Guns are the second-leading cause of death among children in the United States. Guns kill about 34,000 people per year in the United States. Countries with reasonable gun laws don't have this level of gun violence. Until the state can act (here are ideas for when it can: https://diy.rootsaction.org/p/gunideas ), it should cease preventing localities from acting. Localities like Charlottesville should not be burdened with any war monuments they do not want, including those that attract violent and hateful riots. The state has no business blocking localities' cultural advancement.

Any compensation that Member States have or will contribute towards any of Donald J. Trump's businesses are in violation of The United States Constitution.

Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) produces a weekly radio show (Counterspin), which began decades ago. KPFA Radio was regularly airing CounterSpin until Oct. 19, 2018, when it was abruptly taken off the air with no explanation to listeners. Please urge KPFA General Manager Quincy McCoy ([email protected]) and Program Director Kevin Cartright ([email protected]) to bring back CounterSpin to a regular slot on its program grid. FAIR, the national media watch group, was established in 1986 by co-founders Jeff Cohen, Martin Lee and others. It describes its mission as: “FAIR has been offering well-documented criticism of media bias and censorship since 1986. We work to invigorate the First Amendment by advocating for greater diversity in the press and by scrutinizing media practices that marginalize public interest, minority and dissenting viewpoints. As an anti-censorship organization, we expose neglected news stories and defend working journalists when they are muzzled. As a progressive group, we believe that structural reform is needed to break up the dominant media conglomerates, establish independent public broadcasting and promote strong non-profit sources of information.” In the past CounterSpin aired shows featuring guests as Marjorie Cohn on the Afghan unending war, Amit Harana on deregulation, Sasha Abramsky on Trump’s new attacks on immigration, and Corey Gillan under attack by Monsanto. CounterSpin is meticulously researched and exceptionally well documented and produced. CounterSpin is in keeping with KPFA’s mission statement: * “To promote cultural diversity and pluralistic community expression. * To contribute to a lasting understanding between individuals of all nations, races, creeds and colors. * To promote freedom of the press and serve as a forum for various viewpoints. * To maintain an independent funding base”. Please urge KPFA General Manager Quincy McCoy ([email protected]) and Program Director Kevin Cartright ([email protected]) to bring back CounterSpin to a regular slot on its program grid.

Tulsi has criticized Israeli human rights abuses such as the use of live ammunition against unarmed protesters, and supported the U.N. Security Council Resolution condemning the expansion of Israeli settlements. She also publicly defended Rep.Ilhan Omar against charges of anti-semitism. We thank her for all those actions; Tulsi's grass roots supporters have largely accepted her explanation of her vote for HRes246, even though many disagree with her sincere belief that it threatens or is intended to threaten the two state solution; Tulsi has cosponsored HRes496 clarifying that attempts by government to impede boycotts are violations of the 1st amendment, though that language should have been written into HRes246 to begin with; "SEC. 2. Findings" of H.R.2407 explains in great detail why the bill is necessary and provides documentation from organizations such as Human Rights Watch, an Israeli human rights organization (B’Tselem), UNICEF and even the US Department of State; Rep. McCollum's bill provides an appropriate vehicle for Tulsi to demonstrate her commitment to fundamental human rights for all people worldwide.

I believe that it would help get money out of politics, the lobbyists would not be able to sway and pay off Congress, and the people we elect would serve our interests!

Aramark's prison food portions are inadequate, causing hunger. The food is not nutritious nor does comply with the daily requirements for nutrition and calories needed to sustain life. The foods are causing degenerative diseases like Diabetes, High Blood Pressure, Hypothyroidism, high cholesterol and so on. They have no regard for human life, which is cruel and unusual punishment.

