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Talk about a page from Ripley’s Believe it or not. A new CNN poll now claims that the one-time universally battered, bruised, hectored and in virtual disgrace George W. Bush is almost as popular as President Obama. Here’s an even more incredible way to put it. If the presidential election were held today it would be a toss-up between Bush and Obama over which one would bag the White House. The poll finding is: Americans say Obama is a better president than Bush by a statistically insignificant 2 percent. This scant two percent Obama edge is down a whopping 23 percent from where it was a year ago.
The first thought is that CNN pollsters hung out at Republican National Committee headquarters to get their sample respondents or are toking something that unless voters in California vote to legalize it still can get you jail time for smoking it. But that’s the charitable way to look at what on the surface seems an absurdity. More than a few political pundits say that the single biggest reason Obama is in the White House can be summed up in one word Bush. He turned his administration into the poster administration for everything wrong with America. The colossal giveaways to the corporate rich and Wall Street, a failed, flawed, and absolutely unnecessary war, a bungled Katrina response, off the chart sex, and corruption scandals within the GOP, a tanked economy, and a general clueless, governing incompetence that defied political belief. It was a textbook perfect storm for an Obama win. But what a difference a year can make. In that time the memory of Bush ruin have dimmed, and that’s just enough time for the GOP historical revisionists to get busy and rewrite, revise, and plainly lie, about the alleged good things that Bush did.
The year is also enough time for a resurgent GOP and its shock troops the Tea Party horde, Glenn Beck, Limbaugh, Palin the endless pack of shrill, hatchet job righstide bloggers, websites, and talk show hacks to paint a picture of an Obama who take your pick is: an alien, anti-American, a closet Muslim terrorist sympathizer, a socialist, communist, and an inveterate America basher and hater.
The post Bush year has also been ample time to stoke and inflame the latent, and in some quarters unabashed, racial bigotry of millions of whites whose stomach churns in knots at the sight of an African American president. They will say and do anything to rid the White House of him. Even if that means dredging up by almost any standard one of the worst and disastrous presidents and presidential administrations saddled on the American people in the last century.
So, it’s really no wonder or mystery that so many could actually pine for the return of a miserable administration and actually compare the man that was the architect of so much of that misery to Obama. Bush versus Obama should draw a laugh if not a gag. But believe it or not, it doesn’t. Could Bush beat Obama? That’s definitely one for believe it or not?
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He hosts a nationally broadcast political affairs radio talk show on Pacifica and KTYM Radio Los Angeles.
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Engineers at Google have tested a self-driving car on the streets of California, the company has announced.
The cars use video cameras mounted on the roof, radar sensors and a laser range finder to “see” other traffic, software engineer Sebastian Thrun said.
They remain manned at all times by a trained driver ready to take control as well as by a software expert.
Google hopes the cars can eventually help reduce road traffic and cut the number of accidents.
, Mr Thrun said the self-driven cars had so far covered 140,000 miles on the road.
They have crossed San Francisco's iconic Golden Gate bridge, negotiated the city's famous sloping streets, driven between Google offices, and made it around Lake Tahoe in one piece.
Engineers that the forays onto the highways have been largely incident-free, apart from one bump when the car was reportedly hit from behind at a traffic light.
In his Google blog post, Mr Thrun – professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford University – insisted that safety was the “first priority” in the project.
Routes are pre-planned, mapped first by real drivers, and local police are briefed in advance, he says.
But he pointed to figures from the World Health Organization which show that more than 1.2 million people are killed each year on the roads, and said that number could and should be reduced.
“We believe our technology has the potential to cut that number, perhaps by as much as half.
“While this project is very much in the experimental stage, it provides a glimpse of what transportation might look like in the future thanks to advanced computer science. And that future is very exciting,” he added.
Google has rapidly branched out from its previous core business of search in recent years.
The company already has significant interests in location services through its Google Maps and Google Street View offerings.

Source:BBC

US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has pressed China to let the value of the yuan rise against other currencies.
Speaking at IMF talks in Washington, Mr Geithner said nations relying too much on exports must change their policies, or global economic growth would slow.
He said major emerging economies should move towards “a more flexible, market-oriented currency policy”.
In response, China blamed rich nations for problems in the currency markets that have hit many developing nations.
The tension over between the US and China over currency policy surfaced once again at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) talks.
Mr Geithner renewed the pressure on China to allow its currency to rise. He named no names, but he was talking mainly about China.
The US has a long-standing grievance over China's currency policy, which limits the movement of the yuan against the dollar. The American complaint is that it gives Chinese exporters an unfair competitive advantage.
There was a vigorous response from Shou Xiaochuan, governor of China's central bank (The People's Bank of China), who blamed the rich countries for problems in the currency markets.
Mr Zgou said extremely low interest rates in rich countries had created “stark challenges for emerging market countries”.
More recently, many developing countries have had to contend with their own currencies rising and undermining their competitiveness.
The problem is that those low interest rates in the developed world have led investors to seek higher returns elsewhere, in emerging markets.
To invest in those markets, they need to buy the currency and that pushes its value up. That in turn makes those countries' goods more expensive for foreign buyers and the overseas investment money creates a danger of unsustainable bubbles in their property and financial markets.
China has stopped its currency rising much by buying foreign currency. If it were to refrain from that and allow the yuan to rise, it would probably help other developing countries that compete with China, as well as the US which is protesting the most.
But there is another force behind the rising developing world currencies. Their economies are growing robustly, while the rich countries are not.
That uneven global economic recovery is a problem that cannot be quickly fixed.

Source:BBC

This October 9 would’ve been the 70th birthday of John Lennon, a statement that can’t help but make one wonder about what could/should have been. What kind of music would he have made? What would he be saying about the world today? What causes would he be championing? I imagine Lennon would’ve been much like a modern-day Mark Twain, a man who the media constantly sought out to see how any and all world events would be refracted through the prism of his considerable intellect, talent with words and impish wit. The fact that we never got to hear those thoughts from Lennon is a terrible loss.
With a figure as colossal as Lennon, it’s hard to remember that he was once just a lad growing up in working-class post-World War II Liverpool. Lennon’s pivotal teenage years, when he first discovered rock ‘n’ roll and confronted the complicated relationship between himself, the aunt who raised him, the mother who didn’t, and the father he never knew are explored in the new film Nowhere Boy, directed by Sam Taylor-Wood in her feature debut with a screenplay by Matt Greenhalgh (CONTROL). See the trailer for Nowhere Boy below.
Nowhere Boy takes place in 1955, when the arrival of rock ‘n’ roll began pulling young Brits out of the conformity and discipline that had kept England together during World War II. Aaron Johnson (Kick-Ass) puts in a strong performance as the fifteen-year-old John, who, by the looks of it, spent considerable time in the gym when he wasn’t rehearsing with his first band, the Quarrymen, or rebelling against authority. That authority is embodied by John’s strict, straight-laced aunt Mimi (an excellent Kristin Scott Thomas), while John’s biological mother, Julia (a vibrant Anne-Marie Duff), represents the exciting, impetuous sexual energy of rock ‘n’ roll. It was Julia who introduced John to rock, taught him to play the banjo (which led to him picking up the guitar), and supported John’s early musical endeavors, but it was Mimi who fed him, put a roof over his head, and who John called every week until he died. Nowhere Boy chronicles John’s journey to reconcile his relationships between the two most important women in his life while embracing the rock ‘n’ roll music and attitude that would start a revolution.
One of the nice things about Nowhere Boy is that it’s really a small coming-of-age story that would probably work even if it’s main character didn’t become one of the most influential figures of the 20th century. But knowing that it does adds meaning and weight to each moment, especially when John discovers his idol, Elvis Presley, his fledgling “skiffle” band embarks on its first performances and John is introduced to two promising young musicians named Paul and George. And on the day when he would have turned 70, it’s a wonderful gift to have a loving portrait of Lennon’s crucial, turbulent adolescence to remind us of his humble roots and the forces that drove him as we celebrate who Lennon was, even as we try to hide our sadness and loss at never getting to know who he would become.
Happy birthday, John. We miss you and will never forget you.
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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

