The Redstar Perspective

That’s what I’ll be doing this weekend for my exam, typing up some notes, organizing my books and articles, taping key stuff to the walls surrounding my desk (which has been moved to my “foyer” area where my books are).  I’m NERVOUS and the MIKE IS OPEN HERE AT THE RP FOR WELL-WISHES FROM THE AUDIENCE.   

(Prayers for NO SNOW on Monday are also welcome; our amazing and diligent Dept. Admin. Chief has already emailed me concerned that snow on Monday morning will prevent her from getting my exam questions to me at the specified hour of 10 a.m.  When will this end????)

As for today, it was all exercise and retail therapy and now a dinner date with my man.  I’m wearing a cute little jumper of a dress from Michael Kors more appropriate for my 22 yr old NYC cousin, but it was $25 at Macy’s after 3 different discounts, and I’ve got the legs for it, if I do say so myself!!   

Legs that, to Amy’s delight I’m sure, are covered in LEGWARMERS!!!  I have been jonesing for these since they came out last year - who even knows if they’re still in style (Weboy?), but I DON’T CARE!  (Plus it’s Boston, which means they’ll be in style late or never or for too long, and regardless, just bucking the prep trend of which I am typically a part is avant garde enough for me!)

A pair of new gloves, also deeply discounted and with some cashmere inside, and a little make-up and Chaka Khan on the iPod and I am ready to head out.  Hoping to leave the anxiety at home with the misplaced idea that I should be reading The Truly Disadvantaged (again) instead of having some much needed, last minute fun.

Have a Wonderful Weekend!!!

AAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

…endsightmilestogobeforeisleep*

In other words, in 87.5 hours I will begin my doctoral general exams, the first of the two major hurdles in my PhD program (the other forthcoming: my dissertation).  I’ve been staying up later and later, dragging myself out of bed, not leaving my house, missing my workouts, binging on food, reading a shitload, watching not so much but occasional long stretches of tv, and feeling generally anxious and like I might need the Jaws of Life to pry my shoulder blades apart.

Hence the sporadic blogging this week, both in quantity and quality.  At least, I scheduled my exams towards the end of the semester when the rest of the academic universe is aslo entering the miserable crunch period.  My more pleasurable breaks have been talking the M.A.S. off the ledge about his assignments and irritations, and chuckling over Professor Zero’s lamenting re: grading and her students’ and their families’ less than stellar - and rather hypocritical - commitment to their studies - a devastating mini-series in her usual excellent cataloging of all that is insane and intolerable about the Ivory Tower. 

For some reason, her blog invites just long, confessional commenting from me - I am not sure what it is about her virtual encouragement towards my streams of consciousness ramblings, but when I click through my Google reader to her site every few weeks of so, I end up chatting away as if we’re long lost friends.  She, like so many, maintains an anonymous blog, which in hindsight I wish I’d done, but I’ve never been very good at concealment, for better and definitely worse. So, if you are interested in the mental unraveling going on over here at The RP HQ’s, here’s some excerpts from my comments at her site re: not going completely bananas:

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http://www.freerice.com/index.php

In Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, one sociologist’s exploration into the “American character,” the “Massachusetts Irish” are “the ethnic group that defines the standard for ethnic groups.”*  (In all our traditional, old world, trusting, close-kin glory)

I’m sayin’.

*From Alan Wolfe, “Democracy versus Sociology,” in Michele Lamont and Marcel Fournier’s Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality,”  1992, p. 317.

(Meanwhile, perhaps appropriately, on WWOZ, playing quietly on my iTunes, I can only make out the line in some alt version of The 12 Days of Christmas, “5 ROB ROYS.”)

…re: feminism and education.

