Year: 2011

  We like Jimmy, always have..

Jimmy Carter: Troy Davis Execution Exposes Flaws In Death Penalty

ATLANTA — Former President Jimmy Carter says the execution of death row inmate Troy Davis in Georgia shows that the nation's death penalty system is…

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We have received the following announcement from Gabriela McCall Delgado:

I would like to share with you the link to the We Connect Now website.
http://weconnectnow.wordpress.com/ The website was created while I was
a college student with a grant I received from YP4 to develop a
website to serve college students with disabilities. The website was
developed in an effort to connect and integrate college students with
disabilities as a virtual community with a voice on important issues.
The We Connect Now website has been up and serving college students
with disabilities since April of 2008.

I wanted to share the We Connect Now website with you so that you may
post it as a resource in your website or otherwise share it with
students that you serve or have contact with. The website has been
used as a resource by institutions of higher learning and has been
linked to by colleges and universities and groups serving people with
disabilities in 50 states and at least 9 foreign countries.

The We Connect Now website has been featured in the press
http://www2.hernandotoday.com/content/2011/jul/14/HBNEWSO1-college-students-with-disabilities/
http://theadvocate.com/utility/homepagestories/441855-98/site-offers-community-for-students.html
and in publications of various professional organizations
http://www.nacacnet.org/PublicationsResources/KnowledgeCenter/Pages/NewOnlineCommunity.aspx

I thank you for any and all help that you and your office may give me
in promoting this project as a service to all college students with
disabilities.

Sincerely,

Gabriela McCall Delgado

Editorial: For Mentally Ill, Justice Fails Again
(Denver Post)
September 16, 2011

PUEBLO, COLORADO– [Excerpt from Inclusion Daily Express] The news of a lawsuit alleging unconstitutional delays in evaluating mentally ill inmates by the state hospital in Pueblo is enough to leave Coloradans with the disoriented feeling that they're in a time warp. 

How many times must the courts be called in to protect the rights of this state's mentally ill? How often will budgetary pressure be cited as a reason for apparent neglect? 

"You can't use the budget crisis to justify violating people's constitutional rights. You don't dump the problem on the most-disenfranchised population in Colorado," exclaimed defense attorney Iris Eytan. "You fix it. You saw this coming. We sued you five years ago."

In response to that earlier legal action, the state agreed to provide mentally ill inmates in county jails with competency evaluations within 28 days of a judge's order. But Eytan and others maintain the state abandoned the terms of that deal in recent years.

As a result, they say, inmates who need an evaluation may languish for months behind bars before they get one. Only then, if they're found incompetent to stand trial, will they finally get the treatment they require.

Entire editorial:
Editorial: For mentally ill, justice fails again
http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_18887501

“You have to decide what kind of writer you want to be,” my friend Kate Gale told me at a recent conference. “You have to decide what career path you want to follow.” If anyone would know about these kinds of things, it would be Kate, who has created for herself a pretty amazing writing and publishing career.

But it’s challenging for me to think in those terms, in making clear-cut decisions towards a particular type of career. I know of writers who do, of poets who decided they wanted to become respected, so set about publishing only their very best poetry, then moved on to an important translation, then published some important works of theory or criticism. They become, shall we say, academic poets, poets who want to be remembered in academia for their intelligence, for their long and storied careers. Sometimes they speak in stentorian voices. They command attention. Non-poets may or may not know their work, but that’s really beside the point. The point is that other poets adore them.

On the other extreme, there are writers who go the pop culture route, who value big book contracts over carefully constructed plot development, who make their livings churning out murder mysteries or romance novels year after year. They are the writers with fancy houses and cars, the writers whose books have words like “diamonds” in their titles. They’re not usually poets, of course, but they seem to make nice lives for themselves even if respected writers turn down their noses at their work.

