Dunbar Village Meeting Today

Dunbar Village Meeting, Monday, February 18,2008- Sharpton to Attend

Thanks, Ann.

Blue-collar suburbs mourn NIU victims

Blue-collar suburbs mourn NIU victims
By LINDSEY TANNER and CARYN ROUSSEAU

CICERO, Ill. - The middle-class Chicago suburbs that send their sons and daughters to Northern Illinois University struggled Sunday with the closeness of the country's latest massacre — this time the gunman grew up among them, in a community some consider "Mayberry."


Parishioners at Our Lady of the Mount Catholic Church in blue-collar Cicero, on Chicago's southern fringe, prepared for the funeral of Catalina Garcia, the youngest of four children of parents originally from Guadalajara, Mexico. They're longtime parishioners at Our Lady of the Mount, a tight-knit group of low and middle-income families, many of them young, with some older Czech and other immigrants.

The Garcias were the "typical Mexican-American family," working low-wage jobs to help put their children through school, Jaime Garcia said Sunday on the porch of the family's two-story red brick home.

"My parents came here to better their lives," he said. They worried more about their children getting caught in gang crossfire at home than away at college "in the cornfields" of DeKalb.
"It's like the all-American dream cut short," he said.

Investigators still haven't determined what set off 27-year-old shooter Steven Kazmierczak, who killed five students and injured more than a dozen other people with a shotgun and pistols and took his own life, Kazmierczak grew up to the west, in Elk Grove Village, and played saxophone in the school band. He spent time in a mental health facility in his late teens, and police have said without elaboration that he had stopped taking some kind of medication in the days or weeks before the shooting.

"I couldn't believe coming from a place like Elk Grove he could do that," said Judy Glomski, who has lived in Elk Grove Village for 39 years. "It's just a friendly town. I guess there are sick people everywhere."

Kazmierczak attended NIU, studying sociology. Three semesters back, he transferred across state to the more prestigious University of Illinois in Champaign. Most students and professors on both campuses remembered him as a promising student.

Some NIU parents took the shootings as a call to action, speaking out for stricter gun control in hopes the tragedy would propel the issue into the presidential campaign. Connie Catellani, a Skokie physician whose 22-year-old son is an NIU senior, helped organize a weekend news conference with other NIU parents.
"It's sickening. What are we supposed to do, surround college campuses with barbed wire and metal detectors?" Catellani said Sunday.

Her son, Tony Skelton, was in art class when the shootings occurred. Catellani heard about the shootings from a friend, but was unable to reach her son for more than an hour.

"It felt eternal," she said. "And at the end of it, I was overjoyed to hear from him and all I could think was a lot of parents are not going to get this kind of phone call."

At least six people remained hospitalized Sunday, with three in serious condition. The other three were in fair condition. A seventh patient, who had been upgraded from serious to fair condition Saturday, was transferred from Advocate Good Samaritan Hospital, spokeswoman Laura Taylor said Sunday.

In addition to Garcia, the dead were Daniel Parmenter, 20, of Westchester, Ill., Ryanne Mace, age 19, of Carpentersville, Ill., Julianna Gehant, 32, of Mendota, Ill., and Gayle Dubowski, age 20, last of Carol Stream, Ill.
Parmenter stood six-feet-plus and played rugby and football. He also was quiet, studious and introspective, recalled Joe Morgan, who served as his confirmation mentor at Christ Church in Oak Brook for nine months when Parmenter was a high school freshman.
"He was a big kid who was gentle," Morgan said.

The shooting recalled another senseless modern tragedy that struck the congregation, who arrived for services in the soaring, modern sanctuary Sunday under steady rain and a driving wind. One of the church's pastors, Jeff Mladenik, was a passenger on one of the planes flown into the World Trade Center by terrorists on Sept. 11, said the Rev. Daniel Meyer, senior pastor.
"You're not meant to offer platitudes, you simply offer love," Meyer said.

At First Baptist Church in DeKalb, members passed pinned-on red ribbons for a morning service.

The Rev. Joe Sanders prayed for the NIU community and the victims' families and asked God to help Kazmierczak's family cope with the attack and their own grief of losing a son: "We want God to be merciful and gracious to them."

Anti-gay pundit pleased at 'admission' that AIDS is a 'gay disease'

PageOneQ | Anti-gay pundit pleased at 'admission' that AIDS is a 'gay disease'

Today, right now, more than 45 percent of African-American gay and bi men in key urban areas are infected with HIV, with a 33 percent increase in new diagnoses among our brothers under age 30 over the past six years. Today, right now, African Americans are nearly 10 times more likely than white people to be diagnosed with AIDS.

