When Arthur Mkoyan was two years old, his family fled Armenia to escape the climate of Soviet Union rule.  They've been working since 1992 to claim asylum in the United States while their son has excelled in the classroom.  This week, the Fresno-area high school senior with a 4.0 GPA should be focusing on final exams and his Valedictorian speech to his fellow graduates; instead, he and his mother are facing deportation while the father sits in a migrant worker concentration camp in Arizona.

DNC Chairman Howard Dean has announced the representatives for the 2008 Democratic National Convention's State Blogger Corps in Denver, Colorado this coming August.

"Similar to the record-breaking voter turnout our Party has seen during the primary season, the demand for these coveted blogger positions is yet another indicator of the tremendous interest in this historic Convention," said Governor Dean.  "The Internet has played a critical role in connecting Americans to elected officials and candidates seeking office.  The DemConvention State Blogger Corps will continue to foster this dialogue - in all 50 of our states and our territories too - as we head towards this year's historic election and elect a Democrat to the White House."

The selected blogs are listed below the fold.  Congratulations to all of the citizen journalists that make up each site's writing team:

Crossposted from Latino Político

An all-star cast of stars united in 2007 for this powerfully-told tale of the ongoing disappearance and murder of women in El Paso's sister city of Ciudad Juárez in Chihuahua, Mexico.  The film reunited director Gregory Nava with leading-actress Jennifer Lopez ten years after their collaboration on Selena.

Lopez' character, Lauren Adrian, is an accomplished U.S. journalist who has been put on assignment in Juárez to investigate the alarming number of murders of female maquiladora workers.  The story line takes the audience into the very real settings of the NAFTA-spawned slave industry, as well as the improvised living conditions of the factory workers that have flocked to the border region from all parts of Mexico.  While the film boasts acclaimed Hollywood actors such as Lopez, Martin Sheen, and Antonio Banderas; a powerful performance by one of Mexico's leading ladies, Maya Zapata, draws viewers into the horror that thousands of families have experienced as the numbers of desaparecidas (dissapeared) grow without the clamor of outrage it deserves.

Cuz BooMan is probably on the toilet or somethin  :D looking up Super Bowl odds.

Today is Blog Action Day for the environment.  Gracias to Smartypants for the heads up and her contribution to this blogswarm that centers on an area of Peru that is polluted from a nearby copper smelter.

For my part, I would like to highlight something that I read over the weekend that disturbed the hell out of me.  Growing up, the political system was always something that intrigued me.  At least, the law-making aspect of it.  The way the checks and balances of the U.S. government worked in theory seemed like a good way to pierce the cáscara of any one person's overinflated ego.

Well...

One of the hallmarks of conquistador mentality is the treatment of minority/ostracized groups as savages.  The belief that there is something inherently deformed in the being of these others, therefore their very existence in the wider scope of things is judged using different rules.  If they have something that the conquistador wants, then it is taken; if a crime is committed by one of them, then the conclusion drawn by the majority Voice is that all within the minority group is prone to exhibit the same animalistic behavior.  An ugly cycle of thinking, but prevalent.

Take, for example, the recent manhunt that was underway in the Miami, Florida area for a suspect that killed a cop.  The caption of his picture reads:

DaBloguiMan over at Los Blogueros has uploaded a podcast with reactions from Sunday night's historic Democratic Presidential Debate on Univision.  Here is the link (the blogcast is in english, click the blue play box in the post).

Live blogging was also done by Liza over at culturekitchen, la bloguera over at Adventures of the Coconut Caucus, and viralvoice over at DailyKos.

My thoughts:

Let's engage in some omphaloskepsis, shall we?

It's Friday, many peeps are coming off the YearlyKos wave (not me, I was chained to my desk), and an explosion of kinetic energy has hit blogtopia (yes, skippy coined that phrase).  Actually, that's quite presumptive of me to say, isn't it?  I should clarify that my role has seemingly been shifted into a higher gear.  I'll get to the specifics in a jif, but want to begin with some thoughts that are stewing in my head.