October 10, 2011

Voter ID laws and voter suppression – Post 2

(Previous post on this subject)

The lead editorial in today’s New York Times came down hard on the Republican Myth of Voter Fraud.

It begins with, “It has been a record year for new legislation designed to make it harder for Democrats to vote — 19 laws and two executive actions in 14 states dominated by Republicans… As a result, more than five million eligible voters will have a harder time participating in the 2012 election.

Republicans insist that laws requiring government identification cards to vote are only to protect the sanctity of the ballot from unscrupulous voters not to turn away from the polls people who are more likely to vote Democratic, particularly the young, the poor, the elderly and minorities. Cutting back on early voting, a necessity for many working people, is only to save money.

None of these explanations are true, according to the editorial. In all cases, the Republicans are abusing the trust placed in them by twisting democracy’s machinery to partisan ends.
You can go to the New York Times to read the entire editorial.

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October 9, 2011

Holy Hot Dish! What’s going on at church dinners?

Headlines in the Twin Cities section of today’s Star Tribune: Holy Hot Dish! New food safety rules……hope churches wake up….they’re not above anything!

And we just had a pancake breakfast at our church this morning! It feels like we went to a speakeasy.

Let’s see what this is all about? It seems that unbeknown or at least little known to most of us, the Republican legislature passed a food safety law known as the “Church Lady Bill.” Basically, it exempts church groups from routine state health inspections where food is served to large groups. However, it requires at least one volunteer who prepares the food to take a food handling class and share what he or she has learned with the other church cooks.

It exempts church kitchens from state inspections. Is that a good move in this era of food borne illnesses. Most everyone remembers the time they got a “touch of stomach flue” at a church dinner or family picnic. The problem was that these inspectors made a “nuisance” of themselves. That sounds like over-regulation! Now that is something a Republican legislator can sink his teeth into.

And, that’s what Rep. Steve Drazkowski, R-Mazeppa, did. His argument, “You’ve got people out here who are volunteers, and we see government for a multitude of reasons overreaching … in its exercise of regulating people. And in this case, regulating people out of their volunteerism. Common sense was being violated.”  But, it wouldn’t look good if they just turned the churches loose to their own devices. Especially, at the next outbreak “stomach flu.” Making one person attend a lecture should shift the blame back to the church.

The first training lecture will be held on October 18. It will be a free videoconference called “Cooking Safely for a Crowd” that will be broadcast to 22 sites around the state. It will be put on by the University of Minnesota Extension and the Minnesota Department of Health (that’s a good move) and will cover the causes of foodborne illness, personal hygiene and hand-washing, and storing and preparing foods safely, among other things.

They expect about 600 “cooks” to attend. Will your next cook be one of them?

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October 8, 2011

Notes on “Occupy Wall Street – 21 days into it

“Occupy Wall Street” began on September 17 as a protest speaking out about corporate greed and inequality. It consisted of a few hundred people in Zucotti Park near Wall Street. They painted protest signs and talked about how to proceed. The press ignored them.

Now, three weeks later, the movement is followed by the press world-wide, helped by police white-shirts using pepper spray and a mass arrest of 700 marchers on the Brooklyn Bridge, all captured on iPhone cameras. Labor unions have joined in to swell already exponentially growing ranks of the protestors. ​Well-known Canadian journalist, Naomi Klein (famous for her anti-corporatist books No Logo and The Shock Doctrine) gave the protestors encouragement and advice.   The movement is quickly growing and spreading. Today, a demonstration like that in Zucotti Park will begin in Washington Square and in Washington, D.C.  Cities across America have held demonstrations over the past week.

Yesterday afternoon the protest came to the Twin Cities  with hundreds converging on Hennepin County Government Center plaza in downtown Minneapolis. Mayor Rybak, former Governor Jessie Ventura and U.S. Representative Keith Ellison visited with the protestors. The protest will continue today.

(Note: An early force behind the movement is AdBusters .)

 

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October 7, 2011

Afghanistan – a 10 yr war and counting

Today is the 10th anniversary of the Afghan War; America’s longest war. Ten years have passed with still no end in sight. The first of the two ill-begotten George Bush wars, it was ostensibly started to eliminate Al-Qaida and remove the Taliban from power in Afghanistan. Though Bin Laden was killed after nine years, Al-Qaida still flourishes and has spread throughout the world. The Taliban is still a strong fighting force and influence throughout the country. America put Hamid Karzai in power in 2002. He is still there only because the U.S. forces are still there. Most analysts believe that when (if) American troops leave, the Taliban will resume where they left off.