The response — internal to our community and external — is appallingly racist. Internally, when these numbers come out, the “established” gay community seems to have a collective shrug as if this isn’t our problem. Folks, with 70 percent of the people in this country living with HIV being gay or bi, we cannot deny that HIV is a gay disease. We have to own that and face up to that.

Even more disgusting is the response of our government. Of the 129 interventions developed and approved by the CDC to address HIV in the African-American community, only one has been designed for gay black men. Twenty-six years into the epidemic and only one out of 129 addresses the group of people most affected by HIV. And, on top of that, funding for meaningful and honest prevention programs has been systematically excised from the federal budget. If these things don’t prove that our government considers the lives of gay black men utterly expendable, I don’t know what does.

--Matt Foreman, outgoing executive director of the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force

The above was part of Matt Foreman's State of the Movement address given on February 8, 2008 at the Creating Change conference in Detroit. The second paragraph, in particular, is all but a victory of rhetoric for Concerned Women for America's Matt Barber.

"Because of their war on semantics and being in such denial and not focusing on the reality of the dangers of their behaviors," said Barber to Cybercast News Service, "many people have contracted the disease."

"Who knows," Barber adds, "how many lives could have been saved had homosexual activists been honest about the dangers of the lifestyle they choose to engage in."

While HIV, as an opportunistic infection, does not discriminate on who it infects, gay men who practice unprotected sex are at particular risk of becoming infected and spreading the virus. Early cases of HIV were given names such as "gay cancer" and "gay-related immune deficiency" due to gay men being the first major demographic affected.

"It's extremely encouraging," says Barber in a recent press release, "to see Matt Foreman, a homosexual activist who has for so long been in denial about the dangers of the lifestyle he has promoted, publicly coming to terms with the undeniable perils of that lifestyle."

"I only hope," he continues, "he will now stop promoting homosexual conduct and push for other liberal elites, especially those running our public schools, to do the same. Educators must truthfully address the 'gay' lifestyle's potentially deadly consequences."

Email racist radio show host

Please contact Laura Ingraham show, her syndication network, and some advertisers and voice your displeasure over Laura Ingraham insinuating that Al Sharpton is a thief this past week on her radio show. You can hear the audio clip by using the link below and there are also several email links you can use to contact the parties mentioned above below.

I am personally getting sick and tired of racist hiding behind the conservative banner and daring somebody to say anything about what they say. I am no fan of Al Sharpton but I think that if these racist talk show host keep sticking their chins out there it's time for us to tap it by voicing our displeasure to them and their advertisers.

You can listen to Laura's comments here: http://www.letstalkhonestly.com/LTHtakeactionpage.html

Laura Ingraham email contact Email Show or suggestions@lauraingraham.com

Talk Radio Network info@talkradionetwork.com Advertisers contact info
AIG AIG Contact Page
Gotomypc.com gotocorp@citrixonline.com
Stamp.com Stamp.com contact page

Phony Faintings At Obama Rallies - MEDVED :: MAXINE | The News is NowPublic.com

Phony Faintings At Obama Rallies - MEDVED :: MAXINE | The News is NowPublic.com: "Today, during the second hour of the Michael Medved show, Michael alleged that he suspected that faintings had been staged at at least six Obama campaign rallies.

He felt that after seeing and hearing several video's showing the faints he suspected that they were staged because:

1) The 'faint' would always happened next to the stage.

2) Barack Obama showed calm and stated the same words over and over in each of the six occurrances - 'Make some space for her. Make some space for her.'

3) The 'faintee' was ALWAYS a woman.

4) Each of the occurrences (6) when shown together all felt the same and process like.

We, at MAXINE would like to see what Michael Medved had seen ... we were only left with Michael's radio account and the playing of the audio of a recent Obama campaign stop from Santa Barbara, California."

Northern Illinois Campus Shooting

Five dead, including gunman, in US university shooting
by Mira Oberman Thu Feb 14, 9:03 PM ET

CHICAGO (AFP) - A black-clad gunman turned a university lecture into a Valentine's Day massacre Thursday, killing four people before turning the gun on himself in the latest episode of US school violence, authorities said.

Armed with a shotgun and two handguns, he calmly stepped out from behind the curtain at the front of a packed auditorium just minutes before a geography class ended at Northern Illinois University, officials and witnesses said.
"It started and ended within a matter of seconds," university police chief Donald Grady said at a press conference outside this Midwestern US city.
"We have no apparent motive at this time," Grady said. "The suspect killed himself on the stage."
Grady would not identify the four victims or confirm reports that a teacher was among the 18 people shot.

Witnesses said the shooter, described as a white male around six feet (1.8 meters) tall, said nothing as he opened fire.

"He was aiming towards the crowd but I don't think he was aiming at a specific person," a witness named Sheila told WBBM radio. "He was quiet. He just stood on the stage in front of everybody and just started shooting."

