Start the revolution. Stop at the evolution.

Want to stop hunger? Shift the food industry to plant-based foods

by VL Baker Oct 27, 2013 4:00pm PDT

http://m.dailykos.com/stories/1250321

Drawing back the curtain

http://www.realclearworld.com/articles/2013/10/20/assads_terror-famine.html

Slaves and Eve

Red state predicament ...

Eliminate all support services for the health and welfare of the poor, minorities and women so they have to move out of state. Less poor people less Dems, right?

Now that's America for you... Under the guise of fiscal responsibility keep as much for yourself as you can and screw the others...

As for Eve how else can you describe what the GOP has done to women's health choices in the last year around the country but to say they're mad at Eve for biting the apple and they're getting even...

Stop reviewing and start solving

I am not a progressive I am an egalitarian

G_d bless Huelskamp

Truly a man of few convictions, and wishes it to stay exactly that way "no" compromises .

Also the same day Joe Scarborough figured out why the GOP conservative factions in the House and not Obama are to blame for everything "that what's wrong" in America

Find the video .... The local Kansas link printed the eye popping jaw dropping word for conservative word.

http://m.cjonline.com/news/2012-12-21/excerpts-huelskamps-morning-joe-interview


NEiLc

Building a bigger boat

irin Carmon points out why President Obama can help us build a bigger boat..
.........
Still want to fight a war on women? -

http://www.salon.com/2012/11/07/a_womans_place/?mobile.html

A couple of weeks ago, three words were projected on the U.S. Capitol by a feminist group: “Rape is rape.” It was momentous, but only to a point.

After all, by then President Obama had already repeated that feminist mantra rejecting a hierarchy of rape: In August, he’d announced that “Rape is rape” in response to Todd Akin’s blithe invocation of “legitimate rape.” Three days after the words appeared on the Capitol, Indiana Senate candidate Richard Mourdock’s talk of rape and God’s gifts gave the president occasion to say it again. Rape is rape. You could complain that this was still being debated in 2012, and many did, but why would profound disruption come fast or easy? No, it was an urgent dividing point, and the president himself had chosen a side.

Today, Obama is still the president, thanks to being the choice of an overwhelming margin of women, after (for the most part) not backing down, or away from, reproductive rights and women’s autonomy. A dazzling change achieved last night after years of hard work is the unprecedented wave of women elected to office, many of whom, like Elizabeth Warren and Tammy Baldwin, are strikingly progressive. Instead of projecting words asserting women’s rights outside the Capitol, these women will be asserting them inside. It appears there could even be 20 women senators.

Today, Akin is gone. Mourdock is gone. Rep. Joe Walsh, R-Ill., who said an abortion could never save a woman’s life, is gone. Tom Smith, who said that his daughter having a child out of wedlock was as bad as if she’d been raped, is gone. Republican women who were variously wielded as proof against the party’s misogyny, including Michele Bachmann (who narrowly held on to her seat) and Mia Love, mostly did not do well. Their recent foremothers, Sarah Palin, Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell, are mostly forgotten.

This is still a country divided on abortion, but it is also an electorate that has fiercely rejected an antichoice agenda of banning it outright, limiting access to contraception, pushing certain contemptuous and paternalistic abortion restrictions, and evincing a lack of compassion for women’s lived realities, including sexual assault survivors and women who depend on Planned Parenthood and Medicaid. It’s an electorate that, broadly speaking, took a look at where the antichoice “incremental strategy” was heading and turned the other way.

Surprisingly enough, the blueprint for all this was laid exactly a year ago, in Mississippi. Not usually a bellwether state, Mississippi was where people who saw more “personhood” in a minutes-old fertilized egg than in a sentient woman thought they could become slowly inevitable. They were wrong, not because abortion had become less stigmatized in that reddest of states, but because it was suddenly clearer that it wasn’t just those other women who would be restricted — that being a “good girl” didn’t mean your autonomy was any less fragile. A grassroots uprising helped beat Personhood, and this year it was nowhere to be found. A few months after the Mississippi win, the treatment of the decorously on-message Sandra Fluke would doubly prove that point: You could play by all the rules you were supposed to, but a woman in public disagreeing was still a slut.

Recognizing those hard lessons, women earned today’s celebration. But it is, of course, just the beginning of a path that includes undoing a whole lot of damage and calling in a whole lot of return favors; just because the Democratic party is no longer running scared from reproductive rights and the Republicans face some grim truths on them doesn’t mean anyone should get complacent about the way forward.

