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Dang, it’s the Weekend again – why don’t you lot discuss, with your characteristic decorum leavened by F-Bombs, whatever you like? Here are a couple-a hot topics you could try on for size – both typical topics that appeal to this blog in our never-ending, sometimes-victorious and not-particularly partisan struggle against the powerfuls’ constant attempt to get more power over us. We had good news on ONE front at least, this week:
Ricardo wrote about this last June, in a pice including a good Jon Oliver video entitled “Loretta, Don’t Sell Us Out to Big Telcom.” But it really grabbed our personal interest when our kleptocrat nemesis Matt Cunningham chimed in against net neutrality on his Chamber-funded Anaheim blog: Stop Federal Regulation of the Internet. (Yes, that’s how the corporate interests of the type that fund Matt decided they should frame the issue: preventing, at the public’s request, the internet giants from herding us all into slow and fast lanes and charging us tolls for the fast lanes, is the dread “government regulation.” Whatever.)
So we wondered, starting with Zenger, what businesses comprising the Anaheim Chamber would care much about this, to inspire Cunningham’s post? Disney perhaps. Although the corporate-funded AnaheimBlog is exactly the sort of mouthpiece that would be able to benefit from an end to net neutrality, as their funders could afford the fee to keep them in the internet’s fast lane, while the humble ankle-biters like your blog truly would start loading slower than YOU’d have patience for. Well, not THIS time, not on OUR watch.
Still hot: The drive to give the President Fast-Track Authority to negotiate the Trans-Pacific Trade Partnership (TPP) and similar terrible trade agreements. The votes on this outrage in Senate and Congress could happen as soon as this coming week. If you haven’t, or even if you did, you should read or re-read D’Marie’s masterpiece from a couple weeks ago. And then go call your Congressman to vote NO on it – here, we made it easy:
Senator Boxer: 202-224-3553
Senator Feinstein: 202-224-3841
Congressman Dana Rohrabacher: 714-960-6483
Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez: 714-774-0236
Congressman Alan Lowenthal: 562-436-3828
Congressman Ed Royce: 714-255-0101
Congresswoman Mimi Walters: 202-225-5611
Congressman Darrell Issa: 949-281-2449
And if you need to remember, quickly, who should be against this deal and why, here’s D’Marie’s short version:
Folks, if you are a small business owner, you need to be involved in stopping these deals. The deals are for the benefit of BIG BUSINESSES alone – the huge transnational corporations – not for small businesses at all.
If you are a working professional, you need to be worried. This time it’s not manufacturing that is going to get hit, it’s white collar professionals. The Asian rim has been preparing for this and educating their cheap workforce to take your jobs.
If you are retired, you need to be concerned as these provisions will severely impact your Medicare as well as your quality of life.
In short, WE ARE ALL AFFECTED!!! So we all need to be involved in stopping this huge give away to the fascists that are running the globalization of our planet.
And while you’re at it sign the petition demanding Senator Menendez, the highest-ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, who is still wavering on TPP, to figure out quickly where justice is, and just say no!
There is nothing more fundamental to a democratic form of government than the right to petition your government.
American school children are taught that “we the people” have the right to enact a change when, “in the course of human events,” it becomes necessary to challenge our own government should they refuse to act for the good of the people.
I authored California’s Parent Empowerment Act in 2010 to give real rights to parents to enact transformative changes at their children’s failing schools.
California has thousands of education laws. This was one law that enabled parents to become the architects of their own children’s educational futures.
Immediately, the law was recognized as historic, providing parents, who were otherwise forced to keep children in state-identified failing schools with no means of exit, a way to hold schools accountable.
Parents were given the same right enjoyed, though rarely exercised, by school boards to restart a failing school when their own elected representatives – typically elected with campaign dollars from unions – failed to make these changes for fear of entangling with education unions.
Indeed, Julio Perez, executive director of Orange County’s Labor Federation, told me their opposition to a charter school was because “there aren’t protections for the workers,” reinforcing that schools are a public works program rather than a public education system.