When I got back on-line yesterday after an overwhelming family weekend (you can pretty much ignore that Friday night musing about relaxing), I found my Google reader filled with I-think-Round 2 or 3 (??) of argument and confrontation related to Feministing Jessica Valenti’s Full Frontal Feminism (FFF).  Now, RP readers know that I tend not to engage in debates I don’t know too much about; indeed, my blog personality is a lecturing one.  My comments on other people’s threads tend to be towards correction or filling in blanks with research that I think would strengthen the argument in the post.  (Unsurprisingly, I am often ignored.  Who’s less fun than a troll?  A smarty pants.)

Broadly speaking, women of color (WOC) bloggers are taking white, male community college professor Hugo Schwyzer to task for adding FFF to his course list, and using the vocal enthusiasm he is hearing from some of his students of color, who comprise the majority of his classroom, I believe, as a ringing endorsement for FFF.  The larger context for this is that there has been a wide and vocal condemnation of the book from WOC bloggers for being exclusionary in its stereotypical white, upper-middle-class feminist perspective (did you check out the book’s cover?).  His report of his students’ enjoyment of the book is therefore effectively translated as proving the WOC blogosphere wrong.

Here are the most recent posts about this that are in my Google reader, beginning with the professor’s that stimulated the criticism.   I ended up reading through them for hours, and eventually posted a comment at Brownfemipower’s post about the silo-ing and/or silencing of perspectives and activism of women of color in women’s studies curricula.  I wish, a day later, that I could remember in which post the author asked where were the white women criticizing FFF.  It was made as a critique, if I remember correctly (feel like I’m playing catch up…this is why I am often so often just a lurker!), of how the professor’s post indicated that a few of his women of color students liking the book therefore meant it was actually not offensive to WOC, as if women who fit this description (according to whom, RP readers ask) are a homogeneous and tightly bounded group such that the opinions of a few individuals can stand for everyone, versus the basically infinite opinions possible re: this book among all women who read it.*   Well, here’s one white woman, at least.

Through Sylvia at Problem Chylde: Learning in Transition, I found an earlier brief review of hers of FFF, with a link to this longer one.   Both point to my main problem with the book, which I discovered when I picked it up earlier this year at a bookstore and read excerpts from it for a few minutes.  I was new to Feministing at the time, and discovering the book on a shelf at an independent local retailer seemed kind of neat.  Then I began reading, and was struck by how shallow and glib the tone was.  It had that forced hipster thing going on that I just hate, and seemed equivalent to the cool, older girl deigning adolescent you with her presence and leaving you to try to emulate her and her infinite wisdom about sex, fashion, relationships and boyz.  As Ama Lee writes at Feminist Review, “Valenti doesn’t give her readers credit that they can do the thing she most wants them to do: think, analyze, and be critical.”  (She also compares her to Ann Coulter…yikes.)  And as Sylvia writes, “…if anyone talked to me with the language this book uses, let alone put it in writing, I’d be done with them.  Like, totally.  (Pun intended.)”

For me, in addition to it’s exclusionary perspective, abundant all over academia, the idea of a college professor using such a superficial book that deliberately talks down to its audience like this is infuriates me. I see why women of color who take offense to this book are so pissed off.  Not only does it narrowly cast mainstream feminism as essentially about “the pro-life/pro-choice/mostly-fetus centered debate of women’s reproductive autonomy”, to quote Sylvia again, with occasional token “lip service to our [women of color, working class and poor women, lesbian, gay and transgendered women, disabled women] pet issues” (to quote her a third time), but it does so in a decidedly condescending tone.  And is getting  lot of press for it.   This sh*t drives me nuts.

But hey, smut sells.  Yet, it’s bad enough that feminism in this frame leaves the majority of us grappling with larger, more complex struggles out of “the movement.” It’s even more infuriating that possible recruits on the fringe are being lured in with a book that has about as much depth and range as a fashion magazine.  The insult in this particular case is this white man inflicting it on his majority students of color, whereas those of us not in his class can either exist in blissful ignorance about the book, ignore it, or rant about and deconstruct it and the limitations of feminism on our respective blogs or in other public fora. 

