Rather make a difference with your time?

Stop wasting your life on a 9-5 and come join a team of activists fighting for social and economic justice.



The Working Families Party is fighting for a more just world.

One where the economy works for everyone- not just Wall Street. One where politicians are held accountable to and actually work for working people, instead of just riding the laurels of a failed two-party system. One where all of us, no matter where we come from, can find a good living-wage job, get healthcare when we need it, find affordable housing & know that every voice and vote counts.

Hiring immediately F/T & Seasonal; Internships also available.
Opportunities for advancement, travel, and bonuses
Experienced activists are encouraged to apply, though no experience is necessary- paid training will be provided.
Excellent communication skills and passion for justice a must.

Contact jobs@votewfp.org with your resume & why you care about social & economic justice or apply online at http://www.workingfamiliesparty.org/jobs/

Washington Community Action Network is looking for recent Census Crew Leaders to use their experience and work with our non-profit focusing on social, racial, and economic justice. We have full-time Community Outreach Organizing positions with leadership possibilities.

Position Description:

The first part of your day will be spent working with fellow organizers in our Georgetown office, educating yourself on current economic justice (such as Initiative 1098) and immigration issues, as well as developing your communication skills so that you feel confident and articulate discussing these issues. The second part of your day will be spent going out into communities, talking face to face with people in their own homes in order to educate them as well as motivate them to get involved with our organization and in the fight for economic and immigration reform! You will be a key player in securing a large membership base for Washington CAN as well as play an important role as a community educator and organizer. Want to be a part of social change at the "ACTION!" level? Then come be a part of our team!

Proven track record for success.

full-time
paid on-the-job training
leadership development
travel and advancement opportunities
medical and dental benefits
401(k)
$12 to $15 an hour (Staff Average)

Work Hours: Monday through Friday 1:30pm to 10:30pm
rapid advancement

Call 206-389-0050 or e-mail resume to: jami@washingtoncan.org

http://www.washingtoncan.org

Case Manager -

Full time position providing intensive mental health services in co-occurring disorder treatment program located near downtown Seattle for individuals with history of incarceration. Completes intakes regarding client history of mental health and substance abuse issues. Facilitates mental health treatment groups, and possibly chemical dependency treatment groups.

Requirements include BA in social services, MHP, and 2 years experience. CDP and experience with assessment and the criminal justice system strongly desired


For more information, please see our website at Community Psychiatric Clinic.

The American University Career Center is seeking a full-time Career Advisor to advise students in the School of Public Affairs (SPA) on a wide range of career issues including self-assessment, decision-making, internships, and job development strategies. The SPA Career Advisor works with both graduate and undergraduate students. In order to serve the diverse career interests of SPA students (e.g. government, criminal justice, public administration/policy), the advisor must be familiar with a variety of career fields in public affairs, collaborate with the Outreach and Marketing team on alumni and employer development, and remain up-to-date on employment trends. Other responsibilities, in collaboration with the other SPA career advisor, include: serving as Career Center contact for school; advising pre-law students; spearheading special initiatives and resource development for SPA graduate students; coordinating targeted programming for SPA students (such as an annual Graduate Student Orientation); acting as a liaison to the Academic Advisors in SPA and developing relationships with faculty; designing new programs for students and marketing those programs effectively.

This position is located within the American University Career Center which serves all American University (AU ) students except law and business. U.S. News and World Report recently named AU’s School of Public Affairs the best of its kind in the greater Washington area. Nationwide the Public Administration/Public Management Program is ranked #6 and the Criminal Justice Policy Program is ranked #5. This career advisor reports to the Director of Experiential Education. Within the Career Advising Team, the advisor works with nine other career advisors serving other AU schools and colleges. The Center serves a diverse population of 5,000 undergraduate students and 3,000 graduate students, as well as alumni. For more information about the AU Career Center and the School of Public Affairs, please visit the following websites: www.american.edu/careercenter and www.american.edu/spa

Qualifications:
Master’s degree and three to five years of progressive professional experience required. Previous experience advising college/university students is highly desirable. Previous experience in a public affairs setting (e.g., local or federal government, Capitol Hill, government affairs, public policy) is highly desirable. Must have up-to-date knowledge of public affairs job opportunities in public, private and non-profit sectors. Must have the ability to function in a fast-paced, team-oriented environment. Position requires strong communication skills, computer literacy and facility with social media, and excellent interpersonal, teamwork, and presentation skills. Demonstrated ability to interact with students, employers, faculty, alumni, and other constituents is required. Experience interpreting the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and Strong Interest Inventory is desirable.

To Apply: Go to jobs.american.edu, search on “Career Advisor” position, complete the application and attach your resume and cover letter. Preference will be given to applications submitted by August 13, 2010. EOE

Work on the most important grassroots campaign in NY! The New York Public Interest Research Group Fund (NYPIRG) is the state's largest and most effective environmental and consumer advocacy organization. We are a nonpartisan, not-for-profit group established to effect policy reforms while educating citizens about vital issues in their communities. NYPIRG is a leader in the fight for environmental preservation, government reform, public health and accessible higher education. Work with the state's most effective organization that has over 37 years of experience getting real results right here in New York! NYPIRG is now recruiting a staff to work with our community outreach program in the fight for environmental preservation and social justice. Paid positions for $400-$600/week are available immediately in New York City. The largest campaign of its kind in the country, NYPIRG's outreach program talks to hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers every year. By getting support signatures, fundraising and organizing citizens into a powerful political force, outreach staff are able to make a difference every day while getting paid for it. This year, NYPIRG is fighting climate change, one of the most serious threats facing our planet, while working to create a new clean energy economy for New York and the nation. The position is ideal for students and others interested in a job that provides valuable organizing and public speaking skills in a campaign environment. NYPIRG's outreach program is also excellent for recent graduates interested in a career in public interest work or preparing for law or graduate school, and there are rapid advancement opportunities for qualified individuals. The ideal candidate is energetic and has good communication skills and a strong concern for environmental and social justice issues. No experience necessary. EOE Call Jen at 212-349-PIRG(7474) or apply online at NYPIRG!

The Paradox at the Base of Freedom

Another way of understanding the problem with the ideals of self-actualization and spontaneity is the fact that both terms are intimately connected to the concept of “freedom”. And that idea is very complex and paradoxical in a way that popular followers of “self-actualization” don't, I believe, understand.


It is relatively easy to think about “freedom” when we contrast public life in a Liberal Democracy with that in a Totalitarian Dictatorship, such as Nazi Germany or Catholic Europe under the counter-reformation. People can point to the greater opportunities for expression, less oppressive police presence, etc. Where the problems begin, however, is when we contemplate exactly what freedom means when we already have freed ourselves from the Gestapo and Inquisition---which is exactly the position that many North American citizens found themselve in during the post-WWII era.


The complexity is that people can find their freedom limited by a lot more than nasty people in uniforms or cassocks.


They can, for example, find themselves addicted to recreational drugs. Walk down just about any street in the world and you will find people who are so addicted to alcohol, cocaine, amphetamines, opiates, etc, that they are worse off than all but the most desperate of chattel slaves. Indeed, the popular parlance admits the fact when they are described as “slaves” to their addictions, or, that they have a “monkey on their back”. Walking by these people who are begging for the means to get high, are many others who have almost as dangerous addictions: smokers, people who eat too much, are in debt up to their eyeballs, who never exercise, etc. These “addicts” are able to live functional lives1, but they still pay a huge price in terms of longevity and/or diminished quality-of-life. The paradox of freedom is that it isn't just the “freedom to do as you please” because that would seem to imply that people can, and often do, “freely choose” to become crack whores or do nothing more than sit on a chesterfield watching television and eating potato chips until they have a heart attack.


It is often argued that these people's freedom is constrained by “private demons” that they aquired during traumatic childhoods. I have no doubt that this is often true. But it doesn't change the fact that these people exist without any significant outside physical contraints upon their freedom, yet it is perfectly reasonable for observers to question just how “free” these people truly were to choose the lives that they find themselves in. Once we accept that people can be “unfree” because of a “monkey on their back”, the realization isn't weakened because we find that in some sense the metaphorical simian was placed there many years ago by an abusive parent. Either way, the idea of “freedom” has been made dramatically hard to understand once this observation has been acknowledged.


Another equally complex wrinkle to consider is the term “discipline”. Who is the freest person: the man who follows whatever momentary idea pops into his head at any given moment? Or, he who is fixated on an idea that popped into his head a while back and which he has developed into a game plan that he follows day after day for a long period of time? A long-term task like writing this essay can often seem like an onerous obligation or a crazed obsession---either way, it seems to be a constraint on the writer's freedom in those given moments that he sets aside to write. Yet if a man is incapable of planning and executing this sort of long-term goal, it seems that he is like a leaf blowing in an autumn wind---totally at the mercy of the moment's fleeting fancies. That too hardly seems to be a life of “freedom”.


Even more to the point, it seems an inescapable fact of human existence that often the most exhilarating freedom can only come as the result of significant drudgery. Musicians---even people who play the wildest improvised jazz---are only able to freely express their fleeting emotions if they are willing to spend years and years grinding away at scales, arpeggios and etudes. Martial artists are in much the same boat: that momentary glimpse of “mushin awareness”2 will only come from years spent grinding away at forms practice. All the ways in which a person can “actualize the self” offer the same lesson: True spontenaity seems to be intrinsically linked to the drudgery of disciplined practice.


This raises the point why I have tried to emphasize that I am responding to the popular understanding of Maslow's theory, not the theory itself. I often meet people in positions of some prominence who espouse some version of it, but when you look at the way they live their lives you see that they too have put in the disciplined years necessary learning the “finger exercises” of their art. Professors, writers, psychologists, etc, who espouse the value of “sponaneity” and “following your bliss” have shown in one way or another that they have large reserves of discipline, or else they would never have been able to learn the skills and credentials needed to follow their avocation. Unfortuantely, they rarely will admit how important discipline has been in their careers, though, because that would force them to back down on the extreme position. 3


I would suggest that the reason why we have a hard time undersanding the paradoxical nature of freedom is because we assume that personal freedom is exactly that: “personal”. Our society bye-and-large assumes that human beings are atomic, isolated entities that find themselves confronted with having to choose between different, universally-understood, options. Our legal system, for example, is based on this assumption. That is why crimes are considered as being the result of a single individual and justice as being exclusively the result of what the state decides to do to the convicted criminal. Liberals believe that this criminal needs to be re-educated. Conservatives believe that he should be punished. But neither sees any role for either the victim or the community at large in the process.


In contrast, certain so-called “restorative justice” models might suggest that whenever a crime is committed it is both the result of complex social forces at work, and, it affects the entire of society. Under this model, when a crime is committed the “balance” of society has gone out of whack, and the entire society needs to come together and reconfigure people's relationships so it will work in the future.


I can remember reading a short book about the Lakota Indian legal system that gave an example of a restorative model in practice. A man had killed another man and had been found guilty by the elders. Under our system of governance, he would be punished and the story would end there. The Lakotas understood, however, that there were other issues at play. For example, without the dead man's work as a hunter, his widow and children would suffer from poverty. The tribal elders decided that the killer would have to marry the widow of the man he killed, which meant that he would be obligated to provide for her and her children.4


The emphasis in this situation was to rebalance the outcomes of the crime, namely the loss in livelihood for the dead man's family. But it is possible to consider a restorative model that would attempt to rebalance the initiating factors that led to the crime in the first place. For example, people who are arrested for certain property crimes sometimes are asked to engage socially with the people that they have stolen from in an attempt to force them to rethink their relationship to society at large. It is one thing to burgle a home with the assumption that no one is hurt because “insurance pays for everything”, another to meet an individual with modest means and a large deductable who suffers real problems as a result of a break and enter. The hope is that once the criminal puts a face on their victims, it becomes harder to justify the crime to one's self.


In a similar vein, people who follow a criminal lifestyle often do so in order to fuel an addiction. In a restorative model, instead of being punished they would be offered treatment for their addiction. A further expansion of the restorative model would include a rethink of our laws against recreational drugs, which dramatically increases their cost---which makes it necessary for addicts to become criminals in order to afford their habit. An even greater expansion of the restorative model would be to examine the informal social network that these criminals inhabit in order to try and foster new associations that would make it easier to re-integrate into mainstream society, which would make it less “normative” for the individual in question to take recreational drugs and pay for them with crime.

Organization: Mountain Association for Community Economic Development

Location: Berea, Kentucky, US

Ed. note: While not operating in the developing world markets that NextBillion's Career Center generally covers, we felt that MACED's approach is very relevant as it is aimed at enterprise development for the base of the U.S. economic pyramid.

Overview
MACED is looking for a highly motivated and experienced manager to join its staff as the enterprise development director. This senior position will guide MACED's efforts to grow enterprises (for-profit and nonprofit) that create employment, strengthen important sectors and foster entrepreneurship. Central to this position is a commitment to sustainable development and experience with rural community development, enterprise development and commercial financing. The enterprise development director will manage our growing enterprise development effort and focus on strengthening enterprises related to new energy (energy efficiency and renewable energy) and sustainable forestry. The enterprise development director serves on MACED's management team.  

 

Background
The Mountain Association for Community Economic Development (MACED) is a 34 year-old multi-strategy sustainable economic development organization that seeks to create economic alternatives that work for people and places in need throughout Central Appalachia (eastern Kentucky, southeast Ohio, southwest Virginia, northeast Tennessee and West Virginia).

 

MACED is a fast-paced, dynamic and growing organization with a 25-person staff that manages $17 million in total assets. The organization focuses its efforts on sustainable development and change strategies that generate economic and environmental benefits to local people and places. These strategies include: 1) providing financial capital and expertise to individuals, businesses and communities, 2) conducting research and engaging in effective communications to support good public policy, and 3) demonstrating effective community economic development efforts that make a difference. MACED has recently completed a new strategic plan that focuses on two sectors (new energy and sustainable forestry), deepens our commitment to entrepreneur and enterprise development, and promotes the development of a new economic vision in Appalachia.

 

Enterprise Development
MACED's enterprise development program combines two of our core strategies-investing capital and providing capacity building efforts to grow entrepreneurs and community leaders. MACED provides loan capital, technical assistance and market knowledge as key tools to help build enterprises and entrepreneurs that provide important development benefits to the region. We lend between $2 and $3 million and provide meaningful technical assistance to more than 50 entrepreneurs a year.

 

Our efforts are currently focused in three directions-1) developing efforts to strengthen energy efficiency and sustainable forestry related enterprises and opportunities, 2) focusing on enterprises in the community services, natural resources and cultural assets areas, and 3) refining our efforts to provide effective support to micro-entrepreneurs and enterprises. The Enterprise Development team partners closely with other MACED programs with sector expertise. The enterprise development program staff will soon anchor a new MACED office in southeast Kentucky. Our technical assistance strategies include staff- and consultant-delivered one-on-one technical assistance focused on financial systems and reporting, business planning and marketing. We also provide some classroom-based training. 

 

Our enterprise development team is consists of four full-time staff. We work closely with our portfolio support team to monitor the health of our loan fund. We are working to expand the team to six full-time staff. We currently operate from two Kentucky offices, in Berea and Paintsville.

 

We are seeking an enterprise development director who can build from the strength of the current team and emerging strategy by deepening the impact of these efforts on low-income people, communities in the region and the natural systems we all depend on. This position should also help the organization identifying ways in which the strategic investment of capital grows meaningful sustainable development opportunities in the region.

 

Position Description
The duties and responsibilities of the program manager include but are not limited to the following.

Program Management and Development 

 

• Ensure that the enterprise development program is aligned with MACED's overall mission, vision and goals.

• Guide the enterprise development team in sharpening MACED's overarching enterprise development strategies, approaches to our work and how we communicate them to others.
• Coordinate with operations and finance director to oversee the loan fund, monitor its overall health and take action as needed to improve operations of lending and technical assistance.
• Work with program staff and the president to develop innovative new program through research, discussion and grounded learning.
• Participate in and, where appropriate, lead program evaluation.
• Ensure integration of enterprise development efforts with MACED programs, related sector strategies and support functions.
• Manage the successful implementation of MACED's enterprise development activities through supportive coaching, problem solving and other forms of direction and assistance.
• Prepare and monitor program budget including earned revenue.
• Supervise enterprise development staff.
• Identify and assess potential new sources of grant funding and earned revenue.

 

Enterprise Development Assessment

• Identify meaningful enterprise development opportunities.
• Help staff assess and improve enterprise development opportunities by marshalling resources, connecting to partners and developing innovative solutions.
• Review and approve loan proposals before they go to loan committee.

 

Networking and Marketing

• Develop and implement new ways for MACED's work to be informed by connections to ideas, people and institutions across the region and across relevant practitioner networks across the country.
• Participate in relevant networks of community economic development and sustainable development practitioners across the state, region and country.
• Develop and implement a program marketing plan that utilizes network relationships as a primary referral resource.
• Identify and develop new markets for lending and consulting services.
• Work with staff to communicate about impact of our work and share stories of partners.

 

General Management

• Ensure effective annual and trimester work planning.
• Participate actively on MACED's management team.
• Assist in the development of written proposals and assist in fundraising efforts as needed.
• Represent MACED at conferences, events and functions when needed.
• Practice safety in all aspects of the job.
• Other duties as assigned.

 

Minimum Qualifications and Characteristics

• Commitment to sustainable development.
• Minimum of five years of broadly defined community economic development experience, including experience with lending and capital-based programs.
• Minimum of a four-year college degree in business, economics, management or related field.
• Successful experience in project design, planning and management, including budget responsibility.
• Successful experience in supervision and group facilitation; able to work successfully on a team with diverse members.
• Ability to skillfully and respectfully supervise the work of others.
• Strong written and interpersonal communication skills.
• Committed to strategic thinking and innovative action.
• Strong computer skills.
• Highly self-motivated.
• Commitment to economic, environmental and social justice.
• Well-organized, attentive to detail, creative, able to work on multiple projects at once.
• Keen sense of humor!

 

Preferred Qualifications and Characteristics

• Significant knowledge of and appreciation for the Appalachian region.
• MBA.
• Entrepreneurial experience.
• Experience in accounting, spreadsheet development and financial analysis.
• Experience with evaluation.
• Understanding of marketing.

 

Additional Information

The position offers a competitive salary, based on experience, plus a generous benefits package. Position is based in Berea, Kentucky. Berea is a beautiful, small college town, an hour south of Lexington, on the edge of the Appalachian region. MACED is an equal opportunity employer.

 

 

Please e-mail your resume, three references and a cover letter specifically explaining why you are interested in working in Appalachian Kentucky and why you are a good fit for this position toDirector@maced.org. Application review will be on-going and continue until the position is filled. For more information about MACED, visit www.maced.org.

 

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Last week, Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans demanded a hearing on the New Black Panther Party shenanigans of the Obama Department of (Social) Justice.

Sen. Pat Leahy has replied. Cliff Notes’ version: Blame Bush. Hide behind Abigail Thernstrom. Wait for Eric Holder’s next spin cycle. Read the response right here:

7-29-10 PJL to Sessions Re – NBBP

Speaking of Thernstrom, Andy McCarthy responds to her latest weak sauce at NRO — and her own obstructionist refusal to get to the bottom of the NBPP case:

On July 16, her colleagues on the Commission gave her a chance to put her money where her mouth is. They voted to ask the Justice Department for the testimony of Christopher Coates, the guy Thernstrom told NRO readers she’d “love to hear first-hand” from. The request is set forth in a letter sent yesterday to Attorney General Holder, signed by Commission Chair Gerald Reynolds. This short letter can be read in its entirety here, and Jen Rubin has posted the relevant parts of it at Contentions. But to put the letter’s requests in the words Thernstrom used, the Commission would like to ask Coates (a) “what Deputy Assistant Attorney General Julie Fernandes actually said about the Civil Rights Division’s enforcement priorities” (remember, that’s the thing Thernstrom told NRO readers “the world deserves to know”); and (b) “whether the Obama DOJ has a policy of offering protections for black voters but not white ones.”

Yet, at the July 16 hearing, Dr. Thernstrom refused to support the Commission’s request for this testimony. As Pete Kirsanow wrote in his post, replying specifically to Thernstrom’s claim that she would “join [her] colleagues in welcoming further testimony” from Coates and others with relevant knowledge of DOJ’s civil rights enforcement policy:

This is news to the other members of the Commission. On July 16, a majority of Commissioners approved a motion to once again request that the Justice Department produce the very witnesses that Thernstrom now claims she is interested in hearing from. The motion was crafted in a manner to circumvent the Justice Department’s year-long refusal to produce such witnesses.

Thernstrom refused to support the motion. [Emphasis in original.]

I find this jaw-dropping. I do not know Dr. Thernstrom — we’ve been introduced once, I think — but I have always admired her work. Consequently, it pains me to note that her responsive essay, which NRO published on July 27, was obviously written several days after the July 16 Commission meeting at which she would not support the motion to ask DOJ for the pertinent testimony.

Wow.

If you want to work for a non-profit and believe in social, racial, and economic justice, join Washington Community Action Network. We are looking to fill a full-time Community Outreach Organizing position.

Position Description:

The first part of your day will be spent working with fellow organizers in our Georgetown office, educating yourself on current economic justice and immigration issues, as well as developing your communication skills so that you feel confident and articulate discussing these issues. The second part of your day will be spent going out into communities, talking face to face with people in their own homes in order to educate them as well as motivate them to get involved with our organization and in the fight for economic and immigration reform! You will be a key player in securing a large membership base for Washington CAN as well as play an important role as a community educator and organizer. Want to be a part of social change at the "ACTION!" level? Then come be a part of our team!

Proven track record for success.

full-time
paid on-the-job training
leadership development
travel and advancement opportunities
medical and dental benefits
401(k)
$12 to $15 an hour (Staff Average)

Work Hours: Monday through Friday 1:30pm to 10:30pm
rapid advancement

Call 206-389-0050 or e-mail resume to: jami@washingtoncan.org

http://www.washingtoncan.org

Historically, social justice has meant different things to different people, and equally so today, where the term remains as frustratingly elusive...

Here's a report from my friend and CNAS colleague Bob Killebrew, who has been hanging out in Colombia. It sounds like the we could learn a thing or two from the Colombian government. 

By Col. Robert Killebrew (U.S. Army, ret.)
Best Defense Bogota bureau chief

That the United States has had to painfully re-learn the lessons of counterinsurgency is by now a staple of strategic culture; the story of Gen. David Petraeus and our new counterinsurgency manual is well known even in places that wouldn't know a guerilla from a traffic cop. 

What we don't yet fully understand is that the nature of insurgency itself is changing. In a sense, Iraq and Afghanistan are only the beginnings -- call them "insurgency 101" -- of a dialectical change in warfare that is locating crime, terrorism and insurgency in a shifting network of state and nonstate actors that will make fighting "insurgents," or drug cartels, or violent gangs, much harder for status quo states like the United States. In the hemispheric-wide narco-war that now covers North and South America, the Mexican drug cartels and their fellow travelers - including the Venezuelan government and their Iranian allies -- the only success story so far is Colombia, and some of their lessons are worth considering.   

First, context. Colombia had had a rocky time in the 20th century with its military establishment. By the late 1970s, the military existed virtually outside the government as part of a compromise deal to keep the generals happy and the politicians away from security issues.  As a result, when the Marxist Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) began to make inroads in the 1980s, military action was divorced from the political life of the country, and though the military was fighting a war against the FARC, it was losing because the fighting had no political context. So a painful lesson the Colombians had to learn was to bring the military into a political relationship with the rest of the government, and for the government -- not just the generals -- to take ownership of the war.  

[[BREAK]]

About that time, the FARC made a huge mistake; with cash support from the Soviet Union dropping, they began to deal with the Colombian drug cartels, first as security guards and ultimately as a producer. Today, the FARC is the major producer of cocaine in the world, and ideology takes a back seat to profit. There are other lawless gangs in Colombia, but the overall general model now is not inspired leftists, but criminal insurgents. This is a big deal in terms of popular support; some Colombian citizens and even most European countries sympathized in the ‘80s with Marxist views of social justice, but there is no sympathy for drug-dealing crooks.  

Second, the people of Colombia in 2002 voted decisively against further negotiations with the FARC -- who controlled vast swaths of the country -- and brought in hard-line Alvaro Uribe, who ran on a platform of "no more compromises." Public support was so high that tens of thousands of Colombians elected to pay extra taxes to fund the war effort. Today the FARC is on the ropes, pressed back into safe camps in Venezuela, foreign investment in Colombia is up, the streets of Bogota are full, and confidence is in the air. How did they do it -- or, more accurately, how are they doing it, since the fight isn't over yet? 

Most important, the Colombians have learned to put the fight into a political context, not the other way around. Uribe, who leaves office on August 7, has been personally involved in the fight, and he has brought -- in some cases dragged -- his ministers government-wide into the fight. This is a “whole of government" effort.

As part of building the political context, Uribe promised at the beginning of the war that Colombia would not sacrifice civil rights during the war. There has not been a day of martial law, one general announced with pride.  Nor has there been any effort to muzzle the free press.  The maintenance of civil rights and the integration of the police and military into the civil life of the country, so that citizens see them as protectors of their rights, versus the kidnapping, murderous FARC and drug gangs, has led to a surprising turnaround in public opinion to support the government, the military -- and, to a pleasing degree, the United States, which is seen as a key ally.  

As part of building the political context, Uribe promised at the beginning of the war that Colombia would not sacrifice civil rights during the war. There has not been a day of martial law, one general announced with pride. Nor has there been any effort to muzzle the free press. The maintenance of civil rights and the integration of the police and military into the civil life of the country, so that citizens see them as protectors of their rights, versus the kidnapping, murderous FARC and drug gangs, has led to a surprising turnaround in public opinion to support the government, the military -- and, to a pleasing degree, the United States, which is seen as a key ally.   

This has been a war over land. Colombia has vast tracts of sparsely settled jungles and plains, ideal for guerilla warfare, and distant rebellions were historically tolerated until the FARC and others got close enough to actually threaten the state.  So the Colombian government had to take the land -- and the people -- back. It wasn't about destroying the FARC as much as pushing them out, winning back the population, keeping the guerrillas on the run, and making life so miserable that they'd quit -- as the commander of the Colombian armed forces said to me recently, guerillas who are only into fighting for the money will quit more easily than ideologues.  And he emphatically said that killing the guerillas is his last choice - better that they become to harassed that they quit, come in and re-integrate into the life of the country. 

So the Colombian government evolved a three-step, "whole of government" process.  First, the military pushes the FARC out of a geographical space. Close behind the troops comes the National Police, who have evolved into a quasi-paramilitary force acting under the rule of lawto secure the gains the military has just made, and courts to hear complaints -- and the cops and the legal system stay permanently. Third, and with the cops and judges, comes economic assistance in the form of food grants, the making of truck farms, larger grants in in-kind assistance for  economic development, electricity, email connectivity, roads, schools and all the trappings of good government.  The assistance package also includes voluntary participants from industry and Colombian universities, and the whole thing is organized by an series of informal, mostly out-of-government volunteers who are unfunded themselves - very important to avoid statist politics -- but have the authority of the president himself to spend money and jaw cooperation from the rest of the ministries -- with presidential wrath at foot-dragging. USAID also contributes funds but, as one authority said gently, U.S. development funds come with so many strings - competitive bidding and so forth - that they lack flexibility to be employed quickly.  The important thing is speed, he said - so that the newly-liberated inhabitants of the former FARC territory see that the government can actually help them. 

As the Colombian military takes back land and development assistance begins, the National Police role as cops becomes vital to restore the rule of law and beat the remaining cartels - tracking bad guys down nationwide, building cases according to civil law and extraditing them to the U.S. for trial.  The American Drug Enforcement Administration, working with the Colombian Police since 1972, has become a transnational hub for law enforcement around South America and the globe, assisting police in a dozen countries to build cases, make arrests and extradite them to the U.S.  Why extradition?  Because, as one DEA executive explained, if the narco-terrorists are incarcerated in their own countries, they find ways to direct their empires even from jail.  When they leave for the U.S., succession fights begin immediately in Colombia.  "The bodies pile up," said one experienced DEA official, who didn't sound too displeased. 

