Welcome! "What's Happenin'?" is a casual community diary (a daily series, 8:30 AM Eastern on weekdays, 10 AM on weekends and holidays) where we hang out and talk about the goings on here and everywhere.
We welcome links to your writings here on dkos or elsewhere, posts of pictures, music, news, etc.
Just about anything goes, but meta and pie fights are not welcome here. This is a community diary and a friendly, peaceful, supportive place for people to interact.
Everyone who wants to join in peaceful interaction is very welcome here.
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Good Morning!
John Ashbery from the book "Where Shall I Wander"
From one of America's greatest writers:
The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence. The writer is the man or woman who automatically takes a stance against his or her government. There are so many temptations for American writers to become part of the system and part of the structure that now, more than ever, we have to resist. American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous. Writers in repressive societies are considered dangerous. That's why so many of them are in jail.
--Don DeLillo, from the 1988 interview with Ann Arensberg
[my emphasis]
News
Montana Ruling Could Fuel Campaign to Amend Constitution
The Supreme Court’s Monday ruling to strike Montana’s ban on corporate campaign spending opens a new chapter in the political money wars, fueling an improbable but increasingly vocal movement to amend the Constitution.
“This Supreme Court ruling could be a watershed in terms of the court aligning itself with the interests of big corporations,” said Jamie Raskin, a Maryland state Senator and law professor at American University’s Washington College of Law. “And the constitutional amendment strategy will be a way to plant the flag and rally people for a different vision of the Constitution and the country.”
Rio 2012: it's a make-or-break summit. Just like they told us at Rio 1992
This is the government, remember, not of George W Bush but of Barack Obama. The paranoid, petty, unilateralist sabotage of international agreements continues uninterrupted. To see Obama backtracking on the commitments made by Bush the elder 20 years ago is to see the extent to which a tiny group of plutocrats has asserted its grip on policy.
Needless to say, Cameron, with other absentees such as Obama and Angela Merkel, attended the G20 summit in Mexico, which took place immediately before Rio. Another tenet of the 1992 summit – that economic and environmental issues should not be treated in isolation – goes up in smoke.
Oooops, propaganda alert. The author of this article in Foreign Affairs forgot to disclose that he serves on the board of directors of TransCanada, the company behind the Keystone XL pipeline. That fact was posted as a correction.
How Obama Lost Canada
Permitting the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline should have been an easy diplomatic and economic decision for U.S. President Barack Obama. The completed project would have shipped more than 700,000 barrels a day of Albertan oil to refineries in the Gulf Coast, generated tens of thousands of jobs for U.S. workers, and met the needs of refineries in Texas that are desperately seeking oil from Canada, a more reliable supplier than Venezuela or countries in the Middle East. The project posed little risk to the landscape it traversed. But instead of acting on economic logic, the Obama administration caved to environmental activists in November 2011, postponing until 2013 the decision on whether to allow the pipeline.
[My emphasis of brazen lies. It's more like 1,000 permanent jobs because they will need monitors to spot the leaks. All pipelines leak.]
Some people in Texas aren't buying the Keystone propaganda
Texas Activists Move Toward Tar Sands Blockade
Bring it, TransCanada.
The Tar Sands Blockade will be coordinating nonviolent, direct actions along the pipeline route to stop this zombie pipeline once and for all. We are working with national allies as well as local communities to coordinate a road show that will travel throughout Texas and Oklahoma as well as a regional training effort for activists interested in getting involved in the blockade movement against the Keystone XL.
"Our action is giving a new meaning to 'Don't Mess with Texas,'" said Tar Sands Blockade Collective member Benjamin Kessler. Kessler is also a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War.
Gardener Sues City of Tulsa For Cutting Down Her Edible Garden
Everything that Morrison grew could be eaten. At the time the gardener was unemployed and not covered by insurance. She used her garden not only to feed herself, but to treat her diabetes, high-blood pressure and arthritis. According to Morrison, when she explained this to the enforcement officials she was told “we don’t care.” Morrison has filed a civil rights lawsuit arguing that the enforcement officials overstepped their bounds.
'We did have about 200 feet of property ... and I watched that disappear in 12 hours.'
said the owner of this house.
Family escapes dangling house in B.C. flood zone
Blog Posts of Interest
Breaking:
The Supreme Court Upholds the Affordable Care Act
The Evening Blues 6-27-12 by joe shikspack
What's Happenin'? We have a new site in beta testing right now!
Stay tuned to this space where we will reveal more details over the next few weeks. It's gonna be happenin'!
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