What’s so problematic about education is how the subjectivity of researchers, teachers and other authorities is infused into the curricula and student development.  A significant part of the research on the reproduction of inequality focuses on schools as a key site in which this occurs.  It’s why sociologists 100 years after The Chicago School are still arguing about whether social relations in poor and/or ethnic/racial communities are “disorganized” or not, because they don’t adhere to the ecological model of urban organization proposed by the white men considered to be the founding fathers of urban/community studies.  It’s why women are too often absent from ethnography, because the traditional ethnographer has been the “lone wolf” male who integrates himself into communities under study by going to bars and hanging on the streets (to paraphrase sociologist Maria Kefalas).  While I’m all about increasing the definition of legitimate perspectives in the classroom, and access to a much broader range of analysis, students deserve better exposure to the strengths and limitations of feminist theory and activism than is provided in FFF.  Now I’m curious to see what else is on the syllabus.

*I liked this point because one of my biggest cognitive problems with questions of racism, anti-racism or racial justice - especially in the blogosphere - is that they too often become binary or reductive, i.e., problems, conflicts and oppression boil down to racism with no other -isms present, and whites are necc. the oppressor.  In the context of feminism, the oppressors are white women, who are therefore also in bed with the patriarchy (though apparently with at least 18 rounds of birth control strapped to their thongs).  The construction at this stage comes across as very instrumental on the part of whites/perpetrators, which is easier to digest at an aggregative, macro-structural level than it is at a micro level, which is the level of analysis a good deal of the blogosphere specializes in, by its very nature of being a virtual universe of endless soapboxes (for those with access to computers).  Just I loathe in my Ivory Tower the assumption that the white, male perspective is the logical, objective interpretation of our social world, with its accompanying presumptive, prescriptive abstraction of the lives of women, communities of color, and poor communities, to name just a few, so do I resent alternatively being labeled by default as part of the problem when it comes to racism.  I wrote about this at greater length last week, so I’ll stop here...

Yesterday I wrote about Governor Patrick’s stance on nooses as terrorism. While I was developing that post, I realized the direction I was moving in about the larger issue of racism and racial justice was going to derail that post, at least in its readability due to my intellectual wanderings all over your computer screen. Perhaps you’ll bear with me here.

To begin, check out this week’s guest bloggers over the Center for Community Change’s Movement Vision Lab blog (MVL). On the question of the “future of racial justice,” commentators aren’t “optimistic:

There’s more tension and ambivalence from this week’s authors — and for good reason. They’re grappling with a feeling of frustration that I think all of us share — a deep disgust for and a sense of urgent critique of the current racial status quo in America.

Individual writers of color - a range of activists working for racial justice at home and abroad - alternatively believe they’ll see racial justice “when pigs fly,” or when whites allies are able to “discontinue” being white (??), or when we admit that race is “complicated” and “messy” and get into it. Man, we can’t even tell each other our asses look big in those pants; how are we going to wade into this morass together?

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If you are a freedom fighter, proud Brandeisian, feminist, or any or all of the above, read this interview with Angela Davis NOW.

Excerpts after the jump.

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Or so MA Gov. Deval Patrick equates responding to the discovery of nooses within the MBTA (one employee wearing one for Halloween, and a noose found in a subway car by a black carman). Good for him. That’s the aggressive language that municipalities and officials should be using to describe these homegrown acts of racial violence, these hate crimes, including the agnostics at the federal Dept. of Justice who promise to act when “the facts and the law warrant” them to do so. (Duh.)

Based on data compiled from 70% of all police authorities nationwide, the FBI reports that hate crimes increased 8% in 2006. While race-related incidents in the precincts reporting fell about 2% from 2005, they comprise 52% of all reported events. 58% of all offenders are white, and one-third of the incidents occur near or at home. (Sleep well!)

