The Good Fight

It's already being compared to the Second Coming. If Salt Lake City council can unanimously approve a law banning discrimination against gays, maybe it could happen here. Or maybe not! Decide for yourself at http://webmail.aol.com/28878/aol-1/en-us/Suite.aspx

SALT LAKE CITY — The Mormon church for the first time has announced its support of gay rights legislation, an endorsement that helped gain unanimous approval for Salt Lake city laws banning discrimination against gays in housing and employment.

The Utah-based church's support ahead of Tuesday night's vote came despite its steadfast opposition to gay marriage, reflected in the high-profile role it played last year in California's Proposition 8 ballot measure that barred such unions.

"The church supports these ordinances because they are fair and reasonable and do not do violence to the institution of marriage," Michael Otterson, the director of public affairs for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints said.

Passage made Salt Lake City the first Utah community to prohibit bias based on sexual orientation or gender identity. Under the two new ordinances, it is illegal to fire someone from their job or evict someone from their residence because they are lesbian, bisexual, gay or transgender.

The disaster that is America's war on drugs has many manifestations. One of them is the
unwarranted traffic stops many citizens undergo so that a cop may check us out and see if
he can smell some reefer burning in the car. Another is the high rate of crime, not just to
settle turf battles and rivalries among dealers, distributors and cheated buyers, but the
countless property crimes that fuel millions of drug habits across the nation. Then there is
the spread of HIV/AIDS by heroine users who do not have the means or the opportunity to
procure fresh needles. Another disaster has been the tens of millions of Americans arrested
and incarcerated in the 39 years since Richard Nixon declared war on drugs. Most alarming
of all is the wide disparity between blacks and whites who do time for drugs in South Carolina.
Below are some statistics compiled by the ACLU on effects of 39 years of drug war on our
state:

• For every dollar South Carolina spends on corrections, it spends only 49 cents on education.1

• South Carolina's overall incarceration rate ranks in the top fifth of states nationwide.2

• South Carolina's drug use rates are comparable to those of the rest of the country, yet South
Carolina's rate of imprisonment for drug offenses ranks seventh in the nation, putting an
unusually large burden on the state's taxpayers and justice system.3

• Whites and African Americans use drugs at virtually identical rates, yet in Charleston County,
you are 24 times more likely to go to jail or prison for a drug offense if you are African American
than if you are white. This racially disproportionate rate of imprisonment for drug offenses
ranks among the 50 worst for mid-sized counties in all of America.4

• In Richland County, you are 17 times more likely to go to jail or prison for a drug offense if you
are African American than if you are white.5

• In Greenville County, you are 14 times more likely to go to jail or prison for a drug offense if you
are African American than if you are white.6

A FRESH APPROACH…

South Carolina's bursting prisons paired with the ongoing economic crisis demand a fresh approach to
nonviolent drug offenses. Unfair and ineffective laws that require lengthy incarceration of nonviolent
drug offenders have squandered precious taxpayer dollars and pushed the state to the brink of
bankruptcy. "Lock 'em up and throw away the key" policies fail to recognize and resolve the root
causes of drug use and abuse, and undermine the health and safety of us all.

A FRESH LOOK AT SOUTH CAROLINA AND THE FAILED "WAR ON DRUGS"
SO, WHAT CAN OUR POLICYMAKERS DO?

• Create alternatives to incarceration: Eliminate imprisonment for all nonviolent drug
possession offenses, instituting civil penalties and non-prison alternatives, such as treatment,
which have been found more effective and cost-effective than incarceration.

• Let judges judge: Eliminate one-size-fits-all mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses,
allowing judges to make appropriate sentencing decisions on a case-by-case basis.

• Repeal the "three strikes" law, which often senselessly punishes minor offenses with major
terms behind bars to the detriment of us all.

• Take practical steps to prevent recidivism: Facilitate reintegration into the community by
removing the barriers to voting, employment, housing, and driving that now face individuals
leaving prison. For example, remove provisions that suspend the driver's license of a drug
offender when there is no evidence that he or she was driving while impaired.

• Make room in prison for serious, violent offenders: Reform the State's parole system to bar reincarceration
for technical violations.

• Research the impact of drug sentencing: Finally, more state- and local-level data is needed to
better understand the fiscal and human costs of lengthy sentences for nonviolent drug
offenders. The State should make specific data available and collect new data where needed to
allow for an honest accounting of necessary reforms.

For the sake of public safety, fairness and South Carolina's fiscal solvency, a new approach is needed
and soon.

