Citizen Of The World

After 20 years as a Christian Right leader I then spent a decade within the wacky Neo Fundamentalist Movement that was birthed from the ashes of the old Christian right and that formed the worldview of social issue warriors like Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann. The bizarre world of their Dominionist-Spiritual Warfare mentality is a new and much more dangerous manifestation of the old Christian right and it has the power to bring us to the brink of civil war. It is vital that we understand what is happening and what can be done to stop it before it’s too late.

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Key Architect of Religious Right Warns of “Christian Jihad”

(via azspot)

(via amodernmanifesto)

(via howtobeasatellite)

howtobeasatellite:

The identity of being Asian doesn’t exist, except here in the United States!- William Schneider, Political Analyst

Read that. Read that again. That’s important - like Latino-Americans, Asian-Americans are not one big homogeneous group. They come from tens of different countries, innumerable different backgrounds, and, as pointed out, many linguistic backgrounds. Asian-Americans, the lump term thrown around (not enough, apparently) in politics, comprise one of the most diverse ethnic groups in this country. But not so in the eyes of the media.

And thank you Jane Junn for pointing out that the policies that Asian-Americans care about are… (unsurprisingly) the same policies all Americans care about. Education! Health care! Foreign policy! We’re people too!

[Also please take note of the little brown factoid box pointing out that Asian-Americans have the highest rate of long-term unemployment in the country.]

So how is it possible that over 50% of Asian-American voters haven’t been contacted by either political party in the last two years?? In states like California, Asian-Americans make up a full 13% of the population - as pointed out in the segment that’s more than three times the African-American population, and you can bet more than 50% of African-American voters have been contacted.

What’s that, Mr. Schneider? You know who the Asian-Americans being contacted are?

Here’s a little clue: they [political campaigns] do contact Asian-American community leaders: for money.- William Schneider

Damn straight, and it just reeks of “model minority” thinking. The homogenization of Asian-American voters into a single voting bloc whose current function is as financial donors only is both insulting to all Americans and inefficient for political hopefuls on both sides of the aisle.

I love Melissa Harris-Perry. This is a great show.

[Transcript available here]

The Obama campaign launched a national effort to counteract voter-identification laws on Friday, rolling out a bilingual online portal, Gottavote.org, and a fifty-state system for educating and turning out Obama supporters.

This is an unusually early time for a presidential campaign to focus on voter education, reflecting the concern among Democrats about new challenges to voting access in several key states. “We want to start as early possible,” explained Michael Blake, the campaign’s deputy director of Operation Vote, on a press call announcing the initiative.

Visitors to GottaVote.org are automatically directed to a state-specific page with local rules for registration and a checklist of “what to bring” to the polls. The campaign also uses the site to harvest phone numbers and e-mails, offering to text or e-mail voting reminders for Election Day. (Over a million people signed up for the 2008 campaign’s text messages.) The portal tries to cut through the thicket of voting rules with clear information about how to follow the law and be counted.

Count this as the most under-covered story of the week: late Thursday, Republicans in the House of Representatives forbade a vote on a resolution that would end the war in Afghanistan next year—because they knew it would pass. This means that, though we don’t have the roll call vote to prove it, Obama’s current strategy for Afghanistan is no longer sustainable in Congress.

You might recall that last year, Representative Jim McGovern offered an amendment to the defense authorization bill that called for President Obama to offer an “accelerated” withdrawal plan to Congress—which lost by only eleven votes, 215-204. All but eight Democrats supported it, along with twenty-six Republicans, including key members of the House Armed Services Committee.

Yesterday, McGovern was back with another amendment that would require the end of combat operations by the end of 2013—a year ahead of the president’s schedule—and redeployment by the end of 2014. It would require Congressional authorization for any deployment of troops to Afghanistan after 2014. McGovern’s bill was bipartisan and co-sponsored by Representatives Ron Paul, Walter Jones and Adam Smith, and had the full support of the Democratic leadership in the House.

But Republicans on the Rules Committee didn’t allow it to come for a vote—and two GOP sources told CNN the reason was that “Republicans were concerned the amendment could pass.” They expected a significant bloc of Republicans to support it, and that “they couldn’t rely on the White House to lobby Democrats against it.”

Instead, Republicans only allowed debate on a resolution by Representative Barbara Lee, which would have effectively ended the war immediately by only authorizing further money for withdrawal efforts. That has no real chance of passing the House.

McGovern, speaking on the House floor, was incensed. “What is the Republican leadership afraid of? Are they afraid a bipartisan majority of this House will vote to follow the will of the American people and change our Afghanistan policy?” he asked.

The vote would have been a massive embarrassment for the White House, coming as NATO leaders are gathering in Chicago this weekend to discuss the war strategy. Republicans rarely miss a chance to embarrass the president, but party leaders—including Mitt Romney—have long supported the war and have at times criticized Obama for drawing down even on his longer timetable.

