Our Saturday evening diaries offer a weekly summary of news on women's issues, and information on current political actions. We welcome all who are interested, to comment in the discussion, bring relevant links and stories, join in order to reblog to our group, and consider writing for the Saturday schedule (these diaries are a team effort â weâll help!) â see schedule comment in the thread.
  Particular thanks this week to Angmar, elenacarlena, & Tara the Antisocial Social Worker.
 20 good womenâs-news sources are here. (Please comment to link us to yet more.) Our Saturday posts - here. Trailblazing Women and Events in Our History - here. Everything blogged&reblogged to our group - here.
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All âquotesâ are actually paraphrases, edited for
brevity â you can read more at each articleâs link.
Like Afghan identity documents, childrenâs birth certificates carry only the name of a personâs father. For years, womenâs rights campaigners have pressed for the inclusion of their names on birth certs, facing opposition in a country where some see using a womanâs name â even on the invitation to her wedding, even on her gravestone â as offensive.
Since the ultra-conservative Taliban was overthrown in 2001, Afghan women have regained the right to go to school, to vote, and to work. But violence against women in the home is widespread, and often goes unpunished.
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913 registered sex offenders are reported so far gone from police surveillance. Past data shows many such offenders change their names, sometimes up to five times, to cover their pattern of behaviour. They can get a new passport, a new driving licence â essentially, they erase their past, because the onus is on them to inform police.
The Safeguarding Alliance has now launched a parliamentary petition to "revoke the right of registered sex offenders to change their name by deed poll".
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With the Tokyo Olympics postponed for a year due to the pandemic, The Associated Press is looking back at the history of Summer Games. 1928 in Amsterdam was the first time women were allowed to compete in gymnastics and athletics at an Olympics.
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TheForwards, July 17 â Irani-Jewish refugee, mother, prosecutor, general counsel of the Brooklyn district attorney's office, Tali Farhadian Weinstein runs for Manhattan district attorney in 2021
âLaunching a campaign during a pandemic was definitely not what I imagined,â Farhadian Weinstein said. âDid I expect my children to be going to school during the day during the busiest year of their motherâs life? Yes, I did.â
Born in Iran, Farhadian Weinstein was four when her family fled to the US in 1979 to escape catastrophic religious persecution. She grew up in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., attending yeshiva day schools, later Yale and a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford.
After law school, she clerked for both Sandra Day OâConnor and Merrick Garland in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, served as counsel to Attorney General Eric Holder under the Obama administration, and worked as an assistant US Attorney in the Eastern District of New York.
âI wanted to be of service, in the world, in an active way,â she said.âI knew I wanted to be a public servant. I was always thinking about government and institutions, how to harness power to make things better.â
Sheâs running against seven others so far, presumably including the incumbent, Cyrus Vance, Jr., whoâs yet to announce his campaign. Vance secured a SCOTUS ruling to support his bid to subpoena Pres. *rumpâs tax returns, and successfully prosecuted Harvey Weinstein to conviction, but critics say heâs mishandled sexual assault cases and favored wealthy and powerful defendants.
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GUARDIAN EDITORIAL â Womenâs progress is regressing under worldwide backlash, and rightwing govts are not the sole culprits âand report.
Plummeting rates of prosecutions and convictions for violence of every kind toward women and girls in the UK and Wales amounts to decriminalization, prompting calls for the criminal justice system to adopt No.Irelandâs Gillen review recommendations [PDF], including legal representation for complainants and providing juries with guidance on rape myths in every trial.
Global assault on reproductive rights and on the fundamental right to physical safety challenge both long-established laws and policies, and relatively recent advances, as the role of misogyny in populism across the board is aggravated by the pandemic sending domestic violence soaring worldwide. â Despite mass protest, Poland threatens to exit a treaty aimed to prevent violence against women after Pres. Andrzej Duda narrowly wins re-election with a socially conservative and homophobic campaign. â the US justice department restrictively rewrote its definition of domestic violence last year in terms that disregard elements such as psychological abuse. â Despite mass protest, Franceâs new justice minister outspokenly opposes the 2017 landmark street harassment law and the #MeToo movement, and the interior minister is a man accused of rape.
