WASPs to (finally) receive Congressional Gold Medal

As one of them remarked, "it's about time." Indeed.

Now, more than six decades later, the women are being recognized with a Congressional Gold Medal, one of the nation’s highest honors for civilians. President Obama signed a bill July 1 granting them the same honor bestowed on such other boundary-pushers as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and the Tuskegee Airmen.

They were the Women Airforce Service Pilots, or WASP, and there were about 1,000 of them who volunteered to fly dangerous fighter, bomber, transport, and training aircraft in the United States in order to free up male pilots for combat duty overseas. Thirty-eight of the women were killed, either as trainees or in active service. Only 300 of the WASP are still alive; the youngest is 85.

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Where's the beef?

Joe's reaction to Obama's gay speech is up on the gay blog.

As for my take... Barack Obama just promised us that if he becomes president, he's going to repeal Don't Ask Don't Tell, the Defense of Marriage Act, and get ENDA passed. It was a bit surreal. I'm sitting at a fundraiser for the No on 1 effort in Maine (that Obama didn't even bother to mention), and we were all just speechless (actually, hardly speechless - and I thought yelling at the TV was long since over). Obama repeated his campaign promises. That was it.

What's particularly disturbing is how President Obama contradicts himself, and his own administration, when talking to a gay crowd. The president claimed that he's for treating gay couples just like married couples. Then why is he against letting gay couples marry? The president claimed that it doesn't matter if we're at war and working on health care and lots of other important issues, we must forget ahead on gay civil rights. Then why is Obama's own administration putting out the talking point that they can't move ahead on gay rights until the wars are over, until health care is over, until Obama has less on his plate? Even General Jones last week said we can't do DADT because we're at war in Iraq and Afghanistan. But President Obama claimed today that precisely because we're at war it is important to lift the ban now.

Huh?

What did President Obama say new tonight? Absolutely nothing. What did the Human Rights Campaign get in exchange for once again giving our president cover for all of his broken promises to our community? Absolutely nothing.

I like HRC, I know a lot of people who work there, I've defended them when others in the community have been highly critical of them. But it is criminal that any gay rights organization would invite an embattled president to their dinner, giving him political cover for repeated broken promises and slaps in the face to our community (like the DOMA incest brief), and then get absolutely nothing in return. HRC's actions only feed the suspicions of critics who say that the organization is more interested in fundraisers than in advancing our rights.

All in all, the evening was a disappointment, but not unexpected. President Obama doesn't do controversy, and we, my friends, are controversy. So, the bad blood between this administration and the gay community will remain, and continue to worsen. It's unfortunate, but at some point you have to have enough dignity to say enough is enough. The Obama administration doesn't respect our community, and doesn't respect the seriousness of our cause. It's our job to hold them accountable. And we will. Read More......

America's Smartest Cities

From The Daily Beast:

"Which metropolis has the most intelligent residents? The Daily Beast crunched the data on the brainpower of America’s 55 largest cities, from first-to-worst.

Collective brainpower. More than sports prowess or political leanings or wealth or cultural accomplishments, this is the quintessential bragging point of a metropolitan area, the civic version of a playground taunt: I’m smart, you’re not.

So in terms of sorting out which cities walk the walk, The Daily Beast decided to play scorekeeper. Specifically, we’ve gone out and ranked the relative intelligence of every major American population hub, from first-to-worst."

My nearest city wasn't smart enough. How about yours?

Note: For my quirky computer, it worked best to click the article link to the gallery, then to select View All, clicking the individual photos for info about why that city was selected. Read More......

More bully, less pulpit

Nancy Gibbs with TIME:

At this moment, many Americans are longing for a President who is more bully, less pulpit. The President who leased his immense inaugural good will to the hungry appropriators writing the stimulus bill, who has not stopped negotiating health-care reform except to say what is nonnegotiable, whose solicitude for the wheelers and dealers who drove the financial system into a ditch leaves the rest of us wondering who has our back, has always shown great promise, said the right things, affirmed every time he opens his mouth that he understands the fears we face and the hopes we hold. But he presides over a capital whose day-to-day functioning has become part travesty, part tragedy; wasteful, blind, vain, petty, where even the best-intentioned reformers measure their progress with teaspoons. There comes a time when a President needs to take a real risk - and putting his prestige on the line to win the Olympics for his hometown does not remotely count.

