Former President Clinton's latest meeting with bloggers

Former President Bill Clinton says he likes blogs and bloggers.That's why he had his staff invite 15 of us to his Harlem, New York office Monday for an hour-long chat about the work of the Clinton Foundation, his recent appointment as special UN envoy to Haiti and a range of other current political issues.

Energy policy

Global warming is one of Clinton's major concerns. He lauded his Foundation's recent announcement that the Empire State building is going to be remodeled with energy-saving technologies. Clinton wants to see laws changed to allow utility companies to create favorable financial terms for these kinds of major renovations. Specifically, he wants them to ba able to get use the costs savings from green renovations to repay the bondholders and debtors who financed the construction.

 

 

According to Clinton, investing in solar power and renewable fuels creates ten times the number of jobs than, say, investments in a coal or nuclear plant. That's why he wants to see a greater investment in those technologies in any energy legislation that emerges from the President and Congress this year.

Health care

He also wanted to talk about health care. The Clinton foundation, he noted, is providing anti-retroviral medications to about 2 million people around the world. (Details are available on his foundation website.) People no longer die for lack of medicine, he said. However, people are dying for lack of access to health care. Still, he said, Pres. Obama has a better shot at getting a health care reform bill passed. Chris Bowers, who was also at the meeting, got the most accurate notes explaining Clinton's position. "I'd be surprised if we don't get health care this year," Clinton said. If we don't however, he said allowing uninsured Americans to enroll in the federal employees' health program would be a good compromise. He also echoed the Obama administration's focus on reducing administrative costs.

Think Progress has a transcript of this part of the exchange. Here is an excerpt:

"The other thing that people keep talking about is how complicated my bill was. You know, there's a reason President Obama hasn't presented a bill here. The fact is, my bill replaced hundreds of more pages of federal law than it added. It was a net simplification of the current system. The current system looks like Rube Goldberg on steroids. And so - But he's not going to have to worry about - I think we're going to get past the filibuster, and I think they'll be tough enough to go to 51 votes. But they would prefer, for his long-term relationships with Congress, it would be better if we could get the 60 votes. So what I think they'll do is go for the 60, but if it seems that people are just dug in taking positions that don't make any sense, then I think they'll go back to plan B. That would be my preference, because he's got to think about what it's going to be like next year, and the year after, and the year after, and all of that."

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Haiti

Clinton also reflected about his recent appointment as UN Special Envoy to Haiti. Noting that the small island nation has been "ignored or oppressed" for most of its history, Clinton expressed optimism that the country was about to turn itself around, partially because of his confidence in Haitian president Rene Preval. At a press conference with UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, Clinton elaborated on his plans:

This job, as I see it, will involve the following elements. First, have to support the Government in the implementation of its program, "Haiti: A New Paradigm", to generate new jobs and enhance the delivery of basic services. Second, we have to assist the recovery effort with the same fervor that was brought to the tsunami-affected nations to build back better. That is to say, better schools; better hospitals; better housing; better public facilities; better infrastructure. And, we have to do a better job of disaster prevention and mitigation.

I'm encouraged that I've had a number of people who know a lot about this call and offer their services just to try to help. We know from experience in other places that we can do a lot to mitigate disasters, and we can do a lot in Haiti. We're about to face another storm season without that sort of mitigation and I don't want go another year without it.

Third: we want to encourage more international private sector investment in Haiti and to make Haiti more competitive to attract such investment. When the Secretary-General and I visited the industrial park, for example, the people we talked to said this is a really good place to do business, the people work like crazy and they're very productive, but because there's not a broad-based revenue collection system, and because the power system is unreliable, it costs too much to get into the industrial park and the power is too expensive. We can fix that. And I intend to do everything I can to do that.

Fourth: we want to encourage the donors to honor the commitments they have already made at the donors' conference. We'll do just what we did before: I'll have a grid, and we'll match the donors to the Haitian plan and the work that needs to be done. It'll be a totally transparent process so all of you can keep up with what is going on as we go forward. We also want to do everything we can to make sure these donor commitments are aligned as closely as possible with the Haitian program we have been given.

Women's rights

Asked what he would do to expand women's rights, Clinton talked about the empowering role that education can play in women's lives. Emily Douglas at RH Reality Check has more.