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Reuters Fndn â July 29 Motocrosser Negin Afshar showing Afghan women can be tough too amid growing concerns that hard-regained rights might be lost.
With full parental support, 16-year-old Negin Afshar turned from other athletic competitions for Afghanistan to training alongside male riders in Kabul for about a year now, and itâs not just about the excitement.
"When I saw the men motorcycling here, I decided to pursue motocross to inspire Afghan women and show that they can do this tough sport as well," Afshar said. To her, this is both a symbol and practice in women refusing to give ground on any further erosion of their rights, and determined to regain all theyâve lost.
When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan in the late 1990s, girls were stopped from attending school and women from working outside the home, and in public they had to wear all-enveloping burqas. Leading a ruthless insurgency since 2001, the hardline Islamist movement now bids for a share of national power, projecting itself as more moderate in seeking to turn battlefield gains into formal recognition.
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TheGuardian â July 28 Mrs. Americaâs Shirley Chisholm â Uzo Aduba first achieved critical acclaim in the role of Warren in Orange Is the New Black. Now playing the first black woman to seek US presidency, Aduba rejects suggestions she gets a âHollywood smile.
Adubaâs Orange Is the New Black character initially was comic relief, with time and skill becoming increasingly layered and complex. Last year, Aduba starred in Miss Virginia, about early 2000s single mother Virginia Walden Ford, who fought for the creation of a school scholarship program for low-income students.
Shirley Chisholm is Adubaâs latest strong female role. Chisholm was a woman of many firsts: the first black woman elected to Congress, first black candidate to run for US president, first woman participating in US presidential debates. Introducing over 50 pieces of legislation, she championed racial, economic and gender equality; and is often credited as paving the way for Barack Obama. In doing so, she occupied a space many black women recognise: the sole and first such face at the table.
Playing Chisholm in FXâs Mrs America, Aduba found âfirstâ and âonlyâ the key to bringing this formidable politician to life. âIt was an honour to represent Chisholm, because sheâs not often portrayed. I just wanted to get her humanity ... It was important to get that right.â
The humanity of iconic 1970s feminists is central in the depiction of the aims and conflicts of activists fighting to pass the Equal Rights Amendment â and the conservatives who opposed it.
Aduba called her mother, an emigree from Nigeria to Boston, the foundation of her portrayal of Chisholm, born in New York but sent to live with her grandmother in Barbados at the age of five. âThere was a scene where Shirley was talking about growing up in the West Indies,â recalls Aduba. âIt said almost verbatim what my mother used to say. She would say, âIt wasnât until I moved to America that I discovered there was something wrong with being black...â â
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For more on Chisholm, read Denise Oliver Velezâs 2016 illustrated diary, Before Barack Hillary and Bernie there was Shirley Chisholm.
The Us & world are living a lot of history at the moment. And re-examining a lot of past history, too. This looked helpful regarding the whole process. Itâs not news, thoâ â scroll down past the beige and grey boxes to skip it.
Revisionism may refer to:
-  Historical revisionism, the critical re-examination of presumed historical facts and existing historiographyâŠ
...In historiography, the term historical revisionism identifies the re-interpretation of an historical account.[1]It usually involves challenging the orthodox (established, accepted or traditional) views held by professional scholars about a historical event or time-span or phenomenon, introducing contrary evidence, or reinterpreting the motivations and decisions of the people involved. The revision of the historical record can reflect new discoveries of fact, evidence, and interpretation, which then results in revised history. In dramatic cases, revisionism involves a reversal of older moral judgments.
At a basic level, legitimate historical revisionism is a common and not especially controversial process of developing and refining the writing of histories.
