From Raw Story:  http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/11/27/fmr-navy-chaplain-demon-of-rape-sending-transgender-people-to-violate-your-daughters/

By David Edwards
Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Former Navy chaplain Gordon Klingenschmitt warned on Wednesday that a “demon of rape” was granting bathroom rights to transgender people so that they could “violate your daughters.”

On his Pray in Jesus Name Internet broadcast, the disgraced former Navy chaplain pointed to the story of 6-year-old Colorado girl Coy Mathis, who was born as a boy.

“He has been dressed as a girl by his parents because his parents have a political agenda to push these coed bathroom bills into Colorado state law,” Klingenschmitt opined. “What a cute little boy. Unfortunately, he’s being abused by his parents, who have paraded him on national television shows.”

“You know, there’s not just a demon of deception here or confusion or sexual immorality,” he explained. “But there is a demon of rape inside of this movement to violate your daughters.”

Klingenschmitt was discharged from the Navy in 2006 after disobeying a direct order and wearing his uniform to a protest demanding that Jesus’ name be used in military prayers.

From Alternet:  http://www.alternet.org/drugs/will-legal-pot-hurt-booze-business-what-do-you-think

With marijuana law reform sweeping the nation, will consumers be driven to drink more or less alcohol?

By Jodie Gummow
November 26, 2013

As the legalization of recreational marijuana gains momentum across the United States with public support at an all-time high, many advocates eagerly await to see what effect legalization will have on big alcohol.  Will it be forced to fight for market share? Or is alcohol so heavily ingrained in our society that pot legalization will barely create a ripple with booze consumption remaining unaffected?

In the cannabis reform movement, it is an article of faith that the more pot is legally accessible, the less booze will be consumed, but is there evidence to support that theory?   The answer to the overall question likely depends on how cannabis and alcohol interact in  our culture, that is, whether pot will complement booze and vice versa or whether people will choose pot as an alternative to drinking.

As Forbes explains, if the two substances are complements, then states legalizing marijuana would expect to see more consumption on both sides, which may increase competition and likely exacerbate pre-existing health concerns about over-consumption of alcohol, particularly in this era of mixing red bull and other highly caffeinated drinks with booze.   However, if pot truly becomes a substitute for alcohol, than legalizing marijuana may reduce alcohol consumption.

According to economists, D. Mark Anderson and Daniel Rees, co-authors of the most recent research on this topic published in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, marijuana and alcohol are substitutes rather than complementary substances.

The co-authors cite a number of prior studies ranging from 2001-2013, which illustrate that as marijuana becomes more readily available, adults respond by drinking less, not more, with pot legalization associated with a reduction in heavy drinking amongst 18 to 29-year-olds and a five percent decrease in beer sales.

Continue reading at:  http://www.alternet.org/drugs/will-legal-pot-hurt-booze-business-what-do-you-think

End Scrooge Employer’s Theft of Worker’s Holidays

At the very least require them to pay triple time. 

As hard as it may be for these fucking soulless Corporate Douches to imagine, employees have real lives outside of work.  As much as these Libertarian assholes would like us to be slaves we too have families we love, entertainments we enjoy far more than killing all the joy in our lives so some fucking rich asshole can make a profit off of our lives and labor.

From The Guardian UK:  http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/28/walmart-black-friday-protests-thanksgiving

Record numbers of workers plan to protest major retailers, with Walmart at centre of row over holiday wages and hours

Dominic Rushe in New York
theguardian.com, Thursday 28 November 2013

Retail workers and union activists are preparing for a record day of action across the US on Friday, protesting wages and conditions on the busiest shopping day of the year.

Retailers, including Macy’s, are opening their doors on Thanksgiving for the first time this year, joining other store giants including Target, Sears and Kmart. But it is Walmart, the nation’s largest private employer, which has attracted the focus of protests.

Protests are planned at more than 1,500 of Walmart’s 4,000 US stores on Black Friday, the day after the Thanksgiving holiday and traditionally the start of the festive shopping season. Last year similar protests attracted 30,000 workers and supporters. This year organisers said they expect even larger protests with retail workers angered by the decision of many more retailers to open on Thanksgiving, traditionally a national holiday.

