Women Born Transsexual

North Texas Planned Parenthood Hit With Pro-Life Movement Molotov Cocktail

From Death and Taxes: http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/124430/planned-parenthood-hit-with-idiots-molotov-cocktail/

An unidentified person threw a Molotov cocktail at a North Texas Planned Parenthood last night, apparently unaware that the clinic only provides preventative care.

By Andrew Belonsky
Thursday, July 28, 2011

Planned Parenthood of North Texas has some cleanup to do this morning after an unidentified assailant threw a Molotov cocktail at a McKinney clinic’s front door last night, shattering a window and scorching the clinic and its neighbors’ facades, the local Courier-Gazette reports.

Though Planned Parenthood clinics elsewhere in the nation clinics have been targeted with vandalism in the past, Planned Parenthood of North Texas spokeswoman, Holly Morgan, says this incident represents something new for them.

“We have not had this kind of violence at any of the other locations in the past,” she said. “I believe we’ve had some vandalism in the past but that was a decade or so ago. We have never had any kind of attack to this degree.” And that degree is of utter stupidity.

Sure, anti-abortion activists are well within their rights to fight the procedure, but using violence to make your point not only endangers people and properties, it also makes your movement look unhinged.

Continue reading at:  http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/124430/planned-parenthood-hit-with-idiots-molotov-cocktail/

FOX News’ Dr. Ablow Wants Male Veto Over Reproductive Rights

From PoliticusUSA: http://www.politicususa.com/en/fox-news-dr-ablow-wants-male-veto-over-reproductive-rights

By Hrafnkell Haraldsson
July 27, 2011

Writing in an opinion piece on FOXNews.com, Dr. Keith Ablow, a psychiatrist and member of the Fox News Medical A-Team, offers a new challenge to women’s reproductive rights: he argues that men should be allowed to veto abortions.

He writes,

I believe that in those cases in which a man can make a credible claim that he is the father of a developing child in utero, in which he could be a proper custodian of that child, and in which he is willing to            take full custody of that child upon its delivery, that the pregnant woman involved should not have the option to abort and should be civilly liable, and possibly criminally liable, for psychological suffering and wrongful death should she proceed to do so.

He does not bother to exclude cases of incest or rape, so apparently all that matters is that the man can claim he fertilized the egg. What Dr. Ablow is arguing for is a form of sexual slavery. I made that baby: I own your uterus and I own that embryo. In all ways that matter, until that baby is born, I own you!

I’d never seen such an ingenious case made for sexual slavery. Dr. Ablow, to put it bluntly, is a misogynist and he certainly fits in nicely at FOX News. Nobody in history has been better placed.

He claims that if the man is “fully willing to parent his child (independently, if necessary)” he should have full veto power over the woman’s reproductive rights. The man’s rights – unsurprisingly coming from a conservative on FOX News – trumps the woman’s.

Continue reading at: http://www.politicususa.com/en/fox-news-dr-ablow-wants-male-veto-over-reproductive-rights

From Forbes: http://blogs.forbes.com/haydnshaughnessy/2011/07/31/after-the-debt-deal-four-trends-that-spell-the-end-of-jobs/

Haydn Shaughnessy
Jul. 31 2011

2012 will be a pivotal year in how we think about employment, not just for how we create jobs. The debt debate hides a shift in the way jobs, and indeed wealth creation, are organized and that shift is accelerating even as politicians struggle to find an agreement on economic management.

Recessions so big that they cost trillions of dollars signal the need for deep structural change so we should expect, anticipate, even enjoy a re-imagining of the economy, and we should articulate new economic trends as part of the big debate on economic management.

Continued high debt and austerity will give 2012 a superficial air of sameness but 2012 is an election year so the debate will get more shrill. Supporters of public super-spending will say job losses are  a slow unravelling of what otherwise have been a cataclysmic collapse in 2008/9. Opponents will blame spending.  So be it but there are signs that employment has changed for good anyway.

