Once again Senator Joe Lieberman is in the news. This time, Senator Lieberman is in the news as the holdout in the Democratic caucus in the Senate against both the public option and expanding Medicare for those 55 years old and older. I have been plainly dumbfounded at this, as many Democrats have been, as he has supported both ideas in the past. As a former Lieberman supporter, though, Lieberman has always followed his own road, regardless of party. On some issues, Lieberman is very liberal and on other issues he's quite conservative. I wrote a post for Everyday Citizen on the Good Joe Lieberman and Bad Joe Lieberman. While I deeply disagree with Senator Lieberman's position on the public option and his opposition to the compromise lowering the Medicare eligibility to 55 years old, there are other things that he is working on in the Senate that I agree with. Here is another article on the Good Joe Lieberman and the Bad Joe Lieberman.

In the mid to late 1960s, the Black Arts Movement was begun by African American writers like Amiri Baraka, Maya Angelou, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, and Sarah Wright. Triggered by the assasination of Malcolm X, the Black Arts Movement inspired many young African American writers of the time towards a more militant stance to "promote an aesthetic that furthered the cause of black revolution." In the 1966 Fisk Black Writer's Conference, the writers who held to this philosophy clashed with poet Robert Hayden, one of the leading African American poets of the day. Hayden believed that he should be a poet first and black second. The clash between the two sides is a perenniel debate that asks what the responsibilities are of the artist to his or her community, As an Asian American, this question has special resonance with me, as I've struggled to reconcile my Filipino heritage with my upbringing as an American. Three responses to the question of an artist's responsibility can be found in the works of Amiri Baraka, Robert Hayden, and Gwendolyn Brooks.