Rosa and the Power of No.

Having just discussed with my brother over dinner how bizarre America's lack of outrage is—at the bald-faced lies of the Bush Administration over the Plame leak, the clear deceptions over the Iraq war, the deaths of 2,000 GIs and wounding of 15,000 more, the desire by our president to give rich folks tax cuts when we're wallowing in unprecedented debt, and the ludicrous nomination of the obviously unqualified (but apparently exceedingly Christian) Harriet Miers for the highest court in the land—this feisty homage to Rosa Parks by the inimitable Greg Tate is somehow soothing. A taste:

Thanks to the Daily News' beyond-fabulous sepia-tone mug-shot memorial cover, Parks, the bespectacled seamstress–NAACP activist of 1955, is now officially a Thug Immortal, the original ride-or-die chick. So gangsta, so About The Black, she moved all the way to roughneck Detroit as Montgomery fast turned life-threatening. The News' cover choice has upset some in the cult-nat ranks, but I applaud it lest we forget the freedom road is paved with jailed revolutionaries and that liberation rhymes with incarceration when not death. Tain't but a hop, skip, and a jump from Parks to Angela and Assata on the FBI Most Wanted lists. And unlike the women of the Weather Underground who had to blow some shit up to get there, all these Black women had to do to register as threats to kracka supremacy was to make a federal case out of saying No.

Read it all.