What Florida’s Amendment 2 says:

“Inasmuch as marriage is the legal union of only one man and one woman as husband and wife, no other legal union that is treated as marriage or the substantial equivalent thereof shall be valid or recognized.”

Similar amendments in other states are being used to take away benefits from public employees (Kentucky, for instance), and dissolve domestic partnership registries used to provide health care benefits and pensions (in Michigan).

Broward and Palm Beach Counties and the cities of Tampa, Gainesville and Miami Beach, among others, offer Domestic Partnership Registries. Most Florida universities and more than half of Fortune 500 companies offer Domestic Partnership benefits. These benefits would be placed at risk, if not outright abolished, if this amendment passes.

Every unmarried Floridian will be impacted by this amendment - especially divorced or widowed seniors and public employees who, under existing programs, can share some benefits such as hospital visitation privileges and health care coverage without being married.

Learn more about this BAD amendment at SayNo2

A story guaranteed to enrage:

Another Election Season, Another Political Prosecution in Alabama

The morning calm in the small Alabama town of Toney, located near Huntsville, was broken at 6:15 a.m. yesterday morning. A team of five FBI agents, accompanied by a prison matron, pounded on the door. When the man of the house answered, he was forced into the yard, shirtless in the early morning cold. The team had come for his wife, Sue Schmitz. She was dragged out of her bathroom, where she was taking a shower, handcuffed, breaking her flesh and scraping her wrists, and hustled off to prison.

Who was this threat to the community? Sue Schmitz is a diminutive, 63-year-old retired social studies teacher who has lived in the town for 38 years, roughly 20 of them as a civics teacher. She is loved in the community and among her students is legendary for her passion for civics and her outreach to the disadvantaged. The dream of her life was to let the fire of civic spirit catch on in communities and among families on the margin of society, where the danger of drug abuse and criminality are the highest. She dedicated her life to it. She launched a program called “We the People,” designed to build civic spirit and interest in participatory democracy among school children. And Sue Schmitz’s advocacy of civic engagement led directly to her conflict with U.S. Attorney Alice Martin, who considers it to be criminal. But one other fact figures directly in this drama. Schmitz is a Democratic member of the state legislature. (Emphasis mine)

Continue reading at Harper’s Magazine.

By a vote of 235-184, the House approved the first federal ban on job discrimination against gays, lesbians and bisexuals yesterday. And even though ENDA faces a tough fight in the senate, and the promise of a veto by Chimp-N-Charge, it’s still a triumphant blow to the religious / homophobic / anti-we-the-people mentality that grips our country.

“Republicans, meanwhile, said the bill could undermine the rights of people who oppose homosexuality for religious reasons…”

Probably one of the most offensive sentences I’ve read in a very long time. Being gay is who you are, and not what you do. Homophobia is a mental illness. It can (and should) be removed from the workplace. A homosexual can no longer check the ‘gay’ at the door as women can ‘female’ or blacks can ’skin color’. And if you truly believe in “we the people”, the choice couldn’t be more clear.

Greedily demanding their tax moneys, while not extending them the same rights in the workplace, sounds a tad bit like taxation without representation. Try and defend that position… I dare you!

Religious reasons, my ass! Just plain ol’ homophobia at play here. How did I come to this conclusion, you ask? Has it ever been common practice to pink’slip employees for gluttony? How about adultery? When employers start firing workers for “coveting his neighbor’s house”, then we’ll talk.

by Will Durst
cross posted at Buzz Flash

Karl Rove, Bush’s brain, quit last week. And no, he hasn’t been replaced, so yes, you could say the cavity remains empty. To put it another way: Voldermort has left the building. Darth Vader took off his helmet. Proof positive that Satan had more than just a passing acquaintance with the Pillsbury Doughboy has exited stage right. This sudden shift of malodorous winds has caused liberals to shiver in separation anxiety knowing they’re going to have to look elsewhere to assuage their demon jones, as they no longer have the pale pudgy strategist as target for their limp verbal projectiles.

