Author: Indianadem

The anti-gay marriage amendment to the Indiana Constitution that homophobes hoped would be on the November ballot is now dead for at least two years.

Good news: the Senate just voted for the third and final time to pass the House-amended version of HJR-3.

While we wish the Senate had voted down this harmful amendment altogether there are two things we can celebrate about this outcome: The version of HJR-3 the Senate just passed doesn’t contain the especially harmful second sentence, and HJR-3 won’t be on the ballot this November.

These are real victories, and they are yours.

Opponents to the amendment organized an effective coalition, Freedom Indiana, to slow what was just recently viewed as a done deal, given the stranglehold Republicans have on the Indiana Statehouse. Freedom Indiana was joined by major Hoosier businesses Eli Lilly & Co. and Cummins, Inc. as well as Indiana University in opposition to the amendment.

Given the trend toward acceptance of equal rights for all, this harmful and hurtful piece of legislation may never see the Indiana House floor again.    

Guilty!

NEW ORLEANS — Former Mayor C. Ray Nagin of New Orleans was found guilty on Wednesday of accepting payoffs for city contracts, becoming the first mayor in the city’s history to be charged and convicted of corruption.

The jury, deliberated for about six and a half hours in total before finding Mr. Nagin, 57, the Democratic mayor for two terms and the face of the city’s leadership during the Hurricane Katrina disaster, guilty in 20 of the 21 counts against him.

Live coverage of the last day at trial by the Times-Pic.

Nagin will remain free on bond awaiting his sentence. He will have to submit to home monitoring.

Now, if you could just work in some banksters and possibly a hedge fund manager or two…

After Occupy

Keep the dream alive. There’s something each of us can do to help. Everything we do matters, no matter how small.

Those who dismiss these moments because of their flaws need to look harder at what joy and hope shine out of them and what real changes have, historically, emerged because of them, even if not always directly or in the most obvious or recognizable ways. Change is rarely as simple as dominos.  Sometimes, it’s as complex as chaos theory and as slow as evolution. Even things that seem to happen suddenly turn out to be flowers that emerge from plants with deep roots in the past or sometimes from long-dormant seeds.

I’m picking up new energy from working with an OFA regional coordinator veteran of the 2008 and 2012 elections. She’s inspired and its highly contagious.  

The arrests of peaceful protesters, journalists and even spectators in Madison Wisconsin continue. I remember a time when federal marshals were used to protect our constitutional rights against the abuse of power by local and state officials. Isn’t it time the rule of law was restored in Wisconsin?

I went to the Wisconsin capitol again today to report on the Solidarity Singers, as I’ve done many times before. I was not intending to get arrested. Nor did I want to get arrested. But that’s what happened.

I arrived about fifteen minutes late for the one-hour noon sing along, which has been going on steadily for two and a half years now.

When I arrived, I was told that Madison city council member Mark Clear had already been arrested, while he was singing “This Land Is Your Land.” This seemed to be an escalation, since he was the first currently serving elected official to be rounded up in the more than 200 arrests that Scott Walker’s capitol police have made in the last few weeks. (Former longtime member of the Madison school board, Carol Carstensen, was arrested a couple of weeks ago. She’d never even gotten a speeding ticket before, she told me.)

At Occupy, Moral Mondays and Madison, let our voices be heard!

The folks over at European Tribune have posted some poignant memories of former PM Margaret Thatcher’s political career. Funny, my recollections of the Madness of Saint Ronnie are quite similar.

A sample from Helen:

The worst part of what she did was that she left us a nation divided. Those few who benefited a lot and those many who lost a lot. There was little in between.

Sound familiar?

You poor, poor things. Life in The Village is so unfair. Go ahead and keep blaming those nasty pundits for their shallow and possibly traitorous screeds against your chosen ones. I’m certain a good scolding is just what they need to straighten out their recent misguided turn.