Workers lobby group Our Walmart plans to lead protests by supporters and staff, many of whom will be working Thanksgiving for the first time this year. Church groups and civil rights, consumer and environmental organisations including the National Organization for Women, The Sierra Club, Color of Change and the National Consumers League have all pledged support.

Tiffany Beroid, who works at the stores Laurel, Maryland store, said she would be joining this year’s protest. Beroid, 29, said she earned $12,000 last year working full time as a customer service manager for the company but had to go part-time this year because she could no longer afford her child care. “Even if I worked 40 hours a week, I wouldn’t be able to afford child care,” she said. “We need better wages and respect in the workplace. Walmart can afford to treat us better.”

The company has said associates – as it calls its workers – who work over the holiday will receive an additional day’s pay, a 25% discount off a Walmart purchase and will be served a Thanksgiving meal during the Black Friday shift. More than a million associates are expected to staff Walmart stores during the events.

A Walmart spokesman dismissed the protests as “a union orchestrated PR event” and said that the National Labor Relations Board had okayed unions to pay some protesters $50 to join the protests. “Very few of these people will be actual Walmart employees,” she said. “We are really focussed on sales and serving our customers. We don’t believe there will be any disruption at stores. It’s business as usual at Walmart.”

Continue reading at:  http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/28/walmart-black-friday-protests-thanksgiving

Every year at this time politically correct people come out of the woodwork to debunk Thanksgiving.

Yes I realize the European Colonialists killed off the Indigenous People.  Genocidal wars are as old as the ancestors of modern humanity and not the invention of Europeans although they have waged more than their share.

While American kids are taught that the First Thanksgiving was to celebrate peace between the Pilgrims and the Indigenous Peoples of Massachusetts its origins like most origins is much older and found in harvest festivals around the world.

Harvest festivals as such usher in the Winter and mark the beginnings of a season of holidays and feasts that brighten what is the darkest part of the year in the northern hemisphere.

Christianity laid claim to those holidays and assigned Christian significance to them.

Yet with things like Christmas trees and yule logs it is hard to escape the pre-Christian origins of many of these seasonal rituals.

Today Robert Jensen has a piece on Alternet titled: No Thanks to Thanksgiving. Seems he expects us to all atone for events over which we had no control.

I will stipulate that colonialists did terrible things in the 1620s.  From the time the Spanish first came to the Americas they waged a genocidal war against the Native Peoples.

History is filled with campaigns of genocide.  No doubt there will be campaigns of genocide in the future as we run out of resources for the ever increasing billions of people.

At times like this I feel I have the right to invoke the Serenity Prayer.  Especially since in it one asks for the strength to change those things one can change, the serenity to accept those things I’m powerless to change and the wisdom to know the difference.

As I have gotten older I have come to realize I am powerless to change the past.

I barely have control over the events that immediately shape my life conditions and my ability to survive can be dependent upon the whims of a fickle employer with a bad temper.

The short version of the serenity prayer is this: Fuck it!

I’m thankful I am nearly 13 years sober.

I’m thankful for my relationship with Tina, we have been together longer than I’ve ever been together with another person.

I’m thankful for the pittance I get from Social Security, for Medicare and for e-Bay and swap-meets.

I’m thankful I currently don’t have to kiss the ass of some fickle boss who has a mean streak.

I’m thankful that I am an American.  I’ve had the opportunity to live in a number of incredible places in this beautiful country and have enjoyed the weirdness, craziness and beauty of all those places.

As angry as I am with too many things  I still have a glimmer of optimism.

Thanksgiving isn’t about shopping.  It isn’t about wars or remembering veterans. It isn’t about the long dead Pilgrims and Native People.

It’s a harvest festival, a time of giving thanks and feasting to celebrate the past year.  It is the first of a series of holidays that carry us through to after the start of the New Year.

From Salon:  http://www.salon.com/2013/11/27/sorry_pope_francis_reproductive_justice_and_lgbtq_rights_are_economic_issues_too/

The new pope’s economic justice platform will continue to fall short if it ignores women’s and LGBTQ rights

Katie Mcdonough
Wednesday, Nov 27, 2013

Pope Francis issued a mission statement for his papacy on Tuesday that features an incredibly direct indictment of free market economics and growing global inequality. Agnostic or religiously indeterminate progressives of the Internet were suitably excited, as they have been before about the new pope.

