Important and true news and stories about our world
This is an update from a Standing Rock volunteer. It’s not pleasant.
Friends,
I have returned from Standing Rock with my mind blown, my heart broken and my spirit troubled with foreboding of a deepening tragedy. Volunteering as a legal observer with the Water Protector Legal Collective I witnessed several confrontations between Water Protectors (WP) and law enforcement: national guard, sheriffs and private security (LE).
Sleep.Eat.Write responds on Medium to a women who doesn’t believe in women’s rights or the Women’s March entitled, “You Are Not Equal. I’m Sorry.” Here’s an excerpt:
You are not equal. Even if you feel like you are. You still make less than a man for doing the same work. You make less as a CEO, as an athlete, as an actress, as a doctor. You make less in government, in the tech industry, in healthcare.
You still don’t have full rights over your own body. Men are still debating over your uterus. Over your prenatal care. Over your choices.
We all need to read @ShaunKing's Twitter feed starting yesterday. Prepare yourself first. He's documenting "#Trump Day 1" hate. Horrifying.
— Brent Toderian (@BrentToderian) November 10, 2016
"Almost all white people except for educated white women chose Donald Trump in droves &that's a problem"- @ShaunKing pic.twitter.com/1GajQn8WLV
New Jersey Assemblyman Dr. Tim Eustace wants New Jersey voters to know that voting YES on Ballot Question #2 will enable extremely important protections of taxpayer dollars. Election Day this year falls on Tuesday, November 8.
Here are short and long versions of the reasons it’s important to vote YES to Q2. You already know how important it is that you go vote in the first place – right?
On the gas tax issue, Assm. Eustace comments:
The New Jersey gas tax increase of 23¢ is law – and it’s a mistake to think it will go away if people vote NO on Ballot Question #2 at the polls next Tuesday. Gov. Christie’s second-in-command discussed the ballot question in a 101.5 Radio interview, revealing that either she does not understand this law, or maybe Ms. Guadagno is hoping to draw out Republican voters who believe that the gas tax will go away if they vote no. But, this is not true.
The President responds to Trump’s tweet, “Obama will go down as perhaps the worst president in the history of the United States,” with the comment, “Well, @realDonaldTrump, at least I will go down as a … president … (mic drop)!”
That’s just one of the mean tweets the president read out and responded to on the Jimmy Kimmel show a couple of days ago. Our president does not disappoint.
Here are some of the mean tweets Pres. Obama dealt with on the Jimmy Kimmel show last year.
Ronald Reagan loved to tell stories. When he ran for president in 1976, many of Reagan’s anecdotes converged on a single point: The welfare state is broken, and I’m the man to fix it. On the trail, the Republican candidate told a tale about a fancy public housing complex with a gym and a swimming pool. There was also someone in California, he’d explain incredulously, who supported herself with food stamps while learning the art of witchcraft. And in stump speech after stump speech, Reagan regaled his supporters with the story of an Illinois woman whose feats of deception were too amazing to be believed.
In an essay gone viral that reminds me a lot of Peggy McIntosh’s legendary ownership statement about white privilege, Jeff Cook explains that racism was incorporated into the Wheaties he eat for breakfast every day in white suburban America. But, he says, this involuntary programming makes him not evil, but definitely ready for change.
It’s a great essay, full of keen insights into both the writer’s mind and the society in which we live. Well worth the read. Here’s an excerpt:
The Model Minority Myth — which, let us remember, is a myth — was invented for this explicit purpose: its first appearance in the American political zeitgeist was in a 1960’s New York Times Magazine article (“Success story: Japanese American style”) as a reference to Japanese American immigrants who overcame discrimination through alleged “perseverance”, in stated contrast to African Americans who were focused on overcoming discrimination through political action (i.e. the Civil Rights Movement). In other words, the Model Minority Myth has always been a fiction invented by Whiteness and has always been used as a cudgel to denigrate, belittle, or dismiss African American efforts to agitate for political equality, while simultaneously appropriating and limiting the roles that Asian Americans can politically inhabit.
Booker was handsomely paid to go into Newark and blow it up from the inside so property values would fall and residents would be eager to sell to developers and gentrifiers for a fraction of what their properties were worth. That’s what gentrification is all about.
While Mayor Booker went around collecting over a million dollars for speeches, he managed to also push a Newark firefighter to the ground in front of a burning building … to fire a huge number of police officers and to cripple the city’s Department of Public Works so snow removal could not be performed. Interestingly enough, he concurrently waged a misleading PR campaign based around his promises to personally shovel out residents who were snowed in. The number of Newark residents Cory helped were just a handful of those needing professional snow removal.
In Question and Answer form, Nestah lays out what every Bernie supporter ought to know about the logistics behind Sen. Sanders’ move:
Students who identify with Trump’s hate rhetoric are using it to justify bullying behaviour, persecution of certain students and threats … while immigrant and ethnic minority students across the country are voicing fear, expressing thoughts of suicide and having meltdowns in class.
How does Greenhouse work?
It works by highlighting the name of any member of Congress on any website, and when you hover over these names a little box appears that shows detailed contribution information with amounts and where those amounts have come from. It’s basically a list of the top-ten industries from which they receive their money. My goal was to create something that promotes transparency. It would be great if people used it on sites where they’re reading about politics every day. For example, if you’re reading a piece on Congress votes for energy policy, you might see that a sponsor has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the oil and gas industry. I like to say that Greenhouse allows people to see the money story behind the news story.
Yet when the CFPB was drawing up new rules to make it harder for payday predators to feast on the poor, Rep. Wasserman Schultz co-sponsored a bill to delay those new rules by two years. How, you ask, could the head of the party’s national committee embrace such an appalling exploitation of working people?
