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Proposition 40: Sore Losers in the California GOP Give Up & #Fail

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You won’t see any TV ads for or against Proposition 40 on this fall’s California Ballot. That’s because the people who put it on the ballot have given up.

Proposition 40, which will still appear on the ballot, asks voters to approve or reject the efforts of the California Citizens Redistricting Commission, which drew up new voting districts following release of the data from the 2010 census. State Republicans were seeking the have the redistricting overturned, hoping that they’d pick up a few seats out of the deal.

Californians have voted three times in the past four years to have district maps drawn by an independent commission …   [Read more…]

The Chicago Teachers Union Versus the New Democrats, the Same Old Republicans, and the Corporate Media

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 After nearly twenty years of ‘reform’, the schools of Chicago remain among the lowest performing in the nation.

A funny thing happened on the way to labor’s extinction: the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) staged one of the most daring and important strikes in recent memory. As Chris Hedges put it during his Democracy Now interview last week  “the teachers’ strike in Chicago is arguably one of the most important labor actions in probably decades.”  And in the midst of this struggle, most of the corporate media around the country have decried the horrible greedy teachers from their editorial pages and assured readers that they were on the side of the children rather than the teachers.

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Mitt Romney Opts for Politics Over National Security

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By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Picture this scenario from last week:

Unrest is fomenting in the Muslim world. Is it due to the anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks against the United States, the recently notorious and hateful film trailer for The Innocence of Muslims, an al Qaeda plot, or the latest storm in the Arab Spring?

Who knows.   [Read more…]

The Labor Movement Is Us

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Some people go on and on about labor unions as if they’re some kind of STD, so un-hip to the reality that the Labor Movement is us, We the People.

Who else labors?

As far as my relations with unions is concerned, if it hadn’t been for the San Diego Teachers Union I wouldn’t have enjoyed the time of a lifetime, a period of three years where I put work aside and took a “Parental Leave,” the first such leave taken by a man in the school district.

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The Starting Line – ‘Occupy’ Anniversary Protests in New York, San Diego & Around the World

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3:30 PM (PDT) As the press reports that OWS is all over for the day, here’s a picture taken a moment ago in Liberty Square

(For info on what’s happening in San Diego, come inside

3pm- Word from New York is that the late day actions were peaceful with few arrests. Thousands of people remain in Liberty Park. We’re headed out shortly to cover San Diego Occupy events. Check out our live feed from NYC below.
1 Pm This next hour will probably be the most dramatic part of the day for Occupy Wall Street. The activists gathered in Liberty Park are getting ready to march on Wall Street; the cops are massed and blocking the way.

Also It would appear that Anonymous has taken the Monsanto website down for the afternoon. Occupy groups in California have been targeting Monsanto for demonstrations as part of a campaign to support a ballot initiative that would require labeling of GMO foods.

NYPD reports 143 arrests as of 12:30 PDT.

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Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps.

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By Dave Rice

Ten elderly nuns get kicked out of an Indiana polling station for not having driver’s licenses or other state ID.

Electronic voting machines in Georgia report massive malfunctions – but only in Democratic-leaning low income districts, where the hot, humid conditions of polling stations aren’t conducive to electronics. The ones in wealthy, Republican-leaning districts are protected in well kept, air-conditioned buildings – and have no problems registering votes.

Thomas Brown, a black Floridian, has his name purged from voter rolls because a white man with the same name and birthday once committed a felony.

Foreclosure firm Trott & Trott shares an office building with John McCain’s Detroit campaign headquarters. Whenever Trott completes a foreclosure, the McCain campaign challenges the foreclosure victim’s voter registration to have it purged from Michigan’s voter rolls: if they’ve been kicked out of their home, the address they used to register must not be valid.

Mad yet? Greg Palast is hardly getting warmed up ….   [Read more…]

Extreme Weather Watch: The Effects of Global Warming Are Here Right Now

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Even those global warming deniers can’t escape the fact that the weather events causing a billion dollars or more of damage and destruction are piling up at an increasing rate. The National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) is the Nation’s Scorekeeper in terms of addressing severe weather/climate events. The NCDC tracks and evaluates climate events in the U.S. and globally that have great economic and societal impacts. The U.S. has sustained 133 weather/climate disasters since 1980 where overall damages/costs reached or exceeded $1 billion – assuming Consumer Price Index (CPI) adjustment to 2012. 46 of these events occurred between 1980 and 1995 and 87 occurred between 1996 and 2011.

