People United Means Action

WE’RE NOT COMING HOME!

August 6th, 2012
‘NObama’ Say Hillary Clinton Voters

Scott Conroy reports that Mitt Romney sees opportunity and a chance to win in Pennsylvania. A Republican winning Pennsylvania is supposed to be “unpossible” according to the Ralph Wiggums’ of Big Media. But maybe not.

The “maybe not” might be due to Hillary Clinton voters. Why Hillary Clinton voters?:

“For a striking number of Democrats, May 31, 2008, is a day that lives in infamy. It marked the moment that the national party’s rules committee dealt a deathblow to Hillary Clinton’s bid to win the presidential nomination over Barack Obama.

The committee, weighted with Obama loyalists, issued a unanimous decision amid whispered back-door deals.

The date “will not be forgotten,” according to Gayle Allegro, a Democrat from Pine Island, Fla. – which is why Allegro was frosted by last week’s announcement that Bill Clinton will be the keynote speaker at the Democrats’ national convention next month.

“If Obama and his crew think that having Bill Clinton give a speech is going to sway all the Democrats that left the party in 2010 or just slipped into the shadows, they are mistaken,” she said.

“Do they really think we are that stupid, that we don’t see what is going on?”

::::snip:::::

“Further behind the eight-ball” is a polite way of putting it. Even the New York Times noticed Obama’s shrinking coffers. If this keeps up it’s not only his coffers that will continue to shrink. Don’t expect Hillary Clinton voters to come to the rescue.”

continue reading at hillaryis44.com

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Olympic Weightlifter Responds To Sexist Tweets:
‘We Don’t Lift Weights…For The Likes Of Men Like That’

By Annie-Rose Strasser on Jul 31, 2012

Being able to lift 267 pounds is only one of the things that makes 18 year-old British Olympic weightlifter Zoe Smith tough. She can also swat down sexist Twitter trolls like they’re flies.

While Smith was preparing to set an Olympic record for Great Britain in the clean-and-jerk event, men (and some women) on Twitter were busy saying she wasn’t attractive enough, or that she was manly, or that there was something wrong with her body because she was so muscular.

So Smith took to her blog to respond:

“[We] don’t lift weights in order to look hot, especially for the likes of men like that. What makes them think that we even WANT them to find us attractive? If you do, thanks very much, we’re flattered. But if you don’t, why do you really need to voice this opinion in the first place, and what makes you think we actually give a toss that you, personally, do not find us attractive? What do you want us to do? Shall we stop weightlifting, amend our diet in order to completely get rid of our ‘manly’ muscles, and become housewives in the sheer hope that one day you will look more favourably upon us and we might actually have a shot with you?! Cause you are clearly the kindest, most attractive type of man to grace the earth with your presence.

Oh but wait, you aren’t. This may be shocking to you, but we actually would rather be attractive to people who aren’t closed-minded and ignorant. Crazy, eh?! We, as any women with an ounce of self-confidence would, prefer our men to be confident enough in themselves to not feel emasculated by the fact that we aren’t weak and feeble.”

Sexism seems to be almost as common as sweat at this year’s Olympics — which has a record number of women participating — from female boxers being asked to wear skirts to differentiate them from the men to women’s teams taking coach while men’s fly first class.

h/t thinkprogress.org

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Male Madness

The Overwhelming Maleness of Mass Homicide
By Erika Christakis, TIME.com

(TIME.com) — There’s a predictable cycle of mourning and finger-pointing that follows a massacre like the shootings last week in Aurora, Colorado. First come the calls for unity and flags flown at half-staff. Then the national fissures appear: The gun lobby stiffens its spine as gun control advocates make their case. Psychologists parse the shooter’s background, looking for signs of mental illness or family disarray. Politicians point fingers about “society run amok” and “cultures of despair.”

We’ve been down this path so many times, yet we keep missing the elephant in the room: How many of the worst mass murderers in American history were women? None. This is not to suggest that women are never violent, and there are even the rare cases of female serial killers. But why aren’t we talking about the glaring reality that acts of mass murder (and, indeed, every single kind of violence) are overwhelmingly perpetrated by men? Pointing out that fact may seem politically incorrect or irrelevant, but our silence about the huge gender disparity of such violence may be costing lives.

