"I am a black South African, and if I were to change the names, a description of what is happening in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank could describe events in South Africa."
~Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Global Exchange has tons of info on what we can do, and a list of US Companies that operate there.

Money talks -- loudly. If we can't affect our government funding them, we can stop our own funding of it.

Gandhi, his Grandson, Israel, and the Jews --

... what did Mahatma Gandhi actually think of the idea of Israel, and of the fate of the Jews of his time?

As it turns out, M.K. Gandhi engaged in sustained conversation with Jewish intellectuals of his day—many of whom were dismayed by the great man's insistence, for example, that Jews in Germany should have willingly "offered themselves to the butcher's knife."

In this essay, Shalom Goldman sketches out the little-known background to a contemporary controversy. ...

Posing as a Bidder, Utah Student Disrupts Government Auction of 150,000 Acres of Wilderness for Oil & Gas Drilling --

... While many environmental groups launched campaigns to oppose the sale of the land, one student in Salt Lake City attempted to block the sale by disrupting the auction itself. Twenty-seven-year-old Tim DeChristopher posed as a potential bidder and bid hundreds of thousands of dollars on parcels of the land, driving up prices and winning some 22,000 acres for himself, without any intention of paying for them. Read more…

The inescapable and ubiquitous Christmas songs, specials, etc -- and how us Jews helped create and embed them, have fought against them, and how some deal with it now -- fa-who dor-ay, fa-who dor-ay, ...

The white Christmases that Irving Berlin dreamed of weren't the earliest ones he used to know. ... watching his neighbors burn his family's house to the ground in a good old-fashioned, Jew-hating pogrom.
So it's no surprise that when Berlin got around to writing his great Christmas song in 1941, nearly half a century after his family had fled the shtetl of Mohilev for New York's Lower East Side, it was flatly devoid of Christian imagery. It is, for all that, a religious song. ... Read more…

Alone among major Western nations, the United States has refused to sign a declaration presented Thursday at the United Nations calling for worldwide decriminalization of homosexuality. ...

U.S. officials expressed concern in private talks that some parts of the declaration might be problematic in committing the federal government on matters that fall under state jurisdiction. In numerous states, landlords and private employers are allowed to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation; on the federal level, gays are not allowed to serve openly in the military. ... Read more…

Quite a list here of who he's meeting with and learning from, and those supposedly "sensible Republicans" are far outnumbered by the usual warmongering criminal ones -- but all is not lost: he's actually read 2 whole books by non-warmongers! (but not spoken to them or met with them or asked them for advice)

A World of Issues Waiting, Obama and His Foreign Policy Squad Brush Up --

... Besides reaching out to Mr. Scowcroft, Mr. Obama has also called former Secretary of State George P. Shultz, a Reagan administration official who is known in some foreign policy circles as the father of the Bush doctrine because of his advocacy of preventive war. It is unclear what the two men talked about. Read more…

President-elect Barack Obama has picked the widely respected housing commissioner for New York City, Shaun Donovan, to be the secretary of housing in his cabinet.

... Mr. Donovan was considered a national innovator in capitalizing on the strong real estate market to find financing for low-cost housing. He held to a middle ground between free-market forces who opposed government controls and liberal groups that believed only government and nonprofit groups could be counted on to provide housing for the working class. Read more…

2025: the end of US dominance --
the National Intelligence Council global trends review is out, and contrary to 2004's rosy view of 2020-- still dominated by US and with oil to burn--the new forecast sees things very differently. (pdf link to full report at bottom article)

"... the world is entering an increasingly unstable and unpredictable period in which the advance of western-style democracy is no longer assured, and some states are in danger of being "taken over and run by criminal networks". ..."

"... start dissecting exactly what this supposed Democratic consensus document is all about. First, is it really the consensus plan—the plan that consultants have focus group-tested and carefully crafted to avoid ruffling special-interest feathers and to soothe the middle class, assuring that it can keep the insurance it has now if it wants? ... Spend two hours reading it, he says, and “you’ll see there is no consensus.” ... Sift through it, and you’ll also find a lot of on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand language that really doesn’t offer much of a road map. ..." Baucus' HealthReform2009 here Read more…

Violet at Reclusive Leftist starts
"pulling together some of our thoughts about the new feminism we’re building, what I think of as the Fourth Wave." Very interesting list -- and great comments/discussion.

This comment especially struck me: "Women need, desperately, cultural permission to be selfish, to put ourselves first without apology and without trying to spin it as good for other, more important people, too. Because even though I do believe feminism is good for the whole Human community, it really wouldn’t matter if it weren’t. Women have a right to demand what’s good for us." Read more…

"Of the baker’s dozen that the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington reported being under investigation in its 2008 annual report, “Most Corrupt Members of Congress,” nine appear headed for re-election. ... Of the four others in the baker’s dozen, three resigned. And just one lost."

Meet the new Ari/Scottie. A little history on Obama's new press sec'y--his role in destroying Dean while working for Kerry, reviving the "lincoln bedroom" against Clinton, and other totally Rovian and "old politics" methods. So far, we have Gibbs and Emanuel and Axelrod -- 3 old-school, old-politics, attack dogs. Who's next?

the first openly-gay person to be elected to Congress--ever (Baldwin and Frank came out while already in office). The article takes stock all around the country.