Finally, and with little fanfare, the Colombians are now training the armies and police of other South and Central American countries as they themselves were once trained by us. They are offering help to the Mexicans, who are now where the Colombians were at the turn of the century -- teetering on the brink of losing their own sovereignty to narco-insurgents.   

For the Colombians, the distinction between crooks, terrorists and insurgents is meaningless; they point out that Pablo Escobar, the biggest Colombian drug cartel leader in the 1980s, was a terrorist before the word was in general use -- murdering judges and bombing civilian targets, killing soldiers and bribing politicians. Escobar, in fact, appears to introduced the car bomb to the Western hemisphere. (He was killed in 1993 by Colombian police advised by U.S. personnel.) Likewise, the Mexican drug cartels today are criminals, terrorists and insurgents at once; one General used the term "lethal gas" to explain how criminality and terrorism spread. Explaining why the Colombians are helping the Mexicans, one Colombian official said that the cartel insurgencies spreading throughout the Western Hemisphere have to be fought everywhere -- no country is safe alone, he said, including the United States. 

Oakland Leaf was established 2003 as an organization dedicated to providing transformative educational programs for the families of Oakland. The mission of Oakland Leaf is to work in solidarity with Oakland inner-city youth, their families, educators, artists, organizers, and community based organizations for individual, collective, structural, and environmental transformation. Together we build towards connection in a more just, self-determining, ecologically sustainable, artistically rich, and loving society.  We aim to accomplish our mission through two school based after school programs for middle and elementary school children, two families resource centers housed in the same schools, one critical media high school after school program, a garden apprenticeship program for high school students, a free social justice based summer camp, and a talent showcase highlighting the wealth of culture and art of Oakland’s youth.
 
We plant seeds to grow. We root in, rise up, and branch out. We’re commited to stay.
 
The Position

Oakland Leaf seeks a 0.5 FTE Development Coordinator who will have the vision and adaptive capacities needed to recognize new opportunities consistent with our mission.  Together with the Executive Director, they will cultivate meaningful relationships with philanthropic entities including individual donors.  They will develop an annual fundraising plan, manage the development infrastructure, and help coordinate the communication and marketing of Oakland Leaf’s mission and strategic direction.  
 

Specific Duties and Responsibilities

-Coordinate foundation research, files, annual calendar, proposal and report writing, grant submission, and relationships with current and prospective funders
-Generate compelling and timely proposals;
-Improve and institutionalize organizational systems for donor tracking, acknowledgment, cultivation, processing;
-Track proposal and reporting deadlines, key funding interests and compliance issues, contacts, and the status of next actions for each source-specific funding development plan;
-Prepare reports as required by the granting agency, Finance Manager, Executive Director, and Board of Directors
-Provide leadership with timely advice and information on funding opportunities, requirements, procedures and collaborate in defining and implementing funded projects,
-Support all fundraising events by serving as the lead staff member for fundraising dinner parties
-Actively participate in the Board of Directors Development Committee
- Coordinating the production and distribution of print and online materials, including website, and print newsletter, and holiday giving letter
 
Qualifications
• Committed to social justice, sustainable ecology, youth empowerment and the arts
• Minimum of three years related experience in grant writing and coordinating grant writing
• Excellent organizational/project management skills and able to meet and manage strict multiple deadlines
• Ability to synthesize complex or diverse information from a variety of sources
• Ability to translate program goals clearly, and motivate and inspire others to give financial support
• Excellent communication and presentation skills adaptable to a variety of audiences such as funding sources, Oakland Leaf staff, the Board of Directors, and community members
• Self-motivated; able to work independently and with various teams, as needed
• Proficiency in Microsoft Office Suite (Work, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, etc), and Salesforce.com database
• Excellent management skills
• Bachelor’s degree from a four-year college or university
• · Highly organized with strong attention to detail.
• Demonstrated ability to multi-task and meet competing and strict timelines.
 
Measures of Success

• Retain and grow grant making relationships by coordinating the stewardship of $200,000 in foundation support of the work of Oakland Leaf
• Support the development of individual donors in the amount of $30,000
• Effectively lead and manage the research and development of Oakland Leaf’s philanthropic entities
Reports to: Executive Director

Email a cover letter, résumé, and address the questions outlined below to Mirella Rangel at: oaklandleaf.jobs@gmail.com

1) How do you effectively manage multiple projects? 
2) What is an the ideal organizational culture? 
3) What are your greatest assets?  Why?
4) What are your largest areas of growth?  Why?

Some folks think activism is sexy. I happen to be one of the people who think it's honest hard work, and I don't really dig glamorizing getting your hands dirty. You do what you need to do, and you hope at the end of the day, your work pays off. But what if you're feeling left out of your movement? Do you walk away? Do you have the option to stay and re-engage?

A new report from the Berger-Marks Foundation, which supports women who work in organizing, suggests that women and young people are considering abandoning the labor movement if it doesn't become more reflective of their needs. The report, based on the findings from a meeting of 30 activist women in New Orleans in March, demonstrates some of the problems young people (those under 35) and women face in labor organizing. It also offers suggestions on how to keep the movement diversified and how to appeal to members who might otherwise feel disenfranchised and leave for other causes. Women of all ages from 20 different unions and progressive organizations were present for the two-day talks.

The study's conclusion won't surprise many already working in labor organizing: unions are at a tipping point. While generally speaking, women have gained ground in the workplace and in unions, there is a lot of work to still be done. The women who attended the summit put together a list of 12 ways labor organizers could recruit and keep more young, female activists in their ranks, which included developing a broader social justice agenda, being open to new ways of communicating and teaching young activists basic skills of organizing that they may not already possess. There was also a focus on retraining older activists to be more inclusive of young people, such as learning new vocabulary and valuing new models of organizing. That's a long to-do list.

The Berger-Marks Foundation has put together similar data in the past. Its 2005 report, "Women Organizing Women: How to Rock the Boat Without Being Thrown Overboard," (pdf) was compiled in the same way: through frank discussions in a safe space with women organizers. What stands out about all of these publications is not just how they can help women continue to feel included in labor organizing; it seems like every goal they lay out could be applied to organizers everywhere. I hope that this tipping point turns out to be one that pushes more young women into organizing. It sounds like the movement has a lot to offer its own, as well as models for other organizers to borrow and learn from.

Photo credit: luckywhitegirl

The 2010 mid-year survey by Gibson Dunn titled, “2010 Mid-Year Electronic Discovery and Information Law Update“ of 103 eDiscovery decisions issued between January 1, 2010 and June 17, 2010 indicates, among other things, that judges continue to urge litigators to avoid or resolve discovery disputes through cooperation, often explicitly relying on The Sedona Conference® Cooperation Proclamation ("Cooperation Proclamation").

This is very welcome news for the entire industry as it shows that the US judicial system is serious about weeding out or those litigators that have attempted to “play” what they perceived as an immature system with uninformed judges and litigators.

The Gibbs and Dunn survey indicates that courts continue to urge counsel to avoid or resolve discovery disputes through cooperation, often explicitly relying on The Sedona Conference® Cooperation Proclamation ("Cooperation Proclamation").  See Home Design Servs., Inc. v. Trumble, 09-cv-00964, 2010 WL 1435382, at *5 (D. Colo. Apr. 9, 2010) (Shaffer, Mag. J.) (quoting Cooperation Proclamation and stating that counsel "bear a professional responsibility to conduct discovery in a diligent and candid manner"); JSR Micro, Inc. v. QBE Ins. Corp., C-09-03044, 2010 WL 1338152, at *3 (N.D. Cal. Apr. 5, 2010) (Laporte, Mag. J.) (citing Cooperation Proclamation in holding that proper response to uncertainty in definition of term in 30(b)(6) notice would have been to meet and confer rather than "to unilaterally assume a narrow interpretation"); Cartel Asset Mgmt v. Ocwen Fin. Corp., 01-cv-01644, 2010 WL 502721, at *14 (D. Colo. Feb. 8, 2010) (Shaffer, Mag. J.) (instructing counsel "to work together consistent with . . . The Cooperation Proclamation"); Bldg. Erection Servs. Co. v. Am. Bldgs. Co., 09-2104, 2010 WL 135213, *1 (D. Kan. Jan. 13, 2010) (Waxse, Mag. J.) (directing counsel to read Cooperation Proclamation to understand their obligations to work cooperatively).

Even when not specifically citing the Cooperation Proclamation, courts encouraged parties to reach agreement on solutions to e-discovery problems.  See, e.g., Burt Hill, Inc. v. Hassan, No. Civ. A. 09-1285, 2010 WL 419433, at *8, *10 (W.D. Pa. Jan. 29, 2010) (Bissoon, Mag. J.) (ordering parties to meet and confer on scope of defendants' request and search terms); Ross v. Abercrombie & Fitch Co., Nos. 2:05-cv-0819, et al., 2010 WL 1957802, at *13 (S.D. Ohio May 14, 2010) (Kemp, Mag. J.) (ordering parties to meet and confer to devise search protocol). 

An area ripe for increased cooperation is the form of production of ESI, notwithstanding the explicit requirement in Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26(f) that parties address form of production in their proposed discovery plan.  Recent decisions reinforce that specifying the form of production in discovery protocols or requests for production could avoid many disputes.  See Secure Energy, Inc. v. Coal Synthetics, 4:08CV01719, 2010 WL 597388, at *4 (E.D. Mo. Feb. 17, 2010) (denying plaintiff's motion to compel production of engineering drawings in native format because plaintiff did not specify native production, and defendants "fulfilled their discovery obligations by producing the engineering documents in PDF").  One court required re-production in native format, showing little patience for a party that had produced spreadsheets and emails in a printed format "for no apparent reason other than to make searching their content much more difficult."  Covad Commc'ns Co. v. Revonet, Inc., 06-1892, 2010 WL 1233501, at *3 (D.D.C. Mar. 31, 2010) (Facciola, Mag. J.).

The full text of the Gibson Dunn Report is as follows:

This 2010 Mid-Year Update provides an overview of recent e-discovery developments and trends, based on Gibson Dunn's review of 103 e-discovery decisions issued between January 1 and June 17, 2010. 
The following are highlights:

• Like last year, sanctions and cooperation were dominant themes in the first half of 2010. 
• Motions to compel and privilege disputes also continued at a steady pace. 
• We noted fewer decisions regarding preservation, form of production, and accessibility of data. 
• Courts have concentrated on more nuanced factual scenarios and discovery disputes arising farther along in the discovery process, such as iterative search terms, protective orders and the application of Federal Rule of Evidence 502. 
• We also noted a substantial increase in decisions analyzing the interplay between the Fourth Amendment and electronic discovery, as well as cases analyzing individuals' reasonable expectations of privacy in various electronic data. 
• Courts have begun to engage in the burgeoning arena of e-discovery in the social media context, as the number of cases recognizing evidence from social networking has exploded. 

For more in-depth treatment of these and other related topics, a collection of Gibson Dunn's publications on electronic discovery and information law topics may be found on our website.
Continuing the trend from 2009, courts within every federal circuit have issued at least one e-discovery opinion so far in 2010.  We have observed a more even distribution of opinions among the circuits, however, as opposed to the prevalence of opinions from the Second and Ninth Circuits that we saw in the past.  Even the U.S. Supreme Court decided a case which presented potential e-discovery implications, with its opinion in City of Ontario v. Quon, No. 08-1332, 560 U.S. ___ (June 17, 2010).  State courts remained involved too, and the New Jersey Supreme Court issued an important opinion concerning the attorney-client privilege and an employee's personal use of an employer-issued computer.

Certain courts have taken an active role in providing more guidance and certainty to e-discovery practitioners.  For example, the Seventh Circuit has created an Electronic Discovery Pilot Program, which developed Principles Relating to the Discovery of Electronically Stored Information ("Principles") in order to assist with the administration of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure ("FRCP") in the context of e-discovery.  The first phase of the Pilot Program concluded in May, and the second phase is expected to develop final Principles.  We will be keeping a close eye on the Seventh Circuit's Pilot Program, which, if successful, has the potential to be adopted in other circuits as well.

With an eye toward the future, we note the continued calls for overhauling the FRCP to provide greater guidance amidst the ever-growing complexities of e-discovery.  This topic was a focus of the May 2010 Conference on Civil Litigation, sponsored by the Advisory Committee on Civil Rules at Duke University.  Potential amendments to the FRCP represent another area that we will be carefully watching for further development.  

2010 Mid-Year Trends in Sanctions
Of the 103 opinions Gibson Dunn analyzed, litigants sought sanctions in 30% (or 31)--compared to 42% in all of 2009--and received sanctions in 68% of those cases (or 21)--compared to 70% in all of 2009.
The most frequently awarded sanctions were the costs and fees associated with the discovery dispute itself.  Of the 21 cases in which courts imposed some kind of sanction, costs and fees were awarded in 14.  See, e.g., Cherrington Asia Ltd. v. A&L Underground Inc., 263 F.R.D. 653, 663 (D. Kan. 2010) (Bostwick, Mag. J.) (imposing sanctions for failing to prepare Rule 30(b)(6) witness to discuss party's e-discovery collection efforts); Bray & Gillespie Mgmt. LLC v. Lexington Ins. Co., No. 6:07-cv-0222-Orl-35KRS, 2010 WL 55595, at *6-7 (M.D. Fla. Jan. 5, 2010) (awarding $75,000 in sanctions in addition to partial dismissal of plaintiffs' claim for damages). 

Courts have continued to impose monetary sanctions on outside counsel for failing to adequately supervise a client's collection and preservation of electronically stored information ("ESI").  In In re A&M Florida Properties, the court sanctioned both the client and its outside attorney, noting that although neither had acted in bad faith, sanctions were appropriate because outside counsel "simply did not understand the technical depths to which electronic discovery can sometimes go."  No. 09-01162, 2010 WL 1418861, at *6-7 (S.D.N.Y. Apr. 7, 2010).  Pitting the client and counsel against each other, the court required counsel and the client to provide facts regarding how to "determine an allocation of the fees and costs among [the client] and its attorneys."  Id. at *7. By contrast, outside attorneys have escaped sanctions where they could demonstrate "significant efforts to comply with their discovery obligations," even if those efforts fell short.  See Qualcomm, Inc. v. Broadcom Corp., No. 05-cv-1958, 2010 WL 1336937, at *2 (S.D. Cal. Apr. 2, 2010) (Major, Mag. J.). 

In its 2008 opinion in Qualcomm, the magistrate judge levied $8.5 million in sanctions against Qualcomm and referred six of its outside counsel to the California State Bar for failing to search the electronic files of key custodians in connection with issues central to the case.  Following a reversal and remand by the district judge, the magistrate judge decided against imposing sanctions on outside counsel after reviewing all the evidence.  (The outside attorneys had been permitted to introduce in their defense information that previously was protected by the attorney-client privilege.)  The magistrate judge observed, however, that "[t]here is still no doubt in this Court's mind that this massive discovery failure resulted from significant mistakes, oversights, and miscommunication on the part of both outside counsel and Qualcomm employees."  Id.; see also Lawson v. Sun Microsystems, Inc., No. 1:07-cv-196-RLY-TAB, 2010 WL 503054, at *3 (S.D. Ind. Feb. 8, 2010) (overturning magistrate judge's imposition of monetary sanctions on outside counsel, on ground that attorneys' behavior was not "wanton").

The most notable and widely reported sanctions cases in the first half of 2010 concerned the imposition of adverse inference sanctions for failure to preserve relevant evidence.  These decisions revealed a split in the level of culpability courts will require before imposing this kind of sanction. 
In the Pension Committee case, Judge Shira A. Scheindlin of the Southern District of New York, author of the famed Zubulake opinions, awarded an adverse inference sanction because a party acted with gross negligence (as opposed to willfulness) in failing to preserve electronic documents.  Pension Comm. of Univ. of Montreal Pension Plan v. Banc of Am. Sec., LLC, 685 F. Supp. 2d 456, 470 (S.D.N.Y. 2010).  The court reasoned that "contemporary standards" of discovery practice rendered the failure to preserve and collect electronic files from key witnesses "grossly negligent," and therefore worthy of the severe sanction of an adverse inference, even without proof of intentional misconduct.  Id. at 471; see also Diocese of Harrisburg v. Summix Dev. Co., No. 1:07-CV-2283, 2010 WL 2034699, at *1-2 (M.D. Pa. May 18, 2010) (imposing adverse inference despite no allegation of bad faith); Passlogix, Inc. v. 2FA Tech., LLC, No. 08 Civ. 10986, 2010 WL 1702216, at *26 (S.D.N.Y. Apr. 27, 2010) (echoing Pension Comm. in holding that "where the spoiling party [is] merely negligent, the innocent party must prove both relevance and prejudice in order to justify the imposition of a severe sanction"); Kwon v. Costco Wholesale Corp., Civ. No. 08-00360, 2010 WL 571941, at *3 (D. Haw. Feb. 17, 2010) (imposing adverse inference sanction because party knew or should have known of relevance of destroyed videotape).  For more detailed analysis of the Pension Committee opinion, see Gibson Dunn attorneys Gareth Evans and Farrah Pepper's article, "E-Discovery Principles Revisited."

Similarly, in Wilson v. Thorn Energy, LLC, No. 08 Civ. 9009 (FM), 2010 WL 1712236 (S.D.N.Y. Mar. 15, 2010) (Maas, Mag. J.), the court imposed an adverse inference sanction for gross negligence where the defendants had lost all data relevant to a large transaction when a USB drive was erased.  Id. at *3.  The Wilson decision declined to apply the protections of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 37(e), which provides a "safe harbor" "for failing to provide electronically stored information lost as a result of the routine, good-faith operation of an electronic information system," as the erasure occurred outside of any routine document management procedures.  Id.

In contrast with these cases, courts in other circuits have required a showing of willfulness before imposing an adverse inference, and have held that even grossly negligent electronic discovery failures are insufficient to impose such a severe sanction.  See Rimkus Consulting Group, Inc. v. Cammarata, 688 F. Supp. 2d 598, 615-17 (S.D. Tex. Feb. 19, 2010); see also OCE N. Am., Inc. v. Brazeau, No. 09 C 2381, 2010 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 25523 at *19 (N.D. Ill. Mar. 18, 2010) (refusing to impose adverse inference sanction because defendant "did not know he had the option or ability" to preserve instant messages until after litigation began and plaintiff had no evidence of harm). 

Judge Lee Rosenthal, Chair of the Judicial Conference Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure, noted in Rimkus that the Fifth, Seventh, Eighth, Tenth, Eleventh, and D.C. Circuits all appear to require bad faith to impose adverse inference instructions, while the First, Fourth, and Ninth Circuits "hold that bad faith is not essential . . . if there is severe prejudice."  Rimkus, 688 F. Supp. 2d at 614.  The Second Circuit allows an adverse inference sanction for "negligent destruction of evidence because each party should bear the risk of its own negligence."  Id. at 615 (quoting Residential Funding Corp. v. DeGeorge Fin. Corp., 306 F.3d 99, 108 (2d Cir. 2002)).  The Third Circuit "balance[s] the degree of fault and prejudice."  Id. at 614-15. 
While acknowledging that Pension Committee did a "great service by laying out a careful analysis of spoliation and sanctions issues in electronic discovery," id. at 611, Judge Rosenthal observed in Rimkus that "circuit differences in the level of culpability necessary for an adverse inference instruction limit the applicability of the Pension Committee approach."  Id. at 615.

Although courts demonstrated their willingness to impose sanctions on parties and counsel, there appears to be reluctance in most circuits to impose the harsher sanctions of dismissal and adverse inferences, particularly in the absence of intentional misconduct.  Only one court thus far in 2010 has granted dismissal or default judgment for electronic discovery shortcomings--and even in that case, the court limited the dismissal to only certain claims and allowed the remainder of the plaintiff's claims to proceed.  Bray & Gillespie, 2010 WL 55595, at *6.  In Bray & Gillespie, the plaintiff failed to produce electronic records in response to a clearly worded request from the defendant and three court orders compelling the plaintiff to produce the records.  Id. at *5.  The court found this conduct "willful and in bad faith," and dismissed with prejudice certain claims relevant to the unproduced records.  Id. at *6.


2010 Mid-Year Trends in Preservation
The 2010 opinions addressing the preservation of electronic evidence continued to emphasize that the duty to preserve ESI may be triggered before the filing of a complaint.  See, e.g., Pension Comm., 2010 WL 184312, at *4 (noting that plaintiff's ability to control timing of lawsuit can trigger plaintiff's duty to preserve evidence prior to litigation); Crown Castle USA Inc. v. Fred A. Nudd Corp., No. 05-CV-6163T, 2010 WL 1286366, at *6, 10 (W.D.N.Y. Mar. 31, 2010) (Payson, Mag. J.) (finding that plaintiff's duty to preserve documents arose several months before litigation commenced when plaintiff began labeling communications as privileged and hired litigation counsel). 

Courts also continued to hold that parties need to preserve ESI that is stored in formats other than email, including "outlier ESI" and ephemeral data that might otherwise be overlooked.  See OCE N. Am., 2010 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 25523, at *18 (duty to preserve instant messages); Passlogix, 2010 WL 1702216, at *24, 28 (duty to preserve Skype messages); Wilson, 2010 WL 1712236, at *2 (duty to preserve USB flash drive).  For more detail on the preservation obligations for outlier ESI, see Gibson Dunn attorney Farrah Pepper's article, "Honey, I Forgot the Cell Phone: The 411 on 'Outlier' ESI."  For more detail on the preservation obligations for ephemeral data, see Gibson Dunn attorneys Jennifer Rearden and Farrah Pepper's article, "Oh No, Ephemeral Data!".

In the first half of 2010, courts placed increased responsibility on parties and counsel to ensure that preservation measures are effectively implemented.  See, e.g., Pension Comm., 685 F. Supp. 2d at 473 (remarking that litigation hold memo must "direct employees to preserve all relevant records" and noting that counsel should "specifically instruct" parties not to destroy their records (emphasis in original)); Jones v. Bremen High Sch. Dist. 228, No. 08 C 3548, 2010 WL 2106640, at *10 (N.D. Ill. May 25, 2010) (Cox, Mag. J.) (imposing sanctions where in-house counsel relied on employees to self-identify whether to preserve documents); John B. v. Goetz, No. 3:98-0168, 2010 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 8821, at *85 (M.D. Tenn. Jan. 28, 2010) (concluding that "even if the . . . litigation hold memorandum were distributed, there was not any implementation of its provisions," constituting gross negligence). 

Several courts emphasized that the litigation hold must be written (as opposed to oral) and communicated to all key employees.  Judge Scheindlin in Pension Comm. went so far as to presume that relevant documents had been destroyed where a proper litigation hold was not implemented.  See Pension Comm., 685 F. Supp. 2d at 463 (opining that where a party "fail[s] to timely institute written litigation holds . . . , there can be little doubt that some documents were lost or destroyed.").  Similarly, in Crown Castle the court found that the failure of outside and inside counsel to undertake any efforts "to implement" a litigation hold constituted gross negligence.  Crown Castle, 2010 WL 1286366, at *13; see also Melendres v. Arpaio, No. CV-07-2513, 2010 WL 582189, at *7 (D. Ariz. Feb. 12, 2010) (same). 
Historically, the propriety of preservation efforts had been judged in a fact-specific manner according to what was reasonable under the circumstances of a given case.  Reflecting the maturation of e-discovery law, courts this year have stated that, going forward, what is reasonable will be judged instead according to "clearly established applicable standards," Rimkus, 2010 WL 645253, at *6, which "have been set by years of judicial decisions."  Pension Comm., 685 F. Supp. 2d at 464. 

According to Judge Scheindlin, the failure to take certain actions will almost certainly constitute gross negligence, including "issu[ing] a litigation hold; identify[ing] all of the key players and ensur[ing] that their electronic and paper records are preserved; ceas[ing] the deletion of email or preserv[ing] the records of former employees that are in a party's possession, custody, or control; and preserv[ing] backup tapes when they are the sole source of relevant information."  Id. at 471.  Another court noted that parties would be well advised to proactively document all specific preservation efforts they have taken.  See Crown Castle, 2010 WL 1286366, at *12 (noting that record failed to reveal steps taken to implement litigation hold and issuing monetary sanctions).

2010 Mid-Year Trends in Search Methodology
The growing body of law regarding the adequacy of search terms reflects that courts are increasingly examining the mechanics of e-discovery.  So far this year, several courts have refused to compel productions where the requesting party could not justify its proposed search terms.  See, e.g., Seger v. Ernest-Spencer, Inc., No. 8:08CV75, 2010 WL 378113, at *9 (D. Neb. Jan. 26, 2010) (Thalken, Mag. J.) (denying motion to compel where defendant failed to show relevance of information sought by each of its 24 proposed search terms); Bellinger v. Astrue, CV-06-321 (CBA), 2010 WL 1270003, at *6-7 (E.D.N.Y. Apr. 1, 2010) (Gold, Mag. J.) (denying motion to compel where plaintiff offered no reason for propounding broad range of search terms long after initial searches were conducted and results culled).  One court sanctioned a requesting party that refused to "reasonably narrow" document requests through specific search terms or place limits on the number of custodians whose files would be searched, despite the responding parties' "numerous attempts" to meet and confer.  See Edelen v. Campbell Soup Co., 265 F.R.D. 676, 683, 692-93 (N.D. Ga. 2010).

Several courts nevertheless declined to take an active role in the design of search terms or specific search methodology.  In a dispute over keyword search techniques, one court observed that "[n]either lawyers nor judges are generally qualified to opine that certain search terms or files are more or less likely to produce information than those keywords or data actually used or reviewed."  Eurand, Inc. v. Mylan Pharms., Inc., 266 F.R.D. 79, 84 (D. Del. Apr. 13, 2010) (Thynge, Mag. J.).  While the court ordered the producing party to conduct another search, it refused to "enter the wilderness of keyword search usage and is not directing the appropriate search terms for plaintiffs to employ."  Id. at 85 n.31.  This echoes similar discomfort expressed last year in William A. Gross Constr. Assocs. v. American Mfrs. Mut. Ins. Co., 256 F.R.D. 134, 135-36 (S.D.N.Y. 2009) (Peck, Mag. J.) and United States v. O'Keefe, 537 F. Supp. 2d 14, 24 (D.D.C. 2008) (Facciola, Mag. J.)

In a growing number of Fourth Amendment cases involving e-discovery, courts tended to uphold the government's search of ESI even where a search warrant lacked particularized search methodologies.  See United States v. Kernell, No. 3:08-CR-142, 2010 WL 1491873, at *7-9, *14 (E.D. Tenn. Mar. 31, 2010) (Shirley, Mag. J.) (holding that forensic analysis of data on defendant's computer did not violate Fourth Amendment, even though search warrant did not contain written search methodology); United States v. Blake, No. 1:08-cr-0284 OWW, 2010 WL 702958, at *4 (E.D. Cal. Feb. 25, 2010) (stating it would be "unrealistic" to require that warrant specify "a particular program or specific search terms"); United States v. Bowen, No. S1 07 Cr. 961 (LBS), 2010 WL 710829, at *3 (S.D.N.Y. Feb. 17, 2010) ("Courts are ill-suited to constrain law enforcement to certain search-terms or methodologies in advance" and Fourth Amendment does not require search warrant to specify computer search methodology).

2010 Mid-Year Trends in Cooperation
Courts continue to urge counsel to avoid or resolve discovery disputes through cooperation, often explicitly relying on The Sedona Conference® Cooperation Proclamation ("Cooperation Proclamation").  See Home Design Servs., Inc. v. Trumble, 09-cv-00964, 2010 WL 1435382, at *5 (D. Colo. Apr. 9, 2010) (Shaffer, Mag. J.) (quoting Cooperation Proclamation and stating that counsel "bear a professional responsibility to conduct discovery in a diligent and candid manner"); JSR Micro, Inc. v. QBE Ins. Corp., C-09-03044, 2010 WL 1338152, at *3 (N.D. Cal. Apr. 5, 2010) (Laporte, Mag. J.) (citing Cooperation Proclamation in holding that proper response to uncertainty in definition of term in 30(b)(6) notice would have been to meet and confer rather than "to unilaterally assume a narrow interpretation"); Cartel Asset Mgmt v. Ocwen Fin. Corp., 01-cv-01644, 2010 WL 502721, at *14 (D. Colo. Feb. 8, 2010) (Shaffer, Mag. J.) (instructing counsel "to work together consistent with . . . The Cooperation Proclamation"); Bldg. Erection Servs. Co. v. Am. Bldgs. Co., 09-2104, 2010 WL 135213, *1 (D. Kan. Jan. 13, 2010) (Waxse, Mag. J.) (directing counsel to read Cooperation Proclamation to understand their obligations to work cooperatively).

