Last March, Shirley Sherrod told an American tale of hope and redemption.

The year was 1986, and she was working for the Georgia field office for the Federation of Southern Cooperative/Land Assistance Fund. Sherrod, who is black, met a white farmer seeking help with a pending bankruptcy. But the farmer’s attitude was, shall we say, offputting.

“What he didn’t know while he was taking all that time trying to show me he was superior to me was, I was trying to decide just how much help I was going to give him,” Sherrod said. “I was struggling with the fact that so many black people had lost their farmland, and here I was faced with having to help a white person save their land. So I didn’t give him the full force of what I could do. I did enough.”

Sherrod did more than enough — she “kept us out of bankruptcy,” says the farmer’s wife, Eloise Spooner. “Her husband told her, ‘You’re spending more time with the Spooners than you are with me’… She took probably two or three trips with us to Albany just to help us out.”

The experience was a revelation for Sherrod. “I went on to work with many more white farmers,” she says. “The story helped me realize that race is not the issue, it’s about the people who have and the people who don’t. When I speak to groups, I try to speak about getting beyond the issue of race.”

Shirley Sherrod is now the USDA rural development director for Georgia. Or was.

Read more »

We stand by our judgment that Sarah Palin is only maintaining a pretense of running for President in order to keep her speaking fees and bendy straws flowing. We say this despite the fact that we would really, really, really enjoy such a development:

Read more »

While we’re all having fun with Sharron Angle pretending that she doesn’t endorse Social Security privatization, let’s see what the grownups are thinking:

Is there a new, bipartisan consensus forming on Capitol Hill about whether (and how) to scale back Social Security benefits? A surprising number of signs point to “yes” — and that has many progressives looking ahead a few months to what they believe could become a serious fight.

And who’s sharpening their knives?

Read more »

“President Barack Obama has decided to relieve Gen. Stanley McChrystal of his command over all U.S. military forces in Afghanistan, sources tell NBC News… The Associated Press reported that Obama has chosen Gen. David Petraeus to replace McChrystal as top Afghan commander.” [MSNBC]

If, like us, you’re just waking up to this story, apparently General Stanley McChrystal gossiped about Barry, Plugz, and our ambassador to Afghanistan to Rolling Stone, and now he’s being invited to the White House to deposit $20 billion into a slush fund be reminded about who’s in charge.

Note to Teabaggers: “Tyranny” is when you let the generals get away with it.

The Runaway General [Rolling Stone]

Obama leaving options open on firing McChrystal, Gibbs says [WaPo]

Part the First:

A court in Bhopal, India has sentenced seven men to two years each in jail after finding them guilty of criminal negligence over the accident that spewed tonnes of poisonous gas from a Union Carbide India Ltd plant in 1984. These are the first convictions related to the Bhopal gas accident, which is estimated to have caused the deaths of at least 15,000 people.

Read more »

Michelle Malkin on the GOP Crapweasel Club: “Yep, it’s time again for my upside-down elephant again. Just when CT Democrat Attorney General Richard Blumenthal’s Vietnam fables should be front and center political news, here’s a creepy Republican to steal the ignominious spotlight… Seriously, can these losers stop yammering about God when they’re caught?”