I raised the issue of crowdsourcing yesterday. One example: companies like Trada have cunningly opened up search engine optimisation to crowdsourced labor but there is much more going on. Talking to crowdsourcing.org’s Carl Esposti this week he told me they now have 3,000 case studies of crowdsourcing in action, from crowdsourcing routine processes like bank check exception monitoring to crowdsourcing creative tasks, like the Fiat Mio. Microsoft, Yahoo, Google all have their eyes on it.

The consumerization of software meanwhile illustrates how people are  just plain fed up with big company decision making, and they are opting instead to freelance their IT purchases. Many companies are plagued by people who come to work to do the minimum, as defined by them. In fact the innovation boom, particularly the ideation side of innovation, is in part a giant motivational game, offering employees a little extra kudos for showing more commitment. Consumerization shows where the power is headed but this is an uneasy environment, and a conflict that can’t go on.

Continue reading at:  http://blogs.forbes.com/haydnshaughnessy/2011/07/31/after-the-debt-deal-four-trends-that-spell-the-end-of-jobs/

From The New York Times:  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/31/movies/new-roles-for-transgender-performers.html?ref=arts

By ERIK PIEPENBURG
Published: July 28, 2011

FOR someone whose only acting experience was playing a Boy George lookalike in a high school production of the musical “The Wedding Singer,” Harmony Santana is having an incredible year. Ms. Santana is making her big-screen debut in Rashaad Ernesto Green’s coming-out drama “Gun Hill Road,” which had its premiere in January at the Sundance Film Festival. Last month the movie made a splash on the gay film-festival circuit, opening Outfest in Los Angeles and closing Newfest in New York. It opens commercially in New York on Aug. 5.

But when Ms. Santana goes to sleep at night she does so not as a buzzed-about young starlet but as a resident of Green Chimneys, a group home in Harlem mainly for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender youth. Ms. Santana, who says she is in her early 20s, has been living full time as a woman only since last year.

She is the latest performer to join the tiny pool of openly transgender actors who are finding a place on screen. Her small cohort includes Candis Cayne, who appeared in the film “Stonewall” and the television series “Dirty Sexy Money,” and Laverne Cox, a reality-television star with a role in the coming Susan Seidelman film “Musical Chairs.” The most recognizable female-to-male personality today is probably Chaz Bono, the child of Cher and Sonny Bono who, while not an actor, is the subject of the documentary “Becoming Chaz.”

Cross-dressing on film certainly has a long tradition, dating to the silent era when Fatty Arbuckle and others put on dresses and wigs for laughs. And Oscar nominations have been given to actors who played transgender characters, including John Lithgow (“The World According to Garp” from 1982), Jaye Davidson (“The Crying Game,” 1992) and Felicity Huffman (“Transamerica,” 2005). Hilary Swank won an Academy Award for her role in “Boys Don’t Cry” (1999).

But transgender actors are for the most part left to watch from the sidelines. It doesn’t help that in some people’s minds being a drag queen and having a transgender identity are the same thing.

Continue reading at:  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/31/movies/new-roles-for-transgender-performers.html?ref=arts

Sex workers sell their bodies “propaganda whores” sell their ethics and souls.

From Think Progress: http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/07/31/280574/steve-milloy-anti-science-tobacco-apologist-now-denies-coal-plant-pollution-kills-people/

By Sam Parry, Director, Online Membership and Activism, EDF
July 31, 2011

In a falsehood-filled Washington Times op-ed, Steve Milloy attacks the EPA and EDF for supporting tough new clean air standards for coal-fired power plants.

Asking EPA to “show us the bodies,” Milloy questions public health estimates that these standards will prevent up to 17,000 premature deaths every year.

Some might find it odd to question decades of research by innumerable scientists and public health professionals. But, for Steve Milloy, notorious climate denier and tobacco apologist, it’s something of a personal trademark.

