New Years reflection from an electoral activist

Californian Activist Warns RNC to Choose Wisely
If Michael Steele or Reince Priebus wins the chairmanship of the Republican party, Activists will punish the committee people who voted for them, an e-mail obtained by National Review Online warns. In the e-mail, Ron Robinson, a member of the Los Angeles Republican Central Committee, slams Priebus for his Law Firm’s work in behalf of recipients of stimulus funds. With 28 publicly declared supporters, Priebus is the current front runner in the race. Now hold on, says Robinson: The new chair...

Party Time!
Bob Casey Vulnerable in ’12? Lancaster, Pa.—Seventeen months before the 2012 Republican U.S. Senate primary in Pennsylvania and nearly two years before the next General Election, GOPers in the state are already discussing who their Candidate will be against freshman Democratic Sen. Bob Casey Jr. The talk of a spirited 2012 challenge to Casey has been fueled by a just-completed Quinnipiac University Poll showing only 39% of state voters approve of his performance, while 29% don&rsquo...;

Tea Party Activists Take Issue With GOP Leaders As New Congress Begins
The New York Times: As Tea Party politicians prepare to take their seats when the 112th Congress convenes this week, they are already taking issue with Republicans for failing to hold the line against the flurry of Legislation enacted in the waning weeks of Democratic control of the House of Representatives and for not giving some Candidates backed by Tea Party groups powerful leadership positions. Read the whole story: The New York Times Get HuffPost Politics On Twitter and Face...

Tea Party Activists Angry at G.O.P. Leaders
Source: The New York Times As Tea Party politicians prepare to take their seats when the 112th Congress convenes this week, they are already taking issue with Republicans for failing to hold the line against the flurry of Legislation enacted in the waning weeks of Democratic control of the House of Representatives and for not giving some Candidates backed by Tea Party groups powerful leadership positions. Just a month ago, Tea Party Leaders were celebrating their movement’s victories in the midt...

Japanese whalers and activists clash off Antarctica
Japanese whalers shot water cannons at anti-whaling Activists today, the conservationist group's founder claimed, hours after the Activists tracked down the hunting fleet in the remote and icy seas off Antarctica. The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is chasing the fleet in the hopes of interrupting Japan's annual whale hunt, which kills up to 1,000 whales a year. The two sides have clashed violently in the past, including last year, when a Sea Shepherd boat was sunk after its bow was sheared ...

Anti-whaling activists clash with Japanese whalers
Stumble This! Japanese whalers shot water cannons at anti-whaling Activists on Saturday, the conservationist group's founder claimed, hours after the Activists tracked down the Whaling fleet in the remote and icy seas off Antarctica. The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is chasing the fleet in the hopes of interrupting Japan's annual whale hunt, which kills up to 1,000 whales a year. The two sides have clashed violently in the past, including last year, when a Sea Shepherd boat was sunk after ...

Kindra Arnesen's Explosive New Revelations And Message to The World
Activist, Mother, and Voice of the Gulf People, Kindra Arnesen sat down with the Project Gulf Impact team, Matt Smith, Heather Rally, and Gavin Garrison recently to reveal shocking new information about the BP Oil Disaster and why the whole world should be paying attention to the Gulf. A must watch for anyone wanting new information on the Gulf of Mexico, she reveals shocking new information sure to send waves through the country. Activist, Mother, and Voice of the Gulf People, Kindra Arnesen ...

Opposing war and occupation is not a crime
In December 2010, under the direction of U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, the FBI delivered 9 new Subpoenas in Chicago to anti-war and Palestine solidarity Activists - bringing the total number of subpoenaed Activists to 23. Patrick Fitzgerald’s office is ordering the 9 to appear at a Grand Jury in Chicago on January 25. In response, we are calling for Protests across the country and around the world to show our solidarity. Hundreds of organizations and thousands of people will be protest...

Make a New Years resolutiongo to Stopfbi.net every day
Dear readers of Fight Back! The editors and staff of Fight Back! want you to make a New Year’s resolution for 2011: Go to the web site StopFBI.net every single day. StopFBI.net is the voice of the Committee to Stop FBI Repression , the coalition that is building the fight against the FBI attacks and Grand Jury Subpoenas that have hit anti-war and international solidarity Activists. StopFBI.net is updated daily. It contains solidarity statements issued by organizations and prominent individ...

Happy New Year!
I have written about Men's Rights Activists (MRA) before. No doubt there are several subtypes of MRAs, some quite sane and interesting, but some neither of those. One can always spot the latter type in comments threads, because they appear to share a canned and condensed message (like Campbell's Tomato Soup) which is always the same, whatever the topic of the article they comment on, as long as it's about women and/or Feminism. That canned-and-condensed message always has certain parts, though o...

Skirmishes break out in Antartica between whalers and protesters
JAPANESE whalers allegedly fired water cannons at anti-whaling Activists yesterday, just hours after the campaigners tracked down their ships in the seas off Antarctica. Members of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society are chasing the fleet in the hopes of interrupting Japan's annual whale hunt, which kills up to 1,000 whales a year. The two sides have clashed violently in the past, including last year, when a Sea Shepherd boat was sunk after a collision with a whaler. Japan is accused by Sea...

Police clash with leftists at Tel Aviv demonstration of Bil'in protester's death
Hundreds of Activists Protest in front of Defense Ministry after Palestinian woman dies as a result of Tear Gas shot by IDF; Police reportedly slap former Meretz MK....

