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First, I am an African American woman. I am a wife. I am a mother. I am a grandmother. I am a friend, lover, cousin, sister, associate. I am a Democrat. And I love myself, and have many women ...

Ethics from my upbringing . First and Second-hand Accounts of the Battle of Blair Mountain aka Redneck War of ...

Both my parents grew up along the Kentucky River. My mother's father died when she was almost 7 and her mother remarried when Mom was a sophomore in high school and Granny and her youngest children ...

On the same day that the U.S. Chamber of ...

The novel 2666 is the masterwork and, alas, swan song of the late Roberto Bolaño, a Chilean-born novelist and poet whom the New York Times has called "the most significant Latin ...

Community Not Commodity is the point we're driving home at San Francisco Pride next Sunday. For those of us who remember early Gay Pride Marches and indeed feeling proud, today's extravaganzas look ...

Today I had a visit from the past. I'm talking about quite the distant past, back in 1954. I was 12 years old, and going to school in Switzerland. In my first year in that school, I got ...

Samhain (pronounced as if it rhymes with “wowin’”), one of the four fire festivals, marks the beginning of the Witches’ New Year. It is the time when the veil between the worlds grows very ...

I live in Santa Fe, New Mexico. We think of ourselves as a liberal city where artists, philosophers, poets and hippies converge, converse and create. We are also a tourist destination so the ...

I have a real problem with our bench in Colorado. We don't have anybody to primary Bennet. We don't have people well known enough to run for Attorney General, Secretary of State, State Treasurer, ...

What you're about to read won't be an exercise in sour grapes. The candidate I supported, Debra Bowen, lost fair and square to a better-funded candidate with far more institutional support and a ...

(Note: this got to be too big for one diary so I'm making it into 2 or 3 parts) In honor of the 67th anniversary of D Day I thought I'd write about my trip there. One of the most moving experiences ...

After refusing to take part in a budget reconciliation conference all year, Republicans now agree to it. Is there any chance for productive negotiations and compromise? No. None. Absolutely none.

Since Indiana Governor Mike Pence recently signed a bill into a law that is being called blatantly discriminatory, the condemnation has been nearly universal.

_Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home,_ _Your house is on fire,_ _Your children shall burn!_ _Except little Nan_ _Who sits in her pan_ _Weaving gold laces as fast as she can._ This old nursery rhyme ...

Did you know that Leprechauns are called fairy cobblers, for they make shoes for elves -but always one shoe, never a pair? Near a misty stream in Ireland in the hollow of a tree Live mystical, ...

Both Christmas shopping and regular daily shopping was a lot easier before Republicans started exposing themselves. A company had a reputation for its products, either good or bad, and I bought ...

"I think what's very amazing about this campaign and what a lot of people have not really talked about is that it is making the union movement cool again."---Lorraine Chavez of Fight for $15 It was ...

A couple of weeks ago, friend devtob and I took a quick trip to the Big City of New York. It was primarily to see the play War Horse at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre at Lincoln Center. I had been ...

This is just another post focused on America's least important multi-billion-dollar boondoggle and ongoing civil rights violation and a couple of half-steps towards, maybe, correcting it someday. ...

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney must realize by now that it has become a catch-22 situation with either the release or the continued non-release of more of his tax returns – his ...

My philosophy regarding buying photography equipment. It is also a statement about consumerism in general. There are two distinct approaches to photography gear and equipment. There is the ...

Independientemente del año, la remuneración promedio de un asalariado norteamericano, en dólares constantes, nunca sobrepasó el nivel alcanzado en...... ¡1978!

The newly minted Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument is a fascinating destination for the biologist or natural historian. The Organ Mountains are especially diverse, with Chihuahuan Desert,

I write this since my daughter is taking the lovely TAKS (Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills) test here in good old last place state of Texas. I know its been pointed out that Texas level of ...

The Daily Bucket is a regular feature of the Backyard Science group.  It is a place to note any observations you have made of the world around you.  Rain, sun, wind...insects, birds, flowers......

