Night stalks the sun’s exodus
Slowly turning up the dark
As shadows awaken
To the night’s calling

-J.W. Stoller

 

 

The Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA has released results of a survey of incoming college freshmen in 2011. More than 200,000 first time, full time students participated in the survey. The students at the four year colleges were generally more liberal on marriage equality, abortion and legalizing marijuana than they were two years ago.

The students certainly want to get LGBT citizens to the 'church on time"! An amazing 71% of college freshmen believe same sex couples should be able to legally get married. That is up from 64% in 2009. Now if all those freshmen could just convince their parents and grandparents we would be in great shape.

Regarding the issue of abortion, 61% believe in a women's right of choice. That is up from 58% two years ago. As for smoking a joint, 49% believe it should be legal and that is an increase of 3%.

 

 

Dmitri Shostakovich wrote his famous 7th Symphony mostly during the Siege of Leningrad by the Germans during World War II. For 900 days, the Nazis attempted first by force to seize the historic Russian city of Leningrad (now restored to its original name St. Petersburg). When they were unable to break the spirit of the Soviet army they established a blockade hoping to starve them into defeat.

With no food, no heat in brutal winter weather and no medical supplies the citizens of Leningrad suffered the greatest disaster to befall any city in the world. As they starved and froze to death, the Germans bombed them on a daily basis. Over 1,500,000 Russians died during the siege.

In the middle of this mayhem Shostakovich wrote the 7th Symphony for the people of Leningrad. On August 9, 1942, as bombs fell nearby, a depleted orchestra played to a full concert hall of starving people. The concert was aired over loudspeakers, many of them directed toward German lines, as an act of culture resistance to the blockade. T

he Hitler-led Germans, like the Napoleon-led French years before, eventually lost the battle. Not to the Soviets/Russians. But to the season of winter.

The blockade ended 67 years ago this week. Enjoy this amazing video

 

 

In Ecuador, clinics have been offering programs to 'cure homosexuality and parents have been placing their children in them. Under the guise of addiction clinic's, these institutions have been using torture and humiliation as means to create behavior modification.

The Ecuadorian government has been cracking down on the clinics especially since a CNN Report was aired highlighting the massive violation of human rights. The government recently appointed a new national Health Minister, Carina Vance, who has been an LGBT activist and she has been closing some of the clinics. CNN reported specifically on the story of lesbian Paola Concha. The report said,

Paola Concha is openly homosexual and is not afraid to speak about her sexual orientation publicly. But the 28-year-old Ecuadorian woman says her family didn't feel the same way.

Five years ago, when she was 23, she says, her family contacted a center that promised to cure Concha of her homosexuality. That, she says, is when her nightmare started.

"On December 8 of 2006, they stormed into my house, overpowered me, they put me inside a van and took me to a so-called 'therapeutic' center. By the time I got there, I was already handcuffed and beat up," Concha said.

The clinic was called Puente a la Vida, or Bridge to Life. In December, CNN was granted limited access to the clinic. It looked like a mid-level tourist resort with buildings, houses and meeting rooms where patients were treated. The facility is located on the outskirts of Quito, Ecuador's capital.

Concha says she endured all kinds of demeaning and abusive treatment during the 18 months she was held there.

"I was kept in handcuffs for more than three months. I would be left without food for more than three or four days. They would handcuff me in a bathroom to a toilet bowl facing a toilet that was used by 60 people at the center," Concha said.

 

New Jersey's Governor Chris Christie loves to give the appearance that he is tough and often swaggers around loudly proclaiming his views. As he campaigns for the Vice Presidency on a Romney ticket he tells those that disagree how "things are done in Jersey." Wonder if the governor shares with those voters that the way a governor acts these days in Jersey is cowardly? Wonder if tells about a governor of the Garden State distorts history and advances division in order to advance his creeds with the right wing religious extremists who have taken over his party?

Bigotry is exactly what the cowardly Governor Chris Christie is currently practicing "Jersey style."

The New Jersey legislature is set to pass marriage equality and the governor promises to veto the civil rights bill. He wants a referendum on the issue and to allow the voters of New Jersey to vote on the rights of its neighbors. In pressing his case, he said that African-Americans would have loved the right to have the public vote on their rights in the 1960's.