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Send us your photos of the National Equality March, if you're in DC this weekend

Joe, Chris and I were talking, and we wanted to start taking more advantage of you guys, so to speak :-) We want you to send us your photos (not photos you found online, but photos that YOU took) of particular things, from time to time, that I can then post in the photo album feature on the top right corner of the site. For any particular day, we can swap out my photos for your photos of, say, Halloween, or your pets on Friday, things like that.

This weekend, I'd like any of you who are in DC for the National Equality March to send me your photos of anything related to the political weekend in DC. It could be you and friends at a party related to this weekend, it could be a photo from the HRC dinner tonight, from the protest outside, from the march tomorrow, etc. If I get enough, and enough good ones, I'll post them.

Send your best photo (or two, if they're really good) to me at:
ablogphotos@gmail.com
And put "march" in the subject line so I know. And actually, if you want to send your favorite pet photo too, go for it, I can post those next Friday - put "pets" in the subject line. And if you know how to change the size of your photo, we don't need anything huge - 500 x 500, max, at 72 dpi is fine (if you don't know how to edit photos, we can do that for you).

And by sending me your photo, you are attesting to the fact that you have the rights to the photo, and that I have permission to publish it on the blog for free via my Flickr account (or whatever other means works best). Thanks, I think this will be fun. Read More......

Why is the Globe attacking foreign fact finding missions?

The Boston Globe is often full of great articles but this is not one of them. The Globe is attacking Congressman Michael Capuano for - gasp! - traveling as a member of Congress to see how other countries deal with similar problems. The Amurican-love-it-or-leave-it crowd somehow floated this stupid attack and the Globe bought into siding with ignorance. It reminds me of when I started traveling abroad for work and people in the office always thought it sounded so dreamy traveling to foreign locations. Sorry to break any dreams out there but work travel is work travel. Hotels are hotels, taxis are taxis whether you are in Des Moines, Iowa or Madrid, Spain. Sure it has moments where it can be fun but as people should know, you can find something fun to do anywhere.

If a Congressman is working on a transportation project for the US, wouldn't it make sense to see how a country such as Spain has rolled out new infrastructure? Wouldn't it make sense to see how another city has prepared for security? What complete fool thinks the US has a corner on that market? There is no single city or country that is perfect with everything and it's more a mark of ignorance to pretend as though only in Amurica could people learn something is so old fashioned. I don't know much about Congressman Capuano but attacking him for seeing how the world addresses common issues is silly not to mention closed minded. Surely the Globe can do better than this Fox News-like hit piece, no? Read More......

Just try and guess what this commercial is for

(H/t Andrew) Read More......

Welcome our new blogger, longtime AMERICAblog reader Mirth

(NOTE FROM JOHN: I want to welcome Mirth, one of our longtime commenters, as a new blogger on the home page. Joe and I have been really impressed with Mirth's writing, and ideas, and asked her to join us for the occasional blog post (or more if she likes), and she agreed. She won't always agree with the rest of us, but variety is the spice of blogging. So welcome Mirth :-)

Catholic Bishops Demand Changes to Health Bill

From The Hill:

"On behalf of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), we are writing to express our disappointment that progress has not been made on the three priority criteria for health care reform that we have conveyed previously to Congress," the bishops wrote in an open letter to members of Congress. "If final legislation does not meet our principles, we will have no choice but to oppose the bill."

Thomas Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptists affirming their protection from a government-sanctioned religion is where the "wall of separation" between church and state originated. The Supreme Court has through the years ruled affirmatively on this governing principal, from Justice Hugo Black's succinct "In the words of Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect a wall of separation between church and state" to later Court rulings restricting use of public schools for religious purposes and, later still, defining cases that would pass constitutional muster being those with a secular purpose that neither advanced or inhibited religion and fostered no excessive entanglement between church and state.

So how did we get to the audacity of threats and retribution from such as these Catholics leaders - William Murphy of Rockville Center, Justin Rigali of Philadelphia, Josh Wester of Salt Lake City - to our secularly elected officials of our secular government concerning secular law?

