“Here's the deal: It's not their damn business,” he said.

The U.S. Secret Service is at it again asking journalists about their race. This is getting kind of annoying.

A telling sentence in Eun-Kyung Kim's article suggests a shift in the way credentials for journalists are being handled now: “Credentials for the 2000 presidential debates were handled by the Senate Press Gallery. Applications did not ask for race information.”

My question is – why is race so important? Well, the article also states rather glibly that the infomation is necessary for the FBI database to cross-check “identifiers.” Are you satisfied with the official response?

Via New York Times

Richard G. Butler, founder of the Aryan Nations, a white supremacist organization died on September 8. As an aeronautical engineer Mr. Butler spent some time in India working for the Royal Indian Air Force. [Is that what it was called?] There, the article suggests, Mr. Butler “became aware of the caste system and the idea of racial superiority.”

The article quotes Butler:

“I noticed all the maharajahs were much whiter than the average Indian,” he told The Los Angeles Times in an article published in 1999. “As you went up the hierarchy, the lighter they got. It all got me to thinking, and when I came home from overseas, I had a feeling that we, the white race, were losing the war.”

Talk about a warped line of thinking! I was aghast to learn that the racist ideologies and actions of the Aryan Nations had its beginning in India!

According to National Public Radio there were some 1700 arrests over the course of the Republican National Convention. Photojournalist Moises Saman who works for Newsday in NYC was one of them.

Another highly subjective arrest was of activist and artist Joshua Kinberg. Watch this interview on Hardball with Ron Reagan on Sunday August 29, 2004.

And then there is this article about Arun Venugopal's experiences at the RNC.

I wonder who is more out of control.

Over the weekend we received a wedding invitation from a couple in New Jersey. Wrapped elegantly around the beautifully and tastefully designed invite was a strip of red paper tethered with gold tassels.

The inscription on the paper read:

“I have made you the polar star of my existence;
Never again can I lose my way in the voyage of life.”

– Rabindranath Tagore

This blog post is dedicated to Sangeetha, my wife, who has allowed me to gaze into her beautiful soul and made my life that much more richer.