Parents at Anaheim’s Palm Lane Elementary School lawfully submitted qualifying “Parent Trigger” petitions on Jan.
14. Under the law, the Anaheim City School District was to have verified signatures. In cases where the district couldn’t verify, implementing regulations clearly spell out the role of the parents’ lead petitioners to assist verification.
None such occurred in Anaheim.
Rather, on Feb. 19 the parent’s petitions were denied. Without a single question from any of the trustees, they voted unanimously to reject the 332 parent signatures representing approximately 67 percent of school parents. Their denial was applauded by some 100 union activists who had packed the meeting.
The district cited a variety of claims against the parents, ranging from not being subject to the law to claiming that 133 of the 332 signatures were “invalid,” dropping the parents to 48.8 percent and below the 50 percent threshold.
While the law mandates that the district return “invalid” signatures to the petitioners so they can resubmit corrections within 60 days, the district has signaled it has no intentions to comply with the law: The day after the vote, district officials called the police to arrest one of my staff who, despite being told we would obtain the petitions, was still waiting in the district’s lobby at 4 p.m. with nothing having been released. Anaheim police declined to arrest.
The following Monday – after parents had already lost three days in the 60 day review period – District Superintendent Linda Wagner refused to release the documents to waiting parents.
Rather, she simply provided them copies of the petitions and a list of 12 names they had rejected – rather than the full discarded 133.
How can parents attempt to address the claims of invalid signatures if the district refuses to even identify which petitions are supposedly invalid? When pressed by parents, she told them to go “contest it” in court.
Just recently, there was a vote recount in the Orange County Supervisor election. It was a public process, enabling all to view alleged disputed ballots required under law.
Would we have tolerated the Registrar of Voters prohibiting the public and candidates to see which ballots were disqualified and why?
In the 1940s, led by the Mendez parents in Westminster, the first major lawsuit seeking access to a quality education for all children was filed. Their victory established the foundation for the Brown v. Board of Education landmark ruling in which 13 Topeka, Kan., parents sought to desegregate schools. Seven decades later, Anaheim parents are being forced to seek justice in the courts simply to be able to use a California law written to empower parents. This is the next chapter in the fight for education equality in America. One day, your children and grandchildren might ask which side you were on.
Staff opinion columnist Gloria Romero is an education reformer and former Democratic state senator from Los Angeles. Email: Gloria@parentempower.org Twitter: @gloriajromero
From the OC Register
*Sorry if we treat this as a week-end open thread, but two things are terribly important to consider which our lovely Sunday talking heads do not want to discuss. (1) Rick Perry and all those CPAC guys: “We love Netanyahu, Bibi is much smarter and brighter than the President Obama!” Great Rich, Rand, Ted and Scott – so you must believe as Bibi does that all Palestinians should leave Palestine, Gaza and all Jews should come home to Israel and all the Palestinians should be deported out of the country? The grand ONE State Israeli Final Solution? (2) Why have we not captured any ISIS/ISIL Fighters and why have we not interrogated them and had Major News Media report their story, of why they became Islamic Terrorist and like to cut people’s head’s off. Why, we can’t contain 20 to 30 thousand pick-up truck fighters when we incarcerated 110,000 German Soldiers at El Alamein? Why we can’t find out where they get their guns, artillery and tanks and who is funding their operations and why we haven’t taken out their cyber and banking capacity? It is about time we stopped watching stupid television on Sunday when no one asks the right questions or wants to know the right answers.
La luta continua …”Is it apathy, or resignation?’…a young man’s perspective: ” Obama turned out to be an American tragedy. I think of all the young Obama volunteers sleeping in their cars and on couches, sacrificing their time, comfort, energy and zeal for the man. He marched them from a mountaintop of idealism into a cynical swamp. In doing so, he destroyed my generation’s faith in the political process. It won’t come back. I keep the poster of the young, idealized Obama to remind me not of the man but of the hope—raw and addictive and now gone.”