We are a nation at war, and if we lose this war, our nation is in grave danger. But we’re not talking about the war in Afghanistan, we’re talking about the war going on here in our country, the war of education. In the new documentary Waiting for “Superman” we get an up close look at the battleground through the eyes of 5 young kids, who along with their parents, are in a battle to find a school that can offer them a quality education. At first glance, most people would assume that these kids are nothing like them, but the opposite is true. These kids represent you, me, and every kid and parent who is in search of hope and opportunity to make their lives better. That is what America is built on, its what people have sacrificed and died for throughout our history as a nation, the opportunity to reach the elusive “America Dream.” Throughout this film, we are forced to face the fact that unless something is done to change the educational system, the “dream” will become just that for millions and millions of Americans. The Civil Rights movement in this country was founded on the premise that black people wanted to be treated equally as their white counterparts, not better, but equally so they would have the same access to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that everyone was promised in the document that governs our country. Well, this is exactly what the young people in this movie are desperately searching for. They want the same opportunity to pursue their dreams as everyone else who lives in affluent school districts. They want the same attention and care given to kids who have the money to attend private schools or go to charter schools that send kids to colleges at an alarming rate.
The conditions of inner city schools are as author Johnathan Kozol described, “The Shame Of The Nation.” We owe them more. Lucky kids in the suburbs get new books and computers, air conditioned classrooms with a teacher’s aid and tutors and mentors to assist them through the educational process, while the kids in the inner city are sharing used books. Dilapidated buildings with no air conditioner in the summer or heat in the winter. They are faced with over-crowded classrooms and under paid, under-appreciated teachers who attempt to communicate to the masses of minds. Being born on the wrong side of the tracks shouldn’t dictate the type of education you receive. Then, they are actually judged and compared through standardized tests to the schools in the suburbs. But how could their test scores possibly be comparable if they are not getting the same education?
These kids simply want someone to realize that they matter, and regardless of their background, neighborhood, or their economic status that they too deserve the opportunity to chase their dreams! That if given the same tools, same expectations, same teachers and same instructions they can excel and remind America that you should never judge a book by its cover. This film is important as it brings the hardships of many Americans to everyone’s attention. The pain and anguish of a mother who has no choice but to tell her child that she can’t attend a good school because she doesn’t have the money spills across the screen. The heart wrenching part where a mother has to actually tell her children that she doesn’t know why their teacher can’t help them learn to understand their words better. Could you imagine having to tell your child that you don’t know how they will fulfill their dream of becoming a doctor because getting into college will be much more difficult simply because the school they have to attend doesn’t actually prepare them or give them a great chance to go college? We are brought face to face with the fact that unless we do something, unless we stand up and unite, that our kids will fail. And that means we fail, all of us, regardless of which side of the tracks you live on. We will fail because of a system that isn’t set up to help everyone succeed, only the ones that live in certain areas, or have parents who can afford to send them to private schools. And that will mean that the very words our kids say every day when they get to school will mean nothing… “liberty and justice for all!” Instead, they will just have to continue to wait for Superman.
On Monday, A Poet and A Profit will offer a free screening of the movie Waiting for “Superman,” in Largo, MD at the Magic Johnson AMC theaters. We felt that the theme and ideas in this film are too important for people not to see and discuss in every community. As a partnership, we both felt that one way to spread the message of this movie was to provide a free screening of the movie to people in the community in which we both reside, as an incentive to come out and see it. With so many things going on in our country, sometimes issues such as education get pushed to the back and we felt that we couldn’t allow this to happen with this film. We have reached out to people in our community and beyond in an effort to to get as many types of people we can to come and see the movie so the dialogue and discussion can begin as to how we can systematically change and alter the educational system to ensure that every child has access to quality education beginning from pre-school and beyond. We encourage anybody who wants to make a difference and wants to get a up close first hand look at a problem that Micro-soft founder and renowned philanthropist Bill Gates calls “crucial to our nations’s long term future” to come out and see the movie. If you can’t make it to our screening, find out where the film is showing in your area, take a friend or family member, but go see this film. It may be the final straw that causes us to want to take action instead of being what Newark Mayor Corey Booker calls “sedentary agitation” which means we get mad at the problem but never do anything to solve it. Now is your chance, so what will you do?

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

So, now we know what you need to be the most powerful woman in the world. It’s really very simple. What you need to be is a wife.
That’s a wife not in the sense that Gordon Brown needed to be a husband, in order to show that he had, on at least a handful of occasions, managed to swap endogenous growth theory for sexual intercourse, and also, of course, that he wasn’t gay, which ought to be fine but which, judging by the number of politicians who have tried to hide it when they are, seems not to be. No, it’s a wife in the sense of that’s who you are, that’s how you’re defined, and that, in the end, is your job.
Michelle Obama, it’s true, happens be married to the most powerful man in the world. But she was married to him last year, when Forbes magazine rated her the 40th most powerful woman in the world. She doesn’t, it’s fair to say, shape the foreign policy of the world’s only superpower; she doesn’t run the world’s fifth biggest economy; she doesn’t even host the world’s most successful talk show. But she beats the women who do to the number one slot, because, according to the executive managing editor of Forbes Woman, this year’s list is “weighted more towards media attention and social influence”. And Michelle Obama, it’s clear, has gained more, and better, media attention since she became less strident and more – well, wifely.
The world has almost forgotten the fistbumps, and the lukewarm statements of national pride (both of which were clear indications of incipient terrorism). What it sees instead is a tall, slim, coiffed, buffed, super-elegant woman with a neat helmet of reassuringly Western-looking hair, and such magnificent arms that you feel that all future statues of multi-armed goddesses should be modelled on them. It sees a woman who’s filmed digging vegetables in the organic garden she has created, and telling the nation that overeating makes you fat. It sees a woman who can make or break a career by the choice of her frock.
You just can’t underestimate the power of a frock. There was a time when politicians’ wives just had to look neat and unobtrusive. Nowadays, they can’t set a stilettoed foot out of the door without having their entire outfit subjected to a rigorous taxonomy. It started here, I think, with Cherie Blair, whose fashion faux pas were almost as frequent as her verbal ones and contributed to memorable moments like the one where her ex-nude-model “lifestyle guru” was photographed showing her that lipstick goes on lips.
Sarah Brown, who gave up her job when she married her high-maintenance husband, and who, like Michelle, brought home-grown veg to the corridors of power (and who also, like Michelle, gave a he’s-very-irritating-but-he’s-my-hero speech at a strategic moment, perhaps not realising that it tends to work rather better with someone who’s perceived as a hero than with someone who’s perceived as very irritating), arrived in Downing Street looking a bit frumpy and a bit dumpy, but left looking really rather gorgeous. In the meantime, she had acquired a supermodel as a new best friend, and a wardrobe of designer dresses. Because suddenly, it seemed, if you were on the left you had to be a patron of a heartwarming international charity called “British fashion” and you had to look as though your political role models didn’t include Shirley Williams.
If you’re on the right, it’s trickier. If, for example, you’re someone who’s never been the least bit interested in politics, but happen to be married to someone who’s always quite fancied being prime minister, and you get paid nearly three times a prime minister’s salary for working for a stationery company, and you’re naturally very pretty and slender, and look good in pretty much anything, then you’ll make sure that you’re photographed in clothes from shops you didn’t even know existed, shops where you don’t even necessarily know the name of the person who designed your frock! But it doesn’t matter, because it’s all great fun, and your husband says that it’s important to look as though you’re “in touch” with ordinary people, though the ordinary people you’ve seen on those ghastly staycations you have to do for the cameras all seem to be wearing leggings which, from the size of them, they probably shouldn’t.
And so, at the conference where your husband talks about becoming prime minister, you wear a dress from M&S (which everyone thought cost 65 but which, in fact, they had to make specially) and at the conference where your husband actually is Prime Minister, you wear a dress that costs 749, which is a lot less than one of the handbags you designed, because, well, because he’s Prime Minister and you can’t go on pretending to be a prole for ever.
The main thing to remember if you’re a leader’s wife is that you need to look good, but not too good. You want the men to fancy you and the women to think they’d like to look like you, not, la Carla, that they hate your guts. You need to look as though you’re interested in things like dresses, shoes, handbags, vegetables, cooking, charity and health. And you need to look as though your husband is your hero and you are his helpmate. Which means that if you have a job, unless it’s something like a “creative director”, you should probably give it up.
If this is the new politics, then, as David Cameron said, when Neil Kinnock boasted that he’d got his “party back”, you can keep it.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