…but an overwhelming percentage of material I saw on my usual aggregators was a powerful wave of whining by conservatives about the vicious treatment of poor Mitt Romney by the vicious, hateful, Obama-loving media that’s clearly trying to steal the election once again despite the obvious desire of the American people for new leadership.

<snicker>  

The NYT reports another windfall for the banksters in today’s top story.

Wells Fargo reported $4.8 billion in revenue from its mortgage origination business in the first six months of the year, an increase of 155 percent from $1.9 billion in the first six months of 2011.

So what’s a CEO make at this level of the finance business?

Chairman and Chief Executive John Stumpf received compensation valued at $19.8 million last year.

Is anyone out there feeling a trickle yet? …anyone? …even a little?

Sad times continue in the Big Easy. Layoffs of print media staff at the Times-Picayune are looming and there’s apparently little actual reporting on the blog that’s been hyped as the plan to pick up the news gathering slack when the print edition is cut to just three days a week. One reporter let her frustrations out on management this weekend in a scathing memo.

“Sometimes I just want to scream about what is happening around me” at the newspaper, she writes.

Despite efforts by advertisers, city officials and citizens, who formed The Times-Picayune Citizens’ Group last month, hoping to negotiate with the papers’ owners and maintain a seven day print edition, the paper seems doomed to follow others owned by Advance Publications and operated by Newhouse Newspapers, such as the Ann Arbor News, that ceased daily printing in 2009. Other Advance Publications owned organizations scheduled for similar cutbacks are The Birmingham News, The Huntsville Times and The Press-Register of Mobile. The business model reminds me a lot of the purchase and gutting of local AM/FM radio and I sometimes wonder if Bain Capital is involved. I also wonder if, in the end, anyone will be left to write the obituary of the Times-Picayune.  

As was mentioned a few days ago in another thread, its 1968 all over again.

…neighbors of activists accused of “terrorism” give their stories of aggressive, seemingly incompetent and extralegal harassment by the Chicago Police.

I sincerely hope these police actions cost the City Of Chicago dearly.

In the apartment across the hall from the arrested activists, around 11:30 that night, Ben (not his real name) was coming out of his bathroom when his door crashed in and 25 to 30 armed police burst into his living room. One of them approached him, pointing a gun at his face and yelling at him to get down. When he didn’t get down quickly enough, the man shoved him to the ground and cuffed him.

“I thought I was being robbed,” Ben said. “They were wearing dark clothes, and I thought if they weren’t police, I was being robbed, and if they were, I didn’t know why this was happening.”

Just who are the real terrorists anyway?

And it looks as if the New Orleans Times-Picayune will be the latest victim. No more daily Times-Picayune for New Orleans; the paper will restructure to publish only three days a week. Staff and management employees are in shock this afternoon.

Tonight, in private homes, on porches and at least one bar, employees of The Times-Picayune gathered to collectively absorb the shock of a New York Times report that the paper is about to undergo a massive restructuring that will leave New Orleans without a daily published newspaper —

Here’s the memo outgoing publisher Ashton Phelps sent to staff this morning.

A snippet:

We wanted to make you aware of a news story that will be posted on NOLA.com regarding the future of the company, and to alert you that we will be scheduling meetings to discuss it with groups of employees today.

    The story, which can be accessed through this link, details the formation of NOLA Media Group, a digitally focused company that will launch this fall and that will develop new and innovative ways to deliver news and information to the company’s online and mobile readers. NOLA Media Group will be led by Ricky Mathews. Also this fall, The Times-Picayune will begin publishing a more robust newspaper on a reduced schedule of Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays only.

Mr. Mayor comments.

“For 175 years, The Times-Picayune has been a mainstay in this region. Through wars and floods, the `Aints and a Saints Super Bowl victory, the TP has been and remains an integral part of our daily routine and our culture. It is a part of our identity.

So is this another cruel blow to the culture and tradition of a great American city? Maybe its just another statistic in the “death of print media” progression, but it seems somehow a sad postscript to Ashley Morris’ famous rant.