From The Root. Click here to read the entire article.

When Hattie McDaniel, the first African American ever nominated for an Academy Award, arrived at the Ambassador Hotel for the 1940 ceremony, she was seated at a table on the extreme periphery of the auditorium. McDaniel had been nominated for Best Supporting Actress based on her role as Mammy in Gone With the Wind (1939). Though this seating assignment was quite insulting, such slights were not uncommon, as McDaniel had also been forced to miss the film’s Atlanta premiere due to southern Jim Crow laws. McDaniel would go on to win the Academy Award that evening in 1940, becoming the first African American to ever win the prestigious award. It would be 24 years before another African American would be declared an Oscar winner.

Continue reading "The Troubled (Black) History of the Oscars From Hattie McDaniel’s out-of-place seat assignment to the “Do the Right Thing” snub to Denzel’s win as a crooked cop, Todd Boyd surveys the last 70 years of the Academy Awards." »

from Slate. Click here to read entire article.

The primary purpose of a president’s annual budget is to highlight his domestic and foreign-policy priorities. But this year’s budget may have a secondary purpose: to scare Congress into doing something about the deficit.

Continue reading "Article: “OMB: OMG Obama’s new budget shows just how badly we need to fix the deficit.”" »

From Foreign Policy. Click here to read the entire article.

In 1939, Joseph Kennedy, then serving as U.S. ambassador to Britain, petitioned President Franklin D. Roosevelt to restrict foreign screenings of Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington on the grounds that the film was “an indictment of our government” that “will cause our allies to view us in an unfavorable light.” Capra’s depiction of a Washington dominated by special interests and toadying political hacks also angered Senate Majority Leader Alben Barkley, a Democrat from Kentucky, who complained that the movie presented a “grotesque distortion” of Washington politics that suggested that the Senate was nothing more than an “aggregation of nincompoops.”

Continue reading "Article: An Aggregation of Nincompoops — Viewed from across the pond, the U.S. government seems at best incompetent and at worst a joke." »

From Slate and via a facebook friend. Click here to read entire article:

Jamie Leigh Jones was 20 years old in 2005 when KBR—then a subsidiary of Halliburton—sent her to Baghdad’s Green Zone as a clerical worker. Her contract with Halliburton/KBR provided that “any and all claims that you might have against Employer related to your employment, including your termination, and any and all personal injury claim[s] arising in the workplace … must be submitted to binding arbitration instead of to the court system.” Mandatory arbitration clauses of this sort are hardly unusual. What’s unusual is that KBR is willing to go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court to keep Jones from having a day in court.

Continue reading "Article: Open the Shut Case Why is KBR so afraid of letting Jamie Leigh Jones have her day in court?" »