I like Al Sharpton- who cares about how he wears his hair
Sharpton's stature rises to new heights By NAHAL TOOSI, Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 17 minutes ago
The morning 23-year-old Sean Bell was shot to death by police, his grieving relatives did something that has become almost routine in such cases: They called the Rev. Al Sharpton.
Within hours, the longtime civil rights activist had consoled relatives, held two news conferences, and begun organizing a community rally for the next day.
Sharpton has long been a fixture on New York's left-wing scene, and has been especially vocal in his crusade against police brutality since the 1990s. But the Saturday shooting, which left Bell dead on his wedding day and wounded two other black men, is proving again how far Sharpton has come since the days he was routinely derided as a race-baiting, publicity-hungry opportunist.
His rhetoric this week has been decidedly less harsh than in previous episodes, and he has been given unprecedented access to City Hall thanks to a mayor who is intent on not making the same mistakes of past administrations in dealing with racially divisive situations.
All the while, he keeps asking a question that many — including Mayor Michael Bloomberg — are asking: "Why did officers fire 50 rounds at three unarmed men?"
At least one of his former detractors has been impressed with the way Sharpton has handled the situation.
"His rhetoric is totally acceptable in my judgment," said former Mayor Ed Koch, who once called Sharpton "Al Charlatan" and has had him arrested. "I haven't read a single statement on his part that is demagogic. I think he's conducted himself in a statesman-like manner."
Born in Brooklyn in 1954, Alfred Sharpton Jr. was preaching by the time he was a preschooler and was ordained a Pentecostal minister by age 9. His father deserted the family after impregnating and later marrying his stepdaughter. Sharpton and the rest of his immediate family fell into poverty. But activism kept him focused while other children got into crime and drugs.
In the 1980s, he earned national prominence after ugly racial episodes in Howard Beach and Bensonhurst involving white gangs attacking and killing black males. Sharpton toured the press circuit, led large demonstrations and, in the Howard Beach case, helped force the appointment of a special prosecutor.
Over the years, Sharpton, who used to don velvet jumpsuits and gold medallions, has been accused of financial irregularities and blamed for inciting racial unrest. In what was perhaps his biggest blunder, he wrongly accused a prosecutor of rape in the 1980s case of Tawana Brawley, a teen whose claims of kidnapping and abuse were determined to be a hoax by authorities. The prosecutor later won a $65,000 defamation judgment against Sharpton.
In 1991, while leading a demonstration, Sharpton was stabbed in the chest by a white man. He said the incident moved him to be more careful with his rhetoric. His appeal has broadened since, enough for him to run for president, but he has remained unequivocal in demanding proper justice for minority communities.
Sharpton led protests against police after the 1997 torture of Haitian immigrant Abner Louima and the 1999 fatal shooting of African immigrant Amadou Diallo. On Saturday, after meeting with Bell's distraught relatives, Sharpton again demanded answers from the police over the shooting, carried out by five officers who were white, Hispanic and black.
He insisted, however, "We're not anti-police ... we're anti-police brutality." And at the Sunday rally, he framed the shooting as part of a larger struggle, declaring, "We've got to understand that all of us were in that car."
Once elected officials avoided him. But on Monday, Sharpton was among key figures who joined Bloomberg at news conference to address the shootings.
Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.
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Really good article
How Americans are living dangerously
By Jeffrey Kluger
Time
Editor's note: The following is a summary of this week's Time magazine cover story.
(Time.com) -- It would be a lot easier to enjoy your life if there weren't so many things trying to kill you every day.
The problems start even before you're fully awake. There's the fall out of bed that kills 600 Americans each year. There's the early-morning heart attack, which is 40 percent more common than those that strike later in the day.
There's the fatal plunge down the stairs, the bite of sausage that gets lodged in your throat, the tumble on the slippery sidewalk as you leave the house, the high-speed automotive pinball game that is your daily commute.
Shadowed by peril as we are, you would think we'd get pretty good at distinguishing the risks likeliest to do us in from the ones that are statistical long shots. But you would be wrong.
We agonize over avian flu, which to date has killed precisely no one in the United States, but have to be cajoled into getting vaccinated for the common flu, which contributes to the deaths of 36,000 Americans each year.