Imagine for a moment if a deadly disease disproportionately affected men. Not a disease like prostate cancer that can only affect men, but a condition prevalent in the general population that was vastly more likely to strike men. Violence is such a condition: Men are nine to 10 times more likely to commit homicide and more likely to be its victims.

The numbers are sobering when we look at young men. In the United States, for example, young white males (between age 14 and 24) represent only 6% of the population, yet commit almost 17% of the murders. For young black males, the numbers are even more alarming (1.2% of the population accounting for 27% of all homicides). Together, these two groups of young men make up just 7% of the population and 45% of the homicides. Overall, 90% of all violent offenders are male, as are nearly 80% of the victims.

We shouldn’t need Steven Pinker, one of the world’s leading psychologists and the author of the book “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” to tell us the obvious: “Though the exact ratios vary, in every society, it is the males more than the females who play-fight, bully, fight for real, kill for real, rape, start wars and fight in wars.” The silence around the gendering of violence is as inexplicable as it is indefensible. Sex differences in other medical and social conditions — such as anorexia nervosa, lupus, migraines, depression and learning disabilities — are routinely analyzed along these lines.

Continue reading here.

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Dr. Sally Ride, America's First Woman Astronaut

Sally Ride, A Complete Heroine
BY GLORIA STEINEM – 24 JULY 2012

No one on earth — or in space — could have created a more complete heroine than Sally Ride.

She came from a family of strong and barrier-breaking women — a mother who devoted her life to working with women in prison and a sister who was a pioneering minister.

She was a physicist and astrophysicist when she answered a classified ad to become an astronaut — and also an English major, a Shakespeare scholar and a tennis champion.

She survived with good grace a global barrage as the first American woman in space, including endless jokes about everything from menstruation to bathroom privacy.

She reminded reporters that women had qualified to be astronauts in the very first class, but had been ruled out only because they were women.

She was always mindful of being a role model for little girls with big dreams. She was more likely to spend time with Girl Scouts than with celebrity interviews, and she wrote a half dozen science books for children.

She was kind towards people around her. She greeted challenges not with fear or competitiveness but with joy at doing the thing itself.

I am very lucky that our paths crossed. If we let her keep on inspiring us, then Sally Ride is with us still.

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America’s First Woman Astronaut Dr. Sally Ride Dies

Sally Ride, the first American woman to fly in space, died on Monday at her home in San Diego. She was 61.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, her company, Sally Ride Science, announced on its Web site. Dr. Ride, a physicist, flew on the shuttle Challenger on June 18, 1983, and on a second mission in 1984. She was also, at 32, the youngest American in space. Dr. Ride later became the only person to sit on both panels investigating the catastrophic shuttle accidents that killed all astronauts on board — the Challenger explosion in 1986 and the Columbia crash in 2003.

Dr. Ride was finishing studies at Stanford — degrees in physics and astrophysics (and also English) — and looking for a job when she saw a newspaper advertisement that said NASA was accepting astronaut applications. She looked at the qualifications and said, “I’m one of those people,” she told The New York Times in 1982.
She applied, and made the cut.

“The women’s movement had already paved the way, I think, for my coming,” she said.
By the time she began studying laser physics at Stanford, women had already broken through into the physics department, once a boys’ club. And when she applied to the space program, NASA had already made a commitment to admit women.

But there were still rough spots.
Before the first shuttle flight, Dr. Ride — chosen in part because she was known for keeping her cool under stress — politely endured reporters’ asking whether spaceflight would affect her reproductive organs, whether she planned to have children, whether she would wear a bra or makeup in space, whether she cried on the job, how she would handle menstruation in space. The CBS News reporter Diane Sawyer asked her to demonstrate a newly installed privacy curtain around the shuttle’s toilet. On “The Tonight Show,” Johnny Carson joked that the shuttle flight would be delayed because Dr. Ride had to find a purse to match her shoes.

At a NASA news conference, Dr. Ride said: “It’s too bad this is such a big deal. It’s too bad our society isn’t further along.”

The Soviets had already sent two women into space. One was welcomed aboard a space station by a male cosmonaut who told her the kitchen and an apron were all ready for her.