I once heard Ruth Bader Ginsburg quote her husband — a feminist ally before there were very many — saying that “the symbol of the United States really isn’t the bald eagle. It’s the pendulum.” That day last February, Ginsburg was answering my question about her remark that someone like her, who’d made her name unapologetically fighting for women’s equality at the ACLU, could never be confirmed for the court today. She was saying she thought it could swing back to bipartisan comity, but she might as well have been talking about the cycles of progress and backlash for women in this country.

This year, in an election mostly silent on the Supreme Court, Ginsburg exercised a sort of talismanic and terrifying power: Over sympathetic people who feared her death in the event of a Romney presidency, but who also found inspiration in her steely resilience. (This superhero-like scolding was still going viral even after the polls closed.) More importantly, she’s also probably the most significant believer that reproductive rights are guaranteed in the constitution, not by dint of privacy but as part of guaranteeing women’s equal citizenship — something that would have far-reaching consequences if more powerful people believed it.

Maybe that’s not such a fantasy. Speaking at Barnard’s commencement this year, Obama struck a similar note. The constitution, he said, “had its flaws — flaws that this nation has strived to perfect over time. Questions of race and gender were unresolved. No woman’s signature graced the original document.” But, he added, “What made this document special was that it provided the space — the possibility — for those who had been left out of our charter to fight their way in. It provided people the language to appeal to principles and ideals that broadened democracy’s reach. It allowed for protest, and movements, and the dissemination of new ideas that would repeatedly, decade after decade, change the world — a constant forward movement that continues to this day.” That struggle to make room for all of us is not always so linear, or so regular as a “constant forward movement,” but last night, we got a little closer, by fighting.

When Porn and Information merge

It's not often easy
It's not often kind.....

http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Usher-syndrome#Usher_syndrome_III

War good Gd

It's hard to go toward war and hide your mobilization unless you disguise it as defending yourself....

It really is about Alinsky and the community

Barack Obama wrote this article for Illinois Issues in 1988, while he was a community organizer in Chicago. It later became part of a book, After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois, published by Illinois Issues in 1990. We are republishing it this month to show, in his own words, some of the Democratic presidential candidate’s earliest influences in Illinois.

Problems and promise in the inner city
by Barack Obama

Over the past five years, I’ve often had a difficult time explaining my profession to folks. Typical is a remark a public school administrative aide made to me one bleak January morning, while I waited to deliver some flyers to a group of confused and angry parents who had discovered the presence of asbestos in their school.

“Listen, Obama,” she began. “You’re a bright young man, Obama. You went to college, didn’t you?”

I nodded.

“I just cannot understand why a bright young man like you would go to college, get that degree and become a community organizer.”

“Why’s that?”

“’Cause the pay is low, the hours is long, and don’t nobody appreciate you.” She shook her head in puzzlement as she wandered back to attend to her duties.

I’ve thought back on that conversation more than once during the time I’ve organized with the Developing Communities Project, based in Chicago’s far south side. Unfortunately, the answers that come to mind haven’t been as simple as her question. Probably the shortest one is this: It needs to be done, and not enough folks are doing it.

The debate as to how black and other dispossessed people can forward their lot in America is not new. From W.E.B. DuBois to Booker T. Washington to Marcus Garvey to Malcolm X to Martin Luther King, this internal debate has raged between integration and nationalism, between accommodation and militancy, between sit-down strikes and boardroom negotiations. The lines between these strategies have never been simply drawn, and the most successful black leadership has recognized the need to bridge these seemingly divergent approaches. During the early years of the Civil Rights movement, many of these issues became submerged in the face of the clear oppression of segregation. The debate was no longer whether to protest, but how militant must that protest be to win full citizenship for blacks.

Twenty years later, the tensions between strategies have reemerged, in part due to the recognition that for all the accomplishments of the 1960s, the majority of blacks continue to suffer from second-class citizenship. Related to this are the failures — real, perceived and fabricated — of the Great Society programs initiated by Lyndon Johnson. Facing these realities, at least three major strands of earlier movements are apparent.

First, and most publicized, has been the surge of political empowerment around the country. Harold Washington and Jesse Jackson are but two striking examples of how the energy and passion of the Civil Rights movement have been channeled into bids for more traditional political power. Second, there has been a resurgence in attempts to foster economic development in the black community, whether through local entrepreneurial efforts, increased hiring of black contractors and corporate managers, or Buy Black campaigns. Third, and perhaps least publicized, has been grass-roots community organizing, which builds on indigenous leadership and direct action.

