As we noted before, 64 Democrats voted against women's right to health insurance funded abortion procedures. Many of these Democrats have claimed the ultimate fallacy: That proponents of forced pregnancy shouldn't "pay with their tax money" for abortions because it infringes on their civil liberties. As if anti-war activists and pacifists could claim the same when it comes to funding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and any other wars they oppose.

Yet I'd like to focus on the "hispanics" that voted against women's rights. Long-time readers now that even though I am a proud  Puerto Rican and blatina, I've never been one to shy away from writing about the ugliness and even atrocities perpetrated by Latin Americans. It should come as no surprise my willingness to call out these so-called Hispanics and Latinos of dubiosity. Particularly since in Latin America and the US Latino community we have to still wrangle with the social and political consequences of the machismo and marianismo myths that permeate the cultures of Latin America.

Am listing all seven members of the Congressional Hispanics Caucus for a variety of reasons: If you are not looking closely, some of these votes do not make sense given the previous voting record of people like Costa ad Rodriguez. After all, wasn't Ciro Rodriguez a darling of the netroots? And yet when you look closely at their lists of donors, their votes actually become not just sinister but cynical as well (as in the case of John Salazar). So we can't just blame it on the fact that all of these guys happen to be Roman Catholics or members of the Blue Dog Coalition. It's those donors lists for 2008 and 2010 that really paint a clearer picture of their "conservatism".

Last but not least, compared to the Congressional Black Caucus, the CHC delegation voted atrociously : Artur Davis was the lone member of the CBC who voted for Stupak. Why couldn't the CHC conjure such discipline when voting a measure that would basically kill women's right to an abortion? Or are their votes exactly correlated to the 2007 "whore" scandal that rocked the CHC thanks to John Baca's leadership in disrespecting the women of the caucus?

Let's take a quick look at the faces of Los Siete Infames (the infamous 7) :
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We've come a long way in this country when a black woman can talk about her obscene wealth in such a nonchalant way. From Gawker - Oprah Advises Grads: Get a Private Jet, Losers - Oprah:

"It's great to have a nice home. It's great to have nice homes! It's great to have a nice home that just escaped the fire in Santa Barbara," she told the students. "It's great to have a private jet. Anyone that tells you that having your own private jet isn't great is lying to you."

Really Oprah, really?

Ok, so she also encouraged the kids at Duke to give back. But still, you gotta wonder what was the thought process behind that. Or am I reading too much into her love for her Global Express XRS?

What do you think?

This is cross-posted at TechPresident

Yesterday I wrote about getting Lost In Hillaryland while driving down to Philadelphia to volunteer for the Obama campaign. In that post at Kenneth Cole’s Awearness Blog, I write about how after the mini-adventure of the day, my oldest came to the same conclusion as Joe Trippi : that Obama was going to lose.

My son’s observation was the most interesting part of the whole trip because it lent credit to my recent thinking of “politics as interface”.

Let’s look quickly at the definition of interface :

in·ter·face
(ĭn'tər-fās') Pronunciation Key
n.
1. A surface forming a common boundary between adjacent regions, bodies, substances, or phases.

2. A point at which independent systems or diverse groups interact: "the interface between crime and politics where much of our reality is to be found" (Jack Kroll).

3. Computer Science

1. The point of interaction or communication between a computer and any other entity, such as a printer or human operator.
2. The layout of an application's graphic or textual controls in conjunction with the way the application responds to user activity: an interface whose icons were hard to remember.

An interface is a “surface forming a common boundary”, a space that is not only a common space but a mesh of space and communication. As the Java handbook to object-oriented programming explains rather well, an interface is not just the end result of a design process. Interfaces don’t come from the outside of the software process. It is part of the process itself.

So the surface that creates a common boundary is not outside two distinctive people or two distinctive groups. An interface is not something that is given to a “user”. An interface is a meshing of actions or simply put, it’s a two way street.

“Politics as interface” would be the meshing of actions, states of beings and phases between individuals, groups or even systems negotiating power. As a space of communication and as a meshing of actions, states of beings, wills and desires for power, politics as interface is developed all the time.

Politics as interface in Hillaryland is in the box of buckshot lighters gracing the gas station attendant’s counter. Politics as interface in Hillaryland is certainly the senior women holding posters saying “Honk for Hillary”.

Yet Politics as interface in Hillaryland was the absence of sidewalks down Cedar Road, the expansive manicured front lawns with their mansions in the background and the “Hillary” signs cleaving the dirt in the foreground. It was the absence of white people in the small crowds waiting with exhausted looks on their faces for the bus to come. And it was certainly the meshing sights on the road to Philly of million dollar mansions, to quaint family homes to the “We buy ugly houses” signs next to boarded up brownstones and row after row after row of broken down and abandoned buildings on North Broad Street.

When we got lost in Hillaryland, my son was very keen and very much aware of who had the upper hand in expressing power. And it became even more obvious to him when we went canvassing on the 14th Ward.
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This is just so unbelievable it feels like I am in an episode of the Twilight Zone's rendition of Lord Of The Flies.

The fact that the accusation has been published in a few newspaper blogs makes it even worse : LA Times and Chicago Tribune are both alleging that Obama flipped the middle finger to Clinton during the course of a speech in North Carolina.

This.
Insanity.
Has To.
STOP!

You know, because he can't have that much class. Obama could have never scratched his face just because. Especially when it is in the middle of one of the snarkiest and wittiest dressings-down of the media and political elite by any presidential candidate in recent memory.

Yes, you read that right. Some idiot over at both the Chicago Tribune, LA Times took the spweage of several pro-Clinton and Republican blogs and ran with it. They actually took the time to slow down the footage to show how Obama's scratching his face is somehow akin to flipping the bird.

It's just ... OMFG ... this is just outrageous!

A brother cannot have class at all. That's basically what these people are saying. How can he take it and throw it back at them with the class, intelligence and snark they only attribute to their own whiteness? How can this negro be a thug without being a nigger? How can he brush it off and still look damn fucking good doing it.
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This post was not supposed to happen this way. I was supposed to give a quick and dirty, "you go girl" to Alisa Valdés Rodriguez for her smackdown of Adam Nagourney and Jennifer Steinhauer. Why? They've written one of the most poorly researched, poorly fact checked, backed by barely just one expert in Caribbean and Latin American history, anthropology or public policy race-baiting piece of drivel about how Latinos will not vote for Obama because they can't relate to his blackness.

In Obama and the Latino Vote, Alisa goes to bat :

The sloppy, inaccurate story goes on for 32 agonizing paragraphs, using the terms “black” and “Latino” as though they were mutually exclusive – which they are not. Historians estimate that 95 percent of the African slave trade to the Americas took place in Latin America.

To this day, the vast majority of people in the African diaspora live south of the U.S. border, in Latin American countries from Brazil to Colombia to Cuba and, yes, even Mexico. The song "La Bamba," in fact, was brought to the Veracruz region of Mexico by Africans enslaved to the Spanish. The song likely has roots in the Bembe (Bantu) culture from what is now the Congo. This is only a stone's throw, geographically, from the Kenya of Obama's father's birth.

How quickly we forget in this country. How brutally we refuse to learn.

The New York Times not only ignores completely the African history of Latin America by positioning "blacks" against "Latinos" as if none of us were both. To do so is enormously irresponsible because it dissolves from public consciousness the fact that African slavery was a crime committed all across this hemisphere, by colonial Europeans who spoke English, Spanish, Portuguese and French. The story also erroneously portrays Latinos as a race unto themselves - an error egregious enough to be stated in our own census bureau's definition of Hispanic as a person "of any race". Including "black".

I was supposed to expand on Alisa by going deeper into the work I have already covered here, most recently with On Why I Hate Hispanic Heritage Month and Blanquito vs. Latino or the Unbearable Lightness of Being Alberto Gonzales. I was supposed to smackdown Nagourney for his complete lack of any understanding of Latin American history, culture and politics.

And then something happened.
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I find it incredibly ironic that since the loss of 2004, certain parts of the liberal blogosphere have complained forcefully about how the 'women studies' groups and "those whinny colored people" are destroying the Democratic Party and yet, here we are, almost a general election later and guess what? The emotional baby-eating feminazis and those colored folks who don't STFU are indeed destroying the Democratic Party we've grown to love and loathe.

I don't know if to to laugh or cry a little.

Oh, who am I kidding : Of course I am going to laugh!

Sure, when I started writing this article, I started out of the anger I felt after reading Gloria Steinem's now infamous "Hos Before Bros" editorial. After all, the mother of the modern feminist movement basically says white women are entitled to have their day in the White House before a black man.

Yet the anger turned into more of an outraged amusement. A lot of people around me are absolutely astounded at the transparent viciousness of the Clintons and company. Yet there's those who are kind of sitting back saying, "We were right all along".

Everything in this country, no matter how you cut it, ends up being about race. There is no denying it. There is no escaping it.

To walk away from a discussion about Race is to walk away from the possibility of understanding better the madness that produces Influence, Power and Wealth in this country. To walk away from Race is to walk away from understanding the craziness that produces this set of rules, preferences and practices we call American 'culture'.

The craziness that, for example, makes it possible for white women to compare sexism to racism.

Ahhh ... hmmmmm ... no.
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