In her early days at NASA, Dr. Ride trained in parachute jumping, water survival and acclimatization to weightlessness and the huge G-forces of a rocket launch. She learned to fly a jet plane. She also switched from physics to engineering and helped to develop a robotic arm for the space shuttle. The Challenger commander, Robert Crippen, chose her for the 1983 mission in part because of her expertise with the device. She was part of a crew of five that spent about six days in space, during which she used the arm to deploy and retrieve a satellite.

At Cape Canaveral, many in the crowd of 250,000 that watched the launch wore T-shirts that said, “Ride, Sally Ride.”

The next day, Gloria Steinem, then editor of the magazine Ms., said, “Millions of little girls are going to sit by their television sets and see they can be astronauts, heroes, explorers and scientists.”

When the shuttle landed, Dr. Ride told reporters, “I’m sure it was the most fun that I’ll ever have in my life.”

Her next mission, in 1984, lasted about eight days. She was on the roster for another shuttle flight, but then, on Jan. 28, 1986, the Challenger blew up, 73 seconds after taking off.

As part of the accident-investigation panel appointed by President Ronald Reagan, she asked tough questions. The group learned from testimony and other evidence that there had been signs of trouble on earlier Challenger flights, but that they had been dismissed as not critical. Dr. Ride told a colleague it was difficult not to be angered by the findings.

One witness was Roger Boisjoly, an engineer who had worked for the company that made the shuttle’s rocket boosters and who had been shunned by colleagues for revealing that he had warned his bosses and NASA of potentially fatal flaws in the boosters’ seals. Afterward, Dr. Ride — widely considered to be reserved and reticent — hugged him. She was the only panelist to offer him support, and Mr. Boisjoly, who died in February, said her gesture had helped sustain him during a troubled time.

In 2003, after sitting on a shuttle-disaster panel for the second time, Dr. Ride said in an interview with The Times that part of the problem at NASA was that people had forgotten some of the lessons learned from the Challenger accident. But she also said: “I flew the shuttle twice. It got me home twice. I like the shuttle.”

In 1987, Dr. Ride led a study team that wrote a report advising NASA on the future direction of the space program. The team recommended an outpost on the Moon, though not a “race to Mars.” But Mars should still be the “ultimate objective,” the group said. In the report, Dr. Ride wrote that a lunar outpost would combine “adventure, science, technology and perhaps the seeds of enterprise.” She also noted darkly that the Untied States had “lost leadership” to the Soviet Union in a number of aspects of space exploration.

The same year, Dr. Ride retired from NASA and became a science fellow at the Center for International Security and Arms Control at Stanford University. In 1989, she became a professor of physics and director of the California Space Institute at the University of California, San Diego.

She also developed a passion for trying to interest young people, especially girls, in science, math and technology. She wrote six science books for children, including one that explained how to make a sandwich in space. (She advised eating it fast, before it floated away.)

In 2001 she started a company, Sally Ride Science, to “make science and engineering cool again,” as she put it, by providing science-oriented school programs, materials and teacher training. Dr. Ride was known for guarding her privacy. She rejected most offers for product endorsements, memoirs and movies, and her reticence lasted to the end. At her request, NASA kept her illness secret.

In 1983 Susan Okie, a longtime friend and a journalist, wrote an article in The Washington Post in which she described Dr. Ride as elusive and enigmatic, protective of her emotions.
“During college and graduate school,” Dr. Okie wrote, “I had to interrogate her to find out what was happening in her personal life.”

Dr. Okie quoted Dr. Ride’s younger sister, the Rev. Karen Scott, a Presbyterian minister, as saying, “ ‘Closeness’ is not a word that is often used to describe relationships in our family.” Dr. Ride always needed to be in control, her mother told Dr. Okie.

Sally Kristen Ride was born on May 26, 1951, in Encino, part of Los Angeles. Her father was a political science professor at Santa Monica College, and her mother worked as a volunteer counselor at women’s correctional facility. Both parents were elders in the Presbyterian Church.

From an early age, Dr. Ride gravitated toward math and science. She was strong-willed and athletic, and became so obsessed with playing football in the street that her parents pushed her into tennis lessons because it was a safer sport. She was soon playing in tournaments.