In related event, this past weekend thousands of African-Americans marched at the Justice Dept. to protest the racial (and economic) inequality in the criminal justice system.

The Justice Department said yesterday that it is committed to prosecuting civil rights cases.

“The Justice Department shares with those who demonstrate today their objective of bringing to justice those who commit criminal acts of hate,” Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey said in a statement.

“It shares their vision of eradicating hate in our society,” said Mukasey, who was sworn in as attorney general this week.

Clearly one strategy the Administration has to realize that vision is to shift our hatred to those outside our society. Furthermore, perhaps we should give the new AG some time to get caught up on DOJ’s actual record of fighting hate crimes under Bush & Co. From a June 2007 NYT piece:

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Top 10 Questions You’re Better Off Not Asking

1) Is that what you’re wearing?

(Got it, mom?)

2) Why don’t you have a boyfriend? 

This might have been my LEAST favorite question of my 20’s, especially since it was so often asked in sympathy, as if I was flawed, fucking up somehow, or incomplete without the requisite romantic appendage.

3) Do you think he’s “the one”?

Yeah, if we could not get into what I think of the concept of “soulmates” we’d probably all have a much more cheerful afternoon.

4) When are you two getting engaged/married?

5) When are you two having kids?  A.k.a., when are you going to give us some grandkids?

6) What baby names are you thinking about?

I learned not to ask this one when I immediately, reflexively passed judgment on one of the options a friend of mine was considering.  Now I try to never ask.

7) Are you breast feeding? 

I’m also a guilty culprit on this one, as my friends/family are split about 50/50 between moms who switch to formula early on and women who breast feed for longer than 3 months, and so I like surveying mothers on this one.  Apparently it’s a rough equivalent of asking single or unmarried women questions like #2 and #4, respectively.  I try to turn it into a sympathetic space for venting for those who feel like they’re on the wrong side of the question to compensate for my being an insensitive, prying, childless a**hole, but maybe I should just stop asking instead.

8) Are you going to have anymore kids?  (And then, of course: when?)

And what has become my most loathed question of my 30s:

9) What will you do once you finish your degree?

%&%^*^%$*****!!! 

I can only think of these Top 9, so give me your suggestions for #10.

10) …

Legendarily agressive, fearless, obnoxious, and, apparently, stupid too.  Dare we brag, some of the most wicked, f*ckin’ stupid in the nation.  Yeah, what’s up.

Don’t look at me for pointers, I’ve already copped to failing my road test once. Though, now that I think about it, I did pass the written exam for my driver’s permit twice, given I had to renew it after I didn’t get my license on the first try.

Thanks to shame-faced IL driver O. Dear for the tip.

Recently I was celebrating my own unique existence.  As it turns out, my middle and last names are some of the most common in the U.S.

My middle name (my mother’s maiden name) is in the Top 15 of the 5,000 most common surnames in 2000, falling from its spot on the Top 10 list in 1990.  And my last name is #108, down from #104 in 1990.  To add insult to injury, my seemingly unusual first name, in another form, is the most common surname in the world.  (Though I do love when I meet folks who tell me my first name is a “Chinese” name.)

Fortunately, Redstar doesn’t make the list.  You can test your own surname via the link. 

I LOVE these kinds of articles about census data.  But note the total lack of irony in the reporting about the “durability of the family of man” that the persistence of certain last names reflects and the subsequent paragraph on slavery’s contribution to that familial lineage:

But the fact that about 1 in every 25 Americans is named Smith, Johnson, Williams, Brown, Jones, Miller or Davis “suggests that there’s a durability in the family of man,” Mr. Kaplan, the author, said. A million Americans share each of those seven names. An additional 268 last names are common to 10,000 or more people. Together, those 275 names account for one in four Americans.

…The durability of some of the most common names in American history may also have been perpetuated because slaves either adopted or retained the surnames of their owners. About one in five Smiths are black, as are about one in three Johnsons, Browns, and Joneses and nearly half the people named Williams.  