Francis doesn’t pull any punches when laying into those who preach the gospel of trickle down, noting in the 84-page document that, “This opinion [about trickle down theories], which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system.”

His critique grows more explicit in the next paragraph, continuing:

While the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few. This imbalance is the result of ideologies which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation. Consequently, they reject the right of states, charged with vigilance for the common good, to exercise any form of control. A new tyranny is thus born, invisible and often virtual, which unilaterally and relentlessly imposes its own laws and rules.

Francis, to his great credit, is taking his religiously-grounded critique of capitalism well beyond the bland reassurances of his predecessors (and his many contemporaries in church leadership) that “the poor will inherit the earth,” and into a far more radical, policy-oriented place. He is using the heft of his position to pressure leaders to reform a global system that actively marginalizes billions of people across the globe.

Having the leader of 1.2 billion global Catholics get explicit about holding corporate heads and global leaders accountable for causing widespread poverty and all of its resultant suffering is no small thing. And his recent remarks have made all of the right people angry, which is also worth noting.

Continue reading at:  http://www.salon.com/2013/11/27/sorry_pope_francis_reproductive_justice_and_lgbtq_rights_are_economic_issues_too/

From Huffington Post:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/26/pope-francis-evangelii-gaudium_n_4342964.html

By Naomi O’Leary Posted: 11/26/2013

(Reuters) – Pope Francis called for renewal of the Roman Catholic Church and attacked unfettered capitalism as “a new tyranny”, urging global leaders to fight poverty and growing inequality in the first major work he has authored alone as pontiff.

The 84-page document, known as an apostolic exhortation, amounted to an official platform for his papacy, building on views he has aired in sermons and remarks since he became the first non-European pontiff in 1,300 years in March.

In it, Francis went further than previous comments criticizing the global economic system, attacking the “idolatry of money” and beseeching politicians to guarantee all citizens “dignified work, education and healthcare”.

He also called on rich people to share their wealth. “Just as the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say ‘thou shalt not’ to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills,” Francis wrote in the document issued on Tuesday.

“How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses 2 points?”

The pope said renewal of the Church could not be put off and said the Vatican and its entrenched hierarchy “also need to hear the call to pastoral conversion”.

“I prefer a Church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a Church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security,” he wrote.

Continue reading at:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/26/pope-francis-evangelii-gaudium_n_4342964.html

From Common Dreams:  http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/11/24-4

America’s corporate CEOs feel entitled to pensions that pay out $86,000 monthly. To protect their entitlement, they’re attacking ours: Social Security

From Desmog Blog:   http://www.desmogblog.com/2013/11/26/obama-approves-border-crossing-fracked-gas-pipeline-used-dilute-tar-sands

Steve Horn

From Other Words:  http://otherwords.org/betterer-grip-climate-change/

By Emily Schwartz Greco and William A. Collins
November 27, 2013

Reposted with Creative Commons permission

Earth to climate change deniers: The vast majority of Americans are worried enough about global warming to want our government to help stop this scourge.

This good news for people who believe science should drive our climate policy comes from a series of surveys conducted by Stanford University. Even in so-called “red states,” a clear majority of Americans said government action was needed to stop man-made climate change — regardless of what other countries might do about it.

Another poll, which contrasted responses from Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, found that two-thirds of Americans believe in climate change. That includes half of Republicans, up from only one-third of them in 2009.

It’s about time. Several of the worst wildfires in U.S. history have ravaged swathes of California, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico since 2011, stressing out those super-bad climate radicals: insurance companies.

In early October, India was forced to evacuate 900,000 for Cyclone Phailin, which devastated that country’s whole east coast. A month later, the worst tropical storm in recorded history struck the Philippines. Then, 200-mile-an-hour winds leveled Washington, Illinois as fierce tornadoes killed eight people in the Midwest.

