-
-
Black Girls Rock!
Flickr Photos
-
Potus Takes Oath of Office
Flotus & Daughters at Great Wall of China
My Brothers Keeper
-
-
-
-
-
AFRO PUFFS
Most Adorable Shoe Stealer
Six Little Babies
Fatherhood
-
-
Even though 3Chics Politico is written and curated by three women: Ametia, Rikyrah, and SouthernGirl2, I must nominate this as one of the most engaging blogs I've found. Devoted to politics and culture, these three shine a light on contemporary life with humor and spirit.
-
3Chics Action Alert
Lets Make It Happen
3 Chics Trio
-
REALITY Blog Award
Recent Comments
Top Posts
Guard The Change
Vote 4 Democrats
-
-
-
Go to the polls
President Barack Obama
First Lady Michelle Obama
Obama Love
Your Vote Matters
President Obama & Bo
The Obama Family
-
-
-
-
Presidential hug
-
Washington Post ✔ @washingtonpost
Child support creates crushing debt for imprisoned men http://wapo.st/1KinLXz
Nancy Cordes ✔ @nancycordes
A @VP confidant pushes back against @johnpodesta who said it’s time to make decision. “(Biden)does not like bullies and will not be bullied”
Soledad O’Brien ✔ @soledadobrien
Today I watched ten videos of people beating the crap out of black people. Losing my faith in humanity here. https://twitter.com/aptly_engineerd/status/655860142022533120 …
https://twitter.com/callmedollar/status/655773250815946752/photo/1
PragmaticObotsUnite @PragObots
Some have been trying to dismiss Ivy League colleges since Jan. 20, 2009. Gee, I wonder why? https://twitter.com/yahoofinance/status/655879589030424576 …
Melanin Monroe @The4th_Duck
5 African-American churches have burned down in St. Louis the past 9 days and it’s mostly unreported. #WhoIsBurningBlackChurchesInSTL
Mother says 2-year-old wandered off as homeless family slept
APOct 18th 2015 4:24PM
PHILADELPHIA (AP) — The mother of a barefoot 2-year-old found wandering in Love Park in downtown Philadelphia says they’re living on the streets because they have nowhere to go.
Angelique Roland told WPVI-TV on Saturday the family spent Friday night behind cardboard walls underneath a city welcome center after they had trouble finding room in a shelter.
Police say someone located the boy alone Friday night and flagged down a transit police officer.
Roland says her son wandered off after they’d fallen asleep and they didn’t realize he was gone.
Authorities took the boy to a hospital, where he was admitted. The station says his 4-year-old sister was with the parents.
Both children are now in care of the city’s child welfare agency.
http://www.aol.com/article/2015/10/18/mother-says-2-year-old-wandered-off-as-homeless-family-slept/21250683/?icid=maing-grid7%7Cmain5%7Cdl13%7Csec1_lnk3%26pLid%3D1635371132
Graduating, but to what?
Poor students in the Deep South who successfully navigate traumas at home and dysfunction at school find few opportunities afterward
Published on October 17, 2015
The day of his high school graduation, like so many of the days before, began with chaos. Ruleville Central had pledged to lock its front doors an hour before the ceremony to prevent a crowd overflow, and Jadareous Davis was still at his grandmother’s home six miles up the road, time slipping away. Davis scanned through his mental checklist. Shoes? His older brother hadn’t yet swung by to drop off a pair. Bow tie? Maybe he could borrow one from a neighbor. Pants? Davis wasn’t even sure whether the dress code mandated black or brown, and he called a friend for help.
“Hey, what color pants we supposed to be wearing?” he said over the phone.
His grandmother’s voice blared from the other room.
“Quarter after nine!” she said. “C’mon, fellas! I don’t want to be locked out.”
Davis, 19, was about to graduate from one of the poorest-performing schools in a region of America that offers the bleakest landscape for the young, and the moment came with equal parts excitement and dread: As he entered adulthood, there was no telling when or how all the combustible parts of his life might now blow up.
Davis’s senior year had doubled as a reminder about all the hazards. He barely had a stable place to live and had moved months earlier to the far edge of town, taking over a dim unit paid for by his aunt after he grew sick of sleeping on a love seat at his grandmother’s cramped place. Davis had little family support; he’d fought with his mother so furiously several years back, his solution now was to simply not see her. He also was graduating with a debt — $1,200, the fine for driving his aunt’s car without insurance and then skipping a court date.
