An Aging Trans Woman

Former Texas governor Ann Richards dies

AUSTIN, Texas – Former Gov. Ann Richards, the witty and flamboyant Democrat who went from homemaker to national political celebrity, died Wednesday night after a battle with cancer, a family spokeswoman said. She was 73.

She died at home surrounded by her family, the spokeswoman said. Richards was found to have esophageal cancer in March and underwent chemotherapy treatments.

The silver-haired, silver-tongued Richards said she entered politics to help others — especially women and minorities who were often ignored by Texas’ male-dominated establishment.

“I did not want my tombstone to read, ‘She kept a really clean house.’ I think I’d like them to remember me by saying, ‘She opened government to everyone,'” Richards said shortly before leaving office in January 1995.

Goodbye, dear lady. You will be missed.

More at the link above.

. . . “Don’t let Osama Bin Laden tell you how to vote.”

. . . Look at this short speech segment that’s possible: “My opponent has said that Osama Bin Laden wants to destroy America. My opponent wants you to be very scared. He says that’s why you should vote for him. Well, I say to the people here in [insert podunk town, USA], ‘Don’t let Osama Bin Laden tell you how to vote.'”

One simple message, Democrats. One that’ll echo in people’s ears as they go to the polls where they can see the act of voting as an act of defiance, of Bin Laden, of Bush.

Advice To Democrats: One Talking Point To Rule Them All

Warning, there’s a reason they call him the Rude Pundit. Don’t click through if you are easily offended by crude language.

Palast Charged with Journalism in the First Degree

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SOCIAL REPENTANCE
by Rabbi Michael Lerner

You don’t have to be Jewish to take advantage of the Jewish custom of repentance at the High Holy Days (Rosh Hashanah begins this year the night of Sept. 22nd and the period of soul searching goes through Yom Kippur on October 2nd). This year every American has plenty of reason to repent – and our society desperately needs a time for collective reflection on how we have gotten to where we are and how we might turn things around.

The rise of the Religious Right as a force in American politics has reshaped America’s ethical discourse in a particularly disturbing way. Over the course of the past several decades the focus of public attention to “sin” has increasingly narrowed to a discussion of issues related to sexuality and reproduction. The “respectable” news media found a way around its previous self-imposed constraints on discussions of sex and its insistence that it was on higher intellectual grounds than the tabloids that were depleting their market-share by dramatizing the sexual faults of Bill Clinton and other elected officials.

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Twenty Things We Now Know Five Years After 9/11
By Bernard Weiner, Co-Editor
The Crisis Papers

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