPLY

MartyApril 17, 2013

Congratulations Cheryl & Baratunde, I look forward to reading articles, tweets and watching your enterprise grow. I know you two will succeed in all endeavors and achieve your goals, again congratulations and keep moving forward.

REPLYREPORT USER

FeliciaApril 18, 2013

Blackness is making major move super!

REPLY

First Lady Michelle Obama delivers a major address focused on the efforts of the Let’s Move! initiative to meet the needs of parents in Alpharetta, Georgia, on February 9, 2011.

Good Afternoon.

As you go through the rest of your day, don’t forget JJP.

Drop those links. Engage in debate. Give us trivia and gossip too.

And continue to have a peaceful day.

Good Morning.

As you spend this weekend with family and friends, don’t forget JJP.

Drop those links. Engage in debate. Give us trivia and gossip too.

And always, have a peaceful day.

This week, President Obama outlined his goals for an evenhanded approach to cutting the deficit. In doing so, President Obama offered his attempts to get the ball rolling on domestic spending by highlighting his proposed five year budget freeze. President Obama also remained open to further cuts in areas such as defense, Medicare and Medicaid, and tax breaks and loopholes.

President Obama finished his address by cautioning against political stalemates in Washington, and stressing the need for both parties to work together on a short-term budget:

“Next week, Congress will focus on a short-term budget. For the sake of our people and our economy, we cannot allow gridlock to prevail.

Both Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and Senate have said they believe it’s important to keep the government running while we work together on a  plan to reduce our long-term deficit. Given that, I urge and expect them to find common ground so we can accelerate, and not impede, economic growth.”

President Obama’s Weekly Address:

The White House Celebrated Motown This Past Week, so why don’t we celebrate Hitsville, USA.

Motown is a record label that was originally founded by Berry Gordy, Jr. and incorporated as Motown Record Corporation in Detroit, Michigan, USA, on April 14, 1960. The name, a portmanteau of motor and town, is also a nickname for Detroit. Now headquartered in New York City, Motown is a subsidiary of Universal Motown Republic Group, itself a subsidiary of Universal Music Group, and now operates as Universal Motown Records. Motown Records was also the name of Gordy’s second record label; the first, Tamla Records, began on January 12, 1959.

Motown played an important role in the racial integration of popular music, as it was the first record label owned by an African American even if it was not the first to feature primarily African-American artists. Motown achieved a crossover success. In the 1960s, Motown and its soul-based subsidiaries were the most successful proponents of what came to be known as The Motown Sound, a style of soul music with a distinct pop influence.

In 1959, Billy Davis and Berry Gordy’s sisters Gwen and Anna started Anna Records. Davis and Gwen Gordy wanted Berry to be the company president, but Berry wanted to strike out on his own. On January 12, 1959, he started Tamla Records, with an $800 loan from his family. Gordy originally wanted to name the label “Tammy” Records, after the popular song by Debbie Reynolds. When he found the name was already in use, he decided on Tamla instead. Tamla’s first release was Marv Johnson’s “Come to Me” in 1959. Its first hit was Barrett Strong’s “Money (That’s What I Want)” (1959), which made it to #2 on the Billboard R&B charts.

Read the rest of this entry »

hat tip-3CHICSPOLITICO:

President Obama Speaks at Northern Michigan University

Good Afternoon.

As you go through the rest of your day, don’t forget JJP.

Drop those links. Engage in debate. Give us trivia and gossip too.

And continue to have a peaceful day.

Below is a collection of some nice offerings from the interwebs, Twitternets and our very own comments section backed by the musical stylings of the Song Du Jour. Go ahead, get some get right.

* Wisconsin State Republicans Pass Bill So Public Workers Can Lend a Budgetary Hand, Not Have Rights of Any Kind [NPR]

• RELATED: Providence, Rhode Island Decides to Send Pink Slip to Every Teacher It Has [The Providence Journal]

* Libyan Protesters Inch Closer to Capitol, Gaddafi Breaks Out His Fiddle [Reuters]

* Protesters Are Gettin’ Buck in Iraq [Voice of America]

* Puzzling or Poetic? Half of the Performers at Obama’s Motown Review Were White [The Daily Mail]

* Brazilian Blowout Lowers Frustration of Hard-to-Manage Hair, Raises Concerns of Developing Cancer [Yahoo News]

* At a Town Hall Meeting, Rep. Paul Broun Was Asked Who Was Going to Shoot the President and Broun Didn’t Really Denounce the Question [Politico]

* Remember in 2007 When Pacman Jones Made It Rain in That Strip Club and Punched a Stripper and Three People Got Shot and One of Those Shot People Got Paralyzed from the Waist Down? Well, Pacman’s Getting a Year of Probation [Las Vegas Review Journal]

Penultimate Thought: I like ‘The Best Man’ as a movie, but still, this little bit of the plot has always vexed me: Morris Chestnutt was basically guaranteed to read the book at some point, no? I’m of the opinion that his finding out after the fact would have done anything to keep Taye Diggs from getting suplexed onto a coffee table.