Even when not specifically citing the Cooperation Proclamation, courts encouraged parties to reach agreement on solutions to e-discovery problems.  See, e.g., Burt Hill, Inc. v. Hassan, No. Civ. A. 09-1285, 2010 WL 419433, at *8, *10 (W.D. Pa. Jan. 29, 2010) (Bissoon, Mag. J.) (ordering parties to meet and confer on scope of defendants' request and search terms); Ross v. Abercrombie & Fitch Co., Nos. 2:05-cv-0819, et al., 2010 WL 1957802, at *13 (S.D. Ohio May 14, 2010) (Kemp, Mag. J.) (ordering parties to meet and confer to devise search protocol). 

An area ripe for increased cooperation is the form of production of ESI, notwithstanding the explicit requirement in Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26(f) that parties address form of production in their proposed discovery plan.  Recent decisions reinforce that specifying the form of production in discovery protocols or requests for production could avoid many disputes.  See Secure Energy, Inc. v. Coal Synthetics, 4:08CV01719, 2010 WL 597388, at *4 (E.D. Mo. Feb. 17, 2010) (denying plaintiff's motion to compel production of engineering drawings in native format because plaintiff did not specify native production, and defendants "fulfilled their discovery obligations by producing the engineering documents in PDF").  One court required re-production in native format, showing little patience for a party that had produced spreadsheets and emails in a printed format "for no apparent reason other than to make searching their content much more difficult."  Covad Commc'ns Co. v. Revonet, Inc., 06-1892, 2010 WL 1233501, at *3 (D.D.C. Mar. 31, 2010) (Facciola, Mag. J.).

2010 Mid-Year Trends in Proportionality
Courts continued to demonstrate an awareness of the burdens associated with collecting, searching and producing ESI.  In evaluating claims of burden thus far in 2010, courts have often relied on statements from parties' technical consultants, suggesting that parties would do well to submit such statements in disputes over burden.  See, e.g., Universal Delaware, Inc. v. Comdata Corp., 07-1078, 2010 WL 1381225, *7 (E.D. Pa. Mar. 31, 2010) (Perkin, Mag. J.) (relying on opinion of "electronic evidence consultant" for advice on construction of least-expensive search database); Seger, 2010 WL 378113, at *8 (reviewing affidavit from "the Director of Information Technology and Architecture" that production requests are "overly broad" and would be "costly"); Rodriguez-Torres v. Gov't Dvlp't Bank of Puerto Rico, 265 F.R.D. 40, 44 (D.P.R. Jan. 20, 2010) (citing consultant's report regarding cost of producing requested ESI). 
Where litigants made a sufficient showing of undue burden--e.g., that the expense was disproportionate to the anticipated benefit--courts denied discovery.  See, e.g., Rodriguez-Torres, 265 F.R.D. at 44 (denying plaintiff's motion to compel production of emails over 3-year period on grounds that "the ESI requested is not reasonably accessible because of the undue burden and cost").  Courts also ordered limitations on the number of search terms, the number of custodians, and the length of time covered.  See, e.g., Edelen, 265 F.R.D. at 693; Rosenbaum v. Becker & Poliakoff, P.A., 08-CV-81004, 2010 WL 623699, at *9 (S.D. Fla. Feb. 23, 2010) (Johnson, Mag. J.) (applying "rule of proportionality" to limit defendant's search for responsive documents to 6-month period, rather than plaintiff's requested 18-month period).

2010 Mid-Year Trends in Privilege Waiver
Courts continued to interpret the requirements of Federal Rule of Evidence 502, enacted in 2008 to provide uniform rules governing the waiver of attorney-client privilege and work product protection due to inadvertent disclosure of privileged communications.  Several decisions addressed Rule 502(b), which provides that disclosure of privileged or protected material is not a waiver if the disclosure is "inadvertent," the holder of the privilege or protection took "reasonable steps to prevent the disclosure," and upon discovery the holder "promptly took reasonable steps to rectify the error." 

Under the second element of Rule 502(b)--whether a party took "reasonable steps" to prevent disclosure--courts continued to develop methods to analyze whether a party reasonably designed its production methodology.  In doing so, courts have considered the volume of documents produced as compared to the number of inadvertent disclosures; the use of third-party vendors and software to assist the review and production; and the use and reliability of keyword searches.  See, e.g., Mt. Hawley Ins. Co. v. Felman Prod., Inc., No. 3:09-CV-00481, 2010 WL 1990555, at *13 (S.D. W. Va. May 18, 2010) (Stanley, Mag. J.) (holding that precautions taken to prevent disclosures were not reasonable, as large number of inadvertent disclosures demonstrated lack of care, and party had failed to test keyword searches by appropriate sampling, therefore waiving any protections under Rule 502(b)); Edelen, 265 F.R.D. at 682 (holding no waiver under Rule 502(b) "[g]iven that only four pages out of a more than 2000 page production were privileged [and] the documents were checked by three different attorneys prior to production"). 

2010 Mid-Year Trends in Employer/Employee Data Privacy
Two notable cases from the first half of 2010 addressed the issue of electronic communications in the employment context.  These cases highlight the importance of an employer's technology usage policy to determine whether employees have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their electronic communications.
In March, the Supreme Court of New Jersey decided Stengart v. Loving Care Agency, Inc., 990 A.2d 650 (N.J. 2010), and held that the attorney-client privilege protected email messages sent by an employee-plaintiff to her attorney on her work-issued laptop through a personal, web-based email account.  The court also held that the employer-defendant's attorneys could be subject to sanctions because they had read the emails and failed to notify the plaintiff.  The employer's technology-usage policy warned that emails were "not to be considered private or personal," but did not address personal, web-based email accounts, and also permitted "occasional" personal email use.  Id. at 657. 

The court further held that the employee had a reasonable expectation of privacy in her emails due to (1) the ambiguity in the technology usage policy; (2) her use of a personal, password-protected, web-based email account; and (3) the reasonable steps she took to keep her attorney-client discussions confidential, including not saving her password on her work computer.  Id. at 665.  Indeed, noting "the important public policy concerns underlying the attorney-client privilege," the court expressed doubt whether any technology-usage policy could trump attorney-client privilege in this situation.  Id.

Additionally, on June 17, the United States Supreme Court decided City of Ontario v. Quon, No. 08-1332, 560 U.S. ___ (June 17, 2010).  Quon involved a SWAT-team member who had used his city-issued, text-messaging pager for personal communications.  No official city policy governed use of the pagers in particular, but the city's general technology usage policy specified that email and Internet usage would be monitored.  The formal policy, however, was accompanied by an informal policy that supervisors would not audit employees' text messages as long as the employees paid any overage fees.  After a supervisor requested transcripts of Quon's text messages, Quon sued, alleging, among other claims, violations of the Stored Communications Act and the Fourth Amendment.  On appeal, the Ninth Circuit held that users of text messages have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the content of their text messages, analogizing text messages to letters and emails.  In particular, the Ninth Circuit held that the "operational realities" of the employer--which had given employees reason to believe that their text messages would not be audited as long as they paid any overage fees--created a reasonable expectation of privacy for the employee, despite the employee's assent to a contrary formal policy.  Quon v. Arch Wireless Operating Co., 529 F.3d 892, 907 (9th Cir. 2008).  The Ninth Circuit held that the city's search of Quon's text messages was not reasonable in scope.  Id. at 908.

In an opinion authored by Justice Kennedy, the Supreme Court reversed and held that the city's search of the text messages was reasonable.  The Court declined, however, to address the privacy expectations of employees using employer-provided communications devices.  The Court cautioned against the judiciary "elaborating too fully on the Fourth Amendment implications of emerging technology before its role in society has become clear."  Quon, No. 08-1332, slip op. at 10.  Fearing that a "broad holding concerning employees' privacy expectations vis-á-vis employer-provided technological equipment might have implications for future cases that cannot be predicted," the Court decided the case on narrow grounds by assuming arguendo that Quon had a reasonable expectation of privacy in his text messages before finding the city's search to be reasonable.  Id. at 12.

The Court's ruling in Quon revealed the Court's hesitancy to tackle issues of privacy relating to emerging technologies.  As Justice Kennedy explained: "[r]apid changes in the dynamics of communication and information transmission are evident not just in the technology itself but in what society accepts as proper behavior . . . .  At present, it is uncertain how workplace norms, and the law's treatment of them, will evolve."  Id. at 11.  Justice Scalia took a contrary view in his concurrence, stating that "[a]pplying the Fourth Amendment to new technologies may sometimes be difficult, but when it is necessary to decide a case we have no choice. . . .  The-times-they-are-a-changin' is a feeble excuse for disregard of duty."  Quon, No. 08-1332, slip op. at 2 (Scalia, J., concurring in judgment).

Although Quon failed to offer new guidance on key areas of best practices and principles for technology and information management, it highlights the importance of employer technology usage policies.  A prudent employer may wish to expressly include text messaging (or other forms of electronic communications) in its written technology usage policies or else risk waiving its right to audit such data.  Furthermore, the Supreme Court has left the door open for other courts to address the issue of an employee's right to privacy in his or her electronic communications.  For more on the implications of the Quon decision, see Gibson Dunn client alert, "Unanimous U.S. Supreme Court Ruling in Quon Highlights Importance of Employer Technology-Usage and Privacy Policies," and Gibson Dunn attorneys Farrah Pepper and Jeffrey Coren's article, "Quon Could Have Consequences for E-Discovery."

2010 Mid-Year Trends in Social Networking and E-Discovery
Information found on social networking sites continues to regularly appear as evidence in courtrooms around the country in both civil and criminal cases.  In a termination of parental rights case, the child's use of inappropriate language on Facebook after midnight was offered as proof of lack of parental supervision.  In re S.A., No. 10-0203, 2010 WL 1881524, at *2 (Iowa Ct. App. May 12, 2010).  In Evans v. Bayer, a high school student successfully claimed that her free speech rights were violated when she was suspended for creating a group on Facebook entitled "Ms. Sarah Phelps is the worst teacher I've ever met."  684 F. Supp. 2d 1365, 1377 (S.D. Fla. 2010) (Garber, Mag. J.).  The court held that the student's right to off-campus free speech was clearly established, even if a social networking website was a novel medium.  Id. at 1375; see also Partee v. United Recovery Group, No. CV 09-9180, 2010 WL 1816705, at *2 (C.D. Cal. May 3, 2010) (introducing evidence from plaintiff's MySpace page); Zamecnik v. Indian Prairie Sch. Dist. No. 204 Bd. of Educ., No. 07 C 1586, 2010 WL 1781771, at *6 (N.D. Ill. Apr. 29, 2010) (noting number of people joining Facebook page as evidence); United States v. Gagnon, No. 10-52-B-W, 2010 WL 1710066, at *3 (D. Me. Apr. 23, 2010) (Kravchuk, Mag. J.) (accepting evidence from Facebook page); Sedie v. United States, No. C-08-04417, 2010 WL 1644252, at *23 (N.D. Cal. Apr. 21, 2010) (Laporte, Mag. J.) (introducing evidence from plaintiff's MySpace and Facebook pages to dispute personal injury claims); Steinberg v. Young, No. 09-11836, 2010 WL 1286606, at *7-8 (E.D. Mich. Mar. 31, 2010) (accepting evidence from LinkedIn profile); United States v. Beckett, No. 09-10579, 2010 WL 776049, at *2 (11th Cir. Mar. 9, 2010) (accepting evidence from MySpace page).

Courts that have considered the issue acknowledge that discovery from social networking sites may carry different privacy concerns than traditional discovery.  In EEOC v. Simply Storage Management, LLC, No. 1:09-cv-1223 (S.D. Ind. May 11, 2010) (Lynch, Mag. J.), the defendant sought discovery from the plaintiffs' Facebook and MySpace accounts, because plaintiffs' "emotional health" was in issue.  Id. at 3. The court allowed the discovery, observing that "[i]t is reasonable to expect severe emotional or mental injury to manifest itself in some [social networking] content."  Id. at 8.  Plaintiffs and defendant disagreed on the scope of information to be discovered, with plaintiffs fearing that the information discovered could embarrass them.  Id. at 12.  The court discounted this argument, noting that the production of information posted to Facebook or MySpace had already been shared "with at least one other person through private messages or a larger number of people through postings."  Id.  In another case where a party raised privacy concerns about the public dissemination of photographs she had already posted to her Facebook account, the magistrate judge offered to create a Facebook account for himself "[i]f [the parties] will accept the Magistrate Judge as a 'friend' on Facebook for the sole purpose of reviewing photographs and related comments in camera."  Barnes v. CUS Nashville, LLC, No. 3:09-cv-00764, 2010 WL 2265668, at *1 (M.D. Tenn. June 3, 2010) (Brown, Mag. J.).

While to our knowledge no court has yet imposed an obligation to preserve and search electronic data located on social networking sites, we expect that such decisions may not be far off. 

2010 Mid-Year Trends in Cross-Border and International Discovery
We have observed an increasing trend of United States courts compelling cross-border discovery from both parties and non-parties, even where foreign law bars production of the information.  In three decisions involving blocking statutes from foreign countries, courts ordered the requested discovery over the objection that foreign law prohibited the disclosure.  See AccessData Corp. v. ALSTE Techs., No. 2:08cv569, 2010 WL 318477, at *7 (D. Utah Jan. 21, 2010) (Warner, Mag. J.) (ordering party discovery from Germany); Gucci Am., Inc. v. Curveal Fashion, No. 09 Civ. 8458, 2010 WL 808639, at *8 (S.D.N.Y. Mar 8, 2010) (Katz, Mag. J.) (ordering non-party discovery from Malaysia); In re Air Cargo Shipping Srvs. Antitrust Litig., No. 06-MD-1775, 2010 WL 1189341, at *5 (E.D.N.Y. Mar. 29, 2010) (Pohorelsky, Mag. J.) (ordering party discovery from France).

In AccessData and Air Cargo, defendants each resisted document requests by claiming that the blocking statutes of Germany and France, respectively, barred the discovery.  In each case, the court reaffirmed that "[i]t is well settled that such [blocking] statutes do not deprive an American court of the power to order a party subject to its jurisdiction to produce evidence even though the act of production may violate that statute."  AccessData, 2010 WL 318477, at *2 (quoting Societe Nationale Industrielle Aerospatiale v. United States District Court, 482 U.S. 522, 544 (1987)); Air Cargo, 2010 WL 1189341, at *1 (citing same).

The Gucci decision is particularly notable in that it involved discovery sought from a non-party, as courts are generally less willing to impose burdens on non-parties.  Gucci Am., 2010 WL 808639, at *2.  The plaintiff sought documents from the parent of a Malaysian bank, which objected on the grounds that disclosure of the documents could result in a three-year prison sentence or $900,000 fine under Malaysian banking law.  Id. at *7.  The U.S. court balanced the possibility of criminal sanctions against the plaintiff's need for the documents and ability to get the information from other sources, and concluded that the documents should be produced.  As for the potential hardship to the non-party, the court stated that, "[w]hile the penalties are not insignificant, the Court cannot conclude that the prospect of significant hardship is anything more than mere speculation."  Id.  Without any compelling evidence that the blocking statute would in fact be enforced against the non-party, the court discounted the potential hardship.  When several weeks later the non-party still had not complied with the order, the court held the non-party in contempt and subjected it to a daily fine of $10,000.00.  Gucci Am., Inc. v. Curveal Fashion, No. 09 Civ. 8458 (RJS) (S.D.N.Y. May 28, 2010). 

2010 Mid-Year Trends in Government E-Discovery Responsibilities
Courts have continued to treat the government no differently from private parties in the e-discovery context, suggesting they do not believe that the government has any duties or responsibilities distinct from those of private litigants.  See Melendres, 2010 WL 582189, at *6 (refusing to distinguish local sheriff's office from private entities when applying sanctions for document destruction); MVB Mortgage Corp. v. FDIC, No. 2:08-cv-771, 2010 WL 582641, at *4  (S.D. Ohio Feb. 11, 2010) (Kemp, Mag. J.) (including FDIC in requirement to produce otherwise privileged emails released to expert witnesses); Gerber v. Down East Community Hospital, 266 F.R.D. 29, 35-36 (D. Me. 2010) (Kravchuk, Mag. J.) (imposing identical ESI privilege log obligations on government and private parties).

We have observed a growing number of cases in which courts have struggled to define the scope of Fourth Amendment limitations on the government's power to collect and review electronic information.  A number of decisions examined the extent of a user's reasonable expectations of privacy when sharing information electronically.  For example, courts have continued to hold that no reasonable expectation of privacy exists in files accessed from peer-to-peer file sharing networks.  See United States v. Borowy, 595 F.3d 1045, 1048 (9th Cir. 2010); United States v. Ladeau, Crim. No. 09-40021-FDS, 2010 WL 1427523, at *5 (D. Mass. Apr. 7, 2010).  Courts also considered whether a reasonable expectation of privacy exists in email correspondence, and concluded that it does not.  In Rehberg v. Paulk, the Eleventh Circuit held that a person "loses a reasonable expectation of privacy in e-mails, at least after the e-mail is sent to and received by a third party."  598 F.3d 1268, 1281 (11th Cir. 2010).  Although not a Fourth Amendment case, a New York court opined that "the concept of internet privacy is a fallacy upon which no one should rely," and while "some may view emails as tantamount to a postal letter which is afforded some level of privacy . . . in general, emails are more akin to a postcard, as they are less secure and can easily be viewed by a passerby."  People v. Klapper, No. 2009NY032282, 2010 WL 1704796, at *1, *5 (N.Y. City Crim. Ct. Apr. 28, 2010).
The first half of 2010 saw two circuit splits on Fourth Amendment e-discovery issues.  First, in United States v. King, the Third Circuit held that where an owner of a computer consented to its seizure, a device owned by a third party that was installed on that computer (such as a hard drive) also could be seized and searched, despite that third party's objection.  No. 09-1861, 2010 WL 1729733, at *7 (3d Cir. Apr. 30, 2010).  This opinion limited the Supreme Court's holding in Georgia v. Randolph, 547 U.S. 103 (2006), which had held that a present and objecting resident can override another resident's consent to search, to residences only and not personal property.  2010 WL 1729733, at *5-6.  In so holding, King explicitly disagreed with the Ninth Circuit's holding in United States v. Murphy, 516 F.3d 1117 (9th Cir. 2008), which had interpreted Randolph to include not only residences but also personal property.  2010 WL 1729733, at *7. 

Second, both the Seventh and Fourth Circuits issued opinions that contrasted with last year's Ninth Circuit decision in United States v. Comprehensive Drug Testing, Inc., 579 F.3d 989 (9th Cir. 2009).  In United States v. Mann, the Seventh Circuit determined that a "plain view" exception existed in searches of computers using forensic software where the search exceeded the scope of the warrant.  592 F.3d 779, 782-85 (7th Cir. 2010).  The court stated that the problem inherent in attempting to strictly limit computer searches to fit within the direct scope of a warrant is "in the fact that [the sought images] could be nearly anywhere . . . [and] may be manipulated to hide their true contents."  Id. at 782.  The Fourth Circuit also found a "plain view" exception in United States v. Williams, 592 F.3d 511 (4th Cir. 2010).  There, the court expressly rejected the Tenth Circuit's opinion in United States. v. Carey, 172 F.3d 1268 (10th Cir. 1999), which had held that the inadvertence requirement of the plain view exception disallowed the search of computers and electronic media when evidence indicated that the officer's actual purpose was to use the warrant to find "unauthorized" evidence.  Williams, 592 F.3d at 522.  The panel held that Carey directly conflicted with Supreme Court precedent holding that the scope of a warrant is defined objectively by its terms and not by an officer's subjective expectations.  Id. (citing Maryland v. Garrison, 480 U.S. 79, 84 (1987)). 

In two First Amendment decisions, courts denied subpoena requests to obtain from internet service providers the identity of parties anonymously posting controversial electronic communications.  See A.Z. v. Doe, No. A-5060-08T3, 2010 WL 816647, at *1 (N.J. Mar. 8, 2010) (applying strict standard to hold that First Amendment did not allow issuance of subpoena to retrieve identity of anonymous email sender sought in defamation claim); McVicker v. King, No. 02-09-cv-00436, 2010 WL 597468, at *8 (W.D. Pa. Mar. 3, 2010) (quashing subpoena request on First Amendment grounds).  Addressing the Fifth Amendment's testimonial privilege, the court in Burt Hill held that this privilege did not attach to electronic documents whose existence and exact location were a foregone conclusion.  2010 WL 55715, at *2-3.

Conclusion
This year has already been an exciting one for e-discovery developments and Gibson Dunn will continue to track the latest trends.  Look for updates from Gibson Dunn whenever a major opinion is issued, and stay tuned for our 2010 Year-End Report.

A new study on treating Cerebral Palsy with Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy is making waves in India and the U.S. The largest sample of children studied to assess neuro-developmental improvements focuses on a combination of standard rehabilitation therapies, such as Occupational, Physical, Speech Therapies and HBOT. HBOT raises the oxygen molecule content in the body through oxygen-carrying blood cells and all body fluids. A person enters a treatment chamber, and the air pressure is compressed with more molecules of air and oxygen. Lately, HBOT has garnered much attention in the media, with athletes using it to train and recover from injuries, diabetics literally saving limbs, patients able to kill resistant bacteria, and most recently, new applications in neurology brain injuries, traumas and disorders.

In fact, this new study out of India compares the use of various hyperbaric pressures with the use of (ambient) air alone or oxygen enrichment in the treatment of children with Cerebral Palsy (CP). The study shows that low pressure ambient air hyperbaric therapy (1.3 atmospheres-ATA) is as or more effective than high pressure 100% oxygen (1.5 or 1.75 ATA) in the treatment of CP. The children were studied by Dr. Arun Mukherjee, director of the UDAAN Disabled Children's Center, a non-profit organization, recognized and aided by the Indian Ministry of Social Justice & Empowerment.

This landmark study, co-authored with Dr. Pierre Marois (McGill University in Montreal, Canada), further develops the 1999 ground-breaking McGill study (Lancet, February 2001) by expanding the number of subjects and by implementing an accurate placebo-control testing method. Subjects with a functional diagnosis of spastic diplegia cerebral palsy received one of four hyperbaric options, in addition to standard therapies: 1) the placebo therapy (20 subjects); 2) hyperbaric therapy at 1.3 ATA breathing ambient air under pressure (36 subjects); 3) hyperbaric therapy breathing 100% oxygen at 1.5 ATA (32 subjects); and 4 ) 1.75 ATA with 100% oxygen (58). All subjects were reevaluated at six months after conclusion of therapy to negate any traces of the placebo effect. The study showed significant improvements for all three groups receiving therapy (the placebo group showed little or no improvement). There were no significant improvement differences between the therapies, with a slight preference (cognitive improvement) shown towards 1.3 ATA with air only.

These results, combined with the McGill study, refute previous assumptions in the hyperbaric industry that 100% oxygen under higher pressure is a superior treatment, a false "more is better" treatment bias. In the areas of cognitive development, the milder therapy does not trigger the narrowing of the blood vessels (vasoconstriction) in the brain in the way that the other therapies do, thus allowing additional oxygen to pass through tissue unrestricted.

"It brings into focus that the much more affordable mild hyperbaric therapy is an accessible alternative to expensive high-pressure hyperbaric therapy and does not compromise a patient's standard of care," Dr. Mukherjee admits.

This study has far-reaching implications for other neurological conditions as well. Facing the sky-rocketing costs of treating traumatic brain injury for recovering veterans, stroke, and autism, this study brings hope to those families struggling to afford this greatly desired therapy.

Dr. Arun Mukherjee is Senior Consultant in Internal Medicine, Majeedia Hospital, and Hamdard University, New Delhi, India, and a member of the International Hyperbarics Association.



Source: International Hyperbarics Association

[JURIST] The UN General Assembly [official website] on Wednesday adopted a resolution [materials] declaring that access to clean and sanitized drinking water is a basic human right [press release]. The resolution, passed by a vote of 122-0 with 41 member states abstaining, also requires the UN Independent Expert on the issue of human rights obligations related to access to safe drinking water and sanitation, Catarina de Albuquerque [official profile], to report to the General Assembly annually. The initiative promotes progress to achieve Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) [official website] to reduce social and economic harms by 2015, including decreasing the number of people who cannot reach or afford safe drinking water and do not have basic sanitation by half. The resolution also expressed concern that approximately 884 million people are without access to safe drinking water and more than 2.6 billion people lack access to basic sanitation. In March, Bolivian President Evo Morales [BBC profile] called on the UN [JURIST report] to declare access to safe drinking water a basic human right and introduced the resolution. Morales' administration has been working to increase access [NNN-Prensa Latina report] for Bolivian citizens to clean water since 2006, investing in new water and sewage systems throughout the country. Earlier this month, the Botswana High Court [SAFLII database] ruled that the indigenous Bushmen [National Geographic backgrounder], or San, people cannot reopen a well [JURIST report] or dig new wells in their village in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve [official website]. The closest source of water for the Bushmen is 25 miles from their village. The Botswana government has argued that the tribe's village in the game reserve is not a formal settlement and, therefore, the government is not required to provide the Bushmen with water. Spokesmen for the tribe announced in January [JURIST report] that they plan to take the land dispute issue to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) [official website; JURIST news archive] because the government continues to ignore court orders granting land rights.

