The guests of honor were feuding. Spectators booed and cheered behind steel barricades. A crew from an entertainment television program buzzed around a coffin draped in a pink cover studded with rhinestones spelling out her name.
Anna Nicole's Smith's funeral on Friday was part soap opera, part circus perhaps a fitting combination for a woman who found a niche on the ragged outer edge of celebrity as a former Playboy Playmate and reality TV star.
But for those who came to pay their respects, the event was a solemn one despite the atmosphere.
"It was very, very sad," said Kathryn Beranich, who was supervising producer of Smith's reality TV show. "Seeing the casket being rolled down, you realize this friend is in there and she will no longer be with us."
While Smith was laid to rest at the lavish service, the fight over her baby daughter and a potential multimillion dollar inheritance remained very much alive. Her companion Howard K. Stern, her mother Virgie Arthur and her former boyfriend Larry Birkhead are battling for custody of 5-month-old Dannielynn, and barely put their bickering aside for the ceremonies.
Today on IHT.com
Iraqi tribal chief opposes the jihadists Growing calls in Australia for terror suspect's return Argentina contemplates shared custody of its top jobInside Mount Horeb Baptist Church, pink roses and flower arrangements lined the aisle and adorned the altar, where organizers placed two photos of the blonde bombshell including one showing her striking a Marilyn Monroe-like pose.
Fewer than 100 people attended the service, even though organizers said about 300 including an "Entertainment Tonight" camera crew had been invited. Guests said rock guitarist Slash, formerly of Guns N' Roses, was in attendance, and country singer Joe Nichols performed two songs.
Posted by: Fred ||
03/03/2007 00:00 ||
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#1
The baby is 5 months old and there has been no DNA matching.
The article at the link describes an existing service to turn your loved one into a diamond.
Anna was ditzy enough that I was surprised that she didn't turn her son into one and wear him around her neck instead of deap sixing him. Then she could have become the second diamond and the kid could have had instant earings.
The first total lunar eclipse in more than two years will wow skywatchers if skies are clear in eastern parts of North America and all of Europe and Africa Saturday evening. The eclipse will be in progress when the Moon rises in the eastern half of the United States. It will be over before the Moon rises on the West Coast.
The Moon will begin to enter Earth's shadow at 3:18 p.m. ET (20:18 GMT). From locations where it is dark at that time, it will appear as though a bite is being taken out of the Moon. At 5:44 p.m. ET, (22:44 GMT) totality begins when the Moon will be fully inside the shadow.
"For North Americans, the farther East you go, the better the view," said Joe Rao, SPACE.com's Skywatching Columnist. "As the Sun sets in the West, the Moon will coming up on the opposite side of the sky in the East.
From the Eastern United States and Canada, the best view will be one that is unobstructed to the East, allowing a clear look at the Moon as it rises. Totality ends at 6:58 p.m. ET (23:58 GMT). The Moon exits Earth's main shadow, called the umbra, at 8:11 p.m. ET, which correspond to the wee hours of Sunday morning in Europe.
Several webcasts of the eclipse are planned, from the Canary Islands, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway and Spain.
The next total lunar eclipse, Aug. 27, will favor skywatchers in the Western United States.
#1
The sky will fall, there will be mass death, the aliens will come and get Al Gore their spiritual leader and cure the world of global warming. Oh ya, and sap that masty woman Shehan off the face of the earth! Oh damn, where's my meds!
Posted by: 49 Pan ||
03/03/2007 7:47 Comments ||
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#2
Cool! I'm getting the telescope out.
Posted by: Mike ||
03/03/2007 8:38 Comments ||
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#3
message to muzzies....
Posted by: Frank G ||
03/03/2007 9:18 Comments ||
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#4
Sunny in MA right now; they're calling for clouds & a T-storm this afternoon. Sux to be me...
#9
Looked great from this side of the pond . . . until the clouds socked everything in, dang it. Mr. exJAG is on a flight back from DC at the moment -- I bet the view is superb up there.
