Asks Charlestown and Richmond folks to help By Judi Howell
We now have a working group called South County Occupy Providence Enthusiasts - SCOPE - until someone comes up with a better one - we are going with the leaderless, but all hands on deck organizational model.
A 3-day-old person under Mississippi's proposed
amendment to its state constitution.
In the late 1980s and early '90s, I lived around the corner from a Planned Parenthood clinic in Brookline, Massachusetts. For the 7 years that I lived there, I literally could not go out for a quart of milk on a Saturday morning without being followed down the sidewalk by people screaming at me not to kill my baby. There was a dentist's office in the same building as the clinic, and their female patients would end up having to explain to the protesters that they were just there to have their teeth cleaned.
Where is she going with this, you're probably wondering. My point: Unless they're injecting sperm into an egg via intracytoplasmic sperm injection, not even trained physicians are able to pinpoint the moment when an egg has been fertilized. Don't pretend to be able to practice medicine from the sidewalk. Or the courts. Or the legislature.
PROVIDENCE — In less than a week, the Occupy Providence encampment is already greener than most Rhode Island businesses.
With more than 100 tents and 225 demonstrators settled in at BurnsidePark, the community has instituted environmental practices such as recycling, composting and reusing utensils.
There was the Super Nova 60, the world’s first carbon neutral megayacht. Then there was the 72-foot Emax Excalibur, which represented the first step in the maritime industry towards the production of post-carbon yachts. But forget about those — the folks at Sauter Carbon Offset Design and their building partners Ned Ship Group say the latest in their series of green yacht concepts is "the fastest and greenest superyacht in the world."
Whatever else you think about tea-party-infused Republican leaders in Congress, at least they're consistent in their opposition to big government intrusion in the economy, right?
Absolutely. Unless you count intrusions of taxpayer funds into corporate projects back in their districts.
You'd think with millions of Americans out of work, massive deficits, people losing their homes, ongoing wars in two countries, citizens marching in
the streets demanding change, the Senate might have more important work to do. But no, they're more worried about making sure potato-growing states
have a big enough market for their wares.
Because, you know, Mickey D's and BK and Wendy's don't sell enough French fries.
Your tax dollars helped make them the 1%
By Phil Mattera from the Dirt Diggers Digest
Seeking to counter the criticisms raised by the growing Occupy movement, Herman Cain and other apologists for the super-wealthy insist that those who get rich do so only by dint of their own hard work and risk-taking.
This is ridiculous, of course. Accumulating a great fortune requires, among other things, a legal system oriented to property rights, a tax system biased in favor of investment income, and government spending on infrastructure ranging from interstate highways to the internet.
I don't expect the Planning Commission, the Charlestown Citizens Alliance, or the voting majority on our Town Council to give a fig about this, but not only is expanding Charlestown's pool of affordable housing required by Rhode Island state law, but living in more affluent neighborhoods also improves poor people's health.
For months, we have been exploring the inconsistent, if not downright dysfunctional, way that Charlestown regulates land and property.
I’ve reviewed the 750 articles Progressive Charlestown has published since its launch last February and found the largest single bloc of stories have dealt with Charlestown’s seemingly endless arguments over land and property use.
At present, there is a governing philosophy in Charlestown held by the Planning Commission and by a majority of the Town Council that we’ve summed up in the Marx Brothers’ classic song, “Whatever It Is, I’m Against It.”
This song becomes public policy in what we’ve come to call the “Platner Principle.” As articulated by the head of the town Planning Commission Ruth Platner, this principle is “all land and property uses are prohibited unless they are expressly permitted” in our town ordinances.
Herman Cain has made himself the latest darling of the Christian right by declaring on a recent
episode of The View that being gay is a choice. “Abe” on Christwire.org takes Herman Cain’s ball and runs
with it, proclaiming (based on what evidence, he doesn’t trouble himself to
say) that “Every time the gays are allowed to marry in another states [sic], America’s economy falls.”
Huh? Everyone knows fewer straights are getting married
nowadays and if the wedding-industrial complex is to be kept in business, it’s
going to need to rely on gays. So gay marriage laws are jobs bills!
Now, leaving aside all the evidence from genetics and biology that sexuality is rooted in
biology—because, hey, Herman doesn't trouble himself with it either when he makes his proclamation—let's take a look at this issue of choice. If being
gay is "just a choice," like, say, choosing to eat pizza instead of burgers or Kentucky Fried, then being heterosexual must be a choice as well. Which
means there's no reason for society to privilege the choices of heterosexuals over those of homosexuals, any more than one would allow people who
love pizza to dictate other people's fast food choices. No matter how much a pizza magnate might wish for that to happen.
Herman, my advice to you is that you stick to what you know best: pizza. Then again maybe you don't know much about pizza either. According to a blind taste test conducted by Politico,
Godfather's pizza was unanimously rated the worst among five pizzas
including Papa John's and Pizza Hut. And it takes some doing to be worse
than Papa John's or Pizza Hut. So if you're looking for a new career direction, why not take a stab at American Idol? You do have a halfway decent singing voice:
