150 women who shake the world - Newsweek Cover SoS Clinton.  Makes the soul yearn for real change, not short changed.

 Also, check this out on influence of Sharia law in this country.  www.aim.org/aim-column/did-muslim-lobby-force-firing-of-popular-radio-host/

She had such courage, wisdom and down to earth good sense laced with humor.  I did so admire her even when she trashed another woman I admire, Hillary, she was just being real and speaking out to what she believed.  She belongs among the women honored this month and her books are still treasures that have meanings for today and beyond.

 

Molly Ivins on Labor Unions

 

 

Quote of the Day

"Although it is true that only about 20 percent of American workers are in unions, that 20 percent sets the standards across the board in salaries, benefits and working conditions. If you are making a decent salary in a non-union company, you owe that to the unions. One thing that corporations do not do is give out money out of the goodness of their hearts." - Molly Ivins
 

guerillawomentn.blogspot.com/

This video puts things in the proper perspective & has over 4,400,000 viewings on YouTube. 

Really Bad Reporting in Wisconsin: Who "Contributes" to Public Workers' Pensions?

by: David Cay Johnston | Tax.com | Op-Ed on Truth-out

When it comes to improving public understanding of tax policy, nothing has been more troubling than the deeply flawed coverage of the Wisconsin state employees' fight over collective bargaining.

 

Economic nonsense is being reported as fact in most of the news reports on the Wisconsin dispute, the product of a breakdown of skepticism among journalists multiplied by their lack of understanding of basic economic principles.

<snip>

Out of every dollar that funds Wisconsin' s pension and health insurance plans for state workers, 100 cents comes from the state workers.

 

How can that be? Because the "contributions" consist of money that employees chose to take as deferred wages – as pensions when they retire – rather than take immediately in cash. The same is true with the health care plan. If this were not so a serious crime would be taking place, the gift of public funds rather than payment for services.

 

Thus, state workers are not being asked to simply "contribute more" to Wisconsin' s retirement system (or as the argument goes, "pay their fair share" of retirement costs as do employees in Wisconsin' s private sector who still have pensions and health insurance). They are being asked to accept a cut in their salaries so that the state of Wisconsin can use the money to fill the hole left by tax cuts and reduced audits of corporations in Wisconsin.

Read the facts here

From Jim Wallis at Huffpo

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-wallis/can-an-orange-bracelet-tu_b_830...

http://www.politico.com/wuerker/archive/20110302-candidate-obama-in-2007...

http://womenshistory.about.com/library/cal/today.htm

1887: Anne Sullivan arrived at the home of young Helen Keller to begin to teach her to communicate

1911: Jean Harlow born

1913: Woman suffrage supporters marched in Washington, D.C., disrupting the inauguration of President Woodrow Wilson. Onlookers attacked while police stand by.

1996: Marguerite Duras died

as shown by this recent confession from one of our own American Communists:

My Life as a Communist
By Bill McKibben
Tuesday, March 1, 2011

My life as a communist actually began without me knowing it, on Friday evening, when Glenn Beck spent his program explaining about a "communistic" conspiracy that included 10 groups in America. One was 350.org, a global campaign to fight climate change that I helped found three years ago. He even put our logo up on his whiteboard - and next to it a hammer and sickle.  Since I don't actually watch Mr. Beck, I didn't know about it until e-mails began to arrive, informing me that indeed I was a communist. My first reaction was: I'm not a communist. I'm a Methodist.    ............

I turned 50 last fall - that's half a century not understanding who I really was. There's something liberating about finding out. After all, it was Marx who said that above 350 parts per million carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, we can't have a planet "similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted." No, wait, those were NASA scientists. The same people who faked the moon landing. This is a complicated world; I'm going back to the baseball game.

I believe it holds some answers to why American women, for the most part, do not have each other's backs.  It also fortifies my belief that women are capable and brave enough to bond for the common good.

Clad in electric pink saris, the all-female gang shames abusive husbands and corrupt politicians. Amana Fontanella-Khan talks to the woman behind the largest women's vigilante group in the world.

 

The unofficial headquarters of India's Pink Gang, the largest women's vigilante group in the world, is a small pink house in the dusty agricultural town of Badausa, about 250 miles south of the majestic Taj Mahal. This concrete, box-shaped structure belongs to Sampat Devi Pal,  the self-proclaimed commander in chief of the gulabi gang, which means pink gang in Hindi, after the group's electric pink sari uniform.

 

ShareThis

This morning, FOX's Judge Vanilla-chocolate-strawberry is insensed that submitting to a mouth swab before getting on an airplane may be required.  Expect more of the same from their other legal experts. 

Then turn your mental pages back to when women were actively demanding the right to control their own body and note that the Judge and others are using the same arguments brought forth by women.  Can you spell plagiarism?

One, for example just to start you off, is that if one owns anything, it is her/his body etc. 

It's a laugh a minute!  Finally FOX is fair and balanced and on board for women's equal rights.  NOT!

Ronald Reagan was President of the Screen Actors Guild from 1947-1952, 1959-1960. 

During Reagan's presidencies and board terms, 1946 - 1960, were among the most vast and complicated in the Guild's history, including, in addition to the CSU strikes: the Guild's first entirely new contract since 1937; passage of the labor-weakening Taft-Hartley act; the House Committee on Un-American Activities hearings and the blacklist era; a severe decline in Hollywood film production, largely caused by both the exploding popularity of television and the 1948 "Paramount decree" which would bring an end to the "studio system"; the fall of mainland China to communism; the explosion of an atomic bomb by the Soviet Union; the Korean War; jurisdictional struggles over television; the MCA waiver; the Guild's first three strikes (1952-53, 1955, and 1960); the first residuals for filmed television programs; first residuals for films sold to television; and the creation of the pension and health plan.

 

Residuals, pensions, actor strikes and health care for actors all happened under Reagan.

Read more at SAG

(as opposed to a Corporation):

For starters,

1.  People are created with egg and sperm. 

2.  People have opposable thumbs. 

For more tips on how to tell the difference between Corporations and Human Beings, please click this link:  
http://www.pickuppatriots.com/media/users/patriot/how_to_recognize_a_real_person.pdf (pdf)

What's happenning in Wisconsin is our Cairo. 

Breaking News.  CNN is still calling all the protests this weekend, Union Protests.  But wake up CNN and stop pushing the Right Wing propaganda.  At the Concord, NH event yesterday, well fewer than 50% were union.  Most of us were just plain old Americans.

Back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Today I turned on A Prairie Home Companion for 2 minutes and loved what I heard.  Garrison doing his little news update said something to the effect that "over in Wisconsin, Governor Mubarak.....".  The audience went wild.

Governor Mubarak

I'll be in Concord, NH for the noon rally. Mrs. Hampster insists I go. I tweet as Partizane @partizane I'll try and update here too.

This is a funny from Huffpo

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/25/indigo-airlines-female-pilot_n_...

A Mumbai-bound IndiGo airlines flight was delayed nearly 2 hours at the Delhi airport on Friday morning after a passenger caused a ruckus over the fact that the plane's pilot was a woman, according to Indian news site IBN Live.

A fellow passenger told the IANS (Indo-Asian News Service):

First the flight was held up by a slight fog. Then, just when we were about to fly, the doors were opened again at around 9 as a middle-aged man seated a couple of seats away from me objected to a woman piloting the plane.

The man reportedly became jittery after the pilot came the intercom to deliver a regular flight announcement and was female.

The man started grumbling, saying "I don't want to die! She can't take care of the house, how will she take care of a plane?"

Flight attendants were called and ground staff came on board to escort the man off the plane with his luggage. The whole ordeal lasted roughly 40 minutes.

An airline spokesman responded that there was a "mentally unsound" passenger on the plane.

"...One of the proudest moments of public employee unionism was its part in the creation of the New York State Retirement System in 1920. At that time, the state of New York and its public employees joined together to ensure a dignified and economically viable old-age for its workers. Through-out the decades that followed an almost symbiotic tapestry was created - and repeatedly strengthened - which is simple to describe: employees opt for a public service career (not to become rich but) with an understanding that they can retire with a modest pension and health care coverage. Indeed, it is this historic covenant between the state and its government workers which is currently under vicious and unrelenting attack by right-wing ideologues, various media outlets and big business."

Read the whole misinformation post at this link

The quote above is from a site I found referencing what I myself always thought of as the covenant.  It's how my mom explained to me the reasons some people elected to go into teaching or government jobs.  You see, I knew those jobs paid and still pay relative crap compared with other college educated professionals.  My mom said we owe them just as we owe our veterans.

I am not a teacher or government employee.  Never have been.  My aforementioned mother worked for the state going on 25 years before her retirement.  She gets a pension check each month that is less than her social security.  It barely helps but it's better than nothing.