Bangladesh authorities waging a corruption crackdown have asked banks to freeze the accounts of 53 prominent politicians and business tycoons suspected of massive tax evasion. The National Board of Revenue has ordered all the banks to freeze the accounts of 53 persons against whom there are allegations of corruption, said SM Aminur Rahman, managing director of the state-owned Sonali Bank. We have already asked our branches to freeze the transactions of these people until further notice, he added.
The 53 included 50 politicians, bureaucrats and businessmen the Anti-Corruption Commission named earlier this month in a list of graft suspects. The new military-backed interim government has already detained 37 high-profile figures with links to both the main political parties on corruption charges. The governments anti-graft drive is aimed at cleaning up politics and holding credible elections after polls scheduled for January 22 were cancelled amid rigging allegations. President Iajuddin Ahmed scrapped the polls amid escalating violence on January 11. He also imposed emergency rule and stepped down as head of the previous caretaker government.
Posted by: Fred ||
03/03/2007 00:00 ||
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China's Communist leader in Buddhist Tibet yesterday labelled the party a "living Buddha" for Tibetans. Zhang Qingli, Tibet's party chief, said: "The Communist Party is like the parent to the Tibetan people and it is always considerate about what the children need."
It is interesting how the Buddha.. Siddhartha Gautama, an Indian prince, probably a thin ascetic, has morphed into a roly poly Chinese guy with a big belly.
Posted by: John Frum ||
03/03/2007 10:31 Comments ||
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#6
Fat, sits around and doesn't produce anything of value?
#7
S: Zhang Qingli, Tibet's party chief, said: "The Communist Party is like the parent to the Tibetan people and it is always considerate about what the children need."
This is a weird parent indeed, that imprisons, tortures and kills its "children". Most parents would die in their children's place. The Communist Party insists that its children die in its place.
#1
I can't see why the French would need to have military landing rights at a Cypriot airport. I'm sure the British would provide them whatever they needed at RAF Akrotiri. This sounds like the French sticking their nose in something just to start some trouble.
Posted by: mac ||
03/03/2007 5:30 Comments ||
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#2
This sounds like the French sticking their nose in something just to start some trouble.
Canada's ruling Conservative party is widening its lead over major rival Liberal party, gaining 9 more percentage points than the Liberals in a new poll. The Decima Research poll, made available to the Canadian Press, showed Stephen Harper's Conservatives held 36 percent support nationally, similar to the numbers they gained during the last election over a year ago.
Support for the Liberals fell to 27 percent, well below the mid- 30s the party held shortly after electing Stephane Dion leader in December. The survey of just over 1,000 Canadians was conducted between Feb. 22 and Feb. 26, suggesting the Green party continues to show momentum across Canada, with 13 percent support nationally, tied with the NDP for the first time in Decima's polling.
The Bloc Quebecois, which runs only in the Quebec province, recorded 35 percent support in the province. In an average of the last three weekly polls, the Conservatives have 33 percent, the Liberals 30 percent, the NDP 14 percent, the Bloc nine percent and the Greens 11 percent. The Conservative government is facing a confidence vote when it tables the budget on March 19. If the budget cannot pass, a new election will have to take place.
Posted by: Fred ||
03/03/2007 00:00 ||
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Dudly Do-Right and Nell Fenwick?
Posted by: Redneck Jim ||
03/03/2007 10:09 Comments ||
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The originals: Nelson Eddy & Jeanette McDonald.
Posted by: Fred ||
03/03/2007 10:27 Comments ||
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#3
Ummmm, "Canadian Sunset?"
Posted by: Redneck Jim ||
03/03/2007 12:13 Comments ||
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Obama's white ancestors owned slaves. So says the research of William Addams Reitwiesner, "who works at the Library of Congress and practices genealogy in his spare time", and who is featured in this morning's edition of the Baltimore Sun.
Hat tip: NewsBusters.org
Many people know that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's father was from Kenya and his mother from Kansas.
But an intriguing sliver of his family history has received almost no attention until now: it appears that forebears of his white mother owned slaves, according to genealogical research and Census records. To many potential jokes, fighting to hold back...
