Hello all,

I just got this in my email and thought I would let Kossacks know what Edwards has been up to in his quest to reduce poverty. You can join for information on the project. He wants to reduce poverty by 50 percent in 10 years.

It's easy to think about rising gas prices in the abstract - I know that when I fill up our family car, it costs about twice what it did when we bought it in early 2004, but seeing as I only stop at the gas station about once a week, I really don't think about it that often. However, this evening I saw something that made me think about how the gas crunch is affecting people who are less fortunate than I am. I had to fill up the car tonight around 11:15PM, and while I was filling my tank, I happened to watch as someone pulled up to the pump next to me, ran inside to pay the cashier, and came back out to pump their gas. Then, before I even realized it, their car was pulling away. I looked over at the now-empty pump, and what I saw amazed me.

I was introduced to "Social Entrepreneurism" awhile back, when PBS broadcast their stellar series "The New Heroes" hosted by Robert Redford.  Funny thing about this, is that what we as a family, led by the tenacity of my mother, whom I will call 'Mama Matope", her nickname by the two Kenyan's that she reached out to, had begun to participate in this grand experiment shortly after a trip to Kenya and Tanzania two years ago or so.

When George W Bush introduced his plan to use federal funds to back faith-based programs, I was outraged, as were many other firm believers in separation of church and state.

Obama's plan, on the other hand, does what Bush's plan pretended to do.  It strengthens the partnership between church and community, to help faith-based programs combat social ills like poverty.  And most importantly, Obama's plan WILL NOT give federal money to any program that has the intention to proselytize, or will use religion as a basis to hire or not hire someone.

Here's one where we're #1: Prevalence of mental illness in the population. "One-quarter of all Americans met the criteria for having a mental illness within the past year, and fully a quarter of those had a 'serious' disorder that significantly disrupted their ability to function day to day, according to the largest and most detailed survey of the nation's mental health.

http://bartdz.blogspot.com/...

From the same study: "The United States is the wealthiest, mightiest country in all of human history, and yet it has a higher proportion of poor or, worse, hungry citizens than almost every other industrialized nation

I awaken  at 6AM to the sound of huge garbage trucks grinding bags of malodorous refuse piled curbside.

The garbage men do not collect the litter piled beside them, broken bags torn asunder by the homeless men and women who wander the streets nearby searching   for bottle returns to pay for the next few vials of crack.  Fat flies hover, searching for another place to alight, and the soft buzz of mosquitoes is drowned out by the sound of West Indian jitney vans and private car service drivers honking horns loudly; impatient to speed on their way to the next fare, competing with New York Transit buses for fares and winning at 1.00 a ride to the subway.   The neighborhood stirs and awakens to start yet another day of grinding poverty.

Most people know that the cost of prescription drugs is going up, and that the drug companies are not hurting despite most business and industries taking a hit in the recent recession.  We look at the cost in one county, and the causes nationwide.

Haven't we had enough Ron Kovics, Patrick McCaffrey...? In the 21st century, we need a peaceful productive army that builds not bombs nations.  The organizations named in People's Lobby's non-partisan American World Service Corps Congressional Proposals builds that productive army that has yanks compete on the field of sane, healthy development.  Push your Congressperson to cosponsor the AWSC, so we lose fewer legs and loving hearts.

Obama doesn't know how to handle a knuckleballer like Nader (no surprise) but unfortunately he doesn't recognize what a gift the caustic Nader really is (surprised now?).

Firstly, the 'no surprise' is that the Dems still haven't figured out how to out-radical a radical without pissing off the Reagan Democrats. For all their talk of being liberals, the Democrats really aren't. As a party they supported Iraq, welfare reform, and virtually nothing that has come out of Berkley post-Vietnam. From the environment to prisons to social and economic reform, the Dems have moved centrist and away from their New Deal roots - something that Lush Rimbaugh conveniently forgets.  