Had he done any actual research for his hit piece, he may have come across a May 10, 2011, letter written by the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Lung Association, the American Public Health Association, the American Thoracic Society, the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America, and the Physicians for Social Responsibility to Congressman Joe Barton (R-TX).

Continue reading at:  http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/07/31/280574/steve-milloy-anti-science-tobacco-apologist-now-denies-coal-plant-pollution-kills-people/

From Common Dreams: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/07/30-2

by Norman Mathews
Published on Saturday, July 30, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

Progressives are suffering from debilitating cognitive dissonance. Incapable of reconciling President Obama’s rhetoric with his actions, they have created an elaborate, but flimsy, structure of rationales to harmonize this dissonance. These rationales began shortly after Obama took office, with progressives blaming all those nasty triangulating, progress-by-tiny-increment advisers from the Clinton Administration, who were leading him astray from his principles. From the outset, the Administration supplied it’s own excuses for its failure to achieve audacious goals: “Change comes slowly” and “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” Then, despite control of the House and a sizable Democratic majority in the Senate, the party was deemed the problem, because it couldn’t keep its troops in line to get the 60 votes required to pass his agenda. This morphed into a much larger obstacle—the Republicans, following the 2010 landslide. In the recent debt-ceiling debate (and particularly with progressives’ denial that he would actually cut Social Security and Medicare) we’ve seen a rebirth of the meme: “He’s playing chess while everyone else is playing checkers.” Numerous current articles indicate that we now face an epidemic of “he’s just not a competent negotiator” rationale.

Glenn Greenwald adroitly addressed this in his April 14, Salon.com article, “Why Do We Assume Obama’s Actually Trying to Enact a Progressive Agenda.” The crisis is now so threatening that a rational mind can no longer make such excuses credible. His supporters correctly maintain that he’s a man of extraordinary intelligence. They seem blissfully unaware that it is impossible to hold this belief concurrently with the notion that he is just not capable of learning the most basic negotiation skills, or that his advisers, who have been both hardened politicians and businessmen and who, after all, include a vice president who was a senator since 1972, are incapable of instructing him in these arts.

Let’s look at the argument that his advisers are preventing him from delivering on campaign promises. Name a manager any field who is not held ultimately responsible for hiring choices. Again, if we assume that the fault is with the advisers, we must concede that Obama was so politically ill informed or did such a poor job interviewing these people that he had no idea what they stood for—not to mention that he refused to fire them upon learning they were reading from a different play script. Further, we would have to entertain the absurd idea that he is powerless to override his appointees’ suggestions. Beyond that, we would have to acknowledge that not only did he make poor choices with his first appointments, but also that he chose badly the second time around, i.e. William Daley and Jeffrey Immelt.

We are long past the expiration date for denying that the Obama we now know— through his actions rather than his words —is anything other than the real Obama. We must come to grips with the fact that much of the rhetoric we heard during the campaign was fraudulent—or more charitably, that we heard only what we wanted to hear. How many ominous signals did we ignore during the campaign?

Continue reading at:  http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/07/30-2

From Alternet:  http://www.alternet.org/teaparty/151830/debunking_the_big_lie_right-wingers_use_to_justify_black_poverty_and_unemployment_/

Economic factors and changes in public policies, not manifestations of “black culture,” explain African Americans’ relatively poorer economic outcomes.

By Joshua Holland
July 29, 2011

In April, the Oklahoma legislature passed a constitutional amendment that would do away with affirmative action policies in the Sooner State. Sally Kern, a state rep vying for the coveted title of Most Extreme Lawmaker in America, explained her rationale for supporting the amendment, saying (among a slew of nutty things) that “it’s character that ought to count, not whether you’re white or black… it should be your willingness to say, ‘I’m going to become everything I can become.'”

Kern suggested that blacks simply don’t work as hard as whites. “I’ve taught school,” she said, “and I saw a lot of people of color who didn’t study hard because they said the government would take care of them.”