Much more controversial is the reversal of moral findings, whereby what mainstream historians had considered (for example) positive forces are depicted as negative. Such revisionism, if challenged (especially in heated terms) by the supporters of the previous view, can become an illegitimate form of historical revisionism known as historical negationism if it involves inappropriate methods such as:
- the use of forged documents or implausible distrust of genuine documents
- attributing false conclusions to books and sources
- manipulating statistical data
- deliberately mis-translating textsâŠ
For the critical re-examination of historical facts, see Historical revisionism. For negationism or revisionism related to mental abuse, see Gaslighting.
Historical negationism,[1][2] also called denialism, is a distortion of the historical record. It is often imprecisely referred to as historical revisionism, but that term also applies to legitimate academic reinterpretations of the historical record that diverge from previously accepted views.[3]
In attempting to revise the past, illegitimate historical revisionism may use techniques inadmissible in proper historical discourse, such as presenting known forged documents as genuine, inventing ingenious but implausible reasons for distrusting genuine documents, attributing conclusions to books and sources that report the opposite, manipulating statistical series to support the given point of view, and deliberately mistranslating texts...[4]
...Notable examples of negationism include Holocaust denial, Armenian Genocide denial, Lost Cause of the Confederacy, Myth of the clean Wehrmacht, Japanese war crime denial[5][6] and the denial of Soviet crimes.
...the consequences of historical negationism have been imaginatively depicted in some works of fiction, such as Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell. In modern times, negationism may spread via new media, such as the Internet.
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For other uses, see Hindsight (disambiguation).
Hindsight bias, also known as the knew-it-all-along phenomenon[1] or creeping determinism,[2] refers to the common tendency ⊠to perceive events that have already occurred as having been more predictable than they actually were before [they] took place.[3][4] ... people often believe [afterward] that they would have predicted or ... even ... known with a high degree of certainty ... the outcome ⊠before the event occurred. [This] bias may [distort recalling] what we knew and/or believed before[hand], and is a significant source of overconfidence regarding our ability to predict the outcomes of future events.[5] Examples of hindsight bias [are sometimes seen] in the writings of historians describing outcomes of battles, in physicians recalling clinical trials, and in judicial systems as individuals attribute responsibility on the basis of the supposed predictability of accidents.[6][7][2]
CONTENTS
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TheGuardian - July 29 Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg âresting comfortablyâ after non-surgical procedure âThe supreme court said the 87-year-old is expected to be released from hospital by the end of the week...â and will remain on the job while undergoing chemotherapy for cancer recurrence.
âI have often said I would remain a member of the court as long as I can do the job full steam,â Ginsburg wrote in a statement earlier this month. âI remain fully able to do that.â
Justices serve for life or until choosing to retire. Ginsburg is one of four SCOTUS liberal justices. In June, chief justice John Roberts was hospitalized after a fall. Americans across the political spectrum closely watch such events because a vacancy on that bench can herald significant shifts in rulings on key national issues, reproductive rights and immigration not least.
âA vacancy now could dramatically reshape the 2020 elections, with <big> Senate leader Mitch McConnell saying he will fill any vacant supreme court seat this year despite arguing in 2016 that the vacancy left by the death of conservative justice Antonin Scalia should not be filled during a presidential election year. </big>
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unwomen.org/en/newsâŠJuly 7 In Nepal, a women-managed quarantine centre tends to womenâs needs and recovery
In collaboration with the Govt of Nepal, Women for Human Rights (WHR), a national organization founded by Lily Thapa, turned its office space in 21 districts into quarantine centres for Nepali migrant-worker women returning from countries where employers discarded them and/or govts require them to leave because of pandemic impacts.
UN Women supplies food and personal protective equipment (e.g., masks, gloves and sanitizers) to the residents. Thruâ an initiative supported by UNFPA, WHR provides dignity kits, and facilitates womenâs shelter access for those prevented from return to their families due to stigma and discrimination.
Residents speak of feeling safe because all center staff are female, amid the rising gender-based violence of COVID-19 and specific economic vulnerabilities faced by women across the country. But their economic futures are bleak.