Follow the trail of a continually shifting-right Supreme Court issuing increasingly limited and at times conflicting rulings on church/state cases right up to George Walker Bush's establishment of the White House Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives which earmarked billions of dollars from five federal departments for religious organizations while allowing them discriminatory hiring practices based on religious beliefs, the main purpose of which was to strike a final blow to FDR's New Deal and to Johnson's War On Poverty by replacing, not augmenting, federal social services and to further blur church/state separation.

Continuing this erosive process, constitutional scholar President Barack Obama's White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnership - change of two words from GWB's - but (surprise!) hedging in how it may function:

From U.S. News and World Report:

"He's leaving all the substantive options and directions open" on the question of faith-based hiring, says Ira Lupu, a George Washington University Law School professor who specializes in church-state issues. "He's saying, 'Let's see what the lawyers tell me.'"

Which means, of course, that very deep digging will be necessary for any citizen to discover which religious organizations are getting how much money from which federal department for what changes in their hiring practices. Good luck with that.

More troubling to me than government-sanctioned discrimination in faith-based hiring is an additional demand from the Bishops: Include in the bill the right of healthcare providers to deny service based on their personal religious beliefs.

And who is forcing this shift away from established and honored and vital law of church/state separation? Why it's the very ones who are now screaming that they want their government back, that they want a return to our founding principles. Plus, don't forget, while demanding new laws, they want government off their damn backs. All the while, and it never fails at their gatherings, carrying photoshopped signs with pictures of "murdered babies" who are the gestational length of my thumb.

We've tried voting for change, and not just with the current WH occupier, and we all know the herculean task of replacing the Congress with, regardless their campaign promises, no guarantees once a new bunch hits that money pot.

So what's next? Because as it stands now, the line keeping religious zealots, not unlike the Taliban, out of our laws and our lives is becoming increasingly thin and fragile. Read More......

Stephen Colbert destroys Glenn Beck

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Well done and looking for others

Our friend Jane (who blogged about getting cancer in a "Hell Hole" socialist country) did the 10K breast cancer charity run last Sunday in Paris. Jane was diagnosed with breast cancer this summer and started chemotherapy in August. Like a lot of chemo patients, she's struggled to eat as most food tastes like flavorless mush. Different people react differently during such moments but Jane is not your normal person. Determined to fight the fight, she forced herself to eat, checked with her doctor and did the big run.

The poor thing cramped up after 5K but kept going until it eventually eased up around the 9K mark. She then met us to get us started on the walk and was there at the finish line to welcome us and cheer us on. She was glad to see us do the walk but for us, it was an impressive day seeing her battle through it all.

We all see people around us who do something extraordinary but they don't always make it in the news. Maybe it's time we all took a second look nearby to see who stepping things up and doing something extraordinary. If someone you know does something cool or extraordinary, why not let others know? Why not let Americablog know? It could be a local activist. It could be a story such as the one about William Kamkwamba.

It could be anyone doing anything that you think is above and beyond the norm. Us Americabloggers tend to be idealists who are seeking the best possible outcomes. When things go offtrack (or never get started) we get upset and focus on where things are going wrong. It's necessary to point out these issues but as humans we also like to see what is going well. As Joelle and I have been discussing lately, why not hear about what's going right out there? We need to hear more about such people, everywhere, that might inspire someone else. Go ahead, tell us more about someone that is "good news" and brings a smile to our faces.


We heard the walk and run combined were over 15,000 people this year.


The walk passed through the lovely Bois de Vincennes on the eastern side of Paris.


Walkers of all ages were out, including this young girl who was with her cute family dog.
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Chico Cesar

Nice and laid back for a slow starting Saturday. Big dinner tonight with family to celebrate Joelle's birthday. Read More......

Berlusconi: I am the greatest of all time

And frankly, who hasn't compared Berlusconi to Julius Caesar or even Cato? And Augustus? Ha!

"I am, and not only in my own opinion, the best prime minister who could be found today," he told a press conference. "I believe there is no one in history to whom I should feel inferior. Quite the opposite."

The problem, he explained, was that "In absolute terms, I am the most legally persecuted man of all times, in the whole history of mankind, worldwide, because I have been subjected to more than 2,500 court hearings and I have the good luck – having worked well in the past and having accumulated an important wealth – to have been able to spend more than €200m in consultants and judges ... I mean in consultants and lawyers."

Much like Jesus, Silvio will gladly take on the burden of persecution. He's just that kind of guy. Read More......