Kern was simply advancing one of the most enduring and pernicious untruths in America’s political economy. It holds that poverty – in general, but especially within communities of color – doesn’t result from purely economic factors. Rather, the poor are where they find themselves as a consequence of some deep-seated cultural flaws that keep them from achieving success. They’re held back, the story goes, by what is known alternatively as a “culture of poverty,” or a “culture of dependence.” It’s a popular fable for the right, as it absolves the political establishment for public policies that harm the working class and the poor.

t’s a myth that should be put to rest by the economic experience of the African American community over the past 20 years. Because what Kern and other adherents of the “culture of poverty” thesis can’t explain is why blacks’ economic fortunes advanced so dramatically during the 1990s, retreated again during the Bush years and then were completely devastated in the financial crash of 2008.

In order to buy the cultural story, one would have to believe that African Americans adopted a “culture of success” during the Clinton years, mysteriously abandoned it for a “culture of failure” under Bush and finally settled on a “culture of poverty” shortly after Lehman Brothers crashed.

That’s obviously nonsense. It was exogenous economic factors and changes in public policies, not manifestations of “black culture,” that resulted in those widely varied outcomes.

Continue reading at:  http://www.alternet.org/teaparty/151830/debunking_the_big_lie_right-wingers_use_to_justify_black_poverty_and_unemployment_/

From Haaretz.com: http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/a-special-place-in-hell/the-middle-class-anarchists-of-the-tent-city-revolution-1.375160

By Bradley Burston
July 25, 2011

Just last week, when a tent city suddenly snowballed the length of Israel’s most prestigious boulevard in protest of the lack of affordable housing, Likud lawmaker Ofir Akunis, a former spokesman and adviser for Benjamin Netanyahu, took to state radio to elucidate a government response.

“Part of the protest going on at the moment on Rothschild Boulevard is being driven by a gang of anarchists,” the Likud member said, claiming the protesters came from “the adjacent Ahad Ha’am Street, where, as you know, the main branch of the Communist Party is located.”

It took tens of thousands of people filling Tel Aviv’s streets Saturday night, people from all over Israel, from all walks of life, from across the political spectrum, for the government to see their anarchists for what they really are – the middle class – and to realize just how revolutionary all of this is. It took all of them for the government to realize that they had a revolution where they least expected it, when and where they were least prepared for it, led by middle-class young adults that seemed the least likely to ever raise a cry.

You’d expect an Israeli government to know how to deal with a revolution. After all, the story of Israel is a clash of revolutionary movements, the sum total of which is the cabinet table. Every political party was once a revolutionary movement, from the Revisionists that gave birth to the Likud, to the Soviet Jewry movement which spawned Yisrael Beiteinu, to the Sephardi revolution called Shas.

But revolutions get old. Their fire goes out, and with it, their memory. This is what their leaders forget:

When a revolution is born, it is born messy. It erupts hoarse and rough-edged and faltering. Its hunger may not have direction. When a revolution begins to move under its own power, it doesn’t play by the rules. It’s one of the ways you can know that it’s for real. And it’s one of the reasons why this one may be so difficult to contain.

Continue reading at:  http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/a-special-place-in-hell/the-middle-class-anarchists-of-the-tent-city-revolution-1.375160

Anger Tsunami: Mass protest wave reaches Israel

From The Guardian UK: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/jul/30/david-cameron-far-right-nobel-warning

Thorbjørn Jagland says Europe’s leaders are ‘playing with fire’ if they use right-wing rhetoric when discussing multiculturalism

Mark Townsend, home affairs editor
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 30 July 2011

Europe’s leaders, including David Cameron, have been warned to adopt a more “cautious” approach when discussing multiculturalism. The Norwegian chairman of the Nobel peace prize committee has told them they risk inflaming far-right and anti-Muslim sentiment.

Thorbjørn Jagland, a former prime minister of his country, said leaders such as the British premier would be “playing with fire” if they continued to use rhetoric that could be exploited by extremists.

