Serena Williams Opens School In Kenya

International tennis player US's Serena Williams addresses students after opening the Serena Williams Secondary School in Matooni 161km east of Nairobi on November 14, 2008. Getty Images

KENYA sure is getting a lot of attention. Glad to see my girl doing her thing off the court as well.

Despite an unfortunate stomach injury at the Sony Ericsson Championships in Doha, world No.3 Serena Williams still had one huge milestone to look forward to in November, as she opened a school she has co-founded in Africa. Located in Matooni, in eastern Kenya, the school was built through a partnership with tech giant Hewlett Packard and the charity Build African Schools. Williams, accompanied by her mother and younger sister, officially opened the Serena Williams Secondary School on Friday, November 14.

After arriving in Africa, Williams took a 40-minute helicopter ride to Matooni, accompanied by Kenyan Education Minister Professor Sam Ongeri, where she was greeted by thousands of fans and supporters from nearby villages. After cutting the ribbon to open the solar powered school, she attended a play put on by area children and hosted a tennis clinic. "I feel so honored to be here. Thanks so much for receiving me for my first time in Kenya," said Williams at the opening. "Education is the only way out of poverty – that’s what my parents taught us – so obviously building this school is really near and dear to me," she added.

The school, which was opened in an area that has one of the highest dropout rates in Kenya, will be mixed gender. Williams promised that she would work with the government to bring electricity to the school and to improve educational standards. "This is my first of many schools I plan to open up in Kenya," said Williams. "It’s amazing how education has uplifted the lives of many people, and have empowered them to determine their own future… It is the best achievement that I have done in my life."

She's become quite the humanitarian over the past few years.

Sunday With Al - A Change Is Gonna Come

Can't get enough of that tune.

Jack Nicholson's 1978 Chevy

PRESIDENT Carter wore a cardigan in the White House to show leadership on energy conservation and he was virtually laughed out of office.

Here we are, thirty years later, facing a failing auto industry, a deteriorating environment, and a War for Oil, while Big Oil continues to record record profits.

Heaven help us.

Thanksgiving Faces

THE HOST asked me to bring collard greens and sweet potato pie. So I did. But when I got there, he put me to work, mashing potatoes, finishing the squash puree, glazing the carrots, making the gravy, baking the rolls. He took care of the roasted turkey with oyster dressing, the pineapple ham, the pearl onions. Up to 12 of us, many who had no other place to go, gave thanks over all that abundance.

I'm grateful for my beloved husband and my friends, real and virtual. For the memories of my father which make me smile and cry. For my mother in Milwaukee and my sister in California who called nonstop for cooking tips. Not to mention a whole host of birth relatives all over the country who probably won't get a phone call but who, nonetheless, live vividly in my heart this evening.

Mostly, I'm grateful for the gift of my health. As I sit and reminisce about all of my ancestors and my close friends who are now ancestral, I must be thankful for still being here, alive and well, and enjoying this heaven on earth.

And last, but certainly not least, I'm grateful for all of you for stopping by and reading my musings.

Obama Family Visits Chicago Southside Schoolchildren

THE QUALITY is poor.
The content, priceless.

Lord have mercy.

The dam has broken.
I can't stop weeping.

Happy Thanksgiving

WHILE the world bleeds and children hunger, give thanks for what you have but also give thought and prayer to those less fortunate.

Take care of your blessings.

Eating Crow

"ALL OF THESE articles about his boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii are geared towards showing his background is diverse, multicultural and putting that in a new light. Save it for 2050 ... I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and values. The right knows Obama is unelectable except against Attila the Hun." -- Mark Penn, March 19, 2007

"This year's primary results show no sign that Obama will reverse this trend should he win the nomination. In West Virginia and Kentucky, as well as Ohio and Pennsylvania, blue collar white voters sent him down to defeat by overwhelming margins. A recent Gallup poll report has argued that claims about Obama's weaknesses among white voters and blue collar voters have been exaggerated - yet its indisputable figures showed Obama running four percentage points below Kerry's anemic support among whites four years ago... Given that Obama's vote in the primaries, apart from African-Americans, has generally come from affluent white suburbs and university towns, the Gallup figures presage a Democratic disaster among working-class white voters in November should Obama be the nominee." -- Sean Wilentz, ignoramus, May 23, 2008