I was going to do a number-filled post incorporating all of the latest demographic data [1]from GosKomStat, data that show that Russia's demographics continue their slow but steady improvement, but then I saw that Anatoly Karlin had already produced a quality overview [2] of the recent trends. However since Russian health and demographics are my speciality (or at least the area in which I embarrass myself the least) I still want to write something, because I think it's an issue that is worth highlighting and an area in which Western forecasters have been almost uniformly awful.   To simplify things just a little bit, and really just by a little, the basic Western view of Russia is the following: things are really awful, things are not only really awful but they are clearly getting worse, and not only are things really awful and clearly getting wore but they cannot get better due to the Kremlin's malevolent incompetence .  The people expressing this decidedly pessimistic view of Russia, like any large group of people, run the gamut from the hackish, incompetent, and predictably idiotic (like Ed Lucas) to the honest, intelligent, and highly capable (like fellow True/Slant contributor Julia Ioffe). Now the world is a very strange and unpredictable place, and it is perfectly possible that the "Russophobe" (a term I hate, as I generally find such labels worthless, but use here for convenience and clarity's sake) view is the more accurate one. As is probably clear, I don't have access to any special trove of knowledge, nor do I have a direct line to the powers-that-be in the Kremlin, so I can never state, and hope I've never stated, that I am 100% sure that Russia will do X, Y, or Z. I do my best to read a wide variety of sources to understand what's happening, and I hope that my record as a prognosticator demonstrates that I have some idea what I'm talking about, but Russia is a very big and a very complicated place that has a nasty habit of routinely humbling the Westerners who study it. All of this is an extremely long-winded and pretentious way of saying that, while I am mildly optimistic about Russia, I don't want to understate the problems that still plague it: they are legion, and many are serious. The recent spate of violence in the North Caucasus is particularly alarming, and should be keeping even the most supremely confident siloviks up at night. The Putin-Medvedev government has built a great deal of its popularity on the idea (which, as it turns out,  is not entirely fanciful) that it has "kept Russians safe," and a spate of Islamist violence that shows that this is not the case  could have potentially catastrophic destabilizing consequences. Why, then, am I mildly optimistic about Russia, a country that even in the most optimistic of all readings has so many pressing issues? Is it simply because I'm a paid shill? There are two reasons, both of which are quite simple. First, the Russian themselves are increasingly optimistic about the future since they are having more babies, getting married more frequently, getting divorced less frequently, living longer, having fewer accidents, drinking themselves to death less often, and killing themselves (and each other) less and less frequently. Decreases in crime and suicide, and increases in fertility, marriage, and life expectancy, of the sort seen in Russia since 2000, and particularly since 2004, are exactly what one would expect from a society that is increasingly self-confident and making modest economic and social progress.* Second, and this might even be more important than the first reason, things got so catastrophically awful, so incomprehensibly wretched, gruesome, and horrific during the 1990's that, absent a descent into a truly Hobbesian state, there was little way to go but up. Most Westerners still don't comprehend the extent to which Russia collapsed along with Communism, because contemplating things like societal collapses is as difficult as it is disconcerting. I have neither the time nor the rhetorical talent to do a full and comprehensive evaluation of the 1990's, I've made a few crude attempts at various points while writing this blog, but the corruption, the thievery, the violence, the criminality, and the sheer amount of human misery in 1990s Russia make Putin's version look like the Netherlands. Entire branches of industry, worth billions upon billions of dollars even by the most pessimistic reckonings, were simply handed over in rigged auctions or "purchased" by oligarchs with loans given to them by the state. Assets were stripped and sold off on a historically unprecedented rate, and the amount of capital flight was beyond anyone's reckoning (some of this money is still tickling back in via Cyprus, which despite its miniscule population and economy is one of the largest sources of Russian "FDI"). Perhaps most shockingly of all, Russia fought and lost a major war on its own territory. More telling than any of the political, military, or economic problems (which were very serious indeed) though was the simple fact that Russians abruptly stopped having kids once the Soviet Union fell apart: in the few years after 1991 the fertility rate fell by 50% which is one of the most precipitous drops ever recorded. A more damning indictment of the state of the contry can hardly be imagined. Indeed the fertility rate stayed firmly planted down in the 1.2 range for most of the 1990's and the first years of Putin's reign until it started to increase significantly in 2006 (estimates are that it will be right around 1.6 for 2010, which is actually higher than the rate in most Central/East European countries). The most parsimonious explanation for the increase is that, after significant economic growth and a dramatic increase in real wages, Russians were increasingly confident about their own futures and increasingly able to find gainful employment and afford the basic necessities required for raising a family. The fact that the state started dumping money into pro-natal programs probably didn't hurt, but decisions about if or when to have a child are intensely personal in nature and are only weakly impacted by state policy.  Of course there are other, competing, explanations for the recent increase in Russian fertility such as "it's all Mooslims!" or "The state is cooking the books!" but these are pretty radical interpretations that would need a mountain of corroborating evidence to be taken seriously. So what is the point of all of this? Is there one? Surely boosting my own ego is a major consideration, but I am truly exasperated by the Western tendency to conflate Russia's condition with its trajectory. It is one thing to say "life in Russia sucks!" In general, I'd agree with this point since large sweeping sections of Russia remain desperately poor and ramshackle: you would need to be blissfully ignorant, or extremely stupid, to not notice the huge gaps between Russia's level of development and the levels of development of leading industrialized nations. It is, however, an extremely different thing to say "things in Russia are getting worse!" This is simply not true, and the Russians themselves are exceedingly well aware of this. If the Russians come accross someone who is telling them that their country is getting worse they will rightfully be suspicious of that persons motives. So to the 5 people that will read this screen/paen please: when describing Russia please try to do justice to the fact that things are getting better, and that the most basic indicators of the health of a society (life expectancy, the crime rate, average wages) are far more positive than they have been in many years. *As Anatoly Karlin astutely noted in his post, Russia's rates of "death from vice" (alcohol poisoning, suicide, and homicide) are now better than they were in 1990, meaning that one can make a compelling argument that Russians have never lived in a more stable and healthy society. Of course this says more about the deep dysfunctions and pathologies that have long been charicteristic of Russia than it does the blissful nature of Medvedev's kingdom circa 2010 [1] http://www.gks.ru/free_doc/2010/demo/edn06-10.htm [2] http://www.sublimeoblivion.com/2010/07/28/russian-resilience-4/

Kayley Boleyn and Christopher Taylor inflicted more than 70 injuries on toddler Ryan Lovell-Hancox

A couple who murdered a toddler they were paid to look after were today jailed for life.

Kayley Boleyn, 19, and Christopher Taylor, 25, inflicted more than 70 injuries on three-year-old Ryan Lovell-Hancox. The boy lived with the couple at their flat in Bilston, West Midlands, for a month before he was taken to hospital in a coma after a brain haemorrhage.

They had been paid £40 a week by the boy's mother and Boleyn's cousin, 21-year-old Amy Hancox, who felt she could not look after the child because of mental health problems. But Boleyn "abused the trust" of Ryan's parents, who had no idea of their son's suffering.

Wolverhampton crown court heard Taylor and Boleynforced the youngster to live in squalor in the weeks before his death on Christmas Eve 2008, providing better care for two dogs. Violence towards Ryan was not borne from a "flash of temper", but was sustained and horrific.

Two days before Ryan's death, Hancox tried to batter down the door to Boleyn's home to see her son. But Boleyn, who like her boyfriend abused cannabis and alcohol, refused to let her in as Ryan's face and body was covered in bruising.

Mrs Justice Macur ordered Boleyn to serve at least 13 years in prison while Taylor was told his minimum term would be 15 years. "It's clear to me that you [Boleyn] and your co-defendant were incapable of looking after yourselves, let alone a child," she said.

"There were bruises to his skull, which had been inflicted by up to 10 individual blows. There were marks on his legs and grazes to his face. He had been grabbed forcibly around the jaw and slapped and punched.

"These were not in isolation. There were further assaults to his lower back and buttocks on which there was extensive bruising.

"It really was a case where the jury saw injuries from top to toe. He would have suffered emotionally and physically and he would have needed comfort but you mocked him."

The judge added: "You were unable to keep your own lives under control without smoking cannabis and alcohol and you took your petty grievances out on this boy because you regarded him as hyperactive and out of control."

It was disclosed during today's 45-minute hearing that Boleyn, who with Taylor was found guilty in March of murder and child cruelty, was known to social services. A social worker had attended her home on the day the toddler was taken to hospital.

Social workers were aware Boleyn had problems after she left school, aged 12, to care for her younger siblings.

Frances Oldham QC, for Boleyn, read out a probation officer's report to the court which said: "I believe Miss Boleyn is vulnerable and in need of assistance. She has very few supportive relationships in her life and as a result is very isolated."

Wolverhamton city council said it expected to publish the findings of its serious case review this autumn.

Ryan's mother and his father, John Lovell, 24, wept throughout the hearing. Hancox ran from the public gallery in tears as her victim impact statement was read out. In it she described her son as a "bubbly, intelligent boy who she loved with all her heart".

by David Roberts.

In the U.S. Senate, it requires 60 votes out of 100 to do anything—to proceed to debate, to pass a bill, to amend a bill, to confirm a political appointee or a judge—anything. This is not what the Founding Fathers envisioned and it’s not in the Constitution; rather, it’s a result of unprincipled abuse of informal practices by an increasingly nihilistic Republican Party.

The dysfunctional state of the Senate has damaging consequences that extend into virtually every corner of American politics. There’s just one in particular I want to focus on today, namely: It gives progressives a complex!

Take environmentalists. Just last week, the climate bill, into which they’d poured countless hours of effort, lobbying, campaigning, arguing, and advocating, died an unceremonious death. Not surprisingly, this set off a round of self-recrimination and mutual recrimination. “Why did we fail?” they cried in anguish. Was it the messaging? Too much climate, not enough jobs? The reverse? Was the strategy too focused on Congress and not enough on the grassroots? Too many compromises? Too few? Could Obama have saved it? And on and on.

But step back for a moment and think about it. Climate and clean energy are incredibly difficult issues for any number of reasons. Yet environmentalists pulled together a huge coalition of businesses, religious groups, military groups, unions, and social justice groups. They got a majority of U.S. citizens on their side, as polls repeatedly showed. And—here’s the kicker—on the back of all that work, they got a majority of legislators in both houses of Congress on their side.

I submit to you that in a sane world, that’s what success looks like. More to the point, that’s what success looks like in every other developed democracy on the planet. Environmentalists did what they were supposed to do—and they did it well! They should be proud of themselves. It’s not their fault that idiosyncratic, historically accidental features of U.S. government make enacting reform prohibitively difficult.

The fact is, on a consequential, far-reaching, forward-looking, regionally charged set of issues like climate and energy, getting 60 percent of the country on your side is difficult enough. But getting 60 votes in the already-unrepresentative Senate is just an absurdly high bar. Theoretically, 40 senators representing under 10 percent of the population can block the will of the other 90 percent!

At least for the time being, it’s unlikely that any combination of messaging, mobilizing, and lobbying could put a climate bill over the top. That doesn’t mean the environmental movement is incompetent. It just means the Senate is broken.

Related Links:

The filibuster undermines democratic accountability

The filibuster is what enables the ‘secret hold’ in the Senate

There is no express or implicit constitutional right to filibuster

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Social justice is a very important concept for anyone who is interested in peacemaking, coexistence,

Court in Khabarovsk region orders internet provider Rosnet to block YouTube over ultra-nationalist video

Russia's blogosphere reacted with anger today after a regional court banned YouTube because it carried a single video containing "extremist" content.

The court in Komsomolsk-on-Amur in Khabarovsk region in the Russian far east ordered Rosnet, a local internet provider, to block YouTube as well as three online libraries and a website that archives deleted web pages.

The regional ban was made because YouTube hosted Russia For Russians, an ultra-nationalist video which was added to the justice ministry's federal list of banned extremist materials after a separate court decision in Samara region in November.

The other four sites – Web.archives.org, Lib.rus.ec, Thelib.ru and Zhurnal.ru – all carried copies of Hitler's Mein Kampf.

Anton Nosik, Russia's leading internet guru, condemned the decision. "The level of crassness in this court ruling is typical of legal proceedings concerning the internet in Russia," he said. Google, the owner of YouTube, said the ruling violated Russians' constitutional right to freedom of information.

Many bloggers also decried the ban, warning it could be a slippery slope to tighter censorship across the country.

"I can imagine it now," wrote Ghost82 on LiveJournal. "Russia in 2015, YouTube is banned everywhere. In search of a gulp of air, people travel to the border with Georgia where they will sit with their laptops and pay unimaginable sums to connect to the internet via powerful Wi-Fi transmitters for a taste of depraved western civilisation."

Alexander tweeted on RuTvit: "YouTube has been given to understand that Russia, Pakistan and North Korea have much in common."

An engineer with Rosnet said the company had suggested prosecutors should contact the portals concerned directly to request they take down the offensive material, rather than issuing a blanket ban. "They [prosecutors] remained deaf to these pleas," he told the Gazeta.ru news website. Rosnet is appealing the ruling.

While television is tightly controlled by the state, Russia's soft authoritarian government has so far done little to rein in the internet. Social media and blogging sites are popular and provide a vital outlet for opposition and civil movements.

However, a package of laws to be reviewed by parliament in October could give the security services new powers to close down sites at short notice.

The YouTube ruling is likely to be an embarrassment for President Dmitry Medvedev, who recently launched his own channel on the video-sharing site.

Other countries that have banned YouTube include China, Pakistan, Turky and Iran.

Much has been written about how people are absurdly careless with their personal information online, offering everything from their home being readily available for theft to their least savory moments with unknown suitors in dimly lit pubs.   Little by little, people are beginning to realize that a moments foolishness can be their perpetual online legacy, and they restrain that urge to update their facebook with the running description of their bathing rituals.

That's all well and good, but does that mean you're now safe from online shenanigans?

Not as long as the government has its way.  While you calmly vet your online information to protect yourself, various tentacles of the government are busy mindlessly posting your personal information on the internet.  How personal?  Like your social security number, in tandem with other identifying data that is commonly used to access your financial and personal records.  Via The Virginia Watchdog:

Your SSN is just a click away on the world wide web and it was most likely put there by some stupid elected official. And your health information is next.   Go to more news articles in our archives  and see examples of records put online by courts and other state agencies.  Yours could be online somewhere right now.    Many state agencies across the country like New York, Colorado, and Pennsylvania have SSNs online today available to anyone, anywhere in the world.   

 

This is no tin foil society, but quite real.  Government, in the name of transparency, allows access to data of all sorts indiscriminately, from properties to court records.  Within this is a gold mine of personal information, necessary for the purposes of internally maintaining identification information but definitely not the sort of stuff you would hand over to the folks running the omnipresent Nigerian lottery.  And yet it's all there, neatly available.

BJ Ostergren wasn't happy about this, and decided to address it by doing a little tit for tat, publishing the SSNs of public officials online to see how much they liked having their personal information exposed.  Shockingly, they didn't. So they tried to shut her down.  No dice, said the Fourth Circuit in Ostregren v. Cuccinelli.

"The unredacted SSNs on Virginia land records that Ostergren has posted online are integral to her message," Judge Allyson Duncan wrote in the unanimous opinion. "Indeed, they are her message. Displaying them proves Virginia's failure to safeguard private information and powerfully demonstrates why Virginia citizens should be concerned."

The court also agreed that the state cannot punish Ostergren for posting on her website the same public records that the government makes available online.

"Ms. Ostergren's most powerful advocacy weapon has been to demonstrate to the public how bad a job the government is doing to protect our online privacy rights," said Kent Willis, executive director of the ACLU of Virginia, which represented Ostergren. "The government responded, but by trying to silence Ms. Ostergren."

Putting aside our sheep-like willingness to provide personal information on demand to petty much anyone who asks, whether governmental or the nice young lady at the cash register of your local big box store, what this reflects is the difficulty of those entrusted with personal information of exercising reasonable judgment, and putting in the amount of effort, necessary to protect us.  Thousand, if not millions, of records are dumped online so that politicians can claim transparency, but it takes a lot of manpower, not to mention a little bit of thought, to deal with it in a way that doesn't expose our information to anyone who cares to look.

No matter how well we conduct ourselves, or teach our children, to be circumspect in our online dealings, it's not going to help without the cooperation of government clerks who mindlessly offer us up on a silver platter.  Some might view BJ Ostergren's actions in exposing government officials in the same way they expose others, but asking nicely isn't working out too well and this needs to be stopped. 

Is it harsh to expose the personal information of government officials to all the scammers, cheaters, liars and thieves online.  You bet.  When the lesson can't be taught nicely, unfortunately, harsh measures are needed.  This has got to be stopped.



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The police are using this ancient concept to tackle urban gangs, but can it be fairly administered?

The centuries-old legal doctrine of "joint enterprise" has been taken up with enthusiasm by modern policemen and prosecutors. It provides one remedy for the increasingly intractable problem of how you prosecute urban gangs. However, its increased use also raises very real issues of fairness, as has been voiced by campaigners for reform, who were disappointed this week when permission to appeal was dismissed in the controversial case of Jordan Cunliffe , a partially blind teenager convicted of murder because he was present at the attack and did nothing to prevent it.

The concept of joint enterprise is not new. In the eighteenth century, if someone was killed as the result of a duel, the concept gave the authorities far-reaching powers to prosecute. They could convict not just the men taking part in the duel but also their supporters, those holding their coats and even doctors standing ready to attend to the wounded.

The most famous modern use of joint enterprise was in convicting Derek Bentley of shooting a police officer in 1952. The actual murder was committed by his accomplice, Christopher Craig. But, because Craig was only 16 at the time, he escaped hanging. Bentley was heard to utter the words "Let him have it", so he was convicted of murder under the principle of joint enterprise and hanged in 1953.

But the police appear to have stepped up the use of the doctrine in recent years to deal with the specific problem of urban gangs. Gangs are a big issue in the inner city. And this goes beyond the tabloid headlines. People feel menaced by them. Many of the most unpleasant phenomena of modern youth culture take place in gangs, notably gang rape.

In a gang, an under-educated young man finds friendship, family, possibilities for entrepreneurial activity and the bravado to commit horrific acts. Gangs are bad for the communities that they flourish in and bad for the young men involved. In certain communities, young men trying to keep their head down and pass their exams often find themselves on the fringes of criminal gangs because to do otherwise is to risk social ostracism.

But prosecuting gangs has proved an increasingly intractable task for the authorities. The gulf in culture, class and race between many gangs in modern urban Britain and the authorities trying to bring them to book makes it harder than ever to expect a penitent gang member to "crack" and tell the police all they know. On the contrary, I have had a number of instances in my own constituency where a whole gang sees someone murdered or raped, but nobody will admit to seeing anything.

This is where the joint enterprise concept starts to look attractive. The authorities are going out of their way to let young people know of its existence. In a police video presentation for young people, the policeman says: "If you are involved in a murder in any way, shape or form we will come to you. We will find you. We will come at a time when you don't expect us and we will enter your life. We will invade your home. Invariably your front door will be removed. We will enter. This will be in front of your parents and your family, possibly your friends, and we will change your life."

But, increasingly, concerns are being expressed about the use of joint enterprise against gang activity and whether it is fair. The (then) Lord Chief Justice Lord Philips set out his reservations in his Essex University/Clifford Chance lecture on reforming the law of homicide in 2008. The Law Commission has echoed these doubts.

As a strong supporter of civil liberties, but also as someone who has first-hand experience of the problems posed by gang culture in urban Britain, I can see both sides of the argument on the use of "joint enterprise". There can be no doubt that the law warrants review.

Diane Abbott is MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington

By: E.R. Shipp

Once upon a time, the ultimate concentration of black political power in Brooklyn lay in Weeksville, a strategically planned village of free black property holders that began in 1838 in what is now Bedford-Stuyvesant.

"Weeksville was created to be a political base," says Jennifer Scott, director of research at the Weeksville Heritage Center. The settlement (sometimes referred to as a colony) played a critical role in the abolitionist movement, including stops along the Underground Railroad; and it became a haven for blacks fleeing racial violence in Manhattan in the 1860s during the Civil War. Businesses, churches and a school thrived there. Eventually as the new Brooklyn Bridge made this part of Brooklyn accessible to Manhattanites and others, and as blacks spread throughout greater Brooklyn--a city separate from New York until 1898--Weeksville ceased being a separate community and, ultimately, was forgotten.

But in the late 1960s, amid an unprecedented period of activism spurred in part by anti-poverty programs and urban-renewal plans, Weeksville was rediscovered, becoming in its own way a spur to activism.

Nearly half a century later, Charles Barron--a self-described radical, onetime Black Panther Party member and now an outspoken representative of eastern Brooklyn on the New York City Council--pronounces the state of black politics in Brooklyn as dire. "We are in a state of powerlessness. We have power within our hands; we just won't collectively use it." Rep. Edolphus "Ed" Towns, the dean of the Brooklyn congressional delegation, echoes that sentiment, noting that from city council to state legislature to Congress, black Brooklyn is present, but not necessarily potent. "We have a tremendous amount of potential, and in many instances we are not utilizing it. But it's there," he said, adding: "We do not talk to each other enough to come up with an agenda we all can rally around."

Kevin Powell, a writer and activist who is challenging Towns in the Sept. 14 Democratic primary, says blacks in Brooklyn are ridiculously disempowered when compared to their ranks of elected officials. There is, indeed, potential, he says, but too many office-holders have formed "little ghetto monarchies" where "they think they own a political seat and think they own a piece of Brooklyn." Their main interest, he says, is in keeping themselves, their relatives and their friends in power.  Powell and others say they have turned off younger middle-class entrepreneurs, professionals and homeowners who have found alternative means of addressing black Brooklyn's socioeconomic needs and perhaps of ultimately displacing entrenched political power.

From the sidelines, Al Sharpton, a Brooklyn scion whose sights have long spread beyond local black politics but whose Godfather-like seal of approval is coveted by prospective candidates, says that even with the evolving spheres of influence, "the bad news is none of it is coordinated."

Welcome to Brooklyn 2010, home to about 954,960 blacks, more than any other county in the United States. Whites of the non-Hispanic variety number about 944,690; Hispanics about 492,880. Harlem in Manhattan has the name and the cultural icons, but Brooklyn has the numbers, and its politics is nothing if not drama-filled. A member of the city council was assassinated--yes assassinated--in the council chamber by a rival in 2003.  There's a reason why Brooklyn has been immortalized in rap lyrics, a Mike Tyson tattoo and with the "Bed-Stuy Do or Die" antics of Spike Lee's film, Do The Right Thing.  In Brooklyn, known for its political pageantry, the streets speak to the suites.

In the early 1960s, once blacks were able to spread out across more of central Brooklyn--especially as the borough's black middle class of doctors, lawyers, teachers and the like left--leaders found it more difficult to carry out the kind of voter registration and get-out-the-vote drives sponsored by such organizations as the Unity Democratic Club.  (The UDC, don't forget, produced, among others, Rep. Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman in Congress and the first woman to run for president in a major party.) The poorer folks left behind were much more vulnerable to the kind of tamp-down-the-vote shenanigans of white political bosses that would have made their Southern counterparts proud.

As a founder of the UDC, Thomas R. Jones helped launch a base of political enlightenment and activism among the poor in 1966. Accompanying New York Sen. Robert F. Kennedy on a more-or-less routine walkabout through black slums, he told the senator that the one thing Bedford-Stuyvesant did not need was to be studied yet again. As the New York Times recounted in Jones' 2006 obituary: "'I'm weary of study, senator, very weary,'" Justice Jones said. "‘The Negro people are angry, senator, and judge that I am, I'm angry too.'"  Soon Kennedy set into motion what became the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, intended to be a model for the nation, and Jones, a longtime fighter for social justice who was then a trial court judge, was its first chair. Among those who emerged from that was Al Vann, now a member of the city council and, according to Towns, the person black Brooklynites of all persuasions tend to turn to for guidance.

For many decades, even before elected officials and activists emerged from the anti-poverty programs of the 1960s and 1970s, there were powerful ministers like Gardner Taylor and Milton A. Galamison and William Augustus Jones--close allies of Martin Luther King Jr.--who harnessed the power of their constituents and acted upon economic, education and civil rights issues during what was still very much an "Up South" era of Brooklyn history. In 1962, for instance, when the Brooklyn chapter of CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) was the most active in the North, these ministers and others joined Brooklyn CORE in a dramatic protest, demanding jobs for blacks during construction of a major medical center. Together they fought to break the barriers that prevented blacks from moving into certain neighborhoods and into new housing developments. But that was then.

Barron says that many younger participants in the political system don't have "the fire in their bellies" that propelled an earlier generation. But maybe that is because they don't want to become inside players more interested in knocking others off ballots, securing their own positions and promoting the candidacies of family members than in addressing most broadly--and sometimes not so politely--the needs of the people of their districts.  The ghetto monarchs, Powell says, "may have had good intentions in the very beginning, but somewhere along the line they lost their way." He adds: "We need 21st-century solutions to the many challenges facing our people. You can't just get up there and think that you can take people to casinos, give them turkeys at Thanksgiving and maybe send them a Christmas card."

In Brooklyn, competition and compromise have resembled Chicago more than Atlanta. They have long revolved around deal-making involving blacks against blacks (often, for lack of a better distinction, African Americans versus Caribbean Americans), blacks against Jews (especially the Hasidic sects) and blacks against Italians.  The outcome of these battles has usually been much more personal power than people power. And that's where human loud speakers like Charles Barron, the late Sonny Carson and Sharpton have come in.  Since the late-1960s, three major protest movements--none of them led by traditional political leadership--have shaped Brooklyn politics and had an impact on who is heard from, whether by formally standing for office or wielding influence from the streets. These were the 1960s and '70s battles for community control of public schools (still a subject of interest), the 1989 murder of a black teenager in Italian Bensonhurst and a violent clash in 1991 between blacks and Hasidic Jews in Crown Heights that left a black child and a Jewish scholar dead.

Of course, political power or influence is not solely exerted from the club houses or the streets. Barbershops and beauty parlors still hold sway. But no politician or wannabe would pass up an opportunity to address church associations or organizations like the Caribbean American Chamber of Commerce and Industry, which draws from the entrepreneurial class.  According to Roy Hastick Sr., president of the chamber, his organization has  provided "advice and counsel" to elected officials  throughout its 25-year history. Another non-politics "political" organization is the West Indian Day Carnival Association, whose parade each Labor Day draws about 2 million people--including political figures seeking to curry favors, especially among the professional associations whose members march, sponsor floats and, when election days roll around, vote. Jones sees the organization as having "an enormous latent political power."

Even if Barron's observation is true that many of the younger crop of politicians don't have the fire in the belly of the older generations, a lot of them do come with name recognition.  In the state legislature, for instance, there is Towns' son, Darryl, and Barron's wife Inez. In the U.S. House of Representatives, there is Yvette Clarke, daughter of former city council member, Una. And challenging the Brooklyn political machine by seeking a position as a district leader is Rep. Major Owens' son, Chris.

One of the most recognized names among the cognoscenti these days is Bill Thompson, who crafted a political career first, from being the son of a prominent party official, legislator and appellate judge, and then from being an aide to the Brooklyn borough president (sort of like a mini-mayor). He parlayed those connections into election as the city's comptroller in 2001; then he launched a campaign for mayor that hardly anyone gave much hope.  With only about $8 million, he came close to unseating Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who spent more than $100 million of his own money for re-election to a third term last year. Having announced that he is running again in 2013, Thompson is now biding his time at an investment bank.

Thompson faces many obstacles, not the least of which is Bloomberg, who just may seek a fourth term and again spend from his own pockets like a drunken sailor. But between now and 2013, other candidates may also emerge with the blessings of Bloomberg and other high rollers. Those who did not support him in 2009, including black elected officials, labor leaders and big-name ministers like Floyd Flake, Calvin Butts and Brooklyn-based A.R. Bernard, might come around if the tea leaves line up right. But observers of the scene say that most of all, while making his money as an investment banker, he has to come up with a compelling message, focusing on issues that prospective voters care about and that make him relevant.  And he has to be visible. "You have to be vocal. You have to take leadership," says Barron.  "If he does, Billy Thompson will be the second black mayor of New York City."

And, Barron, in the meantime, hopes to become the second black governor of the state of New York. He has formed the Freedom Party, channeling the spirit of Fannie Lou Hamer who was "sick and tired of being sick and tired" when she formed the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in Mississippi in 1964.

As he looks ahead, David R. Jones, a lifelong Brooklynite, sees two things about which to be optimistic. First, there is a newer breed of people entering politics, many of them women.

Second, there is a resurgence of a black middle class interested in improving their lives and thus those of their neighbors. "This includes a reversal of out-migration and expansion of the entrepreneurial class," Jones said. These newcomers have the ability not only to raise money for candidates and causes but also to re-invigorate community institutions and to hold accountable officials who they summon to appear before them. After all, they vote.

As all this goes on, Sharpton, who no longer lives in Brooklyn, sees a natural system of checks and balances. I see that, and chaos, too. But I also see a potential return to the spirit of Weeksville, led by independent people with political, social and entrepreneurial vision that transcends the tribalism--or ghetto monarchies--that prevail now.

E.R. Shipp won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1996.

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Agency Description:

Asian & Pacific Islander Wellness Center's mission is to educate, support, empower, and advocate for Asian and Pacific Islander (AΠ) communities - particularly A&PIs; living with, or at-risk for, HIV/AIDS. We are the oldest and largest nonprofit in North America focusing on sexual health and HIV in AΠ communities. Founded in 1987 as an all-volunteer, community-based response to the AIDS crisis in communities of color; we are based in San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood; we operate local, regional, statewide, and national programming, and collaborate with grassroots activists throughout the Asia Pacific Region.

All of our work is aligned to fight HIV-related stigma; to provide primary health care access to A&PIs; who experience the most extreme forms of discrimination and have the least access to quality services; and to be the premiere provider of transgender services for the City of San Francisco. The agency's greatest assets - our Board of Directors, staff and volunteers - reflect the talents and diversity of the communities we serve. As a cornerstone of our cultural competency, our staff speak approximately 20 languages. Our work is rooted in our core values – Client-Centeredness, Compassion, Justice, Leadership, Respect, Sex-Positivity, and Wellness – which anchor our strategic thinking, our service delivery models, our community collaborations, and our organizational culture.