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/thats_all_folks_20150301
*Ricardo……reality is a SOB……at least that’s what they said back in the ’50’s Then we had LBJ, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Talk about a reality check….on the political system. Actually, Obama has done more to save the system than can be calculated. ACA, Dreamer Immigration and no new gun
laws. Talk about a huge moral victory…..amazing really. It was also amazing what Hillary and John Kerry were and are able to do – keeping the lid on the boiling pot we call Global Capitalism. Hedge Funds and Derivatives, the Fed money factory and the IMF…..good grief…how much did you want Obama to do? Our bet is he will still hold back the reversal of the Voting Rights Acts and make Scott Walker look like what he is – before he leaves the building.
It’s brinkmanship for stupid control.
Most of the idealism that volunteers felt for Obama is simply a misreading of the man. You placed expectations on him that didn’t fit with the actual person. He said, for example, while he was still a Senator, that he would never support retroactive immunity for the telecoms that helped spy illegal on Americans. Then he turned around while campaigning and voted for a bill that gave them immunity. Think for a moment how an action like that prefigures his support of NSA spying programs. His idealistic supporters simply brushed aside actions like this and continued to place him on a pedestal.
His supporters have nobody to blame but themselves for idealizing him and not seeing things realistically.
Obama Clinical Narcissist Interview II Sam Vaknin, youtube
Vaknin is not the exclusive source on Narcissism, NPD, or psychopaths. What he claims about Obama is an application of known personality traits in order to find an assessment. What you have to think about is if this application is accurate and precise. Vaknin also openly admits his own NPD
Yeah, I’ve thought about it. It’s not accurate or precise.
Coming from LarouchepacTV, it’s not objective, either.
Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited Paperback – Unabridged, June 30, 2013
by Sam Vaknin (Author), Lidija Rangelovska (Editor)
Amazon
Reviews
Few people can claim to have increased the public awareness of NPD to such a degree.
Adrian Tampany, Financial Times Weekend Magazine, September 4-5, 2010
Malignant Self-love (is a) … magnum opus
Yvonne Roberts, Sunday Times, September 16, 2007
“Sam Vaknin is the world s leading expert on narcissism.”
Tim Hall, New York Press, Volume 16, Issue 7 – February 12, 2003
“Vaknin s a respected expert on malignant narcissists … He set about to know everything there is about the psychopathic narcissist.”
Ian Walker, ABC Radio National Background Briefing, July 18, 2004 –Financial Times and Sunday Times
Among many books published on the topic of pathological narcissism, this is by far the best. It is highly recommended not only for the general public but also for professional therapists.
(Akira Otani, Ed.D.,ABPH, University of Maryland)
The book penetrates deeply into the narissist’s mind and is filled with myriad gripping novel insights.It gives the reader a great insight into the fears, desires, defenses, and motives of the narcissist, as well as those in relationship with the narcissist.
(Alison Poulsen, Ph.D.)
Brilliant, insightful, extremely relevant, not only clinically, but practically, on a day to day basis. This work can be immediately applied and be of assistance to our society at large.
(Dr. Cyndie Spanier, Ph.D., Deputy Director at Pittsburgh Behavioral Medicine, LLC)
Sam is a genius his work most inspiring not only to myself but to my colleagues as well.
(Joan Jutta Lachkar, Ph.D., Affiliate Member of the New Center for Psychoanalysis and Author of: How to Talk to a Narcissist; How to Talk to a Borderline; Narcissistic/Borderline Couples)
“Sam Vaknin’s book is THE bible on Narcissism!”
(Mary Jo Fay, author of ‘When Your Perfect Partner Goes Perfectly Wrong – Loving or Leaving the Narcissist in Your Life’)
so, basically, the government is preventing me from buying a fast trak device for my computer
Wrong.
You can buy more broadband from most ISPs, if you want it.
This is the government preventing the ISPs from practicing indiscriminate control of broadband access.
The U.S. Government has the approval rating of “Communicable Diseases” roughly 10%, they are about painfully scewing you over, its about control. Typically, controlling people are often wrong its actually a diagnostic symptom.