U.S. Army General Stanley McChrystal, for a time one of the war generals, remarked yesterday that the United States had a “frighteningly simplistic” understanding of Afghanistan back in 2001 and even after a decade it still lacks the knowledge required to bring the conflict to a successful end.

The toll as of today would have been unimaginable when Bush declared war. 1779 Americans killed plus 956 coalition troops, many thousands of troops wounded in mind and body, an uncountable toll of service families, thousands of liberated civilian deaths, over $557 billion in costs to the U.S.

Then, in March 2003, Bush started the Iraq war on trumped-up evidence of weapons of mass destruction. It is America’s second longest war.  Winding down under President Obama? We still have to wait and see.

What effect will all this have on the American psyche and the country’s ultimate position in the emerging world? At this point, it seems bleak.

Anniversaries should be for celebration, this one is not.

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October 6, 2011

Weapons of the Spirit – 5000 Christians, 5000 Jews

Today, in our God and Suffering class we watched and discussed Weapons of the Spirit. This documentary by Pierre Sauvage tells, in a matter-of-fact way, the Nazi era story of 5000 Christians sheltering 5000 Jews in and around one village in occupied France.

The village, Le Chambon, was a small, isolated farming community in south-central France. Most of the villagers were Huguenots, the first Protestants in France. After the fall of France in June, 1940, the Germans occupied the northern half of the country and installed a puppet government in the south under Marshal Petain in Vichy. The Chambonnais were opposed to this collaboration. The day after the May 22 surrender, Andre Trocme, the pastor in Le Chambon, reminded the villagers that, “The responsibility of Christians is to resist the violence that will be brought to bear on their consciences through the weapons of the spirit.”

The first Jewish refugees began arriving soon after that. Many had fled earlier from Germany, Poland and other European countries to France and now were fleeing the Nazi occupation. The villagers took in the refugees without questions, without second thoughts. There was no plan, no discussions, no pondering. Their Christian faith made it natural to help others in need.

Pierre Sauvage’s parents found refuge in Le Chambon and he was born there on March 25, 1944.  The film is a very personal search to understand how a whole community of independent, religious and simple people could simultaneously act without agonizing rather than agonizing without acting.

The film portrays what Christians are commanded to do for those in need and what good people can do given the right circumstances. It does not say that this is the whole solution and if everyone did this the holocaust would not be a part of history. Many families throughout Europe did the same thing on a smaller scale. We need to keep in mind that at times the force of hate can for at time overwhelm love.

This movie shows how for a time the force of love overcame hate. It gives much to reflect on.

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October 5, 2011

A BEST movie: The Girl from Paris

We are avid movie fans. A greater share of the films we watch are picked from the extensive list of Netlix DVDs. !!!OOPS!!! Here I am talking archaic…Netflix is a streaming video company and we don’t stream video because we would need extra equipment and, more importantly, interesting titles are too sparse. As everyone should know by now, the old Netfix DVD operation has been shuffled over to another company called… What is that name???…  Right, “Quikster.”  That doesn’t make much sense as that site has something to do with a pot smoking Elmo. Well, I’m sure they can straighten that out.

The BEST movie for this post is The Girl from Paris

But, one note first, all of the movies we watch on DVD are the BEST because we are careful pickers.

The Girl from Paris is one of those movies we have watched twice and will probably watch again in 2012. It’s a French movie with very readable English subtitles. The French title is  Hirondelle a fait le printemps, One Swallow Brought Spring. The director is Christian Carion.

Sandrine ( Mathilde Seigner) is a 30 year old Parisian computer programmer who decides to follow her dreams of being a farmer. At the beginning of the film she quits her job and goes to an agricultural school.

She buys a remote mountain farm in the spectacularly beautiful Rhone-Alpes from an elderly widower, Adrien (Michel Serrault), who has farmed it all his life. However, Adrien stipulates that he plans to remain in the farmhouse for one year. No problem for Sandrine as she renovates one of the buildings in a home and a few apartments.

Adrien scoffs at Sandrine’s ventures in promoting ecological holidays and selling jars of her jam on the Internet. Coach-loads of schoolchildren visit the farm. Adrien begins to grudgingly admire Sandrine’s approach to difficulties and her resilience in the face of difficulties, and, as winter comes, the pair become close, but we find that the highland winter, while beautiful, can be harsh and cruel.