Lammas, or Lughnasadh, is one of the eight sabbats that occur as the Wheel of the Year turns in the heavens. It runs from sunset July 31 to sunset August 1. It is one of the four fire festivals, ...

My Yahoo "All Stories" news feed has been dominated lately with something called "Wochit," a cloud-based video creation company based in Tel Aviv, Israel that ...

The Justina Pelletier Boston Children's Hospital experience, as reported by The Boston Globe, demonstrates that parents and children have no substantive rights in the matter of medical child abuse ...

In Part 3 of this diaryhttp://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/01/13/1054116/-The-story-teller%60s-dream-is-awakened,-Part-3?via=use I wrote of meeting the first and only friend I had ever known. Well ...

I am a deeply sensitive and emotional person. A newer term in psychology might identify me as a “highly sensitive person,” but that field often changes, so I’m not sure what this means for ...

The U.S. Justice Department is about to close the investigation into the shooting death of an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, and clear the white police officer involved of any civil ...

The members of the Board of Regents spend countless hours of their lives reading documents and going to meetings. They make decisions that will affect the future of Alaska in all kinds of ways. I'...

The ultimate reason for government openness is to allow the public to keep their officials accountable. It's a value I hold strong here at this blog. This is a story about a government agency not ...

Yesterday my sweetheart and I were wandering around in San Francisco and, in a store, we found a book called “French postcards” and subtitled “an album of vintage erotica”. It was amazing ...

I’ve never watched a single episode of a “reality” TV series—well, except for SyFy’s So You Want to be a Superhero , but superheroes don’t qualify as reality. Come to think ...

I’m rather surprised that Chris Christie’s little drumhead trial of Hillary Clinton at the RNC on Tuesday night isn’t getting more coverage or reaction. I thought it was one of the most chilling, disturbing and horrific things I’ve ever seen at a...

79% of investors have no trust in the financial system. -- Luis Aguilar, a commissioner at the Securities and Exchange Commission That's a quote taken from the Jan/Feb/ 2013 "the Atlantic." [What��

Interesting report from Reuters : A Reuters investigation has found the house at ...

That's what John Boehner told President Obama when Obama told him that there had to be a deal on the debt ceiling. But he wasn't really talking to Obama - he was talking to the people of the United ...

Frank Bruni has a powerful Opinion piece in the New York Times that chronicles the evolution of a college classmate from a devout Catholic to a progressive abortion doctor. Although the doctor is ...

It’s taken time for this to coalesce enough to become conscious, this tug at my heart these last few bizarre months I haven’t been able to parse until now.  But with a squall of air brakes and the pop of gravel, “Ah Hah” has arrived, disheveled,...

I went back to the bridge today. I hadn’t thought of making the visit when I set out, but with my return bus a half hour from arriving, and the approach to the road only a half block in the ...

How do we know ourselves? M. asked me a question as I was tucking him into bed, just prior to our reading time. "Am I disabled? Or am I a child?" The form ...

Jason Zengerle of New Republic recently published an excellent, timely article entitled The New Racism which focuses on the political career of Hank Sanders, who took his diploma from Harvard Law ...

Just in time for Easter, the movie version of "Atlas Shrugged" is poised to be shown ...

In my little corner of Texas, wildflowers are bloomin’, Texans are sneezin’, and cities are (occasionally) misbehavin’. Mayor Jim Pruitt of Rockwall, in response to a policy instituted by Target, proposed an ordinance, similar to that in North...

The National Journal wrote a nice piece this week on Solar Energy's Sunny Future. I really did enjoy it. Push back against the Solyndra hyperbole, an argument in favor of increased investment in ...

One of the many great characters in Catch-22 is Major Major Major Major, an unfortunate soul whose father's sadistic naming of him was matched by the army's unexplained promotion of him to the rank ...

“Bobby Kennedy — The Making of a Liberal Icon” is magnificent, indispensable new biography by Larry Tye. The jacket copy says that Tye “draws on unpublished memoirs, unreleased government files and 58 boxes of papers that had been under lock and key...