Education

My question had to do with the upcoming debate over the re-authorization of No Child Left Behind Act, which uses standardized tests to determine whether school districts are meeting student achievement goals. The Obama administration has signaled that they will push for changes in the law, and although the precise nature of those changes is not clear, Pres. Obama's criticism of assessments "simply measure whether students can fill in a bubble on a test" has led a number of states to reconsider their standards and assessment measures. Clinton said that he had always been an advocate of national standards, because allowing states to pick their own standards and assessment tools creates incentives for states to set the bar low in order to preserve their funding.

I reminded Pres. Clinton that at his September, 2008 meeting with bloggers, he told me that his administration's efforts to close the digital divide had not achieved the anticipated results. At that time, he told me, "perhaps we were not sufficiently flexible in our approach." (This exchange occured as we were taking a picture, not as part of the group meeting. At Monday's meeting I asked him to elaborate, referring especially to Jane Margolis' findings that many urban schools, particularly, are "technology rich" but "curriculum poor." Clinton agreed, but expressed concern that new curriculum standards could lead to the same kind of dumbed down of curriculum and stunted teaching that has resulted from similar efforts in other disciplines. In addition, he said, he didn't know how to integrate computer science education into an already overburdened curriculum.

I confess that at that moment, I stepped outside of my blogger role and took the opportunity to tell him about the positive preliminary results that we are getting at TCNJ with our efforts to infuse basic computer science education into the middle school language arts curriculum. We are in the process of analyzing all of our data; results will be posted to our project website over the next few weeks.

 

Other blogs attending this meeting were: Daily Kos, TalkLeft, Feministing, Treehugger, Susie Madrak

 

 

cross-posted at Blogher

Ja-Tun singing Killing Me Softly at the Trenton Makes Music Festival

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The Clashing of Black Intellectuals, Nothing New Here

Debates have been circling lately regarding black leadership and public intellectualism. Princeton professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell recently wrote a piece for CNN that slams Tavis Smiley's inadequate critiques of Obama's treatment of race. She also gets at Smiley's "soul patrol"-which includes Cornel West, Michael Eric Dyson, and Dick Gregory-for their roles in his documentary "Stand." She feels Smiley and friends appropriate Martin Luther King's legacy and "implicitly claim that they, not Obama, are the authentic representatives of the political interests of African-Americans."

read the rest

Betty LaVette: Love Reign Over Me

In the wake of the recent killings at the Holocaust Museum and elsewhere

We need the discourse of transformation to help us find a way past the horrors of hate and recrimination spawned by the terrorist opinions of the last two weeks. RIP Steven Tyrone Johns, Pvt. William Long, George Tiller, and Tamrah Leonard








I recommend everyone read Fires in the Mirror or watch the video

I also recommend the discussions at Nat Turner's Revenge and Blogher. Especially, read Jill Miller Zimon's reflections. The contrasting tone of the two conversations is striking.

Try this "Word Shooter" out and let me know what you think

I was looking for a fun way to teach students about commonly mispelled words, so I modified a space shooter game to create this "word shooter." To play, click the green flag to start. The goal is to shoot the misspelled words and restore them to their correct spelling. Use the arrow keys to move the editing pen up, down, left and right. Press the space bar to shoot. If you last long enough, Bill Gates will appear. Shoot at him too. (A little fun for the devoted Mac and Linux folks out there.)

This project is part of the work I'm doing for the Interactive Journalism Institute for Middle Schoolers this summer.

Learn more about this project

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Note: I didn't write the question, which I think is absurd. It's the kind of question that elicits responses that only inflame, which is the opposite of what I tried to do. The comments, I think, bear me out. Interestingly, while there are dozens of comments on the matter at PoliticsDaily.com, there are none on the BlogHer page that the essay is linked to.

As Obama Seeks New Accord With Muslims, Surveys Reveal Suspicions and Stereotypes

Pres. Barack Obama's speech in Cairo today emphasized common values held between Muslims across the world and the United States, but results of two recent surveys reveal that deep suspicions persist. According to a May 19 survey of Arab opinion by Zogby International and Shilbey Telhami, while Obama is personally popular among many Arabs, deep suspicions persist about US foreign policy. Meanwhile, a survey of American attitudes toward Muslims reported by Al Jazeera English found that 46 percent of respondents expressed negative sentiments about Islam. [Note: The Al Jazeera story attributed the original poll to the Pew Forum on Religion, but I was unable to find the study on their website. It's also notable that the quotes in the Al Jazeera story come from residents of Montana, a state that is not known for its diversity.

More:
On Blogher: As President Obama Seeks Accord With Muslims, Events at Home Highlight America's Persistent Dilemmas.