According to the research, one of Obama's great-great-great-great grandfathers, George Washington Overall, owned two slaves who were recorded in the 1850 Census in Nelson County, Ky. The same records show that one of Obama's great-great-great-great-great-grandmothers, Mary Duvall, also owned two slaves.
An Obama spokesman did not dispute the information and said that the senator's ancestors "are representative of America." Right
#3
Obviously an attempted smear, now who would do that? (Hint Initials are Hillary Clinton)
Posted by: Redneck Jim ||
03/03/2007 14:57 Comments ||
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#4
As I understand it, the average African-American is partially descended from Euro-Americans -- and more than a few of those Euro-American ancestors were slave-owners.
So this article is pretty much a "so what?" combined with a "what else is new?"
#6
We're all Americans, except the creeps in the political parties that make a big deal about digging this stuff up. Nice try at being a 1st class a$$hole. Congradulations, you've succeeded.
Posted by: Alaska Paul ||
03/03/2007 17:19 Comments ||
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I: Obviously an attempted smear, now who would do that? (Hint Initials are Hillary Clinton)
I suspect we're going to find out shortly that Hillary Rodham Clinton's ancestors owned slaves. As did Bill Clinton's forebears.
#8
No this came up with Reitwiesner in his genealogy hobby. The article explains that. Something it turns out he does with a lot of DC folks.
Ironic as in being stupid enough to expect fresh seafood with your overprice meal at Gwennies when you could have gotten a better fish sandwich at the McDonald's down the block. Big schitting deal.
The point was looking at what the Clintons might try and throw up in the air while looking at what facts Obama decided to leave out in his book.
#10
Ima kinda liking the GGGGGF name: George Washington Overall. Reminds me of the Indian joke where the baby is named after the first thing seen by the father: Golden Sun, Rising Moon, Two Dogs....,
Least he wasn't looking at the privvy.
Poll: The Politics Of Health Care
Most Americans Favor Universal Health Care, Give Democrats Edge On Improving System
Once again, they oversample Democrats and "Independents" to get the message they desire.
Total Respondents: 1281
Total Republicans: 357
Total Democrats: 440
Total Independents: 484
Total Registered Voters: 1130
So it should be no surprise theyre reporting that "most Americans" want some form of socialized healthcare system or that "most Americans" favor the Democrats to improve the healthcare system.
I just surveyed registered voters here in my house and it appears 100% think this poll is full of crap.
#1
And the avoided the obvious follow on question - Are you willing to pay over 50% of your earned income in taxes to support such socialized medicine?
#5
Alternative phrasing: "would you like John Kerry and Hillary Clinton to make all your health-related decisions instead of you? under what conditions would they be allowed to withhold treatment from you, or euthanize you?"
#6
All democrats should be euthanized within one year of retirement, preferably before the end of October. This plan would reduce the Social Security burden while doing no real harm.
#9
And the sampling is not enough, either. They weight the sample away from the Trunks. See page 22 at the complete report on the poll.
I think I took part in this poll, but if it ever happens again, I'll identify myself as an independent, so my choices will get more, not less, weight.
Posted by: Bobby ||
03/03/2007 12:37 Comments ||
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#10
we already ARE paying for illegal aliens health care. And no I'm not willing to do so, but what can I do about it. I hate how our system has been failing us in such a catastrophic way. Our elected officials haven't been listening to us, they have been following the money.
socialized medicine would be a big mistake. With these carefully orchestrated polls controlling our future we're all screwed.
I'm sorry for this attitude, I'm usually a very positive thinking person. But with all of this crap being piled on top of us, it makes it harder to find the perverbial pony.
Posted by: Jan ||
03/03/2007 12:57 Comments ||
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#11
true, Jan, but they never want to tell us the true bottom line on feeding, caring, educating, and curing Illegals, cuz they know the uproar it would cause
Posted by: Frank G ||
03/03/2007 14:01 Comments ||
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#12
Remember - we ALL have the "1776" option. It's not as easy as it used to be, but the option is still on the table. Donks and Trunks alike should keep that in mind. Any attempt to eliminate that option will trigger it.
