Don’t forget about two awesome events happening tonight:

• The Black Air Foundation Fundraiser to Benefit the Lambert Lima Flying Squadron Cadet Program from 7:00-9:00PM at the Cape Verdean Progressive Center, 329 Grosvenor Avenue, East Providence.
• The Incarceration Rate for Males of Color In the State of Rhode Island, hosted by the Rhode Island Young Professionals, taking place from 6:00PM and 9:00PM at Brown University’s MacMillan Auditorium, 167 Thayer Street.

Obama’s speech yesterday addressing race and the manufactured Jeremiah Wright controversy was brilliant and moving. Whether you agree with that assessment or see him as a crafty politician giving another pretty speech, it is notable for the fact that he actually dared to speak to the voters about a difficult issue as if they were mature adults capable of nuanced understanding and rational discussion.

It is unfortunate that we have to praise him for what should be the standard in American political discourse, but the fact remains that such forthright maturity is decidedly not the standard. All that remains to be seen is whether the voters (and pundits, and media, and his political opponents) actually are mature adults capable of nuanced understanding and rational discussion.

It’s extraordinary to realize that it’s been four years since Miguel Luna and I spoke at Beneficent Church, upon the first anniversary of the Iraq war. Tomorrow at noon, we’ll be gathering at there once more to demonstrate our continued opposition to the war:

In order to raise local awareness of these issues and their impact on the Providence and Rhode Island community and resist their ongoing existence, Providence SDS and fellow anti-war activists will engage in direct action and civil disobedience on Thursday March 20th at 12:00pm. We invite and encourage the press to attend in the interest of reporting on world issues that intersect with local events.

Earlier that morning, there’s the kick-off of the ‘We Can Stop the Hate Rhode Island’ initiative:

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One scraggly hippie grad student at a time. (Guns drawn, and without a warrant.)

The video’s here, in the ‘featured videos’ section.

While media attention has focused, over the past few days, on the indiscretions of Elliot Spitzer, the celebration of his Wall Street enemies, and the hotness of his $1000/hr prostitute, we might be missing the best part of this story: that Spitzer’s Lieutenant Governor, now Governor, David Paterson is awesome. Paterson, the first African-American and first legally blind person to hold the position of New York Lieutenant Gov., might be unready to jump into the role of state executive, but he might be just the man to bring real change to New York. Danny Hakim and John Sullivan profile the challenges facing Paterson, particularly the state’s mammoth budget deficit (we know a lil’ something about that here, no?), in today’s New York Times:

Mr. Paterson is considered more liberal than Mr. Spitzer on some key issues, and that could create friction with the Republicans. He opposes the death penalty and strongly supports overhauling New York’s Rockefeller-era drug laws, for example. Years ago he introduced a proposal to allow noncitizens to vote. On issues like abortion and embryonic stem cell research, Mr. Paterson is staunchly liberal, as is Mr. Spitzer.

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Justice League: New Frontier, the cartoon adaption of Darwyn Cooke’s instant classic about the dawn of the Silver Age of DC Comics, came out on DVD last week. When I was watching it, I was somewhat disappointed. My friends who hadn’t read the miniseries thought it was sweet, but I guess the actual comics ruined me. The movie didn’t capture those iconic moments like Hal Jordan kissing Carol Ferris before he takes off to fight the Center and J’onn J’onnz going apeshit and transforming into the Martian Manhunter we know and love when King Faraday died. That being said, I want to talk about something a little more substantive than fanboy concerns.

I want to talk about the political overtones of the story. That period in the late ’50s was an exciting (and scary) time to be alive for far greater reasons than the dawn of the Silver Age of comics. Americans were suffering silently under conformity, lynchings raged across the South, McCarthyism destroyed people’s lives, and we all feared that nuclear annihilation was around the bend.  But the Global South was on fire with social revolution — A lot of folks believed a real change was a-coming. Among them was Martin Luther King, Jr. (after the jump): more »

RIFuture has coverage of the legislative package that we unveiled at the Assembly today:

Rep. Grace Diaz, Sen. Juan Pichardo, Sen. Charles Levesque, Rep. David Segal, and Rep. Joe Almeida will join Immigrants United at a news conference to unveil the Campaign for Fairness, Respect and Civil Rights - a legislative platform that promotes racial and economic equality for every Rhode Islander.

The platform consists of 10 bills that promote community safety, civil rights and economic opportunity and strength. Attendees will include the International Institute of Rhode Island, the American Friends Service Committee; Comite de Inmigrantes en Accion; English for Action; Fuerza Laboral; Immigrant Students in Action; RI Jobs with Justice; Ocean State Action; Olneyville Neighborhood Association; Progreso Latino; R.I. Affiliate, ACLU and the R.I. Coalition Against Domestic Violence.

Record-High Ratio of Americans in Prison:

More than one in 100 adults Americans is in jail or prison, an all-time high that is costing state governments nearly $50 billion a year, in addition to more than $5 billion spent by the federal government, according to a report released today.

With more than 2.3 million people behind bars at the start of 2008, the United States leads the world in both the number and the percentage of residents it incarcerates, leaving even far more populous China a distant second, noted the report by the nonpartisan Pew Center on the States.