Anita Hill Speaks Out on Supreme Court Nominee Sotomayor

ESSENCE.COM: What do you think of Sonia Sotomayor as a Supreme Court nominee?
ANITA HILL: I think it's an excellent choice, just on the face of the selection. Here's a person who has years of experience on the bench, and has distinguished herself in private practice as well, and has been a prosecutor. I think she's got an incredible breadth of experience. Clearly she's an exceptional mind, having done very well at her undergraduate school, Princeton, and law school at Yale. But that's just the beginning. There are other things that I think make her a great choice.

Read the rest at Essence.com

On Sonia Sotomayor and the Process of Inclusion

I have thought long and hard about writing this post about Judge Sonia Sotomayor and the racial debate touched off by what I think is a misreading of her 2001 speech, "A Latina Judge's Voice."

By now,you know the speech I'm talking about -- the one including the quote, "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."  My fellow BlogHer CE Dana Loesch isamong those who see the quote as either evidence of Sotomayor's incompetence or racism. As Miguelina pointed out in commenting on Dana's post, that statement was immediately followed with:

Let us not forget that wise men like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Justice Cardozo voted on cases which upheld both sex and race discrimination in our society. Until 1972, no Supreme Court case ever upheld the claim of a woman in a gender discrimination case. I, like Professor Carter, believe that we should not be so myopic as to believe that others of different experiences or backgrounds are incapable of understanding the values and needs of people from a different group.Many are so capable. As Judge Cedarbaum pointed out to me, nine white men on the Supreme Court in the past have done so on many occasions and on many issues including Brown.

However, to understand takes time and effort, something that not all people are willing to give.

My reluctance comes not just because I knew the Judge in college and came to think highly of her. I wasn't one of her close friends, and we haven't talked since her graduation from Princeton University in 1976. She and I served together on the governance board of the Third World Center, a unit of Princeton University's student affairs office that provided resources for academic, cultural and social programming centered upon the needs and interests of students of color. (The TWC is now known as the Carl Fields Center for Equality and Intercultural Understanding, in honor of the University's first administrator of color.)Back then, I was impressed by her ability to calmly sort through contentious arguments and tedious bureaucratic details. Considering the sweep of her accomplishments in the 33 years since she finished second in her class at Princeton, I have every reason to believe that she will be a fine Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.

 

I have some concern about adding to the focus on Sotomayor's public comments and her participation in organizations in organizations concerned with racial justice, to the exclusion of her substantial judicial record. Tom Goldstein as the SCOTUSblog conducted a systematic analysis of 50 of Sotomayor's decisions related to race and found no evidencethat she placed racial empathy or identification above the law. Goldstein said his numbers "decisively disprove the claim that she decides cases with any sort of racial bias."Reflecting on Goldstein's analysis, Prof. Ann Althousenotes that in one of her dissents on a race-related case, she argued for the free-speech rights of a white employee who was fired for disseminating racist material. Althouse adds:

"Stop jumping ahead to the assumption that Sotomayor stretches the law to decide cases in favor of people who tug her heart strings and look at the record." 

But I do think that there is a contribution I can make to this discussion that hasn't been made, and that is to look at Sotomayor's speech, and her past involvement in racial advocacy groups such as the Puerto Rican Legal Defense Fund as part in the context of an intraracial process of leadership development. 

 Where others worry that Sotomayor's interests intimate racial chauvinism, I see the organizations in which she has participated, and others like it, as deliberative spaces where people of color who had the privilege of education and entree to the professions could contemplate the meaning of their positions, and the responsibilities that inhere in the privileges that we had been accorded.

I understand this as part of a tradition that goes back to the days of the American Negro Academy where a small cadre of African American intellectuals caucused about the conditions of African Americans in the Jim Crow era.

What We Did at the Third World Center 

When Sotomayor and I colabored at the Third World Center, much of the work concerned mundane matters common to all student organizations:constructing budgets, building a calendar of speakers, career workshops, films, cultural festivals and parties, making sure the building was maintained. And yes, there were also protests against university policies -- labor practices, investments in companies doing business in South Africa, and other issues. But, as a group, we also debated the efficacy of affirmative action, shared stories about our respective heritages, and contemplated the world we wanted to create.