Posted by: Old Patriot ||
03/03/2007 14:17 Comments ||
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#13
Remember - we ALL have the "1776" option. It's not as easy as it used to be, but the option is still on the table.
Yeah. And it isn't as difficult as you might believe either. With the right coordination and organization, it could be over in an eye blink.
#14
Given all the facts, most Americans will favor regulated private medicine, with public funding for those who are disabled or who have been caught in a financial bind. And that IS an inclusivist system. That is: Americans - contrary to Euro-think - support universal care, with regard to affordability.
I have heard stories of UK fraudsters who claim to be heroin addicts, so that they can peddle their state supplied heroin. A system that allows that is universal, in stupidity.
Hillary Clinton suffered an embarrassment in her campaign for the Democratic nomination on Tuesday after it was reported that she did not fully disclose her finances in her annual Senate ethics report.
The Washington Post reported that Clinton had failed to include a family charity she operates with Bill Clinton and their daughter, Chelsea, in her report to the Senate for the last five years.
The Clintons established the charity in 2001 and have donated more than $5-million over the years, deducted from their taxable income. The foundation, which lists Hillary Clinton as treasurer and secretary, has given $1,25-million to their church, universities, the Unicef tsunami fund, charities in the memory of Jordan's King Hussein and Israel's Yitzhak Rabin, and a women's development organisation.
The family charity is separate from the Clinton Foundation which has helped raise more than $10-billion to fight Aids.
Clinton's office said the failure to disclose the existence of the foundation to the Senate was an oversight and had been corrected immediately on learning of the omission from the Post. "The details of the Clintons' charitable family foundation and Senator Clinton's role in it have always been publicly available but, in an oversight that leaders of both parties have made, it was inadvertently omitted from her Senate filing, which has been corrected," a spokesperson, Philippe Reines, was quoted as telling the newspaper.
Clinton is not the first high profile leader to be confronted with such a lapse. The house speaker, Nancy Pelosi, was also forced to amend her disclosure report.
By Ker Than - LiveScience Staff Writer
Scientists scanning the deep interior of Earth have found evidence of a vast water reservoir beneath eastern Asia that is at least the volume of the Arctic Ocean.
The discovery marks the first time such a large body of water has found in the planets deep mantle.
The finding, made by Michael Wysession, a seismologist at Washington State University in St. Louis, and his former graduate student Jesse Lawrence, now at the University of California, San Diego, will be detailed in a forthcoming monograph to be published by the American Geophysical Union.
Looking down deep
The pair analyzed more than 600,000 seismogramsrecords of waves generated by earthquakes traveling through the Earthcollected from instruments scattered around the planet.
They noticed a region beneath Asia where seismic waves appeared to dampen, or attenuate, and also slow down slightly. Water slows the speed of waves a little, Wysession explained. Lots of damping and a little slowing match the predictions for water very well.
Previous predictions calculated that if a cold slab of the ocean floor were to sink thousands of miles into the Earths mantle, the hot temperatures would cause water stored inside the rock to evaporate out.
That is exactly what we show here, Wysession said. Water inside the rock goes down with the sinking slab and its quite cold, but it heats up the deeper it goes, and the rock eventually becomes unstable and loses its water.
The water then rises up into the overlying region, which becomes saturated with water [image]. It would still look like solid rock to you, Wysession told LiveScience. You would have to put it in the lab to find the water in it.
Although they appear solid, the composition of some ocean floor rocks is up to 15 percent water. The water molecules are actually stuck in the mineral structure of the rock, Wysession explained. As you heat this up, it eventually dehydrates. Its like taking clay and firing it to get all the water out.
The researchers estimate that up to 0.1 percent of the rock sinking down into the Earths mantle in that part of the world is water, which works out to about an Arctic Oceans worth of water.
Thats a real back of the envelope type calculation, Wysession said. Thats the best that we can do at this point.
The Beijing anomaly
Wysession has dubbed the new underground feature the Beijing anomaly, because seismic wave attenuation was found to be highest beneath the Chinese capital city. Wysession first used the moniker during a presentation of his work at the University of Beijing.