Mr. Rove made his teary announcement at a joint press conference held on the South Lawn of the White House alongside the tenant whom he thrust into residency of that property with all the elegance and subtlety of an armor plated freight train run off its tracks into a Third World flea market. The 43rd President of the U.S. visibly choked up saying “so long” to the man he affectionately called “Turd Blossom,” as his alter ego was pried away from him for the first time in 14 years.

Rove scoffed at reporters’ questions about future subpoenas in the federal prosecutor firings investigation leading to his abrupt retirement, referring to the inquiry as “pure politics.” And coming from the high grand master of pure politics, this should be considered the ultimate compliment. Then the man with the power to cloud men’s minds shuffled off to Nowheresville City in what he labeled a desire to spend more time lying to his family.

But the furniture in his White House office had yet to be decontaminated when his family apparently grew tired of his company kicking him out to spend the bulk of his new free time on various television news shows tossing fistfuls of scathing barbs at potential Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, whom he described as “fatally flawed” but meant “colder than a witch’s catcher’s mitt hidden under a crate of four pound rump roasts in the rear of a walk-in freezer.”

read more HERE

Did the collapse of that Minneapolis bridge not teach us anything? Rushing construction of this magnitude is simply uncalled for.

So, why the rush? Could it have anything to do with the planned republican presidential nominating convention being held there in September of ‘08?

And another thing. While it’s really nice of Bush and Co. to kick in EXTRA money to get the bridge fixed in time, does it not bother him or anyone else that there are still Katrina victims living in squaller and doing without? That our troops over in Iraq are still being short-changed when it comes to having the proper equipment they need and deserve? $150-million would go a long way in helping those that are in need. It’s a damn shame it has to be wasted on a republican selling point.

Minnesota sets ambitious goal for bridge fix

Officials hope rebuilding, normally a 3-year project, will be done by 2008

Debris from the bridge collapse will be lifted from the site with a crane and other heavy equipment that began arriving on Monday.

MINNEAPOLIS - A plan to replace the bridge that collapsed into the Mississippi River last week is on the fastest of fast tracks: State officials want the span open by the end of next year, and contractors interested in the job must contact the state by dawn Wednesday.
[...]

“It is doable. It is a bit fast, but this is an emergency,” said Khaled Mahmoud with the Bridge Engineering Association in New York. “And if we are ever good at anything, it’s responding to emergencies.”

It took only seconds Wednesday night for the eight-lane, 1,900-foot steel truss Interstate 35W bridge, which opened in 1967, to collapse. Three days later, the state had already begun looking for companies interested in erecting a new bridge in just 16 months.
[...]

Erecting a new bridge like Minneapolis- would ordinarily take about three years, even if the design and building phases were overlapped to save time, said Bill Cox, owner of Corman Construction Inc. in Annapolis Junction, Md., a road and bridge construction firm.
[...]

President Bush on Monday signed legislation that directs $250 million to rebuild the bridge. The legislation, passed by Congress over the weekend, waives the $100 million federal limit per state for emergency relief funds, authorizing $250 million for rebuilding the bridge.

Associated Press

Source: MSNBC.com

from YOU TUBE

The script was obviously written by an adult. But this young lady really tells it like it is. - JS

It just never ends…….

On Jan. 4, just after the 2006 elections tossed the Republicans out of congressional power, Rove met at the White House with six U.S. ambassadors to key European missions and the consul general to Bermuda while the diplomats were in Washington for a State Department conference.

According to a department letter to the Senate panel, Rove explained the White House views on the electoral disaster while Sara M. Taylor, then the director of White House political affairs, showed a PowerPoint presentation that pinned most of the electoral blame on “corrupt” GOP lawmakers and “complacent incumbents.” One chart in Taylor’s presentation highlighted the GOP’s top 36 targets among House Democrats for the 2008 election.

In a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), the Foreign Relations Committee chairman, asked whether the briefings inappropriately politicized the diplomatic agencies or violated prohibitions against political work by most federal employees.

“I do not understand why ambassadors, in Washington on official duty, would be briefed by White House officials on which Democratic House members are considered top targets by the Republican party for defeat in 2008. Nor do I understand why department employees would need to be briefed on ‘key media markets’ in states that are ‘competitive’ for the president,” Biden wrote.