UN climate talks in China have ended without a major breakthrough and with angry words about the US from Beijing.
At the talks in Tianjin, China blamed the US for failing to meet its responsibilities to cut emissions and for trying to overturn UN principles.
The US accused China of refusing to have its voluntary energy savings verified internationally.
But there was some progress toward the next round of climate talks in Mexico in November.
There are hopes that the meeting in Cancun could agree details of a fund to transfer 100bn (63bn) a year from rich countries to help poor nations cope with the projected consequences of climate change.
That sum is described by developing nations as substantial but inadequate.
It has been the old deadlock in the northern Chinese city of Tianjin during the week-long talks.
China feels unfairly criticised by the US.
On Saturday, one of the Chinese climate negotiators reportedly accused the US of behaving like a preening pig, complaining about Beijing when Washington had done so little itself.
The head of the US delegation, Jonathan Pershing, was more diplomatic.
But he said that there could be no US signature on any binding deal that did not also bind China – America's superpower rival.
Despite general frustration at the superpower stand-off, there was some progress in Tianjin.
If the 100bn fund can be agreed in Cancun, it will prove that these talks are not dead.
If even this part of the package falls, diplomats in Tianjin are warning it will threaten the future of multilateral action between nations of the world on anything.

Source:BBC

The Ford Ironman World Championships are fertile ground for companies to release new products to the endurance community. Oakley announced their newest addition to their performance line. You can see the new “Fast Jacket”, that was revealed last night at the Oakley house, on Oakley athletes such as Terrenzo Bozzone in today’s race.
The Fast Jacket uses Oakley’s new switch lock technology to allow quick lens change, depending on the conditions. You can almost do it with one hand. The hydrophobic lens literally beads up any liquids (Gatorade, water, etc…) that splash on the lens. The optical quality allows for clear undistorted views in all conditions. Truly a game changer in the performance lens category.
www.oakley.com

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Co-authored by Katherine Gallagher, Senior Staff Attorney, Center for Constitutional Rights
More than four months ago, the Freedom Flotilla bringing humanitarian supplies to Gaza and seeking to breach the illegal Israeli blockade of Gaza was attacked by Israeli commands, leaving one U.S. citizen and eight other passengers dead. The passengers who survived the attack, including 15 Americans, were forcibly taken to Israel, detained and then deported.
Last week, a U.N. appointed fact-finding mission reported to the Human Rights Council that the attack on the civilian passenger ships was “unlawful” and that lethal force employed by the Israeli forces was “unnecessary, disproportionate, excessive and inappropriate.” It labeled the killing of 19-year old Furkhan Doan, who was shot five times, including twice in the head and once in the back at point blank range while lying on the ground, as “an extra-legal, arbitrary and summary execution.” The U.S. response? Criticism of the report, not the Israeli attack. And its response to the qualification of the killing of a U.S. citizen as a summary execution? Silence.
Yesterday, thirteen U.S. passengers from the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and Ahmet Doan, whose son Furkhan was killed during the Israeli attack, submitted an open letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressing their anger “at the lack of any visible, active effort on the part of any agency in our government to conduct and release an independent investigation of the killing of one and assaults on other Americans by a foreign military force, the Israeli commandos.” In their letter, the U.S. passengers assert that “the State Department has allied itself with Israel, ignoring its responsibilities to its own citizens.”
Ann Wright, the author of the letter, said, “As a former US diplomat, I am appalled at the protection that successive US administrations have given to the criminal acts of the State of Israel. As a passenger on the Gaza flotilla, I am outraged that my own government is relying on the Israeli “investigations” without doing its own investigation which would include formal statements from U.S. passengers on the flotilla.”
The passengers demand to know what steps, if any, the U.S. has taken to investigate the death of Furkhan Doan, who was born in upstate New York. Upon release of the letter, Furkhan’s father said, “Up to this moment, I still do not understand why the United States government is deaf to what has been done to my son, an American citizen. I urge the U.S government to act to defend the rights of my son.”
The U.S. passengers highlighted the findings of the UN Human Rights Council’s fact-finding mission, which included that the blockade of Gaza is illegal and constitutes “collective punishment” of the people of Gaza, that the flotilla did not present an imminent threat and that the Israeli treatment of the passengers constituted “totally unnecessary and incredible violence [that] betrayed an unacceptable level of brutality.” In Geneva last week, the U.S. delegation criticized the report in general terms but provided no examples to support its claims that the report contained “unbalanced language, tone and conclusions.” Ahmet Doan expressed his frustration with the U.S. response. “I would like to know why the US voted against the Gaza Flotilla Report of the UN Fact Finding Mission at the Human Rights Council last week, as that report included information about the execution of my son,” he said.
The passengers also expressed anger that the United States has not pressed Israel to return the property that was seized from them. Of particular concern is the electronic equipment seized, including cameras, mobile phones and computers, which could contain evidence relevant to the attack — if it has not already been destroyed. The passengers wrote, “[i]f the Israeli government insists that we pay for the eventual return of our property, we expect that the United States government will deduct the costs from the $3 billion given to it each year.” The Center for Constitutional Rights has sought to receive answers to some of the questions raised by the U.S. passengers through the filing of Freedom of Information Act requests to various U.S. agencies, including the Department of State. To date, no information has been released from the State Department.
We all must continue our efforts to get answers from the U.S. government about what its role in, or knowledge of the attack on the flotilla, and what it has done since the attack to protect and vindicate the rights of its citizens, including Furkhan Doan, the other passengers on the flotilla, and the people of Gaza who continue to suffer under the illegal Israeli blockade.
To read the letter sent by the U.S. passengers and Ahmet Doan to Secretary of State Clinton and for more information on the Center for Constitutional Rights response to the attack on the Gaza flotilla, go to: http://www.ccrjustice.org/gaza-flotilla.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

