Rosa Parks Passes Away at 92 - Another Signpost of the Zeitgeist

Today, CNN reported the passing of Rosa Parks. 50 years ago, Ms. Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man. To put things in perspective, I was born just seven years later in 1962. My parents owned a three-story brownstone at 7427 Wentworth in Chicago, which they purchased for $27,000. They owned two luxury cars -- and this was all before the passage of the civil rights amendment in 1964, but it certainly led to it. See, they were part of what was an emerging black middle class, and it's important to remember this in the face of too many "poor, black, ghetto" stereotypes presented on TV. I didn't grow up in a ghetto.

Where I'm going with this is that my parents -- Zennie Abraham Sr., and Pat Abraham -- were very much a part of what shaped African American history. They lived the simple American Dream of a car and a house and enough money to have some freedom. They believed in what was possble for them, and so passed that on to me. I sometimes -- well, all of the time -- wished they had not divorced when I was seven, because they were doing so well. But it kept me alive, as I could not stand the emotional strain.

This year, on the Friday after we went to Mike Ditka's, Amanda and I went over to 7427 Wentworth -- I forgot just how big that place was. It was a majestic building -- still is.

My Letter To Mike Ditka

I wrote this letter to Mike Ditka. If you're ever in Chicago, stop by his restaurant! - Zennie

Here's the letter:

Mike Ditka
Owner
Mike Ditka’s Restaurant
100 Chestnut Street
Chicago, Ill


October 21, 2005


Dear Coach Ditka:


Last week on the evening of this Friday, I took my half-sister to your Restaurant as a way of really honoring our father, who’s funeral was that Thursday. I’m writing to thank you for having such a great place to be around great people. Amanda, my sister, said that the Salmon was the best she’s ever had. I really enjoyed the pot roast, and will have it again when I return.

On top of the food, what really makes the place is the people. I grew up in Chicago. Your restaurant, as one of the regulars Nadine (I think that’s the right name –long blond hair, glasses, you know her) said that “Mike Ditka’s is Chicago.”

I came in the night of my Dad’s funeral to have a Romeo and Juliet cigar in his honor. Michelle, who was the downstairs bartender and works upstairs on Fridays, was just wonderful and even remembered me when I returned the next evening. The bartender that Thursday night – I think his name was Tre – bought me a shot and we drank in honor of my father and his grandfather.

What’s so funny about my experience was that when I first walked in, I was worried about not knowing anyone and being in mourning. But then all of these USC fans walked in, and since I went to UC Berkeley (even sat on the Cal Alumni Board), I was right at home. Then, on Friday night, I was upstairs and as Nadine shared the story of the passing of her Mom with Amanda and I, you were kind enough to come over and chat after visitng with Paul Hornung and the Notre Dame alumns – Amanda never got over that. You made us both feel very welcome.

In closing, thanks again, and God bless you. I’ll be back!


Sincerely,



Zenophon “Zennie” Abraham, Jr.
Chairman and CEO Sports Business Simulations, Inc.

Zenophon A. Abraham Sr. - My Dad's Passing On Today

I never thought this day would come. The day when my father passed on. Today's that day, and he's in a hospital in Arlington Heights, Ill, and I'm here in Oakland. He's been sick for a while and with the same cancer that took my stepdad -- Chester Yerger, Jr's - life: advanced prostate cancer.

I really believed I would have more time with him. I didn't think I would have to cope with death twice in one year: Chester in March and now my Dad. I keep wondering what the reason is, but that's also rather selfish I suppose. But one does have to ask "why" when it happens this way.

I already miss my Dad. In my eyes he will always be a great man because he never had less than the right words for the right situation. He was the person who could snap me back to reality with one sentence, as he did when he reminded me that I was at Cal to "get a master's degree" and not worry about why a woman I was dating -- Lauren -- wasn't treating me correctly. After he said that, I refocused and got my work done....and got my degree.

He even did that this year, and supposedly with dimensia. He didn't seem like he had it when he talked with me. He told me so much I will never forget: "Don't go to a board meeting "poping off" -- just listen" was one of them. Of course, when I didn't exactly take his advice he'd ask me "Did you feel you did what you had to do?" And when the answer was yes, he'd say "Well, there you go."

My father is blessed to have some wondeful people in his life: my half sisters Amanda, Jackie, and Vaneessa, and two women he married at different times, one of them my Mom.

I've got so much to do before I go to Chicago. But right now, I'm just gonna sit here.

Bush's Pick Harriet Miers is no God

I grew up believing that Supreme Court nominees were supposed to be the gods and godesses of their profession. But with John Roberts and to a far greater extent Harriet Miers, President Bush is selecting people who not only others have not looked up to, but in the case of Ms. Miers isn't even a judge. I love that she was the first woman to do a number of things, but look: she's no Thurgood Marshall.