The U.S. cannot play a positive role on Earth while it uses destructive conflict resolution. Constructive methods like Unarmed Civilian Protection (UCP) must replace destructive ones, like U.S. military action. Practiced by some 50 groups over the last 30 years, UCP has proven more effective, affordable, humane, and Earth-conscious (unlike Earth's largest single user of fossil fuels, the U.S. military) in deadly conflicts than armed protection. UCP is now recognized as effective by the U.N. It is nonviolent, nonpartisan, empowers locals rather than making them dependent, and brings reconciliation rather than resentment. UCP addresses root causes of conflict rather than surfaces, building sustainable peace. It protects life without taking life, and brings emancipation from "us-them" views. It shows the world we can solve deadly conflicts without carrying, much less using, weapons. Evidence shows we can't shoot, bomb, or regime-change violence out of existence. UCP changes hearts and minds on the ground, something the most surgical drone strike cannot do. It engages those at all power levels in conflicts, rather than just those at the top. How does UCP work? It uses four main methods: proactive engagement, monitoring, relationship building, and capacity enhancement. For more details, see: https://worldbeyondwar.org/unarmed-civilian-protection-ucp-a-concise-overview/ In short, U.S. conflict resolution worldwide can use Martin Luther King Jr.'s school of thought, not Harry S Truman's. The Green and Democratic Parties (and someday the Libertarian and Republican Parties) can embrace this "idea whose time has arrived."

Sydney Embers, the Times reporter assigned to cover the Bernie Sanders campaign, is a former analyst for BlackRock, the largest investor in coal plant developers in the world. Originally hired as an expert in advertising and marketing, she was reassigned in May of 2018 to cover politics and soon was assigned to cover the 2020 campaign of Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders (sometimes sharing authorship of articles with other NYT reporters). Ms. Embers routinely failed to offer information about quoted sources -- even when their previous affiliations and statements strongly suggested anti-Sanders bias. More information can be found by searching "FAIR Sydney Embers."

Guns are the second-leading cause of death among children in the United States. Guns kill about 34,000 people per year in the United States, two-thirds of those being suicides. Countries with reasonable gun laws don't have this level of gun violence.