My brother and sister-in-law are two of those who worked 9 months a year helping to mold the minds of the next generations of leaders.  They each spent 35 - 40 years helping students go on to be professionals in high paying careers.  Neither of them ever earned six figures in their teaching jobs.  But in retirement they are comfortable and having a ball.  Jealous I am, but  I always understood the choice they made and the promise we all made to them.

Republicans and their wealthy friends are desperate to pay lower taxes so they can leave even larger legacies to their unborn great grand kids.  So what do they do?  The same trick the kings and dictators of the middle east have used for decades and the people have finally figured out.  They ignore the age old promises and they use scapegoats.

The kings used Israel and religion as scapegoats and distractions to keep the poor poor.  There was also a German dictator in the last century who pushed this tactic to the limits in his quest for world dominance.  Now the GOP(Grand Old Pricks) are trying to divide and conquer by using teachers, government employees and unions as scapegoats.  They want you to believe that the recession and lack of a recovery is entirely the fault of those three groups.  And Americans being the suckers they are, well Americans are falling for it.

Richard Wolff

The real reason for public finance crisis

If you want to know why we have budget deficits all over, look no further than the roaring success of corporate tax avoidance
________________________

Nothing better shows corporate control over the government than Washington's basic response to the current economic crisis. First, we had "the rescue", then "the recovery". Trillions in public money flowed to the biggest US banks, insurance companies, etc. That "bailed" them out (is it just me or is there a suggestion of criminality in that phrase?), while we waited for benefits to "trickle down" to the rest of us.

As usual, the "trickle-down" part has not happened. Large corporations and their investors kept the government's money for themselves; their profits and stock market "recovered" nicely. We get unemployment, home-foreclosures, job benefit cuts and growing job insecurity. As the crisis hits states and cities, politicians avoid raising corporate taxes in favour of cutting government services and jobs – witness Wisconsin, etc.

France's Sarkosy joins in on multiculturisms's failure. 

"Of course we must all respect differences, but we do not want... a society where communities coexist side by side.

 

"If you come to France, you accept to melt into a single community, which is the national community, and if you do not want to accept that, you cannot be welcome in France," the right-wing president said.

 

"The French national community cannot accept a change in its lifestyle, equality between men and women... freedom for little girls to go to school," he said.

 

"We have been too concerned about the identity of the person who was arriving and not enough about the
identity of the country that was receiving him," Sarkozy said in the TFI channel show.

 

British Prime Minister David Cameron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Australia's ex-prime minister John Howard and Spanish ex-premier Jose Maria Aznar have also recently said multicultural policies have not successfully integrated immigrants.

More here

Hint on the world leader holdout:  the Speaker of the House wonders where he was born.

 FDR would be against Obama’s support of collective bargaining for government workers. 

A must read Op-Ed by George Lakoff, the word expert who has been fighting the GOP use of framing for many years.  This is just a small snippet from a much longer article that all should read.

<snip>

In conservative family life, the strict father rules. Fathers and husbands should have control over reproduction; hence, parental and spousal notification laws and opposition to abortion. In conservative religion, God is seen as the strict father, the Lord, who rewards and punishes according to individual responsibility in following his Biblical word.

 

Above all, the authority of conservatism itself must be maintained. The country should be ruled by conservative values, and progressive values are seen as evil. Science should have authority over the market, and so the science of global warming and evolution must be denied. Facts that are inconsistent with the authority of conservatism must be ignored or denied or explained away. To protect and extend conservative values themselves, the devil's own means can be used against conservatism's immoral enemies, whether lies, intimidation, torture or even death, say, for women's doctors.

 

Read the rest: http://www.truth-out.org/what-conservatives-really-want67907

Many children don’t understand how a check works. They think it is a magic piece of paper and don’t understand what their parents are doing when they sign it. Their misunderstanding leads to conversations like this:

Child: Mommy, buy me this, Puleeze.

 

Mom: Honey, I can’t, not this time. Money is short this week.

 

Child: Oh-h-h, Pul-eeze, PUL-E-E-ZE! You don’t need money, Mommy; write a check…

This mindset isn’t reserved to checks; children have the same misunderstanding of the plastic cards daddy and mommy carry with them. For children, there is a disconnect between the use of the plastic and/or the use of checks and the actual money, and an even bigger disconnect between what they regard as magic tools and the actual human labor and sacrifice involved in making those tools credible. (Bank fees and interest rates are totally beyond their reach.)