I had of course heard about Dinesh D’Souza’s (and Newt Gingrich’s) pathetic arguments about Obama’s anti-colonial socialism he picked up from his almost entirely unknown father, but I get very busy close to the elections and don’t have time for reading fiction. However, I was lucky enough to see an op-ed length version of D’Souza’s argument in the WaPo yesterday, and I enjoyed the read. I think Dinesh D’Souza may be the single funniest political writer I have ever read. While his arguments are too absurd to spend much time on, I do have to stop for a moment to write a little bit about his basic theme, because the entertainment value is just too good.
Anyone following politics closely knows the basic argument D’Souza makes: that Obama is just a chip off the old third world socialist dad block. He cites dramatic, compelling evidence like the fact Obama’s first book, written in his 20s, was entitled Dreams FROM (!) My Father, not dreams of my father. Alrighty then. But clearly D’Souza’s most compelling argument, the one he features and focuses on in his op-ed, is that because Obama is in favor of a system of progressive taxation, and calls for some measure of corporate accountability, that must mean he shares the Third World socialism of his father.
Now I don’t want to be condescending, Dinesh, but I suspect that the reason you don’t get the absurdity of this argument is that you have never studied a lick of American history. After all, you were, as you pointed out in your op-ed, raised in India, so maybe it isn’t surprising you wouldn’t have studied American history growing up. But let me just ask: did Tom Paine have a third world socialist father because he argued against big corporations having too much power and argued for a system of progressive taxation? How about Thomas Jefferson? Or Andrew Jackson? Or Abe Lincoln? Or William Jennings Bryan? Or Teddy Roosevelt? Or Woodrow Wlison? Or FDR? Or Harry Truman? Or the Kennedy brothers? Or Martin Luther King, Jr? Or the thousands of other politicians, writers, and activists who throughout American history have loudly and proudly advocated the same things Obama is advocating for today: reining in the power of big corporations and a system of taxation that follows the common sense principle that those who can afford to pay more should. These ideas are not from Africa; they are not socialist; they are not remotely foreign. They are as rooted in American history, traditions, and values as any set of political ideas out there. Conservatives who try to paint scary pictures of Obama’s views as foreign and non-American contort and twist their arguments into such loony territory that they make funny caricatures of themselves.
I’ll close on this personal note. As a white kid from Nebraska, raised by Republican and Christian parents whose families have been in America for over a century, I grew into my views about reining in the power of big corporations and progressive taxation not because I was reading Karl Marx but because I was reading about those American heroes from our history, and even more importantly because I was reading my Bible. I read that the rich should sell their possessions and give them to the poor. I read that I would be judged by God on how I treated the poor and the suffering. I read the Old Testament prophets railing about societies being destroyed because the wealthy were doing nothing for widows and orphans and the poor. Now, I know that Jesus and the prophets came from a third world colony of a powerful empire far away from America, but I don’t actually think those ideas and values are very foreign to American ideas and values today. D’Souza’s scare mongering is as funny as political writing gets, because it is based on nothing but right-wing fantasies about ideas that are as all-American as you can get.
Cross-posted at OpenLeft.com, where you can read all of my writing.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Arianna debated Wall Street Journal columnist Stephen Moore about the continuing jobs crisis and the state of the economy. Arianna argued that the initial stimulus had not been big enough, and we’re seeing that play out now with persistently high unemployment. She also said it’s imperative that we begin rebuilding our nation’s aging infrastructure.
For more on the how the middle class is being battered and abandoned and what we can do about it, check out Arianna’s new book, “Third World America.”
WATCH:

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

The US Military has announced this year’s deadlines for shipping to soldiers to ensure they arrive by Christmas Day. This applies to troops in Iraq, Afghanistan and other overseas deployments. As they instruct, it’s important not to include the name of a foreign country in the address, since that will shift it out of Military Postal Service and into the even slower international mail system.
Hanukkah is early this year–December 1st–so by these timings, your Hanukkah gifts should be postmarked by October 19 via Parcel Post Mail. Very soon.
For security reasons, the military no longer allows anonymous gifts to GIs (as my elementary school class sent during the Gulf War), but if you’d like to support military families, consider a donation to an Armed Services YMCA near you, or Operation Homefront.
For more holiday news–urgent and frivilous alike–visit http://christm.us.