His aides said Biden plans to raise the matter at a confirmation hearing today for Henrietta Holsman Fore to be administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, whose political appointees received at least two White House briefings in the past 10 months, as well as at an oversight hearing tomorrow on the Peace Corps.

Several months ago, White House aides said that about 20 private briefings were held in 15 agencies before the 2006 midterms and that other briefings were held irregularly throughout Bush’s first term.

Full article at the Washington Post

We see more and more evidence each day that our democracy is in jeopardy and we’re just a stone’s-throw away from being under the rule of a dictatorship. Just another case of the “decider knows best” I suppose.

Undue Influence

Former surgeon general Joycelyn Elders on what happens when politics trumps science in the office of the nation’s top doctor.

Former surgeon general Richard Carmona testified that he faced intense political pressure from the Bush administration. Left: Joycelyn Elders, who held the office in the Clinton administration, asks, ‘If all he is going to do is be the president’s mouthpiece, what does the country need with a surgeon general?’

July 12, 2007 - On Thursday, President Bush’s nominee for surgeon general, Dr. James Holsinger, faced blunt questioning at his Senate confirmation hearing about how he would react if he were pressured to put politics before science. “I would resign,” Holsinger said.

If history is any indication, he’s likely to be tested on that promise. Earlier in the week, three former surgeons general-including Dr. Richard Carmona, the most recent occupant of that august office-testified before Congress that he felt intense political pressure. Carmona, who left office in July, said that the Bush administration had delayed his reports and changed his speeches on controversial issues such as smoking and stem cells. “Anything that doesn’t fit into the political appointees’ ideological, theological or political agenda is ignored, marginalized or simply buried,” he testified. That came as no surprise to Joycelyn Elders, who served as surgeon general from 1993 to 1994 under President Bill Clinton; she was asked to step down after her comments about masturbation’she called it “a part of human sexuality, and is part of something that perhaps should be taught”’stirred up a political controversy of their own.

(Mary Carmichael, Newsweek)

Full article at MSNBC.com

Link below is to the clip of Michael Moore on “The Situation Room”

There must be applause for Michael Moore, producer of the new documentary “Sicko”. After a short “hit piece” about the film, Wolf “The Beard” Blitzer had Michael on live in “The Situation Room“. And Mike really went off on CNN. The link will take you to “Crooks and Liars“. Enjoy and appreciate Michael for speaking truth to power.

Check out the video here

by Eleanor Clift
from Newsweek

A longtime confidant of the Bush and Cheney families describes the dangerous influence of the vice president.

June 29, 2007 - Dick Cheney is like “Zelig,” the Woody Allen character with the uncanny ability to turn up everywhere. We always suspected his dark influence throughout the government, and now it’s been documented chapter and verse in an exhaustive series in The Washington Post. Cheney operates largely in secret, and because he is such a skilled bureaucratic infighter, he’s able to do end runs around everybody, including President Bush, who does nothing to rein in his evil twin.

Under the guise of national security, Cheney has gotten away with curbing civil liberties, condoning torture and launching an unnecessary war. He’s also chipped away at environmental regulations and done myriad favors for his friends in the business world. His stealthy intervention undermined former EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman and led to her resignation. He shapes tax policy and energy policy and whatever else strikes his fancy, installing himself as president of Corporate America.

Cheney’s above-the-law arrogance finally met its match this week, when he declined to give national archivists who oversee the handling of classified data in the executive branch access to his papers. Cheney’s argument: that he’s not part of the executive branch because he also serves as president of the Senate. The claim was ludicrous on its face and opened up Cheney to ridicule. Democrats can-t muster the votes to cut off funding for the war, but when House leader Rahm Emanuel threatened to cut off funds for the vice president’s operation, Cheney backed down.