We wring our hands over the mad cow pathogen that might be (but almost certainly isn't) in our hamburger and worry far less about the cholesterol that contributes to the heart disease that kills 700,000 of us annually.
We pride ourselves on being the only species that understands the concept of risk, yet we have a confounding habit of worrying about mere possibilities while ignoring probabilities, building barricades against perceived dangers while leaving ourselves exposed to real ones.
Shoppers still look askance at a bag of spinach for fear of E. coli bacteria while filling their carts with fat-sodden French fries and salt-crusted nachos. We put filters on faucets, install air ionizers in our homes and lather ourselves with antibacterial soap.
"We used to measure contaminants down to the parts per million," says Dan McGinn, a former Capitol Hill staff member and now a private risk consultant. "Now it's parts per billion."
At the same time, 20 percent of all adults still smoke; nearly 20 percent of drivers and more than 30 percent of backseat passengers don't use seat belts; two-thirds of us are overweight or obese.
We dash across the street against the light and build our homes in hurricane-prone areas -- and when they're demolished by a storm, we rebuild in the same spot.
Sensible calculation of real-world risks is a multidimensional math problem that sometimes seems entirely beyond us. And while it may be true that it's something we'll never do exceptionally well, it's almost certainly something we can learn to do better.
Dread skews response
Which risks get excessive attention and which get overlooked depends on a hierarchy of factors. Perhaps the most important is dread.
For most creatures, all death is created pretty much equal. Whether you're eaten by a lion or drowned in a river, your time on the savanna is over. That's not the way humans see things.
The more pain or suffering something causes, the more we tend to fear it; the cleaner or at least quicker the death, the less it troubles us. The more we dread, the more anxious we get, and the more anxious we get, the less precisely we calculate the odds of the thing actually happening.
The same is true for, say, AIDS, which takes you slowly, compared with a heart attack, which can kill you in seconds, despite the fact that heart disease claims nearly 50 times as many Americans than AIDS each year.
We also dread catastrophic risks, those that cause the deaths of a lot of people in a single stroke, as opposed to those that kill in a chronic, distributed way.
Unfamiliar threats are similarly scarier than familiar ones. The next E. coli outbreak is unlikely to shake you up as much as the previous one, and any that follow will trouble you even less.
In some respects, this is a good thing, particularly if the initial reaction was excessive. But it's also unavoidable given our tendency to habituate to any unpleasant stimulus, from pain and sorrow to a persistent car alarm.
The problem with habituation is that it can also lead us to go to the other extreme, worrying not too much but too little. September 11 and Hurricane Katrina brought calls to build impregnable walls against such tragedies ever occurring again.
But despite the vows, both New Orleans and the nation's security apparatus remain dangerously leaky.
"People call these crises wake-up calls," says Dr. Irwin Redlener, associate dean of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University and director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness.
"But they're more like snooze alarms. We get agitated for a while, and then we don't follow through."
Click here for the entire cover story on Time.
Copyright © 2006 Time Inc.
Kohls
Remember how excited I was about the opening of the new Kohls in my area? Well, the excitement has turned into resentment. I thought I'd be all bundled up this winter with all kinds of sweaters to choose from, blah blah blah. Well, there is nothing for me there- NOTHING. Especially after seeing a shower curtain at TJ MAX that was the same price as the one at Kohls. The difference? The price at Kohls was the marked down sale price while the price at TJ Max was the regular price.
Hello and Happy Thanksgiving!!!
I'm starting to get my life back. The semester is coming to an end and I have a little break for the holiday. I had to write a paper for both my classes and do a presentation. The presentation was a group one but still, very stressful. I have a hard time speaking in front of an audience. I get so nervous at the last minute and then I forget things. The only way to cure myself of "stage fright" is to keep doing it over and over. I did much better this time around though. I learned if I tell a little joke and laugh in the beginning, I become more relaxed.
I had to briefly speak at work in front of the entire department. That was a big deal because it was my first time speaking in front of the group. Managers of all levels were there and everyone was watching. I'm leading this project so I will have to get use to speaking in front of everyone about it. It's a small project I'm leading but it's a big deal. It will give me some much needed exposure. My reputation is on the line but, I'm trying not to stress about it.