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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Billionaire Meg Whitman has flailed for the past week-and-a-half after being caught in the grip of her own massive contradictions on illegal immigration. What to do, what to do, for a candidate who’s already spent well over $140 million and is losing? Try the kitchen sink comeback.
First Whitman and her panoply of pricey consultant/lobbyists falsely charged that Jerry Brown, who had already taken a slight lead in the race to replace Arnold Schwarzeneger as California’s governor, caused her illegal immigrant woes. He didn’t. We saw how well that worked when Whitman tried it face to face with Brown in debate. Then Camp Whitman tried linking Brown with Fidel Castro. Then Whitman’s Fox News allies tried to move the focus to what the Obama Administration is going to do about Nicky Diaz. Then came a pair of new TV ads, one an attempt at a positive reboot, the other another attempt to paint Brown as a big tax-and-spender. All of which I’ll get to after dealing with the latest distraction factor, the purported “whore” comment, in which Whitman’s efforts turns on a private conversation and, to be as charitable as possible, sloppy reporting.
Billionaire Meg Whitman’s new TV attack ad against Jerry Brown.
It’s becoming a staple of flailing political campaigns for governor of California to produce arguably embarrassing recordings of private conversations. That’s certainly what Phil Angelides did with his losing campaign against Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2006. (With a key player calling me off the record to say that the unreleased portion was what really devastating, with Schwarzenegger dissing Mexicans. Which he did not.)
Context, clearly, is key. But these days, sensation comes first. So let’s look at the sensational charge, recklessly echoed by the Los Angeles Times in a sloppy headline and even sloppier reporting, that Jerry Brown may have called billionaire Meg Whitman a “whore.”
“Brown Or Aide Is Heard Slurring Whitman,” reads the LA Times headline. Brown? Not even close. Not unless Brown is a ventriloquist with a knack for female voices. Or unless Brown had multiple sex change operations during the course of a brief conversation.
Yes, it’s clearly a woman, not a man, who suggested the pejorative reference to Whitman’s pandering to a public employee union. For some reason, no one else has reported this.
Before Labor Day, Brown had phoned an official of the Los Angeles Police Protective League (LAPPL) to lobby against their likely move to endorse Whitman. Brown is getting by far the bulk of law enforcement endorsements. But a longtime operator named Don Novey, ousted from his longtime perch as head of the prison guards union, resurfaced as consultant/consigliere for the LA cops union and for another outfit of far more miscellaneous law enforcement types called the California State Law Enforcement Association. He was getting his client the LAPPL to go with Whitman, with whom Novey has formed a working relationship. And Whitman, who rails against public employee unions and their purportedly big pensions, had agreed to exempt law enforcement officers from public pension reform.
Unlike Brown, who, despite being cast by Whitman as the toady of the unions, does not exempt any sort of public employee from public pension reform.
So Brown had left a voicemail message talking about the powerful campaign he was about to spin up after Labor Day, debunking some bogus poll and focus group Novey was telling his clients showed that Whitman was the easy winner of the race. So far, so good, not that it would make a difference with regard to this particular endorsement. But when he hung up the phone, it didn’t disconnect the line, and the LA police union official got a recording of a brief impromptu Brown strategy session.
Whitman’s new positive TV ad, in which she says she knows you can’t run government like a business and proceeds to say how she would, well, do just that.
Which so deeply offended the Whitman campaign that it waited five weeks to release it, naturally.
Here’s what the LA Times reported transpired:
“Do we want to put an ad out? … That I have been warned if I crack down on pensions, I will be — that they’ll go to Whitman, and that’s where they’ll go because they know Whitman will give ‘em, will cut them a deal, but I won’t,” Brown said.
At that point, a voice — either that of Brown or a second person — can be heard saying: “What about saying she’s a whore?”
“Well, I’m going to use that,” Brown says. “It proves you’ve cut a secret deal to protect the pensions.”
Well, that is some remarkably poor reporting. Here, incidentally, is the recording. You can hear the “What about saying she’s a whore?” suggestion shortly after the 1:50 mark.
The voice suggesting that Whitman be slammed as a pandering whore kow-towing to a powerful public employee union is obviously not Brown’s, whose voice is very distinctive throughout the tape.
In fact, the voice is obviously female.
But the new Times political reporter Seema Mehta somehow doesn’t notice this, and says it may be Brown who makes the arguably offensive suggestion.
She also doesn’t report that, prior to Brown saying he’ll “use that,” there is a lot of overlapping dialogue discussing how Whitman is selling out her supposed position on reforming public pensions in order to get a police union endorsement.
Mehta, incidentally, got a one-on-one talk early on with Whitman when Whitman wasn’t talking to the press. Not that Whitman is talking to the press now, mind you.
Most California outlets got the key fact right, reporting that an unnamed Brown aide made the suggestion, not Brown himself.
Though none reported that the suggester is a woman, which is rather significant, considering that Camp Whitman, increasingly desperate to get the focus off illegal immigration, is charging sexism.
(After I reported this yesterday afternoon on my blog, New West Notes, a few other outlets, such as the Associated Press and the Sacramento Bee, did report that the voice is not that of a man.)
The other problem with the Times report — and the Times was the first outlet given this recording, by the LAPPL at the suggestion of Novey and his colleagues in the Whitman campaign — is that it got picked up elsewhere.
Actually, it got spread elsewhere by the Whitman campaign.
On Time magazine pundit Mark Halperin’s blog, for one, a Washington insider early morning stop which trumpeted the misinformation at the top of the page through the early morning hours.
Fox News talkers are pushing to change the subject by having Whitman’s longtime illegal immigrant housekeeper, Nicky Diaz, deported.
Halperin, who has been a regular conduit for early viewings of Whitman commercials — declaring the thoroughly dishonest Whitman ad using Bill Clinton footage the best of the election cycle (without ever mentioning that it was false) and using his blog to reveal video footage of Brown’s gaffe (or gambit, take your pick) aggressively tweaking Clinton’s 1992 comments — then went on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, the table-setting show for cable news culture, to push the story some more.
But it didn’t go so well there with host Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman who was notably less than scandalized.
Transcript:
Notice that Halperin acts throughout as though Brown said this himself, which he did not. Just as he acted as though Whitman’s notorious ad wasn’t a big lie effort.
But this isn’t about what a twerp Mark Halperin is. (Here’s my semi-pan review of his gossipy book on the 2008 presidential race, “Game Change,” for the Huffington Post. Halperin never really got what was going on in 2008.)
For Brown, this can be brushed aside. For one thing, it’s dirty pool for the LAPPL official to produce a voicemail message that is part and parcel of private communications. For another, what this actually represents is Brown standing up to public employee unions, and Whitman so desperate for these endorsements that she will compromise her supposed public pension reform imperatives.
Moving on to the rest of the kitchen sink.
Whitman has a new positive TV spot, which is actually a desperate reboot of her core message about running government like a business. She looks and sounds desperate in it.
Right-wing LA talk radio mavens John and Ken had already typed Whitman as “two-faced” on illegal immigration prior to the Nicky Diaz scandal.
She knows, she says, that government isn’t like a business. (Even though she said from the beginning that she should be governor so she can run it like a business.) But still those business values will be very useful in running a government. That’s more than a little confused, from a conceptual standpoint.
And Whitman has a new negative TV spot which takes her campaign in a very familiar and wrong direction.
Brown, it seems, is a big tax-and-spender.
There are two problems here. First, the Whitman campaign has been making these charges all along. Second, it’s not true, and the record shows that.
The charges are tired, and the ad is visually very busy.
Yes, Brown campaigned against Prop 13. Then he turned around and implemented it, using his rainy day fund to save local government services in the process, earning the endorsement and vote of Prop 13 author Howard Jarvis. He even has TV footage of Jarvis praising him.
So if the ad gains enough traction to start to bite, Brown can bounce it back in a number of ways.
But he really should be clear on how to properly hang up a phone.
This little clown show is no “game changer” but it is a distraction he doesn’t need. Unless he is cleverly setting up Whitman for the big reveal of her fake reformism on public employee unions. Nah.
Meanwhile, Fox News talkers are pressing the Obama Administration to do something about billionaire Meg Whitman’s longtime illegal immigrant housekeeper, Nicky Diaz. This may help prevent conservative Republican base voters from abandoning Whitman’s candidacy, but further guarantees that the spotlight remains on an issue damaging to Whitman, who once favored comprehensive immigration reform — when she still employed Diaz — but flip-flopped hard during the primary.
While the Foxsters try to pump up the ire of the right-wing base, the hits keep coming in California, from SEIU’s Cambiando California $5 million TV ad campaign hitting Whitman in Spanish language media for her newfound hardline positions.
Perhaps the most amusing bit of flail from Camp Whitman came on October 5th, with a Daily Beast report on a Brown visit to Cuba over 10 years ago. The writer quoted, at great length, long-ago conversations with Brown in Cuba, leading up to the former governor and then Oakland mayor spending hours hanging out with Fidel Castro.
Whitman is being pounded now in a $5 million TV advertising campaign in Spanish language media. Here Cesar Chavez’s niece, Dr. Christina Chavez, denounces Whitman for her newfound hardline positions in the wake of employing an illegal immigrant housekeeper for nine years.
Tellingly, the writer reports that Brown had been five points behind Whitman prior to the revelation of the illegal immigrant housekeeper, which is both false and indicative of the timing of her piece. I have a number of thoughts on all this, including my amazement at the writer’s precise memory of late night conversations from so long ago, but I won’t even get into it because none of it really matters. Only zealots and cranks imagine that Brown is pro-Communist, and he’s not running for governor of Florida.
Which apparently Whitman chief strategist Mike Murphy, who orchestrated the promotion of this story before it obviously fell flat, doesn’t quite grasp.
As he did not grasp in his days as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s chief political strategist when I caught him using Schwarzenegger’s photo as a logo on every page of proposals for corporate lobbying contracts. He said he didn’t see anything wrong with doing that, since he was doing the same thing with his client in Florida, then Governor Jeb Bush. I reminded Murphy that he was in California, not Florida, and the Arnold brand is very different from the Bush brand.
Murphy proved that he still didn’t get the point when he helped lead Schwarzenegger into his 2005 special election initiatives debacle, which led directly to his departure from Schwarzenegger and the end of his blossoming California lobbying business. Until he latched on to Whitman, that is.
In addition to the big advertising campaign against Whitman on her illegal immigrant stance, events are happening and will keep on happening.
In a press conference a few days ago, Nicky Diaz said that no one put her up to disclosing that Whitman had long employed her despite her undocumented status and ample reason to believe that she was not a legal resident of the United States.
She said she did so to shed light on the plight of undocumented workers who live in the “shadows” and are treated poorly.
“Meg Whitman was wrong when she said somebody put a gun to my head. Nobody did. I spoke out because I want people to know who Meg Whitman really is and I am glad that I did. I want to be heard,” she said.
“I knew the risk of speaking out and I was afraid for my family. Despite my fear, I decided to come out from the shadows, the shadows in which millions of people live every day,” she said. “It’s not fair that we work hard and then get thrown away like garbage. We have families to support like you do. We are here. We need you just like you need us. Meg Whitman, don’t say I was part of your family because you never treated me like I was.”
Attorney Gloria Allred has filed a claim against Whitman for unpaid wages and mileage with the California Department of Industrial Relations. A hearing is set for October 20th.
Will Whitman contest the claim, which is for less than $7000? Or will she seeks a continuance until after the election? Either move is problematic for her.
Meanwhile, presssure is mounting for Whitman to have the Social Security Administration release follow-up letters sent to her regarding Diaz’s bogus ID. You’ll recall that Whitman first denied the existence of any such letter, then claimed that if it did exist that Diaz must have stolen it. Thus accusing her of a federal offense.
Then, when confronted with a copy of the first such letter, bearing the handwriting of Whitman’s husband, Dr. Griff Harsh IV, Whitman claimed he had never mentioned it to her. And he, naturally, claimed he’d forgotten about it.
Late on Thursday, Whitman contributed another $2.5 million to her campaign warchest, taking her official personal contribution to $121.5 million, by far a record for any American politician in any race, from the presidency on down. But the true total, as I’ve reported from the beginning, is at least $2 million more than that when you add in the admitted $1 million-plus given to Murphy for his credit-free Hollywood production company two days after he cut ties with Whitman primary rival Steve Poizner and heavy unreported early spending on consultants, research, and travel.
Whitman had spent over $140 million by the end of September, by far the record for any non-presidential campaign in American history.
Brown, who had spent barely $11 million, had over $22.5 million to spend for the last month of his campaign for governor of California. That is a great deal of money, and testament to his disciplined Zen rope-a-dope approach to the campaign.
Unless he keeps forgetting to hang up the phone, it should be enough.
You can check things during the day on my site, New West Notes … www.newwestnotes.com.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Among those sharing memories of John Lennon on what would have been his 70th birthday, no one was more directly affected by a Lennon song than poet John Sinclair. After Lennon and Yoko Ono flew to Michigan to perform Lennon’s song John Sinclair for the Free John Rally, Sinclair was released from his sentence of 10 years for giving an undercover police officer two joints.
“I first heard it in prison when one of my lawyers came and played it for me,” Sinclair said of the song in a phone interview. “I couldn’t believe he would come and play it for my concert.” The rally was held at Ann Arbor’s Crisler Arena in December 1971. Within a week, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that the state’s marijuana statutes were unconstitutional and Sinclair was released.
“My first wife and I went to New York to say thank you in December. I got out on the 13th,” Sinclair said. The song was later featured on Lennon’s Some Time in New York City album and is in the movie The U.S. Versus John Lennon.
Sinclair’s fellow peace activists had lobbied for years for his release, but a former Beatle showing up and singing a song with the judge’s name in it spurred immediate action. “It was the culmination of two and a half years of agitating and organizing to get me out. I just lucked into Lennon hearing about it and wanting to help. That meant a lot to me.”
Others at the rally included Stevie Wonder, Allen Ginsberg, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. All were friends of Sinclair who was known for reorganizing The Fifth Estate, one of the longest running alternative newspapers in the United States, and managing Detroit’s MC5 – the only band to play the rally at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago before the police shut it down. Ann Arbor still hosts a Hash Bash ever year, possibly an offshoot of Sinclair’s Free John Rally.
Sinclair’s path as an activist and author has led him from Detroit to New Orleans to Amsterdam where he now runs Radio Free Amsterdam. In addition to Lennon writing the song that released him from prison, Sinclair’s favorite memories of his friend include “when he wrote Power to the People, putting up the billboard in Times Square, the Bed In’s for Peace – I liked all of that a lot. You think you’d you see Lady Gaga doing a Bed In for peace? Or 50 Cent? It’s a different world. No one with the taste of musicality of John Lennon would ever be heard today.”
It’s true that the days when a superstar at the level of John Lennon could release a song as politically potent as “John Sinclair” are long gone. But with platforms shifting everywhere from the recording industry to the publishing industry to something as simple as Twitter, we could once again be reaching a time when Power to the People is more than just the title of a song.
Just imagine.

