March 2012

by Jeremy Leaming

As is being widely noted by media, right-wing pundits, or blowhards, such as Fox News’ Sean Hannity, are feverishly working to create uproar over President Obama’s association with the late Harvard Law School Professor Derrick Bell.

TPM’s Ryan J. Reilly reports on Hannity’s airing of a video edited by associates of the late Andrew Breitbart that shows a young Barack Obama, then a Harvard law student, hugging Bell at an event calling for the law school to hire more African American women for its tenured faculty. “This was supposedly secret video that the late Andrew Breitbart had promised from Obama’s college days, showing … Obama supporting Harvard Law Professor Derrick Bell’s campaign for more diversity at the institution,’ Reilly writes.

The video, as TPM and Media Matters’ Simon Maloy note, has been aired and written about before. But, Breitbart’s team hasn’t given up on trying to sully Bell’s legacy.

As Maloy writes, Breitbart, who died last week, has painted Bell as “a dangerous radical who, in the act of pressing his body to the young Obama’s, imparted to him all the insane radicalism that now animates the moderate liberal currently residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.”

The late professor, however, was no radical. Remember, this charge is coming from the late Breitbart, who Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone points out, should be celebrated largely for his shamelessness.

Obama, and many others for that matter, should be proud of Bell (pictured) and his work.

As noted by Inimai Chettiar, a civil rights attorney, for ACSblog, Bell “was a racial justice pioneer and teacher who enlightened many.” She continued, “He was the first black law professor at Harvard Law School, yet in 1990 he vowed to take an unpaid leave of absence until the school hired a black woman for its tenured faculty.”

by Jeremy Leaming

The Occupy Wall Street protests helped amplify discussion of the nation’s growing economic inequality. They highlighted the fact that conservative economic policy has made a tiny few in the country extremely wealthy, while shoving many more people into poverty.

Not surprisingly, however, those demonstrations have also prompted Congress to react with legislation that as The Daily Agenda reports would undoubtedly work to harm free speech. In its first post on the legislation, H.R. 347, The Daily Agenda dubbed the measure the “anti-Occupy law,” because it is aimed at keeping many federal buildings and grounds free of protestors. The measure is not law yet, but it easily passed both chambers of Congress and has been sent to the president.

The measure, euphemistically dubbed the “Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act,” would alter federal criminal law barring persons from “knowingly” wandering onto “any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority.” Those places include the White House, the vice president’s residence, “a building or grounds where the President or other persons protected by the Secret Service is or will be temporarily visiting,” or federal buildings or grounds that are hosting a “special event of national significance.”

The anti-free speech measure’s chief sponsor is Florida Republican Rep. Tom Rooney, who has railed against President Obama’s landmark health care reform law, the Affordable Care Act. Rooney is also supporting a federal lawsuit lodged by a religious university against a part of the health care reform law that will require insurance companies to pay for contraceptives for workers at religiously affiliated institutions.