"I saw him holding the gun and it was huge. I thought it was fake and then I realized he was really shooting at people and I got down," she said. "I saw a lot of blood. I have blood all over my clothes."

Officials of the 112-year-old university 65 miles (105 kilometers) west of Chicago gave out few details of the incident.

"It has been confirmed that there has been a shooting on campus and several people have been taken away by ambulance," its website said.

A spokesman for nearby Kishwaukee Community Hospital earlier said 17 wounded victims had been brought in.

Students described now-familiar scenes of panic in the fifth school shooting in the United States in the last week.

"I saw a lot of confusion," Dominique Broxton, 22, told the Chicago Tribune, describing the scene from her dorm room. "Students were running. People really didn't know what was going on."
The shooting came 10 months after 32 students and faculty were shot down by a mentally disturbed student at Virginia Tech University in the deadliest massacre ever at a US school.

Chicago has long been noted for the Valentine's Day Massacre of February 14, 1929, when seven people were executed by machine-gun, in a Mafia killing during the city's gangster heyday.
Northern Illinois University, chartered in 1895, is a teaching and research institution with a student enrollment of more than 25,000 and nearly 1,300 teachers. It has 862 international students from 88 nations.

Broxton said she could see two wounded students from her dorm room.
"The ambulance took away two students on the ground right outside my dorm," she said. "I don't know them. They looked bloody. Where I am right now, there are a lot of police, at least a dozen. There are police cars and trucks everywhere."

"There is an intercom system inside the dorm. Someone came on and stated that someone had been caught. They said they caught the shooter and that we should remain calm and stay in our rooms."

bell hooks Pt 8 cultural criticism (rap music)

renowned intellectual bell hooks examines popular culture in the context of patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism.

Cross Post from Black and Missing: Do you know Phylicia Moore?

For a few days now we have been hearing about Natalee Holloway and the new developments in her case. But a similar situation happened last year with another American teen: Phylicia Moore. Have you heard of her? Unfortunately most people haven't. So today I'm going to do a flashback post. I have not posted on her before because I'm just finding this out myself. After about an hour of searching, I finally found an article from June 2007 that I think will give you guys a good understanding of what went on with the case.

When Lola Moore thinks back to the day her daughter and two dozen of her classmates said their goodbyes as they prepared to leave for a trip to Ghana, one moment is especially haunting. "The last thing the chaperones said was, `Don't worry — we'll take good care of her,'" Moore recalled Friday as she fought back tears. "And she was the only one who didn't come home."

Six weeks after 18-year-old Phylicia Moore's body was discovered at the bottom of a hotel swimming pool in the Ghanaian capital of Accra, Lola and Douglas Moore are demanding answers to questions they say have not been adequately answered by the initial investigation in Ghana or by school officials in Teaneck.

Their anger stems from two beliefs: that their daughter's death was not an accident, and that Phylicia would still be alive had the trip's chaperones been more vigilant in monitoring the students.

"She was stolen from us," Lola Moore said in an interview at the office of Nancy Lucianna, an attorney representing the family.

Lucianna filed a legal notice Friday informing the Teaneck School District of the Moores' intent to sue for negligence in their daughter's death.

They also have been pushing for the FBI to investigate, an effort aided by Rep. Steve Rothman, D-N.J. The U.S. ambassador to Ghana, Pamela E. Bridgewater, told the Moores in a letter Friday that Ron Nolan, the FBI's legal attache assigned to Lagos, Nigeria, would travel to Ghana next week and serve as a liaison to a task force formed by Ghanaian authorities to review Moore's death.

Under international law, the FBI cannot be formally involved in the investigation until it receives an official request from the Ghanaian government. The FBI had not received such a request as of Friday.

The details of the final hours of Phylicia Moore's life are frustratingly incomplete. She was seen leaving the hotel swimming pool alone around 10:30 p.m. April 15. About 11 hours later, her body was discovered in the pool, still clad in a tank top and shorts with a bathing suit underneath.

An autopsy performed in Ghana found no foul play, pending the results of toxicology tests. A separate autopsy performed in the United States for the Moores concluded that Phylicia's body had not been in the water for a significant amount of time.

Douglas Moore rejects the notion that his daughter, who could tread water but was not a swimmer, would have been horsing around in the pool — particularly at the deep end, where her body was found.

He is troubled that Phylicia's absence apparently was not noticed by the chaperones, nor was it reported to them by the students, some of whom were awake until the wee hours of the morning while the chaperones slept.

"Most certainly there was negligence," Douglas Moore said.

Teaneck High School Principal Angela Davis was out of the office Friday and could not be reached for comment. School district officials have said they support an FBI investigation into Phylicia's death.