They thought it was very, very interesting, Wysession said. China is under greater seismic risk than just about any country in the world, so they are very interested in seismology.
Water covers 70 percent of Earths surface and one of its many functions is to act like a lubricant for the movement of continental plates.
Look at our sister planet, Venus, Wysession said. It is very hot and dry inside Venus, and Venus has no plate tectonics. All the water probably boiled off, and without water, there are no plates. The system is locked up, like a rusty Tin Man with no oil.
#1
Very interesting. Not something I had heard before, but haven't followed this topic in 20 years, so... But nothing said in this article strikes me as patently bogus.
It's not an 'ocean', as title correctly scare quotes. It is also not all under China - it just seems there may be a bit more there than average. I am curious why that might be - perhaps somehow related to the collision of Indian and Asian plates, or perhaps not actually unusual but just the first noted?
#5
Glenmore, about 1500 BCE, emperor Yao set up teams to drain Chinese mainland of excess water that was a remnant of some immense flood/tsunami that flooded all the land except for higher elevations. The lowland depresions drained longer, for about 20 years or thus, so the fragments of literature related to that perio go. It is posible that the water locked in the Beijing anomaly is originating from those times.
Those Geico "cavemen" shouldn't be so upset after all they may get their own television series. ABC said Friday it had ordered a pilot for a comedy, tentatively titled "Cavemen," that features the characters used in a series of ads by the insurance company.
In the ads, cavemen appear insulted by a Geico pitchman's claim that the company's Web site is so easy to use that "even a caveman can do it."
The potential series, one of 14 pilots that will be produced by Touchstone Television this spring, features the cavemen as they "struggle with prejudice on a daily basis as they strive to live the lives of normal thirty-somethings in 2007 Atlanta."
It's unusual for characters from an advertising campaign to move into shows of their own, but not unprecedented. The CBS comedy "Baby Bob" featured a talking baby that had been used in several advertisements, according to Daily Variety.
The advertising copywriter who helped create the "cavemen" ads is writing the pilot, the studio said.
A pilot order is no guarantee a show will make it on the air; in fact, the majority of pilots don't make it that far.
#1
features the cavemen as they "struggle with prejudice on a daily basis as they strive to live the lives of normal thirty-somethings in 2007 Atlanta."
First they came for the Cave Men....
unfreakingbelieveable. Is this the full measure of how poor ABC's (or any of the alphabets) programming can be? "Tonight, on a very special edition of The Cavemen...."
Posted by: Frank G ||
03/03/2007 18:53 Comments ||
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#2
I don't care what anyone says, those commercials are damn well done and funny.
#3
30 seconds of entertainment dragged down by 22 minutes of the usual Hollyweird crap churned out by hacks in what passes for a job. I guess if you can't do anything else in life and both Senate seats from Massachusetts are already taken by equally unskilled labor, its the best you can do for a living.
J.D. Baldridge, 73, has official government documents showing him to be a descendant of a full-blood Cherokee. He has memories of a youth spent among Cherokee neighbors and kin, at tribal stomp dances and hog fries. He holds on to a fair amount of Cherokee vocabulary. " Salali," Baldridge says, his face creasing into a smile at the word. "Squirrel stew. Oh, that was good."
What Baldridge, a retired Oklahoma county sheriff, also has is at least one black ancestor, a former slave of a Cherokee family. That could get Baldridge cast out of the tribe, along with thousands of others.
The 250,000-member Cherokee Nation will vote in a special election today whether to override a 141-year-old treaty and change the tribal constitution to bar "freedmen," the descendants of former tribal slaves, from being members of the sovereign nation.
"It's a basic, inherent right to determine our own citizenry. We paid very dearly for those rights," Cherokee Principal Chief Chad Smith said in an interview last month in Oklahoma City.
But the Cherokee freedmen see the vote as less about self-determination than about discrimination and historical blinders. They see in the referendum hints of racism and a desire by some Cherokees to deny the tribe's slave-owning past.