"When he is forced to fight, Sen. Obama's inexperience shows. His record, slight as it is, is tough to defend. He's got a glass jaw, and he will fall into the trap of identity politics. In fact, he already has. The "could we beat Obama?" conversation is purely academic. It's over. The Clintons have defeated him already, because he is leaving South Carolina as "the black candidate." He won't win another state. Even worse, in November Hillary will carry 90 percent of the black vote, despite their cynical, race-based campaign against the first viable black presidential candidate." -- Michael Graham, January 26, 2008

"[P]olarizing the contest into whites versus blacks will work just fine for Hillary." -- Dick Morris, January 23, 2008.

"Sen. Obama cannot possibly believe, and doesn't even act as if he believes, that he can be elected president of the United States next year." -- Christopher Hitchens, September 24, 2007

"As I wrote last December, "[t]he pundits can talk until they are blue in the face about Obama's charisma and eloquence and cross-racial appeal. The fact of the matter is that Obama has no chance of being elected president in 2008." I am more convinced of this conclusion than ever." -- Steven M. Warshawsky, American Thinker, August 11, 2008

(via Andrew)

Overcome

A woman is overcome with emotion after meeting Democratic presidential candidate Illinois Senator Barack Obama at a rally on October 3, 2008 in Abington, Pennsylvania. (STAN HONDA/AFP/Getty Images)

Reverend Jeremiah Wright Breaks His Silence

Jeremiah Wright, in a rare media appearance, told Sirius XM Satellite Radio's Mark Thompson that he understands why Obama distanced himself from him, but doesn't forgive the media the way it covered him.

His reaction to Obama's victory, he said, was a "mixed bag of being proud of him and being blessed to have lived" through the moment, and pain at being "put up by the media" as a "weapon of mass destruction to destroy his candidacy."

Wright, who posed what may have been the deepest challenge to Obama's candidacy, and provoked its most racially-charged moments, is now a footnote to a winning campaign. He opened little new ground, and expressed joy that his former friend was now president, and no remorse at his own role.

The negative press, and the final wave of negative ads, had been particularly painful, he said.

"I sort of never realized how that affects my family, what that does to my kids or my grandkids," he said.

Wright also seemed to dispute the notion that the inflammatory moments that aired on cable television and the Internet were out of character, though he said they were out of context.

"I’ve been preaching the same thing for 40 years," he said, saying that white audiences couldn't be expected to understand a form of worship they'd never seen, and was once practiced in secret.

He also said that Obama's chief political advisor had been the one who pressed for rescinding his invitation to perform the invocation at Obama's campaign launch in Springfield, referring to David Axelrod's "not wanting me to give a public invocation."

Wright also repeated his perception -- which helped convince Obama to cut him off after initially refusing to in his speech on race -- that politics was part of his former congregant's calculus.

"He’s running for the presidency of the United States of America, which is a country where blacks are a minority," he said. "To get the votes that he needs in electoral politics, he has to distance himself from me, because his support would dry up when certain parts of the constituency found out who I was."

His greatest disappointment, he said, wasn't in Obama, but in some of his fellows in the black church, who "just rolled over and played dead while we in the black church continue to be hammered for who we are."

Source

I was angered by the ads that ran in the final days of the campaign because they were gratuitous and harmful. But they didn't work.

God don't like ugly.

First African American Woman Wins National Book Award for Non-Fiction

Annette Gordon-Reed, a professor of history at Rutgers-Newark, has won the 2008 National Book Award for Non-fiction for her work "The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family."

An interview with the author.

Gordon-Read is the first African American woman to win the nonfiction award.

In addition to teaching at Rutgers, Gordon-Reed is a law professor at New York Law School.

She co-wrote with Vernon Jordan, Vernon Can Read: A Memoir.

Gordon-Reed is a graduate of Dartmouth College and Harvard Law School and lives with her family in New York City.

Source