Category Archives: women

Chicago public school teachers to strike

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Story here.

Emanuel is just another member of “the team” that is trying to undermine public education.  (haha, I typed “undermind” at first–perhaps a better term? 🙂

…because, you know, bankers, financiers, business-oriented people who look at kids as products or resources to be exploited.  They look at the kids with $$ in their eyes–what can we squeeze out of them?  What kind of profit can we make off of them?

This report from Indiana.

From the story:

But Russ Simnick, president of the Indiana Public Charter School Association, said it’s disingenuous to compare charter schools with other schools based on the ISTEP results. For one, such comparisons are between individual charter schools and the overall results of school corporations, in which high and low ISTEP scores are lumped together. Thus, he said, larger corporations have a better ability to mask their lower scores than smaller individual schools. A more honest comparison, he said, would involve lumping all charter schools together and treating them as one school corporation in order to compare with others.

Simnick also disputed Schnellenberger’s statistics on the lowest 50 ISTEP scores; he said only four were charter schools, and all of these opened in 2008. He said it’s not fair to expect such young schools to post high ISTEP scores, especially since many charter schools are in some of the most challenging communities and take in students who just transferred from poorly performing schools.

 

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Unbelievable.  What a way to worm out of accountability.  The teachers from public schools have made the argument for not giving them a failing grade for the above reasons–children from “challenging communities” are difficult to bring up to speed if they are poor, the parents are not involved, and there is some learning/behavioral difficulty.
But charter schools officials want to claim it’s not their fault that the kids are failing?

This from Pennsylvania.  Nepotism? Um, yeah.  Nice little game they have going there.

Notice how they use the same lines as the Indiana officials–the kids are poor performers, they’re special needs…blah, blah, blah.  If you’ve got only a 15% graduation rate, you’re not the people to be teaching kids. Period.

This from Miami.  Taxpayers should not be funding them at all.  But that would cut into the profit margin for the education vultures, wouldn’t it??  You know, privatize the profits while socializing the costs, eh?

 

 

Elizabeth Warren

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Her speech last night, seen here, is what truth looks like… (hat tip to crooksandliars.com)

…only when a corporation can walk into a voting booth will it be a *person*, in my view.

And as that refrigerator magnet said “I’ll believe corporations are people when they execute one in Texas.”

I don’t know why she didn’t name names when talking about a credit card company that cheated cardholders…why not publicly state it?

For me, she should have been the one running for president.  I would have no problem with going to the voting booth to cast a ballot for her.

Being Peace

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Rev. John Dear has this up on Sister Anne Montgomery, and her work for peace.

I was raised to believe that peace would only be attained if we were all Christians.  After studying Buddhism, Hinduism, Tao and Confucious in college, I discovered that all religions said the same thing–they all say, in so many words, “Do unto others as you would have done unto you.”  All of them say it…so in my view, it isn’t that we should all have the same way that we worship, but that we actually follow that simple sentence.

I think peace will only be attained when we put it into action…not as easy as it seems…it takes actively thinking about it with every action/every decision we make–and not believing that we all have to have the same religion.  I truly believe that we are individuals led along a certain path and those experiences along that path lead us to our spirituality–and no one has a right to interfere with that or impose their own beliefs upon another.  That’s just wrong to me.

“Baffling new disease…”

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AP has this up on a yet another disease that implicates a destroyed immune system.

Let’s break this down, shall we?

She was from Vietnam, and came here after the war, in 1975.  Although the article doesn’t state that, she most likely was exposed to Agent Orange–exposure to Agent Orange can cause immune system deficiency.

I also wonder about Celiac.  When doing my research on it, I had read that Asians don’t get it–it’s just unheard of in that population…but knowing how the medical profession likes to make pronouncements of entire classes of people with a small sampling, I’m suspicious that she might have it and not be diagnosed nor tested.  I didn’t have any overt symptoms–it was only because of my Irish-German heritage that I put the puzzle together.  And it’s interesting that I have become more sensitive as I have adopted the GAPS diet–allowing my gut to heal.

There isn’t any mention of her diet, nor of the doctor asking her about diet….so one is left to wonder if she’s adopted the Western diet and is suffering because of it.  I think the age thing is a big clue–our bodies are miracles that can take a lot of abuse before the cells break down and start to wreak havoc.  This is something I’ve noticed on the mercury poisoning support group–some folks will have good health up ’til the time they reach 40, and then things start happening.