Dr. Ride attended Westlake High School, a girls’ prep school in Beverly Hills. Dr. Okie was her schoolmate, and wrote that she and Dr. Ride, both on scholarship, felt out of place among the actors’ daughters and “Bel Air belles” at the school. Dr. Ride did not have to work hard for good grades, called herself an underachiever and refused to feign interest if she was bored in class. But it was at Westlake that Dr. Ride found a mentor and friend in Elizabeth Mommaerts, a science teacher whom she described as “logic personified.” A great enthusiast for research, Ms. Mommaerts invited her favorite students — Dr. Ride among them — to her home to sample French food and wine and to hear stories about her life in Europe.
(Later, in graduate school, Dr. Ride was devastated to learn that Dr. Mommaerts had committed suicide. When she was chosen to be an astronaut, the one person she wanted most to call was Dr. Mommaerts, she told Dr. Okie. “And I can’t,” she said.)

After graduating from high school in 1968, Dr. Ride attended Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania but quit after three semesters. She was homesick for California and was considering a career in tennis. She practiced for several hours a day, and also began taking physics courses at the University of California, Los Angeles. In 1970, she enrolled at Stanford as a junior. She played tennis for Stanford, became the team’s No. 1 women’s singles player and was nationally ranked. She taught at summer tennis camps, and at one of them she met Billie Jean King, who urged her to quit college and become a professional tennis player. She did not take that advice.
Years later, when a child asked her what made her decide to be a scientist instead of a tennis player, she laughed and said, “A bad forehand.”

She received bachelor’s degrees in physics and English in 1973 (her specialty was Shakespeare), a master’s degree in physics in 1975 and a Ph.D. in astrophysics in 1978, all from Stanford. Her graduate work involved X-ray astronomy and free-electron lasers.

In 2003, Dr. Ride told The Times that stereotypes still persisted about girls and science and math — for example the idea that girls had less ability or interest in those subjects, or would be unpopular if they excelled in them. She thought peer pressure, especially in middle school, began driving girls away from the sciences, so she continued to set up science programs all over the country meant to appeal to girls —science festivals, science camps, science clubs — to help them find mentors, role models and one another.

“It’s no secret that I’ve been reluctant to use my name for things,” she said. “I haven’t written my memoirs or let the television movie be made about my life. But this is something I’m very willing to put my name behind.”

Dr. Ride married a fellow astronaut, Steven Hawley, in 1982. They divorced in 1987.

Dr. Ride is survived by her partner of 27 years, Tam O’Shaughnessy; her mother, Joyce; and her sister, Ms. Scott, who is known as Bear. (Ms. O’Shaughnessy is chief operating officer of Ms. Ride’s company.)

Dr. Ride told interviewers that what drove her was not the desire to become famous or to make history as the first woman in space. All she wanted to do was fly, she said, to soar into space, float around weightless inside the shuttle, look out at the heavens and back at Earth. In photographs of her afloat in the spaceship, she was grinning, as if she had at long last reached the place she was meant to be.

nytimes.com

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Coney Island, Brooklyn, NY

WASHINGTON – It won’t be a news flash for the 250 million sweltering Americans east of the Rockies, but the first half of the year has been the USA’s warmest on record, federal climate scientists announced Monday.
Twenty-eight states and more than 100 cities have posted their warmest first six months on record, based on national weather data that go back to 1895, according to the report from NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center.
For instance, Chicago is almost 7 degrees warmer than average this year; the Windy City had eight 80-degree days in March and five days in the 90s in May.
New York City, where temperatures are about 4 degrees above average, is seeing its warmest year since records began there a few years after the Civil War ended.
The national temperature this year was 52.9 degrees, which is 4.5 degrees above average and 1.2 degrees above the next-warmest year, which was 2006, the climate report notes.
From January to June, a whopping 22,356 daily record high temperatures have been set across the USA, according to Weather Channel meteorologist Guy Walton. This compares with 2,448 daily record lows during that time, he reports.

Continues here.

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JULY 4 – A Women’s Independence Day
by Diane Marie Amann

It will come as no surprise that suffragists in the United States claimed this date — the anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence– as their own.