Follow Karen Dalton-Beninato on Twitter:
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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

I am sitting in Austin’s Paramount Theater, a former opera house and one of the most beautiful Classic Revival venues in the country, holding a test tube full of green liquid I can only assume (and hope) is Jell-O and very strong booze, watching several grown men in Viking costumes stomping around to Led Zeppelin onstage. They are followed by a hauntingly lovely choral performance from a gaggle of angelic-looking preadolescent boys in red robes and comically large ruffs. Apparently as the two groups passed each other backstage one of the boys, fidgety in his choir robe, wistfully said to a Viking “I wish I was on your team.” At Fantastic Fest, the largest genre film festival in the US but better known to its loyal fans as an epic week-long geekout, this collision of anarchic revelry, tongue-in-cheek irony, and sincere talent is the right way to kick things off.
This year’s opening night film was the high profile vampire flick Let Me In, which would have packed the 1,000 seat theater even without surprise performances, highly anticipated as it was by both genre enthusiasts and foreign film snobs who hold the Swedish original, Let The Right One In (Thomas Alfredson), near and dear to their hearts. Showcasing a remake on opening night was not an inappropriate choice given the context; no genre has been mined for recyclable material like, well, genre. Fantastic Fest presented two other remakes this year; Im Sang-soo’s take on classic Korean drama The Housemaid, and Steven R. Monroe’s roughening up of iconic rape-revenge number I Spit On Your Grave. Notably, both films have been made decades after their originals, take place in the same culture, and even retain identical titles.
Adapting a beloved film to a new culture however, particularly a more mainstream American one, less than two years after the release of the original raises some unsavory questions about intention. Director Matt Reeves has spoken frequently of his veneration for Alfredson’s version – is Let Me In homage, an honest desire to put a personal stamp on the story, or was it made for purely commercial reasons? The answer is most likely some uncomfortable combination of those factors. Having worked in distribution I understand the limitations of a foreign language film in the American market, but part of me wants to believe that a unique, well made movie that happens to be in Swedish could still have a shot. We’ll have to see how Let Me In and David Fincher’s upcoming remake of the Millennium Trilogy fare at the box office before drawing any conclusions about this new fangled predilection for looting Scandinavia for movie ideas.
The plot of Reeves’ film is basically identical to the original. Owen (Kodi Smit-McPhee), a maladjusted, mercilessly bullied boy from a broken home, meets Abby (Chloe Moretz), an angst-ridden 12-year-old vampire trying to hide her identity while feeding her thirst. As their sweet but star-crossed friendship blossoms, so does it trigger a series of viciously tragic events. Of course what fans found so special about Let The Right One In is not just the cool creepy-kid twist on the Vampire genre, but also the unexpected poignancy of its protagonists’ outsider romance, and the unnerving intersection of innocence and brutality. At the disturbing heart of both films is the idea that Abby is not the only monster in the story, that many children, bullies and victims alike, are inherently capable of cruelty.
Despite sharing the same major plot points and themes as its predecessor, Let Me In still feels like a completely different film; a distinctly American film. It is more tethered to time and place, creating a repressive 1980′s suburban dystopia whose social and political concerns are woven into the general aura of isolation and anxiety. Let The Right One In, reflects a Swedish sensibility in terms of pacing and dialogue but is overall relatively free from an outside world. The remake feels more American in terms of the general tone as well. The filmmaking choices are a little more on-the-nose, and despite having lifted several shots directly from the original (see the images above, and these side-by-side comparisons from Fearnet) everything is just a tiny bit glossier, as if sprinkled with a pinch of Hollywood fairy dust. The more color-saturated imagery is more pretty than gritty, the violence more spectacular, the sparseness of the original dialogue exaggerated beyond dry into stiff. This is not always a bad thing in terms of the viewing experience, other than the still upsetting fact that few will see the bleaker, more challenging original film.
So, is the US remake of Let The Right One In as good as the original? Surprisingly, kind of. Reeves is faithful but not slavish to the source material, completely rebuilding the context of the original story in a way that still does it justice. The strange mix of horror and nostalgia shines through the occasional heavy handedness that makes the film more accessible; the romance and revenge feel as sickeningly thrilling as ever. Let Me In even features a few truly brilliant moments, most notably a Krzysztof Kieslowski-inspired car crash sequence that is so elegantly disorienting it made me feel suspended in mid-air while taking place and awestruck when completed. Wide-eyed in that “this is what movies can do!” sort of way, I chose that particular moment to quietly down my vile green drink in admiration.

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You know I support small business in the West Bank through Kiva and CHF International, encouraged by the Israeli, Palestinian, and US governments.
Well, here’s someone I met recently, CHF International’s Country Director in the West Bank, Lana Abu-Hijleh. She gets stuff done, has been working on Palestinian issues for two decades and is leading some important programs in Palestine on microfinance, job creation, infrastructure and governance.
Lana was featured recently in the Huffington Post as “one of the most impressive women I’ve ever met in my life” by writer Fadi Elsalameen. You can read more here.
This is a big deal, focusing on real stuff of interest to all involved.