In a time that Obama is being called the most liberal Senator, Nader could remind everyone what a real liberal sounds like. Yes, Code Pink has nothing on Nader, a man that could sit next to you in coach section and regale you with decades of stories that would fire up even the most burnt out Peace Corp volunteer. If Obama is seen as a smoldering threat to conservative America, Nader and the Green Party is a five alarm fire that calls attention to everything wrong in an industrialized globalized America.  

Nader relishes playing with matches...now if Obama would only learn to toss gas and scorch Rove's a**.

To say it will suck a lot is an understatement.  Let me spell it out for the Bushies and McCainanites who have no earthly clue how much it costs to heat a house in the northeastern US with oil.

Right now, oil is running $4.60 a gallon.  By the time heating season starts, sometime in October, it might get to five bucks.  Let's go with five bucks for no better reason than to keep the math simple.

David Korten of YES Magazine poses the question of what must be done to save the planet.

Cheap oil provided an energy subsidy that defined the wars, economies, settlements, values, and lifestyles of the 20th century. The result was a century of wasteful extravagance and inefficiency that encouraged us to squander virtually all Earth's resources -- including water, land, forests, fisheries, soils, minerals, and natural waste recycling capacity. We are now waking up to the morning-after consequences of a brief but raucous party. These include depleted natural systems, unsustainable economies, an obsolete physical infrastructure, and a six-fold increase in the human population dependent on the diminished resources of a finite planet.

Mike Davis, the author of Planet of Slums, has a new piece up at The Nation about the science, economics, and politics of global climate change.  If you haven’t yet read it, you should.  But be warned: he paints a bleak portrait.  

It must be known first that I am a pediatrician. I practice in a blue-collar community in Oregon, and I enjoy a richly diverse mix of patient families liberal and conservative, religious and secular, urban and rural, and from all colors of the human rainbow.

Thirty percent of my practice lives in poverty or near-poverty, and qualifies for Medicaid (in Oregon, the Oregon Health Plan) and for the Women, Infants, & Children (WIC) program. Most of the remainder of my practice is solidly middle-class, though within my practice I have several obscenely wealthy families.

It is about one of these families, about a parent of this family, that I write today.

Scarborough had this nugget to say about race, Nader, Obama, and America’s cities (sorry, the link is to NewsBusters):

Given the rising price of petrol, many people have advocated the movement towards increased production of biofuels as an alternative to oil-based fuel sources. In fact, the european union has proposed a mandatory policy advocating that 10% of all member states' transport fuels are derived from  biofuels.

We also have seen increased production of biofuels from developing economies like Brazil and Indonesia. Biofuels are also less polluting than traditional oil-based fuels. Many have seen this as a potential way to move away from a resource-constrained fuel (i.e., non-sustainable) to others that are producible and would be less devastating for the environment.

While clearly biofuels are a positive step from traditional oil-based fuels, there are substantive difficulties indicated given the rising price of foodstuffs.

An outsider, an intruder, a giver of charity and nothing more.

In one of my previous articles titled; "A Divine History," I gave a snapshot of the rich, royal and magnificent past of African people and the tremendous contributions that people of African descent have made to religion, spirituality, mathematics, philosophy, medicine, science, architecture, literature, and the first civilization based on communal order.

Considering the apathetic state of many of today's Black people, one could scarcely surmise that these are the same people who have traveled from exceedingly majestic origins to being the social pariahs of the world.  What happened?

I stumbled onto an article by Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic which discussed one of the places in the West Virginia Panhandle, where I live, that I have shopped at: the local Wal-Mart.

Or, as he put it, the "crappiest Wal-Mart in America".  An exerpt:

If you want to see the underside of the unregulated capitalist economy, the people who can't find the non-existent escape ladder from poverty and its pathologies, visit the Martinsburg, West Virginia Wal-Mart. Morbid obesity; spontaneous, public bouts of corporal punishment directed against dirty children; ten-year girls dressed as whores; tattoos running up necks and down legs; smoking like you only see these days in Baku; it's all here.