So in the latest 15 year period there were almost twice as many billion dollar plus extreme weather events as in the 15 year period preceding it. Global warming or not, extreme weather is becoming more and more common all over the world. Losses from these events pushed the cost of weather disasters in 2011 to an estimated $150 billion worldwide. In the US last year there were a record 14 events that caused a billion dollars in damage or more. That’s more than one a month!
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Time for Oversight of Predator Drones – Made in San Diego

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Unmanned predator drones are now used for surveillance here in the U.S. and abroad

By Dave Patterson / East County Magazine / September 12, 2012

September 12, 2012 (Poway)–Every Thursday afternoon one can see a demonstration at the General Atomics plant in Poway, home of the Predator drone. The demonstrators are from the San Diego Veterans For Peace and their supporters, with the goal of enlightening the public on the desperate need for oversight regarding drone technology.

The Predator drone is flying over 16 countries now, loosing weapons over Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan. The kill statistics would be unacceptable in any conflict but are somehow overlooked because we are at war with terrorism.   [Read more…]

Federal Judge Rules NDAA’s Indefinite Detention Unconstitutional and Issues Permanent Injunction Against It

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Ruling Backed By Civil Liberties Groups Who Urge Obama to Give Up Defending Indefinite Detention

By Michael McAuliff / Huffington Post / September 13, 2012
Civil liberties groups are asking the Obama administration to stand down and give up defending America’s law allowing the indefinite detention of terrorism suspects after a judge Wednesday issued a permanent injunction against it.

The indefinite detention law — contained in the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 — codified the post-9/11 practice of having the military jail suspects, including Americans, and hold them without trial.

Federal Judge Katherine Forrest reaffirmed on Wednesday her May ruling that the provision was unconstitutional, and made the ruling permanent.   [Read more…]

The Back Story about the ‘Innocence of Muslims’, the death of four Americans and shameless candidate Mitt Romney

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Let’s start at the beginning of this one, shall we? The U.S. Ambassador to Libya and three others died yesterday over what amounts to a home video made by a bigoted California real-estate developer. An angry mob attacked the U.S. embassy in Cairo. Before all the particulars were in (and breaking a self imposed embargo on political attacks on September 11th) the Republican nominee issued a factually incorrect statement denouncing the Obama administration.

So let’s start with the video/film. It’s an amateurish production called “Innocence of Muslims”, produced by a self-described Israeli Jew and California developer named Sam Bacile. Until recently, the video seemed destined to languish in the dust bins of right-wing theocratic books stores; it had been screened exactly once, to a mostly empty theater in Los Angeles. (Eds Note: Turns out that the full length feature that the trailer promoted never existed)

“Innocence” depicts the Islamic religion as a “cancer”, Muslims in general as immoral and gratuitously violent, and the prophet Mohammed variously sleeping with women, talking about killing children and referring to a donkey as “the first Muslim animal.” It also strongly suggests that the founder of that religion was a pedophile.

There are breaking developments on this story, come on inside to catch up…   [Read more…]

Romney: “I pay all the taxes that are legally required, not a dollar more.”

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What Mitt fails to say is that most of the money he makes is funneled through offshore shell corporations in no tax jurisdictions so that no taxes are legally required at all. We have written before about how easy it is to set up an offshore shell corporaration linked to a bank account in the Cayman Islands, the Seychelles, Bermuda or a whole slew of other no tax jurisdictions. When money is made by a shell corporation in these places no taxes are legally required.

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The Myth of the Filibuster-Proof Democratic Senate

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Republicans have magically, mystically turned 72 days into two full years.

We’ve heard it over and over and over again. Mitch McConnell has gleefully used it as a cudgel. Congressional Republicans typically can’t wait to get their mugs on camera to tell America just how inept Congressional Democrats are in order to aid their case that they should be put back in power. After all, Democrats couldn’t get anything done even with a 60 vote, filibuster-proof majority in the United States Senate during the first two years of the Obama administration.   [Read more…]

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