Just hours after General Motors filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the Rev. Jesse Jackson led a rally of more than 1,000 people at Michigan’s state Capitol Monday, demanding that the government and industry join forces to save jobs for U.S. auto workers and that laws be enacted to stop the avalanche of home foreclosures. “We demand better,” the civil rights icon said at the gathering. Read more.

Obama has an ambitious jobs plan. President-elect Barack Obama has an ambitious goal in mind when it comes to creating jobs over the next couple years. With the economy flying apart at the seams, 3 million to 4 million jobs could dry up over the next year, spiking the unemployment rate to an astronomical 9 percent, according to Vice-President-elect Joseph Biden. In what has become the worst economy since World War II, General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler have announced that they will close five dozen manufacturing plants over the next month – mainly because Americans have stopped buying cars. Read the rest here.

Portland preachers stand strong against violence. About a dozen Black Portland, Ore., preachers, fed up with the street violence rocking their city, have taken to the streets to demand that the gangbangers drop their guns and usher in a new era of peace. “The issue is urgent. Our house is on fire. Our children are dying. We need to take immediate action,” said the Rev. LeRoy Haynes Jr., at Northeast Portland’s Allen Temple Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. His call comes a week after the fatal shooting of a 30-year-old on Dec. 12, inside of New Hope Missionary Baptist Church. In this “unthinkable travesty,” as the Rev. Robert C. Jointer of New Hope calls it, Darshawn Cross, a gang member, was attending a noon funeral service when he got into a fight with Latwan Brown, a member of a rival gang. Police and witnesses said Cross suspected Brown was the man who shot him in the stomach four months ago. Brown was handed a gun by somebody else at the service and unloaded four shots into Cross, who slumped to the floor of the church. The pastors want the violence to stop and for Brown to turn himself in to authorities. “We call upon Latwan Brown to surrender himself to the Portland Police Bureau and take responsibility for the actions he has done,” Haynes said. “We plead to the family members to encourage him to surrender. Then we call upon the witnesses to do their moral and civic responsibility by contacting police.”

Those responsible say that race absolutely had nothing to do with it.

Why was a Black reporter assigned to cover a McCain campaign rally in Panama City, Fla., singled out by security and told to leave? That’s what The Tallahassee Democrat, the newspaper that employs that reporter, wants to know. Executive Editor Bob Gabordi said, “I’m upset because my reporter was singled out for whatever reason. That bothers me. We’re just trying to figure out what that reason was.” Stephen Price was one of four Florida Capital Press Corps reporters on hand to cover the rally last week when a Secret Service agent approached and told him he had to leave. Price, the only Black journalist on hand, says he pointed out there were other reporters on his same beat in the area, but he was the one who got the boot. “The fact that I’m Black was the only obvious reason,” Price said. Jonathan Block, a McCain campaign worker, told Gabordi that “access to the senator is tightly controlled … I would first express regret that your reporter was moved, and I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt that race had nothing to do with it…. At the end of the day, your reporter was in the wrong place. I do not know why the other reporters were not moved. The rest of the local press should have been moved as well.”