While the movie at times portrays the country idyll that Sandrine sought, the harsh realities of remote farming, even in this land of beautiful mountain pastures, soaring mountains and spectacular cliff, permeate the film.

This is a movie filled with slow-paced emotions that allow you to live the events with the participants.

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October 4, 2011

Skippy Peanut Butter Scan – 2 years later

On September 18, 2009, I wrote a post on the The Skippy peanut butter Scam that had begun early in 2009. Skippy, a Unilever brand, had added an exaggerated concave bottom on their 18 oz jar that had the effect of reducing the contents to 16.3 oz.  while maintaining the same appearance as the original 18 oz. jar.  Pricing remained the same.

At that time I switched my life long allegiance to the Skippy brand to Jif. Today, about 2300 oz. of Jif peanut butter later, I decided to check the prices of the two brands at the same grocery I had made the comparison in 2009 (Korte’s Supermarket, 1326 Randolph Ave. Saint Paul, MN 55105). It looks like the scam goes on – 18 oz. Jif @ $2.95 or 16.4 cents/oz. while the look-alike 16.3 oz. Skippy sold for $2.99 or 18.3 cents/oz.

Wow!!!

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October 3, 2011

Voter ID laws and voter suppression – Post 1

Today’s Strib (that’s the Minneapolis Star Tribune) has a page one, column one, bold headlined article,”VOTER ID LAWS MAY AFFECT MILLIONS.” The article begins with, “Since Republicans won control of many statehouses last November, more than a dozen states have passed laws requiring voters to show photo ID at polls, cutting back early voting periods or imposing new restrictions on voter registration drives.” This was followed by a fairly even-handed, though superficial,  summary of what has been going on in the last few years of radical Republican emergence in state legislatures, including the Minnesota GOP voter registration law vetoed by Gov. Dayton last May.

Indiana has had a Voter ID since 2008 when the Supreme Court looked at it and found that while it found no evidence of the fraud the law was intended to combat, it also found no evidence that the new requirements were a burden on voters. I guess they didn’t talk to the senior seniors who found it all very confusing and misleading. Or the transient poor. Or the students.

Well, …MAY AFFECT MILLIONS.  If the right-leaning Strib thinks there is something going on here, it may be even worse than it appeared. Could there be something Un-American going on? Can we just depend on the Supreme Court to work out an American solution? Will we see corporations carrying voter ID cards? Lots of questions.

More to come.

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October 2, 2011

IRL Racing and a very exciting day in Kentucky

A very exciting day in Kentucky! I think I heard you say, “Ehh? It’s not Derby Day.” True, but it was the day of the IRL Kentucky 300 and the most exciting finish of this IRL season.

After a restart with 22 laps to go (from a yellow caused by Ana Beatriz’s spectacular run-in with the wall), Dario Franchitti on the inside and Ken Carpenter on the outside raced lap after lap only feet apart, first one in 1st place, then the other. When they crossed the finish line Carpenter, with help from his last power boost, edged Franchitti by 0.0098 of a second. In the IZOD IndyCar Series there have been only 5 closer finishes. A few feet behind them, also racing side by side, were Scott Dixon (3rd) and rookie  James Hinchcliffe (4th). This was a great win for Sarah Fisher’s team.

Danica Patrick finished 10th to notch another top ten finish to her IRL career in the 2nd last race before she moves full time to NASCAR.

Will Power, who entered the race with an 11-point lead for the individual championship over Franchitti, started from the pole, but was hit going into his pit by Ana Beatriz when he cut in front of her as she was leaving. He was never a contender after that and ended up in 19th place, 18 points behind Franchitti going into the final race in Las Vegas in two weeks.

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October 1, 2010

Rising from the ashes…


Saint Paul Calling started as an eclectic personal commentary in August of 2009 and had a short life of nearly daily posts for about two months. Then, the blog was set aside at the end of September, 2009, as involvement in the Minnesota 2010 election process got out of hand, Now, it is time to begin again. NaNoWriMo begins in less than 31 full days and it is past time to limber up stiff fingers and a brain sotted by politics. Dr. WordPress  prescribes “a blog a day” therapy.

“Rising from the ashes” may be a rather grandiose start-up theme, but I have always been fascinated by the ancient myth of the Phoenix who periodically regenerates itself from its ashes – a tale made famous world-wide for this generation by Harry Potter – so I take this opportunity use it here as this blog begins again.

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