Politics
Breaking Barriers: Kentucky’s First Female African American Senator, Georgia Davis Powers
Kathy Groob, former elected city council member, publisher of ElectWomen Magazine, and partner at November Strategies political consulting firm contributed this inspiring article about Georgia Davis Powers, the first woman and first African American elected to the Kentucky state senate. It’s the first of a number of Women’s History Month guest posts I’m excited to share with 9 Ways readers.
At the time, Georgia Davis Powers had no idea she had made history in 1968 by becoming the first woman AND the first African-American elected to Kentucky’s State Senate. All she knew was that she wanted to make a difference in her community.
It was never her intention to become a politician, or even to work in government, but in the spring of 1962 Powers was introduced to politics upon the suggestion of fellow church member Verna Smith. Upon Ms. Smith’s advice she joined the U.S. Senatorial campaign staff of Wilson Wyatt. This led to six more years of managing mayoral, gubernatorial, and congressional campaigns. She also became heavily involved in the civil rights movement, leading the Allied Organization for Civil Rights in promoting statewide public accommodations and fair employment law in the early 1960’s. In 1964, she was one of the organizers of a march on the capital in Frankfort in support of equity in public accommodations, in which Dr. Martin Luther King and baseball legend Jackie Robinson participated.
In 1964 she was the first black woman elected to the Jefferson County Democratic Executive Committee. But after two years she resigned after becoming discouraged by the fact that the Committee had not discussed a single one of her proposals.
In 1966 she worked in the bill room during the legislative session for the Kentucky House of Representatives. This gave her the opportunity to see first hand how government functioned; as a result her political ambitions grew.
Read MoreWomen's History Friday Roundup: The Rally Edition
In 2004, women made history by descending on Washington in droves to March for Women’s Lives. Estimates vary about how many people attended the march, but it’s safe to say that there were over 1 million pro-choice activists in D.C. in 2004, myself included.
Last weekend a Walk for Choice was held in cities across the globe. Here is a roundup of photos from rallies across the country–the decentralized nature of the walk made it impossible to get exact numbers, but the geographic dispersion was impressive.
This Is a Sampling of What a Pro-Choice Rally Looks Like:
NYC – Feministing
Boston Walk for Choice
Walk for Choice Chicago – Feministing
Tucson Walks for Choice – Feminists for Choice
But we should not have to fight these battles over and over…
If you’ve got photos that you would like to add to our historical record (however “unofficial” it might be), please leave a link in the comments section. And by all means, take a moment to share your most proactive and innovative thoughts about what history you want to write for the future of reproductive rights, health, and justice.
Read MoreIs Olberman the Canary in the Progressive Talk Mine?
Like many who are talking about Keith Olberman’s show ending tonight, I have been watching him less lately than when he began “Countown” eight years ago during the height, or perhaps depth would be the more accurate term, of the W Bush administration.
Though he was the breakthrough up-front liberal to be given a prime time show on a major network, he has since been joined by others, most notably Rachel Maddow and Ed Schultz. I have more options if I want to watch a like-minded commentator. And like any show that has been running for some years, Olberman’s patter could wear on me at times.
Still I felt a foreboding shiver run down my spine when I heard the news of Olberman’s departure from MSNBC.
Read MoreEagle Forum Leader Schlafly Calls Single Women “Welfare Queens” – Yes, She Really Did
Eagle Forum founder Phyllis Schlafly put her foot in it big time yesterday when she said single women are “welfare queens” and President Obama is trying to create more of them, just so they’ll be dependent on what Schlafly refers to as “big daddy” government. After blacks, she claimed, they’re his second biggest voting block. The O’Reilly Factor on Fox News invited me to share my thoughts on the matter. Read TPM’s news report and watch the video of her remarks here if you have the stomach for it.
She’s wrong on at least two counts.
Read MorePanel at Netroots Nation 2010 on Why Women Are Key to Victory
Netroots Nation is the premier conference for progressive bloggers. So I’m totally thrilled that they accepted my proposal to facilitate a panel on “Why Women Are the Key to the Future of Progressive Election Victories.”
As the GOP has garnered victories in Massachussetts, Virginia and New Jersey since the 2008 presidential election, progressives are looking for a new path to keep the seats they have and win back the ones they’ve lost. Standard playbook assumptions about where, how and why progressives can win campaigns have been turned on their head as increasing numbers of voters feel disaffected and Tea Partiers throw wild cards into many races. Progressive women can embrace this moment to help move the progressive agenda forward. But too often the Democratic Party fails to recruit and support the very women candidates who could be game changers for progressive politics. We’ll discuss how the growing numbers of activist women—and organizations devoted to helping them participate in politics and political leadership—can help reconnect voters with important progressive economic and gender issues. And we’ll analyze how to access the untapped power of women who want to make a difference for progressive issues and what it will take to get them elected.
Read MoreUm Could This Possibly Be Why We Have Nuclear Weapons to Begin With?
The picture says it all. Thanks to Lucinda Marshall of Feminist Peace Network for calling it to my attention.