âWe need employment opportunities and interest-free loans to start our own enterprises,â said Mithu Tamang, 30, one of over 300 Nepali migrants stranded for weeks in Kuwait before a June 11 chartered flight brought them home. In hopes of escaping domestic violence and to pay for her sonsâ education, she had accepted a difficult, insecure worklife in a foreign land. According to UN Women Representative Wenny Kusuma, most Nepali migrant women would remain in Nepal if their only job possibilities werenât abroad. They leave loved ones to live mostly as domestic workers at risk of rape and abuse and slavery.
Nepalâs Ministry of Women, Children and Senior Citizens said they are working with the UN to implement employment programmes starting with skillset registration. Kusuma said plans for the post-pandemic socio-economic recovery need to recognize women workers as a central concern.
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independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/coronavirus-women...symptoms-havent-gone-away⊠Underinformed doctors dismiss evidence of continued serious covid19 symptoms in recovering patients who are female and/or persons of color. The article finishes with what all health workers should know by now: In a July news conference,
the nationâs top infectious disease expert, Dr Anthony Fauci, recognised the possibility that the disease could cause âa post-viral syndrome.â
âIf you look anecdotally, there is no question that there are a considerable number of individuals who have a post-viral syndrome that in many respects incapacitates them for weeks and weeks following so-called recovery,â Dr Fauci said. âSo this is something we really need to seriously look at because it very well might be a post-viral syndrome associated with Covid-19,â
Dr Jessica Dine, director of the advanced consultative pulmonary section at Penn Medicine and a pulmonologist who has been treating patients with persistent symptoms, told NBC News that âthe first step is to recognise that these symptoms are real ... we donât know if [these symptoms are] going to get better or when...â
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Additional expert examples of the after-effects:
Clinicians observe that COVID-19 negatively affects the heart, althoâ "why" is uncertain. Two new reports published July 27 in JAMA Cardiology shed light on how the virus can infect the myocardium without causing myocarditis. Furthermore, some recovered COVID-19 patients are faced with persisting myocardial injury and inflammation that potentially could later manifest as heart failure. [NOTE: even before the pandemic, more women than men get longterm HEART FAILURE as it is.]
A prospective cohort study of patients recently ârecoveredâ from COVID-19 showed evidence of ventricular dysfunction, greater ventricular mass, and signs of myocardial inflammation on cardiac imaging. Another study, a postmortem analysis of 39 hearts of COVID-19 patients, revealed a significant SARS-CoV-2 presence and signs that the virus vigorously replicated in the myocardium. More research is needed to understand the long-term cardiac consequences of COVID-19.
Low plasma vitamin D levels emerged as an independent risk factor for COVID-19 infection and hospitalization in a large, population-based study [of] 14,000 patients who had been tested for COVID-19 and also had a previous blood test for plasma 25(OH)D (Calcifediol) level.
Participants who tested positive for COVID-19 were 50% more likely to have low vs normal 25(OH)D levels in a multivariate analysis that controlled for other confounders.
The study makes a compelling case for screening vitamin D levels for judging an individual's risk of COVID-19 infection and hospitalization, and exposes the need for a large randomized vitamin D supplement study to see whether vitamin D has a role in infection prevention.
...In a research letter published July 9 online in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Angelo Carfi, MD, and colleagues, Gemelli Against COVID-19 Post-Acute Care Study Group in Rome, Italy reported 87.4% of 143 previously hospitalized patients had at least one persistent symptom 2 months or longer after initial onset and at more than a month after discharge. Among the results:
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Only 12.6% of the 143 patients were completely free of any COVID-19 symptom
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32% of patients had 1 or2 symptoms; 55% had 3 or more
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None had fever or other signs and symptoms of acute illness.
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53.1% still had fatigue, 43.4% had dyspnea [shortness of breath], 27.3% had joint pain, 21.7% chest pain
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44.1% reported worsened quality of life on the EuroQol visual analog scaleâŠ
...Here in North America, itâs also a rough road to recovery âŠ
âŠdoctors are seeing a growing list of related health impacts beyond just respiratory problems, including the digestive system, heart, kidneys, liver, brain, nerves, skin, and blood vessels. For people with severe and critical disease, dangerous immune system and blood clotting responses can also cause a lot of damage throughout the body and may result in long-term health effects...