Follow Craig Newmark on Twitter:
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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

I’m saddened for the young gay students who took their lives and outraged at the churches who perpetuate ignorance and intolerance. We are leaving the churches in droves and well we might, considering their Dark Ages approach to this issue.
This memoir, Born Gay, is my attempt to show what it feels like to grow up gay in a culture, family and church that thinks of it as an abomination. I was dismissed from the convent for it, am in exile from the Catholic church because of it, have been fired from jobs, betrayed by friends, rejected from organizations…and yet it is my very gay uniqueness that has led me to be an activist for justice, a facilitator of creativity, an author/expert on visionary thought leadership, and a mentor to religious leaders across the country.
I am happy to offer this book free of charge in the hope that it gets passed around enough to open up more than a few minds.

http://www.janphillips.com/giftshop.html

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California’s budget deal, coming 100 days after the protracted budget negotiations began, is anything but cause for celebration. True, the state will also be able to start issuing debt, which is needed to pay for a myriad of things, such as public works projects. Localities will also get some much anticipated state funds. However, the legislature closed the state’s $19 billion budget gap with unduly optimistic predictions and accounting gimmicks.
Now, on to the rosy predictions contained in the budget deal:
First, California has balanced its budget in part based on the assumption that the state will get $5.4 billion in federal funds. The problem is that the federal government has indicated that it will give something closer to $1.3 billion.
So there is about $4 billion that we can fairly safely assume the state will be short next year.
Second, the budget assumes that California will have higher than expected tax receipts. Why? A cynic would say because the state needs to balance the budget, and utilizing unreasonably optimistic predictions is the way to do it.
Next, where will be remainder of the revenue come from?
The state expects to receive $1.2 billion in revenue from the delay of a corporate tax break. California is also getting approximately $2-3 billion from a transfer of state funds, which the state will eventually have to be paid back. So there is another few billion that the state will have to pay back in the future.
We’re now up to $7 billion that the state will have to pay off in the near future.
Next, on deck, the spending cuts:
Forty percent of the $19 billion budget gap is made up in spending cuts. These cuts include: (1) a roll back of benefits to state workers, including a higher retirement age and a requirement for larger employee contributions to pension programs; (2) reductions in medical care to inmates; (3) reductions in pay to state in-home care workers; and (4) a reduction of approximately $3 billion in funding to schools, funding which is in fact voter mandated, and will have to be paid back in the future.
If you’re still counting, we’ve now tallied approximately $10 billion that the state will have to pay back in the coming year or years.
The voters should tell their public officials that the time for accounting gimmicks and unrealistic expectations is gone. California just “closed its budget gap” by employing rosy predictions and accounting gimmicks which actually demonstrate that the state is in the red to the tune of $10 billion.

Follow Jessica Levinson on Twitter:
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Tonight, White House Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett will deliver remarks to the annual dinner of the Human Rights Campaign in Washington, DC. While the Human Rights Campaign does not speak for or represent the gay military community, Jarrett will no doubt deliver assurances to the gathered crowd that President Obama and his staff strongly support the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) – the outdated law that continues to make the lives of many gay troops a living nightmare. After her remarks, the crowd of 3,000 will no doubt reward Jarrett will thunderous applause and administration officials will once again think that it has appeased those who have been hounding the administration for its failures and inaction on DADT this year. And the administration will once again be wrong.
Servicemembers United, the nation’s largest organization of gay and lesbian troops and veterans, has thrown down the gauntlet with this latest attempt at appeasement. The days when grand gestures made at black-tie galas with no meaningful follow through are over. The days of appeasement speeches in front of the least-critical organizational voice in town are gone. Those who are actually serving under the cloud of DADT each and every day, and those who have actually been harmed in very real ways by this discriminatory law, want to be heard by this administration. And they want to be heard now.
Servicemembers United has asked that Jarrett at least also meet with a group of gay veterans before her gala appearance tonight to have a respectful but substantive dialogue about getting DADT repealed. Despite growing blog and media coverage of this request, the White House has so far been silent. And it’s not just that they’re not hearing the request – they seem to have gone into one of their characteristic “communications lock-down” modes.
The White House has gone into communications lock-down mode before, primarily when it is being heavily – but legitimately – criticized and it wants to punish the critics by ceasing all engagement with them for a period of time. If this strikes the American public as funny and petty, it should, especially since the White House has an entire office dedicated to “public engagement.” What are our taxpayer dollars funding in this operation if the “Office of Public Engagement” is refusing to engage affected constituencies at all at critical times? And isn’t it even more ironic that Jarrett herself holds the official title of Assistant to the President for Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs!
As for Valerie Jarrett, the audience she owes a real speech to is not the one she will stand in front of tonight. It is those who sweat and toil around the clock to make sure that she continues to enjoy the freedom to snub them with another hollow appeasement attempt, as well as the committed veterans who are actually working and sacrificing day in and day out to ensure that the interests of their active duty brethren are looked out for. That audience, it is certain, will not be in attendance tonight.

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There is very little that changes people — or the culture of a country — as much as fear does. This is particularly true of chronic fear.
The landscape of America has changed quite a bit since the Cold War when we evolved rapidly from an Allied country at war to a Western culture of constant terror. With the enemy gone and no acute situation to rally us together, we spent nearly twenty years building bunkers in vague anticipation of complete annihilation.
From there, advertisers — prompted by major business interests and stockholders — made it their marketing strategies to infect us with a very calculated form of viral fear. They would convince us that the very same threat of destruction (social, physical, political) was always around the corner, unless of course, we had their product.
What this has done to us collectively is the same thing it has done to us individually. It has made us profoundly vulnerable.
The Irony of Viral Fear
You would think that someone who is chronically afraid would be more likely to be self-protective rather than less, but it is actually the reverse.
People who have been traumatized repeatedly, especially those with histories of severe childhood abuse, seem to be the least likely to take precautionary measures (e.g., avoid walking through a bad part of town at night or lock their doors and windows) and the most likely to wind up in situations that recreate the original trauma. Their chronic fear leaves them insensible, literally. They do not see what is right in front of them.
Chronic fear is always about what’s a possibility, what may be around the corner, not just this Osama (with whom we still haven’t properly dealt), but the next Osama. It is not present, prepared or protective. It is projective. In real time, it is not useful in any way whatsoever.
Thus, while chronic, viral fear has made us hyper-vigilant and hyper-suggestible (likely to buy anything that is being sold to us so long as it has the words “safety,” “antiseptic,” or “protection” printed somewhere on the package), it has simultaneously made us less prepared, less likely to defend ourselves appropriately, and more likely to get hurt.
The Three Major Fear Groups: Fight, Flight and Freeze
Nothing moves us faster, spreads faster or stops us faster than fear. It takes 1/12,000th of a second for the sound of something moving in the bushes to make our hearts beat out of our chests, our intestines to contract and our hands to sweat.
This massive physiological response involves only a very small part of our brain — the limbic system, which includes the Amygdala, the Hippocampus, the Fornix and Cingulate gyrus.
Some people call this the Lizard Brain or Hind Brain because it is located properly in the center of all that gray matter between the brain stem and the mid brain and it operates on primitive pistons set only for survival. It doesn’t think. Thinking requires the cortex and frontal lobes of the brain, which process, moderate, integrate and execute with judgment. The limbic system reacts.
Which is good if you know precisely what to do and when to do it.
Knowing that is what separates those who fight, flee, and freeze.
A recent case in point: On July 15, 2009, US Airways Flight 1549 left the runway at LaGuardia Airport in NY and within three minutes had to make an emergency landing in the Hudson River. Once it was clear that the plane had neither exploded nor spontaneously submerged, the division between fight, flight and freeze began.
Those who were prepared moved towards the exits and stood on the wings. The crew, for instance, due to countless hours of training, remained task-oriented and efficient despite their dire circumstances and certainly a substantial dose of their own adrenalin. Those whose fight-flight response was unrestrained panicked.
They jumped into the water without any flotation devices, thrashing in cold water, subjecting themselves to hypothermia and drowning. Others — and this is the hardest to believe but is actually the cause for most airline crash fatalities — sat in their seats and waited to be told what to do as jet fuel burned around them.
Some were so immobilized they had to be taken out of the plane as the water rose above their shoulders.
What essentially happens with fear when it is unresolved and pervasive, is we undergo what clinicians call “psychic numbing.” We are neither able to deal with the danger, nor are we able to discharge the energy and engage the cortical or reasoning centers of the brain.
Cultural Numbing
The effects of this sort of fear are to be found in abundant evidence all around us: It surrounds us in all media, at our local supermarkets, and in this country’s vast dependency on drugs (both illicit and legal).
I have dealt with trauma of all kinds for more than 25 years. I have helped survivors of sexual abuse and rape, veterans of several wars, victims of car crashes and airline disasters, injured and stressed police officers, fire fighters, and medics. I know numbing when I see it. It can look normal enough. It can walk, talk, go to work, and play. But emotional adaptability has been profoundly flattened. Responses are mitigated and limited. Reactions are out of bounds and out of context. Relationships are either distant or overly enmeshed and dramatized.
Our culture has shown the same overall symptom picture as the trauma patient: heedlessness to real danger, obsession with fear-inducing stimuli, hypersensitivity to non-existent threats, deliberate deadening by lurid fixations on scandal and drama, distraction through drugs, and self-soothing with incessant eating.
One slow, observant walk through Wal-Mart is all we need to see that we have become a nation of fattened calves, stuporous, dependent, unable to see anything past the feedbag attached to our chins.
Terrorists may be insane, but they are not stupid. They watch us shop, and eat, and worry about consumption indices and the next Osama and laugh because we still haven’t gotten the first one.