Four months ago in Munich, Cameron declared that state multiculturalism had failed in Britain, a view immediately praised by Nick Griffin, leader of the BNP, as “a further huge leap for our ideas into the political mainstream”. Marine Le Pen, vice-president of the far-right National Front party in France, also endorsed Cameron’s view of multiculturalism, claiming that it corroborated her own party’s line.

Jagland’s comments come in the wake of the Oslo bomb and the massacre on Utøya Island that left 77 people dead. The killer, Anders Behring Breivik, said he was inspired by the right-wing English Defence League. Breivik sent his manifesto, published online hours before the attacks, to about 250 British members of the BNP, the EDL and the Stop Islamisation of Europe group.

Jagland, who is also secretary general of the Council of Europe, told the Observer: “We have to be very careful how we are discussing these issues, what words are used.

“Political leaders have got to defend the fact that society has become more diverse. We have to defend the reality, otherwise we are going to get into a mess. I think political leaders have to send a clear message to embrace it and benefit from it.

“We should be very cautious now, we should not play with fire. Therefore I think the words we are using are very important because it can lead to much more.”

Continue reading at:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/jul/30/david-cameron-far-right-nobel-warning

From Mother Jones:   http://motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2011/07/chesapeake-dead-zone-agriculture

By Tom Philpott
Thu Jul. 28, 2011

Every year in the Chesapeake Bay, an algae bloom spreads out, sucking oxygen out of the water and destroying fish habitat. This year’s “dead zone” stretches from Baltimore Harbor to south of the Potomac River, the Washington Post reports. It’s on track to become the bay’s largest ever. Already, fully a third of the bay—once one of the globe’s most productive fisheries—is incapable of supporting sea life.

Meanwhile, down the Gulf of Mexico, the same thing is happening on an even grander scale. According to Texas A&M University researchers, this year’s Gulf dead zone blots out 3,300 square miles of our nation’s most important fishery—”roughly the size of Delaware and Rhode Island combined,” they calculate. Before the year’s out, it could as much as triple in size, the researchers fear, which would make it the Gulf’s largest hypoxic (oxygen-depleted) area ever.

Why such huge dead zones this year? The immediate cause is heavy rains in both the Midwest and the Northeast, which wash vast amounts of nutrients down streams and rivers and into the sea at key river delta areas like the Chesapeake and the Gulf. There, the nutrients provide a feast for algae, and voilà, dead zones.

But the ultimate source of the nitrogen and phosphorus that feed the algae blooms is industrial agriculture: millions of acres of fertilizer-guzzling corn farms in the Mississippi River watershed and massive concentrations of chicken farms right on the banks of the Chesapeake.

Snip

But this is pure industry hucksterism. In the Gulf, according to the US Geological Survey, “agricultural sources contribute more than 70 percent of the nitrogen and phosphorus…versus only 9 to 12 percent from urban sources.” As for the Chesapeake, Pew Environment Group has just released a major report called Big Chicken (PDF) that demonstrates the poultry industry’s devastating impact on the bay. The poultry industry has chosen to concentrate enormous production on the bay’s eastern shore, known as the Delmarva Peninsula. The factory-scale poultry farms there generate more than 40 million cubic feet of nitrogen- and phosphorus-rich manure—much more than can be effectively absorbed by the area’s limited farmland as fertilizer. As a result, all too much of it runs off into the bay, Pew shows.

Continue reading at:  http://motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2011/07/chesapeake-dead-zone-agriculture

From Frontiers LA: http://www.frontiersla.com/Blog/FrontierBlog/blogentry.aspx?BlogEntryID=10265135

From Alternet:  http://www.alternet.org/story/151837/%24230%2C000_for_a_guard_dog%3A_why_the_wealthy_are_afraid_of_violence_from_below/

As inequality in the US grows, the ultra-rich are pouring their spare cash not just into private jets, but into private security. Think there’s a connection?