Proponents of electoral politics and economic development strategies can point to substantial accomplishments in the past 10 years. An increase in the number of black public officials offers at least the hope that government will be more responsive to inner-city constituents. Economic development programs can provide structural improvements and jobs to blighted communities.

In my view, however, neither approach offers lasting hope of real change for the inner city unless undergirded by a systematic approach to community organization. This is because the issues of the inner city are more complex and deeply rooted than ever before. Blatant discrimination has been replaced by institutional racism; problems like teen pregnancy, gang involvement and drug abuse cannot be solved by money alone. At the same time, as Professor William Julius Wilson of the University of Chicago has pointed out, the inner city’s economy and its government support have declined, and middle-class blacks are leaving the neighborhoods they once helped to sustain.

Neither electoral politics nor a strategy of economic self-help and internal development can by themselves respond to these new challenges. The election of Harold Washington in Chicago or of Richard Hatcher in Gary were not enough to bring jobs to inner-city neighborhoods or cut a 50 percent drop-out rate in the schools, although they did achieve an important symbolic effect. In fact, much-needed black achievement in prominent city positions has put us in the awkward position of administering underfunded systems neither equipped nor eager to address the needs of the urban poor and being forced to compromise their interests to more powerful demands from other sectors.

Self-help strategies show similar limitations. Although both laudable and necessary, they too often ignore the fact that without a stable community, a well-educated population, an adequate infrastructure and an informed and employed market, neither new nor well-established companies will be willing to base themselves in the inner city and still compete in the international marketplace. Moreover, such approaches can and have become thinly veiled excuses for cutting back on social programs, which are anathema to a conservative agenda.

In theory, community organizing provides a way to merge various strategies for neighborhood empowerment. Organizing begins with the premise that (1) the problems facing inner-city communities do not result from a lack of effective solutions, but from a lack of power to implement these solutions; (2) that the only way for communities to build long-term power is by organizing people and money around a common vision; and (3) that a viable organization can only be achieved if a broadly based indigenous leadership — and not one or two charismatic leaders — can knit together the diverse interests of their local institutions.

This means bringing together churches, block clubs, parent groups and any other institutions in a given community to pay dues, hire organizers, conduct research, develop leadership, hold rallies and education campaigns, and begin drawing up plans on a whole range of issues — jobs, education, crime, etc.

Once such a vehicle is formed, it holds the power to make politicians, agencies and corporations more responsive to community needs. Equally important, it enables people to break their crippling isolation from each other, to reshape their mutual values and expectations and rediscover the possibilities of acting collaboratively — the prerequisites of any successful self-help initiative.

By using this approach, the Developing Communities Project and other organizations in Chicago’s inner city have achieved some impressive results. Schools have been made more accountable — job training programs have been established; housing has been renovated and built; city services have been provided; parks have been refurbished; and crime and drug problems have been curtailed. Additionally, plain folk have been able to access the levers of power, and a sophisticated pool of local civic leadership has been developed.

But organizing the black community faces enormous problems as well. One problem is the not entirely undeserved skepticism organizers face in many communities. To a large degree, Chicago was the birthplace of community organizing, and the urban landscape is littered with the skeletons of previous efforts. Many of the best-intentioned members of the community have bitter memories of such failures and are reluctant to muster up renewed faith in the process.

A related problem involves the aforementioned exodus from the inner city of financial resources, institutions, role models and jobs. Even in areas that have not been completely devastated, most households now stay afloat with two incomes. Traditionally, community organizing has drawn support from women, who due to tradition and social discrimination had the time and the inclination to participate in what remains an essentially voluntary activity.

Today the majority of women in the black community work full time, many are the sole parent, and all have to split themselves between work, raising children, running a household and maintaining some semblance of a personal life — all of which makes voluntary activities lower on the priority list.

Additionally, the slow exodus of the black middle class into the suburbs means that people shop in one neighborhood, work in another, send their child to a school across town and go to church someplace other than the place where they live. Such geographical dispersion creates real problems in building a sense of investment and common purpose in any particular neighborhood.

Finally, community organizations and organizers are hampered by their own dogmas about the style and substance of organizing. Most still practice what Professor John McKnight of Northwestern University calls a “consumer advocacy” approach, with a focus on wrestling services and resources from the outside powers that be. Few are thinking of harnessing the internal productive capacities, both in terms of money and people, that already exist in communities.