Position Description:

The Associate Director is responsible for co-directing the care services department & the prevention education department and ensuring that programmatic and administrative implementation meet the organization’s overall vision, mission, and goals.

The Associate Director will work with a team that provides care and prevention case management, mental health assessment and counseling, health and treatment education, and service referral, linkage and coordination to Asians and Pacific Islanders (A&PIs;) living with, or at-risk for, HIV/AIDS and members of their family and support system. Additionally HIV prevention education via HIV and hepatitis testing, street and bar outreach, individual counseling, educational workshops and support groups, and retreats for the following communities which may include: A&PIs;, Transgender individuals, queer youth, and gay and bisexual men. Responsibilities also include the management of federal and local contracts, as well as program development and proposal writing to expand services.

Major Responsibilities:

Program Planning and Evaluation:

• Coordinate and maintain quality management and evaluation activities
• Conduct need assessments, program planning, and evaluation
• Conduct internal audit reviews on a quarterly basis (minimally)
• Identify and seek opportunities for program and agency expansion, including but not limited to, grant/contract-research and grant-writing, working in concert with the Development Department
• Oversee development of program curricula and protocols
• Develop prevention intervention modules towards motivating individuals to test for HIV and Hepatitis and preventing/reducing risk behaviors

Contract and Grants Management:

• Serve as liaison to funding source contract monitors
• Coordinate fiscal and grant management with the Director of Health Education and the Grants and Contracts Manager
• Manage city and federal contracts and oversee completion of programmatic implementation
• Prepare and manage program budgets
• Monitor client satisfaction surveys & client data collection, maintains data management program, and coordinates data submission to DPH and other funders.

Agency and Community Advocacy:

• Represent the agency and the community at external collaborations and events as assigned.
• Participate in the Department, Staff, and Managers meetings, and other management task-related workgroups as needed.
• Participate in the Organizational Leadership Team as interim when the Director of Health Education is not available.

Supervision:

• Recruit, train, supervise, coach and evaluate program staff.
• Provide clinical support to direct reports
• Prepare and facilitate the monthly department in-service meeting

Other duties as assigned

Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelors degree in a health-related field or equivalent experience
• Strong experience with HIV care and /or prevention and HIV/AIDS issues in Asian & Pacific Islander communities
• Proven clinical skills and experience with health care and social service systems in San Francisco
• At least three years experience supervising staff
• At least three years experience in HIV prevention education program development, substance abuse, mental health, or primary care
• At least two year experience with budget, contract, and program management in health or social service setting
• Strong written and verbal communication skills
• Ability to think analytically and creatively in order to solve problems
• PC proficiency in Word, Excel, e-mail
• Ability to master a wide range of information, taking initiative in a team-building environment
• Ability to coordinate multiple projects and tasks simultaneously in a high-pressure environment.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Masters degree in a clinical field (social work, counseling, psychology, public health, etc.)
• Familiarity with Bay Area community-based organizations and the SF Department of Public Health
• Bilingual in an Asian or Pacific Islander language

To apply, please click here or copy and paste: https://home.eease.com/recruit/?id=475374 into your web browser. When prompted to "enter text resume", please enter both your cover letter and resume. In your cover letter, please describe what drives you to achieve your goals, and tell us what leadership means to you.

We offer a comprehensive compensation and benefits package which includes: medical, dental and vision insurance, generous vacation, sick leave and holidays, one-month sabbatical, 403(b) with employer match, flexible work schedule, flex spending account, life insurance, long-term disability, professional development opportunities and more! (Benefits guidelines and eligibility vary based on tenure, employment status and FTE, among other factors.)

Asian & Pacific Islander Wellness Center is an equal opportunity employer committed to identifying and developing the skills and leadership of people from diverse backgrounds. Asian & Pacific Islander Wellness Center does not discriminate on the basis of age, ancestry, citizenship status, color, creed, disability status, gender identity, HIV status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, pregnancy, race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, or veteran status.

The Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Race, Ethnicity and Diversity (Warren Institute) is a multidisciplinary, collaborative venture to produce research, research-based policy prescriptions, and curricular innovation on issues of racial and ethnic justice in California and the nation. The Warren Institute’s mission is to engage the most difficult topics related to civil rights, race and ethnicity in a wide range of legal and public policy subject areas, providing valuable intellectual capital to public and private sector leaders, the media and the general public, while advancing scholarly understanding.

The Director of Education Policy will work with the legal, research and policy staff of the Warren Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, to develop a research-based policy agenda for K-12 and post secondary education reform. Responsibilities include conducting qualitative and quantitative research and policy analysis, and providing policymakers and civil rights leaders with research-based policy recommendations focused on the racial and ethnic justice dimensions of various school improvement measures; develop the education research and policy portfolio for the Warren Institute; conduct original research and policy analysis for internal and external constituencies. This position will also supervise and manage activities of education staff and assist with multiple fundraising efforts.

Responsibilities

35% Program & Policy Development
Identify, build and promote stable/productive relationships between the Warren Institute, the campus and federal, state, and/or local governments, and other community or civic groups (external contacts are typically at the highest and most influential levels). Design, develop and implement effective strategies through a thorough and in-depth knowledge of key issues in K-12 education and proposed/pending legislations to ensure a favorable outcome for underserved and disadvantaged communities of color. May coordinate visits between senior campus administration and key federal, state, and local government officials, including identifying and facilitating meeting sites, agendas, and other relevant details. Represent and advocate for the institution on various committees, task-forces, etc., including local community boards/committees. Provide information, advice and counsel to the Directors and Executive Director in the creation of programs and policies and the strategic direction of the Warren Institute. Assist in the implementation of short and long term goals and objectives. Collaborate with social science researchers, attorneys, advocates and scholars to conduct and commission new research and develop policy analysis.

20% Program Support
Assist with fundraising activities including writing grant proposals and attend meetings with funders as required. Write proposals for solicitation of individual, corporate, and/or foundation prospects. Identify, cultivate, solicit and/or steward gift prospects and work to build ongoing relationships with a broad and multi-tiered donor base.

10% Supervision
Select, train, lead, direct, and motivate staff, taking corrective action as necessary. Supervise research and legal staff working on education initiatives. Work with other staff to integrate students into the Warren Institute’s programs and research activities and advise and supervise law and graduate students.

35% Legal Research and Advocacy
Identify appropriate research design and methodologies. Assess advocacy efforts to determine the complimentary research needed. Conduct literature reviews of existing research. Identify new avenues of policy research that will address racial disparities in the education sector. Develop institutional relationships with advocacy, research, and policy partners within targeted communities and in organizations around the country. Shape the content for convening’s and briefings, developing agendas, materials and speakers. Conduct meetings, events, briefings, roundtables and campus visits or other opportunities to discuss key issues. Condense and distill research into formats that are understandable and useful for advocacy groups, legislators and other policy makers, and the media. Guide, direct, and manage activities within the education portfolio of the unit. Incumbent is charged with identifying, building, nurturing and maintaining effective relationships with external constituencies. Build/maintain excellent working relationships with key internal and external partners, typically at the highest level. Serve as a strong advocate for Warren Institute goals and objectives. Fulfill other responsibilities related to the Warren Institute’s educational equity initiative.

Requirements
• Graduate degree in education, social science, public policy, or related field required, Ph.D. or JD preferred.
• Advanced comprehensive knowledge of relevant external constituencies including the education research and policy community nationally and regionally including their composition and primary goals/objectives.
• Advanced knowledge and experience in K-12 and higher education and civil rights issues.
• Seven to ten years experience working in the education, policy and civil rights arena required.
• Strong experience in policy analysis and development as well as experience translating research into policy formats preferably within a civil rights-oriented environment.
• Advanced written, verbal, interpersonal communication and leadership skills, including attentive listening, skill in thinking quickly and responding appropriately.
• Advanced skill in advocating for and representing the institution to its various publics, including the media.
• Advanced skill in understanding constituency needs as relates to institutional needs and skill in designing solutions or strategies to achieve consensus.
• Advanced analytical, negotiation and political acumen skills.
• Strategic planning skills.
• Leadership/management skills, including skills to lead, direct, mentor, evaluate and motivate staff.
• Advanced, thorough and in-depth knowledge of the legislative process at all levels, key legislators, and current and on-going issues of concern in K-12 and higher education in general and specific issues of campus concern.
• Advanced skills in correctly and appropriately reading, interpreting and analyzing proposed and pending legislation.
• Advanced skill to develop and implement strategies designed to achieve legislative outcomes favorable to the best interests of the institution.
• Advanced knowledge and experience of social science and/or policy background with an understanding of social science methodologies.
• Ability to rapidly become familiar with new fields and research literatures.
• Published research and policy experience in an institutional setting required.
• Advanced ability to set priorities and demonstrate sound judgment, manage multiple projects and work with a team and a broad range of internal and external constituencies essential.
• Some travel required.

Other Information
This is a one year contract position, with possibility of renewal. This position may be subject to furlough.

How to Apply
In order to be formally considered for this position, please apply online at http://jobs.berkeley.edu and select Job ID #11240.

The University of California, Berkeley is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer.

Yes. We have other needs besides equality, social justice and human rights concerns cloaked in black power to people rants. Our dear dear friends over at Soulsessions.net announced today that they’re sponsoring a big ticket giveaway for the Rock The Bells Tour 2010. We find this to be most delicious news. This is the hip hop [...]

In her Tuesday column in the Arizona Republic website, columnist Laurie Roberts noted that

We are now less than 48 hours until Senate Bill 1070 becomes the law of the state – unless, of course, Judge Susan Bolton nixes the whole thing. . . Already, the barricades are up at the Sandra Day O’Connor Federal Courthouse . . .  Busloads of folks will be coming in from California to join with Arizona opponents of the new law.

[Ed. Note: Judge Bolton issued an injunction against key portions of the law this afternoon.]

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a notorious immigrant-hater who has for many years been violating the civil and human rights of  citizens and non-citizens alike, has just drawn his own line in the sand.

“Thousands of people will reportedly descend upon Maricopa County this week in support of or in protest to SB1070.  Intelligence gathering leads us to believe that several acts of civil disobedience are planned – here at my office headquarters in the Wells Fargo Bank high rise in downtown Phoenix; at the jails including Tent City and at Thursday’s crime suppression operation which will be conducted by my deputies and posse members.

“Activists and their celebrity sympathizers who wish to target this community and this Sheriff by attempting to disrupt our jail and patrol operations will be unsuccessful as we will be fully prepared to meet those challenges head on with appropriately staffed personnel and resources.”

Roberts concludes:

Angry protestors, an angry sheriff and plenty of TV cameras.

This has trouble written all over it.

I don’t know what Thursday’s protests seek to accomplish.  What I do know is that they won’t change a thing.  If fact, if anything the foxholes on both sides will just be dug in all the deeper.

As one of the thousands of local folks who plan to join our “celebrity sympathizers” in taking to the streets on Thursday, I would like to offer an explanation for our unruly behavior to Ms. Roberts, the clueless nativists filling up the comments on that column, and anyone else who may be wondering.

What Thursday’s protests hope to accomplish is precisely the same thing that civil rights protests of the early 1960s hoped to accomplish: to raise local and national awareness of the outrageous injustices being committed against innocent people in the name of “law and order” and “the American way of life,” in the hopes that such awareness will result in the overturning of laws that violate both the explicit guarantees of the US constitution and the most minimal sense of human decency.

These protests are not about competing visions for effective immigration policy, although indeed those issues are certainly circulating around here.  These protests are the f(@%!#g Montgomery bus boycotts and Woolworth’s sit-ins of the early 21st century, and the people streaming into our state this week are its Freedom Riders.

What these protests are about is simply this: the right of every single U.S. citizen, legal resident, and authorized or unauthorized visitor to walk across the street or drive a vehicle down the interstate highways  or  otherwise peacefully go about the normal, peaceful, and mostly law-abiding course of our daily business—without being subject to detention and questioning by any law enforcement officer who believes s/he has “reasonable suspicion” that you might not be a legally authorized resident or visitor, and subject to arrest and immediate jailing unless you can immediately provide one of the specific forms of identification deemed acceptable under the new law.  From there on, you are welcome to sweat it out in some of the most dangerous jails in the nation, until such a time as your immigration status (or lack thereof) can be officially verified by the federal government.

In other words, you could be this guy, a US-born citizen truck driver who pulled into a weigh station on the highway about 20 minutes from my house, provided both a commercial drivers’ license and a social security card upon request from some random government official, and somehow ended up cooling his heels in the ICE office until his wife could find his birth certificate and bring it in.  (And that was before SB 1070 was even passed!)

Please note that if you dare to get excessively cranky at these violations of what you thought were your rights under the 1st, 4th, 5th, and several other amendments to the United States Constitution, they will probably add on a few extra charges for disturbing the peace or resisting arrest, and in the current climate you are likely to find yourself face down on the ground with a baton or gun barrel pressing down on your neck.

And please note that you may now, under SB 1070, also be at risk of arrest and prosecution if you “conceal, harbor or shield” an undocumented immigrant or if you “know or recklessly disregard the fact” that the person does not have all their papers in order.   Which makes this the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 all over again, and any individual U.S. citizen who fails to report their friends or family members or patients or clients or students to the proper authorities a de facto outlaw as well.  [NB: This provision was NOT covered by today's injunction, so it still goes into force on 7/29.]

So what part of “illegal” don’t YOU understand, mis amigos?

While I would note that as in the 1960s Southeast, much of the heavy lifting is being done by local folks here in the churches and community organizations that have been struggling over these issues for years. I will say on behalf of the concerned residents of Arizona, “Bienvenidos a Arizona, mis hermanos y hermanas! And howdy, ya’ll!”  It’s about time you started paying attention, because things here are about to get even uglier than the already quite ugly we’ve been seeing for years, especially here in Maricopa County, and the ugliness seems to be threatening to spread nationwide if somebody doesn’t stop it before it jumps the firelines into California and Colorado and Texas and from there spreads like wildfire across the nation. And if there is anything that we Arizona residents know more about than racist hatemongering and fearmongering and badly crafted legislation, it is how fast and how far a tiny little wildfire can spread during a long hot dry summer and how unbelievably thoroughly it can scorch the land.

For those of you haven’t been paying much attention to our little state, I am working on a primer with some helpful links to the background and significance of this law, and I will be posting those later this week.

For those of you who are already in AZ, or on your way, or sitting out there somewhere far away wondering what you can do to help, here are some quick links to what’s going on this week:

General suggestions for supporting the cause, courtesy of AltoArizona, with specific suggestions for self-organized protesters both in and out of state: National Week Against Criminalization and National Day of Non-Compliance.

Update:

This morning, U.S. District Court Judge Susan Bolton has issued a preliminary injunction preventing several sections of Arizona’s new immigration law from becoming law, at least until the courts have a chance to hear the full case.

However, all this means is that some parts of the law won’t go into effect until after all of the relevant lawsuits can work their way through the courts. So the Thursday events are all still on, and we can still expect Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s goon squad to be out there doing their utmost to sweep the streets of brown people whose ancestors have, in most cases, been in this state since long before there even was a Bill of Rights, let alone a state of Arizona.

But Pollyanna is feeling quite vindicated in her cockeyed optimism that the good ol’ checks and balances system is still more or less functional even in this sunburned neck of the Tea Partying woods, and that reason and justice and sensible public policy considerations may still prevail over hatred and fearmongering, especially with the Obama administration actually stepping up to the plate on this.  And I’m looking forward to a protest mood that is much more hopeful and jubilant than depressed and terrified.

¡Sí, se puede!  Juntos somos fuertes! Oh, yes, I do believe that we shall overcome SOMEday!

Ya’ll be careful out there tomorrow, because it’s going to be a hot one, both literally and figuratively.  Or as we say here in the Sonoran Desert every time we take leave of anyone from May to September, stay cool!

I’ll be there with my camera, and blogging everything I see or hear, and giving away awesome free t-shirts to the first 25 righteous compañeros who catch my eye.  Because Pollyanna is just that kind of grrl, and she is crazy psyched to have discovered a means of non-armchair liberal activism that dovetails so nicely with her penchant for online shopping, her love of really clever graphic design, and her personal preference for mostly hiding out in air-conditioned cafes and only occasional stepping her toe out onto the actual streets. I figure I can empty a box in less than 60 seconds and be free to roam around with my camera and my giant bottle of ice water.

Stay tuned, folks, I’ll be here all week!  Coming soon:

• Out of my armchair and onto the streets; or, what’s a nice little gringa like me doing in a place like this?
• Open letter to my conservative friends and loved ones, re: why SB 1070 is not actually the common sense solution to actual immigration policy problems that you seem to be laboring under the delusion it is.

After yesterday's disappointing votes on the DISCLOSE Act and the war supplemental, liberals had reason to cheer today. A judge ordered Arizona to hold off on the most draconian elements of SB 1070, the House passed a bill reducing the disparity between crack and powder cocaine sentencing guidelines and Harry Reid pushed ahead with rules reform. Snarky newsletter writers had something to smile about, too: Senate candidate Sharron Angle isn't very familiar with what the Senate actually does and Jay Rockefeller is coming to terms with Amazon.com. This is HUFFPOST HILL for Wednesday, July 28th, 2010:

EXCLUSIVE: MOVE YOUR MONEY BILL MOVING IN HOUSE - The worst part about moving your money from one of the big banks to a local joint is the moving part. Automatic bill-pay has you snagged in its sticky grip: A bill dropped tomorrow by Brad Miller (D-N.C.) will require a megabank to work with the local bank so that the move is seamless. Hey, GOP, this is free-market stuff, here. As it is now, the FDIC can come in on a Friday, take a bank over, sell it to another bank by Monday and nobody misses a payment. Miller wants banks to do the same thing for regular, fed-up customers.

JUDGE BLOCKS CRUCIAL PARTS OF ARIZONA IMMIGRATION LAW - Our long, national nightmare of not having conservative blogs publish articles asking whether a Hispanic Supreme Court justice can properly judge a major immigration case may soon be over. The decision, handed down by district court judge Susan Bolton, suspends the parts of the law that order immigrants to carry their status papers at all times and require law enforcement officers to check the immigration status of individuals they've pulled over for other reasons . "U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton ruled that those sections should be put on hold until the courts resolve the issues. Other provisions of the law, many of them procedural and slight revisions to existing Arizona immigration statute, will go into effect at 12:01 a.m." http://huff.to/aP0XrX

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer: "This fight is far from over. In fact, it is just the beginning, and at the end of what is certain to be a long legal struggle, Arizona will prevail in its right to protect our citizens."

Former Mexican President Vicente Fox: "I think xenophobic measures taken by Arizona and its government are totally wrong. We're partners. Maybe that lady which is governor doesn't know how many products from Arizona are being exported into Mexico." Bloomberg: http://bit.ly/cEoIjs

DOJ spokeswoman Hannah August: "States can and do play a role in cooperating with the federal government in its enforcement of the immigration laws, but they must do so within our constitutional framework." http://yhoo.it/9V6o8p

A study out from the Immigration Policy Center finds that immigrants "wielded $1.5 trillion in consumer purchasing power," and "the businesses they own had sales and receipts of $549 billion and employed 3.7 million people at last count." In Arizona, immigrants contributed $776 million in tax revenue and provided the state with 66,500 full-time jobs. A state-by-state breakdown available here: http://bit.ly/9TBdP2

HOUSE SAYS CRACK SENTENCING IS WHACK - Congress addressed a historic wrong on Wednesday afternoon, replacing it instead with a slightly lesser wrong. By a voice vote, the House approved legislation reducing the disparity in the treatment of people caught with crack cocaine and powder cocaine. To be charged with a felony, crack users needed only possess 5 grams of the drug. Powder cocaine users, to be hit with the same charge, would need to be found with 500 grams. That 100-to-1 disparity has frequently been used by Drug War opponents as exhibit A in making the case that drug laws are racist. (GUILTY!) Dick Durbin and Steny Hoyer worked closely together to move this through, but let's give bloggers the credit. On Friday, the bill wasn't on the suspension calendar. On Saturday, Pelosi was asked about it at Netroots Nation and said she hoped it'd pass the next week. #NN10 FTW http://huff.to/a48M1T

Just to be clear: http://bit.ly/3aVTDm

The head of a company that shortens the lives of countless individuals by sending them thousands of feet into the bowels of the Earth daily to harvest its innards is apparently doing something suspicious. "Massey CEO Don Blankenship's company is reportedly working with other energy companies on crafting a new 527 group to run ads against candidates in West Virginia and Kentucky it fears will take on coal interests.." Daily Beast's Benjamin Sarlin: http://bit.ly/aCfyUL

Remember how hedge fund billionaire Pete Peterson's survey found majority support of raising the Social Security retirement age? Seemed weird, right? It was wrong. They've corrected it. "Software" error: http://huff.to/aFOYce

Some good news: keep your eyes peeled tomorrow for news about the search for a radical breakthrough in surface oil cleanup technology.

TOMORROW'S PAPERS TODAY - Washington Post: E.J. Dionne Jr. says we are letting stupid politics, irrational ideas on fiscal policy and an antiquated political structure undermine our power as a nation. The Hill: Molly K. Hooper on the message House Republicans plan to convey to voters over the August recess. Roll Call: Kathleen Hunter writes that House Democratic leaders are amplifying their efforts to supply rank-and-file Members with plenty of economic messaging fodder for the fast-approaching August recess. On Wednesday alone, the House passed three planks of the party's "Make It in America" initiative on trade and manufacturing.

DAILY DELANEY DOWNER - From Arthur Delaney: "After Senate Democrats broke a 50-day filibuster and restored unemployment benefits to the long-term jobless, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) vowed to do more. 'There are a number of people who have maxed out, they've been looking and looking for work and haven't found it, and there is a separate act that would extend the unemployment benefits to them....Extending this was really important. There are some people who go beyond the 99 weeks and we're going to try to do that next.'" Neato -- can we have some details on what you plan to do and when? No. http://huff.to/cd3Oyq

Don't be bashful: Send tips/stories/photos/events/fundraisers/job movement/juicy miscellanea to huffposthill@huffingtonpost.com. Follow us on Twitter - @HuffPostHill

HEY OUTDATED PARLIAMENTARY PROCEDURE, THE DEMOCRATS ARE COMING FOR YOU - Harry Reid today added a bill to the legislative calendar that would put an end to the practice of anonymous holds on nominees presented to the Senate. The Hill: "If Reid does bring it up, it appears that he may have the votes to do away with the practice after Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) lobbied Senate colleagues to end it. Sixty-seven votes are needed to change Senate rules, and McCaskill, as of late June, had said she'd gathered 68." http://bit.ly/bpW6m7

Sam Stein's take: "A smaller bite at the institutional reform apple but still a major cause for reformers." The institutional reform apple, Sam tells us, is fuji.

Continuing our HuffPost Hill update on the rough and tumble world of Senate rules reform, a group of Democratic senators are standing their ground on filibuster reform. Sam Stein: "On Wednesday morning, the Hill reported that five Senate Democrats 'have said they will not support a lowering of the 60-vote bar necessary to pass legislation' while another four said 'they are wary about such a change.'...One top Democratic aide speaking on the condition of anonymity predicted that the party would ultimately pursue more incremental gains in reforming Senate practices as opposed to fully changing the 60-vote threshold for cloture votes on legislation. But lowering the threshold, the aide cautioned, is 'not impossible.'" http://huff.to/9aVXje

We're here! We're queer! We're less than thrilled with congressional inaction on the Employment Non-Discrimination Act! "Eight protesters were arrested in the Capitol Wednesday after disrupting tours for hundreds of visitors and getting the attention of the House Speaker's office...The protest signaled an increase in the level of civil disobedience Get Equal is willing to do over the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which would make it illegal for employers to discriminate based on sexual orientation." Congress.org: http://bit.ly/bRIZ9D

OLYMPIA SNOWE TO SUPPORT ELENA KAGAN - "Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe says she plans to vote to confirm Elena Kagan as a Supreme Court justice. The Maine lawmaker's announcement makes her the fourth Republican to break with her party to back President Barack Obama's high court nominee. In a statement, Snowe says Kagan has met her standards for a justice with her strong intellect, respect for the rule of law and understanding of the Supreme Court's important but limited role." http://huff.to/cdH94a

GOVERNMENT ACTION DURING FINANCIAL CRISIS PREVENTED A DEPRESSION, STUDY FINDS - A paper by Blinder and Zandi is making the rounds on the Hill: "In a new paper, the economists argue that without the Wall Street bailout, the bank stress tests, the emergency lending and asset purchases by the Federal Reserve, and the Obama administration's fiscal stimulus program, the nation's gross domestic product would be about 6.5 percent lower this year. In addition, there would be about 8.5 million fewer jobs, on top of the more than 8 million already lost; and the economy would be experiencing deflation, instead of low inflation. The paper, by Alan S. Blinder, a Princeton professor and former vice chairman of the Fed, and Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics, represents a first stab at comprehensively estimating the effects of the economic policy responses of the last few years." NYT: http://nyti.ms/dbZU9a

The study: http://bit.ly/9jEz01

Hey remember that auto dealer carve-out from the consumer protection bureau in the Wall Street bill? "GM, majority owned by taxpayers, is buying a company that makes car loans to shoppers with poor credit. Unlike home loans, though, the risk in subprime auto lending is relatively low and may reward GM. The company hopes to boost sales by making loans and leases to buyers that it must now turn away for lack of financing." http://bit.ly/9UJbER

Don't Panic About The Volcker Rule - A late-breaking Fox News report from yesterday, on Goldman Sachs trying to circumvent the Volcker Rule by moving its prop traders to its client desk had folks freaking out, including us here at HuffPost Hill. "Thanks to a line in the Volcker Rule which specifies trading 'operations unrelated to customer operations,' as long as the prop trading' is done for client-related purposes, it's OK," said Fox. Except, not really. The language "in facilitation of customer relations" was specifically taken OUT of the bill so this couldn't happen. Read the bill, Fox! That traders are getting shifted off the prop desk following a prop trading ban shouldn't be surprising. "We are in fact pleased with the development because it shows how strong the Volcker Rule is," said a Senate Dem aide who helped draft the bill. "These firms are moving their traders into their asset management division because they recognize that these traders can no longer engage in prop trading but rather must trade on behalf of customers - who can exercise real market discipline on those traders." Also, let's pause for a moment at the image of a prop trader cleaning out his desk following an act of Congress. Kind of feels like a nice long exhale, doesn't it? Do you smell sage?

@Kombiz HuffPo should have a best looking flacks (over 30, under 40) and 5'2" tall so @evale72 can win something..