I had lunch with Vic Gold, an old friend of the Cheney’s, on the third day of the Post series. I asked him how he felt reading about Dick’s dark adventures. “A tremendous feeling of validation,” he said. In a recent book, Gold described Cheney as a “mega-maniacal paranoid” whose secret empire within the government had captured the Bush presidency and helped bring the Republican Party to the brink of ruin. Gold’s book, published in April, is titled: “Invasion of the Party Snatchers: How the Holy-Rollers and the Neo-Cons Destroyed the GOP.” (It was originally titled “How the Neo-Cons Took Over the GOP,” but midway through the process, Gold got so angry he changed the verb to “Destroyed.” )

read more at NEWSWEEK through MSNBC

By NEDRA PICKLER, Associated Press Writer
from YAHOO! NEWS

WASHINGTON - Democratic presidential candidates stood united Thursday night against the Supreme Court and its historic ruling rolling back a half-century of school desegregation laws. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton said the conservative court “turned the clock back” on history.

Sen. Barack Obama, the only black candidate in the eight-person field, spoke of civil rights leaders who fought for Brown v. Board of Education and other precedents curbed by the high court. “If it were not for them,” he said, “I would not be standing here.”

The 90-minute debate was the third gathering of the Democratic hopefuls in a presidential campaign that has gotten off to an unusually early start. While the first two debates focused on their narrow differences on Iraq, moderator Tavis Smiley promised to steer the candidates to other issues that matter to black America, including health care, education, criminal justice, police accountability, housing and voting rights.

The debate was held at Howard University, a historically black college in the nation’s capital.

Black voters are a large and critical part of the Democratic primary electorate, making the debate a must-attend for candidates seeking the party’s presidential nomination. Civil rights activist Al Sharpton and Princeton University scholar Cornel West were among those in the audience.

Segregation was not the only issue. In turn, the candidates discussed their hopes to stem poverty, close the economic gap between rich and poor, fight AIDS and overhaul a judicial system that doesn’t always seem colorblind.

read more at YAHOO! NEWS

By James Rowley and Nicholas Johnston
from Bloomberg.com

June 27 (Bloomberg) — The fate of U.S. immigration legislation was cast into doubt when at least six senators who helped revive the proposed overhaul said they either oppose or are leaning against a move to permit a vote on final passage.

The measure is in more jeopardy “than I thought a few hours ago,” said Senator Christopher Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat.

The supporters’ strategy of disposing of amendments that threatened the legislation’s bipartisan support hit a procedural snag late in the day, adding to the uncertainty. The Senate refused to set aside an amendment by Montana Democrats Max Baucus and Jon Tester that would dilute requirements employers verify the identity of new workers.

Under Senate rules, Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, now can’t move to consider other provisions without getting the consent of all 100 senators.

“I think this hurts” the measure, said Texas Republican John Cornyn, an opponent.

Earlier today, Senate sponsors had succeeded in killing a series of proposed changes that would undermine the measure’s support. Nonetheless, senators who voted yesterday to resume consideration of the bill were withdrawing support.

Leaning Against

Republicans Richard Burr of North Carolina and Christopher Bond of Missouri and Democrat Ben Nelson of Nebraska said they oppose permitting a vote on final passage. Virginia Democrat Jim Webb and Republicans John Ensign of Nevada and Pete Domenici of New Mexico said they were leaning that way.

It takes 60 votes, or three-fifths of the Senate, to shut off debate. Yesterday, the Senate voted 64-35 to permit debate to resume.

Five other senators who voted to resume the debate said they are undecided on the next procedural test. They are Republicans Ted Stevens and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Judd Gregg of New Hampshire and Democrats Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico and Mark Pryor of Arkansas.

The legislation would create a path to citizenship for 12 million illegal immigrants, tighten the U.S. border with Mexico and create a guest-worker program to help employers fill low- paying jobs. The Senate had planned to complete action on the bill by the end of the week.

Angry Senators

Sponsors of the bill shut off efforts by critics to offer their own changes, angering some senators.

“We are in trench warfare and it’s going to be rough,” said Pennsylvania Republican Arlen Specter, a chief sponsor of the legislation. “But we are going to see the will of the Senate work one way or another.”

read more at Bloomberg.com

By Ken Fireman
from Bloomberg.com

June 27 (Bloomberg) — Anti-American sentiments are on the rise in many parts of the world, driven by concerns that U.S. leaders are prone to act unilaterally and have widened the gap between rich and poor nations, a new international survey found.