What planet is he living on? Does he really believe African-Americans in Mississippi wanted the public to vote on their rights in the 1960's? Are you kidding me, Governor? African American leaders in New Jersey were the first to respond to this insanity. Mayor Cory Booker of Newark said,

"I shudder to think what would have happened if the civil rights gains, heroically established by courageous lawmakers in the 1960's, were instead conveniently left up to popular votes in our 50 states,"

The first African-American Speaker of the New Jersey Assembly, Shelia Oliver, was shocked and offended at the governor's suggestion and said,

“Governor, people were fighting and dying in the streets of the South because the majority refused to grant minorities equal rights by any method. It took legislative action to bring justice to all Americans, just as legislative action is the right way to bring marriage equality to all New Jerseyans.”

Even President Eisenhower and Republican Minority Leader Everett Dirksen opposed a referendum on civil rights for African Americans.  Republican Minority Leader Dirksen said in 1959:

“Do we have legislative responsibility or don’t we?” he said during the debate on the Senate floor. “I’m ready to accept my responsibility. I’m not going to pass the buck to the people back home and say, ‘I’m thinking about the next election.' And they would say, ‘Haven’t you got any guts to stand up under the Constitution of the United States?’”

The governor pointed out that individual rights had been voted on before in New Jersey. In 1915, male voters in the states voted overwhelmingly to deny women the right to vote. Does Governor Christie really think this was a bright spot in New Jersey's history? That this vote was the right action to be taken in the suffrage movement?

Even The New Jersey Star-Ledger, a conservative paper, took on the governor's lack of courage in an amazing and powerful endorsement of marriage equality that must be read in its entirety but here is a powerful excerpt:

Imagine how different American history would be if this rule by referendums had carried the day from the start.

Take race relations. If Southern states could have held a referendum on free speech rights for Martin Luther King Jr., can anyone doubt how it would have turned out? How long would it have taken for voters in Mississippi to integrate its public schools?

Gallup has traced attitudes toward interracial marriage for decades. Note that when the Supreme Court struck down Virginia’s ban in 1967, fewer than 1 in 5 Americans supported the court’s position. If Christie’s philosophy had carried the day, the ban would have remained in place until the late 1990s.

The point is that minority rights should not be subjected to majority vote. That misses the gist of constitutional rights.

As James Madison put it in Federalist Paper 51: “It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part. If a majority can be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure.”

Christie is not bothered by such niceties. He is a politician who sees this kind of restraint as an obstacle to be overcome, not a principle to be respected. He has even threatened to ignore Supreme Court rulings that he doesn’t like.

He is, in other words, exactly the type of politician that Madison had in mind when he drafted the Constitution’s restraints on majority power.

Americans must remember in this time of historic struggle for civil rights that Governor Chris Christie was nothing more than a coward, bully and horrible historian.

 

 

Growing up in rural America, the sure sign of a person's wealth was if they were driving a Cadillac. The car has been a symbol of status and success since it first was created by Henry Leland in 1902. It didn't join the General Motors list of cars until 1909. Named after the family that founded Detroit the car has had an up and down history.

Recently it has made a major comeback in the luxury field. In 2010 sales jumped an amazing 35% in a time of recession and is now sold around the world. Without question it is the American version of the Mercedes Benz or Rolls Royce.

 

 

 

 

Being kept informed is the epitome of a good citizen. With thousands of blogs, media outlets and candidates giving 'selective information' , that is not always an easy task. Truth is simply the information we have absorped at any given moment. New knowledge can change the reality of that "truth' in seconds.

That is why the 'facts' shared with us by "Think Progress" are so important. After the State of the Union, this information gives us the status of America today. There is both good news and bad news contained within the facts. However if you want to be informed, take a few minutes and catch up on some basic information. (For sources go to the Think Progress site).

• Since the last SOTU, the economy has created 1.9 million private sector jobs.

• The top 1 percent take home 24 percent of the nation’s income, up from about 9 percent in 1976.

• Private sector job creation under Obama in 2011 was larger than seven out of the eight years Bush was president.

• The top 1 percent of Americans own 40 percent of our country’s wealth while the bottom 80 percent owns only 7 percent.

• Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, 2.5 million young adults gained health insurance.

• For every one job opening, there are four people looking for work.

• Last year, China spent 9 percent of its GDP on infrastructure. The U.S. spent 2.5 percent.

• 2.65 million seniors saved an average of $569 on prescriptions last year thanks to the Affordable Care Act.

• “In 2011, the United States killed Al Qaeda’s most effective propagandist, Anwar al-Awlaki; its operating chief, Atiyah Abd al-Rahman; and of course its founder, chief executive and spiritual leader, Osama bin Laden.”

• Union membership is at a 70-year low.

• Unemployment benefits have lifted 3.2 million people out of poverty.

• The United States used to have the world’s largest percentage of college graduates. We’re now #14.