Author: Source

There is a growing movement in America that equates godliness with hatred of our government — in fact, hatred of our country.

By Frank Schaeffer / AlterNet

The Norwegian police on Saturday charged a 32-year-old man, whom they identified as a Christian fundamentalist with right-wing connections, over the bombing of a government center and a shooting attack on a nearby island that together left at least 91 people dead.

Citizens for Patient Rights and The Patient Care Association of California (PCACA), law enforcement, legal, clergy and MMJ patient representatives will present their reasons for supporting the repeal of San Ordinance No. O-20042.

WHEN: Monday, July 25, 2011, 2:00 p.m.,

WHERE: City Administration Building, Council Chambers – 12th Floor, 202 “C” Street, San Diego.

It has taken me more than 30 years as a journalist to ask myself this question, but this week I find that I must: is the Left right after all? You see, one of the great arguments of the Left is that what the Right calls “the free market” is actually a set-up.

The rich run a global system that allows them to accumulate capital and pay the lowest possible price for labour. The freedom that results applies only to them. The many simply have to work harder, in conditions that grow ever more insecure, to enrich the few. Democratic politics, which purports to enrich the many, is actually in the pocket of those bankers, media barons and other moguls who run and own everything.

By Jane Fonda

I grew up during World War II. My childhood was influenced by the roles my father played in his movies. Whether Abraham Lincoln or Tom Joad in the Grapes of Wrath, his characters communicated certain values which I try to carry with me to this day. I remember saying goodbye to my father the night he left to join the Navy. He didn’t have to. He was older than other servicemen and had a family to support but he wanted to be a part of the fight against fascism, not just make movies about it. I admired this about him. I grew up with a deep belief that wherever our troops fought, they were on the side of the angels.

Theodore Roszak, who three weeks after the Woodstock Festival in 1969 not only published a pivotal book about a young generation’s drug-fueled revolt against authority but also gave it a name — “counterculture” — died on July 5 at his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 77.

His wife, Betty, in confirming the death, said he had been treated for liver cancer and other illnesses.

Dr. Roszak’s book “The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society” had gone to press months before the music festival was held in August that year, displaying the exuberance and excesses of a generation rebelling against war and seeking new ways to be and think. But in serendipitously timely fashion, the book provided what many regarded as a profound analysis of the youth movement, finding its roots in a sterile Western culture that had prompted young people to seek spiritual meaning in LSD, exotic religions and even comic books.

At the turn of the last century, as the robber barons’ first gilded age lingered on, many Californians came to regard one powerful enterprise as the symbol of oppressive avarice and of big money’s corrupt appropriation of the political process.

By Katrina vanden Heuvel / The Nation Magazine / July 20, 2011

With too much fanfare , the contours of a “grand bargain” on the budget have emerged with a proposal offered by the Senate’s Gang of Six. It’s a deal that looks a helluva lot more like a Raw Deal than a New Deal or a Fair Deal.

By Jason Everitt / Two Cathedrals / July 19, 2011

Without much time to produce a side-by-side comparison of the major redistricting proposals and the newly minted “July 19th Plan,” here is my first take on the obvious shortcomings of this map.

It’s clear that the so-called “Coast and Canyon” district, the historic African-American empowerment district, and Border-Barrio Latino empowerment district are locked. Expectedly, there has been little variation in the borders of these districts in any major proposal, including the “July 19th Plan.”

On July 18th, 200 family members, community members and lawyers across CA mobilized outside the headquarters of California Department of Corrections & Rehabilitation (CDCR) in Sacramento to demonstrate their support of the people on hunger strike at Pelican Bay, Corcoran and other prisons, and to call on the CDCR and Governor Brown to intervene in this urgent, life-death matter.

By Los Angeles Times – Editorial / July 20, 2011

Conditions in California prisons are so bad that a panel of federal judges ruled that they violate the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, but until recently the ensuing protests came mainly from lawyers rather than the inmates themselves. That changed on July 1, when thousands of inmates at one-third of the state’s prisons started a hunger strike.

by Marjorie Cohn / CommonDreams .org / July 19, 2011

The torture of prisoners in U.S. custody isn’t confined to foreign countries. For more than two weeks, inmates at California’s Pelican Bay State Prison have been on a hunger strike to protest torturous conditions in the Security Housing Unit (SHU) there. Prisoners have been held for years in solitary confinement, which can amount to torture. Thousands of inmates throughout California’s prison system have refused food in solidarity with the Pelican Bay prisoners, bringing the total of hunger strikers to more than 1,700.

The County of San Diego is asking the lowest paid County employees to take pay cuts between 7 and 14%!

This while the County has 1.2 billion in reserves; while they have been spending hundreds of millions of dollars in cash on infrastructure property, including $120 million on a planned “Legacy” water park at the County Administration Building; and while the top management, executives and elected officials have continued to get raises on top of their $200k plus salaries, plus better health care benefits and car allowances of between $600 and $1000 dollars