UPCOMING BUSH MEMOIR HAS REPUBLICANS WORRIED - 43's forthcoming memoir "Decision Points" might provide the Dems some cannon fodder for November. Daily Beast's Matt Latimer: "[Some] Republicans, particularly those most closely tied to the Bush regime, actually argue the book could help the party by reminding some voters of what they liked about Bush. Still, that has not stopped some Republicans, traumatized over the last two election cycles, from fearing the worst. 'Monumentally bad timing' was the reaction of one former Bush aide who learned of the book release date. Another prominent conservative compared the Bushies' public-relations savvy to LeBron James. 'Selfish and stupid' was another noted right-wing columnist's reaction." http://bit.ly/bbqYWH

ROB SIMMONS JUMPS (BACK) IN CONNECTICUT SENATE RACE - Birthday boy Jason Linkins: "In the weeks since the Connecticut GOP threw its official support behind former WWE CEO Linda McMahon at the state convention, her opponent, former Congressman Rob Simmons, has been running a 'suspended' campaign, where he walks around Connecticut reminding voters that he's on the ballot without officially engaging McMahon in direct battle. But recently, it's been looking like the Simmons campaign was set to emerge from suspended animation. And after last night, it looks like the stealth campaign is officially over. The first clue is that Simmons showed up for a debate, hosted by the Federation of Connecticut Taxpayer Organizations. Also: there's that whole part where Simmons said, 'I am running for the U.S. Senate.'" http://huff.to/bVoXUe

A new ad from the DNC, promoting it's new website RepublicanTeaPartyContract.com, ties the Republican party to the Tea Party movement, saying they are one and the same: http://bit.ly/dzXHmR

A new Rasmussen survey has Harry Reid leading Sharron Angle 45% to 43%. TPM summarizes: "In the previous Rasmussen poll from two weeks ago, Angle led by 46%-43%. The TPM Poll Average has Reid leading Angle by 44.5%-42.8%. In addition, Rasmussen has changed its rating on this race, from toss-up to leaning Dem. The poll finds that Democratic attacks on Angle as 'extreme' have caused both candidates to be viewed as 'extreme,' albeit by very different segments of the population. The poll has 58% of respondents calling Angle extreme, compared to 50% saying the same about Reid." http://bit.ly/bsLBRk

No one has told Sharron Angle that the DISCLOSE Act isn't law. From a radio interview this morning: "I think that the Supreme Court has really made their decision on this, they found that we have a First Amendment right across the board that was violated by the McCain-Feingold Act. And that's what they threw out, was those violations. The McCain-Feingold Act is still in place. The DISCLOSE Act is still in place. It's just that certain provisions within that they found to be definitely violating the First Amendment. If we didn't have the DISCLOSE Act there would be a lot of different things that people wouldn't be able to find out." Via: http://bit.ly/8XpVUh

Crazy, but not mind-controlling-antibodies-in-our-tap-water crazy: Some Tea Partiers are not happy with Michele Bachmann's endorsement of Roy Blunt in the Missouri Senate race. "A coalition of Tea Party and Patriot groups issued a news release this morning saying they were 'shocked' that Bachmann would be coming to St. Louis to campaign and raise money for Congressman Roy Blunt. While the Tea Party groups have said they don't endorse candidates, they made it clear in their news release that they do not endorse Blunt. Many of the Tea Party groups have been offering support to state Sen. Chuck Purgason, R-Caulfield, who is running a long-shot campaign against Blunt, the front-runner who has raised more than $8 million in the race." St. Louis Post-Dispatch: http://bit.ly/aJGT7x

A series of tubes, redux: "Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), who appears not to be a frequent customer of Amazon or eBay, was worried that an online retailer 'records every book you purchase' and 'these machines, as I call them, are storing all of this information about you.'" http://bit.ly/9hhjOP

JEREMY THE INTERN'S WEATHER REPORT - Tonight: The rain should actually hold off tonight. Enjoy a warm night! Tomorrow: It looks like a cold front may be sweeping through the region late tomorrow. If it comes during the 4-7 p.m. window -- when it's hottest -- expect to see strong thunderstorms. Thanks, JB!

This day in weather history: The British Midlands saw tornadoes injure close to 40 people and caused damages over 4 million GBP. Ouch, JB!

COMFORT FOOD

- Can God live in a canvas? Here's Chewbacca riding a giant squirrel while fighting Nazis. http://huff.to/9jxDRE

- Ridiculous real estate advertisements. http://huff.to/b7XWSl

- All the news that's fit to print: 12 bizarre facts about fish mating. http://bit.ly/9Dhhaj

- An elderly lady juggler is taking Britain by storm. http://bit.ly/daaBV4
- "Woman Shoplifts Clothes, Comes Back to Interview For Job In Shoplifted Clothes, Shoplifts Some More" http://bit.ly/aFg9af

- Who says the Brits are known for their restraint and politeness? Check out this job rejection letter from the BBC. http://bit.ly/9tKgva

- The first posts from a collection of popular websites, including the good ship HuffPost. http://bit.ly/aPtWab

TWITTERAMA

@stephenathome: Why doesn't Wikileaks release documents that Americans actually want to see, like Barack Obama's birth certificate?

@Geniusbastard: The Death Star has a serious design flaw in one of its exhaust vents. #wookieleaks

@flyboypatrick: TK-421 was not at his post. #wookieleaks

@daudig: Protocol droid fluent in 6 mil languages discharged for violating DADT. #wookieleaks

@FrankLautenberg - In #NJ we call them subs in the north and hoagies in the south. But nowhere in #NJ are they called grinders.

THE TUBE

TONIGHT: Tom Coburn discussed budget with Ratigan. Raul Grijalva appears on Hardball. Mark Warner, Elijah Cummings and HuffPost's Roy Sekoff talk to Ed Schultz. Elijah Cummings keeps it going, along with Luis Guiterrez, on Countdown. Barney Frank weighs in on Elizabeth Warren on Maddow's show. Chris Dodd and Blanche Lincoln offer their two cents on Morning Joe. Lamar Alexander drops by Daily Rundown.

ON TAP

TONIGHT

8:00 pm - 11:00 pm: NoMa Summer Screen airs one of our favorites, "Groundhog Day" [L Street Between 2nd and 3rd Streets NE].

5:30 pm - 7:00 pm: Frank Kratovil (D-Md.) hosts a fundraiser featuring a performance by the Eastern Shore Boys. We're not sure what their deal is (is it Frank's band?) but this pops up in YouTube when we enter their name: http://bit.ly/cLfPAA [Top of the Hill, 319 Pennsylvannia Ave SE].

6:00 pm: The Republican Majority Fund tries to realize the promise of its name [Trattoria Alberto of Capitol Hill, 506 8th Street SE].

6:00 pm - 8:00 pm: Forget dying quickly (pace: Alan Grayson), Mel Watt (D-N.C.) wants you to die slowly. The congressman hosts a "Bojangles Fried Chicken and Krispy Kreme Doughnuts" reception [Democratic National Headquarters, 430 South Capitol Street SE].

7:00 pm: John Barrow (D-Ga.) hosts a reelection event at the Nationals game against the Braves [Nationals Park, 1500 South Capitol Street SE].

7:00 pm: Ditto John Lewis (D-Ga.) [Nationals Park, 1500 South Capitol Street SE].

TOMORROW

8:45 pm - 10:45 pm: The Capitol Riverfront Outdoor Underdog Film Festival screens "Happy Gilmore" [Canal Park, 200 M St SE].

8:30 am: Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) hosts a reception benefiting Indiana Senate candidate Dan Coats (R-Ind.) [Charlie Palmer Steak, 101 Constitution Ave NW].

9:30 am: Ed Pastor (D-Ariz.) welcomes his labor allies for a breakfast campaign event [National Democratic Club Townhouse, 40 Ivy Street SE].

12:30 pm - 4:00 pm: Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) skips out on work for a bit to attend the Nationals game and fill his campaign war chest [Nationals Park, 1500 South Capitol Street SE].

5:30 pm - 7:30 pm: John Hall (D-N.Y.) apparently is quite the gastronome. He hosts a fundraiser at the newly-opened We The Pizza [We The Pizza, 305 Pennsylvania Ave., SE].

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A conservative senator blasted a Justice Department crime-prevention program this week, portraying it as a waste of taxpayer dollars undermining the department’s core mission. Senator Tom Coburn released a 42-page report documenting in lurid detail recreation activities funded via DOJ grants. I use “lurid” here liberally, since we’re talking about bowling, dancing, and skateboarding, not drug use, illicit sex [1], or a night out at a lesbian bondage club [2]. Lady Justice graces the report’s cover, holding, in the same hand as her scales, a bunch of multi-colored balloons floating on a string. Titled “Party at the DOJ,” the report features findings from a General Accounting Office study heavily larded with bits from local newspaper stories, a mix apparently aimed at exciting the outrage centers of the American brain. “With our nation facing the heightened threats of domestic terrorism and unprecedented debt and financial challenges,” the report says, “taxpayers should be shocked to learn DOJ crime prevention grant programs are paying for parties and rollercoaster rides for children rather than focusing on investigating crimes, locating and prosecuting terrorists, and administering justice.” Coburn’s report hazards a guess that DOJ has spent $100 million over the past five years on frivolities at the expense of public safety and national solvency. Coburn’s ire is directed primarily at DOJ’s Weed and Seed [3] program, which hands out grants targeted at cleaning up high-crime neighborhoods. The funds go to police and prosecutors to weed out gangs, addicts, and thugs, and to private community groups to then seed the area with social services, from treatment programs to youth centers. Sometimes the seeding involves community activities like dances and block parties. Coburn’s report, citing the GAO study, recommends DOJ should require weed and seed programs to keep better track of the money they receive. To inflate this important, if quotidian, point into an indictment against recreation events on the taxpayer dime, the report spikes facts with an ample dose of truthiness [4]. Let’s look at that $100 million figure. Sounds impressive, but how did the report arrive at that figure? By lumping the Weed and Seed’s relatively modest budget ($25 million) together with the entire budget the much larger Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Program [5] ($453 million), and then making a guess. “If the total amount spent on parties and other fun activities is only a small percentage of the $478 million combined Weed and Seed and OJJDP budgets, tens of millions of crime prevention dollars are being spent on parties and other recreational activities with little or no measurable impact whatsoever on crime every year,” the report says. “Over a five year period, this could amount to well over $100 million, yet it is impossible to know for sure.” This $100 million guess was then repeated as an estimate – without reference to its less-than stringent methodology – in reports by CBS News [6], Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government [7] site and the Washington Examiner [8]. The Legal Times covered [9]Coburn’s report on its blog, but did not mention the alleged $100 million figure. Being a journalistic enterprise in accuracy more than agitprop, it also tested some of the report’s claims. One of the recreational events portrayed in Coburn’s report as a trivial waste was a luau thrown by East Chattanooga Weed and Seed. The program’s site director, Vivian Hixon, told the Legal Times the event, intended for children, was staffed by volunteers and paid for with private donations. “This is not some luau party like he’s making it sound,” Hixson said. She added that Coburn’s office did not contact her before issuing its report. “I wish that we had been asked,” she said, “because I think that we could have cleared this up very easily.” Told of the Chattanooga program's response, Coburn spokesman John Hart wrote in an e-mail: “In many of these cases, it comes down to a question of whether the funds in question are fungible. Also, because DOJ does not track the funds, it is difficult to pin this down." The report also complains about the lack of examination into the effectiveness of recreational activities. But it’s not like Weed and Seed programs haven’t been studied [10]. Research tends to concentrate on the forest, primarily how the weeding and seeding programs impact things like crime rates and perceptions of safety, rather than the trees, like the effect of a block party or carnival. Granted, there's a concrete example [11] of Weed and Seed funds being misused in Coburn's home state of Oklahoma, but in the absence of data on recreation activities, the report simply assumes money spent on that (which it assumes is $100 million) is by definition a waste. Coburn has earned a reputation as an anti-pork crusader and, as a member of the Judiciary Committee, DOJ programs fall under his purview. (He tried and failed [12] to eliminate the funding for Weed and Seed back in early 2009.) I suppose his willingness to employ what Stephen Colbert would call “truth that comes from the gut” in this report is a sign of his enthusiasm for controlling government spending. It’s a shame he doesn’t have a seat on the appropriations committee, where he’d get a crack at a lot bigger fish than a program to improve high-crime neighborhoods. [1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/10/AR2008091001829.html [2] http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0310/35148.html [3] http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/ccdo/ws/welcome.html [4] http://www.merriam-webster.com/info/06words.htm [5] http://ojjdp.ncjrs.gov/ [6] http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/07/23/eveningnews/main6707431.shtml [7] http://biggovernment.com/publius/2010/07/26/party-at-the-doj-golf-pool-parties-and-other-fun-on-the-taxpayer-dime/ [8] http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/justice-dept-parties-with-tax-dollars--arcade-games-bowling-and-skateboarding-99250529.html [9] http://legaltimes.typepad.com/blt/2010/07/senator-aims-at-doj-recreational-grants.html [10] http://www.google.com/search?q=weed+and+seed+effectiveness+study&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a [11] http://newsok.com/audit-finds-misspending-in-oklahoma-citys-weed-and-seed-program/article/3471544 [12] http://senatus.wordpress.com/2009/03/04/senate-defeats-coburn-emmett-till-funding-omnibus-amendment/

Teen Center Lead Staff

The Stonestown Family YMCA is seeking a dynamic and enthusiastic leader to facilitate the teen cultural center as part of the Lincoln High School/ Stonestown Family YMCA After School Program. This is a unique opportunity to learn about the functions of a burgeoning high school after school program while spearheading a new project; employing creative vision, leading and inspiring high school aged youth. The ideal candidate will be ready to take initiative and work quickly to keep up with a rapidly developing grant funded program, possess the ability to remain calm under stressful circumstances, and will be excited to provide opportunities for learning and engagement for youth. This position will be an integral past of the success of the newly formed Teen Center, and the high functioning after school program servicing a large San Francisco public high school, every day from 2:30-6:00pm.


Essential Job Functions/Responsibilities
• Coordinate, plan and facilitate monthly service-learning projects with high-school youth
• Supervise and provide leadership to youth participating in tutoring or service learning projects in the drop-in teen cultural center Monday- Friday, from 2:30-6:00pm
• Recruit, organize and facilitate student advisory board for teen cultural center
• Outreach with larger school community, students and teachers to promote teen cultural center
• Publish monthly teen cultural center calendar to facilitate cohesion for pre-existing cultural activities on the school campus
• Work with school community to plan and implement monthly family events incorporating cultural literacy and or parental advocacy using a grant to promote family literacy
• Work with Site Coordinator to monitor budget for Family Literacy grant to ensure best use of funds
• Work with Site Coordinator and leadership team to set vision and goals for Family Literacy grant
• Interface professionally with school administration, teachers, counselors, students, parents, and the larger school community; act as a representative for the program
• Provide structured leadership and positive behavior modeling for youth


Necessary qualifications
• At Least 21 years of age
• At Least 2 Years of college, AA degree, or a Pass on After School For All-ExCEL Qualification Exam (No Child Left Behind- NCLB)- emphasis in cultural studies, youth development, or social justice preferred
• Must have experience working with youth
• Must be highly motivated to provide quality After School opportunities to youth
• Must be a Team Player
• Bi-Lingual English/Spanish, English/Cantonese, English/Mandarin speakers are strongly encouraged to apply.
• Knowledge or expertise in youth development, social justice, and or cultural studies preferred
• Must be comfortable leading physical activities with youth
• Must be available daily M-F during after school program hours (2:30-6:00pm)
• Must be willing to participate in BI-annual evaluations and supervision meetings as needed.
• Connections in the, Sunset, OMI, Merced, Miraloma and West of Twin Peaks communities or the greater San Francisco Community are a bonus.



• Compensation: $13.00-16.00 per hour DOE plus a free gym membership to Stonestown Family YMCA.
• Hours are 20-25 per week, with some nights and weekends possible as necessary for family events

Please submit cover letter and resume to address listed above with TEEN CENTER LEAD STAFF in the subject line


• The Stonestown Family YMCA provides a fun and supportive work environment with many training opportunities.
• For More information on the Stonestown Family YMCA please visit our website at www.ymcasf.org/stonestown.

George Washington 1789 - 1797, Nonpartisan from Virginia
Americans know him as the "father of their country." Having been General and Chief of the Continental Armies durring the War of American Independence as well as the presiding officer of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 there seemed little doubt that he would be the first to occupy the office of the Presidency and he was elected unanimously to that office by the Electoral Collage in 1788 and reelected unanimously in 1792. This was the only time that a single candidate captured every singe electoral vote. James Monroe did not have an opponent listed in 1820 but fell one vote short of unanimousness, perhaps in hopes of keeping Washington's record in tact.

As President Washington faced the daunting challenge of fleshing out the bare-bones structure of the executive office articulated in the US Constitution. As such Washington was keenly aware that every move he made was to be precedent setting he stated: "As the first of every thing, in our situation will serve to establish a Precedent, it is devoutly wished on my part, that these precedents may be fixed on true principles."

The first of these precedents involved the selection of his Cabinet. Article II, Section 2 of the US Constitution states quite clearly that these appointments are to be made with the "advise and consent of Congress," however, the great reverence that the nation felt for Washington made these confirmation hearings a mere formality. None of his appointments were challenged setting the precedent that the President thereafter is generally permitted to appoint his own Cabinet officers without Congressional interference, even in cases where the President is: blatantly playing favorites, making appointments that are clearly underqualified or just plain weird.

He also, reluctently, set the precedent that the President accept a salary and initiated the practice of calling the President "Mr. President" as opposed to "your worshipfullness sir" or something equally appalling as was common in Europe.

Domestic affairs were dominated by the conflict of personalities within his Cabinet between liberal Thomas Jefferson and conservative Alexander Hamilton. Jefferson was an admirer of the Free Market Capitalism articulated by Adam Smith while Hamilton preferred the tried and tested Mercantilism which had been practiced in England since the fifteenth century with some success. Washington eventually chose to side with Hamilton causing Jefferson to eventually resign from the Cabinet and join the burgeoning Anti-Federalist movement laying the ground-work for the two party system as we know it today, much to chagrin of Washington who had hoped to avoid the rise of political parties.

Early in his term Washington had to face down Rebellion in the Western part of the country (now the East) over taxes and the enforcement of unpopular laws. Washington's swift and effective response both crushed the Rebellion and sent out the message that the Revolution was over.

Another rift between Washington and more progressive elements in his Cabinet arose over his pro-English foreign policy which many saw as a slap in the face of France who had been the American's most important allies during the Revolutionary War. The excesses of the French Revolution combined with the military threat that England posed to the fledgling nation which Washington headed the government of caused Washington to pursue a policy of, at best, nutrality in the Anglo-Frankish Wars. Washington also foresaw England as a valuable trading partner and insisted that American Citizens continue to be held liable for debts incurred to the English prior to the Revolution.

Historians have generally vindicated Washington in regard to Anglo-French relations. Washington was revolutionary but he was no radical.

Americans have largely ignored the warnings issued by Washington in his famous Farewell Address in regards to the evils of political parties and the dangers of "entangling alliances" with foreign powers. Washington died in 1799 at the age of sixty-seven. Polls of historians generally rank Washington second behind Abraham Lincoln as one of the greatest of all US President but he has ranked as low as fourth.

John Adams 1796 - 1801, Federalist from Massachusetts
In 1796 George Washington refused to seek election for a third terms as President of the United States setting the precedent, only overlooked by Franklin D. Roosevelt, of Presidents, no matter how popular, being limited to two four-year terms. John Adams was clearly Washington's choice to succeed him but Adams faced a formidable electoral challenge from Thomas Jefferson in what was to become the first partisan election campaign much to the disappointment of Washington.

The election was a good deal closer than anyone could imagine as Adam's promise to continue the conservative policies of Washington and Hamilton was very much against the growing trend toward making the United States the exemplar of egalitarianism. However, the nod from Washington was enough to put Adams over the top.

Although a very piteous and honorable individual on a personal level, Adams was a weak and ineffective President whose political skills just weren't up the challenge of the nation's highest office. At the same time, the Nation's Gross National Product more than doubled during his single term. This is the largest increase in wealth the US has ever experienced under a single administration, a record unlikely to be bested any time in the future.

Adams' term was doomed from the start due to an oversight by the drafters of the Constitution. Because the Electoral Collage was instructed to cast two ballots without distinguishing which was for President and which was for Vice President with the individual receiving the second highest number of electoral votes winning the office of Vice President, the appearance of a fringe candidate forced Adams to accept his old enemy Thomas Jefferson as Vice President. The US Constitution also provides that the Vice President be the deciding vote should a tie-vote occur in Congress. The Nation was so divided at that point politically that Jefferson's Vice Presidency essentially paralyzed Adams' administration.

In his own time Adams had the reputation for always saying the exact wrong thing at the exact wrong time, though this may only point to his unpopularity rather than to any inherent awkwardness on Adams' part. There were no new policy initiatives undertaken in Adams' administration and Adams himself put only minimal effort into executing the duties of the office the public had given him.

Adams continued the pro-English foreign policy initiated under Washington but was unable to continue the guise of neutrality which Washington had erected. Armed conflict with France appeared eminent and Franco-American hostilities nearly reached the breaking point with the famous XYZ-Affair when the French Diplomatic Corps demanded an enormous bribe of Charles Cotesworth Pinckney before he would be received for negotiations. Pinckney is said to have responded "NO NO NOT A SIXPENCE!" The favorite jingo of the "Quasi-War" with France was "millions for defense and not a cent for tribute."

True war never came but taxes were levied at unprecedented rates to pay for a large Navy to protect American commercial interests and civil liberties were severely curtailed under the Alien and Sedition Acts which made it a crime to criticize the President or Congress in print.

The final year of Adams' term was dominated by Fries' Rebellion in Western Pennsylvania which he handled both swiftly and amicably. Blaming the Democratic-Republicans for stirring up the persons involved Adams used his pardon power to diffuse the situation. The taxes and curtailment of civil liberties which were the cause of the Rebellion were not, however, adressed.

Adams was defeated for reelection in what was, perhaps, the nastiest Presidential Campaign in history. Adams had no knack for political campaigning and wildly accused his opponent, Thomas Jefferson, of being both an anarchist and an atheist, foretelling of "murder, rape and mayhem" being "openly taught and practiced" should Jefferson prevail. In the end Adams had a very ill-timed falling out with Alexander Hamilton whose home state of New York would cast the deciding votes in favor of Jefferson.

Adams' last act as President was to force through a slew of "midnight appointments" to the Federal Judiciary in hopes of derailing Jefferson's legislative agenda. This turned out to be a minor nuisance for Jefferson but remains as a stain on the memory of Adams who was otherwise not given to abuses of power of this magnitude.

The Federalist Party which had formed around his Presidential ambitions would flounder and die over the next few electoral cycles as Adams' ideal of a Republic governed by professionals and not subject to the "whims of the mob" as he called them became increasingly unpopular. In my view, although a founding father and an important figure in history, Adams was not a good President being both inattentive to the needs of his country's citizens and despotic in the suppression of his political opponents.

Adams died on July 4, 1826 (the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence) having been preceded in death by his old enemy Thomas Jefferson by only a few hours. His last words were purported to be "Thomas Jefferson still lives" indicating that he still saw himself in competition with his old adversary. Jefferson and Adams were the only two US Presidents to have signed the Decoration so the probability of their both dieing on that particular date must be astronomical. Historian polls generally rank him well above average often tied with John F. Kennedy for position number fourteen.

Thomas Jefferson 1801 - 1809, Democratic - Republican from Virginia
The inscription on Thomas Jefferson's tombstone reads: "[h]ere was buried Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and father of the University of Virginia." Anyone notice something missing?

That Jefferson was not proud enough of his accomplishments in his two terms as President of the United States of America to mention his having held this office in the inscription on his tombstone may be indicative of the fact that Jefferson's best days were already behind him when he took the oath of office. Nevertheless, the eight years he held the Presidency was a revolutionary period as the young nation increased in both size and status to new heights of independence.

Early on Jefferson faced opposition within his own party from Vice President Aaron Burr who made a play for the Presidency on the grounds that he had received an equal number of electoral votes as Jefferson. Republican electors had been instructed to cast one vote for Jefferson and one vote for Burr but the Constitution provided that electors not distinguish which ballot was for Vice President and which was for President. At Burr's insistence the election was settled by a vote in the House of Representatives where Jefferson was forced to seek the support of his old enemy Alexander Hamilton to secure the Presidency which he had won in a narrow defeat over his predecessor John Adams. Jefferson and his Republican Congress quickly pushed through the the 12th Amendment to the US Constitution requiring that Electors vote separately for President and Vice President so such a mess could never darken the hallowed halls of Washington again.

Jefferson's first term was largely occupied with undoing the policies of his two predecessors. The huge military amassed in the wake of the Quasi-War with France was largely dismantled. Taxes were decreased significantly. And the Alien and Sedition Acts allowed to expire. Jefferson also discontinued many rituals surrounding the office of the President setting the stage for our modern, informal methodology by which presidential duties are fulfilled.

The most enduring act of Jefferson's first term was the Louisiana Purchase from the French Emperor Napoleon nearly doubling the land area controlled by the United States at the piddly cost of $.08 an acre. Jefferson then commissioned the Lewis and Clark Expedition which explored the continent bringing back invaluable topographic and scientific information from which America would continue to benefit for generations to come.

Jefferson's first term also saw the United States' first military success in the Barbary Wars with Tripoli which was the first foreign war in which the United States had become involved.

Though not quite as stellar a record as one might expect from a "great man" like Jefferson, his successes in his first term were more than sufficient to win him a second term as he absolutely buried Charles Cotesworth Pinckney putting the last rusty nail in the coffin of the short-lived Federalist Party.

Jefferson's second term was a good deal less successful, however. Jefferson faced rebellion from his former Vice President, Aaron Burr who, have shot Alexander Hamilton in duel in 1804, was caught sailing down the Mississippi River in a boat full of weapons hoping to incite an armed insurrection in the Louisiana Territories. Burr was tried for treason but the Supreme Court, wisely not wishing to make a martyr of such a man, acquitted him.

This failure to maintain order was followed by an ineffective foreign policy venture which led to the Embargo Act of 1807 barring trade with England and France for the duration of the Anglo-Frankish conflict. This proved very unpopular as the US was not yet the industrial powerhouse it would one day become and her citizens were thus deprived of many consumer items causing a black market to arise further undermining the authority of the government. Historians have partially vindicated Jefferson on the issue of the unpopular embargo since the US' economic independence was largely secured at time planting the seeds of the industrial revolution in American which would grow into the greatest industrial powerhouse the World has ever known. Unfortunately, Jefferson misses getting the credit for this due to his shortsighted view of America's future as being agrarian in nature as opposed to promoting industrialization which Jefferson affiliated with the Mercantilist system. Jefferson refered to cities as "sores upon the body politic."

Of course, criticism of Jefferson's economic views seems, frankly, unimportant as he shows himself as being most short-sighted on the issue of race. An owner of an obscene number of slaves whom he treated quite cruelly he did, nevertheless, sign into law a bill banning the importation of any more slaves to the Republic.

Jefferson's system of government was to remain in effect for most of the next generation being suplanted by that of Andrew Jackson shortly after Jefferson's death in 1826, upon the very same day that his predecessor John Adams died. In polls Jefferson normally ranks in the top five but rarely breaches the top three ranking with other "near great" Presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, however his impact on American history far exceeds the influence of his term as President.

James Madison 1809 - 1817, Democratic - Republican from Virginia
At only five feet tall, Madison was the shortest of all US Presidents but he is a giant intellectually being known as the "Father of the US Constitution." Madison has always been a personal hero of mine for the principled stance he took against Virgina Governor Patrick Henry's unsuccessful attempts to institutionalize the Christian Religion in Virginia, a move that cost him a seat in the newly formed United States Senate but did much to strengthen the tradition of separation of Church and State that the United States has enjoyed on and off ever since.

Madison was shoe-in as the Republican candidate in the 1808 Election as Federalism had essentially petered out by that point. Madison's first term was practically Jefferson's third term and the two men remained close friends throughout their lives.

Ron Paul supporters might like Madison's continued opposition to the first Bank of the United States, an issue that would consume the body politic for much of the next twenty years of American history. He did eventually relent forming a national bank in 1816 but his eloquent arguments against the institution continued to influence the debate for many years to come.

The War of 1812 was to dominate Madison's second term. The war initially broke out over the issue of impressment of American sailors into the British Navy, claiming, "once an Englishman always an Englishman."

The war itself was something of a disaster inviting a destructive full-scale British invasion of the Americas. Complete disaster was averted by the magnanimous Treaty of Ghent in which neither the Americans or the British lost any territory but the issue of impressment was not resolved. The lost blood and treasure from that conflict was largely in vain, unfortunately.

Nevertheless, Madison played off Ghent as though it had constituted a great victory causing the final collapse of Federalism initiating the Era of Good Feelings in which partisan hostilities no longer dominated the political landscape. In his last two years in office Madison became the chief proponent of State's Rights vetoing spending measures he felt were not sufficiently national in nature. Madison also achieved military success over the Barbary Pirates which did much to expand American exporting abilities and raised America's status as a player on the international scene.

Madison died in 1836, the last Founding Father to pass away, at the age of eighty-five. As the chief framer of the US Constitution, Madison's name continues to be associated with the birth of Democracy. In polls Madison ranks slightly above average usually keeping company with John Quincy Adams and William Howard Taft.

James Monroe 1817 - 1825, Democratic - Republican from Virginia
James Monre was not a great man like his predecessors, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, however, his namesake, the Monroe Doctrine, is one of the few initiatives left-over from the earliest period of US history which is still evoked today when examining policy.