1 Pew Center on the States, "One in 100: Behind Bars in
America 2008," February 2008, p. 31.
2 Ibid, p. 34.
3 Justice Policy Institute, "The Vortex: The Concentrated Racial
Impact of Drug Imprisonment and the Characteristics of Punitive
Counties," December 2007, p. 9.
4 Ibid, Appendix A, p. 26. Charleston ranks #47, with an African American-towhite
drug prison or jail admission ratio of 24.
5 Ibid, p. 25.
6 Ibid, p. 25.

www.aclusouthcarolina.org

Link to World clock with running statistics on world population, production, etc.

http://www.poodwaddle.com/clocks2.htm

By Mark Z. Barabak, Los Angeles Times

October 22, 2009

Reporting from Columbia, S.C. - It's tough these days being from South Carolina. Ask Dick Harpootlian.

He was in Peru, on a train from Cusco to Machu Picchu, when he and his wife began chatting with another couple. Where, Harpootlian asked, are you from? Rio, came the response, and you? South Carolina, Harpootlian replied. Mark Sanford! the couple exclaimed. Argentina!

Read the whole story of South Carolina and her embarrassing politicos at www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-southcarolina22-2009oct22,0,2541176.story?track=rss

The Pastafarians of the University of South Carolina — the group
that brought us Richard Dawkins at USC last week — is now
sponsoring a debate between Herb Silverman of the Secular
Coalition of America and Chaplain E. Ray Moore of the Exodus
Mandate Project. The subject: Is America a Christian nation?

Details below:

The Pastafarian secular student organization at the University of South Carolina will host a debate on the question “Is America a Christian Nation” October 29th, an event designed to question the fundamental foundations of American government.

Andrew Cederdahl, the group’s founder and president, will moderate the debate between E. Ray Moore and Herb Silverman, two activists with very different perspectives concerning Christianity and its intersection with policy.

Chaplain E. Ray Moore is the executive director of the Exodus Mandate Project, "a Christian ministry to encourage and assist Christian families to leave Pharaoh's school system (ie government schools) for the Promised land of Christian schools or homeschooling," according the the organization's website. Moore has served thirty years in ministry, working as a Bible instructor, Army Reserve Chaplain, and campaign consultant for some 12 political campaigns, including work with Vice-President Dan Quayle's Senate race in 1980 and Pat Robertson's Presidential campaign from 1986-1988. He is considered an authority on involving Christians in politics and government.

Moore's opponent, Dr. Herb Silverman, is the president of the Secular Coalition for America, a national lobbying organization consisting of several of the largest groups advocating for nonreligious Americans and the separation between church and state. Silverman earned his PhD in mathematics from Syracuse University and is Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at the College of Charleston. Silverman is responsible for the lawsuit which overturned the religious test for the governorship for South Carolina in 1990, making atheists legally eligible for public office in the state. Herb has appeared in a number of debates, including one at the Oxford Union in Oxford, and is an “On Faith” panelist for the Washington Post online.

The debate will be sure to evoke heated discussion on the role of faith in politics, government and public life. It will occur at 7:00 PM in the Belk Auditorium of the Close-Hipp (Darla Moore School of Business) building.

For more information, visit www.pastafariansatusc.org

Contact:
Melanie Griffin, Pastafarians PR Director, griffiml@mailbox.sc.edu
Patrick Morency, Pastafarians PR, morency@mailbox.sc.edu
Andrew Cederdahl, Pastafarians president, cederdah@mailbox.sc.edu

South Carolina National Office of American Civil Liberties Union invites you to a free screening of American Violet

An innocent woman is arrested, charged, and imprisoned for drug trafficking inthis film based on the life of Regina Kelly, a 24-year-old mother of four in a smalltown in Texas. Ms. Kelly refuses to plead guilty or plea bargain and, with thehelp of the ACLU and others in her community, she challenges the local criminaljustice system. The film explores the issues of racial profiling and other inequities in the “war ondrugs,” and it dramatizes the importance of standing up for our civil liberties.

With the participation of:

Representative David J. Mack, III, SC House of Representatives, Charleston County, District 109
Reverend Joseph Darby, Pastor — Morris Brown AME Church and 1 Vice President of the Charleston Branch of the NAACP

Graham Boyd, Attorney, Director of the ACLU Drug Law Reform Project, who represented Ms. Kelly

Monday, October 26 at 7:00 PMat the Terrace Theater
Admission FREE

Published on Saturday, October 17, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

by David Michael Green

Are we a sick society?

Oh yeah. You betcha. That's why we need healthcare reform.

Pardon me, however, for wondering if the treatment is just as bad as the disease. At a minimum, the events of the last six months have demonstrated that we have a political system worthy of intensive care, to go along with the broken health of our society that that very political system is supposed to be fixing.