“George Rogers Clark, Conqueror of the Northwest” is a massive sculpture (approximately 24 feet in height, 20 feet in length, and 8 feet in width) that was put up in 1921 by the University of Virginia, at the edge of its campus in Albemarle County, just across the line from the City of Charlottesville. The location is prominent, although not as prominent as it was in the 1920s, due to the growth of trees around three sides of the monument, which nonetheless proudly and openly faces University Avenue with some 10 yards of grass between the memorial and the sidewalk along the street. This monument was paid for by Paul Goodloe McIntire, the same wealthy individual who paid for three other statues in Charlottesville in the 1920s, all of which still dominate central spaces in the city: those of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, which have been in the news in recent years, and that of Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and Sacajawea. Like these other statues, that of George Rogers Clark was created without any vote by the general public. Like the statues of Lee and Jackson in downtown Charlottesville, the statue of George Rogers Clark at UVA depicts a white man on a horse dressed for war. But, unlike Lee and Jackson, Clark is not alone. He has other men behind him with a gun and a barrel of gun powder, and he appears to be reaching back for a gun with his right hand. There are four Native Americans in front of him, including one infant. One of them appears defiant. One appears to be a woman carrying the infant. An article from the 1921 dedication of the statue in the University of Virginia Alumni News approvingly describes the woman in the memorial as being forced to beg for mercy for her baby. A successful 1997 application to add the statue to the National Register of Historic Places reads, in part: “She kneels in front of Clark holding a covered cradle board aloft as if to plead for a papoose within.” At the dedication, then-UVA President Edwin Alderman credited George Rogers Clark with stealing large amounts of territory for an empire — the empire of Virginia, of which the land he claimed had been deemed a part. The Alumni News newspaper celebrated the statue when it was first created as “explaining the futility of resistance.” The base of the sculpture calls Clark the “Conqueror of the Northwest.” The Northwest means the general area of today’s state of Illinois. At least that was the focus of Clark’s victories which either importantly seized or easily and temporarily occupied, depending on the account. But the entire Old Northwest Territory, which the United States took from Britain at the end of the Revolutionary War, included all or large parts of six eventual U.S. States (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and the northeastern part of Minnesota). Conquering means . . . well, let’s allow George Rogers Clark to tell us in his own words. George Rogers Clark said that he would have liked to “see the whole race of Indians extirpated” and that he would “never spare Man woman or child of them on whom he could lay his hands.” Clark wrote a statement to the various Indian nations in which he threatened “Your Women & Children given to the Dogs to eat.” Thomas Jefferson, the founder of the University of Virginia, depicted in a smaller statue nearby in front of the Rotunda building, when he was Governor of Virginia, sent George Rogers Clark west to attack Native Americans, writing that the goal “should be their extermination, or their removal beyond the lakes or Illinois river.” Clark killed the captured and destroyed the crops of those he was sent by Jefferson to exterminate or remove. Clark later unsuccessfully proposed further military expeditions to Virginia Governor Benjamin Harrison in order to demonstrate “that we are always able to crush them at pleasure.” The quotations above are found in Surviving Genocide by Jeffrey Ostler, who shows that U.S. officials developed the policy that “wars of extermination” were “not only necessary, but ethical and legal.” Causes of decline among Native peoples included direct killing, other traumatizing violence prominently including rape, the burning of towns and crops, forcible deportation, and the intentional and non-intentional spreading of diseases and of alcoholism to weakened populations. Ostler writes that the most recent scholarship finds the devastation caused by European diseases resulted less from Native Americans’ lack of immunity, and more from the weakness and starvation created by the violent destruction of their homes. In George Rogers Clark’s day, John Heckewelder (a missionary and author of books on the customs of Native Americans) noted that frontiersmen had adopted “the doctrine . . . that the Indians were the Canaanites, who by God’s commandment were to be destroyed.” That is not the view of the general public of Charlottesville or Albemarle County or Virginia today. It is not the view of the University of Virginia today. But it is the view blatantly and explicitly celebrated by the George Rogers Clark memorial that greets those arriving from downtown to the campus of the University of Virginia. The University is constructing a memorial nearby to those enslaved people who built the university. This will arguably be the first and only major memorial in Charlottesville and the immediate surrounding area that is not clearly or arguably a celebration of war or genocide. (One could include in that statement the monument to the war on Vietnam, while some would claim it does not apply to the monument to Lewis-Clark-Sacajawea. Minor statues at UVA include war poet Homer and a World War I memorial, as well as Jefferson who of course engaged in many activities including but far from limited to war and genocide). But the new memorial at UVA will be dedicated just down the street from the monument celebrating the horrors inflicted by George Rogers Clark. READ MORE: http://davidswanson.org/grc

We the undersigned are concerned that Nordic Aquafarms’ proposed facility threatens to harm Belfast and all communities around Penobscot Bay. Our concerns include depleting our fresh water supply, polluting our ecosystems, endangering our fisheries and increasing our dependence on fossil fuels. At this time of ecological crisis, local control of our fresh water and the health of Penobscot Bay are crucial. We must protect our valuable resources for today and for our children’s tomorrow. This is why we support halting the project. Halting the project would prevent probable pollution, potential accidents and activation of existing mercury deposits in the bay. Halting the project would protect jobs in fisheries, tourism and coastal recreation. We the undersigned are committed to generating healthy, local alternatives for a robust regional economy. This petition provides an opportunity to demonstrate our communities’ level of concern about this project in our region.

The well being of the Northern Mendocino Coast is entirely dependent upon a healthy ocean and natural landscape, which requires protection of our coastal resources. The former G-P Mill Site, now owned by Koch Industries, encompasses almost one third of the City of Fort Bragg. Its reuse offers an opportunity to showcase the importance of thoroughly cleaning up our coastal resources that have been polluted by highly toxic materials extremely harmful to the health and well being of humans and wildlife both on land and in the ocean. This is particularly urgent because the Mill Pond has been identified as the most polluted area of the site and its failing dam leaves it highly vulnerable to earthquakes, tsunami and sea level rise. Please sign the petition and demand that the Fort Bragg Headlands be Cleaned up First.