At the same time, global attitudes about China have also declined, with residents of many countries expressing concerns about China’s growing economic and military power, the survey concluded.

The survey of 45,239 people in 47 countries by the Washington-based Pew Research Center found “worldwide support” for a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and substantial opposition to U.S. and NATO military operations in Afghanistan.

There is a question as to whether we are living up to our own values, which is what is making people question what our policies are,” former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said at a news conference today announcing the poll’s findings.

America’s image “has plummeted throughout much of the world” over the last five years, the center said in its report on the survey, which was conducted April 6 through May 29.

It found sharp drops in favorability among traditional allies in Western Europe, as well as substantial declines in Latin America, the Middle East and elsewhere.”

Favorable Views Decline

For example, the survey found that favorable views of the U.S. among Germans slid to 30 percent this year from 60 percent in 2002, the first year that Pew surveyed global attitudes. In Brazil, the decline was to 44 percent from 51 percent; in Jordan, to 20 percent from 25 percent; and in Indonesia, to 29 percent from 61 percent.

This is not a matter of anti-Americanism taking over the globe, but an intensification of the areas where we’ve seen problems,” said Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew center.

read more at Bloomberg.com

By ADAM NAGOURNEY and MEGAN THEE
from The New York Times

Young Americans are more likely than the general public to favor a government-run universal health care insurance system, an open-door policy on immigration and the legalization of gay marriage, according to a New York Times/CBS News/MTV poll. The poll also found that they are more likely to say the war in Iraq is heading to a successful conclusion.

The poll offers a snapshot of a group whose energy and idealism have always been as alluring to politicians as its scattered focus and shifting interests have been frustrating. It found that substantially more Americans ages 17 to 29 than four years ago are paying attention to the presidential race. But they appeared to be really familiar with only two of the candidates, Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, both Democrats.

They have continued a long-term drift away from the Republican Party. And although they are just as worried as the general population about the outlook for the country and think their generation is likely to be worse off than that of their parents, they retain a belief that their votes can make a difference, the poll found.

More than half of Americans ages 17 to 29 - 54 percent - say they intend to vote for a Democrat for president in 2008. They share with the public at large a negative view of President Bush, who has a 28 percent approval rating with this group, and of the Republican Party. They hold a markedly more positive view of Democrats than they do of Republicans.

Among this age group, Mr. Bush’s job approval rating after the attacks of Sept. 11 was more than 80 percent. Over the course of the next three years, it drifted downward leading into the presidential election of 2004, when 4 of 10 young Americans said they approved how Mr. Bush was handling his job.

read more at The New York Times

by Gabrielle Grenz
from YAHOO! NEWS / AFP

VIENNA (AFP) - Kurt Waldheim, the former UN secretary general and president of Austria whose reputation was tarnished by revelations over his Nazi past, died Thursday at the age of 88, his family said.

The former statesman suffered a heart attack in May and had been ailing ever since. He left a Vienna hospital last week and died surrounded by his family, they told the APA news agency.

Waldheim was UN chief from 1972 until 1982 and then president of Austria from 1986 to 1992, when he was at the center of an international storm over his wartime links to a Nazi militia.

His denials of any wrongdoing failed to stop him becoming a virtual outcast on the international diplomatic stage.

As UN secretary general, Waldheim circled the globe preaching his “Christian vision of the world.” He helped organize international conferences and pop concerts for the people of Cambodia.

He won the Austrian presidency in June 1986 but his victory turned sour following reports that he at least knew of Nazi war crimes while a young lieutenant in the Balkans, even if he did not actually participate in any.

His victory prompted Israel to recall its ambassador and boycott his inauguration.

The United States put the Austrian president on its “watch list” of potential undesirables in April 1987 while scores of other countries snubbed him.

A 1987 trip to the Vatican for an audience with Pope John Paul II — his first state visit after his election — unleashed a diplomatic storm.

Waldheim steadfastly denied all allegations about his wartime activities, but critics complained his answers just raised more questions.

Increasingly isolated internationally and at home, he fell back on responses also given by many former Nazis: “I was only doing my duty” and “I have only obeyed orders.”

read more at YAHOO! NEWS