Toughest of all, graduation meant stepping into a place providing few examples of something better. His street in Drew consisted of a rusting cotton gin and a row of boarded-up storefronts. His neighborhood had a thriving drug trade that took place near an abandoned building with “For Colored” painted atop a doorway. His county had a poverty rate nearly three times the national average, at 36 percent. His state had the lowest median income in the nation and the second-highest incarceration rates. He could drive for two hours in any direction without finding a local jobless rate resembling anything near the national average.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/business/2015/10/17/poor-students/?tid=sm_tw
The Battle For The Soul Of Oakland
How A Brutal Beating Became The Symbol Of Oakland’s Gentrification Struggle
In a city wrestling with fast-rising housing costs and demographic change, a security guard’s attack of a poor black man at Whole Foods has come to represent what many black residents fear: Oakland wants them out.
Oct. 17, 2015, at 12:02 p.m.
OAKLAND — On the night of Sept. 3, sisters Zoe and Julia Marks were waiting in line to buy coffee and ice cream at the Whole Foods Market a few blocks away from home. This was supposed to be a quick post-dinner stop. Few customers were left, most of the registers were unmanned, and only one entrance to the store remained open. The day — and the store — was coming to a close.
A dispute a few aisles away punctured the quiet hum of the supermarket: A customer was arguing with a couple of Whole Foods employees about a problem with his welfare benefits card, more commonly known as an EBT card. The employees wanted the man to go to the customer service counter and let others through. The shopper kept arguing and wouldn’t budge. One of the store’s armed security guards moved in and tried to escort him away, the sisters said.
That’s when the confrontation turned violent. The security guard twice swung the man into the concrete wall, pinched his nose, and put him in a headlock, the sisters said. “It’s like the security guard was re-enacting a Mortal Kombat scene,” Zoe said.
In only a few seconds, the shopper — a 27-year-old black male who hasn’t been identified — was left sprawled on the pavement outside the store, unconscious and bleeding from the head and face. The security guard quickly closed the doors to the store, casting the man out into the darkness. The sisters watched in bewilderment, almost absentmindedly paying for their items.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/joelanderson/how-a-brutal-beating-became-the-symbol-of-oaklands-gentrific?utm_term=.fgQ7YEXRL#.ogGX0qyJR
Sarah Palin’s Attack on Obama’s Manhood is the Most Bizarre Thing You’ll Read This Week
Ben Cohen on October 16, 2015
If you want to understand the type of thinking progressives forces are up against in the eternal struggle for America’s sanity, look no further than Sarah Palin – the country’s greatest example of banal mediocrity and willful ignorance. Palin isn’t completely stupid, she’s just very not-bright, which in the Fox News era translates into huge amounts of influence and success. Palin has hacked America’s Id and now speaks for it via her facebook page.
In another gnawingly irritating and downright bizarre screed against Obama for his fictional transgressions against ‘real Americans’ (white people), Palin has outdone herself with a wonderful mixture of sexual innuendo, racism and violent rage.
Here is our translation of the full rant (Palin’s text is highlighted):
http://thedailybanter.com/2015/10/sarah-palins-attack-on-obamas-manhood-is-the-most-bizarre-thing-youll-read-this-week/
Check your email, Chicas
that is so sweet
uh huh
uh huh
……………
The Privatization of Childhood
Childhood has become a period of high-stakes preparation for life in a stratified economy.
by Megan Erickson
Today, nearly half of American children born to parents with low incomes grow into adults with low incomes, and 40 percent of children born to wealthy parents become high-income adults. In the United States, which has based much of its social safety net on educational mobility, the ability to do better than one’s parents by completing more years of schooling did indeed rise between 1947 and 1977, but it has decreased sharply since.
Correlation of educational attainment between parents and children is now higher in the United States than in European countries, particularly Nordic countries, where a tiny fraction of low-income children becomes low-income adults. As Richard Wilkinson, coauthor of The Spirit Level, has said, “If Americans want to live the American dream, they should go to Denmark.”
Upward mobility has always been the exception to the rule — children born to families in the bottom income quintile have about a 6 percent chance of making it to the top income quintile in their lifetimes — but unfortunately it is a fantasy on which United States welfare programs are now based. Never has pulling oneself up by one ’s bootstraps been more plainly a cruel action than when prescribed as a policy regime for large swaths of the population.
Under Clinton, who delivered on his promise to “end welfare as we know it,” direct aid — itself hardly redistributive — has been replaced with punitive welfare-to-work programs emphasizing personal responsibility.
In 1996, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) become temporary (TANF), and continuous access to government transfers became contingent on filing a tax return (Earned Income Tax Credit, or EITC).
Using data from tax records, economist Thomas Piketty shows that both capital income and earned income have grown for the richest families to the extent that in the America of 2010, like the Gilded Age Europe of 1910, the top 1 percent owns the same share of income as the bottom 50 percent, and the top 10 percent own the same share as the bottom 90 percent.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/09/children-testing-schools-education-reform-inequality/
Never have liked the organization
…………….