But this should still be a huge story, particularly for reporters covering the summit in Chicago this weekend. Backed by constituents that are sour on the decade-long war in Afghanistan, Congress no longer has the votes to support the president’s plan.  

Make no mistake, this battle is about self-determination by women of the direction and course of their lives and their family’s lives. Abortion is about women’s hopes and dreams. Abortion is a matter of survival for women.

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- Dr. George Tiller, murdered three years ago today by an anti-choice fanatic. (via iamdrtiller)

I can’t believe it’s been three years.

(via stfusexists)

(via howtobeasatellite)

msamberhazard:

msamberhazard:

tal9000:

transawareness:

The above article is an update.  Her mother went to appeal to keep her out of the psychiatric ward and lost.  She will be institutionalized because of her expression of her gender.  She will be held until she conforms to male gender and then released to foster care, not her mother who was supporting her.

Please, if you haven’t signed the petition, sign it, reblog it, ask your friends to sign it. We’ve managed to get 40K signatures for a pageant model, we’ve only gotten 11K for a little girl about to have her life ruined.  Lets get on the ball and spread the word.

Sign It.

I literally just repeated the f-word until I ran out of breath.

Let me catch my breath. I may go on a cursing spree again as soon as I get it back.

Seriously people…

WHY THE FUCK AREN’T PEOPLE REBLOGGING THIS??

(via howtobeasatellite)

You know, I don’t agree with all the people who support me and my guess is they don’t all agree with everything I believe in. But I need to get 50.1% or more and I’m appreciative to have the help of a lot of good people.

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Mitt Romney responds to why he won’t renounce noted racist Donald Trump

Romney 2012: As Racist As It Takes To Win

(via joegressivism)

(via reagan-was-a-horrible-president)

Arguments about the so-called redistribution of wealth are mistaken in assuming that the existing distribution is somehow the natural state of things, from which any deviation is unnatural, and hence morally undesirable. In reality, every distribution of wealth reflects a particular set of choices that a society has made: to value some skills over others; to tax or prohibit some activities while subsidizing or encouraging other activities; and to enforce some rules while allowing other rules to sit on the books, or to be violated in spirit.

All these choices can have considerable ramifications for who gets rich and who doesn’t—as recent revelations about explicit and implicit government subsidies to student lenders and multinational oil companies exemplify. But there is nothing “natural” about any of these choices, which are every bit as much the product of historical accident, political expediency, and corporate lobbying as they are of economic rationality or social desirability.

If some political actor, say the president or Congress, attempts to alter some of these choices, say by shifting the tax burden from the working class to the superrich, or by taxing consumption rather than income, or by eliminating subsidies to various industries, then it is certainly valid to argue about whether the proposed changes make sense on their merits. But it is not valid to oppose them simply on the grounds that altering the distribution of wealth itself is wrong in principle.

—Everything Is Obvious:  Once You Know the Answer by Duncan J. Watts  [Download] (via sociolab)

(via questionall)

Though no one would ever think of using the term honor violence (we reserve that descriptor for brown people who live somewhere else, motivated by religious something-or-other or tribal something-or-other), one-third of women murdered every year in the United States are killed by their intimate partners. In 2005 that amounted to 1,181 women, or three women every day. To put that in perspective, the UN estimates there are 5,000 honor killings every year in the entire world. 5,000 in a world of 6 billion versus nearly 1,200 in a single country of 300 million. In other words, a woman in America runs a greater risk of being killed by her husband or boyfriend than a woman in Pakistan.

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A woman in America runs a greater risk of being killed by her husband or boyfriend than a woman in Pakistan.

How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Feminists. (via popmuslim)

A woman in America runs a greater risk of being killed by her husband or boyfriend than a woman in Pakistan.

A woman in America runs a greater risk of being killed by her husband or boyfriend than a woman in Pakistan.

A woman in America runs a greater risk of being killed by her husband or boyfriend than a woman in Pakistan.

(via silverqueen)

Let me reiterate that for you all …

A woman in America runs a greater risk of being killed by her husband or boyfriend than a woman in Pakistan.

A woman in America runs a greater risk of being killed by her husband or boyfriend than a woman in Pakistan.

A woman in America runs a greater risk of being killed by her husband or boyfriend than a woman in Pakistan.

(via dank-potion)

I think you’ve missed a crutial point though, let me point it out:

A woman in America runs a greater risk of being killed by her husband or boyfriend than a woman in Pakistan.

A woman in America runs a greater risk of being killed by her husband or boyfriend than a woman in Pakistan.

A woman in America runs a greater risk of being killed by her husband or boyfriend than a woman in Pakistan.

(via themindislimitless)

I’m going to go ahead and guess that more men are killed by their wives or girlfriends in the United States than in Pakistan, considering women commit quite a few domestic murders in the united states each year. 

(via espionagis)

The point is that we think of the Middle East as a terrible place for women with oppressive laws and honor killings, when the truth is that technically it’s more dangerous to be a woman here.

(via stfuconservatives)

(via stfuconservatives)