Congratulations to this year’s award recipient! Rosalinda Guillen was honored with the Jeanette Rankin award at Social Justice Fund’s Immigrant Rights: Fighting for the Future of the Northwest event on October 6, 2006 at Marion Oliver McCaw Hall.

In August 2005, millions of viewers watched in horror as the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina unfolded on the television news. Perhaps more horrifying than the human impact of the storm itself was the inept and callous political response by the Bush Administration, characterized by comments like the infamous, “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job!” It was a stark juxtaposition. As the rich, white, and powerful rallied to cover their political assets, poor and working class people trapped in New Orleans—the vast majority of them black and brown—waited for relief. And waited. And waited.

The scale of progressive wins around the region and the country from the midterm elections is just coming into focus. We’ll see the true impact unfold over time, but this much seems clear at this early stage: the election was emphatically not an anti-incumbent backlash. As of this writing (with a couple of “too close to call” races still pending), not a single Democratic incumbent Congressperson was defeated anywhere in the country. Instead, it was a wholesale rejection of the President’s war strategy and the rampant culture of corruption, self-dealing and holier-than-thou moral hypocrisy in the Republican controlled Congress.