Who has seen The Butler? Just returned from a matinee

in a progressive North Carolina town.

Wow. Hubby was in tears when Jack Kennedy was shot...I was fighting back tears several times.

What an amazing piece of work juxtaposing Cecil's personal life with his service in The White House.

Forest Whitaker was phenomenal. Oprah was terrific. Horrible casting for several of the presidents.

I do believe all the uproar about Jane Fonda being cast as Nancy Reagan is an excuse for right wingers
to not see the movie so they won't have to be reminded of the brutal fight for civil rights in this country.

See the movie for the history lesson and the work of some wonderful actors.

Interested in NC public schools? Check out this concept for fundraising.

Used cooking oil recycling company--Green Circle--runs a program called
Biodiesel 4 Schools. Here is how it works straight from their website:

How the Fundraiser Works

We collect used cooking oil from local restaurants.
The used cooking oil is then processed into quality feedstock to make Biodiesel fuel.
The used cooking oil is then sold to be made into Biodiesel—a much cleaner, more environmentally safe form of energy than current diesel fuel.
A portion of the proceeds from the sale of the used cooking oil will then be awarded back to schools to support:
Classroom Teachers
Teacher Assistants
Technology for classrooms
Fuel to fund student transportation and extra-curricular activities.

http://greencirclenc.com/

I just finished reading George Packer's book, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America. One of the people
he focuses on his book is Dean Price, who is a partner in the Green Circle business. Fascinating book. Highly recommend it.

It just burns me up that we are fighting fracking in this state when there is so much renewable energy available to us.

Just wanted to give a shout out about this concept.

Some fun info about Roatan wrecks

Miss Sharknado on TV? Want to see it on the big screen this Friday night?

It's playing across the country on 200+ screens for one night only at midnight screenings.

For the list of theaters:

http://www.regmovies.com/promotions/sharknado

Grabbing the "morality" rights by naming the protests in NC "Moral Mondays"

was a stroke of genius by Wm. Barber, the leader of the NC NAACP.

It's about time the left name what is going on in this country.

Even though this article is from TIME, it's a pretty good summary.

The man behind the Moral Mondays movement, Rev. William Barber II, president of the North Carolina NAACP and a Disciples of Christ minister, says he is undeterred. The Moral Mondays are the result of seven years of progressive organizing for a new Southern ‘fusion politics’—a new multi-ethnic, multi-religious coalition with an anti-racist, anti-poverty agenda. Their goal, he continues, is “to directly attack the old divisions of the white southern strategy and what we believe were the shortcomings of the so-called Christian evangelical right that limits issues in the public square to things like prayer in school, abortion, and gender issues.”

His goals are bigger than just changing policies and looking toward the 2014 election. Barber believes the South is in the middle of what he calls the “third reconstruction.” Changing demographics in America, and state battles over voting rights laws, he claims, echo both the first reconstruction, which was voting rights for African Americans after the civil war, and the second reconstruction, which was the Civil Rights movement. A new southern strategy must, he says, be “rooted in the idea of the deep moral issues about faith, our constitution, anti-racism, anti-poverty, that can break open the solid south and put holes in it so that we expand the electorate, we expand the discourse, we destroy the myth that when you hurt entitlements you only hurt certain folk.”

Barber, 49, sees North Carolina as a necessary test case. Republicans won both houses of the General Assembly in 2010 for the first time in more than a century, and the state that swung from President Obama in 2008 to Mitt Romney in 2012. “[Republicans] believe if they can get away with this in a progressive, southern state, then it pours water on the aspirations of the rest of the southern states,” Barber says. Barber has a masters degree from Duke Divinity School and a doctorate in Public Policy and Pastoral Care from Drew University, and he worked on Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential campaign.

Local Catholic, Episcopal, Lutheran, Presbyterian, and United Methodist leaders issued a joint statement in early June supporting the Moral Mondays purpose, if not their means of civil disobedience. Their concern, the faith leaders explain, is “not an act of political partisanship”—instead “it is a matter of faith with respect to our understanding of the biblical teachings and imperatives to protect the poor, respect the stranger, care for widows and children and love our neighbors (Isaiah 10:1‐2, Hebrews 13:2, James 1:27, Matthew 22:39, Galatians 5:14).”