There’s also no discussion on toxin exposure.  She lives in Tennessee, ranked 11th in toxic exposure.  (What? Indiana is *only* ranked 4th? …we must be slipping in polluting our environment./snark)   Note the assertion of the article that the EPA is right on top of things… the reporter apparently didn’t get the memo of the corporate polluters who worked to get those regulations repealed.

From the article:

The NRDC also framed its report in a political context, indicating that Sen. Lamar Alexander voted against an attempt by Sen. James Inhofe, R.-Okla., to repeal the Mercury and Air Toxics standard. Sen. Bob Corker supported it.“For too long, Americans have had no choice but to breathe toxic air pollution. Thanks to the EPA, the air is getting cleaner,” said Franz Matzner, NRDC associate director of Government Affairs. “But we need lawmakers who will help clean up the air we all breathe — not lawmakers who do the bidding of big polluters trying to repeal safeguards that protect children’s health. This and future Congresses should let the EPA do its job so all Americans can breathe easier.”

Here’s another article on the toxic junk in Tennessee by Kelly Hearn ( The Nation).  Pay attention to the date–I think it could be significant to this woman because she began getting ill in 2009.  Holy Crap.  Mysterious disease…my arse.

Here’s another discussion on it (same blog).  A good discussion on Celiac reaching across several populations that the medical profession has refused to acknowledge. Good Grief.  The misery and diseases they have caused by their ignorance.

 

 

Definition of rape

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Well, I’m glad Senate hopeful Todd Akin has cleared up the definition of rape. /snark

See, it’s not *really* rape if she gets pregnant…

Sadly, there are too many of the R’s that believe this garbage.  Truly appalling that they don’t see women as human beings.  I’m left to wonder what category they place us in?  As a wise woman once said, rape is the only crime where the victim has to prove they didn’t want the crime to happen.

 

Following the trail…

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I picked up an old copy of The Nation over the weekend, the date:  10-1-2001.  It was the first issue after 9/11, and prominently featured the twin towers on the cover.  In it was a story that I don’t recall reading, and given the upheaval of that moment in time, I probably didn’t read it.

However, the story was worthy of the cover had it not been for the tragedy of the weeks before–

The report by Amy Bach, an attorney, was on the Federalist Society and its infiltration into law schools all over the country.

In it, she showed the web of connections that this “society” was constructing–conservative law students (Antonin Scalia was one) who didn’t like their liberal law professors’ point of view, and wanted to do something about it.  That something was the Federalist Society to encourage conservative students to organize, and then make connections to the power players in the White House and the Supreme Court.

Bach names names and one of them is Jeff Sutton.  He argued the cases Alexander v. Sandoval and University of Alabama et al v. Garrett. (link here: http://www.civilrights.org/monitor/vol11_no4/art1p1.html)

I did a search to see where Sutton was now–here:  http://www.onu.edu/node/34771

and here:  http://abovethelaw.com/tag/jeffrey-sutton/

Well, of course he was nominated to a judge position by Bush.

From the article:

“…it [Federalist policy] benefits big business, it’s anti-egalitarian, it shuts plaintiffs like the poor and disabled out of courts, and it rolls back the New Deal notion that the courts have a role to play in helping the downtrodden.”

However, Bach noted organizations of progressive and centrists, one of which is the American Constitution Society.  The problem with getting organized is that progressives are not as narrow-minded, but independent in thought.  It’s soooo much easier to organize when your targets are the poor, disabled, women, minorities, etc.–you know, people who have less power to fight back.

From the dark side…

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…I try not to give Limbaugh more attention, as they say whatever you give attention to gives it power…but today, as I moved the dial past Limbaugh’s show, I couldn’t help myself…

He is heavily trying to divert attention from the Bain/Romney deal by arguing that corporations are not people…so, therefore, there is no way that Romney could have had anything to do with Bain sending jobs overseas.  Romney makes patronizing speeches about bringing jobs back to the U.S.–saying he “knows what it takes” to bring jobs back–yeah, it takes workers willing to work for $3.00 an hour…(While Limbaugh continues the slams on those on welfare–you lazy good-for-nothings, getting off your ass and get a freaking job….)

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Next we have a racist and sexist statement all rolled into one:  “Elizabeth Warren, Indian squaw…”

First, he and his ilk were all over her for claiming to be a Native American…even after it had been in the news that she was, in fact, Native American.  Now he degrades her and her heritage by that racist statement.  Squaw is a derogatory term the French gave the women–it means vagina. I believe they also named the Grand Tetons…I’ll leave your imaginations to what female body parts that name refers to…