H/t to Zuzu at Feministe, whose blog moniker is also likely as rare as her last name is common.

In my patriotic high school and hometown, we in the chorus learned all the Armed Forces songs, and performed a Veteran’s Day concert every year.  Firedoglake offers up the much more depressing facts on the state of veterans’ lives in the U.S.

I’m really late in even acknowledging the flood in Tabasco, Mexico (being a Katrina and 9/11 responder has not transformed me into a disaster specialist, by any means.)  Brownfemipower has the info, the photos and links to how we can help. 

Paul Krugman chides Reagan revisionists.  I don’t get the Reagan love at all (theoretically, sure).  Everything historical I read in terms of urban, economic and social policy in this country points to Reagan’s special powers of increasing inequality and insecurity, undermining civil rights, race-baiting, and eroding faith in government.  The guy makes me sick. 

This “newsflash” is sort of entertaining: smart chicks can’t get dates.  Not enough M.A.S.’s to go around, apparently.

Not exactly a disaster, though I’m disappointed Felix Arroyo didn’t get re-elected, here’s a breakdown of Boston City Council at-large voting by ward.  Ever heard of machine politics?

And prior to this post, I’m carrying on about housing as a human right and subprime vs. predatory lending.  Hope you all had a terrific long weekend!!

As a community development scholar-practitioner, I’m compelled to remind us of the difference between these forms of lending: a subprime loan is the product for households without access to mainstream credit.  Provided by knowledgeable (sp??), trained lenders (such as community development financial institutions) with fair terms and additional services such as homeownership counseling, subprime loans can be an important stepping stone to building good credit and asset accumulation for households, often low-income and/or of color. 

Predatory lending, on the other hand, is a distinctive type of subprime lending with rapacious terms and fees that willfully preys on borrowers that lack the same access to and information about credit products.  It disproportionately targets communities of color of all incomes, where the access issue is key, as well as the elderly, where information about lending products is likely the bigger opening for predatory lending.  Obviously, these target populations are not mutually exclusive, and many of us can probably relate to the problem of having sophisticated consumer knowledge and motivation to shrewdly navigate the lending process.  The point of predatory lending is to strip equity from homes and neighborhoods, not increase it.

I’m bringing this up as two of the mainstream blogs I read, Feministing and Pandagon, go after the subprime lending issue in minority neighborhoods.  I’m also linking again to a fairly wonkish piece I wrote in March clarifying these types of lending. 

Commenters over at Feministe debate, spurred on by New Orleans public housing activists’ Pledge of Resistance re-printed there.  I’m in there providing greater context (of course) and hoping some of them will pop over to the RP for some history on the NOLA public housing struggle.

Have I mentioned how much I love 30 Rock?  I am so late to the game on this one. 

Genius.

So happy with my DVR, Grey’s, and 30 Rock right now.

Have a great weekend!

Courtesy of the Gulf Coast housing advocacy network, I see that FEMA has prohibited its staff from entering the formaldehyde-laced trailers used to shelter evacuees, even as it has stalled the CDC-led investigation into toxic levels of formaldehyde that it promised in July. (The Sierra Club documented that 83% of trailers across the Gulf region have higher than recommended levels.)

CBS has obtained internal emails between FEMA authorities:

In an Oct 19 email, a worker asks if there is “any safety reason you know of that says we can’t go into a [deactivated or previously used] trailer quickly to shut a vent.”

The response from the director of the Baton Rouge office, Jon Byrd, said, “the issue is formaldehyde.”

Then, on Oct. 22, this final answer from FEMA’s head of safety in Washington, David Chawaga: “Please reinforce … FEMA employees do not enter stored TTs until further notice…”

I don’t even know where to begin with this one; where’s Sheelzebub and her rage when I need her?