Read more: http://swampland.time.com/2013/07/01/moral-mondays-religious-progressives-protest-north-carolina-policies/#ixzz2aLMTdkn5

Recently read "Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free"

by Charles P. Pierce.

I would recommend it.

An excerpt:

The rise of Idiot America, though, is essentially a war on expertise. It's not so much antimodernism or the distrust of the intellectual elites that Richard Hofstadter teased out of the national DNA, although both of those things are part of it. The rise of Idiot America today reflects—for profit, mainly, but also, and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power—the breakdown of the consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people we should trust the least are the people who know best what they're talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a scientist, or a preacher, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.

This is how Idiot America engages itself. It decides, en masse, with a million keystrokes and clicks of the remote control, that because there are two sides to every question, they both must be right, or at least not wrong. And the words of an obscure biologist carry no more weight on the subject of biology than do the thunderations of some turkeyneck preacher out of the Church of Christ's Own Parking Structure in DeLand, Florida. Less weight, in fact, because our scientist is an "expert" and, therefore, an "elitist." Nobody buys his books. Nobody puts him on cable. He's brilliant, surely, but no different from all the rest of us, poor fool.

How does it work? This is how it works. On August 21, 2005, a newspaper account of the intelligent design movement contained this remarkable sentence:

"They have mounted a politically savvy challenge to evolution as the bedrock of modern biology, propelling a fringe academic movement onto the front pages and putting Darwin's defenders firmly on the defensive."

"A politically savvy challenge to evolution" makes as much sense as conducting a Gallup poll on gravity or running someone for president on the Alchemy party ticket. It doesn't matter what percentage of people believe that they ought to be able to flap their arms and fly: none of them can. It doesn't matter how many votes your candidate got: he's not going to be able to turn lead into gold. The sentence is so errantly foolish that the only real news in it is where it appeared.

On the front page.

Of the New York Times.


http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/13281-idiot-america-how-stupidity-became-a-virtue-in-the-land-of-the-free

It's so hot...

that even the squirrels are looking for a drink of water.

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Photo taken on the UNC Chapel Hill campus 7/20/2013

I watched the NC Senate 'debate' HB 695 on Wednesday and was thoroughly

disturbed by it: not only the process--tack all the abortion restrictions late the previous night onto a bill that
started out as anti-Sharia law--but the utter contempt and disregard for women. The pro-choice organizations
in the state hustled out social media postings to generate a crowd of hundreds of people--not just women--to
protest the next morning at the third reading of the bill.

In NC, the gallery is required to remain silent. It was FULL. The presiding officer of the senate warned
people in the gallery numerous times to observe the protocol--and dem senators who spoke also asked
for people's cooperation--but this graphic I think is most telling:



Thanks to gerrymandering in this state by the Repubs after the 2010 election, even though MORE people voted for
Dem rather than Repub House Reps in 2012, districts had been drawn in such a way that Repub reps could be elected over Dems by about 2 to 1.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/11/republicans-gerrymandering-house-representatives-election-chart

The same forces came into play in the elections at the state level. The manipulation, the lies, the contempt, the deceit is truly stunning. The Repubs are gonna' do what they are gonna' do. They don't give a rat's a$$ about what we think. They have taken
control and they are determined to shove whatever they want down our throats.

I am beginning to believe that civil disobedience alone will be insufficient to change the direction of things, and I'm even less
convinced that attempts to change things via the ballot box will succeed.
It makes me very sad, and very afraid, of just what might be coming down the road.

Having just watched the NC Senate vote yesterday on a bill to seriously restrict a woman's

right to choose in NC, I agree. The NC Republicans are sending this state
down the toilet as fast as they can with bills affecting education, voting
rights, unemployment, health care...and more.

Saw this full page ad in the NY Times today. Provides some interesting ammunition
to fire at the ill informed, a historical right wingers who claim this country was founded
as a "Christian" nation.

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To read the quotes and see the references in better detail, go here: http://ffrf.org/celebrate-our-godless-constitution

Found on fb this a.m. with a call to "throw the clowns out" in NC next election

Great visual of how the Repubs are destroying the state.