Taking on TFA
Disillusioned Teach for America alumni are striking back at the organization’s neoliberal narratives.
by T. Jameson Brewer & Sarah Matsui
For the first two decades of its existence, Teach For America (TFA) could expect fawning media coverage and unremitting praise. With founder Wendy Kopp and her band of Ivy Leaguer grads, article after article glowed, education inequity in the US had met its match. But over the last several years, the near-universal adulation has begun to wane.
Several school districts have kicked out the organization. Some professors refuse to write student recommendation letters for TFA applicants. And TFA’s high-powered PR department now seems to spend much of its time churning out statements defending itself.
Not surprisingly, the uptick in public criticism of TFA — one of corporate education reform’s totemic institutions — has tracked with increasing opposition to neoliberal education reform. Teacher organizing has been key. Taking its cues from the Chicago Teachers Union, reform caucuses have sprung up in teachers unions across the country. Bill Gates and company, if still powerful, no longer seem indomitable.
Two new books by former TFA corps members seek to heighten that growing skepticism. Unlike previous works, Sarah Matsui (Learning From Counternarratives in Teach For America) and T. Jameson Brewer (Teach for America Counter-Narratives: Alumni Speak Up and Speak Out, coedited with Kathleen deMarrais) both focus on the experiences of TFA alums themselves. The picture that emerges — of overworked, disillusioned corps members — is distinctly at odds with the way TFA presents itself internally and externally.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/10/tfa-wendy-kopp-corporate-education-reform-new-orleans/
Just thought I would drop this article here:
Chicago’s other Magnificent Mile isn’t State Street or the Clybourn Corridor. The second-highest-grossing shopping district in the city is a 2-mile stretch of 26th Street on the Southwest Side.
The strip lacks the glamour of Michigan Avenue or the wealth of Lincoln Park. Instead, the area between Kedzie and Kostner avenues is dotted with family-owned restaurants, bakeries, barbershops, grocers and clothing shops, plus an occasional Western Union and Verizon outlet. Nothing about the simple signage or interiors hints at the huge volume of cash being spent: some $900 million annually, according to the most recent figures available, at roughly 500 businesses along 26th Street.
Neighborhood residents don’t make much money—average household income is around $33,000, and a third live below the poverty line—but they tend to spend what they have close to home. The shops’ linoleum floors are well-trodden by the 500,000 Mexican-Americans who live within a 10-minute drive. On weekends, many more pour in from suburbia and the entire Midwest for the food, clothing and household goods of a country they or their parents left behind.
http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20150925/HOMEPAGE/150929884/little-village-big-business
The Bounce House has been set up. Oh boy!
they’re going to love it!!
all kids do
Oh MY! My Spidey senses tells me Jay’s going to love this.
Yep. Spider man everywhere today.
BWA HA HA HA
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JAY!!!!!!
Love, Ametia <3
no.you.didnt.
no you did NOT get a cake in the shape of a football…
LOL
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JAY!!!!
So Jay is a Texans fan? They just whupped my hometown team today, the Jax Jaguars.
Happy Birthday, Jay. I hope it’s been a fun day for you.
Jay’s mother is fainting because she thinks he’s loving the Texans. She is a cowboy fan.
Tired already. Getting prepared for a barbeque this afternoon. A few guests coming over.
See my b-day message to Jay. Send me a plate please. Thank you! LOL
Oh Ametia, the cake is too cute. I’ll sure show Jay when he gets here. Remember he said he didn’t want his party at my house. He wanted to go to the skating rink. LOL
I sure will.
Can’t he do boith, go skating and come to Grandmas?
LOL! Jay just speaks his mind. I don’t want to come to your house. I wanna go skating.
After he enters the bounce house, he’ll forget about the skating rink.
After Shootings, Varying Shades of Recovery at Charleston Church
CHARLESTON, S.C. — The Rev. Dr. Norvel Goff Sr. was standing on a Wednesday evening in the room where the massacre occurred at Emanuel A.M.E. Church, readying himself to lead Bible study.
A police officer was at the door. But for those who arrived, even the strangers, there were no pat-downs, no metal detectors. They were all as welcome as Dylann Roof had been when he arrived on a Wednesday night in June, concealing his pistol and his intentions.
If the visitors had come looking for a grand statement on racial reconciliation, the open door was it. At Bible study, surrounded by walls bearing scars of the mayhem, Dr. Goff expounded on the more routine topics of salvation and sin.
“All have sinned, am I right about it?” he said, pacing the floor. “Is there a distinction between a big sin and a little sin in the Bible?”