Monroe faced almost no opposition in his quest for the Presidency since the Federalist Party did not even proffer an opponent in either the 1816 or 1820 elections. For this reason his presidency is remembered as "The Era of Good Feelings" an attitude of nationalist cooperation that Monroe encouraged with lengthy tours of the country to see for himself how good the people were feeling.

Divisions did exist within the dominate Republican party as the issue of slavery reared its ugly head as one-by-one all of the Northern States of the Union, save Deleware, abolished the practice of involuntary servitude while the slave-based plantation-system began thriving in the American South due to an increased demand for cotton to fuel the European textile industry. Madison himself appears to have been opposed to the practice of slavery as evidenced by his founding of Liberia in 1822 as a safe place for freed slaves to escape to. Today we wouldn't consider "put 'em on a boat and send 'em back to Africa" a very culturally sensitive solution but at the time it was.

Unfortunately Madison's personal beliefs on the issue ran up against his political beliefs in re State's Rights. Madison had hoped to confine slavery to the American South with the Missouri Compromise of 1824 which barred slavery North of Missouri's southern border at the same time admitting Missouri as a slave slave state along with Maine as a free state setting the precedent that all new slave state admissions be paired with a free state not allowing either abolitionists or ardent defenders of slavery to ever gain an upper hand in the US Senate. Like most compromises, it settled absolutely nothing brining to an end the Era of Good Feelings and causing the nation to become more divided than it had ever been or has ever become since.

As I said, Monroe is mostly remembered for the Monroe Doctrine in which the United States takes the position that attempts by European powers to further colonize other nations in North and South America would be construed as an act of War and be responded to in kind. Sadly, Monroe was not farsighted enough to prohibit American intervention in the affairs of the various free-states of the Americas but the Monroe Doctrine became an integral part of American foreign policy in the Early Twentieth Century and remains so to this day.

Monroe died in 1831, he was the third President in a row to have died on July 4 defying many odds. Polls rank Monroe as quite average to slightly above average along with presidents Grover Cleveland and the Elder George Bush.

John Quincy Adams 1825 - 1829, National Republican from Massachusetts
A former Federalist, the younger Adams might seem an unlikely choice to succeed Monroe who had banished Federalism to the back-pages of history during the "Era of Good Feelings." Adams, however, had distinguished himself as Secretary of State throughout the Monroe administration and was clearly the most talented person seeking the Presidency at the time.

Adams, however, did not win the popular vote nor a plurality of the Electoral Collage in the election which placed him in the White House (which his Father John Adams had been the first President to occupy). A four-way race for the office which had largely split according to regional loyalties had prevented the front-runner Andrew Jackson from achieving the required majority of Electoral Votes to win the office forcing the election to be decided by a vote of the House of Representatives. Jackson's lead over the other three candidates was substantial but only three candidates were to be voted upon under the house rule and Henry Clay, who had been excluded from the house vote, threw his support behind Adams giving Adams the requisite number of votes in the House to defeat Jackson. Clay was then appointed Secretary of State, then seen as the top stepping-stone to the Presidency. Jackson pronounced this robbery a "corrupt bargain" and he and his supporters would be a misery to Adams and his administration during Adams' single term as a result.

Immediately upon acceding to the Chief Executive Adams endeared himself to me due to the, possibly apocryphal, story of his having taken his oath of office on a stack of law books rather than the Bible either due to his Unitarian religious beliefs or his staunch support of separation of Church and State. Adams is not remembered as a great president like Jefferson before him and Jackson after but he certainly is one of the "great men" in American history.

In many ways Adams was decades ahead of his time calling for Civil Service reform which would exclude mere office seekers from filling government jobs and a wide array of internal improvements and protective tariffs to encourage America's fledgling manufacturing sector which Adams was farsighted enough to see as the true wave of the future. On the debit side he was not much more astute in politics than his father had been and tended to look down on those farmers and agrarian interests which had been the bedrock of Jefferson's popularity.

Already unpopular due to the "corrupt bargain" that had brought him into the Presidency, Adams was completely unsuccessful in getting any of his farsighted initiatives enacted due to his complete and utter incompetence in the art of swaying public opinion.

Adams was the first President to seriously undertake promotion of the arts and sciences at the Federal level and the Smithsonian Institution that he founded remains America's premier educational facility to this day largely though Adam's efforts.

The only legislation passed during Adam's single term was the ill-fated tariff of abominations which would later cause his successor to have to threaten to invade the state of South Carolina due to its' unpopularity.

Defeated overwhelmingly for reelection in 1828 Adams became the only former President to serve in the US House of Representatives where, in his dotage, Adams was the leading voice of opposition to the Mexican–American War and a constant foe of the expansion of Slavery. In 1997 Adams was immortalized by actor Anthony Hopkins in the film Amistad dramatizing his successful arguing before the Supreme Court in the case of United States v. The Amistad Africans which won the freedom of African Slaves who had mutinied on a Spanish Slave vessel which had been illegally transporting them through American waters.

Adams was an abolitionist but died before he could see any more slaves freed, in 1848 at the age of eighty-one shortly following his having cast a very loud and impassioned NO vote on a proposal to decorate certain officers from the Mexican War. In polls he tends to rank average to slightly below average, usually coming in around number eighteen along with Presidents Lyndon Johnson and William McKinley both of whom did manage to win a second term.

Andrew Jackson 1829 - 1837, Democrat from Tennessee
The only President to have both an era and a brand of democracy named for him, at first sight Jackson appears an unlikely candidate to revolutionize the Presidency in the way that he did. Jackson was: cantankerous, vindictive, crudely educated and could be quoted on both sides of every major political issue of his day with absolute assurance. Jackson also had a disturbing history of violence having killed at least a dozen men in duals and summarily executed deserters in his role as a general in the War of 1812 and the First Seminole War where he also received a sanction from Congress for having undertaken the conquest of Florida of his own initiative.

All that said, Andrew Jackson was the first modern President, vetoing dozens of bills and really controlling the tone in Washington through the force of his own character. Widely viewed in his own time as corrupt and despotic for his less than eloquent defense of the spoils system, filling most civil service positions with political appointments, his opponents labeled him "King Andrew I" and formed a new political party, the Whigs whose only unifying theme was opposition to Jackson's person. Because political figures were largely influential on a regional level this brought together an unlikely coalition of Federalist leaning Republicans enraged by Jackson's vetoing of internal improvement bills and radical state's rights Democrats who saw Jackson's strong style of executive leadership as running roughshod over the rights of states as outlined in the Tenth Amendment.

Jackson's first term was, unfortunately, dominated by the Peggy Eaton affair. During the 1828 Presidential Election his opponent, John Quincy Adams, had taken to "hitting below the belt," attacking his relationship with his wife, Rachel, whom Jackson had married before her divorce from her first husband had been finalized, technically bigamy. Rachel died shortly after Jackson's election in 1828 but before his inauguration 1829, an event Jackson blamed on the attacks on her honor she sustained during the Presidential Campaign.

Thus it was quite natural that when the wives of many of Jackson's Cabinet members began snubbing his friend and Secretary of War John Eaton's wife Peggy, a widow of a Naval Officer who had died at sea, some said under "mysterious circumstances," over unfounded rumors about the death of her first husband that Jackson would step in ordering that the wives of his Cabinet members pay Mrs. Eaton "courtesy calls" setting off a feud with fellow Southerner Vice President John C. Calhoun and prompting the resignation of most of Jackson's Cabinet.

The feud with Calhoun, naturally, went a good deal deeper than the simple case of Jackson's disapproval of Calhoun's snooty wife. While the Eaton Affair was going on Jackson faced a more tangible threat to the Union of States in the form of the Nullification Crisis whereby Calhoun's home state of South Carolina began insisting it had the right to "nullify" the infamous "Tariff of Abominations" which Calhoun also claimed was Unconstitutional because it constituted a protective tariff and some ambiguous wording in the Constitution led him to believe that the Federal Government was authorized to issue tariffs "for revenue only."

The lines were drawn in 1830 when Jackson raised a toast "our federal Union: It must be preserved" to which Calhoun replied "The Union: Next to our Liberty, the most dear!" Calhoun was dumped from the Democratic ticket shortly thereafter prompting him to resign the Vice Presidency and take up the Senate Seat from South Carolina a position from which he would rabble-rouse the cause of Southern succession and the expansion of slavery until his long-overdue death in 1850.

In Jackson's day, however, Calhoun very nearly began the Civil War three decades before time as Jackson had to actually get authorization for the use of force from Congress before South Carolina would back down from its' claim to be able to nullify Federal laws. The state continued to pursue their right of succession, however until 1864 and it is not unheard of for succession language to be heard from politicians in the deep south to this very day.

Jackson's legacy as an egalitarian figure is severely damaged by his Indian Policy in which an estimated 45,000 Indians were relocated to the Western Territories along the infamous Trail of Tears. Though popular in the Southern States where most of the removal was taking place the move was widely condemned in the Northern States and historians generally see this as a dark stain on American history.

Jackson's economic policy was something of a mixed bag. In his second term as President Jackson managed to pay off the entire National Debt through spending cuts alone and without raising taxes. No other President can make a claim to have even tried such a thing. While this shows a level of efficiency in his administration for which he deserves much credit, his handling of the dissolution of the Second National Bank by withdrawing all Federal funds from the institution to insure its' quick demise and placing those funds in State Banks of his own choosing was to prove disastrous economically. As is often the case when large amounts of funds are transfered in an economy the funds deposited in those state banks were confused for investable funds setting off a flurry of speculation and irresponsible lending practices which culminated in the Panic of 1837 causing the next three Presidential Administrations to govern the nation in the midst of an unprecedented economic depression. It must have felt good for Jackson to take all that money away from those greedy bankers who he hated so much, though.

Like many of the Founding Fathers, Jackson was also a slave-owner, but, whereas the founders showed great discomfort with the institution of involuntary servitude Jackson appears to have reveled in the Plantation culture. Any hope of history depicting the President, who really was the first "man of the people" to hold that high office, as a force for justice or egalitarianism dies upon examination of his Indian policy and the steps he took to expand the institution of slavery.

Jackson died in 1845 at his plantation The Hermitage in Nashville, TN. Historian polls had traditionally ranked him at the top of the "near-great" category coming in at around number six, however, in recent years he has fallen out of the top-ten into the "above-average" category alongside much less talented individuals such as President Dwight Eisenhower.

Martin Van Buren 1837 - 1841, Democrat from New York
By far the most homely of US Presidents, in contrast to the rugged frontiersman Jackson, Van Buren cultivated a very dainty and almost effeminate appearance and was known to adorn himself with ruffles and perfumes causing Congressman Davy Crockett of Tennessee to remark that he was unable to tell if Van Buren were a man, a women or "something else altogether."

In spite of their differences in opinion on wardrobe issues, Van Buren was very much Jackson's man and had been hand-picked by Jackson to succeed him as President. A wily political operator, Van Buren is traditionally credited with the founding of the Political Operation we now know as the Democratic Party of the United States through his association with the corupt Tammany Hall Machine.

Van Buren's ridiculous attire and association with the "fat cats" of Tammany Hall caused his political opponents to cast him as a politician of the "silk-stocking-set." This is more than unfair, as Van Buren was very much a self-made man, being the son of a tavern-keeper and having never attended college.

In spite of his political astuteness and the endorcement of Jackson (for which he owed his winning of the 1836 Presidential Election) Van Buren was a weak and ineffective President and his single term is remembered for: financial hard times, cruel treatment of American Indians and the ballooning of the slavery issue that would come to tear the Nation apart in the next generation. A Northerner elected on a Southern platform Van Buren only manged to inflame the passions of both side of every issue he put his hand to.

In the 1997 film Amistad Van Buren was ably portrayed by actor Nigel Hawthorne and was very accurately cast something of a villain due to his overtly political nature and disregard for the rights of anyone who might stand in the way of his winning a given state or district in his upcoming reelection campaign. None of this was ahistoric, however Van Buren did have a history of anti-Slavery sentiments both before and after his term as President having voted against the admission of Missouri as a slave state as a Senator before and having run as the candidate of the anti-Slavery Free Soil Party after.

Van Buren also had distinguished himself in New York politics as the chief proponent of abolishing the practice of Imprisonment for Debt in that state. Sadly, he did not pursue that agenda nationally as that would have gone a long way to exonerate him for his short-sightedness in the areas of slavery and Indian Relocation. Ultimately it was Van Buren who would oversea the Trail of Tears fiasco which continues to darken American History to this day.

Van Buren died in 1862 at his traditional family residence in Kinderhook, NY. Polls consistently rank Van Buren's Presidency as consistently well-below average to poor usually placing him around number thirty along with President Chester A. Arthur who, like Van Buren, is often remembered as much for the homliness of his physical appearance as much as for the failings of his administration.

William Henry Harrison 1841, Whig from Ohio
Harrison rode to victory in the 1840 Presidential Election on a populist "log cabin and hard cider" platform portraying himself as a poor man of the people and depicting his opponent as the candidate of the silk-stocking-set. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Harrison and his running mate John Tyler were well-established members of the Virgina Gentry and descended from the Landed and Armored classes dating at least back to Magna Carta.

The success of this ruse was often chalked up to the lack of accurate information available to voters in the period until the early twentieth century a graduate of Harvard and Yale, the son of a former President and member of the most elite aristocratic social circles in the world managed to portray himself as a Texas rancher, unable to pronounce the word "nuclear" by clearing brush for a few photo ops smack dab in the middle of the age of the internet. Not important, Harrison came to office with high expectations that the newly formed Whig Party would serve as a more liberal and credible alternative to the widespread corruption and financial ruin which abounded in the wake of the Jacksonian era.

This new era of progress to be marked by: protective tariffs, expenditures on internal improvements and a harder-line on constraining the expansion of slavery was to be initiated by the longest Inaugural Address in American History which the tough old hero of the Battle of Tippecanoe insisted upon giving outdoors during a rainstorm in March catching Pneumonia and dieing only thirty days into his term as President. By far the shortest term of any US President.

Harrison's brief tenure as chief executive was occupied primarily by a barrage of office-seekers harassing the poor, sick, old man so that his pockets were known to bulge with petitions. There was every indication that Harrison had planned to undertake Civil Service Reform as a result of the cruelty and corruption he had witnessed. His last words were "these office seekers, will they ever cease?"

Because of the brevity of his term in office it is customary not to rank Harrison in Historian Polls however he did manage to outrank George W. Bush in a 2010 Poll of historians conducted by Siena College.

John Tyler 1841 - 1845, Whig from Virginia
Perhaps the most unpopular President in history owing to his choice to join the Confederate Congress at the end of his life it really cannot be said that Tyler did not accomplish anything during his single, unelected term. Tyler was a staunch conservative and states-rights advocate who had fallen out with the Democratic Party due to Andrew Jackson's handling of the Nullification Crisis in South Carolina. The Whigs had placed Tyler on the ticket to provide geographical and philosophical balance with the more Liberal Harrison but had never wanted him to President, after all he was more Jacksonian than Jackson in nearly every respect.

Once again some vague wording in the US Constitution came back to haunt the nation as many began referring to Tyler as "acting-President" inferring that only the duties of President and not the title had passed to Tyler upon the unexpected death of Harrison. For his part Tyler was indignant at such legal wrangling returning, unopened, all mail addressed to the acting-President. This set the stage for a massive feud within the Whig party as more liberal Whigs such as Henry Clay soon found themselves on the outside with the new President ensuring that the great Whig platform for responsible and responsive government would never see the light of day if Tyler had anything to do with it. Tyler vetoed nearly the entire platform once it has passed through congress, most alarmingly a banking reform act which would have reestablished the National Bank.

Tyler's entire cabinet apart from Secretary of State Daniel Webster (who was in the midst of negotiating the very important Webster-Ashburton Treaty assuring a permanent state of peace with Great Britain) resigned in protest.

On the positive side Tyler's administration was the scene of many successful measures in the area of foreign policy. In addition to the above stated Treaty with Great Britain, Tyler also oversaw America's first diplomatic success in the East signing the Treaty of Wanghia in addition to making necessary preparations for the annexation of Texas and Hawaii into the United States.

The Texas question was settled when Tyler shifted parties to support Democrat James K. Polk, who was in favor of annexing Texas, over his fellow Whig Henry Clay who was opposed. Polk won the 1844 election which was largely seen as a referendum on annexation. Though increasing the land mass of the United States' territory significantly, Texas was largely south of Missouri's southern Border making it slave territory under the Missouri Compromise causing even deeper divisions in the country on issues surrounding slavery and state's rights.

Tyler died in 1862 at the age of seventy-one shortly before he was to take his seat in the newly formed Congress of the Confederate States of America. Because of his support of the Confederacy his name is often associated with treason and Historian Polls almost always list him as one of the worst Presidents in history averaging out at about number thirty-six somewhere in-between Presidents George W. Bush and Tyler's own predecessor, William Henry Harrison who only served 28 days in the office.

New York Working Families (www.workingfamiliesparty.org) was formed in 1998 by a coalition of labor unions and community activist organizations to fight for economic and social justice.

The Working Families Party is hiring campaign staff to work on the progressive issue campaigns

If you feel strongly that the time for real change is now, and are sick of band aid solutions, this is for you.

Job Responsibilities:
Field Representatives work with the Working Families Party or one of our major affiliates on various legislative and electoral campaigns. Responsibilities will include volunteer recruitment and mobilization, one on one house visits with members and cold door knocking, participating in and supervising phone banks, membership drives and fundraising, turnout for rallies and organizational meetings, qualifying candidates for the ballot through petitioning, organizing letter writing drives to pressure elected officials, and various other campaign related work.

Requirements:
All applicants must be 18 years of age or older, posses strong communications skills and a real commitment to social and economic justice. Must be willing and able to work between the hours of 1:30pm and 9:30pm at least five days per week. Some college preferred.

Compensation:
Campaign Staff make $400/week salary, regular raises, and room for growth. This is NOT a commission job. Healthcare included.

Apply at: http://www.workingfamiliesparty.org/jobs

Watch Our New Video About WFP And Our Current Campaign

All NEW AND EXPERIENCED ACTIVISTS WELCOME.

Counselors: Non-profit social service agency seeks qualified and experienced substance abuse counselors to conduct screening and assessments; facilitate individual and group counseling; develop treatment plans; create and maintain client charts in compliance with regulatory agencies; facilitate relapse prevention and continuing care services; and provide follow-up and aftercare services.







The requirements for the position include, but are not limited to the following: Substance Abuse Counseling Certification from a State of California appoved accrediting body preferred; Demonstrated experience providing substance abuse treatment services with criminal justice populations is necessary; Experience with substance abuse treatment models and an understanding of treatment modalities; Knowledge of community resources and services is preferred; Must possess a valid driver's license and have a clean driving record. Must be able to pass criminal justice clearance.



Positions available in San Francisco and San Rafael.



Please fax resume, supporting documents and transcripts or certification to 415-492-0244, attention D. Ricci or email dricci@cpinc.org

WANT TO HELP OTHERS BY USING YOUR OWN EXPERIENCE?

Do you have experience as a consumer or caregiver of a consumer of Children's Mental Health Services, Special Education or Juvenile Justice System? Join a team of therapists, other Family Support Partners, and medical staff providing therapeutic community - based services to children and families in the Latino and Asian Pacific Islander communities. Our program has a Full Time Position for a Bilingual Consumer Family Support Partner (FSP) available. FSP's provide outreach and engagement in the community, schools, churches and other social service agencies. FSP's also provide case management and education on a variety of topics such as leadership, stigma, depression, parenting, mental health, acculturation and building support for kids.
Must have direct experience as the parent, caregiver, or consumer in a public agency serving children and demonstrate education and/or life experience commensurate with job duties. Must have had at least one year of supervised working experience with children and adolescents. Must be bilingual in Spanish. Must have high school diploma or GED.

To be considered as a candidate for the above position, please forward an updated resume and salary requirements to Rosemarie Sachs by e-mail rsachs@comresearch.org or by fax 858-836-1094 or. Please see our website for further information at www.comresearch.org EOE.

Cap and trade or emissions trading schemes can be confusing. They have been touted as the chief market-based solution for limiting greenhouse gas emissions, preserving valuable natural resources like forests, while making money for rich and poor countries alike.

The far right and climate change skeptics hate them for obvious – and sometimes less obvious – reasons: they hate government meddling in the free market and regulating business and industry to the point that they believe in a vast ‘socialist’ conspiracy involving all prominent climate scientists. Or is it just a simple question of which class and which industries will make less money and pay more taxes and which are getting subsidies rather that the fact that subsidies exist at all.

But carbon trading has also come under fire from serious environmentalists and those in favor of social justice, who are skeptical of their efficacy or about who ultimately profits from such emissions markets.

READ MORE HERE

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Filed under: Fashion, Celebrity, News, Designers & Brands

It's got to be her color.

First Lady Michelle Obama loves that green-ish, acid yellow color, and seems to wear it in every iteration she can find.

Her most recent foray was in a matte jersey pant suit made by Stephen Burrows paired with an Erickson Beamon techno deco belt. Obama wore this ensemble to speak with students from the Duke Ellington School of the Arts and the Joy of Motion Dance Center, as they rehearsed a segment from the Broadway show 'Hairspray' at the White House on July 19.

"The color is called 'Sunrise Yellow,'" Burrows tells StyleList. "It's almost the color of Isabel's (Toledo) dress for the Inauguration. We sent it in red, green and a blue-ish teal color," but this is what she kept.

"Ikram (Goldman, a Chicago retailer and Obama's de facto stylist) called and requested that we send pants suits in color," Burrows continues. "The suit is inspired by one I made in the 1970s," and Burrows added, "My family freaked out when they saw it."

Check out what Burrows has designed for Target.

Designer Stephen Burrows Dishes on Michelle Obama Pant Suit originally appeared on StyleList on Wed, 28 Jul 2010 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR
YWCA OF SAN FRANCISCO AND MARIN

REPORTS TO: Executive Director
LOCATION: Marin
AVAILABILITY: Immediate

Since 1878, the YWCA of San Francisco & Marin has drawn together members of our community to empower women, families and individuals in order to obtain a common vision: peace, justice, freedom and dignity for all people. History of the YWCA follows the Job Description.

Candidate Profile: The successful candidate is a senior development executive who brings substantial experience from prior non-profit development positions. She/he has the ability to work effectively with the Executive Director, members of the Board of Directors and has developed sustainable gift giving programs. This is a seasoned development executive who thinks strategically, shares a passion for the YWCA and its programs and acts as an Ambassador for the YWCA at all times.

Responsibilities:

• Develop fundraising strategy and implementation to ensure annual financial goals are met or exceeded.
• Develop and execute a fundraising plan targeted to individual donors and institutional donors. This should include: fundraising for major gifts, special gifts, the annual fund and funds for operational support.
• Maximize the potential of current funding options as well as uncovering and growing additional avenues of revenue.
• Initially prepare grant applications seeking funding from foundations and government entities.
• Work closely with the Executive Director to develop YWCA’s Case for Support and to help the Executive Director prioritize fundraising initiatives.
• Provide inspiration to the Board of Directors to encourage a higher level of involvement in fundraising.
• Develop and maintain a database of donors and prospective donors to ensure consistent outreach and messaging.
• Explore new initiatives such as donations through social networking.
• Work with the Executive Director and staff to ensure all communication platforms encourage giving.
• Work with the staff to develop and manage an effective donor communications program including query responses, appeal and acknowledgement letters.


Relevant Experience:
• 5 to 7 years of significant non-profit fundraising experience from major individual and institutional donors.
• Knowledge of trends in giving and the process of foundation, corporation and individual prospect research, individual cultivation and solicitation.
• Experience in the developing a Fund Development plan and engaging the Board of Directors in its implementation.
• Basic understanding of tax and legal issues pertaining to non-profit organizations.
• Technology literate: comfortable using a wide variety of communications and networking tools.
• Excellent interpersonal communication skills including the ability to work with a diverse array of people.

Compensation:

Excellent compensation and medical benefit package, personal time off and a retirement plan funded by the YWCA of San Francisco and Marin.

This Search is being conducted by
Center for Volunteer and Nonprofit Leadership Transition Services
Email Resume and Cover Letter in confidence to: jjanssen@cvnl.org
Please put YWCA Development Director in the subject line
Documents submitted in Word highly preferred.

For consideration in the first round of candidate screening, resumes should be received by July 30, 2010.




BACKGROUND OF THE YWCA

The YWCA of San Francisco and Marin was organized in 1878 as part of an international movement to support women and girls. In our early history our programs included sewing classes, a kindergarten for young children and several residence halls in the city for young girls needing a safe place to live. During the 1930s the YWCA owned a cottage in Mill Valley to provide country living for women and girls as a retreat from city life.

Throughout the 20th century, the YWCA USA and its local affiliates were in the forefront of most major movements in the country as a pioneer in race relations, women’s equality, child care and women’s health. Today the YWCA advocates on behalf of 2 million women and girls in the United States and 25 million women in over 100 countries.

Today the YWCA movement has 300 local associations that are organized into 9 regions throughout the country. We are dedicated to the elimination of racism, the economic advancement of women and promoting peace, justice, freedom and dignity for all.

The YWCA of San Francisco and Marin focus its current programs in three areas:

Senior Housing: In 1980 the YWCA partnered with the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to convert the historic YWCA building to affordable housing for seniors and the disabled. The site provides housing for approximately 120 adults. The building is located at 940 Powell Street and is the location for the administrative offices in San Francisco.

Chinatown Programs: The YWCA offers programs for youth during after school and summer hours. Additionally, English as a Second Language classes are taught and computer classes for residents and the general public. Programs are offered at the 940 Powell Street building.

Fifty Plus Employment Program: The YWCA assists Marin women over the age of 50 in finding permanent employment and career advancement. Services include assessments, resume writing, interviewing skills and job search techniques. The YWCA Fifty Plus Employment Program partners with several community agencies to provide services at several locations in Marin. The program is based at the Marin Employment Connection in San Rafael.

Life, Inc: This Marin based program offers career and job search skills to over 100 youth in 4 schools in Marin. The focus of the program is to keep youth in school to graduate and find suitable employment or enroll in post secondary education.

The Fifty Plus Employment Program has received consistent funding and positive publicity for this unique service to adult women. The YWCA believes fostering economic advancement opportunities for women is a viable pathway to fulfill its mission for women of all races The YWCA has a long term goal of being recognized in Marin and San Francisco as a major nonprofit that attracts visibility and support from the community and to position the Fifty Plus Program as the signature program of the agency.

In 2009 the Board of Directors engaged a strategic analysis of the Fifty Plus Employment Program with the management consulting team of Zimmerman and Lehman. As a result of the study, the Board is committed to expand and enhance the services of the employment program and to find a permanent office in Marin.

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This Search is being conducted by
Center for Volunteer and Nonprofit Leadership Transition Services
Email Resume and Cover Letter in confidence to: jjanssen@cvnl.org
Please put YWCA Development Director in the subject line
Documents submitted in Word highly preferred.

For consideration in the first round of candidate screening, resumes should be received by July 30, 2010.

Tim Kring, a long-time television writer and producer, is best known as the creator of the NBC show "Heroes." But he's rapidly expanding his media universe -- last week at Comic-Con he launched a new book project, "Shift," which will debut in August from Crown Books.

He has also created a new transmedia project called "Conspiracy For Good" (CFG), which describes itself as "a movie where YOU can be the hero and impact the outcome of the story for the better." Participants travel through a blurred narrative that mixes media, interactive storytelling and a learn-as-we-go collective approach to fight a greedy corporation and benefit good organizations.

CFG is being partially supported by Nokia and its Ovi mobile platform. Plus, the fictional story includes chances for players to do real good in the world. For instance, there is a collaboration with the Pearson Foundation and Room to Read, where each time an online visitor reads a book to a child, the corresponding book will be donated to five libraries set up in Zambia. Nokia and Room to Read will also fund a year of education for 50 girls in Zambia.

The first live meeting of participants in "Conspiracy For Good" occurred on July 17 in London. I connected with Kring to explore this new genre he calls "social benefit storytelling," and what its implications are for entertainment and social good.