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... "We see patients first diagnosed in March or April and still symptomatic in July," said Zijian Chen, MD, an endocrinologist and medical director of Mount Sinai Health System's Center for Post-COVID Care in New York CityâŠ
There is no comparison to persistent symptoms from acute influenza infection.
As in Italy, Chen sees âpost-âCOVID-19 patients having ongoing shortness of breath, some requiring supplemental oxygen, or with persistent chest pain on exertion, blood clotting problems, poor concentration, gastrointestinal distress, and reduced muscle strength and impaired grasping power. He doesn't rule out permanent lung damage in some. "Even asymptomatic individuals already show lung scarring on imaging," he saidâŠ
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reuters fndn - Nashra Balagamwala, from Pakistan, put her own real life strategies for evading marriage pressure into creating
the board game "Arranged!" âplayers take the role of teenage girls with âauntiesâ hounding themâ features in "Gamemaster" [YOUTUBE], a documentary about aspiring game designers released this month.
Marriages arranged by families matching up their youngsters are common in South Asia. It differs from forced marriage, but many young people face intense pressure to wed and start a family once considered adults.
Balagamwala was able to convince her family to allow her to wait until she was 21 - and nearing the deadline as a student at Rhode Island School of Design in the United States, she came up with the idea for the gameâŠ.
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reuters fndn â Running for Congress â At least 122 Black or mixed-race women have filed to run for congressional seats in this year's election!!!Â
This figure has increased steadily since 2012, when it was 48, according to the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP).
âwho also served on former President Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, now Washington Center for Equitable Growth director of macroeconomic policy, and is known for the Sahm rule, an identifier of the start of a recession: the economy has just or is about to enter a period of contraction when the three-month average of the unemployment rate rises half a percentage point above the low of the previous year â blogged a searing post "Economics is a disgraceâ citing the profession generally, and the Fed in particular, for discrimination and harassment against women, singling out several prominent male economists and detailing their interactions, remarks, and behavior demeaning to the expertise and achievements of herself, women economists, and women generally.
âThe lack of diversity and inclusion degrades our knowledge and policy advice⊠Everyone who is privileged enough to hold a PhD in economics should reflect on our toxic culture..."
The central bank's head, Jerome Powell, acknowledged, âthere's been a lot of pain and injustice and unfair treatment women have experienced in the workplace, not just among economists ... And at the Fed it's been going on for far too long."
An American Economic Association survey released last year found 30% of female economists reporting theyâd been discriminated against in the field, compared to 12% of male economists.
While the federal government hires more women and minority economists than academia, the pace of their hired remains slow, according to a study from the Brookings Institution.
Sahm wrote of the mental health impact, and called upon universities, the government and lead economists for a more welcoming and respectful environment for women and minorities.
"Efforts to change our culture are cheap talk if we do not act," she wrote. "Instead of a victory lap, we should be ashamed of the lack of progress and the sloppy implementation."
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- theguardian.com â jul/31Newly released New York court documents from the 2015 Epstein/Maxwell v Virginia Roberts Giuffre civil case allege that Epstein tried to gather incriminating material against Prince Andrew, to recruit him for lobbying, by forcing then-underage Giuffree to have abusive sex with the Prince and report back on it.
- https://www.aljazeera.com â July 22 Another brutal murder of a Turkish woman bring outraged protesters to the streets and social media â University student Pinar Gultekin, 27, reported missing the week before, was found dead in the woods of the Aegean province of Mugla: strangled, in a burned barrel with concrete poured over it.
- womensenews.org âs new Loreen Arbus Accessibility is Fundamental Fellowship will train women with disabilities as professional journalists so they may write, research and report on issues impacting the disabilities community. The article profiles the inaugural 3 fellows.