"They know these people exist. And they're trying to push them aside, as though they were never with them," said Andra Shelton, one of Baldridge's family members. Shelton, 59, can recall her mother gossiping in fluent Cherokee when Cherokee friends and relatives visited.
People on both sides of the issue say the fight is also about tribal politics -- the freedmen at times have been at odds with the tribal leadership -- and about money.
Advocates of expelling the freedmen call it a matter of safeguarding tribal resources, which include a $350 million annual budget from federal and tribal revenue, and Cherokees' share of a gambling industry that, for U.S. tribes overall, takes in $22 billion a year. The grass-roots campaign for expulsion has given heavy play to warnings that keeping freedmen in the Cherokee Nation could encourage thousands more to sign up for a slice of the tribal pie.
"Don't get taken advantage of by these people. They will suck you dry," Darren Buzzard, an advocate of expelling the freedmen, wrote last summer in a widely circulated e-mail denounced by freedmen. "Don't let black freedmen back you into a corner. PROTECT CHEROKEE CULTURE FOR OUR CHILDREN. FOR OUR DAUGHTER[S] . . . FIGHT AGAINST THE INFILTRATION."
The issue is a remnant of the "peculiar institution" of Southern slavery and a discordant note set against the ringing statements of racial solidarity often voiced by people of color.
"It's oppressed people that's oppressing people," said Verdie Triplett, 53, an outspoken freedman of the Choctaw tribe, which, like the Cherokee, once owned black slaves.
Cherokees, along with Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks and Seminoles, were long known as the "Five Civilized Tribes" because they adopted many of the ways of their white neighbors in the South, including the holding of black slaves.
Many of the Cherokees' slaves accompanied the tribe when it was expelled from its traditional lands in North Carolina and Georgia and forced to migrate in 1838 and 1839 to Indian Territory, in what is now Oklahoma. Thousands of Cherokees died during the trip, which became known as the "Trail of Tears." It is not known how many of their slaves also perished.
The tribe fought for the Confederacy. In defeat, it signed a federal treaty in 1866 committing that its slaves, who had been freed by tribal decree during the war, would be absorbed as citizens of the Cherokee Nation.
By the late 1880s, Washington started opening up tribal lands in Oklahoma to white settlers, breaking previous pledges to the tribes. As a step toward ending tribal ownership of Indian Territory, Congress initiated a new census of the "Five Civilized Tribes" -- a census known as the Dawes Commission. It is that head count that the Cherokee Nation would use to determine the eligibility of freedmen.
Past censuses of the tribes had noted both the Indian and the African ancestry of freedmen, counting those of mixed heritage as Native Americans. The Dawes Commission took a different approach.
Setting up tents in fields and at crossroads, the census takers eyeballed and interviewed those who came before them, separating them into different categories. If someone seemed to be Indian or white with Indian blood, the commission listed that person as whole or part Indian, historians say. People who the officials thought looked black were listed as freedmen, and no Indian lineage was noted, according to freedmen and historians.
"In cases of mixed freedmen and Indian parents," Kent Carter wrote in his book "The Dawes Commission," applicants were "not given credit for having any Indian blood."
Baldridge's ancestors are recorded as freedmen in the Dawes rolls. Roy Baldridge, J.D.'s son, said that for the Dawes Commission, "if you had a drop of black blood, you were black."
"That's false," said Smith, the Cherokee chief. "I think there was not a fixed policy that if you were dark, you were put on the freedmen roll."
Still, whether people were listed as Indians or freedmen, they were, under the 1866 treaty, considered citizens of the Cherokee Nation. Today's vote could revoke that designation for freedmen.
The census recorded about 20,000 freedmen for the five tribes, said Angela Y. Walton-Raji, a genealogist whose research has been seminal for freedmen tracing their roots.
Descendants of those freed tribal slaves would number in the hundreds of thousands today, Walton-Raji said.
But segregation and the civil rights movement separated native members of the tribes from freedmen. Today, no more than a few thousand descendants of the slaves are officially members of the five tribes, leaving their prospects of defeating the Cherokee referendum slim. By late last month, about 2,800 had re-registered in time to vote.