Final Thought: Friday, JJPers. Don’t you be somebody loving everybody this weekend.

hat tip-ProfGeo

from TPM.com

Town Hall Attendee Asks GA Republican When Someone Is Going To Shoot Obama

An audience member at a town hall hosted by Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) on Tuesday asked the Tea Party congressman who was going to shoot President Barack Obama.

The unidentified town hall attendee’s question got a big laugh from the audience, reports Blake Aued of the Athens Banner-Herald.

But Broun didn’t exactly condemn the remark, according to the newspaper report.

“The thing is, I know there’s a lot of frustration with this president. We’re going to have an election next year,” Broun said in response to the question. “Hopefully, we’ll elect somebody that’s going to be a conservative, limited-government president that will take a smaller, who will sign a bill to repeal and replace Obamacare.”

Here are his phone numbers:
Phone: (202) 225-4101
Fax: (202) 226-0776
Phone: 706-447-3857
Fax: 706-868-8756
Phone: 706-549-9588
Fax: 706-549-9590
Phone: 706-886-1008
Fax: 706-886-1009

I’m tired of these CAC who think somebody’s playing with them.

Today, in honor of her appearance TODAY on the Oprah Winfrey show…..

Ms. Diana Ross

One of the most widely-known female performers in the world since the 1960s, Diana Ross was born in Detroit and spent most of her childhood living in the city’s Brewster Housing Projects. Despite an extremely shy disposition, at a young age she began singing with the choir of her family’s church, and soon afterward became determined to establish herself as an entertainer. At the age of 15, Ross was invited to join a girl group being organized by manager Milton Jenkins as accompaniment for his doo-wop outfit The Primes; already enlisted into the group were three of her classmates and neighbors: Florence Ballard, Mary Wilson and Betty McGlown, and with Ross rounding the line-up out to a quartet, The Primettes set to work performing in local clubs and talent shows. Not long afterward Travis was replaced by Barbara Martin, at which time the group launched an aggressive campaign to secure a deal with Motown Records, spending as much time as possible hanging around in the label’s reception area.

It wasn’t until 1961 (after they had completed high school) that Motown label head Barry Gordy finally agreed to sign the four young women to a record deal — although with the stipulation that they find a different name for the group. Ballard came up with The Supremes, and it was under this name that their first single I Want a Guy appeared in April of that year. Neither this single nor the other three that were released between ’61 and ’62 fared particularly well; in fact, of the eight singles issued before August of 1964, only one (When the Love Light Starts Shining) managed to crack the top 30. With the release of Where Did Our Love Go, however, this slump was abruptly turned around: the song climbed to the top of the charts, and would be followed to this position by eight of the singles released during the next three years. By this time, Ross had fully assumed the role of The Supremes’ lead singer — a situation that was clearly established by the replacement of Florence Ballard (who sang lead on some of the earlier recordings) with Cindy Birdsong and an alteration of the group’s name to Diana Ross and The Supremes in 1967.

In November of 1969 Ross publicly announced her plans to leave The Supremes and embark upon a solo career, her eponymous first album subsequently materializing early in 1970.

Read the rest of this entry »

so says the lie he told Greta Van Sustren on Fake Noise (Hat Tip, Heather at Crooks and Liars):

Walker claimed he’d never spoken to the Koch brothers before and he was just taking a phone call from one of the countless people who call him every day when he allowed the… you know… fake Koch brother to take up twenty minutes of his time.

It’s pretty amazing that someone he’s never talked to before managed to get twenty minutes with him when Democratic legislators and union leaders have said he’s not taking their calls.

So, Walker claims he’s never met the Koch Brothers before, and never spoke to that bucket of pus better known as Andrew Briebart.  Note to anyone doing business with Brietbart: if he owes you any money, you’d best try to collect after Shirley Sherrod gets her cut of his shyt.

Walker obviously thinks the Wisconsin voters are really, really stupid:

Good grief what a horrible liar. Walker obviously thinks the voters of Wisconsin are idiots incapable of listening to a recording or reading a transcript. When John Nichols was talking to Ed Schultz about Walker’s potential ethical and legal problems after this prank, he said there hasn’t been anything that the voters of Wisconsin have been paying as much attention to since Brett Favre quit the Packers. I hope as many of them as possible get a chance to watch this little lie-fest with Greta since they’re obviously paying attention to what’s going on.

Brietbart is the blog version of Typhoid Mary – anyone he comes into contact with gets harmed big time.  Now he’s playing a big role in whether or not Scott Walker can continue as Wisconsin’s governor, while Walker denies even meeting the brothers who poured millions of dollars into his campaign to make sure a Tea Bagger got elected.  If that’s not ingratitude, I don’t know what is, especially since that transcript clearly shows he thought he was talking to David Koch when he said he had a baseball bat waiting on his opposition.

File this under the “You Can’t Make This Shyt UP” file.  At this rate, Scott Walker will outpace Governor Grifty Half-Term McQuitter for cornering the market on the burning STUPID.

hat tip-lamh34

For all of us Michelle O-files, a new book out discussing Michelle O’s iconic fashion style.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Good Afternoon.

As you go through the rest of your day, don’t forget JJP.

Drop those links. Engage in debate. Give us trivia and gossip too.

And continue to have a peaceful day.