Follow Judith Acosta, LISW, CHT on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/VerbalFirstAid

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Toms Shoes just delivered its millionth pair of shoes to those in need. The Toms model of giving a pair of shoes for every pair it sells is now scaling to new heights.
See the Millionth Pair Video below. I met Toms founder Blake Mycoskie at last year’s Clinton Global Initiative and it is great to see the growth and adoption of this movement.
What other products or services can be distributed in this way?

Follow Jack Hidary on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/jackhidary

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Saturday, October 2nd was one year from the day we aired our 1st episode – today we’re making sauteed chicken as an homage to that first recipe. We’re using the same raw material – a whole roaster – but putting it together a different way. Same basic ingredients, same general cost, 2 separate meals. Damn, we’re good! No wonder we’ve made it a year!
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To get serious for a minute: I’m really…what’s the word…OK, I got it: proud. I’m seriously, really proud of myself and Daniel. We’ve spent a year emailing, video chatting, screaming, laughing, phoning, writing, recipe-testing, facebooking, cooking, baking, twittering, traveling, scripting, worrying, celebrating, scheming, researching, arguing, collaborating, editing, waiting and WORKING OUR ASSES OFF to get where we are today. It’s been exhausting, but completely worth it. I’ve never believed in anything as much as I believe in Economy Bites, and the fact that nearly 5000 of you believe with me every week, proves to me that my beliefs are right!
ONTO YEAR TWO! Bigger, better, funnier, awesomer and more fabulous. We can’t wait!
Sauteed Chicken
Ingredients:
-1 4-5 pound whole roasting chicken
-2 Tbsp butter
-1 Tbsp olive oil
-1 Tbsp Paprika
-salt and pepper to taste
Pan sauce
-1/2 shallot, minced
-1/2 cup Vermouth or White Wine
-1/2 cup Chicken stock
-1 Tbsp or more cream (optional)
-1 squeeze of lemon
-salt and pepper to taste
Procedure
-Rinse chicken and pat it completely dry
-Break down chicken (watch this video for a tutorial) into 8 pieces: 2 legs, 2 thighs, 2 breasts and 2 wings.
-heat a pan on high. Add butter and oil. Once butter is oiling, add chicken pieces to the pan, skin side down. Sear for 2 1/2 minutes then turn each piece and cook on the other side for another 2 1/2 minutes. 5 minutes total.
-After 5 minutes, turn the chicken again so it’s skin side down, then turn the heat to low and cover the pan with a tight fitting lid. Cook for 15 minutes, shaking every 5 minutes or so so the chicken doesn’t stick.
-After 15 minutes, season the chicken with salt, pepper and Paprika. Remove the breasts to a plate. Cover and cook the dark meat for another 5 minutes.
-Remove all chicken to a plate and set aside.
-Remove excess grease from pan and place it back on the low heat. Mince 1/2 a shallot and throw it in the pan. Let it cook in the chicken juices for 3-4 minutes before turning the heat to high and adding Vermouth and Chicken stock. Let the sauce reduce by half before finishing with cream, salt and pepper.
-Pour sauce over chicken and serve OR store in fridge up to 1 week!

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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

A newly discovered poem by Ted Hughes entitled “The Last Letter,” provides unprecedented insight into the last few days of the brilliant and groundbreaking American poet, Sylvia Plath.
Hughes and Plath had a fiery, at times explosive, marriage. Shortly after Hughes left her and their two children for one of Plath’s good friends, Plath succumbed to depression and committed suicide. Adding to the tragedy that seemed to follow Hughes, that other woman also killed herself, along with the couple’s four-year-old daughter, six years later.
Many vilified Hughes for his actions and his apparent lack of remorse; he didn’t address the issue of Plath’s suicide for more than 35 years. But just a few months before his death, he published the illuminating collection “Birthday Letters,” a book that many critics consider to be among the most important poetry collections of the 20th Century. The New Statesman aptly describes “The Last Letter,” as the missing keystone of that collection, as it heartbreakingly recounts the last few days of Plath’s life.
In it, Hughes describes confronting Plath just a few days before her death over a suicide letter that reached him too soon. Plath managed to convince Hughes to release her.
Late afternoon Friday, my last sight of you alive
Burning your letter to me in the ashtray
with that strange smile.
Had I bungled your plan?
Had it surprised me sooner than you purposed?
Had I rushed it back to you to promptly?
One hour later, you would have been gone
Where I could not have traced you.
I would have turned from your locked red door
that nobody would open, still holding your letter,
a thunderbolt that could not earth itself.
That would have been electric shock treatment for me
repeated over and over all weekend
as often as I read it or thought of it.
That would have remade my brains and my life.
The treatment that you planned needed some time.
I cannot imagine how I would have got through that weekend.
I cannot imagine.
Had you plotted it all?
I moved fast through the snow-blue February London twilight,
wept with relief when you opened the door,
a huddle of riddles in solution,
precocious tears that failed to interpret to me,
failed to divulge their real import.
But what did you say over the smoking shards of that letter
So carefully annihilated, so calmly,
That let me release you and leave you to bow its ashes off your plan.
Off the ashtray against which you would leave for me to read
The doctor’s phone number.
Hughes goes on to describe his own emotional struggle then in a devastating fashion:
My numbed love life with its two mad needles
embroidering their rose,
piercing and tugging at their tapestry,
their bloody tattoo somewhere behind my navel
treading that morass of emblazon.
Two mad needles crisscrossing their stitches,
selecting among my nerves for their colors …
Two women, each with her needle.
The poem ends with Hughes remembering how he received the news that Plath had died, the voice on the phone like a “measured injection.”
And I had started to write when the telephone
Jerked awake, in a jabbering alarm,
Remembering everything. It recovered in my hand.
Then a voice like a selected weapon
Or a measured injection, Coolly delivered its four words
Deep into my ear: ‘Your wife is dead.’
British Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy told the “BBC” news that reading the poem “feels a bit like looking into the sun as it’s dying.” She continued, “It seems to touch a deeper, darker place than any poem he’s ever written.”
“BBC” news channel four hired the actor Jonathan Pryce to read the poem in full. You can watch it here. The New Statesman is publishing the poem (with the blessing of Hughes’ second wife, Carol) in its entirety in this week’s issue.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Long Way Home, the Guatemalan nonprofit government organization that is constructing community buildings about of tires and other rubbish for the 40,000 residents of San Juan Comalopa, seeks your help so they can win a $20,000 grant from the BBC to further their work.
I last wrote about Long Way Home in November 2009 when their volunteers built an energy efficient school building out of recycled materials.
Competing in the BBC World Challenge with other projects in Denmark, Tanzania, Peru, Kenya, Zambia, India, the Philippines, Madagascar, Mexico, Rwanda, and Malawi to receive that monetary prize and a feature in Newsweek magazine, I am supporting Long Way Home.
“With the financial award,” I am informed in an email newsletter from the organization, “We can build four primary classrooms, ensuring an exceptional educational opportunity for 80 children annually. The publicity will introduce us to a broad group of potential supporters.”
To view a short clip about the Tecnico Maya school construction project (which I featured last year), and to vote for “A Class Apart” with your name and email address, head over to the World Challenge site before November 12.

Follow Ari Herzog on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/ariherzog

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com