thepeoplesrecord:

June 03, 2012

Thousands of people took to the streets of Istanbul on Sunday to protest against plans by Turkey’s prime minister to bring in a new law on abortion, a practice he has called “murder”.

Women of all ages held aloft banners with slogans including “My body, my choice” and “I am a woman not a mother, don’t touch my body” as they marched to the city’s Kadikoy Square.

Fuck yeah!

Read what thepeoplesrecord.com reported yesterday about increased abortion-clinic violence in the United States.

FIGHT abortion stigma and join the women who are telling their stories without shame at wearethe1in3.tumblr.com.

SarahLee: This should make you angry - for so many reasons.  I’ve got to add the following snippet from the article:

Now, that photo of Makayla Urias is a photograph of a naked child, a child exactly as naked as nine-year-old Kim Phuc was when, forty years ago, an Associated Press photographer snapped a picture of her, while she was running and crying from American napalm. You’ve probably seen that photo. It’s iconic. The photographer got a Pulitzer prize for taking it.

Yesterday, on the other hand, Maria was told that she would not be allowed to show that photo. It was not appropriate. She had the blessing of the child’s parents, but Republicans on the subcommittee alerted the capitol police (according to Spencer Pederson, a spokesman for GOP panel members), and after the hearing, the capitol police took Maria aside for questioning about “child pornography.”

Now, this is just what it was, and no more. Coalfield activists like Maria face threats, intimidation, and vandalism regularly; she’s received verbal threats to her life, her children have been harassed at school, “wanted” posters of Gunnoe have appeared in local convenience stores, and so forth. This is a strong lady, and I suspect I’m not wrong to say that it’s far from the worst of the shit she’s faced for daring to be strong in a part of the country where Coal is King. It was just the kind of insulting humiliation that it was meant to be. Coal-friendly congresspeople were using the resources at their disposal to harass someone who had the nerve to speak out against the industry they shill for, to try to intimidate someone like Maria who speaks for (and is) one of the people that industry poisons.

But it’s pretty clarifying, don’t you think? The real obscenity is that people drink that water, that they have no choice but to bathe in it, and to bathe their children in it. You know that, and I know that. But if a massive surface mining operation in the vicinity of your house poisons your water table, and if your well water runs brown with coal sludge and heavy metal particulate, well, that’s just the cost of doing business in America, a cost that will be paid by the Appalachians who only live there. It’s regrettable, at best. You can’t call the police and the state doesn’t want to know. And if you dare to take a picture of child’s exposure to that poison, if you have the nerve to walk into the halls of Congress and show them the obscenity that is a child that must wash herself with poison every day, they will call you a child pornographer. They will call the police.

truth-has-a-liberal-bias:

The Census department keeps track of voting numbers. You can find a break down of the number of people who voted in the 2010 elections based on age, race, gender and more. Download and view the available statistics.

(From usagov )

If you want to win, you will ORGANIZE. You will organize in the same way the Right has done for the last 40 years, and you will spend money on persuasion, where it really matters. You will, in short, make the politicians as afraid of you as they are of them. The Right has built vast networks of think tanks, newspapers, periodicals, cable news channels, and political advocacy organizations to spread their finely tuned, well-honed messages. Their politicians may fail them, and their actual policies may be deeply unpopular, but their message machine nearly always works its magic to get them what they want, even when Democrats are in power.

That’s partly because the American political Right never quits and never gives up. They know that organization is the key to their success, and they don’t trust politicians to do their work for them. Democrats, on the other hand, get disappointed and quit when our politicians don’t pan out the way we wanted. That’s why we lose.

bebinn:

I’ve found new resources for people in need of access, funds, transportation, and lodging for abortions, so I’m compiling all my posts on the subject into one, for easy reference:

Need Help Paying for an Abortion? - National Network of Abortion Funds and The National Abortion Federation

Abortion Funds by State

National Abortion Funds (United States)

International Abortion Funds

Abortion funds cannot cover the entire cost of your abortion, but they will give as much as they can and help you find other funds and ways to pay for your abortion.

Some clinics, including Planned Parenthood, offer their services at a reduced fee for those who can’t afford the regular price. Contact the clinic nearest you to see if that’s an option.

Medicaid covers abortion in 15 states. Check to see if yours is one of them.

Fund Abortion Now has a checklist of ways to raise money for your abortion. If you’re running out of ideas, check it out.

Coal is going down in the United States, and that’s good news for the Earth’s climate. The US Energy Information Administration has announced that coal, the dirtiest and most carbon-intensive conventional fossil fuel, generated only 36 per cent of US electricity in the first quarter of 2012. That amounts to a staggering 20 per cent decline from one year earlier. And the EIA anticipates additional decline by year’s end, suggesting a historic setback for coal, which has provided the majority of the US’ electricity for many decades.

Even more encouraging, however, is the largely unknown story behind coal’s retreat. Mainstream media coverage has credited low prices for natural gas - coal’s chief competitor - and the Obama administration’s March 27 announcement of stricter limits on greenhouse gas emissions from US power plants. And certainly both of those developments played a role.

But a third factor - a persistent grassroots citizens’ rebellion that has blocked the construction of 166 (and counting) proposed coal-fired power plants - has been at least as important. At the very time when President Obama’s “cap-and-trade” climate legislation was going down in flames in Washington, local activists across the United States were helping to impose “a de facto moratorium on new coal”, in the words of Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute, one of the first analysts to note the trend.

Another surprise: most of these coal plants were defeated in the politically red states of the South and Midwest. Victories were coming “in places like Oklahoma and South Dakota, not the usual liberal bastions where you’d expect environmental victories”, recalls Mary Anne Hitt, the director of the Beyond Coal campaign, which provided national coordination for the local efforts. The victories in Oklahoma were particularly sweet, coming in the home state of Capitol Hill’s leading climate denier, Senator James Inhofe.