Q&A

What is "Conspiracy For Good" (CFG) and how can people participate or experience it?

Tim Kring: The "Conspiracy For Good" is a global movement for change driven by a story, which the audience becomes a part of and every participant has the ability to impact the outcome of this story. The story will be played out on websites, mobile devices, at live meet-up events in London, and ultimately in a village in eastern Zambia where CFG will be responsible for building a library, stocking it with books and providing 50 scholarships for school girls.

This U.K.-based project of "Conspiracy For Good" is the pilot for game-changing entertainment -- narrative mythology that blurs the lines between fiction and reality, compelling the audience to become a part of the story with real world outcomes.

To get into the "Conspiracy For Good" and join in the story, simply go to the web page and watch the featured video. A recap will point you to the current activities and detail how you can get involved. And if you're in the London area, register online at the site and join us on the streets.

Anyone can follow along -- comment, contribute, share, decipher, solve, connect and collaborate at the website. The site is the global hub for all things CFG: Watch videos, follow progress and events on the blog, and make an impact and interact with the characters of the story through the main websites.

"Conspiracy For Good" is called "a social benefit experience." What does this mean and how can an entertaining story generate social benefits?


Kring: The "Conspiracy For Good" creates a new genre of entertainment which combines rich narrative, philanthropy and commerce. We call this genre "social benefit storytelling." The "Conspiracy For Good" aims to become a movement. Individuals are now being "tapped on the shoulder" and asked to join this movement to continue to make the work of the "Conspiracy For Good" a reality with global impact. By participating, members of CFG have the opportunity to affect real word change from the environment to education to the economy by applying their unique abilities, talents, networks and passion as an active part of the story.

The entire gameplay centers around causes, and direct action...on the streets in London, where participants will be involved in book drives, toy drives, cleaning the Thames, etc. By creating a secret society for good, and providing a forum for people to connect with one another, the hope is that there will be a tremendous amount of user-generated interest in new and worthy causes.

"Conspiracy For Good" says it integrates "interactive theater, mobile and alternate reality gaming (ARG), music and physical participation." Is there one component that excites you most? And will this multi-screen experience include movie theaters or television?

Kring: I am very intrigued by the mobile aspect. It has just exploded over the last few years as smartphones are reaching a wider demographic. I love the idea that a mobile phone can be both a content consumption device and a content creation device. In other words, an audience can use their mobile phone to receive story and create video and text and geo-tagging themselves. For a storyteller, this really piques my interest.

"Heroes" was a fictional story about people trying to save the world. "Conspiracy For Good" seems to be a real-life extension of this narrative. What elements and lessons from "Heroes" were applied to the development of "Conspiracy For Good"?

Kring: You are right that I came up with this idea when I saw how connected and committed the "Heroes" audience was to the underlying core message behind "Heroes" -- interconnectivity and global consciousness. So, I thought, wouldn't it be great to not just talk about "saving the world" in fiction, but to attempt to do it in the real world. In many ways this is the logical extension of what was known as the "360 Platform" that NBC.com and "Heroes" built around the show. The attempt there was to build a broad, connected universe around the show that created multiple extensions of the story that could cross all platforms.

We learned a tremendous amount doing this. One of the key things was just how motivated the audience can be to create content on its own. So in many ways, CFG takes that idea and makes it the ultimate goal -- to create a self-sustaining movement for good that ends up having real-world implications and direct action.

You just announced that Room to Read and the Pearson Foundation will be beneficiaries of the "Conspiracy For Good" experience. Will there be additional organizations and how can participants support them?

Kring: Other organizations are invited to include their missions in the "Conspiracy For Good," and participants are welcome to join those missions, too. The meeting place for missions and people is conspiracyforgood.com.


The experience includes live meet-ups in London. How will participants meeting other participants evolve the story? Will there be meet-ups in other cities?

Kring: London is the first of what we hope will be many cities around the world. When participants come together they will follow a clue trail of video drops that move the story forward. They will have to work together in teams to solve various clues in order to advance the story. They will find key props and sets and locations for the story, interacting with these and using their collective efforts to confront our bad guys and have justice prevail for our protagonist. Along the way they will interact with actors in character, creating a sense of a truly pervasive experience.

Here's a video giving the back story on "Conspiracy for Good":

Blackwell Briggs is a fictional greedy corporation in the energy industry that distributes false information. Is it inspired by any real-life company or event?

Kring: We've all become very familiar with corporate greed of all stripes. Blackwell Briggs is an attempt to draw from that sense of familiarity without necessarily conjuring up any one corporation in particular. The corporation seems to be involved in almost everything controversial. So, in many ways, they are a "catch all" for corporate greed. By showcasing a fictional, evil corporation, we also celebrate, by contrast, the admirable, real world companies that really do exist in the marketplace today.

What does success look like for "Conspiracy For Good"?

Kring: Teams in five different countries have worked together to bring an idea to life, to do something that has never been done before. Designed as a proof of concept pilot that integrates narrative, cross-platform participation and philanthropy, the measure of success is that it has been built and deployed and proves viable on a story level, a participation and community level, providing a foundation for greater expansion.

*****

Do you plan to join the Conspiracy For Good and contribute to the movement? Share your thoughts about this transmedia project in the comments below.

Nick Mendoza is the director of digital communications at Zeno Group. He advises consumer, entertainment and web companies on digital and social media engagement. He dreamstreams and is the film correspondent for MediaShift. Follow him on Twitter @NickMendoza.

This is a summary. Visit our site for the full post ».

An Ohio woman who helped counsel countless couples experiencing marital discord was found stabbed to death on Monday. Police arrested and charged her husband with the brutal murder.

Tonya Hunter(pictured below), owner of the marriage counseling service Success 1 Services in Bedford Heights, Ohio, met her husband, Maurice Lyons (pictured above), last year, when he attended a class that she taught on anger management. The 42-year-old woman married Lyons last December, but almost immediately, the marriage grew sour because it was fraught with financial problems: Hunter owned two homes, which are both facing foreclosure; had college loans; credit cards; and a car loan debt that totaled to nearly $500,000.

There were two police reports filed by Hunter against her husband for domestic violence. The last complaint was filed two weeks ago. According to police investigators, this report stated that Lyons appeared to be high on drugs and was demanding money from Hunter. "The defendant then pushed Hunter/spouse against the kitchen sink." Hunter's 4-year-old son witnessed the beating.

Hunter, who was pursuing a doctoral degree in marriage and family counseling at the University of Akron in addition to teaching at the University of Phoenix, ran a domestic violence group session every Wednesday at her office. Ironically, her website states that her company's services will "provide you with the knowledge and understanding of how relationships works and how problems can be resolved in even the most challenging situations."

When Lyons met his wife, he had been recently released from prison. He had served time in Illinois for aggravated battery, intimidation and vehicular invasion. The repeat offender also has a criminal record in Missouri and Ohio. People thought that the pairing of both Hunter and Lyons was very odd. Hunter was viewed as being outgoing and friendly, while Lyons was quiet and reserved.

Two weeks ago, with her young son in tow, Hunter had visited various building personnel where she worked, , to tell them to call the police immediately if they saw Lyons anywhere near the building. Many people in the office building had known about Lyon's prison record, and some even changed the locks on their doors when warned by Hunter.

Hunter called police to complain that she had been inundated with threatening phone calls from Lyons, where he allegedly said he wanted to punch her in the face and kill her. On July 20th, police issued a warrant for Lyon's arrest.

A week before she was found dead, Lyons could not be found. When Hunter was discovered stabbed to death in her building's parking garage, her son was dropped off on a street corner. Investigators did not state who abandoned the boy on the street. The little boy was taken to county social workers and interviewed, where he said that his mother was killed and lying in a garage.

Lyons was booked this week on charges of aggravated murder and domestic violence.

Here's the thing, most past convicts are usually attempting to readjust to society's values, norms and relationships outside prison walls.

Why this educated woman would marry and have a child with a man who was convicted of aggravated assault is beyond me.

I'm not saying people don't change, but what I am saying is that this man couldn't have had that much to offer her. Lyons was enrolled in Hunter's anger management classes, for goodness sake. Clearly he needed some time to become stable both mentally and physically. Hunter was getting her doctorate in marriage and family counseling. As a professional, she should have left this one alone.

And what of the poor 4-year-old? How will he become anything different from his father when he has witnessed battery and possibly murder. With no Mother, and a Father who has abandoned him, who will love and nurture this child? As Mothers, we have to do better with our choices in men. If we can't at least do it for ourselves, we should at least do it for our children.

 

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Title: NCPCA Evaluator
Department: National Center for Prosecution of Child Abuse
Division: Research and Development
Location: Alexandria, Virginia - Headquarters

Organizational Role
• To support NDAA’s mission to provide quality training to state and local prosecutors and
allied professionals

General Purpose
• To evaluate training and other programs for the NCPCA

Position Responsibilities
• Design a comprehensive course evaluation process for the NCPCA training programs
• Work with the program manager and staff to develop training evaluation instruments
that incorporate the Kirkpatrick evaluation model to measure training effectiveness
• Collaborate with curriculum developers and program staff to develop evaluation
instruments that are consistent with the goals, objectives, and content of training
programs
• Utilize specialized software and automation equipment to design, administer, and
analyze course evaluations
• Collect, manage, and analyze evaluation data using both quantitative and qualitative
methodologies
• Report on the training effectiveness using results of empirical evaluation methods
• Provide technical and research support for the evaluation process

Position Requirements and Essential Skills and Experience
• Doctoral degree in a social or behavioral science field
• At least five years demonstrated experience in training evaluation
• Experience with statistical software (SPSS) and statistical analysis procedures
• Knowledge and experience in the application of adult learning principles, related
theories, curriculum development, instruction systems design, and instructional media
• Strong writing skills
• Polished and professional presentation and communication skills
• Diplomacy, patience, and tact
• Ability to interact with people from a wide range of professions and disciplines
• Strong computer skills including MS Word and Excel

Strongly Preferred Skills and Experience
• Knowledge and experience in the field of criminal justice
• Experience working on DOJ-funded grants and contracts
• Experience developing grant proposals for training programs
• Teaching and training experience

Travel Requirements
• Travel may be required.

Internal Communications
• Report to the directors of NCPCA and the Office of Research and Evaluation
• Work closely with all NDAA staff

External Communications
• Establish and maintain relationships with staff, faculty members, and others that may be
identified in the course of the evaluator duties

FLSA Status
• Exempt

Reflecting the historic Antioch College emphasis on social justice, the revived Antioch College is sponsoring a series of events this summer focusing on the civil rights movement, especially Freedom Summer in 1964.

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I've expressed before that I tend to find the language around the choice to be childfree pretty insulting. For example, the discourse surrounding Elena Kagan's aptitude as a Supreme Court nominee centers less on her professional credentials and more on life choices such as her sexuality or whether or not she's deficient for never experiencing motherhood.

So while I wasn't terribly shocked by the new report from the Pew Research Center about the rise in the number of childfree women in the United States, I'm exceptionally pleased by the positive attention it has received. The study highlights the shift in cultural norms, social pressure to have children, and individual choice (including improvements in birth control methods and access) since the 1970s. Thirty years ago, one in ten women did not have children, while today, nearly one in five women will remain childfree. White women are still the most likely to remain childfree, though the racial gap has narrowed considerably in the past decade.

I'm not alone in my surprise that among the most highly educated women — that is, women holding advanced degrees including a master's, doctoral, or business degree — are slightly more likely to have children than they were in the past. This may be attributed to wealthier women's access to fertility treatments or the seemingly simple belief that women can now have children and a career with more ease than in the past (though for the record, I pretty strongly disagree with this sentiment). It could also be that some jobs that require an advanced degree can offer a healthy work-life balance payoff later on.

I'm only slightly less excited about the language used to describe the findings, calling women "childless" as if we lack for not having children. How is this any different from calling a woman "unmarried," as opposed to non-married?

What I also find troubling is the way the Washington Post article ends. A researcher from the University of Michigan who co-authored a study on the same subject stated, "[Childfree women] are not any more depressed; their psychological well-being is just as high." It's entirely possible that her thoughts were taken out of context, but at what point will we stop pathologizing women who don't give birth and quit using condescending tropes to assure everyone else that we, the freakishly childfree, aren't depressive defectives?

One in five is getting to be a pretty high ratio — certainly when compared to statistics from earlier decades. Can we instead start assuming that maybe all women are making better choices for their own lives — both to have children and to not — empowered by the wonders of modern technology, advances in social ideals, and less patriarchal pressure to procreate? Reproductive justice includes respecting women who choose, for whatever reason, to both have and to not have children. Period.

Photo Credit: Gnarls Monkey

child,  witnessed & recieved such horrendous, sadistical torture at the hands of my own mother that

body, walk, talk, 7 feel as if I was on fire, the hard wired tortured in blame of my mother for her killing Robbie & torturing me as our fault I was taking all it on as my fault! I took no for answer everytime I begged for my life back & got a no I pushed & prayed fo 

how can I get anyone to hear & believe that I was severelt traumatized as a  it redered me incapable of maturing past the age of 11? My father tried to shoot to kill mother while pregnant with me. Mother didn't want to even name me. She handed me to my 7 year old sister to care for me. I recieved nothing but mother's hate, rage, sadistic revenge towards me for being born like my father as she put it. Rejection from my family. No one allowed to help me. No guidance, no tools 4 life, no empathy even as I laid there dying many times from being drown in toilet, electruted at 2, face half burnt off nut healed with small scar, abseesses so bad I hallucinated at 5, any & every type of torture emaginable was inflicted upon me. I was put in drawers, told if I so much as shook I'd be killed. I was told by mother she could read my mind. By the time I was 2 I believed her. She told me I didn't belong in family that I was mixed up at hospitol. I was only one in family to be treated as if I was a piece of garbage to be thrown on floor & stomped on until I learned to never cry. Thrown down stairs. Hand held behind my back by molester stepfather hundreds of times while mother clubbed, bite, jabbed, slapped, punched, spit, poked, & pulled my hair. i was so traumatized daily that I had to go inside myself to survive. My sister told outsiders I was lying because they were afraid of mother's wrath upon them. NO ONE in family allowed to help me just as NO ONE allowed to help little boy of 2 who mother took in for money from topless dancer. Robbie was his name. He came when he was approximately 2 and was tortured for two years nonstop from sadistical, rageful, sex addict mother. She forced us to eat our own vomit after she rammed a fork full of food down our throats. we ate it or be killed as she put it & she would not stop clubbing until we did. I learned not to shake. I learned not to believe it happened. She continued to reinforce the idea that if "it" happened it was our fault, but "it" didn't happen so stop talking. I never learned that until now! I am 52! i just didn't get it! I told people the turth! If I lied I lied to me 1st. The lies my mother told I believed until recently when I was retraumaized so severly that I started having flashbacks from hell I lived as child.

No one would believe me that Cymbalta medication caused me to be rendered helpless. I sniffed gas at 5 to stop the pain of torture. I tried to kill self then too. Family said nothing wrong with me no matter how severly I was hurt, mangled, sick, or in emotional pian. Alway told to snap out of it & get back to work earning my keep. So I was an addict at or B4 5 years old. Parent gave me alcohol to make me more pliable for men to molest me B4 I was 4 years old. I remember bits & pieces only up to the retraumization in TX center when no one would believe my brain was so fried from Cymbalta medication given to me by Kaiser Medical DR. I have followed the advice of DR 7 told Dr I felt like I was going to self combust but she said that it wasnly my anxiety. I believed her because of my earilier mind bending from mother telling me I caused my own torture. I have done that ever since! Everytime someone abuses me I say I'm sorry what can I do, give, be so you wont hurt me again. I didn't even get that until now! So Cymbalta working in me. I had been workaholic, full time school, lots of volunteer work! when DRS gave me all kinds of meds for PTSD, CFS as I called it but was depression that I had not recognized my whole life due to being an addict & everyone always telling me there was nothing wrong with me except that I was lazy. My family told me I was lazy, stupid, weck & a piece of trash even as I was being an A student, managing to be a Drug & alcohol counselor & apt mgr. They said nothing I said or did was good enough. I was to give all I had to them & never talk. I was told to wait as everyone else dished up because I was a pig. I bought 22 LBS of butter in one day because of being told I ate too much butter even though in last 10 years I had not bought 22 lbs of butter all tolled. I had been away from family since childhood except for times of need 7 every time I was rejected 7 athorities were told by mother & family I was born bad seed. I am empathic, passive, so passive I couldn't even stand up to keep my own children! I am soft, kind, genorous, loyal,helpful, smart, an agoriphobic/workaholic! I will let people say anything to me without saying anythingback! I freeze! I did nothing, said nothing as family let me die of Cymbalta pison in garage. I could barely see. walk, stood up & fell over, peed pants, was so confused I could barely understand words in a string of sentence 4 over a year. I begged 4 help from a counselor but he said as long as I was clean he saw no help I needed. I begged I cxould barely dress myself! I told DRS something very wrong with me, tried to not kill self twice & sister said I was playing games & get off my lazy buut & get to work. No one gets this. I have been incapable of maturing past 11 from the trauma & severe abuse & negect of mother & disregard of family to assist in anyway other then to put me down & deny anything can be right about me or anything could be wrong with my health, safety, mind or body. I was called selish by sister when she saw I could barely see my shoe and had no short term memory so I lost them as I laid them down. She said I should be thinking of baby sister who has it hard! Baby sister has been taken care of so well that I had to give up my own clothes to her as child. I had to be beat every time she got into trouble because as she put it mother loved her not me and she got things not me.

I am incorner now. Just as I was hiding in closets in TX, rocking as I flashed back due to 20 year olds yelling at me to snap out of brain damage inflicted by my chioldhood experiences as well as my own incapable of seeing danger due to living in the mist of a killer, rager, sex addict, child molester mother & her men. I couldn't put the pieces together! I could not remember most of childhood, just snapshoots until TX! I had liad in garage like zombie vegetable while sister said nothing wrong with me. I stood up & fell like a tree! She said it must be drugs & I hadn't used any in months! Cymbalta & federally dispences meds for the pain in head & back that Cymbalta brought on. I egnored the pian somewhat as my subconscious training by mother was in there & I didn't relize it. I know whenever I got hurt my 1st reaction is to hide it & say I am OK, I paidno don't need help, it's ok. But on Cymbalta I kept telling DRS something wrong. No side effects I said but I am going blind, must be old age they say. I was having panic attacks all day, migraines from hell back pain so severe, no short term memory, confusion & I think it must be one of my cycle I go though so I ride it out & it passes. But not on Cymbalta, as long as I was on it allI did was get worse. My mistake was quiting my job to go pay rent at sister's. That has been my mistake since leaving home at 13 & again at16. I paid to be ouyt of house because mother said I owed her & she owned me until 18 & if I wanted 2B gone. I forgot it all because I went so far into me I had to to be safe as child. No one believes me because most families would have done something but mine did nothing! NOTHING but yell& come out to accuse me of breaking, stealing, doing this doing that. I know where I get all that fear at work now. So afraid that if anyone of my employees or residents did anything wrong I would be in big trouble or fired! It came from being scapegoated as family piece of poo. I am telling straight up stuff I am just beginning to get big picture of now at age 52! I need help! I needed help 3 years ago when all the DRS said it was all me & no med could do as it did to me. I read about poeple killing themseleves but because I have been able to take horrendous abuse  & still say I am ok, not hurt, I took DR at word, distrusted myself even though I was going through hell on earth! If all me I was not getting services, beibg told due to my realapse that only my use was looked at. Hep C Dr said I'd bleed to death if byopsied & that I had missed criticile window for TX even though it had been in remission. Told me I had less than 10 years to live so get up and get dressed and be strong get used to idea and stop blaming them. HUH?! I asked how is it "I" missed it seeing as you are DR who told me not to worry Hep not deteceted in over 10 years & now it's too late!? No answers. Dr I told I was going to self combust & she not listen! No one helps. I have been as an 11 year old child in my mind I think as child from all the torment & torturing & neglect as child. Arressted development & I didn't know it! I just felt little. I felt scared each time anyone looked as if they might hurt me & then I got busy trying to do, say act in anyway possible so they wouldn't hurt me. I took valuim from the panic buttton being put on 10005 from CYMBALTA!!! I thought family was to love & asist. I bought sister gifts, gave her money for rent, repaid her when I got beach on old towel by giving her 4 new ones. I took 12 steps to mean it. Never let anyone support me ever in life! I say no I do it myself because mother put that there too. How was I to work on something I DIDN"T KNOW WAS THERE??!!

Robbie was tortured to death by mother! She scaldewd him by holding him in the water & lied to DRS saying the stupid boy got in. HOT water! No child or human will do that! It is hot we react by pulling away. It hurts & I beleive the DR over me. My fiend said it's probably nothing. Nothing called Cybalta took 3 years while I went to at least 7 places for help & each one called me a liar as I stumbled out almost blind, lost in city I have lived 52 years trying to figure out what the street sign said cause I couldn't see it. Living in hell telling people something REALLY wrong & it is not street drugs! I held on for dear life 6mths, 8mths, mths & ccounselor said he redirected me because I was clean as I screamed please help me something is really wrong when i can barely understand a sentence, can't read anymore from blindness & confusion 7 counselor says not his problem. DRS said he either put me back on Cymbalta or give me nothing 3 weeks after 20 years of saving my money & buying gold jewlry & Cymbalta got taken in shelter mysister said I had to go to because she tired of watching me stumle around with dementia. I plea, beg, scream, everything I can to get anyone to hear me but all say homeles junkie, worthless liar & I loss everything! Everything. Sister says she owns my stuff I left it in her house it is her now & she will sell it. My mother did that too. Took everything of mine pushed me onto street with clothes on back after I paid the rent & she sold all my earthy possession!

Robbie & I both blamed for our own torture! Blamed for being alive, soft, gental, kind, loyal, giving & empathic yet we were both blamed for being molested, drowned, clubbed half to death & not once did we cry, not once did we stop loving the person who tried to kill both of us. She killed Robbie! he torured him & he screamed for 2 years while whole neigborhood listened & did nothing! I stuck at 11 because I grabbed Robbie and ran when she got far enough away so I could. She tried to stop me yelling "you think you can save him, your wrong, you are both going to be killed" as she grabbed & pulled my hair, grabbed at me anyway she could, took club she just beat Robbie with & clubbed me chasing me down the strair & out the home calling me a whore as she had called me since 1 years oul saying I deserved the rapes & clubbing I got just because I lived & she wanted me dead,. I ran with Robbie 6 blocks up to park & hide & rocked for hours with his burnt, broken armed, bruised form head to foot, knot everywher on his head just as ther were knots everywhere on mine since birth. I rocked & swore I would never do that to anyone & didn't! yet my family told my kids I did & they believed them! I slapped daughter once & could have died! I never told children about their dad beating on me, taking all our money, cheating on me with man, woman, and child. I never stood up to him in  years I was so afraid! I did as I did with mother I said F U but then gave him evrything that belonged to my babies as he called them. I have been accused of things my mind doesn't even think of! I don't even know how to get my own needs met & have to get advice for that in regular world. I couldn't do anything after being agroaphobic batterd child wife & didn't stand up for my own children I felt so bad about self seeing as I was born a whore, cunt, bitch, piece of trash who didn't deseserve even tmy own hard earned money. I gave that too to mother & husband! Until I said no & then he called everywhere to get me out in streets & him in the home, money I worked under the table for with my children, everything he tried to get as he banged on the door as I hid with my 3 babaies & child service, criminal justice system, housing, welfare all told me I had to do things that if I did I would be braeking the others rules, I hid as husband & his girfriend bangged on door demanding I give thme back presents he gave & told kids he does things that I don't do & he is good & I am piece of poo. I hid just as I hid inside me under the bushes with Robbie holding he, holding on to my babies & still no one believed me! I am 11 and still not know what to do, how to get anyone to believe I haven't been able to mature past 11 in me because I hid in me & didn't know I was hiding! I workrd on everything & got to TX blind , unable to walk, cider blocks on me, self combust feeling, confusion, no short term memeory, telling counselor I was on wrong meds & made me befuddeled 7 she said she not beleive me so snap out of blaming Cymbalta & snap out of self pity so passive she says. I was passive because I couldn't see, think, felt dumb yet on fire, took everything I had to stumble ther & I get no one to believe I was doing my level best to just sit there I was so exhusted & dazed! but 20 year olds just calledme neg as flashbacks came flying out of me as counselor said do it again & again not right just like mother, as girls said I gave them adirty look when I was BLIND! As peioiple said I hurt others feeling when I begged please don't put me with girl who vibrates with sleep apenia just like cild molester stepfather, please do say i am doing things I am not. I can barely function and still the counselors will not listen as I had 24/7 flashbacks triggered to hiding in closets, screaming please help & believe me. I was rocking as with Robbie & they young girls called me crazy lady & pushed me against wall so they could get by. I was at DR every week begging please my brain wont work & everyone saying snap out of it, stop making excuses as I pushed myself harder than everB4 in life just to survive. It was worse then all the raps on street when I didn't know how to suvive ther. It was worst then being in sisters garage by far at least then no one was in ther yelling 24/7 that I couln't say what I was experiencing because it is calledblame! Are you kidding me!  Even as I went back to meetings al I got was I was hostile, agery when my heart was in a vice, head in vice, so blurry, confused & begging please I'm in here it is cymbalta! I know people blame others for using but I not blame anything I BLAME ME everytime I get hit, rapped or robbed because that is hardwired by mother since birth. That is what made me a victim of enormous porportions! I blamed me when I got neck cut & sodomied! I blamed me when boyfriend made me blind in one eye for a month. TX counselor calling me hypocodriac because I had learned to say what is really going on with me & I know I never even went to Dr when I laid posined for 2 weeks & was called liar then too. I not even thought to go to DRS. Mother never allowed me to because she would have been found out! I just put that together now too1 I am 52 & I have not been able to learn since 11 because I am rocking in trauma & torture with Robbie in my arms! No one will help us! No one will let us tell, no one beklieves us because family called us liars & said we deserved to be died if we told! I thought sisters loved like me! I not even think like that! I sat & took their insults 3 years as I became more crippled from Cymbalta believing DR as he said all symtoms all me! It was hardwired in to be all me! NO more! I am telling you what happened! Sister said I wasupposed to stop talking, stop asking questions, stop being me and shut up. I thought love while they thought if she doesn't stop talking mother will keep beating & she did! I stood & took it for them1 All I wanted was to be loved, to belong, to be a part of a loving family & now I sit confused still. Dr said all me, Dr called me a homeless, whore, crazy criminal even though I not sleep with anyone 7 years, paid all bills on time & in advance by 6 mths to a year. I worked 2 jobs & full time school until I relapsed behind pychc meds of every kind & Cymbalta! Now I know poeple use excuses. I stayed in relationships because I blamed me for the abuse not the other person. The ironic thing is that is why I am where I am is that even though Cymbalta was making it impossoible for me to see, think, feel r a miricle. It came when they stoled my lifes savings & called me street trash & they stold the Cy,balta1 Thank God because 3 weeks later I started to get relief & knew then I was going to be OK no matter what degrading, ridiculing, yelling, screaming at me to snap out of the most deepest sense of sorrow, grief, regert, remorse I had evr felt. I had aske for very simple easy to do things from people all my life. None of them even cost money! To listen to me with the heart, to believe me that I was hurt inside, to sayy thank you for me working until I dropped, to say thank you for the gift I gave rather than it's not eough, to say it's nice to work for the disadvanataged rather then to get what I got from my family. I went back thinking with my heart, open armed ready to please, giving all of me to be accepted by what I thought was people who told the truth, who cared for others, who cared for me in action as I took action u & worked & gave until empty just as I had done since birth. I am empty now. The rage is there & I pray to release it. I held it all my life & attacked myself rather than hurt another but my family spoke of who they are not who I am, too passive to even stand up for self around others. I took their iinsults everytime I spoke of the woork I did to get hoeles drug addict off the streets to be productive just like someone had done for me. I was an A student & famuily said how stupid I was to go to school to help trash like me. I am not or evr was trash! It took a small, little deed to change my life in7, it took ONE KIND & COMPASSIONATE WORD!

Topics: social science, gender & women's studies