Let’s see ... after graduating from Harvard Law as Law Review Editor, one candidate -- the grandson of a goatherd from Africa [Bloomberg News] -- heads for Chicago’s notoriously poor and ravaged South Side to organize neighborhoods in need of community playgrounds, asbestos cleanup and just plain help after the steel mills had shut down, leaving families with no jobs and not much hope. [L.A. Times]

I have often thought to myself... "Rome, at its peak, only lasted for so many years... the U.S. won't be 'on top' forever." And it appears W Bush has taken us to, and now, over the precipice.

The Federal Reserve, having demonstrated our entire unregulated financial system is based on nothing but thin air -- upon which the rich built fortunes on loans backed by loans that were backed by loans -- ‘saved’ the dominant, under-the-regulations paper giant Bear Sterns [International Herald Tribune], while the rest of us appear to be spiraling into something akin to our Great Depression, a fact that only a few seem to understand and our electronic media for the most part ignores. [Robert Reich]

We all know the story about how Bill Clinton had been so good for African-Americans that he was declared, by author Toni Morrison, to be 'the first black president.'

Yesterday a friend and colleague at work gave me this video of Dick Gregory from the State of the Black Union, recently held in New Orleans by Tavis Smiley.

And so it goes...

"Army Cpl. Christopher C. Simpson, 23, of Hampton, Va. ... was killed Monday in Baghdad," Washington Post, 3/21/08. "Army Major Alan G. Rogers, 40, [who had worked at the Pentagon] was buried at Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors ... Killed by a makeshift explosive device in Baghdad on Jan. 27 ... he was awarded a Purple Heart, posthumously, and his second bronze star ... His thesis adviser at Georgetown said he had thought, ‘This is a guy I’m going to hear from in 10 years, and he’s going to be a general,’" Washington Post, 3/22/08.