Our thinking about media and public relations is equally stunted when compared to the high-powered direct mail and video approaches successfully used by conservative organizations like the Moral Majority. Most importantly, low salaries, the lack of quality training and ill-defined possibilities for advancement discourage the most talented young blacks from viewing organizing as a legitimate career option. As long as our best and brightest youth see more opportunity in climbing the corporate ladder than in building the communities from which they came, organizing will remain decidedly handicapped.

None of these problems is insurmountable. In Chicago, the Developing Communities Project and other community organizations have pooled resources to form cooperative think tanks like the Gamaliel Foundation. These provide both a formal setting where experienced organizers can rework old models to fit new realities and a healthy environment for the recruitment and training of new organizers. At the same time the leadership vacuum and disillusionment following the death of Harold Washington have made both the media and people in the neighborhoods more responsive to the new approaches community organizing can provide.

Nowhere is the promise of organizing more apparent than in the traditional black churches. Possessing tremendous financial resources, membership and — most importantly — values and biblical traditions that call for empowerment and liberation, the black church is clearly a slumbering giant in the political and economic landscape of cities like Chicago. A fierce independence among black pastors and a preference for more traditional approaches to social involvement (supporting candidates for office, providing shelters for the homeless) have prevented the black church from bringing its full weight to bear on the political, social and economic arenas of the city.

Over the past few years, however, more and more young and forward-thinking pastors have begun to look at community organizations such as the Developing Communities Project in the far south side and GREAT in the Grand Boulevard area as a powerful tool for living the social gospel, one which can educate and empower entire congregations and not just serve as a platform for a few prophetic leaders. Should a mere 50 prominent black churches, out of the thousands that exist in cities like Chicago, decide to collaborate with a trained organizing staff, enormous positive changes could be wrought in the education, housing, employment and spirit of inner-city black communities, changes that would send powerful ripples throughout the city.

In the meantime, organizers will continue to build on local successes, learn from their numerous failures and recruit and train their small but growing core of leadership — mothers on welfare, postal workers, CTA drivers and school teachers, all of whom have a vision and memories of what communities can be. In fact, the answer to the original question — why organize? — resides in these people. In helping a group of housewives sit across the negotiating table with the mayor of America’s third largest city and hold their own, or a retired steelworker stand before a TV camera and give voice to the dreams he has for his grandchild’s future, one discovers the most significant and satisfying contribution organizing can make.

In return, organizing teaches as nothing else does the beauty and strength of everyday people. Through the songs of the church and the talk on the stoops, through the hundreds of individual stories of coming up from the South and finding any job that would pay, of raising families on threadbare budgets, of losing some children to drugs and watching others earn degrees and land jobs their parents could never aspire to — it is through these stories and songs of dashed hopes and powers of endurance, of ugliness and strife, subtlety and laughter, that organizers can shape a sense of community not only for others, but for themselves.

Illinois Issues, September 2008

Second rule for Election Day

You must remember Mt Rushmore!
Washington defined leadership
Jefferson defined the reason
Lincoln defined the republic
Roosevelt defined the responsibility
_______________

"Every male citizen of the commonwealth, liable to taxes or to militia duty in any county, shall have a right to vote for representatives for that county to the legislature. "

"Should things go wrong at any time, the people will set them to rights by the peaceable exercise of their elective rights. "

"The elective franchise, if guarded as the ark of our safety, will peaceably dissipate all combinations to subvert a Constitution, dictated by the wisdom, and resting on the will of the people. "

"The rational and peacable instrument of reform, the suffrage of the people. "

Thomas Jefferson, The Jeffersonian Cyclopedia, John P. Foley, ed. (New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1900), p. 842.

NEiLc note: don't deflect on Jeffersons use of the term "male" in the first quote... the topic of women's and minority rights is not the discussion here.... Equal rights for all voters is..

First rule for Election Day

Maureen Dowd

rapists can assert parental rights in 31 states.

No purple Dino here

Barney Frank said "The GOP's interest in the fetus begins at conception and ends completely at birth."

McCainunu way off the tracks

…John McCain, Iraq War supporter, Iraq War voter-for, let it be known that it was all Colin Powell's fault that we were in Iraq in the first place:
“Colin Powell, interestingly enough, said that Obama got us out of Iraq,” McCain told the National Review. “But it was Colin Powell, with his testimony before the U.N. Security Council, that got us into Iraq.”

rss@dailykos.com (Hunter)
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/10/26/1150743/-John-McCain-says-the-Iraq-War-was-Colin-Powell-s-fault

Hey where are they?

Where are those nuns on the bus?