By Sarah Jaffe
July 29, 2011

“Violence in the streets, aimed at the wealthy. That’s what I worry about.”

That was what an unidentified billionaire told Robert Frank of the Wall Street Journal a while back. Rich people are scared of global unrest, Frank reported, citing a survey by Insite Security and IBOPE Zogby International of people with liquid assets of $1 million or more (translation: folks who have or can get their hands on $1 million in cash fairly easily) that says 94 percent of the wealthy are concerned about “global unrest” around the world.

He noted:

Of course, Insite has an interest in getting the paranoid rich to beef up their security. Still, the numbers are backed up by other trends seen throughout the world of wealth today: the rich keeping a lower profile, hiring $230,000 guard dogs, and arming their yachts, planes and cars with military-style security features.

John Johnson, the owner of the $230,000 dog featured in the New York Times, is a former debt collector. (You can’t make this stuff up.) He sold his debt collection company three years ago, but still has not just one, but six highly—and expensively—trained “executive protection dogs.” Harrison K-9 services, the trainers behind Johnson’s pricey protection dogs, used to train dogs for elite military units like the Navy Seal team that raided Osama bin Laden’s compound. The article doesn’t say exactly how many dogs Harrison K-9 has provided for the world’s rich and famous, but it does feature a quote from their head trainer saying she’s trained “a thousand” dogs.

In addition to security systems, dogs and armed yachts, the security-conscious oligarch can hire a private spy company—Jellyfish, a spinoff of the notorious private security company Blackwater. Or what about their own personal drone? “Smaller, private versions of the infamous Predator” may be coming to well-heeled private citizens near you, according to the UK’s Daily Mail. So far the private drones appear to only be for spying, but former Navy fighter pilot Missy Cummings told the Daily Mail, “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist from MIT to tell you if we can do it for a soldier in the field, we can do it for anybody.”

Continue reading at:  http://www.alternet.org/story/151837/%24230%2C000_for_a_guard_dog%3A_why_the_wealthy_are_afraid_of_violence_from_below/

From AFL-CIO Blog: http://blog.aflcio.org/2011/07/28/ikea-workers-build-solidarity-vote-for-machinists/

By Mike Hall
Jul 28, 2011

For two years, management at IKEA’s Danville, Va., subsidiary Swedwood fought the workers’ choice to join the Machinists (IAM). But after yesterday’s overwhelming 221-69 vote, the workers who assemble furniture for IKEA stores have that voice at work.

Coretta Giles says working conditions—especially heat inside the plant—and low wages are two of the biggest issues she wants resolved. She told the Danville Register and Bee she voted for the IAM:

So we can have a voice. So we can all be heard and have another leg we can stand on when we need to.

The Danville plant is not air conditioned and, says Bill Street, director of the IAM’s Woodworking Department, is routinely 15 to 20 degrees hotter inside than outside. Working conditions on normal summer day are oppressive, but the recent heat waves have made it nearly unbearable, he says.

Also, while Ikea pays its Swedish workforce that does the same jobs about $19 an hour, along with five weeks of paid vacation, in Danville full time workers start at $ 8 hour. About third of the workers are from temp agencies and they make even less. While full-time workers receive 12 vacation days, management determines when eight of them must be taken.  Says Street:

It’s ironic that IKEA looks on the U.S. and Danville the way that most people in the U.S. look at Mexico. In this case, we’ve become Sweden’s Mexico.

Continue reading at:  http://blog.aflcio.org/2011/07/28/ikea-workers-build-solidarity-vote-for-machinists/

From Raw Story: http://www.rawstory.com/rawreplay/2011/07/author-u-s-may-be-on-the-verge-of-another-revolution/

From The Guardian UK:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/jul/29/european-debt-crisis-cyprus

Island may need bailout following exposure to Greek banks and an explosion that hit the island’s finance and tourism sector

Helena Smithguardian.co.uk, Friday 29 July 2011

Europe‘s debt drama has rippled across the Mediterranean to Cyprus. The country’s beleaguered leader was scrambling today to form a government amid speculation that the island’s ailing economy may soon need to be rescued by the EU.