This is his biography:

"...Born in Baltimore, Maryland on July 2, 1908, Thurgood Marshall was the grandson of a slave. His father, William Marshall, instilled in him from youth an appreciation for the United States Constitution and the rule of law. After completing high school in 1925, Thurgood followed his brother, William Aubrey Marshall, at the historically black Lincoln University in Chester, Pennsylvania. His classmates at Lincoln included a distinguished group of future Black leaders such as the poet and author Langston Hughes, the future President of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, and musician Cab Calloway. Just before graduation, he married his first wife, Vivian "Buster" Burey. Their twenty-five year marriage ended with her death from cancer in 1955.



In 1930, he applied to the University of Maryland Law School, but was denied admission because he was Black. This was an event that was to haunt him and direct his future professional life. Thurgood sought admission and was accepted at the Howard University Law School that same year and came under the immediate influence of the dynamic new dean, Charles Hamilton Houston, who instilled in all of his students the desire to apply the tenets of the Constitution to all Americans. Paramount in Houston's outlook was the need to overturn the 1898 Supreme Court ruling, Plessy v. Ferguson which established the legal doctrine called, "separate but equal." Marshall's first major court case came in 1933 when he successfully sued the University of Maryland to admit a young African American Amherst University graduate named Donald Gaines Murray. Applauding Marshall's victory, author H.L. Mencken wrote that the decision of denial by the University of Maryland Law School was "brutal and absurd," and they should not object to the "presence among them of a self-respecting and ambitious young Afro-American well prepared for his studies by four years of hard work in a class A college."

Thurgood Marshall followed his Howard University mentor, Charles Hamilton Houston to New York and later became Chief Counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). During this period, Mr. Marshall was asked by the United Nations and the United Kingdom to help draft the constitutions of the emerging African nations of Ghana and what is now Tanzania. It was felt that the person who so successfully fought for the rights of America's oppressed minority would be the perfect person to ensure the rights of the White citizens in these two former European colonies. After amassing an impressive record of Supreme Court challenges to state-sponsored discrimination, including the landmark Brown v. Board decision in 1954, President John F. Kennedy appointed Thurgood Marshall to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. In this capacity, he wrote over 150 decisions including support for the rights of immigrants, limiting government intrusion in cases involving illegal search and seizure, double jeopardy, and right to privacy issues. Biographers Michael Davis and Hunter Clark note that, "none of his (Marshall's) 98 majority decisions was ever reversed by the Supreme Court." In 1965 President Lyndon Johnson appointed Judge Marshall to the office of U.S. Solicitor General. Before his subsequent nomination to the United States Supreme Court in 1967, Thurgood Marshall won 14 of the 19 cases he argued before the Supreme Court on behalf of the government. Indeed, Thurgood Marshall represented and won more cases before the United States Supreme Court than any other American.

Until his retirement from the highest court in the land, Justice Marshall established a record for supporting the voiceless American. Having honed his skills since the case against the University of Maryland, he developed a profound sensitivity to injustice by way of the crucible of racial discrimination in this country. As an Associate Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall leaves a legacy that expands that early sensitivity to include all of America's voiceless. Justice Marshall died on January 24, 1993."

She's also no Stephen Breyer, the top legal mind on regulation in America. I knew him for his great book called "Regulation and It's Reform" which I read cover to cover twice, because I was interested in the matter of arguements for airline deregulation. (Which I now think should be reconsidered.)

What has she done? Is she a teacher like Ginsburg? No. She's White House Counsel. I understand she's against choice as well.

I wonder if Bush floated her, knowing she would not pass the muster, and has a plan to pick another male. A white male. For some reason, that's my suspicion. Then he can say "I picked a woman, and it didn't work out." Not good.

Howard Dean on John Roberts

This came to me in an email from the Democratic Party - Zennie:

Governor Dean wrote the following op-ed for national distribution:

John Roberts is a decent family man and a bright, articulate, thoughtful judge. He has a quality absent in previous right wing candidates like Antonin Scalia and Robert Bork, namely a judicial temperament that makes litigants feel that they have been respectfully heard whether they are on the winning or losing side of a verdict.

But John Roberts is the wrong man for the job. Despite the fact that the White House has withheld key documents either out of incompetence or a fear that those documents might prove embarrassing, we have learned enough from the files on Roberts at the Reagan Library to make it clear that he should be rejected.