No single extreme weather event can be tied to climate change, but unless we stop climate change, it’s pretty clear that devastating storms and wildfires will become increasingly common. Yet less than 5 percent of TV or newspaper coverage in the six days following Super Typhoon Haiyan made a serious connection between the Philippines’ true climate catastrophe and the world’s belching power plants, swarming autos, leaking gas wells, or clear-cut forests.

Many politicians are trying hard not to connect the dots either. Lawmakers representing fossil fuel states seem to think that they risk all if they call for the kinds of changes that would shrink our carbon footprint.

If the latest polls aren’t evidence enough that voters may actually reward action to avert a climate crisis, maybe it’s time they got organized.

You know, the West Virginians would seek to limit natural gas, the Pennsylvanians would demean oil, and the Texans would clobber coal. But that’s not how it works.

So now President Barack Obama and the EPA are stuck trying to reduce emissions without any help from Congress. But they’ll need a hand from the courts too. Tons of lawsuits have been ambling through the system to the Supreme Court, which in October issues a mixed ruling that gave the fossil fuel boosters another shot.

What can you do? Some options are obvious: Use less energy. Walk more. Start a carpool if you can. Recycle. Compost. Choose more energy-efficient light bulbs, refrigerators, and vehicles.

You can take action that goes deeper, too. Do you have any savings invested in stocks and bonds? Clean up your portfolio by divesting any oil, gas, and coal assets you might own. Even if you aren’t an investor, you can join the fossil fuel divestment movement and encourage your university or town to get out of that dirty business and invest in renewable alternatives instead.

So far, Seattle, San Francisco, Santa Fe, and at least 18 other cities have announced that they’re going this route. Student campaigns at hundreds of colleges and universities are gaining steam too, as counties, foundations, religious institutions and other organizations join the movement to make their investments fossil-fuel free.

From The New York Times:  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/27/us/politics/new-campaign-rules-proposed-for-tax-exempt-nonprofits.html?hp&_r=0

By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE
Published: November 26, 2013

he Obama administration on Tuesday moved to curb political activity by tax-exempt nonprofit organizations, with potentially major ramifications for some of the biggest and most secretive spenders in American politics.

New rules proposed by the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service would clarify both how the I.R.S. defines political activity and how much nonprofits are allowed to spend on it. The proposal covers not just television advertising, but bread-and-butter political work like candidate forums and get-out-the-vote drives.

Long demanded by government watchdogs and Democrats who say the flow of money through tax-exempt groups is corrupting the political system, the changes would be the first wholesale shift in a generation in the regulations governing political activity by nonprofits.

The move follows years of legal and regulatory shifts, including the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling in 2010, that have steadily loosened the rules governing political spending, particularly by those with the biggest bank accounts: corporations, unions and wealthy individuals.

But the proposal also thrusts the I.R.S. into what is sure to be a polarizing regulatory battle, with some Republicans immediately criticizing the proposal on Tuesday as an attack on free speech and a ploy to undermine congressional investigations into the agency’s handling of applications from Tea Party groups.

“Before rushing forward with new rules, especially ones that appear to make it harder to engage in public debate, I would hope Treasury would let all the facts come out first,” said Representative David Camp of Michigan, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.

Political spending by tax-exempt groups — from Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies, co-founded by the Republican strategist Karl Rove, to the League of Conservation Voters — skyrocketed to more than $300 million in 2012 from less than $5.2 million in 2006, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Much of the money has been funneled through chains of interlinked nonprofit groups, making it even harder to determine the original source.

And unlike political parties and “super PACs,” political nonprofits are permitted to keep the names of donors confidential, making them the vehicle of choice for deep-pocketed donors seeking to influence campaigns in secret.

The new rules would not prohibit political activity by nonprofits.

Continue reading at:  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/27/us/politics/new-campaign-rules-proposed-for-tax-exempt-nonprofits.html?hp&_r=0

From Salon:  http://www.salon.com/2013/11/26/conservative_think_tank_appalled_when_guys_with_mbas_take_over/

Heritage staffers for some reason don’t like their organization being treated like a common school or corporation

Alex Pareene
Tuesday, Nov 26, 2013

Julia Ioffe has a piece in the New Republic explaining the recent history of the Heritage Foundation, once the most influential conservative think tank in Washington, D.C. — perhaps the most influential think tank of any kind anywhere, for a few years — and now essentially a very large email list and activist PAC/pressure group.