[…]

In contrast to mainstream environmental groups’ lobbying on Capitol Hill for cap-and-trade, the Beyond Coal movement’s strength was grounded in the unsung work of retail politics: activists talking with friends and neighbours, pestering local media, packing regulatory hearings, protesting before state legislatures, filing legal challenges and more. Nor was the anti-coal movement comprised solely of the usual suspects. In addition to environmentalists, it included clean energy advocates, public health professionals, community organisers, faith leaders, farmers, attorneys, students and volunteers like Verena Owen, a self-described “permit nerd” from Illinois, who proved herself so capable that she was recruited to serve as Hitt’s co-director for the Beyond Coal campaign.

archer-and-anders:

Just saw this in an email from one of my professors who is an adviser for the Lesbian and Gay Vet Med Association at school. Target’s website says it will donate 100% of T-shirt sales from customers during the month of June to Family Equality Council. 

See the t-shirts here.

The big thing about it though is that this has been going around anti-gay organizations, and they’re rallying people to complain to the higher-ups at Target and even boycott their store, just like what happened with the Girl Scouts when they allowed a trans* girl join.

So we need to try to support Target in this if we can. If you can’t go buy a shirt, you can email them at press@target.com to show your support. It will only take a few minutes, and it’s for a cause that I think is really near and dear to a lot of us here. Signal boost please? I can’t reach enough people with this on my own.

Here is a group that is working constructively to stand up against the hatred espoused by Charles Worley.

Revocation of Providence Road Baptist Church’s 501(c)(3) Status

The Catawba Valley Citizens Against Hate   is planning a protest for this Sunday.  The details can be found here

Let’s show them our support.

Trent Franks, the Arizona Republican who proposed a 20-week abortion ban in Washington, DC and then barred DC’s pro-choice female delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton from speaking out against the measure has a new problem on his hands: a flood of DC residents who are bringing their municipal complaints directly to the Congressman, who they’re calling “Mayor.” From potholes to rodent problems to public transportation complaints, DC residents have followed Franks’ lead and begun funneling their problems to him rather than the city’s own government. Well played, smartasses. Well fucking played.

The protest was a cooperative effort between Planned Parenthood of Metropolitan Washington DC and a group called DC Vote, which aims to secure representation for DC in Congress. Today, about 50 DC residents eagerly waited outside of Rep. Franks’ door, ready to let “Mayor Franks” know how he could make his newly claimed city better. According to the Huffington Post’s Laura Bassett, some carried plastic rats, some toted pictures of the potholes they wanted Mayor Franks to fill, and some brought disputed parking tickets.

An old activist buddy of mine put this together.  He is a southern lawyer -who loves to debate - I met via Michael Moore’s old forum. During the build up to the Iraq war, he and I and a few other folks we gathered in a Yahoo Group to try and develop arguments we could use to try and move right wingers to acknowledge some progressive points.  We used Hannity’s forum to test our theories.  When we found arguments that worked, we would take them to comments sections of newspaper articles on the relevant topics. He wrote “Defeat the Right in Three Minutes” as we learned from our experiences - which was way before the 2006 date on that site. 

We spent a LOT of time pushing the media to cover the neocons Project for a New American Century - going so far as drafting a set of ‘interrrogatories’ to the White House and then to every member of the White House press corps urging them to ask the questions. 

We spent about 3 months posting the questions to journalists all over the country and then posting the questions individually in letters to the editor and in comments all over the place.  We were floored the first time a call in to the Washington Journal asked one of the hosts why they were not asking ‘our questions’ to members of the Bush Administration.

Our little group fell apart so, I was delighted to discover that Joe is still at it with his movie and still posting at Daily Kos as Conceptual Guerilla, the originator of the “corporate feudalism” and ‘cheap labor conservatives’ memes I still run into from time to time.

If you run into Joe at Netroots Nation or somewhere else, give him a hug for me - one of his old Green Dems buddies. And you can watch the entire video/movie through his site teapartycult for a small donation.

progressivefriends:

arial view of Montreal demonstration now…(via Instagram)

The 100th day of Quebec’s student strikes.

wwf:

Brazil’s Congress just signed the Amazon’s death sentence, giving loggers freedom to clear-cut huge swaths of rainforest. President Dilma can veto it and is deciding what to do right now — let’s tip her over the edge with a global public outcry to stop the Amazon chainsaw massacre. Sign now!

occupyla:

‎”In a surprising turn of events, reports have emerged that numerous Chicago Police officers openly refused to arrest non-violent protesters – some officers even refusing to show up for work.”
 
“It’s just not right, ya know? I mean… uh… a lot of people think that every guy with a badge and a gun has a thing for lockin’ people up. But that really ain’t the case most of the time… I became an officer to help people, ya know? I didn’t sign up to throw kids in jail for taking pictures on their phones.. and I certainly didn’t sign up to.. uh… arrest war veterans exercising their right to protest… I mean, this is still America right?”

The vicious attacks on women’s health to which we’ve grown so accustomed on the national and state stages are trickling down to the local level, as municipal and county governments get in on the action. Thankfully, time and again, local citizens have mounted fast and furious responses, resulting in the type of swift and satisfying victories that sometimes feel unimaginable on the national stage.

Local officials around the country have been using the “no taxpayer-funding for abortion” mantra to quietly turn away money for family planning programs that provide vital services for their neediest constituents. These attacks tend to follow a pattern: a program that has been funded without debate for years is suddenly pegged by a politician as “controversial.” Fellow politicians fall in line and vote to defund the program before residents and public health officials have time to react.

But in a few instances, community members are stepping in to stop them once word gets out.

At last, a few encouraging stories.