Equality Wins!

POSTED BY JHW22

The U.S. Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit says NOPE to Prop 8! The court finds it unconstitutional to strip rights away from people because they're gay, despite what the majority of stupid voters say.

What a good news day. Anyone know what Obama has Seal Team Six doing today?

Meg Whitman Drowns in Boos at The Women's Conference...

... for failing to agree to a negative campaign ad stoppage with Jerry Brown.



(H/T Huffington Post)

When Politics Meets Personal

Posted by JHW22

I have been volunteering for an organization for over a year. I help them with research for their strategic and marketing plans and grants. I've never met them in person and they are four states away from me but I cared about their cause so much that I couldn't not help.

They run a preschool and childcare center for children in California with an emphasis on children with an ill family member. My friend has been fighting Leukemia for years and he and his wife faced the struggles of trying to find care while he was going through treatment. They learned that the emotional and physical stress takes a toll on the entire family and found it difficult to find good care for their children when he needed to get to appointments or treatments or be in the hospital.

They started their organization wanting to create an all-inclusive home-away-from-home with emergency drop-off services if an ill family member needed to be rushed to the hospital. They wanted to incorporate emotional healing into a child's day of learning the ABC's or that yellow and red make orange. They wanted to provide a place for families to seek financial planning, estate planning, stress management and bonding with other families of young children who are all experiencing the same struggles, fears and needs.

Their organization is one of a kind. They were recognized by the California and United States Senates, personally awarded by Senator Barbara Boxer, as being a crucial resource for children and their families.

They also educate children who aren't from a family experiencing these stresses , because even these children benefit from their curriculum grounded in empathy, communication of fears and frustrations, and from watching children like them struggle. These children all learn to be a community.

The organization also runs a nonprofit foundation to raise funds to help pay for children of all backgrounds to attend. They want to help parents already paying medical bills be able to send their children to a childcare and preschool designed with their needs in mind.

My friends are an inspiration.

Sadly, the California budget has cut funding for the licensing and regulation of new preschool facilities JUST as my friends were ready to get approval for their new building. Aside from the fact that they have committed their time and money into the new location, there are children and families who will suffer. Not just the families my friends serve, but the countless children who have been unable to attend preschool because of California's budget problems, and now more who will lose their childcare and preschool providers because of licensing and regulation shortfalls.

I will be spending the next days and weeks working with my friends to help them create an advocacy plan for getting this problem addressed immediately. We must get childcare and early education for the children who need it most. We can't allow the lack of funding for licensing and regulation prevent businesses from providing a necessary service.

If you have any thoughts or suggestions, send them my way. I hope to return with a clearer call to action soon.

Thank you,
Jennifer

The Palinization of Politics

We've all gotten used to Sarah Palin accusing the media of playing "gotcha journalism" while simultaneously using the press to her advantage until there's some pesky reporter asking questions for which she hasn't written the answer on her hand. Now it looks like others are catching on, but they're not getting away with it.

Former eBay President and CEO and current California Gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman took it to another level when she called a press conference for the publicity but refused to answer questions and actually threw out the press once it became inconvenient.



(H/T Jonathan Turley)

DBOTW

posted by Armadillo Joe

I may be overstepping my bounds here, but I nominate Ross Douthat at Ye Olde NYTimes for the coveted Douchebag of the Week title.

Why? you may ask...

Well, because -- as a person who escaped the third-world cesspool and laboratory for unfettered implementation of conservative economic-theories called "Texas" for a place more, um, evolved -- I find the fact that Douthat thinks California's recent economic and social woes and Texas' apparent lack of them vindicates his pinched, ill-informed world view supremely unpalatable:

In the Bush years, liberal polemicists turned the president’s home state — pious, lightly regulated, stingy with public services and mad for sprawl — into a symbol of everything that was barbaric about Republican America. Meanwhile, California, always liberalism’s favorite laboratory, was passing global-warming legislation, pouring billions into stem-cell research, and seemed to be negotiating its way toward universal health care.

But flash forward to the current recession, and suddenly Texas looks like a model citizen. The Lone Star kept growing well after the country had dipped into recession. Its unemployment rate and foreclosure rate are both well below the national average. It’s one of only six states that didn’t run budget deficits in 2009.

Blue Texan at FireDogLake has this to say about that with her retort:

...Texas is exactly what Douthat's "liberal polemicists" charge.

Stingy? Check out these state rankings. Child poverty: 44th, senior poverty: 40th, per capital child welfare expenditures: 42nd, child vulnerability index: 46th, education expenditures per pupil: 40th.

Lightly regulated? Texas is the nation's 4th biggest polluter, and the biggest contributor to greenhouse gases. Pious? Does having creationists running the school board count?

Finally, the only reason Texas isn't facing a budget deficit is because Obama's stimulus bill bailed us out.

I'd like to point out that four of the seven presidential elections since 1968 to have gone to the Republican candidate have gone to a guy from southern California -- Nixon twice and Reagan twice.

I would like to further point out that Douthat doesn't actually live in Texas or anywhere else in "red" America. He lives in Washington D.C., just like Limbaugh, O'Reilly and Hannity all live in New York City. Funny how none of these rightwing assholes actually choose to live in Omaha or Tulsa or Boisie or any other of these places where they think all the "real" Americans live.

I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions as to why that might be, but in the meantime I think the rest of us should encourage all these toilet smears to move to the places they claim to think are so wonderful -- you know, put up or shut up -- so that, rather than us fending off every attempt by these dipshits to have their delusional mythologies about how the world works imposed on the rest of us, we can instead get about the business of actually running a prosperous, healthy country that benefits everyone and not just the top .01% (who also happen to all be 99.999% white, when corrected for Tiger Woods and Oprah).

Douthat should really be a DBOTW-emeritus, but for now I'll just nominate him for one of the weekly titles. Who's with me?

America, 2009

Posted by Fraulein

Some astonishing reporting this week by the always-excellent McClatchy news service on a town in California with a 41 percent unemployment rate. This is a must-read:

"It's reminiscent of the Depression," said Silva, Mendota's mayor. "In those days you had soup lines, now you have food lines. This is a disaster area."

Signs of poverty and desperation are everywhere.

Many people in Mendota are turning to alcohol to battle depression, said Amador, the council member. And some single-family homes are occupied by two or three families, in what Amador described as "basically labor camps."

"It's a violation of city code, but you don't want to put these families out on the streets," he said.