Instead, I leave you with this excerpt from the excellent and sadly relevant book The Welfare Experiments: Politics and Policy Evaluation.  Prof. Robin Rogers-Dillon examines how state welfare experiment waivers became the institutional channel through which 1996 welfare reform occurred, in particular because their false notion of being scientific and objective in their experimental design provided political cover for the task of dismantling AFDC.  She remarks on the reward for the high-profile, “first-mover advantage” exercised by conservative “policy entrepreneur” Tommy Thompson in narrowing the agenda on time-limits, along with other GOP reformers:

“Moreover, the policy entrepreneurs involved in the waiver programs went on to high-ranking posts in [Bush’s] Administration.  Clearly this level of political recognition was not for those who promoted social scientific knowledge.  It was for those who helped turn a small provision of the Social Security Act into an opportunity to restructure the American welfare state.”

With FEMA operatives as their henchmen, killing off the remaining indigent and vulnerable women, children, elderly and persons of color who refuse to just fucking die or disappear already!!!

In contrast to the rather frivolous tone of the RP lately, the struggle to preserve and re-open public housing in New Orleans continues.  The movement has linked up with broader efforts to pass S.1668 in Congress, as the 5,000 units of public housing are a key part of the compromise phased development of affordable housing in the legislation.  While S.1668 remains stalled due to partisan shenanigans, public housing’s future hangs in the balance, as tireless activists both try to push forward S.1668 and stymie HUD’s looming efforts to demolish the buildings. 

Timing is of the essence right now in the struggle to provide adequate, needed and frankly, compensatory affordable housing in New Orleans: We entered the fall and the S.1668 advocacy battle knowing that we were up against HUD’s timeline to demolish the buildings. 

A couple things in our favor to preserve PH:

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I’m chest deep in texts as I prepare for my general exams (3 weeks and 6 days and counting!!), hence the relative blog silence. Just now I finished reading the chapter “Los Angeles as Postmodern Urbanism” in From Chicago to L.A.: Making Sense of Urban Theory.* But perhaps more interesting to you, Redstar readers, is my own urban experience, observed with typical Redstar intensity as I extricate myself from my books at various intervals.

We begin yesterday morning, when I woke up to NPR telling me that the MBTA was about to undergo a major budget crunch, because its fixed rate on electricity costs was about to expire. Forgive me if I suggest they might have been prepared for this, and point them to the recently increased fares as a partial solution to their financial woes. It then took 45 minutes to travel the ~3 miles from my apartment to Kenmore Square, where my train abruptly terminated, due to a “medical emergency,” and I was reminded - again - of the unique decline in ridership the T is experiencing. Last night, after belatedly facing the truth that I’d never make it to my N.I.A. class after giving myself only 30 minutes on the T to travel the 5-6 miles between Cambridge and Newton, I disembarked in Cleveland Circle to see that the other refurbished storefront opening beside the forthcoming Citibank is a chain burrito place. Noting that it’s several facades down from Boloco, another burrito shop, I sent the M.A.S. a text noting that burritos (broadly defined) are Boston’s new pizza (we have two of those shops in Cleveland Circle already). Sigh. I had such high hopes for the ‘hood (I am pleased to see that Lint sells Paper, Denim & Cloth jeans, which Louis Boston told me two years ago were totally passe but I still love).

Fast forward to this morning (since my evening at home consisted of getting aggravated that my Comcast internet connection is still not working after Sunday morning’s power outage), where NPR now tells me that MIT is suing Frank Gehry for a faulty design of our egomaniacal Stata Center. Welcome to Cognoscente Celebrity Death Match. The wine and cheese is to your left.

After a morning N.I.A. class in Newton Center in which the group of us 8 or so white women put our jewelry in the middle of a circle in order to pay tribute to it (as symbolic of ourselves, according the well-meaning instructor), I headed off to vote. Having paid little attention to the candidates for the at-large City Council seats (Bad Planner!! Bad Activist!!), I voted quickly for the two non-white-Irish-male incumbents and then tried to recall any distinguishing information about the remaining Flaherty, White, Connolly, etc. choices before me. I did my best, then headed off to school.