Read MoreTime for Women to Drive Our Own Health Care Bus
Check out this new video from new Women’s Media Center website notunderthebus.com. You can also follow @notunderthebus (or check out hashmark #underthebus) on Twitter, and please become a fan on Facebook. It’s going to be a long drive, but together we can turn this bus around starting today.
Read MoreSay It Isn’t So, O!
They always disappoint you, these politicians. I tend to be a bit of a Pollyanna or at least a cockeyed optimist even after all these years of political involvement. And though Obama’s appointments have sometimes been thrilling, sometimes worrying; I figured we needed to cut the guy some slack; he’s got a mighty hard job in front of him after all, and it is critically important that he be successful.
But today, he went too far when he gave Rev. Rick Warren the enormous honor of delivering the invocation at his inauguration. I mean, please. Sarah Posner at The Nation writes:
There was no doubt that Obama, like every president before him, would pick a Christian minister to perform this sacred duty. But Obama had thousands of clergy to choose from, and the choice of Warren is not only a slap in the face to progressive ministers toiling on the front lines of advocacy and service, but a bow to the continuing influence of the religious right in American politics. Warren vocally opposes gay marriage, does not believe in evolution, has compared abortion to the Holocaust and backed the assassination of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Excuse me, but what about the basic human rights of women and gays? Is Obama buying into the absurd notion that such disrespect for our fundamental humanity is just a matter of opinion rather than a violation of simple justice?
Read MoreThe Democrats’ Dilemma: Their Own Trojan Horse Kicks Free
Democratic leaders have said that the Stupak amendment’s draconian new restrictions on abortion contained in the House health-reform bill will not appear in the final version. Here why voters who value women’s health cannot sit back and accept such assurances. Re-posted here courtesy of the Women’s Media Center which originally posted it as an exclusive and is rolling out a public and media education campaign to help Stop Stupak. But I think stopping the bad is only the first part of what we need to do…
House Democrats broke into a paroxysm of self-congratulation for passing a health reform bill. By embracing the Stupak-Pitts amendment, however, they entered the women’s hall of shame. They had promised no more limitations based on preexisting conditions. But House leadership allowed a codicil: Except if you are a woman.
The Stupak-Pitts amendment to the health bill is a sweeping ban on insurance coverage of abortion. It expands the 1976 Hyde amendment, which outlaws abortion coverage by existing Federally funded programs, to middle class women participating in the public option, even if they pay from their own pocketbooks. Hyde began a juggernaut of restrictions on abortion and birth control that I’d hoped the current health care debate would rectify.
Headlines blaring, “Abortion an Obstacle to Health-Care Bill,” got it backward. And the biggest obstacle was President Obama’s approach, which meshed all too well with Speaker Pelosi’s: they are both so averse to feather-ruffling that one wonders why they entered the rough and tumble of politics in the first place. No amount of Rahm Emmanuel’s mean-guy interference could have kept this chicken’s eggs from breaking, let alone its feathers in place.
Smart as he is, why didn’t Obama know that when you start from a position of compromise, you’ll end up with a fragment of what you wanted, if that? The public option is too weak to exercise serious cost-cutting control. And now women have been sacrificed, like so much detritus, even though we are 51 percent of the population and (in case they haven’t noticed) 60 percent of Democratic voters.
Read MoreRovian Reality Bites Make My Blood Boil
When I read the New York Times front page story today, showing the extent of Karl Rove’s involvement in the iregular firings in 2006 of a number of U.S. attorneys who weren’t toeing the Rove-Bush line, my blood boiled. Not that this was big news–it was merely a reminder of the many Bush administration abuses of power. I asked my friend, BILL ISRAEL, a former University if Massachusetts Amherst faculty member now at St. Mary’s University, San Antonio, Texas, and the author of the forthcoming book Stealing Reality: the Rise of the Right, the Fracture of News, the Lessons of Karl Rove, to share his thoughts on the matter with me and Heartfeldt readers.
The extent of Karl’s involvement in the purge of U.S. attorneys in the Justice Department is no surprise to anyone who’s known him well. During Watergate, he worked as understudy to Donald Segretti, convicted for performing campaign dirty tricks for Richard Nixon. So I learned a great deal from Karl in the course of teaching “Politics and the Press” with him at the University of Texas at Austin, while he revved up the campaign of George W. Bush to become president.
Unlike Segretti, Karl, to date, has never been convicted. Yet he remains a specialist in wreaking havoc with his opponents, putting deniable distance between himself and responsibility, then arguing that, like Valerie Plame, all opponents are “fair game.” The “hit parade” of his experience in hitting political and other opponents is Chapter 7 of my forthcoming book.
What’s different about the era of Karl, as opposed to the era of Segretti, is that while Karl remains a central coordinator for the political Right, he is also one of its chief beneficiaries. He is among a legion of young conservatives who since the 1960s have been schooled in literally hundreds of right-wing institutions founded since 1935 in a calculated and carefully-coordinated plan to change the ideology of the United States — to push it to the right. The success of that effort accounts for the incredible success of the Right in dominating American politics since the 1970s — and in its efforts to stop health care and health insurance reform now.
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