Bernie, Don’t Endorse Hillary Before the Convention! – Truthdig

If Senator Sanders endorses Mrs. Clinton, it should be expected that some percentage of delegates would not show up in Philly, and many of those who do will be harboring great resentment towards the campaign itself. Millions of voters will instantly retreat to the resignation and despair with party politics that they harbored before this campaign. The momentum of this revolution will largely come to an end. Base supporters will effectively be returned to the masses of disenchanted potential voters who justifiably feel that most politicians can’t be trusted, because they so frequently sell out when they’re most needed. Over the last 13 months, I’ve managed hundreds of volunteers. Dozens of them have individually expressed to me and others that they would “burn their Bernie shirts if he ever endorsed the epitome of everything we’re fighting against.” Nobody is immune to the backlash of endorsing the nation’s most corrupt politician, even the father of OUR political revolution. Most of the 13 million people who voted for Senator Sanders had not heard of him before he announced his candidacy. To these people, he represents more than just the social and environmental issues that resonate with them. He represents the very notion that there can still be integrity in the US Congress. If he endorses the very establishment candidate he railed against, he could lose those people to politics forever.

—Posted on the Confirmed California Bernie Delegates Facebook page by a delegate from Northern California.

As a longtime supporter and super volunteer, I would like to thank you for fighting on behalf of the 99% and for awakening millions of people, especially young people to the fact that establishment politics no longer works for the vast majority of the American people. I also want to thank you and your platform committee members for making the Democratic platform the most progressive platform in history.

However, we all know that the platform is an aspirational document that the President and the party can ignore. As a pledged delegate from California, I want to go to the convention in Philadelphia in two weeks and fight for your nomination, as I was elected to do. As such, I am alarmed by what I have been reading about your possible endorsement of Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire tomorrow. I am asking that you hold off on an endorsement until after the vote, that you not place her name into nomination using a vote by acclamation and that you exercise your option afforded you by the minority report signed at the platform committee meeting to force a vote on the Hightower amendment opposing the TPP in Philadelphia.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/dont_endorse_hillary_before_the_convention_20160711

The Case for Remembering (And the Road Not Taken)

“in the Detroit Free Press, the current Emergency Manager for Detroit Public Schools, Judge Stephen Rhodes (who calls himself a ‘Transition Manager’ as means of avoiding the historical failure of ‘Emergency Manager’- see how that works?), along with interim Superintendent Alycia Meriweather, wrote an op-ed, ‘Focus on Fresh Start for Public Education in Detroit, Not Blame for the Past,’ asking us to wipe the slate clean, forget the past, and move forward in order to do what’s best for kids…

As a superficial gesture, I get it. We all want what’s best for kids. Let’s move forward as way of doing that.

However, it raises so many questions that need to be asked. And to call them distractions displays a scary level of callousness for those who have been deeply harmed along the way.”

educarenow

We live in a time that encourages us to erase our history. Our focus is on moving forward, making progress, all the while we congratulate ourselves for how far we’ve come.

We live in times where we look to “disrupt” as a means of “innovating.” Of creating space for newness.

All the while we do so without fully understanding the forces at work that created the need for change in the first place.

We do so without understanding the choices that our history gives us clues to.

In a recent article in the Detroit Free Press, the current Emergency Manager for Detroit Public Schools, Judge Stephen Rhodes (who calls himself a “Transition Manager” as means of avoiding the historical failure of “Emergency Manager”- see how that works?), along with interim Superintendent Alycia Meriweather, wrote an op-ed, “Focus on Fresh Start for Public Education in Detroit, Not Blame for the Past,” asking us…

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Following Horrific Violence, Something More is Required of Us

Published on Sunday, July 10, 2016

by BillMoyers.com

We need a profound shift in our collective consciousness in order to challenge an entrenched system of racial and social control—and build a new America.

by Michelle Alexander

Michelle Alexander first shared this post on her Facebook page.

I have struggled to find words to express what I thought and felt as I watched the videos ofAlton Sterling and Philando Castile being killed by the police. Thursday night, I wanted to say something that hasn’t been said a hundred times before. It finally dawned on me that there is nothing to say that hasn’t been said before. As I was preparing to write about the oldness of all of this, and share some wisdom passed down from struggles of earlier eras, I heard on the news that 11 officers had been shot in Dallas, several killed from sniper fire. My fingers froze on the keys. I could not bring myself to recycle old truths. Something more is required. But what?