This conclusion has only been solidified by Roberts' testimony during this week's hearings. He has been a polished performer, but in failing to present clear answers to straightforward questions, Roberts missed a crucial opportunity to answer legitimate concerns about his record and show compassion for those who have been excluded from the American Dream. The consistent mark of Roberts' career is a lack of commitment to making the Constitution's promise of equal protection a reality for all Americans, particularly the most vulnerable in our society.

He has opposed laws protecting the rights of girls and young women to have the same opportunities in sports as boys and young men. He has argued that politicians, not individual women themselves, ought to control women's reproductive health care. He has opposed various remedies for the racial injustices which have occurred in America since slavery and which persist today. He has consistently joined the radical right in seeking to weaken voting rights protections, in essence attacking the rights of black and Hispanic voters to cast their ballot without paying poll taxes or being subjected to intimidation or gerrymandering. He fought against protecting all Americans from workplace discrimination. Most worrisome, he refused to answer questions on his limited view of the right to personal privacy that most Americans take for granted.

Over the last half century, we have made great progress in promoting equal opportunity for all Americans, but there is still much work to be done. Hurricane Katrina was more than the most catastrophic natural disaster in American history. Those who have in so many ways been denied the opportunity for full participation in our society once again suffered disproportionately in this tragedy -- seniors, African-Americans and those burdened by poverty.

Now is not the time for a Chief Justice who is bent on turning back the progress we have made in moving America forward.

Judge Roberts is said to love the law, but loving the law without loving the American people enough to protect their individual rights and freedoms will make our American community weaker. And the exercise of the law without compassion -- something that Judge Roberts and so many on the far right have consistently been guilty of -- undermines the grace and wisdom of the founders whose sense of balance and fairness made this country great.

In the past few weeks we have seen what happens when politics and indifference supercede compassion and organization. The enduring lesson of Hurricane Katrina is that there still are too many Americans who are disproportionately vulnerable. Despite the fact that they worked hard and played by the rules, their luck ran out. Americans are a compassionate, fair-minded people. Our nation is great and strong because of that compassion, not just because we have a strong military. We also have strong moral values which include an innate sense of justice often absent in many other parts of the world.

Our Government today shrinks from compassion. In doing so they have first diminished America in the eyes of the rest of the world, and now they have diminished America in the eyes of our own people. This is a time for justice tempered with mercy and understanding. There is no evidence of either in Judge Roberts's career. The President should be denied this confirmation.

FEMA Director Ousted From Post - Recalled To Washington

As CNN reported if you click on the title post, FEMA Director Mike Brown was recalled to Washington because of his lack of experience in handling disater relief scenarios. My question is this: why in the heck would President Bush hire someone who didn't have that kind of experience? What? He lied on his resume?

Well, this is what the Detroit Free Press reported:

RESPONSE TO KATRINA: FEMA chiefs new to disaster relief

Leaders have little experience for jobs

September 9, 2005



BY ANDREW ZAJAC and ANDREW MARTIN
CHICAGO TRIBUNE


Top officials of the Federal Emergency Management Agency have political connections to President George W. Bush, but they also share at least one other trait: They had little or no experience in disaster management before landing in top FEMA posts.


Michael Brown, who heads FEMA, has endured criticism for comments he made last week that seemed to suggest he didn't understand that thousands of hurricane victims had taken refuge at the New Orleans convention center.


Before joining FEMA in 2001, Brown, a protege of longtime Bush aide Joseph Allbaugh, was commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association and had virtually no experience in disaster management.


An official biography of Brown's top aide, acting Deputy Director Patrick Rhode, doesn't list disaster relief experience.


The department's No. 3 official, acting Deputy Chief of Staff Brooks Altshuler, also doesn't have emergency management experience, according to FEMA spokeswoman Natalie Rule.


Rule said the lack of experience managing emergencies is irrelevant because top managers need "the ability to keep the organization running."


But Eric Holdeman, director of the King County Office of Emergency Management in Seattle, said that familiarity with the specifics of disaster management is essential. "Experience is not just general managerial experience, it's experience in the field," he said.

_________________________________

FEMA Officials should have disaster experience. That should be a given. This realization is a disaster in itself.

Red Cross warns against fake Katrina websites

The New Zealand Red Cross (NZRC) is alerting the public to the presence of fake websites which siphon off donations to victims of Hurricane Katrina.

Acting director general Graham Wrigley said fraudsters were sending emails that linked to bogus American Red Cross websites.

The emails strongly resemble the American Red Cross website donation page, but donation information is sent to a completely unrelated third party.

-----------------------

This is a terrible development. It's one reason why I thought of, then rejected, the idea of an online auction. There's too many online criminals out there that would destroy the credibility of any really true and good effort. Be careful.