We think this must have been an all female convention.

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Groundswell-movement.org sent me an email pointing to the video Finally! A Muslim-American woman changes how the media talks about Islam.

This video of a Muslim-American woman from New York challenging Islamophobia on CNN might change the way we talk about Islam in the media.

The Islamophobia begins at 00:13, meant to frighten us and turn us against our neighbors—but Linda breaks through at the 1-minute mark with some prophetic truth that we all need to hear.

This is the kind of sense I would like to make common on my blog and elsewhere.

We need to concentrate on catching criminals and avoiding creating feelings of hopelessness. We do not need to be fomenting more hate. We have more than enough hate to go around already.

The Atlanta Banana has the story Supreme Court Upholds Little Caesar’s Right to Feed Christian Employees to Lions. For crying out loud, this story is in The Atlanta Banana, do I have to put a warning on what type of story this is?

Little Caesar’s argued that the persecution of Christians and the feeding of them to ravenous big cats was a “deeply held” religious belief, that the continued survival of the roughly 6,000 Christian employees, as well as the fact that they remained on company payroll, imposed a “substantial financial burden” on their religious liberty.

Have I not given you fair warning? You can’t be surprised by what you read in the article, can you?

By the way, thanks to Randy Katz for posting this on his Facebook page.

The article Why 10% of the Population Hates Cilantro and the Rest Doesn’t Know Any Better finally explains why Sharon and I are not alone in our dislike for cilantro.

The first time I tried cilantro I didn’t realize it; I just thought somebody had emptied a bottle of Old Spice on my pizza in an attempt to poison me. Cilantro tastes like soap to approximately 10% of the people who have had their genotype analyzed by 23andMe

Thanks to Sarah Clark for posting this on her Facebook page.

I decided to respond to this email and to propagate it.

Subject:	Smackdown! Elizabeth Warren vs. Mitch McConnell
Date:	Thu, 03 Jul 2014 10:04:48 -0700
From:	Ilya Sheyman, MoveOn.org Political Action <moveon-help@list.moveon.org>

Elizabeth Warren is going toe-to-toe with Mitch McConnell to provide some relief for families drowning in student debt. If we want her to win, we need to get behind her. Will you chip in $10 to help get her back? Chip in $10

Dear MoveOn member,

When Mitch McConnell filibustered Elizabeth Warren’s bill to ease the burden of student debt, the pundits said the bill was dead and it was time to give up.¹

But Elizabeth Warren isn’t giving up-she’s taking the fight to Mitch McConnell’s backyard.² And we need to get behind her.

Sen. Warren went to Kentucky to campaign with McConnell’s challenger with a simple message: If Mitch McConnell keeps blocking help for families drowning in debt, it might just cost him his seat.

And since the latest polls show Mitch McConnell in a dead heat against his Democratic opponent, he’s either gotta stop blocking help for students-or pay the price politically.

Sen. Warren can’t force Mitch McConnell to back down all on her own. If we can raise $100,000, we’ll get started by putting an ad on the Facebook page of every college student in the state of Kentucky letting them know that Mitch McConnell is almost single-handedly making them pay a higher interest rate on their college loans. Can you chip in $10?

Yes, I can contribute $10 to help Elizabeth Warren fight to reduce student debt.

This is exactly why we were so excited to have Elizabeth Warren in the Senate in the first place. Other Democrats talk about working families. She’s fighting for them.

And here’s why her strategy is so smart: Political experts think Republicans will win control of the Senate because of low turnout in a midterm election. But if college students turn out like they did in 2012, then Democrats will keep control of the Senate, and Mitch McConnell is finished.

Still, if we want Elizabeth Warren to win this fight, we need to get behind her. The opposition of the banks and the big student lenders is just too powerful for anyone to win alone.

Click here to donate $10 to help Elizabeth Warren fight to reduce student debt.

Thanks for all you do.

-Ilya, Alejandro, Corinne, Mark, and the rest of the team

Sources:

1. “Elizabeth Warren’s bill to refinance student loans dies in the Senate. Now what?” The Washington Post, June 11, 2014
http://www.moveon.org/r/?r=299836&id=98083-7776955-7Br_bEx&t=4

2. “Alison Grimes and Elizabeth Warren rally for higher ed ” The Courier-Journal, June 29, 2014
http://www.moveon.org/r/?r=299837&id=98083-7776955-7Br_bEx&t=5

Want to support our work? We’re entirely funded by our 8 million members-no corporate contributions, no big checks from CEOs. And our tiny staff ensures that small contributions go a long way. Chipin here.

---

PAID FOR BY MOVEON.ORG POLITICAL ACTION, http://pol.moveon.org/. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

The Daily Kos has the great article If Our Founding Fathers Were All Christians, Why Did They Say This? You can appreciate the wisdom of this collection of statements without regard to who said them. However, the author does tell you who said each one.

Some of these may even find their way into my own collection of favorite quotes.

For now, I will just pick one that was appropriate for a discussion I was having about my previous post.

“To argue with a man who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.”

– Thomas Paine, The American Crisis No. V (1776)
Note: You can read Paine’s whole pamphlet, where he expresses his atheistic beliefs, here.

Yes, it would be preferable to talk about our founding ancestors rather than our founding fathers. With that title, perhaps the author could have found a few words of wisdom from women of that time period.