"A lot of Cherokees don't know who the freedmen are," Smith said. Did he, growing up? "No."
The Cherokee Nation expelled many descendants of slaves in 1983 by requiring them to show a degree of Indian blood through the Dawes rolls. A tribal court reinstated them in March 2006. That spurred today's special election, which received a go-ahead Feb. 21 when a federal judge in Washington denied the freedmen's request for an injunction to halt the balloting.
Seated around a kitchen table recently at a family home in Vinita, one of Oklahoma's first settlements founded in part by Cherokee freedmen, the Baldridges spoke with bitterness about the dispute.
"It should have been a nonissue," Roy Baldridge, 51, said of the controversy in the Cherokee Nation. Stacks of photocopied U.S. government tribal censuses, genealogies and family photos lay spread out on the table. A portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. hung in the next room.
"It makes me sad that a few have brought this out and we're in this situation," he said.
And the fight over heritage is moving beyond the Cherokee Nation. The other tribes that owned slaves, and black descendants in those tribes, are watching the vote.
In 2000, the Seminole Nation expelled freedmen but was compelled by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and federal courts to take them back. The Creek Nation has battled its freedmen in court.
Over the winter, Choctaw and Chickasaw freedmen formed their own association.
At his home in Fort Coffee, a hamlet founded by Choctaw freedmen, Triplett said he is not trying to immerse himself in his Indian heritage. "Oh, no!" he said. "I'm black!"
But a few days later he stood at Fort Coffee's Choctaw cemetery, where because of renovation a chain-link fence separates the Indian and freedman sides of the graveyard. Triplett pointed out ancestors.
Leaving, he shouted a warning to the Choctaw side: "Guess who's coming to dinner!" I doubt the Dawes Commission will stand up in court, especially with modern genetic testing.
#1
It would tickle me if the "Freedmen" outnumbered the Whole Blood Cherokee, Whadda you do then?
Posted by: Redneck Jim ||
03/03/2007 15:02 Comments ||
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#2
"It's a basic, inherent right to determine our own citizenry. We paid very dearly for those rights," Cherokee Principal Chief Chad Smith said in an interview last month in Oklahoma City.
That is correct. How you exercise that right DETERMINES whether you are racist or not.
#3
For some years richer tribes have been manipulating their rolls by arbitrarily expelling whole branches of the tribe, thus making the per capita slice of payouts much greater for those who make the cut. It's about greed as much as racism.
The Dawes Commission seems to have operated with a bit of a racist bent. The Dawes Roll is not credible as a basis for tribal membership.
"It's oppressed people that's oppressing people" Yup, and it happens all over Indian Country.
I hope the US Constitution and the 1866 treaty will protect the rights of the freedmen. These protections are not subject to revocation by this vote. "It should have been a nonissue." Indeed.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
The guests of honor were feuding. Spectators booed and cheered behind steel barricades. A crew from an entertainment television program buzzed around a coffin draped in a pink cover studded with rhinestones spelling out her name.
Bangladesh authorities waging a corruption crackdown have asked banks to freeze the accounts of 53 prominent politicians and business tycoons suspected of massive tax evasion. The National Board of Revenue has ordered all the banks to freeze the accounts of 53 persons against whom there are allegations of corruption, said SM Aminur Rahman, managing director of the state-owned Sonali Bank. We have already asked our branches to freeze the transactions of these people until further notice, he added.
China's Communist leader in Buddhist Tibet yesterday labelled the party a "living Buddha" for Tibetans. Zhang Qingli, Tibet's party chief, said: "The Communist Party is like the parent to the Tibetan people and it is always considerate about what the children need."
Canada's ruling Conservative party is widening its lead over major rival Liberal party, gaining 9 more percentage points than the Liberals in a new poll. The Decima Research poll, made available to the Canadian Press, showed Stephen Harper's Conservatives held 36 percent support nationally, similar to the numbers they gained during the last election over a year ago. 
By Ker Than - LiveScience Staff Writer