I think we all know, deep down, that something more is required of us now. This truth is difficult to face because it’s inconvenient and deeply unsettling. And yet silence isn’t an option. On any given day, there’s always something I’d rather be doing than facing the ugly, racist underbelly of America. I know that I am not alone. But I also know that the families of the slain officers, and the families of all those who have been killed by the police, would rather not be attending funerals. And I’m sure that many who refused to ride segregated buses in Montgomery after Rosa Parks stood her ground wished they could’ve taken the bus, rather than walk miles in protest, day after day, for a whole year. But they knew they had to walk. If change was ever going to come, they were going to have to walk. And so do we.

What it means to walk today will be different for different people and different groups and in different places. I am asking myself what I need to do in the months and years to come to walk my walk with greater courage. It’s a question that requires some time and reflection. I hope it’s a question we are all asking ourselves.

Read the entire essay here: Following Horrific Violence, Something More is Required of Us | Common Dreams | Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community

But Jeff, don’t ALL lives matter?

Of course they do.

I remember reading a story once about Mrs Rose Nader, herself an immigrant from Lebanon, mother of consumer advocate and political activist Ralph Nader, who raised four equally talented and well educated and successful children. You might Google her bio.

Anyway, she was asked about her pride in their accomplishments and the challenge of raising four very talented and highly intelligent and successful children. Someone awkwardly posed a question to her as I recall to the effect of which child was she the most proud and in essence which child did she love the most.

She replied, some thing to the effect of, “When one of my children is sick, I love that child the most. When one of my children is injured, I love that child the most. When one of my children is hurting, I love that child the most.”

Similarly and obviously, I have two legs. The knee joint of my left leg was damaged when I was playing high school football. For years I limped slightly and as time passed the pain and the limp grew more pronounced as the years passed.

That left knee joint grew arthritic and so painful that over fifty years later I knew I had to do something. Now, all those years, both legs mattered to me. Both knee joints mattered to me. I was careful not to do anything to damage my one good knee in fact… but the truth was, my left leg and left knee mattered more.

And so in 2010 I went to see my friend, an orthopedist and get a referral from him for surgery which I did in May 2011. And that’s how much that left leg and knee mattered to me.

I was lucky the surgeon said, because I’d ignored the problem so long, gotten so used to favoring my left knee, that I was actually putting an inordinate amount of weight on the right leg, knee and hip that had I waited much longer, the very mild arthritis which was beginning to settle into my right leg joints along with the resulting damage could have meant surgery on both legs.

Fortunately it worked out and by concentrating on getting my left knee replaced and then going through rehab I ended up with two strong legs, simply because I concentrated and focused on the leg that mattered the most.

###

For campaign cash, many lawmakers use a big map; Rob Bishop nears 93 percent out-of-state | OpenSecrets Blog

Home may be where the heart is, but for a growing number of congressional campaigns, it’s not the best place to round up cash. In a political environment that increasingly emphasizes the national over the local, more and more members of Congress are depending on out-of-state contributions — with some bringing in nearly all of their money from outside the area they represent. In 2012, there were … read more. Source: For campaign cash, many lawmakers use a big map; Rob Bishop nears 93 percent out-of-state | OpenSecrets Blog

Ten years after Abramoff: Kevin Ring on lobbying today | OpenSecrets Blog

 

The breadth of the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal a decade ago brought down 21 lobbyists, government officials and aides. Abramoff served 43 months in prison for conspiring to defraud the government, corruption and defrauding his clients. Abramoff’s former colleague, Kevin A. Ring, thinks it would be hard now to pull off the kind of freewheeling favor-trading that went on in Washington at that time … read more.

Source: Ten years after Abramoff: Kevin Ring on lobbying today | OpenSecrets Blog

The Kochs versus their machine | OpenSecrets Blog

To anyone who follows politics, the Koch brothers are best known for spearheading a sprawling network of groups that invest millions in conservative, libertarian-leaning candidates and causes. It’s assumed that Charles and David Koch and their wives have put a great deal of money into these organizations — but it’s hard to know for sure, since most of them operate under sections of the tax code that don’t require them to disclose their donors … read more.