The Real News Network has the story In Wake of Murders, Israel Considers More Settlements and Strikes on Gaza.

I bet I can guess what you may be thinking when you listen to the following part of the video.

ABUNIMAH: Well, my question is: where does this all end? We have an out-of-control Israel, which, you know, is–the scope of debate, as Lia describes it accurately, is between steal more land or bomb more Palestinians. And the likelihood is that they will end up doing both. And there seems to be no internal breaks that can change the disastrous course Israel is headed on. And there is also no international peace process. I mean, the peace process that collapsed was a sham anyway and served as a cover for ongoing Israeli colonization.

So the question is: what can change the direction? Even if calm or relative calm returns to Jerusalem or the West Bank in the next few days, it will only be temporary before the next disastrous event. And who knows where this will lead? So really something has to change. And all that I see on the horizon now that really gives hope is the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement to raise the price for these Israeli policies of collective punishment, of land confiscation, to make it–you know, I mean, Palestinians are killed without consequence. They can be killed. Nobody says, find the perpetrators. I mean, just this year, six, now seven Palestinian children have been killed by Israeli soldiers. It’s suspected that the seventh was killed by settlers, and nobody is asking internationally, nobody is–you know, Obama is not demanding that the killers be brought to justice.

So, you know, I think it’s very important that people understand that waiting will not produce peace. We need to intervene in the form of boycott, divestment, and sanctions to change the direction and to end this cycle of horror and tragedy.

As I started hearing this, I was thinking, “Well, you know, the Palestinians had to know what the Israeli reaction would be to what they did. So who is going to stop first?”

Then I came to my senses. “The Palestinians” did not do “this”, some individuals who may have been Palestinian did “this”. There are criminals all over the USA that commit kidnapping and murder. Our police used to take the attitude (and sometimes still do) that the Israeli forces do. In our case, they would go into a minority neighborhood, assuming their was the slightest hint that a minority criminal had done the deed, and massively search and arrest people. Now there are many forward thinking police departments that know that you cannot behave this way and expect to get future cooperation from the people in communities that you treat this way. Police efforts to apprehend criminals are fostered by getting the cooperation of the communities in which the criminal might live.

Yes, the Israeli/Palestinian situation has deteriorated to such a point that many people looking in on Israel don’t see how “civilized” standards can be used by Israel in these situations. As in our civil rights struggles in the USA and in those of South Africa, a way was eventually found to turn around an impossible situation. If you don’t even think you ought to be looking for such a way to turn things around, you aren’t ever going to find it.

How deeply is a society willing to descend into depravity, before it realizes what it has become? When will that society decide that what they have become is not what they want to be? Yes, you can apply this to both sides of the fight. If you think it is right to let the side you favor to go on until the other side takes the first step, then you are not helping. Even to start on a trip together, someone had to have taken the first step to get the idea of the trip moving forward.

Robert Reich has posted The Big Story On Jobs.

The big story on jobs (hardly mentioned in today’s job report for June) is America is in the midst of a massive shift to part-time work. Part-time jobs accounted for 2/3 of all new jobs in June. Most people don’t want part-time work; they need a full-time job. But corporations are shifting to part-time work because it allows them to (1) avoid paying overtime, (2) avoid paying health insurance (evidence suggests Obamacare’s employer mandate, although delayed, is adding to the part-time shift), (3) more cheaply respond to ups and downs in customer demand, and (4) keep workers obedient and docile (and punish anyone trying to unionize) because workers need whatever hours they can get. So when you hear that the U.S. economy is creating lots of new jobs (288,000 jobs in June), be skeptical. Most are part-time.

I have read that others are wondering how the job numbers can be so good and yet people’s experience working and finding work can be so bad.  I think Robert Reich has the answer to that question.

When the kinds of work weren’t shifting so rapidly, it used to be enough to just quote the number of jobs created.  In this context kinds of work refers to full-time/part-time and level of pay and benefits, not the type of work a person does on the job.  Now that we are undergoing such a shift, it won’t be enough to just quote numbers.

Reuters has an article Yellen drives wedge between monetary policy, financial bubbles.

Monetary policy faces “significant limitations” as a tool to counter financial stability risks, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen said on Wednesday, adding that heading off the U.S. housing bubble with higher interest rates would have caused major economic damage.Weighing in on a global debate, Yellen reiterated her view that regulation – not rate policy – needs to play the lead role in combating excessive financial risk-taking.

“The potential cost … is likely to be too great to give financial stability risks a central role in monetary policy discussions,” Yellen said at an event sponsored by the International Monetary Fund.

So what should the Fed Chair do when she knows what the regulators ought to do, but she also knows there is little likelihood that they will do it?  At least she is speaking out more forcefully on what they should be doing than any previous Fed Chair, including Bernanke, ever did.

It really irked me when the Fed Chair would testify before Congress and I could clearly see what he would like to have told his inquisitors, but was either to diplomatic or too afraid to tell them what they needed to hear.

It is another example of the Congress’s actions and  inactions forcing the Fed to have to work at cross purposes to what Congress is doing and what they aren’t doing.

Here are the first of Sharon’s dahlias to open wide.

You can view this here without the blog paraphernalia getting in the way.