Not to mention, of course, that from obesity to factory farming to tobacco policy, it is the political system which is in large part causing the illnesses that have in turn demonstrated how ill the country's politics are.

And they are sick indeed. America, alone among the developed democracies of the world, has a singular devotion to regressive ideas, no matter how much harm they cause. This patient is in grave condition nowadays, its body abused severely by three decades of regressive debauchery. Here's the unfortunate diagnosis:

See the entire column by David Michael
Green at www.commondreams.org/view/2009/10/17-1.

Living here in the Land of Strom Thurmond, no one should be surprised
to read of Michelle Obama's mixed-race ancestry. But The New York Times
story (which ran in the Post and Courier on October 12) has generated a
lot of heat and print and discussion, including an hour on NPR's On Point
radio program on October 13. Here is The Times story and a blog dedicated
to the discussion.

A friend sent me a Langston Hughes poem (below) and her answer to it. Perfect!

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/08/us/politics/08genealogy.html

http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/08/one-familys-roots-a-nations-history/?ex=1270612800&en=8bf0a99a6e3f32e3&ei=5087&WT.mc_id=OP-D-I-NYT-MOD-MOD-M118-ROS-1009-HDR&WT.mc_ev=click


CROSS by Langston Hughes

My old man's a white old man
And my old mother's black.
If ever I cursed my white old man
I take my curses back.
If ever I cursed my black old mother
And wished she were in hell,
I'm sorry for that evil wish
And now I wish her well
My old man died in a fine big house.
My ma died in a shack.
I wonder were I'm going to die,
Being neither white nor black?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The answer?

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

Remember the screaming and the tantrums by the tobacco addicts over Charleston's smokefree ordinance a few years ago? Remember the anger and the denial, the rhetoric and the lies? (Come to think of it, it sounds like a dress rehearsal for last summer's town hall meetings and tea party rallies, doesn't it?)

Well, Charleston finally went smokefree in July 2007. We do not have anystatistics on the city, but national statistics show that heart attack rates are down in areas where strong smokefree laws are in effect. See the message below from Americans for Non-smokers Rights.

More smokefree laws = fewer heart attacks.

A landmark report released today by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) confirms that smokefree laws reduce heart attacks. We've known for years that secondhand smoke exposure causes heart attacks, and that even brief exposure to secondhand smoke is dangerous. Today, the Institute of Medicine confirms those findings.

The IOM report is good news for smokefree advocates like you because it's one more tool we can use to educate policymakers about both the dangers of short-term secondhand smoke exposure and the immediate benefits of smokefree laws.

The landmark report makes it crystal clear that adopting strong smokefree laws will provide immediate health improvements. There are no more excuses for leaving any workers behind. It's time to close the gaps in smokefree protections because all workers deserve protection from toxic secondhand smoke. If gaps still exsist where you live, call your elected officials and tell them you want a smokefree law that protects everyone, especially bar and casino workers who face the highest levels of smoke exposure.

Smokefree law data from the American Nonsmokers' Rights Foundation's U.S. Tobacco Control Laws Database© was cited in the IOM report, and highlights the benefit of tracking smokefree air laws and their impact on public health policy.

Thanks to supporters like you, ANR and the ANR Foundation are able to continue working to educate people on the dangers of secondhand smoke and work to protect the right to smokefree air around the U.S.

View ANR's press release on the report at http://www.no-smoke.org/document.php?id=665 and our IOM page at http://www.no-smoke.org/document.php?id=666 .

To learn more, visit the IOM's page on Secondhand Smoke Exposure and Cardiovascular Effects: Making Sense of the Evidence at http://www.iom.edu/Reports/2009/Secondhand-Smoke-Exposure-and-Cardiovascular-Effects-Making-Sense-of-the-Evidence.aspx .

Annie at ANRwww.no-smoke.org

http://www.convio.com/

This from the Huffington Post:

It's great to know that during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the wealth of the 400 richest Americans, according to Forbes, actually increased by $30 billion. Well golly, that's only a 2 percent increase, much less than the double digit returns the wealthy had grown accustomed to. But a 2 percent increase is a whole lot more than losing 40 percent of your 401k. And $30 billion is enough to provide 500,000 school teacher jobs at $60k per year.

Collectively, those 400 have $1.57 trillion in wealth. It's hard to get your mind around a number like that. The way I do it is to imagine that we were still living during the great radical Eisenhower era of the 1950s when marginal income tax rates hit 91 percent. Taxes were high back in the 1950s because people understood that constraining wild extremes of wealth would make our country stronger and prevent another depression. (Well, what did those old fogies know?)

Read more at: www.huffingtonpost.com/les-leopold/the-forbes-400-shows-why_b_306228