Four months after one of the worst racially motivated massacres in recent American history, the members of this historic African-American church are laboring to return to the everyday rhythms of worship. But they also know that things will never be the same.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/19/us/after-shootings-varying-shades-of-recovery-at-charleston-church.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0
ChicagoBreaking @ChicagoBreaking
Woman, 23, went missing 12 days ago on South Side http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-woman-23-went-missing-12-days-ago-on-south-side-20151018-story.html …
Jeb! Hasn’t Shuffled Off This Mortal Coil, Yet
by BooMan
Sat Oct 17th, 2015 at 09:40:46 AM EST
I understand the impulse that led Gary Legum to compare Jeb Bush’s campaign to a dead parrot that has “shuffled off this mortal coil.” I understand it because I suffer from the same impulse. I keep having to exercise self-restraint to avoid writing precisely the kind of pre-autopsy that Legum has just penned.
It really couldn’t be easier to mock Jeb Bush and his political aspirations. They are the lowest of low-hanging fruits.
But his campaign isn’t dead, yet.
And his campaign isn’t dead for the same reason that John McCain’s campaign wasn’t dead when he completely ran out of money and had to start over from scratch. It’s the same reason that Mitt Romney could simultaneously be the very last choice of the Republican base (after they had chewed over “serious” candidates like Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, and Herman Cain) and the Republican nominee.
I’m not talking about Republican voters having a come-to-Jesus moment when they realize that they have to nominate someone with an iota of general election plausibility. I’m talking about the sheer impossibility of nominating Tom Tancredo or Fred Thompson or Rick Perry.
And, frankly, Tancredo, Thompson and Perry were considerably better prepared to handle the nuclear football than Donald Trump, Ben Carson, or Carly Fiorina.
Say what you want about Jeb Bush’s warmed-over policy proposals, he wouldn’t spend his first 90 days in office trying to work the light switches in the Residence or asking random Marines how to find the Situation Room.
Legum also compared the Jeb campaign to a zombie that doesn’t know it’s dead, but it could be that the more apt zombie comparison is that Jeb’s campaign is hard to kill and has a remarkable and frightening ability to come back to life.
I’ve said myself that Jeb has no juice. I’ve said that he doesn’t have what it takes. I’ve said that I see no real sign that he can fix his problems. That’s all true.
But I can’t count him out for a simple reason. Until I see the Republicans nominate a candidate as weak and ridiculous as their frontrunners, I won’t believe it will actually happen.
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2015/10/17/94046/478
October 17, 2015, 09:35 pm
Report: Trump, Carson to receive Secret Service protection
By Meghashyam Mali
The Secret Service is extending protection to GOP presidential contenders Donald Trump and Ben Carson, while beefing up Dem front-runner Hillary Clinton’s security, according to a report from Newsmax on Saturday.
Trump and Carson will receive agents as early as next week, with each candidate being assigned approximately two dozen agents. The report cites a source close to the agency’s planning.
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/257250-report-trump-carson-to-receive-secret-service-protection?utm_campaign=briefingroom&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitterfeed
And where ae the COMPLAINTS about our TAX DOLLARS being used to protect these two POS who are fear-mongering, race-baiting, and stirring up HATRED?
Just asking
https://twitter.com/_MusicalOne_/status/655720085542293504?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Happy Birthday, Ms. Esperamza!
Uh huh
Uh huh
Clinton cinches the nomination
By Kathleen Parker
October 16
With the latest poll numbers tallied and political pundits having spoken, a consensus has emerged: Hillary Clinton won the first Democratic debate and, barring a Benghazi piñata exploding with revelations, has cinched the nomination.
Reasons cited for Clinton’s superior performance have been well hashed by now. Her deft parrying placed her left-of-center but right-of-Sanders. She’s a progressive, she declared, but a pragmatic person who likes to get things done.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/clinton-clinches-the-nomination/2015/10/16/4cc0bad4-743f-11e5-9cbb-790369643cf9_story.html
My arse!
HELL NAWL, Kathleen Parker, the poll numbers and political pundits, and YOU can go straight to HELL. Ya’ll don’t decide who wins the nomination
Hillary rode PBO’s PRAGMATIC COATTAILS, during that debate. And that’s about as pragmatic as she’s ever going to get.
Good Morning, Everyone :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2flqv2GWKA
Tee hee hee
did you see this Rikyrah?
there is absolutely NO WAY, in my mind, that this was the FIRST TIME she did a scheme like this. ALL of her other tenures should be investigated. Folks just don’t wake up and decide to do a scheme like this. You learn from previous schemes.
Barbara Byrd Bennett’s Definitely ADEPT at SCHEMING
Good Morning, Everyone. Have a Blessed day.