Source: The Kochs versus their machine | OpenSecrets Blog

Pennsylvania Senate race draws highest outside money from the left | OpenSecrets Blog

Outside spending groups have poured more than $20.4 million so far into Pennsylvania’s Senate race between Republican incumbent Pat Toomey and Democrat Katie McGinty, putting it close behind Ohio’s Senate race, at $21.8 million, for the most outside spending in a congressional contest.

But while Ohio’s race is dominated by conservative groups backed by the Koch brothers, such as the political nonprofit Americans for Prosperity and the super PAC Freedom Partners Action Fund, the Keystone State has been bombarded by money from the left, including some that was spent in the primary. The Pennsylvania faceoff so far has seen the most outside money benefiting Dems: $11.6 million.

The race between Toomey, a first-term senator elected in the 2010 Tea Party wave, and McGinty, the former chief of staff for the state’s Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf, looks to be a toss-up according to the Cook Political Report. Other polls show Toomey slightly ahead.

Click here to read the full article.

Source: Pennsylvania Senate race draws highest outside money from the left | OpenSecrets Blog

An Assault Weapon Is An Assault Weapon Is An Assault Weapon. It’s Time To Put This Argument To Sleep.

mikethegunguy writes: “Know this: The campaign to promote ownership of AR rifles by rebranding them as ‘modern sporting’ anything is totally and completely full of crap. Because it doesn’t really matter whether my friend Dianne Feinstein gets it right or wrong when she refers to ‘automatic guns.’ It doesn’t matter whether AR rifles ‘only’ figure in 1% of all the shooting deaths each year that involve the use of guns. It doesn’t even matter whether the Dallas shooter used an AR or an SKS. The real issue, the only issue in the argument about assault weapons is how we understand the word ‘assault.’

Because guns like the AR or the SKS, even if they can only fire in semi-automatic mode, weren’t designed to go after Bambi in the woods or knock Big Bird out of a tree. They were designed to do one thing and one thing only, and that was to kill human beings, and to kill as many humans as many times as the trigger of those guns can be pulled. So why should we allow Gun-nut Nation to set the terms of the debate for determining the lethality of this gun or that? Remember, they believe that it’s the people who are lethal, not the guns. Tell that one to the families of the dead cops in Dallas whose dear ones were killed with a legally-purchased gun.” – https://mikethegunguy.com/2016/07/09/an-assault-weapon-is-an-assault-weapon-is-an-assault-weapon-its-time-to-put-this-argument-to-sleep/

            In the aftermath of the terrible events in Dallas, the argument has once again erupted over the definition of an ‘assault rifle,’ because the early but unconfirmed reports identified the shooter’s gun as an AR, but some unofficial statements referred to the rifle as an SKS.  Now in fact both guns were originally designed for military use, but the SKS, generally speaking, has a fairly modest ammunition capacity, whereas the AR generally comes with hi-cap mags.  But once President Obama said the magic words yesterday about how the shooter used a gun that was “not intended for city streets,” then Gun-nut Nation went into an immediate rant about how the gun used in Dallas was nothing other than a semi-automatic, top-loading rifle which is just like any other modern, sporting gun.

Since I can’t play golf on a rainy, Saturday afternoon, and in the interests of helping my GVP…

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Karen Wolfe: Activists Make a Dent on the Democratic Platform

Karen Wolfe: Activists Make a Dent on the Democratic Platform
by dianeravitch
Karen Wolfe reports here the precise language of the amendments that were added to the Democratic platform on charters, testing, restorative justice, and other important topics.

This is heartening.

When the election is over, and I hope that Hillary Clinton is elected, we will count on her to remember the party platform.

We also bear in mind that policy comes from people, more than from the platform. It is important to get the platform right but even more important to see who is named Secretary of Education, and who is chosen for top education policy positions. Those of us who want to see better public schools for all children must keep up the pressure, now and in the future.

dianeravitch | July 11, 2016 | URL: http://wp.me/p2odLa-eLY

Diane Ravitch's blog

Karen Wolfe reports here the precise language of the amendments that were added to the Democratic platform on charters, testing, restorative justice, and other important topics.

This is heartening.

When the election is over, and I hope that Hillary Clinton is elected, we will count on her to remember the party platform.

We also bear in mind that policy comes from people, more than from the platform. It is important to get the platform right but even more important to see who is named Secretary of Education, and who is chosen for top education policy positions. Those of us who want to see better public schools for all children must keep up the pressure, now and in the future.

View original post