Many people noticed how much the organization had changed during the recent government shutdown/”defund Obamacare” fight, a giant waste of everyone’s time and general self-inflicted disaster engineered and designed by Heritage Action, the 501(c)(4) “pressure group” Heritage launched in 2010. On the right, there was much consternation over the direction this once-respected think tank had taken. Truth be told, Heritage was always mostly political hacks, they just used to be effective political hacks with a realistic agenda. What was different now was the cheerful absense of any coherent and/or achievable goal — beyond fundraising and image-boosting for Heritage Action itself. Many blamed this on new Heritage president Jim DeMint, a former congressman not particularly known for his intellect, but Ioffe says the new tone at Heritage, and the tactics of Heritage Action, were both largely directed by Michael Needham, a 31-year-old former Giuliani staffer brought on to be the CEO of Heritage Action when it launched.

Needham is a child of privilege, the Manhattan-raised son of a banker and a Saks executive. Basically the minute he was hired to run Heritage Action, he began acting like any up-jumped MBA with an executive position. He and his lieutenant, “a 31-year-old evangelical named Tim Chapman who had a few years experience working on the Hill,” promptly took over the organization, assisted by DeMint, who took over as president when his kindly old predecessor retired.

“I was always struck at how they felt absolutely no intellectual modesty,” says the former veteran Heritage staffer. “They felt totally on par with people who had spent thirty years in the field and had Ph.D.s.”

Hmm. Why shouldn’t they? What good is a Ph.D. compared to the education received by an MBA with a useful business degree?

Continue reading at:  http://www.salon.com/2013/11/26/conservative_think_tank_appalled_when_guys_with_mbas_take_over/

From Alternet:  http://www.alternet.org/corporate-accountability-and-workplace/how-wall-st-turned-america-incarceration-nation

Transforming poorer neighborhoods into desirable real estate for the new elites often requires getting rid of the poor: jail becomes the new home for many.

By Les Leopold
November 25, 2013

The U.S. leads the world in prisoners with 2.27 million in jail and more than 4.8 million on parole. Minorities have been especially hard hit, forming 39.4% of the prison population, with one in three black men expected to serve time during their lifetimes.

How is it that our land, supposedly the beacon of freedom and democracy for the rest of the world, puts so many of its own people into prison?

We usually attribute the prisoner increase to a combination of overt racism and Nixon’s war on drugs, followed by Rockefeller’s “three strikes” legislation in New York, and then the 1984 Sentencing Reform Act with its mandatory sentences. While racism and these laws certainly provide ample opportunity to incarcerate millions for violating senseless prohibition laws, they do not tell the whole story.

Racism was just as virulent, if not more so, long before the dramatic rise in prisoners set in during the 1980s and 1990s. Just because there are draconian laws on the books, it doesn’t explain why they are so dutifully enforced. It also doesn’t explain why so many are willing to risk prison, knowing the increasing odds of getting caught.

If we dig deeper, we’ll see that the rise in incarceration corresponds with the rise of financialization and the dramatic increase in Wall Street incomes. Of course, just because trend lines on charts rise and fall together doesn’t mean one causes the other. But this correspondence is much more than coincidence.

In fact, we could show you a dozen other trends lines about financialization, wealth and the rising incomes of America’s elites that follow the same patterns over similar years as the incarceration rate. What is the connection?

‘Unleashing’ Wall Street destroys manufacturing, older urban areas and black America’s upward mobility

By the end of the 1970s, our policy establishment embarked upon a new experiment to shock the nation out of stagflation (the crushing combination of high unemployment and high inflation). To do so, neo-liberal economists successfully argued that Wall Street should be deregulated and that taxes on the wealthy should be cut to spur new entrepreneurial activity that would enrich us all.

Continue reading at:  http://www.alternet.org/corporate-accountability-and-workplace/how-wall-st-turned-america-incarceration-nation

From Change.org:  https://www.change.org/petitions/southern-poverty-law-center-monitor-gender-identity-watch-as-a-hate-group-2

Secular Woman

As a feminist organization, Secular Woman promotes gender equality. We stand against and combat sexism, hate, intolerance, and misogyny.