Barely a week after EU leaders attempted to contain the crisis by agreeing to a new aid package for Greece, Cyprus has begun to show all the signs of fiscal contagion, with rising borrowing costs and an economy that has seen its credit rating downgraded.

“We are on the verge of economic collapse,” said Ioannis Kasoulides, the island’s former foreign minister and current MEP. “Unless serious structural reforms are implemented, we will face bankruptcy and need [a bailout] too.”

Hopes of the crisis being nipped in the bud were crushed yesterday as President Demetris Christofias struggled to appoint a new administration.

Christofias’ refusal to confront the island’s tough trade unionists – widely blamed for its profligate public sector – appeared to be a major obstacle.

Until recently Cyprus was considered an “economic miracle”. But the global financial crisis and a series of misfortunes have added to its woes. An explosion at a naval base on the island earlier this month left 13 dead and knocked out its main power plant, triggering daily blackouts that have severely affected the financial and tourism sectors on which it depends. Damage from the blast is estimated at €1bn-€3bn (£878m-£2.6bn) and as much as 20% of gross domestic product.

With 19 months left in office, Christofias has come under heavy attack for the accident. The disaster occurred after a cache of explosives confiscated from a Syrian-bound Iranian ship were left out in high temperatures close to the power plant.

Continue reading at:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/jul/29/european-debt-crisis-cyprus

From Think Progress:  http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2011/07/07/262400/clinton-war-on-voting-jim-crow/

By Ian Millhiser
Jul 7, 2011

Speaking yesterday at the annual Campus Progress convention, former President Bill Clinton called out the GOP’s state by state efforts to make it harder to vote— a war on voting designed almost entirely to reduce the number of Democrats who cast ballots:

I can’t help thinking, since we just celebrated the Fourth of July and we’re supposed to be a country dedicated to liberty, that one of the most pervasive political movements going on outside Washington today is the disciplined, passionate, determined effort of Republican governors and legislators to keep most of you from voting next time. There has never been in my lifetime, since we got rid of the poll tax and all the other Jim Crow burdens on voting, the determined effort to limit the franchise that we see today.

Getting rid of same-day registration. Some states getting rid of all advanced voting. Governor of Florida proposed to reverse his Republican predecessor’s signing of a bill that gave people the right to vote when they got out of prison and they’d finished they’re probation period, even if they didn’t have a pardon—that’s one of the most important things we can do. Why should we disenfranchise people forever once they pay their price? Cause most of them in Florida were African Americans and Hispanics and would tend to vote for Democrats, that’s why.

Why do we want to get rid of same day registration? Why has New Hampshire made it almost impossible for college students who come from other states but live in New Hampshire most of the year to vote there? Why is all this going on? This is not rocket science. They are trying to make the 2012 electorate look more like the 2010 electorate than the 2008 electorate.

Continue reading at:  http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2011/07/07/262400/clinton-war-on-voting-jim-crow/

From Raw Story:  http://www.rawstory.com/rawreplay/2011/07/assange-speaks-about-burning-mass-media-to-the-ground/

By David Edwards
Posted on 07.29.11

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange spoke to a forum at the Splendour in the Grass music festival in Queensland Friday, saying that the current generation was “burning the mass media to the ground.”

“We are becoming the agents of perspective,” he said. “This generation is burning the mass media to the ground.”

Assange continued: “We are reclaiming our rights to world history. We are ripping open secret archives from Washington to Cairo. We don’t know yet exactly where we are. But we can see where we are going. The change in perspective that has happened over the last year is what this generation is going to use to find our lighthouse.”

“And when we get there, we’ll turn the fucking spotlight on.”