Egypt bars Iranian activists from Gaza
Asian aid convoy allowed to enter Gaza with 300 tons of medical aid, but Iranian members denied access for 'security and organizational reasons.'...

What We Really Need Is Anarchy
With a great Big Government to give us stuff. It is the Welfare State that is in crisis and the Left is divided on the question of how to fix it. Anarchists, who are the cannon fodder of the extreme left, are sending the message that the Old Leftist politics has failed and the time has come to double down. They do this by manifesting an “anger” and “outrage” which the parliamentarians cannot. [...] Rectification is not an electrical term. On the Left it means “power struggle&

Assam separatist freed from jail
A separatist leader in India's north-eastern Assam state has been released from Prison amid growing speculation about Peace Talks between his rebel group and the central government. Arabinda Rajkhowa leads the United Liberation Front of Assam (Ulfa), which has been fighting for an independent homeland for more than 30 years. Crowds of supporters gathered outside the jail to welcome his release. He had been in Prison after being arrested in Bangladesh a year ago. He was released from jail ...

A Year of Investigation and Action: FDLs Student Loan Activism Pays Dividends for Students, Taxpayers
FDL and our community of Activists worked hard to pass Legislation that changed the way Student Loans are handled, and that work paid off with the passage of the Student Lending and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA). Jane described the work that went into it from FDL and many others. The lenders fought with tons of money, and nearly won with their bogus arguments, which included the scary “government takeover” and the silly “competition benefits everyone”. We thought that the gover

Jayasekera
But again this ignores that Wikileaks has already farmed out this function to the major print dailies to which it has distributed the cables. So far it has only been releasing the cables they release. Nor does he get into how his own expert committee would work and how it would maintain its security. And of course to date, the release of the names of Human Rights Activists has not arisen as a problem....

Dayton Adding to Structural Deficit?
According to this article , one of the first actions Gov. Dayton will take is add to the structural Deficit Minnesota is facing: Incoming Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton plans to make signing an Executive Order expanding the state’s Medicaid program 1 of his first official acts. Signing that Executive Order does a number of things, none of them positive. First, because the money isn’t guaranteed beyond 2014, this EO adds to Minnesota’s structural deficit. This isn’t surprisin...

2010 Elections and Pro-Life Women: A Correction for Modern Feminism
On November 2, that imbalance dramatically shifted toward the pro-life side of the scale, and it is just the beginning. More than sheer numbers are involved, but the numbers alone are compelling. They underscore first and foremost that, as good as this election cycle was for fiscal Conservatives, it was every bit as triumphant for female Candidates who embrace the right to life. Consider the profile of the U.S. Congress. In the session of Congress that just ended, there were 93 women, 17 of them...

Subsidy transparency a must
Governor-elect Scott Walker comes to office having made three chief promises: More transparent Government Spending, greater accountability to prevent waste and more jobs. Especially in hard economic times, these three undertakings are interconnected. Every public dollar wasted could have been used to make Wisconsin a more successful place to grow jobs and must otherwise be shouldered by Taxpayers. Transparency, meanwhile, remains the best way to make programs more efficient and accountable to ...

"Charlie on the MTA"
If you, like me, grew up singing "Charlie on the MTA" in school or at camp, you might be interested to know about Charlie's political past: The character was conceived not as the hapless schlub immortalized in the Kingston Trio song but as a working-class hero ground down by Big Business and the two-party system. The song popularized by the trio, memorized by Romney, and celebrated by the MBTA is actually a sanitized version of the original, a campaign song for a 1949 Boston Mayoral Candidate w...

They're Steele Gunning For Him
The race for RNC chair is getting serious now with Michael Steele still wanting to keep his job and a fair amount of support coalescing around Steele's former ally, Reince Priebus. In many ways, it seems odd that Steele could very well lose, after a cycle in which the GOP made big gains in offices large and small. And if there's one thing we've learned about Steele, it's that he has an impressive ability to weather Scandals and gaffes that would fell others. But now, after all those gaffes and s...

Golden Oldie: On the merging of journalism and activism spaces
An Adam Bink Golden Oldie From Apr 19, 2010. Original HERE Tim Vollmer has a thoughtful piece out expressing concern over the decline of traditional LGBT press. A few reactions are in order. I think folks like Tim have to get past the notion that you're only an LGBT media Journalist if you have credentials, an office, write entirely without opinion, and your work appears in print. To borrow the phrase of a friend, "journalactivists"- something I would call myself- are on the rise. While I eng...

Showdowns On Spending & Debt Will Test New Leaders In Congress
WASHINGTON — Two early showdowns on spending and Debt will signal whether the new Congress can find common ground despite its partisan divisions or whether it's destined for gridlock and brinkmanship that could threaten the nation's economic health. Not all of the bickering in the 112th Congress that convenes Wednesday will be between Republicans and Democrats. House Republicans, back in power after four years in the minority, will include numerous freshmen whose unyielding stands on the...

Spending showdowns will test new Congress
WASHINGTON (AP) — Two early showdowns on spending and Debt will signal whether the new Congress can find common ground despite its partisan divisions or whether it's destined for gridlock and brinkmanship that could threaten the nation's economic health. Not all of the bickering in the 112th Congress that convenes Wednesday will be between Republicans and Democrats. House Republicans, back in power after four years in the minority, will include numerous freshmen whose unyielding stands on ...