Transgender women are women.

Cisgender women are women.

We do not, in any way, view the existence of transgender women, genderqueer individuals or transgender men as a threat to the safety of women, female identity, or the goals of feminism.

As intersectional feminists we acknowledge the privilege that cisgender people experience. We aim to dismantle the axis of oppression that this represents.

Unfortunately, not all who claim the label “feminist” agree with us.  They do not represent us and we reject their actions and views as unethical and devoid of reason.

We stand in opposition.

Members of our community have been targeted by trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs). Personal information such as former names, current legal names, and photographs have been compiled and displayed on the website “Name the Problem”.  Several of the entries are self-attributed to “Pegasus” (“PegasusBug” is a pseudonym of Cathy Brennan, the head of Gender Identity Watch). This information was presented alongside reports describing rapists and batterers of women.

Countless others, including members of transgender advocacy groups have reported similar treatment, as well as other alarming behavior, such as Cathy Brennan contacting employers, schools and medical doctors of transgender women, girls and young men.

This is unacceptable.

It is anathema to our vision of a future in which women have the opportunities and resources they need to participate openly and confidently in every aspect of society.

Cathy Brennan’s tactics, as described, are reprehensible, reckless, and irresponsible as they have the potential to embolden violence and harassment of those she targets and to result in job loss and other discrimination informed by the open knowledge of the target’s transgender status.

Refusal to afford transgender women inclusion, safety, and civil rights is a form of misogyny that is antithetical to feminism.

We invite fellow feminists and secularists, as well as others concerned, to proactively affirm the inclusion of all women as women.  Condemn the toxic ideologies used to rationalize hate, fear, and discrimination based on gender.

Stand with us in petitioning the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) to track the activities of Cathy Brennan’s Gender Identity Watch as a hate group in accordance with SPLC’s stated mission.
Signed in Solidarity,

Secular Woman
Stop Abuse Online
Skepchick
Trinity Aodh, Melody Hensley, M. A. Melby, Veronica K. Berglyd Olsen, Kim Rippere, Mary Ellen Sikes, Dana Lane Taylor

Click Here To Sign Petition

From Trans-Advocate: http://www.transadvocate.com/ab1266-referen dum-drive-so-far-not-so-good-for-privacy-for-all-students-coalition.htm

By Autumn Sandeen
November 22, 2013

Reposted with Permission

The Secretary of State’s office described the process and procedure for qualifying the School Success And Opportunity Act (AB1266) for referendum on the November, 2014 ballot:

Once the requisite number of signatures has been collected, they must be filed with the appropriate county elections official(s). Counties then have eight working days to report the raw count of signatures to the Secretary of State.

If the raw count of signatures equals 100% or more of the total number of signatures needed to qualify the initiative measure, the Secretary of State notifies the county elections officials that they will have to randomly sample signatures for validation, to ensure petitions were signed by registered voters. If the result of the random sample indicates that the number of valid signatures represents between 95% and 110% of the required number of signatures to qualify the initiative measure for the ballot, the Secretary of State directs the county elections officials to verify every signature on the petition. This process is referred to as a full check of signatures. If the total number of valid signatures is less than 95% of the number of signatures required to qualify the initiative measure, the initiative measure will fail to qualify for the ballot. If the number of valid signatures is greater than 110% of the required number of signatures, the initiative measure is considered qualified without further verification. Spreadsheets containing the progress of an initiative in the signature verification stage are updated regularly.

The most recent spreadsheet was released on November 21, 2013.

So with the process and procedures in mind, to qualify California’s AB1266 for a referendum in November of 2014, the Privacy For All Students coalition {which includes the Pacific Justice Institute (PJI)}needed to turn in petitions with 504,760 valid signatures of registered California voters. The coalition reported that they turned in petitions with about 620,000 signatures.

The numbers posted by the Secretary Of State’s office spreadsheet show that 547,984 petition signatures have been raw counted to date, and random checking of petitions so far has indicated a signature validity rate of 72.49%. To succeed, the Privacy For All Students coalition would need a final validity rate of 81.4% to reach the 504,760 valid signatures of registered voters mark to qualify AB1266 for a referendum.

“With only 5 counties yet to report the raw number of signatures turned in, the total raw number is 547,984.” said one of the number-crunching LGBT advocates watching this signature count closely. “Four of the remaining counties are small. Amador County has a population of 38,091. Kings County has a population of 151,364. Mariposa County has a population of 17,905. Mono County has a population of 14,348. Only yet-to-report San Bernardino County is a population center, with a population slightly over 2 million.”

The advocate noted that Kern County (where the city of Bakersfield is located), was “a particular fail.” That county only had a signature validity rate of 69.7%.

Qualification of a November, 2014 referendum to repeal AB1266 looks to be depending heavily on 1.) the raw count of signatures provided to the Secretary of State from San Bernardino County and 2.) the signature validity rate of those signatures in that county. If the signature validity rate out of San Bernardino County isn’t high enough to raise the overall validity rate up by 9 percentage points, then the effort to put AB1266 up for referendum will have failed.

It’s far, far too soon to say that the petition drive to put AB1266 up for a vote has failed, but at this point it’s not looking good for the Privacy For All Students coalition.

And, should the referendum signature drive to repeal AB1266 fail, that would be very, very good news for California’s trans youth.

Update: The Secretary of State’s office released a new spreadsheet dated November 22, 2013. The new report has a raw number count for San Bernardino County of 63,348 signatures. The new report updated the overall signature validity rate to 75.46%.Again quoting my the number-crunching LGBT advocate source:

If the repeal people turned in 620,000 signatures as they said (right now it stands at 613,120), they will need a final validity rate of 81.41% to hit the required 504,760 valid signatures.

If the random checks come in at under 95% of 504,760 valid signatures, it’s over and we won.

If the random checks come in at above 110% of 504,760 (essentially impossible), this part is over and we go to the ballot.

In between those two percentages, the state will force an actual count of every single signature (as opposed to a random check) to see if 504,760 of the approximately 620,000 are valid.

From Huffington Post:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/helen-clark/tackling-violence-against-women-and-girls_b_4338056.html

Helen Clark
11/25/2013

Today is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women — a day which reminds us that violence against women continues to be destructive and pervasive. Ranging from domestic violence and child marriages to the use of rape as a tactic of war, violence against women kills as many women between the ages of 15 and 44 as cancer, is a grave assault on many more women and girls and imposes high economic and social costs on societies.

In responding to gender-based violence, the financial costs to health systems, social services, the justice sector and indirect costs, such as those of lost productivity, burden countries around the world. From Chile, where intimate partner violence is estimated to drain as much as two percent of the country’s GDP, to the United States, where the cost of domestic violence is estimated to exceed $12.6 billion per year, violence against women imposes high costs on both its victims and society.

Yet, when women are able to live in a safe and secure environment, they can participate effectively in the economy and society. This helps overcome poverty, reduces inequalities and is beneficial for children’s nutrition, health and school attendance. Every woman and girl has the right to live in safety in her home and community.

At UNDP, we address the problem of gender-based violence in partnership with other organizations, including NGOs and civil society. We aim to contribute to reducing violence and to promote women’s economic, legal, social and political empowerment. Through our programs, we provide legal and psychological support to victims, and we target the underlying causes of violence.

Improving women’s access to the justice system and to legal aid is vital. In conflict and post-conflict countries where justice systems, security and the rule of law have broken down, women are particularly at risk. To counter this, in countries such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, we are helping to strengthen the justice sector so that the many cases of rape and violence committed by combatants can be addressed. Impunity for perpetrators must end.

In addressing sexual and gender-based violence, it is important to know more about the entrenched attitudes and values which perpetrate it. A recent joint report by UNDP, UN Women, UN Population Fund and UN Volunteers surveyed 10,000 men in Asia and the Pacific. It found that 80 percent of men who admitted to committing rape in rural Bangladesh and China cited a sense of sexual entitlement as their motivation. Of those who perpetrated the violence in those countries, the vast majority never faced any legal consequences.

Continue reading at:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/helen-clark/tackling-violence-against-women-and-girls_b_4338056.html