Later this afternoon I had lunch with another grad student and friend at a new Sebastian’s in Kendall Square, where we agreed the place was NY-ish in its varied and pricey health-conscious quick fare, but absolutely Boston in its enormous scale (easily two stores deep). Shortly after I introduced this friend, originally from the Midwest, to the term “Masshole,” which I used to describe myself - as I backed up out of a parking lot onto Mass Ave across on-coming traffic and into flowing traffic through a green light - and the other drivers who didn’t stop but just went around me as if they’re used to this kind of bullsh*t shenanigan (they are). When I came out of the library several hours later to move my car from its 2 hour spot into the now available parking lot, I passed a homeless man with “Yankees Suck” licenses plates on two of his shopping carts. And I thought to myself, this is my urbanism.

*For those of you who care, the “Chicago School” has been the dominant theory of cities and urbanism in urban sociology (my field) through the 20th century. It’s modernist idea of the city as an organic, unified whole around which regions and through which individual relationships are ecologically (vs. economically) organized (the latter especially along the black-white “color line”) has been contested - most recently - by the postmodern L.A. School, which proposes that cities and urban form are shaped and linked by a global economic restructuring that emphasizes flexible production, deep welfare state retrenchment, and the subsequent, oft-violent polarization of a homogenized capitalist elite living in technologically-linked-but-geographically-dispersed-privatized worlds atop a multi-cultural, insecure proletariat, with both groups relatively placated by the media-disseminated mythology that this hyper-privatized, hyper-consumer, hyper-polarized world is normative and desirable. (As you can probably tell, I’m still piecing together a working definition of the L.A. school, which is sort of its point.)

The M.A.S.’s brother is in town and held us captive in his Brookline B&B last night and forced us to drink bourbon by a roaring fire (gotta love those Eagle Scouts).  If an RP reader could bring me another Gatorade that’d be great.  I like Berry.

If you don’t have a DVR full of shows to keep you company this Friday afternoon, may I suggest the following links instead:

Boston’s Top 25 most stylish people.  Adam at Universal Hub effectively mocks the concept, as well as takes issue with the overrepresentation of Harvard. I wish I could say the average Beaver deserved a spot on this list, but I’d be lying.  However, this urban planner is pleased to see two planning and community development folk make the list…and you thought we were all frumpy in our bike helmets and NPR bags and zeal for zoning board meetings. 

Nope, today we leave the less sartorial wonkish fun to Ezra, who has a cool graph (mmmmm, colorful, pretty graphs) on how federal agricultural subsidies are responsible for our love o’ fast food.  Or something. (Me, I’d just like some more Gatorade right now.  Anyone??)  Sans illustrations, he also has a quick little thought piece on the difference between economic status and economic security in today’s “Tchotchke Economy.”  And finally, some evidence on why we should let Amtrak off the hook for that fact that they totally suck.

In other depressing news, The Urban Institute and National Council of La Raza have released a report on the “orphaning” of U.S. children via federal immigration raids.  One of their three case study sites is New Bedford.  I hope to get back to you all with some deeper thoughts on this report - after my head stops pounding, of course.

Meanwhile, I have been totally remiss in not acknowledging the latest piece of chicanery from those buffoons over at FEMA (or as the Field Negro calls them, F-ake-MA).  Gotta love their post-wildfires fake press conference, which has left all of us about as inspired as Bush’s bullsh*t in Jackson Square two years ago, I’m sure.  Fortunately, there’s enough room in our federal government for everyone to get a chance at a do-over.  Clearly Katrina taught us all some important life lessons.

Enjoy the weekend everyone.  I will be over at The Silence of our Friends, having an intense discussion on racism in feminist activism.  Oh, and study for my general exams, of course.