It’s well known that in the months before that declaration issued, Abigail Adams pressed drafters to “Remember the Ladies.” Neither her husband John nor the principal drafter, Thomas Jefferson, heeded her plea.Also well known: campaigners for women’s rights modeled the 1848 Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments after the 1776 document.

Less known but worth noting is the role Independence Day played in a 1909 campaign for women’s suffrage in Washington.

As detailed in this 2008 essay by Paula Becker, campaigners in that Pacific Northwest state preferred a low-key approach — the “so-called ‘still hunt’ strategy”– to the in-your-face militancy of the Pankhursts and other British suffragists.

A centerpiece of this strategy was theWashington Women’s Cookbook (1909), sold door-to-door as a way personally to lobby women in order that they might persuade their husbands, fathers, and sons to vote to grant women the vote. (Then, during the 1st week in July 1909, activists from across the country arrived in Seattle — many by a train dubbed the Suffrage Special — to hold a suffrage convention alongside AYP, the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, the state’s 1st World’s Fair.

On the 4th of July, a Sunday, famous suffrage leaders took to the pulpit to spread “the gospel of woman suffrage,” Becker wrote. They included several subjects of prior IntLawGrrls posts — Rev. Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, Florence Kelley, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman — and others, like Pauline Steinem, who blazed a feminist path that her granddaughter Gloria would follow.
Days after this spate of sermonizing, the convention ended with July 7 “Suffrage Day” fesitivities at the AYP Fair itself.

As a consequence of these and other campaign activities, the male electorate approved suffrage on November 8, 1910. Thus did women in Washington eventually win a measure of independence.

Addresses by Women on the Fourth of July in the Early 19th Century

Declaration of Rights of the Women of the United States by the National Woman Suffrage Association, July 4th, 1876.

Excerpt:
The history of our country the past hundred years, has been a series of assumptions and usurpations of power over woman, in direct opposition to the principles of just government, acknowledged by the United States at its foundation, which are:
First. The natural rights of each individual.

Second. The exact equality of these rights.

Third. That these rights, when not delegated by the individual, are retained by the individual.

Fourth. That no person can exercise the rights of others without delegated authority.

Fifth. That the non-use of these rights does not destroy them.2

And for the violation of these fundamental principles of our Government, we arraign our rulers on this 4th day of July, 1876,—and these are our

Articles of Impeachment.
Bills of Attainder have been passed by the introduction of the word “male” into all the State constitutions, denying to woman the right of suffrage, and thereby making sex a crime—an exercise of power clearly forbidden in Article 1st, Sections 9th and 10th of the United States Constitution.

continued here

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BREAKING NEWS 4:43 PM ET

House Votes to Hold Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. in Contempt of Congress

From UppityWoman

Let’s recap and clarify: When is a tax not a tax? When it Is a tax. Unless it’s not a tax, unless…

From HillaryIs44

It’s A Tax!!!!!! (Video Included)
Update: It’s a TAX!!!! Not the Commerce Clause, but tax and spend. Mandate upheld: what now?:

“The opinion actually ruled that the mandate violates the Commerce Clause, but as a tax that no longer matters.
It’s an interesting argument, but one that should have Americans worried. Basically, this is a tax that you have to pay to private companies. For all of the screaming the Right did over single-payer — and for good, outcome-based reasons — at least the taxes raised to fund it would go directly to government. The Supreme Court has signed off on what is, in very practical terms, a tax levied by the insurance industry on Americans simply for existing. It’s an amazing, and fearsome, decision that really should have both Right and Left horrified. [snip]

By the way, don’t forget when Obama insisted that this wasn’t a tax, via Patterico:

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What’s missing from this picture?

Egypt’s first “democratic” election. The Muslim Brotherhood Party candidate is the winner. No matter which party won, women are still the losers.

By the way: Islam Sucks.
“Until you do right by women, everything you even think about is gonna fail” — with apologies to Celie, The Color Purple, Alice Walker.
Vote for Women.

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From “Obama for Obama America”.

h/t Myiq2xu

Just skip the expenses of your celebratory events … weddings, baptisms, birthdays, graduations, and send the money to Obama instead!
Wanna bet the obama android cult is lining up to sell their blood, kidneys, and any other extraneous organs they can sell?

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