- fullerproject.org/ â July 30 âItâs Like a War Zoneâ: Anti-Trafficking Organizations Struggle Under COVID-19
jezebel.com/ â July 30 For the First Time Ever, Oprah Winfrey Is Not on the Cover of Her Magazine â Breonna Taylor is,
for the September issue out Aug 11. Taylorâs is among the 89 names from the African American Policy Forumâs #SayHerName campaign, reminding the public of Black women lost to racial or police violence. Winfrey posted action items readers can take to demand justice for Taylor, shot and killed by police officers while she slept in her home. Winfrey wrote about Taylor as a person, removing her, if only momentarily, from the box of murder-victim and the internet meme by which âBlack women ... were once again ⊠erased from the collective narrative around police brutality in service of elevating the stories of Black men.â
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Iâm happy with pretty much all the names that are being tossed around as possible running mates for Joe Biden. And, realistically, even if I wasnât â for that matter, even if his running mate was a cartoon villain â Iâm still supporting him. Iâm fine with the fact that people are going to push for their favorites, and might criticize my favorite along the way.
But thereâs a particular bit of framing that needs be stopped in its tracks, nowâŠ
A story making the rounds says that vaguely defined âBiden Alliesâ are waging a âshadow campaignâ against Sen. Kamala Harris.
Some also argue that sheâs too ambitious and that she will be solely focused on eventually becoming president.
Pardon me while I clutch my necklace of uncut amethysts. (What? I donât have pearls.) Because this all sounds so familiar.
From the time Hillary Clinton entered politics, every mention of her seemed to require a hand-wringing discussion of her âambition,â always portrayed as a damning character flaw. A quick google search of âHillary Clinton ambitiousâ got stories like âThe Curse of Hillary Clintonâs Ambition:â
Hillary Clinton canât be trusted because sheâll do anything to win. Thatâs what several participants in a focus group of thirty undecided voters moderated by Republican strategist Frank Luntz on Friday in Alexandria, Virginia, seemed to believe. At least some of the group of Democratic, Republican and Independent-leaning voters felt the first woman to win the presidential nomination of a major U.S. political party was too ambitious.
That was while she was running for President against Donald Trump. (In contrast, a search for âJoe Biden ambitiousâ gets titles like âBiden sets ambitious climate goals,â and the current story about the oh-dear-so-ambitious Kamala Harris.)
Sady Doyle notes that Hillary Clintonâs approval ratings were consistently high when she was already in a position (First Lady, Senator, Secretary of State), but would plummet each time she sought a higher office. [bolding added by w0w diarist:}
When women do overcome the ambition gap, we punish them for it. One Harvard study found that âwhen participants saw female politicians as power-seeking, they also saw them as having less communality (i.e., being unsupportive and uncaring), while this was not true for their perceptions of power-seeking male politicians.â Power-seeking men were seen as strong and competent. Power-seeking women were greeted by both sexes with âmoral outrage.â
And itâs not just her or Harris:
In contrast, Joe Biden had run for president before he was President Obamaâs VP pick â in fact, heâd run against Obama. Yet no one seemed worried that his ambition was unseemly or disloyal.
Regardless of whom Biden picks as his running mate, sheâs going to be attacked with the âtoo ambitiousâ framing. So Iâm gonna practice saying it now: âGood for her.â
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This is Dem womenâs ambition, and thanks be forâem:
Grabâem and do. not. let. go. We have a nation to save, and a world to win from the jaws of inequality.
And the truth is, itâs together or not at all.
h/t Eyesbright for bringing this to TASWâs Top Comments â ya gotta hear & see this âfilking âWimoweh/the lion sleeps tonightâ â youâll be glad you did!
by Roy Zimmerman and The ReZisters, in collaboration with the Raging Grannies of Mendocino. featuring Peggy Seeger, Jay Siegel of the Tokens, Vicki Randle, George Kahumoku Jr. Sandy Riccardi and Philipos Melaku-Bello.âThe Lion Sleeps Tonightâ words and music by Solomon Linda. Parody lyrics by Ede Morris, Roy Zimmerman and Melanie Harby. Join my mailing list and participate in our next Virtual Sing-In http://www.royzimmerman.com/contact.html