Canada apologizes for forced assimilation

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper issued a public apology today for forced assimilation in the "Indian residential school system" in which indigenous children were taken from their homes and placed in schools.

“Today, we recognize that this policy of assimilation was wrong, has caused great harm, and has no place in our country,” Mr. Harper said.

“The government now recognizes that the consequences of the Indian residential schools policy were profoundly negative and that this policy has had a lasting and damaging impact on Aboriginal culture, heritage and language.”

Harper acknowledges not only the harm done to the children taken from their homes, but the harm done to the future generations, and to the culture.

Harper was joined by Phil Fontaine, chief of the Assembly of First Nations, as well as indigenous leaders and survivors of the residential school system.

The apology is part of a compensation and healing package expected to top $4-billion.

Watch Harper's apology at Globe and Mail, Canada's national newspaper.

Voter Fraud & Honest Elections

The folks at Black Box Voting are keeping an eye on elections around the country. They are advocating for transparency in vote counting, and citizen access to election data. In a submission to the US Election Assistance Commission on April 24, they state:
"The core of elections was and again must return to the principle of citizen sovereignty over government. Elections can never be based on a requirement to trust government insiders and their vendors to count our votes, nor can elections be dependent on experts to tell the citizenry that the system is okay, nor should the detailed mechanics of elections be impossible for the average citizen to understand."

For your vote to count, you need to make sure that your vote is counted. Check out Black Box Voting at http://www.blackboxvoting.org/

Recreate ’68: Democrats to Face Protests in Denver at Democratic National Convention

Check out Amy Goodman's s Democracy Now show from April 21.

As you know, the Poets Party Convention is the (un)official lead up to the Democratic Convention in Denver. Where better to explore breaking the borders of the two-party system? The Poets Party has room for everyone! Come Recreate 68 with us on July 4 at Naropa's Performing Arts Center.

Monks Being Beaten-PG

San Francisco Protest

(pssst...even the republican from Texas wants China to change)

Tibetan protests and the Dalai Llama's reaction:

Obama finds a reliable type to deliver message

In the US presidential race, typefaces say almost as much as the words they form.

IT'S one of the most visible choices Senator Barack Obama has made, and it's burning up the blogosphere and YouTube, being debated on the radio, even parodied.

It's a typeface, of all things; one called Gotham, which the Illinois Democrat chose for his rally banners and campaign signs and which some typographers are calling the hot font of 2008.

Though a discussion of fonts may seem obscure, anyone who has agonised over the look of a wedding invitation or sweated over a resume knows that the shape of letters can say nearly as much about a person as the words they spell out. And in the computer age, the message conveyed by a font is no longer subliminal. It's overt.

"We see type as the clothes that words wear," typographer Tobias Frere-Jones said. "You have more than one outfit in your closet because you don't wear the same thing to the office that you'd wear to the beach."

Typefaces with big round Os and tails are considered more friendly, whereas linear fonts evoke overtones of "rigidity, technology and coldness", according to British psychologist Dr Aric Sigman. With artistic flourishes such as a tail on a lower-case "a", serif styles "conjure images of trustworthiness", whereas uncluttered sans serif styles "carry less emotional baggage", he says.

The serif typeface used in Senator Hillary Clinton's logo is New Baskerville, commonly used by book publishers, law firms and universities.

Senator John McCain's sans serif Optima was created in 1958 by Hermann Zapf (who, like the Arizona Republican, was once a POW). Simon Daniels, lead program manager of fonts for Microsoft's typography team, noted one poignant and high-profile use of the typeface. "It's the same one used to engrave the names into the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall (in Washington)," he said. "An interesting coincidence."

But Senator Obama's sans serif Gotham has been getting all the attention. The font on his signs and banners proclaiming "Change We Can Believe In" and "Stand for Change" has a vague familiarity.

John Berry, author of books on typography, calls Gotham the font of 2008. "It's the hot one," he said. Another commentator likens it to an Armani suit. Online, typography blogs are full of love letters to the typeface, and one artist created a spitting-image parody of an Obama sign declaring: "Gotham, a Font We Can Believe In".

"It's funny to see it used in a political campaign because on the one hand it's almost too ordinary, yet that's the point," Mr Berry said. "It has that sense of trustworthiness because you've seen it everywhere."

LOS ANGELES TIMES