For the project, I'm collaborating with 5 other people to design a database that will track the major accomplishments of the department. The accomplishments will be formally presented to leadership on a regular basis. We're primarily interested in accomplishments that result in direct or indirect cost savings. We're trying to highlight our value as a department to the firm.
So, that's what's been going on with me. I was so sick Sunday and Monday but feeling better. I just had a pretty nasty cold. I'm still really congested but not as tired.
I'm SO FIRED UP!!!
The outcome looks promising. I hope we finally have a woman House Speaker! I knew Jim Davis would lose. It's not official yet but, I called it when he won the freakin primary.
funny
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White House Miffed by Fla. GOP Candidate
- By JENNIFER LOVEN, Associated Press Writer
Monday, November 6, 2006
(11-06) 14:58 PST Pensacola, Fla. (AP) --
The closer the election came to the finish line, the more President Bush's aides battled the perception he was doing his party as much harm as good and was unwanted in many districts.
On Monday, Bush jetted to a conservative corner of Florida's Panhandle, about as far as he could get from the state's three in-play House districts. To the White House's embarrassment and irritation, Republican Charlie Crist, whom Bush came to help in his bid to succeed the president's brother as governor, decided at the last minute to skip the chance to be by the president's side.
In a speech bracketed by raucous foot-stomping to country music and an explosion of metallic red-white-and-blue confetti, Bush won cheers for applauding Saddam Hussein's conviction, lambasting Democrats on the war on terror and accusing the opposition party of plotting to raise taxes.
"The Democrat philosophy is this: If it breathes, tax it, and if it stops breathing, find its children and tax them," Bush shouted.
Next up was Arkansas, where Republican Asa Hutchinson remained well behind in his race to keep that governor's mansion in Republican hands. Still Bush was upbeat.
"You know, I knew we were going to finish strong," Bush told supporters gathered in an airplane hangar with Air Force One parked outside. "I knew that we were going to come roarin' into Election Day because we've got the right position on taxes, we've got the right position on what it takes to protect you from attack."
Finally, Bush was calling it a wrap Monday night in Texas. It was somewhat of a sentimental stop for the president, taking him to his home state and specifically to Dallas, where Bush has headlined rallies the night before most elections.
It was still remarkable that, with so many Republicans around the country facing too-close-to-call races and with GOP majorities in the House, Senate and the nation's statehouses in jeopardy, Bush decided to spend capital on GOP Gov. Rick Perry, who hardly needed the president's assistance to get re-elected.
White House press secretary Tony Snow said Bush's travels on Monday to races more on the periphery of this high-stakes midterm campaign represented the president honoring "long-standing promises" to his brother, Hutchinson and Perry.
But Bush's final five-day sprint to Election Day took on little of the urgency of the last days before the 2002 midterm election, or certainly the close of his own re-election race two years ago.
He's been starting later in the day and finishing by bedtime, with just one stop on Saturday and two on Sunday — all in smaller, very GOP-friendly areas. The last three nights, he even slept in his own bed in Crawford, Texas.
Republican leaders say that the president's get-out-the-vote push in GOP strongholds was helping. The free media coverage that accompanies a presidential visit was keeping his party from having to spend precious dollars in those districts. And some new polls showed a lift in Republican enthusiasm for voting.
"The president's travels are part of the difference," Snow said.
White House aides mocked Crist's choice to duck the Bush rally, which they only learned about on Sunday morning — too late to change the printed schedules that had Crist introducing the president at the rally.
Crist chief of staff George LeMieux said the conservative Pensacola area was so firmly in his camp, and so hard to get to, that it made more sense to campaign elsewhere in the state. Said Crist: "I'm glad he's come to our state, but I've got to get around Florida."
Still, Karl Rove, Bush's top political adviser, suggested that reporters see whether Crist would be able to hastily assemble anything like the Pensacola event, which drew about 7,000.
Bush ignored the flap. "I strongly suggest you vote for Charlie Crist to be governor of the state of Florida," he said.
With Crist as a no-show, Bush was joined on stage by a host of Florida Republican officeholders and candidates — but not by Republican Rep. Katherine Harris. She has run a much-panned Senate race that has had her Republican elders cringing and both the president and retiring Gov. Jeb Bush largely avoiding her.
URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/n/a/2006/11/06/politics/p131853S31.DTL