 Personally, these conversations and activities were integral to my Princeton education. Chatting with Chinese-American students about how their families fled Mao's China enriched my Chinese politics class and helped me see the weaknesses in the arguments of some of the academic Maoists on campus. The Native American students told me about their responsibilities to their tribal governments, which included, in one case, writing arguments to help get decent water and electricity on their reservations. The Puerto Rican students taught me about Jose Marti. I tasted sushi and ground nut stew for the first time. I listened to my Haitian friends' struggle to figure out how to help their struggling homeland suffering under the boot of the Duvalier dictatorship and other attendant ills. I brought my own worries about gang warfare in my home town, police brutality, and unequal access to quality education, jobs and health care.  

My recollection is that Sonia was optimistic about the opportunities that were opening up in corporate America and other sectors of power. Indeed, her ascent demonstrates that her faith was not misplaced. It's been amazing for me to watch many of my fellow TWC members ascend to leadership positions in government, industry, the arts, sciences and professions. Even our First Lady, Michelle Obama '85, is a former member of the TWC governance board. Our activism was a springboard into the wider world across campus and outside of Princeton.

The World in Which We Came of Age 

Truthfully, in the mid-1970s, many of us did not know what was possible. I have written before that those of us who are the children of the Civil Rights Movement have spent most of our lives testing the boundaries of America's promise of equality. DocJess has a letter from an attorney, Karen Porter, that reminds us of what some of the obstacles were:

"As a newly minted lawyer in 1974, I was hired as director of a Philadelphia corporate legal department; and my first priority was to hire two lawyers. When I told my superior that I had chosen, for the first position, a Latina lawyer who had been tops in her class at her American college and law school, his first question was: "But how is her English?" That Latina lawyer went on to become "the first" in so many roles in public service and private law practice that I lost count of all her achievements years ago. (She's also a friend of Judge Sotomayor's.) I told her this story recently, and she said I'd never told her before - and she cried. She also said that no one else would hire her then."

According to Porter, racism and sexism persists in the legal profession to this day:

"These were my experiences in only my first five years out of law school (1974-79) - I won't even attempt to cover the next 30 years in this letter. The list goes on and on. Even today, people ask why I haven't worked in a law firm or for local government. But that question is usually asked not by women or minorities because they know what we were and are up against."

Sotomayor's Berkeley Speech 

This is the context in which I see Sotomayor's 2001 speech. It was given at a Berkeley Law School symposium "Raising the Bar: Latino and Latina Presence in the Judiciary and the Struggle for Representation." It was republished in the Berkeley La Raza Law Journal, described as "one of four journals in the United States that focus on Latina/o conditions, communities, and identities in the U.S. and abroad—and the sociolegal conditions of other communities of color."In other words, she was speaking to fellow members of the legal community about what it means to be Latina and a judge. She noted her expectation that one purpose of the conference is to propose strategies for addressing the underrepresentation of Latino/a judges, particularly in the circuit and Federal appeals courts.

The "wise Latina" quotation comes 4/5ths of the way through the speech -- toward the end of a complex meditation on whether women or people of color in the judiciary function differently as judges.  Earlier in the speech, she contemplates what it is that makes her a Latina, sorting through historical,linguistic and cultural definitions of ethnicity in ways that remind me of academic discussions of Franz Boas or Du Bois' Conservation of Races.She acknowledges ethnic identity that can be deeply felt, but not easily defined.

Sotomayor questioned whether it is possible or desirable for those women and people of color who are on the bench to complete set aside their identities when they are on the bench. But what does she mean by this? Here, I think, is the core of her argument:

"The aspiration to impartiality is just that--it's an aspiration because it denies the fact that we are by our experiences making different choices than others. Not all women or people of color, in all or some circumstances or indeed in any particular case or circumstance but enough people of color in enough cases, will make a difference in the process of judging."

That said, she adds, as part of her conclusion:"I am reminded each day that I render decisions that affect people concretely and that I owe them constant and complete vigilance in checking my assumptions, presumptions and perspectives and ensuring that to the extent that my limited abilities and capabilities permit me, that I reevaluate them and change as circumstances and cases before me requires."

She ends with a call to the lawyers in the audience to reflect on how their identities affect their professional practice.The speech is not an attack on white men. It is a call to an audience of attorneys of color to think about the difference they want to make in the world. She's looking at the misjudgments by the Holmes' and Cardozos and saying, in effect: They had blind spots as a result of their experience. Let's hope that we can use our experience to see more clearly. (To that list, by the way, I would have added former Chief Justice Rehnquist, who wrote a memo defending Plessy v. Ferguson in the 1950s and helped deny black citizens' voting rights in the 1960s.)

That kind of conversation doesn't divide us. It helps us think about the basis on which we come together.

Cross-posted at Blogher

New Yorker cover drawn on an iPhone