The Moores claim Ghanaian authorities botched the investigation by failing to interview more than a handful of students and chaperones before the group continued its tour delivering supplies to schools and to an AIDS orphanage. The group returned to Accra before flying home, but that gave authorities little time to conclude an investigation.

"I feel it's important that in order to solve this, everybody should be interviewed, not just a few people," Douglas Moore said. "That goes for the people connected to the hotel, any visitors, all the students and the chaperones. Then they will most likely get a handle on what happened to my daughter. But to just let it go for a month like this, that's no good."

For now, the last images of Phylicia are found on a video shot by a student on the bus to the airport. She is wearing a pink sweat shirt and flashing what her mother called her "signature smile." She looks giddy with anticipation as the videographer asks her how she is feeling.

"I feel good," she says. "I'm leaving my parents. I'm excited. I'm scared I forgot something.

[Source]


Phylicia Moore, a Teaneck HS honors student, went to Ghana on a goodwill mission to donate books to an orphanage and assist children suffering from AIDS with 23 other students and nine chaperones. This was a dream trip for Moore, who saved for months and took an after-school job at a local Bed Bath & Beyond to pay the cost of the trip. She was a well-rounded student with so much to offer.

Nearly a year since the above article was written, it appears that there is no new information in the case. But thank God for people like Congressman Steve Rothman (D-Fair Lawn) who pushed to make something happen. On December 3rd, 2007, he introduced Phylicia’s Law (in memory of Phylicia Moore), a bill that require public schools to have safety plans and security procedures in place for school-run, overnight, off-premises field trips.

“Every child’s life is precious so when there are reasonable steps that we can take to better protect our young people, then I believe we should take them. It is not unreasonable to put safety plans and procedures in place before a trip occurs. This will help ensure that all involved – the schools, the chaperones, the students, and parents – know what their individual roles and responsibilities are on a trip and what will happen should tragedy strike,” said Rothman.

Phylicia’s Law says that at a minimum a safety plan should address policies on curfews, room checks, and chaperone qualifications, and emergency procedures to be followed in the case of serious injury or death. However, school districts, who know their own schools and students best, will have full discretion to set the specific requirements in a plan as they see fit. Parents will see the policies before approving a trip and can then determine whether they feel that it is safe for their child to go.

You can go here to read the full text of Phylicia's Law. There's also a website where you can find a petition created for those who support Phylicia's Law. Please show your support by signing it and passing the word on to your family and friends.

To further show your support you can donate to the Phylicia Moore Scholarship Fund in her honor.

Keep Phylicia's memory alive and push for more exposure and investigation on her story!

Hat tips to Latimer Williams and Electronic Village for reporting her story.

globeandmail.com: Australia PM proposes apology for Aborigines

globeandmail.com: Australia PM proposes apology for Aborigines: "CANBERRA — Australia's prime minister on Tuesday proposed the text of an unequivocal apology by Parliament to Aborigines, the country's original inhabitants, for “the indignity and degradation” caused by the policies of past governments.

The motion, to be moved Wednesday by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in Parliament, is directed at thousands of Aboriginal children who were forcibly removed from their families under assimilation policies that lasted for decades.

Aborigines remain the country's poorest and most disadvantaged minority.

“We apologize for the laws and policies of successive parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians,” the apology motion says."

Women risk assault with clothing choice: MP - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Women risk assault with clothing choice: MP - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation): "A South Australian MP has told parliament that women who wear clothing with provocative slogans risk sexual assault.

Former Liberal, now independent MP Bob Such made his comments to the State Parliament during debate on rape reform legislation.

Dr Such believes that some women may be inadvertently sending a wrong message by the clothing they wear, such as t-shirts.

'What clothing you wear or don't wear, none of that justifies any form of sexual assault,' he added.

'Some of these young women, they might think it's fun to put that message on but I don't think it helps the situation to be encouraging people out there who don't need much encouragement to do what they shouldn't do.'"

"Jena 6" Defendant Arrested In Texas, Teen Faces New Charge After Being Accused Of Slamming Student's Head Into Bench - CBS News

"Jena 6" Defendant Arrested In Texas, Teen Faces New Charge After Being Accused Of Slamming Student's Head Into Bench - CBS News: "(AP) A defendant in the Louisiana 'Jena Six' case was arrested after allegedly slamming a student's head into a bench at his new school in Texas, police said.

The defendant, Bryant R. Purvis, 19, was arrested on a charge of assault causing bodily injury Wednesday after an altercation at Hebron High School. It began because Purvis believed a student had flattened his tires, Sgt. John Singleton said."

Missing Black Women Ad

Video asking for more coverage of missing black women by the main stream media