Earlier this week, President Barack Obama announced that he was nominating Chai Feldblum, an openly lesbian Georgetown Law professor, to serve on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

The EEOC is a federal agency whose purpose is to end workplace discrimination based on race, color, national origin, religion, sex, age, disability or whistle-blowing.

Feldblum has been at the Law Center since 1991, and founded and directed the Georgetown Law Federal Legislation and Administrative Clinic, a program for students interested in legislative law.  She is an expert on and advocate of disability and gay rights, and was involved in drafting the Americans with Disabilities Act.

From ruling the ICC to ruling half the globe…

Arturo Valenzuela, a professor of Government and the Director of the Center for Latin American Studies in the SFS, was just named as President Obama’s nominee for Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs.

Born in Chile, Valenzuela specializes on Latin American politics and U.S.-Latin American relations. During the Clinton administration, he served as Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs and Senior Director for Inter-American Affairs at the National Security Council.

Photo from the SFS website. Thanks to former Voice EIC Tim Fernholz for the tip!

Movin’ on up

Last week, we speculated on the possibility of Georgetown professor Michael Oren being appointed Israel’s Ambassador to the U.S. Turns out he got the gig, according to Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman have chosen Michael Oren as Israel’s next ambassador to Washington. The cabinet is expected to approve the appointment before Netanyahu’s visit to Washington on May 17.

The benefit of the Voice bump? Probably…

Photo from pbs.org.

Au revoir, Madame?

Could Georgetown professor Madeline Albright be in line for a promotion? That’s what NY Foreign Policy Examiner heard from French Nouvel Observateur:

“An article in today’s French Nouvel Observateur hinted at the possibility of Barack Obama appointing Madeleine Albright as special ambassador to France.

From the French point of view, they are just tickled pink. Mrs. Albright is a francophile, knows France quite well …. She has also been an advisor to President Obama on foreign affairs.”

University Spokesperson Julie Green Bataille hasn’t responded yet to questions of what an ambassadorship would mean for Albright’s availability to continue teaching at Georgetown is she made our list, but we’ll keep you posted.

Scoop via the amazing Hunter Kaplan.

Photo from Flickr user Ross Mayfield used under a Creative Commons license.

Now where did I put that dissident…?

Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi appeared today before a Georgetown audience in the ICC Auditorium via satellite uplink, and though his video presence failed to inspire more student ire than JuicyCampus’ Matt Ivester, that’s not to say the event was without highlights, including Qaddafi’s characterization of Osama bin Laden as “reasonable.”

As is typical of guest speaker events, the most interesting part of the conference was the Q and A session. An anonymous student put Qaddafi in the hot seat for a moment when he asked whether Qaddafi would ever apologize for the Libyan terrorist bombing of a flight over Scotland, to which he replied:

“My son, my son, this file has been closed. It is not in the interest of anyone that we start in what we call grave digging. If you want to go to arbitration, Libya will turn out to be innocent of anything .. And if we start digging the graves, we go back to Philadelphia, we go to the massacre in Iraq, we go back to the revolutionary war and the constitution. It is not in the interest of anyone to reopen this discussion.”

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Charming them away from us

Now that the flurry of Obama nominations is subsiding, we can finally list the professors and alumni that are heading to the Hill after Jan. 20.  Feel free to note anyone who’s missing in comments.

Professors

Alex Aleinikoff, Law Center dean, will be chair of the Immigration working group

Tom Daschle, Public Policy Institute visiting professor, will be Obama’s Secretary of Health and Human Services chair of the Health Care policy working group. (Former Senator, Senate Majority Leader) Daschle withdrew as the nominee for Secretary of HHS as the results of tax woes.

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Professor Tom Daschle

Barack Obama’s transition team has announced the leaders of some policy working groups, and three Georgetown professors, including the Dean of the Law Center, are on the list.

Visiting professor and former senator Tom Daschle will be on the Health Care group, and is also slated to Secretary of Health and Human Services. Law Center Dean T. Alexander Aleinikoff is on the Immigration group, and law professor Daniel Tarullo is on the Economic working group.

Photo from Flickr user talkradionews used under a Creative Commons license

UPDATE: Disregard. A commenter points out that poll’s from the last race.

Judy Feder, the former dean of Georgetown’s public policy school, is running again for Virginia’s 10th Congressional seat. The time she ran she lost Frank Wolf (R-VA) by 13 percentage points, and she’s trailing him in this election, 47% to 42%. If you can’t beat a crazy like Frank Wolf in a miserable year for Republicans, it’s time to go back to academia.

Do we even really want her to beat Frank Wolf, though? Sure, he hassled Georgetown about Saudi money, but he also supports Western Sahara and one of the Hill Hotties works in his office.

Photo from Flickr user KCIvey used under a Creative Commons license

With soul music blaring in the background, Michael Eric Dyson stepped on the stage of Gaston Hall this evening to address several hundred members of the Georgetown community. Blending humor and poignant insights into American society, Dr. Dyson delivered a lecture entitled “No Dreams Deferred?: Black Aspirations form Martin Luther King Jr. to Jay-Z.”

Dr. Dyson began the lecture with a reference to Martin Luther King’s dream for the “American experiment” and the obstacles that stood in the way for his generation. He went on to traverse the next forty of years of American history by incorporating literary quotations, rap lyrics, and historical insights.

The speech even carried a political bent as Dyson reflected on the significance of Senator Obama’s candidacy for President forty years after Dr. King’s assassination. By the end of his thirty minute speech, it was easy to see why Cornell West called him “the most talented rhetorical acrobat in the academy.”

Photo from Flickr user Rocky Mountain News used under a Creative Commons license

Anwar Ibrahim, the man poised to become Malaysia’s new prime minister, is profiled in today’s Voice.  The full text of the email interview with him has been reproduced below:

To start off, why are you attempting to remove the current government from power?

In a democracy, imperfect though it is in Malaysia, you need two legitimacies to govern: a moral legitimacy and a political one.

The moral legitimacy stems from your entire deportment whilst governing – transparency of conduct, rule of law, separation of powers, integrity of office bearers, and the like.

The political legitimacy results from your effective command of the electorate and its legislators.

The National Front of Malaysia, in power for 51 years now, has been oozing its moral legitimacy to govern for at least a decade now. The judiciary was corrupted, the police force became dysfunctional, the civil service was reduced to a rubber stamp, money politics infected political parties, and matters to do with race and religion became a minefield. The economy is sluggish, now approaching quagmire status and the government has offered no solution to the problem of widespread joblessness, rampant inflation and the decline in foreign direct investment. In sum a tragic state of affairs after 51 years of governance.

The National Front’s political legitimacy was premised on its command of a two-thirds majority in Parliament. Once before it lost that majority — in 1969 when race riots flared in the aftermath of that loss. Read the rest of this entry »