Its a power grab, a regulatory form of subjugation.
“The growth of federal regulations over the past six decades has cut U.S. economic growth by an average of 2 percentage points per year, according to a new study in the Journal of Economic Growth. As a result, the average American household receives about $277,000 less annually than it would have gotten in the absence of six decades of accumulated regulations—a median household income of $330,000 instead of the $53,000 we get now.”
All regulation isn’t bad. Get some perspective.
I know it’s fashionable to never acknowledge when government does something right, but you people take it too far.
Its not $330,000 good, its a social disease, like Nepotism and preffered incompetance.
Communism Killed 94Million in 20th Century.
Just centralized nightmares and a regulatory form control and stupidity.
But the problem is that when Big Government regulates Big Business pretty soon the Big Business is writing the legislation – and fighting a rear-guard action all the way.
And small businesses can’t compete with the big influencers.
Pesticide makers, river-dumpers, nicotine peddlers, racetracks operators, etc., etc.
They really are the same now, thats why the Astronomical sucsess of the USA was over a very long time ago.
On the other hand, if government wasn’t regulating the pesticide makers, river-dumpers and nicotine peddlers, we’d have unacceptable levels of dumping, poisons, etc.
It’s always been a balancing act. And history has shown that Big Business is truly awful at policing itself.
So name me ONE entity, other than government, that has the power to reign in that bad behavior?
I know, it’s a real problem, isn’t it?
but it still prevents me from buying my way to the front of the line
Yeah, because that would create an internet that is experientially sophisticated only for those with money.
Don’t know about you, but that’s not a world I want to live in.
*Narcissim? Takes one to know one! If it ain’t about me…..how important can it be? Sure we believe in Karma……but you need your pee pee whacked right now!
Psychopaths? They don’t have those people any more. All we have are people addicted to prescription drugs. They cause mental health problems, liver and heart disease. The whole thing is a total joke and you guys keep buying in to so-called Experts. We have interviewed the best and believe us…..any of them can be challenged. They are not always right or worthy. Many are – but those that are fail to rip off the system with worthless books for example. How about O’Reilly? How many more books of his are you going to buy or even read? How about Brian Williams and his Combat Infantry Badge….NOT! ?? The list is too long to contemplate. The truth is that Obama wouldn’t make a pimple of the back side of Narcissit O’Reilly. Our President is doing a great job and so all you have to hang onto is Scott Walker, Ted Cruz and John Boehner? Pretty sad kids. Pretty sad.
Its sad people playing into a Duopoly.
“JUST DONT BE STUPID”
Its now known as “The Canadian Dream”
The new OJB heroine – Young Kim!
Calif. Assemblywoman Young Kim Announces Legislation to Require Voter Support for New Toll Lanes
Calif. State Assemblywoman Young Kim (R-Fullerton) today announced that she has formally introduced state legislation to require a two-thirds vote of the Orange County electorate before any new toll facility in the county could be constructed on a public freeway.
http://californianewswire.com/2015/03/03/CNW23992_120313.php/calif-assemblywoman-young-kim-announces-legislation-to-require-voter-support-for-new-toll-facilities-in-orange-county/
Heh, betcha Quirky Quirk wouldn’t a’ stepped up.
I’d take an ‘apenny of that action, rounded to the nearest shilling.
But first she’d have had to get rid of that gray thing that followed her around everywhere. She’s terrified of it.
I’m working on a piece about that; I was there, took a video… just took a while to upload..
Dave’s right sadly, SQS and Daly ABSTAINED when similar legislation came before them in the Transportation Committee from Mansoor last year. Too beholden to the Teamsters and Building Trades, who see toll lanes as a gravy train to more makework projects.
Hey, whoever was up in arms about SJC Councilman Sam Allevato (was that you, Tyler?) — OC Political reports that he’s resigning!
That was everyone who knows South County. Tyler, yes, but especially our new Capistrano Common Sense. I hope she writes about this development.