“Jared Polis is the first openly gay man to be elected to Congress as a non-incumbent, and he joins Tammy Baldwin and Barney Frank as the three out members,” said Denis Dison, a Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund spokesperson."

“a bittersweet election for gay people.”

Not so much so far--in Florida, at least.

"... younger voters have shifted heavily toward the Democratic Party during the past four years.

But as yet -- in either Central Florida or the state as a whole -- a surge of younger voters hasn't materialized.

Though a bit more than 10 percent of all voters are younger than 25, fewer than 6 percent of early voters fit that category. Similarly, voters 25 to 34 years old are 14.4 percent of the electorate -- but just 9.5 percent of those who voted early. ..." -- Orlando Sentinal analyses the early voting figures in all of Florida -- Battle for Florida: Blacks turn out in droves, but few young people have voted Read more…

Obama donors get access to top advisers" (not the small online donors, silly!)

"Aides to Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) scheduled pricey luncheons, roundtables, readings, VIP receptions and policy dinners with campaign officials and advisers, offering donors a taste of his potential administration. ..."

Get their ears even before the election-- Buffet, and Daschle, and Cutler, and Tanden, and Jarrett, etc. (Article also includes a very non-complete list of just some October big $$ events.)

“I was born in Oslo, Norway, the son of a Volvo factory worker and part-time ice fisherman,” a mock self-tribute begins. “My mother was a backup singer for Abba. They were good folks.” In Chicago, “I discovered I was black, and I have remained so ever since.”

After his election, the Faux-bama says, he united warring students into “a happy, cohesive folk,” while “empowering all the folks out there in America who didn’t know about me by giving a series of articulate and startlingly mature interviews to all the folks in the media.”

-- a parody of him while at Harvard--from a Jan 07 NYT article on those days -- In Law School, Obama Found Political Voice

"Why should KitchenAid make blenders and health care coverage decisions? Why should lumber companies cut trees and create hospital networks?"

Ezra Klein asks and gives some reasons why , and the New Republic too: Why CEOs Don't Get It on Health Care

New Republic-- The Message Keeper:
How David Axelrod learned to conquer race

"... The self-described "keeper of the message" for Obama's presidential bid has taken the lessons he learned from his mayoral and gubernatorial campaigns and made them cohere into something that approaches a unified theory of how to elect a black candidate--emphasizing biography, using third-party authentication, attacking with an unconventional sideways approach, letting voters connect to the candidate by speaking to them directly in ads, and telling voters that supporting the black candidate puts them on the right side of history. ..."

the AP pulls out their crystal balls--

If Elected ... How Would a President Obama Govern?

"For all Barack Obama's talk about change, there are signs that in style -- if not substance -- a new White House under Democrat Obama would operate much like the current one under President Bush. ..."

If Elected ... How Would a President McCain Govern?

"A rabble-rouser from his earliest days, John McCain has never been one who likes to be told ''no.'' There's no reason to think a President McCain would be any different. ..."

Nice guys do finish first sometimes.

"Paul Krugman, a professor at Princeton University and an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times, was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science on Monday.

Mr. Krugman received the award for his work on international trade and economic geography. ..."

On his blog, The Conscience of a Liberal , he says:

"A funny thing happened to me this morning …"

"... the Obama campaign next week will kick off “Barack Obama: Faith, Family, and Values Tour,” designed to woo the votes of left-leaning Catholics, progressive Evangelicals, and some conservative mainline Protestants. If LGBT people find the tour eerily reminiscent of the South Carolina gospel tour the campaign arranged last year with antigay "ex-gay" gospel singer Donnie McClurkin, their instincts may not be far off.

CBN names Catholic legal scholar Douglas Kmiec as one of the religious surrogates who will hit the road stumping for Obama. Kmiec wrote a June 13 op-ed for the San Francisco Chronicle supporting California's Proposition 8, the ballot measure to ban same-sex marriage ..." Read more…

Ever wonder what Obama actually did as a community activist? Whether he succeeded in actually helping people in Chicago? How an outsider without Chicago ties ended up a political insider? Why he left organizing for law school? Why so much of his language in the primaries was that of "bottom up" and "movements"? About all that Alinsky stuff? ...

John Judis: Creation Myth--What Barack Obama won't tell you about his community organizing past

and from 07, a long, but thorough account of those days: The Agitator--Barack Obama's unlikely political education

45 years ago today, in Washington, DC -- I have a dream

for Bayard Rustin -- and all the rest of us who remain "Brother -and Sister- Outsiders" -- who still don't have the opportunities, equality, and rights that others have -- and that we all deserve.

Examination at The Root of the perceptions and personas of Oprah and Obama, and how unrealistic stereotypes and expectations--and meeting them and molding yourself to fit them--provide very fragile and shaky foundations for trust. Read more…

Apparently, having to show govt-issued picture ID to vote in Indiana isn't the only obstacle or potential roadblock: Gaming Indiana: The quirky state voting law that could affect Tuesday's primary -- Read more…