Why haven't I blogged? Been writing and reading and making a living

I've been invited to read in NYC/CUNY next Monday, September 27th in the evening.
Haven't been to NYC in a few years -- since the Intl PEN Festival when I met writers
from all over the world. Africa; Japan; Germany. A birthday present from Raquel
Ruiz (who's writing a book on women and boxing).

Right now I"m finishing a children's book on the life of Willie Velasquez, that's right
the Voting Pioneer that NYC isn't interested in, but I know I know it will sell.
It's called "The boy made of lightning."

Today I worked getting out the vote on the Southside...for County Commissioner
Tommy Adkisson. Too many people don't want signs or want to be bothered by voting. The Tea Party hype, like some nasty worm,has infested enough brains so that people are ashamed of Obama because he hasn't changed things fast enough -- spending money, etc.
If you hear this enough, you start believing it. The calls to the ego by the
conservative forces in this country seduce people into wanting to be morally superior, morally right. To question, to challenge the status quo, to recognize injustice and
do something about it because it's painful in our hearts -- this is something the
Democratic Party seems to have a hard time discussing. I don't care if we lose
this year's elections -- I'm interested in changing people's hearts. Guess that's why
I'm not a politician, eh?

Comments

Mary Alice, wife of Henry Cisneros, finds her voice in San Antonio as women battle for Free Speech in the Streets

She's a delicate bird of a woman, petite and beautifully apparelled. I know her husband, and she looks up to her supremely intelligent, charismatic, but scared of the status-quo husband. I suspect that she became a San Antonio councilwoman as a result of his lanky shadow. No matter. Yesterday, la Mary Alice stood up to the Man along with Councilwoman Lourdes Galvan and voted on the side of the Constitution and women's rights as one of two women on the San Antonio City Council who recognizes that anti-war or anti-immigrant protestors should be able to march on the streets without having to pay thousands of dollars for the privilege. While the city-wide Fiesta! bacchanal takes over the streets for weeks. With a vote of 9-2, the San Antonio City Council overwhelmingly voted to pass a new "Parade" Ordinance yesterday despite the organized protest of free speech advocates - mostly women - who believe that the City Council is violating the First Amendment of its citiz

A battered woman from San Antonio loses her reporting job

Gina Galaviz , 43, KSAT-TV's I-love-the-police reporter, "has been fired" from the television station , according to the San Antonio Express-News, and I'm quoting verbatim here from Jeanne Jakle's byline, "after she was charged with assault following a fight with her boyfriend," Ronald Aguillen, 46. Ok, so we in San Antonio know about the time in 2004 when Gina filed charges against another boyfriend, the former SWAT cop, who was a councilman at-the-time, Ron Segovia . There were allegations of an apple being thrown at her nalgas, which humiliated her, and that he also pointed a gun at her. It was not the first time, she told me. Tough-guy Segovia got off - I think he had three attorneys representing him if I remember correctly, and in this city, like too many, the cops are in bed with the grand jury - they need and depend on each other, and this grand jury decided there "wasn't enough evidence to pursue a criminal case against him." Seg

Jerry Pittman: The Worst Cop, but there's more in San Antonio

Part II of the Pittman Story ( click here for Part I of the story of San Antonio's badddddest cop) But let’s go back to the beginning of Pittman’s triumphant arc as a black role model, endorsed by white leaders and officially commended by the state’s black legislators. If you were a black nobody cop in the seventies, well, what would it take for you to get promoted? You’d have to be Superman, wouldn’t you? And in a city that sells itself on a myth of cultural fusion, then who would you arrest if you wanted a chance at getting promoted? Hmmmmm? His name was Big House. Real name, Willis Sterling, and he was one of those benevolent drug-dealer types, who’d get arrested, make bond, then go home to the Eastside in the 1980s. A non-violent man. “He was like a modern-day Robin Hood,” says T.C. Calvert, a well-known community activist who doesn’t do drugs himself, only hamburgers. He was so well-liked, say my elder sources, that all sorts of politicians liked hanging out a

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