Of course, there are many grades in between. There are writers with B-list careers, for example, the Matthew Perry’s of the publishing world who write books that many people like, but who don’t win big awards or command huge audiences. Modest careers, one might say. But still, they spend their lives doing the work they love. There are writers with pop culture success who are also incredibly respected in academia. There are writers other writers love to read, but almost no one outside of the writing world would recognize their name. There are writers who self-publish, writers who never publish. Even, once in a great while, a recluse writer locked away in her attic changing posterity.

I like to think of myself as a poet of the people, as someone engaged with the stuff of everyday life—with atrocity, with war, with the harm one human will do to another. With nature, with fairy tales, with the human body. I love giving poetry readings, engaging with other poets and with an audience. I love meeting with other writers to share their words.

But when I’m being honest with myself, I realize that most readers wouldn’t consider my work “of the people.” I write mostly lyrical poetry, I reference the Oxford English Dictionary, I say thing like, “Readers should have to work hard to understand a poem” and “If you don’t know a word, look it up.” It’s true that I’d prefer respected writers enjoy my work, but it’s also true that I’d like my poetry to be something non-poets would like to read. I’d love, one day, to be riding a bus in Boston and see some random woman opening my poetry collection, some non-poet on her way to a 9-5 job diving into my words.

I don’t expect to be a pop culture poet (I don’t even own a TV) and I don’t expect to begin speaking in a stentorian voice. But I’d like some in between without, necessarily, having Matthew Perry’s career. I guess I’m saying I want more categories, more ways to be and write and work in the world. I want to keep writing and publishing in as far-ranging journals as will have me. I want to keep performing my work aloud. To meet with small groups of people and share their stories. Share my own. I’d like a career that lasts my lifetime, that continues to challenge me, continues to grow an audience. I’d like to continue working hard, every day.

Andrea Scarpino is a poet and essayist and a frequent contributor to POTB. You can visit her at:www.andreascarpino.com 

There are some things I believe without the irritable searching after the incitements of thought. For instance, John Wayne in The Searchers is crafty, brash, full of doubt, and accordingly believable as a man who is searching for his niece on the 19th century American frontier. I believe in doubt. Admire it in fact. Each day I invariably doubt my own capacities. I wonder if I can change the things that are in my immediate vicinity and influence those things that are ostensibly beyond me–the global. I recognize that I'm a searcher. I want the places where I work to be accessible to people with disabilities–want them to go beyond compliance as we like to say in the disability advocacy world. Yet, like John Wayne I feel rained on, sometimes find myself taking shelter under a tree. Just a few days ago I complained about a broken wheelchair ramp at Syracuse University. SU doesn't have an ADA Coordinator who counsels individual departments and facilities personnel. Everything is decentralized which means, alas, that access gets left behind and so I come along, newly minted, the fresh faculty face, and complain. Now there are meetings scheduled. The good townsfolk are gathering. This is good. I am capable of advocacy–the brashness, the inexorable crafty and pushy qualities of the activist are mine. But I am doubtful too. Syracuse University should be farther along with its accessibility initiatives. I doubt my efficacy. I'm tired of ADA failures in the places where I work. I've seen it all before. I doubt the system. Doubt myself. Keep moving. Keep talking. Where's Vera Miles? Where's Natalie Wood? 

"What sort of person do governments want as the secretary general of the United Nations? For all the tributes pouring forth on this anniversary, there is no evidence that the members of the Security Council have ever tried to find another Hammarskjold. Can it be that eight years of dynamic leadership half a century ago was enough for them?"

See Brian Urquhart's superb commentary in today's NY Times.

Soon it will leave Iowa City for the trek to Syracuse. This truck is as big as an ocean liner!

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 Gottfried Leibniz’s perpetual living mirror of the universe, the mondad, a psycho-somatic pellet of immanence. Half Gnostic, half Western rationalism, mostly ridiculous, and so, of course, an idea that I love. Today in the rain I shall turn my mirrors everywhere, catch every drop, each with the idea of a man and woman inside it–the rain falling freely with all thoughts in vitro. Let others read the newspapers. 

SK

"A nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people." –John F. Kennedy